Flying the not-so-friendly skies
I’ve tried, recently, to take a step back from the scanner/search/radiation/TSA thing and reflect a bit less reactively. My daily NY Times email Friday led me to this quote:
“If it’s going to keep me and others safe, I’m all for it. I’m 50; I’m proud of what I’ve got.” THE REV. GEORGE OBERLE, a Lutheran minister who said he had gladly submitted to a body scan at an airport.
Oh, the times these days.
Maybe I’m losing my conspiracy-theorizing suspicious-of-a-security-state chops, but I’m more skeptical of the backlash against the newish scanners at some airports than I am with the scanners and body searches themselves. Here’s a few ideas I’ve been kicking around.
First, Americans are in a bad mood. We want to complain about something, and post midterm election we entered a Thanksgiving-week news vacuum. The scanner story is an easy and cheap one to cover, partly because we love a government-centered controversy. If the Wikileaks thing had happened last week, the scanner coverage would have been much less noticeable.
Second, the scanner radiation argument seems to be mostly a red herring considering the fact that the scanners emit about the same amount of radiation as naturally occurs during two minutes of flying at 30,000 feet.
Third, I wonder how much of the backlash has to do with classism and stereotypical disdain for TSA workers. Just like many people strongly dislike IRS agents (though they are public servants benefitting all), it seems like some are beginning to clump all TSA agents into a dehumanizing “other” category. Perhaps, in part, this is because TSA agents are some of the lowest paid government employees. Some entry level workers earn less than $20,000.
Next, I know the argument about rights gets tricky fast — balancing one’s right to fly against one’s right not to be unreasonably searched — but I ultimately favor those who argue concerning one’s rights to fly safely.
Finally, I want to name the real elephant in the room: neither our president nor TSA nor any government can guarantee 100% protection from terrorism. In fact, I’d love to vote for a politician in a second who said, “We can promise one thing: our defense against terrorism cannot and will not ever completely protect you. We will try our darndest, but anybody who promises you fully protection from terrorism is a liar.” People know this instinctively, but it’d be refreshing to hear it spoken more often.
Yes, I am very concerned about those who have been sexually abused having to experience a full body pat-down. Yes, I’m very concerned about security policies for children, the elderly, and those living with difficult medical conditions. Yes, the system is far from perfect and should be improved. But, I think the necessary improvements are on the margins and, despite the raucous popular press coverage, I lean towards agreeing with the majority of Americans who support the new airport security policies.
image by Julien Tromeur
A hymn for Black Friday
This is a freaking awesome hymn text.
On Black Friday last year, I worked several hours in my retail position at an outdoor clothing store in the mall. I won’t go on except to say: it was a cultural experience. This Black Friday, I may buy a cup of coffee or watch a hockey game, but that’s about the extent of my plans. I will for certain, however, be singing the following hymn to myself.
.
Hymn for Black Friday
(aka, the day after Thanksgiving, the first day of Christmas shopping)
to the tune Mendelssohn (“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”)
(1) Early on a Friday morn,
anxious drivers blow their horns.
Swiftly to the mall they race,
praying for a parking place.
Humming carols of the season,
spending with no rhyme or reason.
Checking, savings overdrawn,
all before the light of dawn.
Save a dollar! Save a dime!
Happy, happy shopping-time!
(2) Bargain hunters stalk their prey
all across the U.S.A.
Checkout lines around the block,
just like back at Plymouth Rock.
Stuffed with turkey, pie, and gravy,
they maneuver like a navy,
stacking high their shopping carts,
maxing out their credit cards.
Save a fortune! Save yourselves!
Stuff is flying off the shelves.
(3) Prophets have foretold the day
all of this will pass away:
parking places gone to seed,
escalators clogged with weeds;
Nordstroms, Saks, and Nieman Marcus
empty as a turkey carcass;
heaven’s children at the feast
where the greatest serve the least.
Savior, save a place for me,
where the best of gifts are free.
David Gambrell, 2007
David Gambrell is associate for worship in the Office of Theology and Worship of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and a candidate for the Ph.D. in liturgical studies at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. Check out the new Theology and Worship blog: http://presbyterian.typepad.com/faith/
image by dubes sonego
The Public Isolation Project
Art these days. There’s the urine on display at MoMA, and naked models covered in meat. But my buddy Adam alerted me to a project from Oregon that involves trapping a young woman named Cristin Norine in a glass room room for 30 days. For the entire month of November, Nordine will have no human physical contact, but all of life’s newest communication technologies are available to her — iChat, texting, Skype, FaceTime video chat, and heck, I suppose she could write a snail mail letter. Well, maybe not, since she’s not allowed to use a phone because it’s an “old technology.”
Featured in a recent article from OregonLive, the art piece is called “The Public Isolation Project” and includes a nice video posted below. Joshua Jay Elliott, the artist, sees the experiment as a reflection of the way the Internet age allows for 24/7 accessibility with little privacy. Everything that Norine does is visible (save the bathroom), and Elliott likens this to our lives on the Internet which lack privacy. To add emphasis to the conceit, Norine’s computer interactions are displayed in live time up on a large screen able to be viewed by anyone walking by.
While the OregonLive piece fails to note it, I’m not sure Elliot’s project is a wild new idea — there have been many public art projects with people in glass houses and such in recent years — but the emphasis on new forms of communication may be unique. And if one can get past the voyeuristic undertones of watching a young woman’s every move for a month, the project causes some worthwhile reflections. Here are a few:
What use is physical contact, real life looking each other in the eyes, in our world today? Or to put it another way, as communication technologies have increased the ways we can interact, have we noticed the unique ways real life interaction affects us? For a personal example, my bank in Grand Forks very annoyingly does not have ATMs that accept deposits. So I have to either get out of my car to talk to a live person inside (my preference) or use the drive thru and deal with the muffled voice and vacuum tube weirdness. While I didn’t know the tellers at my bank in Decatur very well at all, I’m beginning to know the names and have nice chats with those in Grand Forks. Such contact is a far cry from substantive interaction, but it is humanizing and perhaps ultimately positive.
Second, I wonder if reflection on communication technologies actually has any effect on the way we use them. I see projects like Elliott’s pointing out what we know — our lives are increasingly overtaken with technology, but struggling to make the larger move to the “so what?” and “what now?” questions. Norine says, once she completes the project, she wants to go to the beach for a few days without any technology whatsoever. But, I wonder, if those who watch the project will do anything more than think, “huh, yeah, I text a lot….and then go on texting.”
Finally, the contrarian in me says: “what’s the big deal?” Nobody ever accused Abigail and John Adams of being addicted to letter writing, so why are we so critical of new ways of communicating that also happen to take up plenty of our time? Sure, I’m always up for reflection as long as it’s not too pessimistic. But while I don’t need to text message through dinner, I also love them ability to do so when appropriate. Let’s think about such issues, sure, but let’s not pile on the negatives while forgetting the positives.
You could look at Elliott’s project and say: it’s totally awesome that Cristin Norine can function so well, communicate so clearly and quickly and with so many folks, even when she doesn’t leave the glass room. Put that in your phone and text it.
The Shared Culture of Homophobia and Its Modern Consequences
I’ve written often on culture, social media, and the consequences of both (e.g. Anti-bullying: There’s an app for that & Facebook Rules for Pastors and How Twitter Makes me a Better Pastor at WorkingPreacher.org). Well today I’m featuring a guest post written for A Wee Blether by Andrew Hall that explores what happens when social media and homophobia combine.
by Andrew Hall
Andrew Hall is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on Online Degree for Guide to Online Schools.
Either I don’t understand Little Rock, Arkansas, or Clint McCance doesn’t understand how the internet works. In the wake of many national news stories about gay teenagers having killed themselves as a consequence of bullying and harassment, McCance, a Little Rock school board representative, used Facebook to single-handedly end his time on the school board.
To do so, he responded to a call to wear purple in support of LGBT by writing back “Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers killed themselves. The only way im wearin it for them is if they all commit suicide. I cant believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid. We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed thereselves because of their sin. REALLY PEOPLE,” then followed this with another rant explaining that he liked how homosexuals “often give each other aids and die,” then followed this with yet another that explains how he would “disown [his] kids [if] they were gay [… I would] absolutely run them off. My kids will have solid christian beliefs.” In addition to espousing blatantly homophobic language, McCance also demonstrates his basic inability to write functionally in the English language, not at all befitting someone intended to represent educational institutions in any school system that predominantly works in English.
McCance’s comments are somewhat unbelievable. It’s hard to imagine that someone in 2010 would truly not understand the implications for one’s career in posting something of this sort on Facebook, where both personal and professional acquaintances (and their friends) can easily see it, take screenshots of it, share it with one’s employers, the national media, and anyone and everyone else who might want to use it as an opportunity to try to end McCance’s career. If you truly must, however, you can account this to a generational gap, and McCance’s misguided belief that his comments wouldn’t easily find an audience ready to jump on them being a consequence of his not having grown up with an online public social life.
What that reading doesn’t account for, however, is the fact that McCance exists, or believes he exists, in a culture in which comments that heavily use negative epithets to refer to homosexuals are completely and totally acceptable when said not by professional bigots, but by people who supposedly have the interests of a city’s very young people at heart. That McCance was willing to post his multipart rant at all is indicative of the fact that he believed that there was no problem at all with what he was saying (especially given that the horrifically bad writing indicates that he didn’t take a minute to edit it), and this is a clear consequence of a culture of long-established homophobia in McCance’s world, possibly in Little Rock, and elsewhere.
This is a clear case of social networking revealing someone’s worst qualities as a human being (and being done in professionally by it). This does not, unfortunately, get us closer to resolving the issues at its center.
Andrew Hall is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on Online Degree for Guide to Online Schools.The image is by Laura.
Pastors and the word “my”
also posted at the CENTURY Blog
Recently a fellow pastor closed a conversation by saying, “I’ll get my secretary to send you that document from my Christian Education committee.”
I bit my tongue. I wanted to say, “Wow, I didn’t know it was legal in Minnesota to own even one person, let alone a whole committee!”
Ownership language employed by pastors is a pet peeve of mine. Using the pronoun “my” to refer to employees, committees, pulpits, choirs, communion tables–really anything other than actual personal property– sets my teeth on edge. Whatever the speaker’s intent, I hear misplaced priorities and dangerous assumptions.
Overuse of the pastoral “my” identifies the church as overly pastor-centered. If the pastor owns the committees and sanctuary and other employees, the implicit message to others is one of arrogance, control and a lack of welcome. Such language also undercuts the empowerment of the congregation to take ownership of its ministry. If church members hear the pastor referring to things as his or hers, they have less incentive to take responsibility themselves.
Most of all, using such language is just plain bad theology. No person is owned by another, and no committee or choir is the pastor’s alone. Instead, the whole church shares the work of the whole church. Using “my” language is theologically lazy and totally misleading. When the pastor leaves, the work will go on–it’s not for or owned by the pastor. It’s to the glory of God.
With this in mind, I tend to avoid even the phrase “my congregation” in favor of “our congregation.” I hope this communicates that the church is owned by no one person, and certainly not by me. Yes, many people refer to a church as “my church,” and I know what they mean. That’s okay–especially for folks who aren’t the pastor.
Ultimately, however, it’s important to remember that the church and everything and everyone in it belong to God.
Anti-bullying — there’s an app for that
also found at CENTURY Blog
Could an iPhone app help address teen bullying? Could a website connect abused children to help? MTV and its A Thin Line campaign think so.
Among other things, the campaign asks youth to share their experiences via the app or on the site, and then other users vote as to whether anyone went “over the line.” The site also directs users to resources such as the National Teen Dating Abuse Hotline or the police.
On the site, anonymous users share stories on a wide variety of topics: a hijacked Facebook account used to send insulting messages, a large cross posted on a Christian student’s locker and labeled “Jesus Freak,” prescription drug abuse, sexting.
Here’s an excerpt from the site’s “about” page:
Sometimes we type things we would never say to someone’s face. As a result, new issues like forced sexting, textual harassment and cyberbullying have emerged, which now affect a majority of young people in the U.S.
Recent news stories have underscored the seriousness of these problems. But is an iPhone app going to rid your child’s school of bullying? No. And although in general I’m enthusiastic about social media and crowdsourcing, the idea of hundreds of anonymous youth determining the morality of something makes my inner John Calvin very nervous.
The A Thin Line campaign could alert youth to a problem, give them an opportunity to share something difficult to talk about, and function as a way for counselors to begin a conversation. But ultimately our society needs to find our collective voice and say clearly—in person as well as online—”that’s just not ok.”
Social media blackout
(Also posted at the CENTURY Blog. To get some discussion going over there, I’ve disabled comments on this post and invite you to comment at the new Christian Century website.)
Last week, students at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania gave up instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter—not by choice but by Provost Eric Darr’s order. “Often there are behaviors, habits, ways we use technology,” said Darr, ways “that we may ourselves not even be able to articulate because we’re not aware of them.” Provost Darr is a smart man.
Not often, at 27, do I feel like an old-timer. But I can remember the days before wireless university classrooms. I was attending seminary when our campus got its first one. All of a sudden, students in the back of the room had the best view—of Web surfing habits, that is. Unaccustomed to Internet access in class, many of us were on laptops Googling an idea the professor mentioned, updating our Facebook accounts, even checking up on fantasy football leagues.
Eventually the school had a more intentional conversation about appropriate use of technology in the classroom. But wireless Internet took some getting used to—professors didn’t use technology to their greatest advantage, and students just used it because we could.
One HU student had this to say last week: “I feel obligated to check my Facebook. I feel obligated to check my Twitter. [During the ban] I don’t. I can just solely focus.”
Thank goodness students and faculty are discussing the so-called obligations imposed by ubiquitous Web access. Perhaps temporarily closing the Internet can lead to lasting open dialogue about its effects.
image by Iva Villi
Connect Online
