The new year, how strange it is

Every new year, we see many top 10 lists in news publications and in broadcast media – top 10 news stories of the year, top 10 movies, etc. I always find these lists strange and artificial, and revealing of something very real that’s inside all of our heads – the utter immensity of the idea of time marching on and our constant attempts to grasp that notion. These lists are as if we are collectively trying to capture time which has already fled us and trying to make sense of it.

Time seems like such a strange idea. It’s a human invention for something that exists but cannot be captured or comprehended or dealt with in any way that falls within the narrow parameters of our consciousness.

In a story I did about how we think about and deal with our own mortality, I interviewed and spent some time with one of the greatest thinkers and researchers on this subject, academic and author Robert Kastenbaum. On this topic of the end of the year and how we grasp the notion of the 12 months that have passed by denoting it with lists, Kastenbaum would probably say that it is yet another attempt to persevere over our own sense of mortality.

How strange it is to celebrate the marking of a new unit of measurement – which is essentially what a year is. We have only one other such celebration – birthdays. I wonder how intricately the two are connected. I wonder if I am the only one who thinks of similar thoughts during both birthdays and new years – assessing the previous year, looking at the year ahead, making plans, processing the past.

And finally, I find it fascinating that we made a conscious choice – in every society in the world that I know of – to celebrate the markings of both birthdays and new years, instead of mourning them. Wouldn’t it have been just as plausible that the passing of yet another year and the start of yet another be a somber occasion? And yet, I think it says something about what it means to be human, the intrinsic sense of hope and optimism that we can’t shake, that we choose to celebrate, to reconnect with each other, and to plan ahead.

I’m the ‘other’ American

Yesterday night, as I was walking toward my car on a dark street in Santa Monica, California, I was busily checking my iPhone email and not paying attention to the exact direction I was walking in.

My head was buried in my iPhone. Then I heard the click of car doors locking.

I looked up, and saw that I was walking toward a minivan parked in front of my car on the street (although I was still quite a distance away). Two nervous elderly women were sitting in the minivan looking at me. I corrected my direction and headed behind them to my car, got inside, and drove away.

I’m not tall or big, or muscular, or imposing, and I was dressed in a suit and tie. So, I had a nagging question: Were the two women afraid because I was a man on a dark street nearing their car? Or were the two women afraid because I was a non-white, non-European, foreign-looking man nearing their car.

My sense of self is that of an American. I don’t see myself as a foreigner. But every once in a while, I am reminded that that’s not how much of my world sees me no matter how long I might be here, what I might accomplish, how I may speak, what I might believe.

Of course, I don’t know what was going on in the minds of those two women. It’s possible they would have been just as nervous if any other man was walking up to them.

But, in fact, that’s beside the point. Because that nagging voice was still there in my mind. The questioning was still present in my consciousness. The notion that I’m an ‘other’ has been impressed upon me so often, that it rears up whether it should or not. And I still wonder what prompted those locked doors.

Latino youth hope beyond their means

A study released today by the Pew Hispanic Center, which looks at young Latinos in America, shows reasons for optimism and cause for concern.

Young Latinos are doing better than their previous generation and are aspiring toward more prosperity. They are often focused on education and career success. However, the study finds they are also likely surrounded by poverty, gangs, and violence, are more likely than other groups to drop out of school, and latino teens are more likely to become pregnant.

More on the study here: Pew Hispanic Center.

The New York Times put the study in excellent context, writing that it could be a glimpse at the concerns, needs and aspirations of the upcoming majority in America – and therefore a glimpse at the future America itself. And that glimpse shows a shifting, less conservative Latino majority, as the increasingly U.S.-born children of Latino immigrants both assimilate American culture and look for solutions to their social needs.

The trouble with pretty people

How many average-looking people do you see everyday? Do you give them the same consideration, the same extra moment of time and thought, that you do a person to whom you are attracted?

The notion of what we find physically beautiful in someone is a complicated one. Aside from relationships and love, I am fasciated about how beauty influences our everyday lives and our innermost selves.

Anthropologists will tell you that different societies find different traits beautiful. We know from the milestone book “Yanomamo: Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology,” that the native people of the Amazon rain forest find men with thick necks sexually appealing. The reason, the book speculates, is that those men are seen as stronger (thick necks mean strong muscles in the back) and therefore better mates.

In another example from my own experience: While I was growing up in my native country of Armenia, I was treated as one of the more attractive boys in school. Both boys and girls wanted to be around me, to be my friend. I was very popular through no deserving action of my own. Adults treated me as something special just upon meeting me. People smiled when they saw me.

When I moved to the United States at a young age, I had to adjust to a different aesthetic and a different way of being seen. By American cultural standards, I was no longer among the most attractive. I didn’t get special treatment. I was appreciated and well treated, as all kids deserve to be, but I realized early on that there was something very different in how people saw me.

Growing up into my adult self, I have had to reconcile these two realities. The sense of self that I developed at a young age in Armenia, based on how I was seen there, has always remained a potent part of me. But it was reshaped based on the way I was and am seen in the U.S.

There was a period in my adolescence, when these two experiences clashed to form a bitterness and resentment. I was cynical of others’ motives and saw hypocrisy in everything. Thankfully, I was able to move on from that.

My past and present experiences have put me in a unique place, in that I find myself able to see the world from the point of you of the physically attractive and the point of view of the rest of us.

What I’ve come to realize is that the notion of beauty and how we interact with each other based on that notion, is mixed up in evolutionary imperatives, social structure, and psychology. And not only does it inform how we treat others, it informs our personalities based on how others see us, it informs our expectations of others and our world views. And in forming our outward selves based on the types of looks we have, we then propagate the expectations of others’ about what people’s appearances forecast about who they are.

At the most basic level, we can all admit that our first judgments upon meeting someone are based on visual cues. The simplest of these cues is, of course, how someone is dressed, how their hair looks, their physical shape, their facial features (symmetry apparently being among the most important for beauty) and the quality of their skin.

Scientists have studied some of these visual cues and assigned evolutionary imperatives to them. For example, they hypothesize that we often find clear skin visually appealing, because in evolutionary terms clear skin is a signal of someone’s health. Before medicine, this was likely a good way to propagate the species and survive.

But what about now? Are these visual cues still relevant? Our rational brains will tell us, no. We expect more from ourselves, that we treat others both as we would want to be treated, and that we interact with others based on who they are, not based on their looks.

But if we honestly examine our everyday actions, we know that we still respond to these cues. They are powerful and impact how we treat others in very subtle, as well as overt, ways. The more subtle intrusions are the most insidious and most profoundly influence our lives.

Have you found yourself wanting to help someone or befriend them just because of how they looked; because they were attractive (whether or not you were attracted to them)?

Here is an example form one of the most representative forms of our popular culture – reality television. In one episode of the television program “My Life on The D List,” comedienne Kathy Griffin spent time with Paris Hilton. In one scene, they were by a pool, surrounded by beautiful people, and Kathy asked Paris whether she could get a very attractive man near them to come over. Paris simply turned around and asked the man to take their picture, and he immediately complied.

Of course, this example is polluted by the culture of celebrity, the fact that there were cameras there. But the larger point is that Kathy Griffin was surprised when Paris simply called out to the man and he immediately responded. Whereas by Paris Hilton’s expression, this seemed the most natural thing to her.

I wonder if Paris Hilton’s world view is shaped by the fact that people respond to her so readily and easily. Besides her wealth and celebrity, could she see the world as a much more generous place simply by the way people react to hear looks? And can this, in turn, give her a certain happiness and confidence that others don’t have?

Conversely, Kathy Griffin, whose program’s premise is that nothing comes easy to hear, has another worldview as exemplified by her shock and surprise at the attractive man’s easy compliance to Paris Hilton’s request. Kathy Griffin doesn’t expect people to be generous and helpful. She doesn’t expect them to be kind to her. And her outward persona to the world reflects this expectation, which itself feeds into what others expect of Kathy Griffin. It is self-perpetuating.

Have you made immediate assumptions about people because of their physical beauty, whether positive or negative? If our outward personas, and probably also our inner selves, can be influenced by how others treat us because of how we look, then it stands to reason that we can fall into expected patterns of personality and behavior that our ‘type’ of look would have.

What ‘type’ of people are funny, morose, calm, happy-go-lucky, honest, sexual? Isn’t it interesting that often the way people look can tell you about how they will behave? Afterall, where does the Hollywood notion of ‘typecasting’ come from? If you look at casting notices for auditions, you will see that looks are assigned very specific character traits. You are a ‘type.’ Seldom to we as a society, let alone those casting our entertainment programming, examine why we have certain assumptions about looks and types. A short man can’t be the romantic hero. An overweight woman cannot be the happy ingenue.

The notion of beauty and our relationship with it so complex, that I wonder if we’ll ever conquer this powerful, gravity-like drive that compels much of our actions and interactions.

Journalism’s devolving role

Just think, how often do you hear about battles (real or imagined) between Democrats and Republicans on news channels and in print? And how frequently do the real-world effects and struggles of the mortgage crisis get covered?

A few months ago, I approached the editors at one of the outlets for which I freelance, and offered a story about California state and federal authorities bringing legal action against a number of home loan modification firms, because they were scamming desperate homeowners struggling to keep their homes. The editors’ response was that they were monitoring the story, but did not wish to cover it just yet.

I went to a press conference arranged by authorities, and discovered that the story behind the story was how these mortgage loan scams carried out their deception, and who were the people most vulnerable to the scams and those most often targeted (minorities with weak English skills and lack of resources). I also learned of legitimate resources which are available to people, but which many don’t know about because information isn’t being well disseminated.

Here I was in a position to disseminate that information, but the outlet I had approached merely wanted to monitor and not cover. They saw the story as a law enforcement action; one with limited short-term results and possible political motives. So, they shut the door, not giving me the opportunity to tell the story behind the story.

I decided to take matters into my own hands, and wrote a post on this very blog, quickly telling a skeletal version of the story I wanted to report. I also filed a posting for a blog syndication service that publishes on eHow.com.

And, wouldn’t you know it: my blog posting about the mortgage modification scams is right now the most popular post on my blog and is daily accepting traffic from people who typed in search engine queries trying to find out more about the issue. I’m also getting traffic from people who are reading my report on eHow, and coming to my blog for even more information.

Instead of feeling vindicated, I feel frustrated. It’s clear this is an important topic. Being the reporter out in the field, I knew it should have received far more coverage. And as reporters will tell you, the subjects involved in a story may not always have the purest of motivations (in fact, they rarely do), and in this case some appeared to have political motivations, but that doesn’t make a story any less valid if the reporter does their job and digs, filters, asks questions, and figures out where the truth most likely lies and what’s most important for the public to know.

And while the story about these scams, how to avoid them, and how to get help with faltering mortgages gets reported from time to time, it is not told in a persistent and continuous way. It simply gets lost, even though we have 24 hours of news every day on various platforms (TV, print and online outlets).

Just think, how often do you hear about battles between Democrats and Republicans on news channels and in print? And how frequently do the real-world effects and struggles of the mortgage crisis get covered? How many times have you seen or heard or read stories informing people specifically how to cope, what to do, where to get help, etc.?

Journalism, as an industry, is less and less shouldering its civic responsibilities. I wish I had an easy answer as to why this is, and whom to vilify. But the problems are complex and multi-faceted. I won’t attempt to get into all of them. There are conferences held, forums, discussions, bemoaning and finger-pointing throughout the industry. But in the end, nothing appears to change, unless it’s for the worse.

This has left many talented journalists hopeless and defeated. I unfortunately know of experienced people who are leaving the profession altogether. That is alarming, because they take with them years of skill building that is hard to replace. Journalism, like practicing medicine well, is something you learn by doing.

At the same time, I have spoken to several college journalism classes, and I have little optimism to offer them. In fact, I was recently invited to speak to another journalism class and declined the offer. I simply couldn’t face another class of hopeful young journalism students, only to tell them that the skills they were learning are little valued and their likelihood of landing a good job after school is very slim.

We are, as a country and perhaps a world, in a period of economic difficulty. With that, comes pessimism. So I know that some of these attitudes are only natural, and that things will improve. But journalism has been in a state of depression for as long as I’ve been in the field professionally – about 10 years now. And while I’ve always assumed that the smart and the talented will always have a platform and a voice, that assumption is no longer true – as I see talented journalists quitting the profession, or laid off and unable to find another place for their skills.

I’m alarmed that we seemingly no longer expect journalism to serve a civic function. And because of that, it doesn’t. And the less it does so, the less we see it as a vital part of our society.

We could do without medical care, but our lives would be far worse off. We’d be regressing. I’m saddened that the same logic doesn’t seem to apply to journalism. And our lives are worse off every day for it.

There is some hope: I was able to get the story out through the Internet and interested people have searched for it and found it – repeatedly, every day. And a number of fantastic laid-off journalists have gone on to found or work for online non-profit news organizations that focus on investigative journalism. But the online forum can’t replace our vast, formidable media outlets. The online world must work in conjunction with them, not be a substitute. For, it is a poor substitute.

Modern-day slavery

Last weekend, I met a woman who escaped slavery.

I was working a freelance project for the nationally-syndicated public radio program “The Story With Dick Gordon” produced by WUNC out of North Carolina. The story was “Enslaved in L.A.” and you can hear the final product at “The Story” Web site. The subject of the story was a 30-year-old woman who spent more than seven years as an enslaved servant here in Los Angeles, working in the large home of a wealthy family.

Her story is sad and simple. She was a poor, badly-treated servant in her home country of Indonesia. She was promised a better working life in Los Angeles, so she moved here and realized she was mislead. Instead, she was a virtual prisoner in the large home, with 24/7 working hours and almost no pay. She was told her destiny was to serve that household, and she felt hopeless. Eventually, a few alert people (a Chinese tutor and a hero neighbor) taught her that she had rights in the U.S. Once she believed them and her neighbor introduced her to an organization called CAST, she was able to escape.

While her story was extraordinary, would startled me most was how ordinary this woman was. If I had met her in the street, I would have thought of her as just another newly-arrived immigrant making their way in Los Angeles. She was dressed simply but fashionably, spoke fluent albeit accented English, and had a modest smile. She was soft-spoken and quiet.

Now I can’t help but look at people twice, wondering how many other stories like hers are walking down the street.

Telltale signs of a mortgage modification scam

This week, I have been looking into the problem of homeowners trying to modify their mortgages, after monthly payments become unaffordable.

These are people who are in danger of falling behind on their mortgage payments, are defaulting or at risk of defaulting, and who are desperate to avoid foreclosure.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Calif. Attorney General Gerry Brown, Federal Trade Commission Chairman on Leibowitz, and Douglas Axel, Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, said that federal and state authorities are increasing their oversight of mortgage modification consulting firms. Law enforcement has handed out legal actions – everything from lawsuits, to criminal charges, to cease-and-desist orders – against firms, lawyers, and individual actors who have taken desperate homeowners’ money but not helped them as promised.

FTC Chairman Leibowitz said the number of scammers in Southern California (especially Orange County) is far higher (even as a ratio of the total population) than in other places around the country. The only other part of the country where it’s as bad is Southern Florida.

Both Southern California and Southern Florida are facing the most foreclosures and defaults. Douglas Axel said the Southern California region he represents has the worst housing market in the country. With that kind of misery and the state budget cuts leaving law enforcement with fewer staff, it’s been an open invitation for unscrupulous people to take advantage of families and homeowners needing help.

Here’s how the scammers operate:

• They check public records for information about those defaulting on their loans (they can get your name, loan info, and what bank you’re with).
• They call you or knock on your door. They might say they represent that bank, even though they don’t. Or they might just sound really sympathetic, and say that they can solve all your problems for a small upfront fee.
• You pay them a fee, and then wait. You might hear lots of different excuses, delays, lost paperwork, etc. But the bottom line is, nothing gets done with your lender.
• Some companies are asking people to turn over their monthly mortgage payments to them, instead of paying their mortgage. This is a huge red flag!

Not all firms who ask for upfront fees are out to scam homeowners. But even lawyers have been caught participating in loan-modification scams. So, going to a law firm doesn’t guarantee you’re safe.

The bottom-line message from state and federal law enforcement officials is: if someone asks you for an upfront fee to help you with your mortgage problems, tell them “no” and look for free, non-profit, and government-sponsored alternatives through HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development).

You can listen to my interviews after the Wednesday press conference here:

• Interview with California Attorney General Gerry Brown
  Brown says that even though the California budget crisis and federal cutbacks have left law enforcement understaffed and scammers flourishing, state and federal offices are trying to ramp up enforcement and oversight. Brown says budget cuts has made law enforcement less effective at keeping track of scams and stopping them. Also, when asked by another reporter when he’s going to announce a run for governor, Brown seems to suggest that he will indeed run, and he will announce sometime in the fall.
• Interview with Douglas Axel, Assistant U.S. Attorney
  Axel says Southern California is a hotbed for mortgage modification scams and a national leader in foreclosures. He says if someone is charging you upfront fees, look for help somewhere else. Axel also says that Spanish-speakers are the most victimized.

The long haul for the gay rights movement

As the Proposition 8 battle was just getting under way, I remember a leading figure in the California gay rights movement sounding extremely confident that public opinion was on the side of gay marriage. That leader was very wrong.

In light of today’s ruling by the California Supreme Court upholding Proposition 8, the state’s gay marriage ban, the Wall Street Journal published a fascinating opinion piece detailing some of the big hurdles still facing the gay rights movement.

As the Proposition 8 battle was just getting under way, I remember a leading figure in the California gay rights movement, speaking in a public forum attended by news media, sounding extremely confident that public opinion in California was on the side of gay marriage. That leader was very wrong.

The WSJ opinion article details just how wrong, by showing how much the public as a whole still has some very fundamental reservations about not only gay marriage, but gay people in general.

Among the contentions of the article is that opposition to gay marriage is firmly rooted in people’s continued discomfort with gay people. There is still educating to do, according to a new poll the article author referenced, on whether being gay is a choice, a lifestyle, or a hard-wired trait. Plurality of respondents still think it’s a choice. I find that very telling, since many people in insular, urban gay communities question whether America is well past the question of gay acceptance, well past questions of whether being gay is a choice, and well past the type of discrimination prevalent as recently as the 1980s and 90s.

As that gay rights leader found out – a leader at the forefront of the losing battle against Proposition 8 – overconfidence, and a lack of understanding of the world outside of the comfortable, safe urban bubble, can be disastrous.

It is even more disastrous, when coupled with a lack of dialogue with those who don’t look like you, since on election night even Los Angeles County voted to approve the gay marriage ban. With a larger than usual turnout among Latino and African-American voters, analysts attributed the gay marriage ban victory in Los Angeles to the surge in minority voters.

Gay people of color have long complained that they are not well represented in affluent, gay communities. There seems to be an internal, subtle segregation among a disparate community that has but one trait in common – sexuality.

And so Proposition 8’s victory in Los Angeles County was evidence that the gay rights movement not only didn’t speak to people outside of urban centers, but also to people of color inside urban communities.

And what was the response following the crushing defeat of Proposition 8? Vilification of the opposition.

Angry protests last November surrounded Mormon worship centers, since the Mormon Church was thought to have donated a huge sum to the Yes on Prop 8 campaign. Church leaders denied that.

And today, as the California Supreme Court decision was handed out, gay marriage supporters were chanting “shame” outside of the supreme court building. This is the same court that ruled in favor of gay marriage in California, which then triggered Proposition 8 on the November ballot.

The WSJ article addresses this as well, pointing out that the civil rights movement on which the gay marriage movement aims to model itself, had a method described as “turn the other cheek.”

Could such angry attacks against those who don’t agree with a point of view actually backfire?

It will be worth watching to see how the gay marriage campaign in California develops from here, both on the pro and con side. Will gay marriage proponents change their tactics? Could all this attention paid to Proposition 8 already have changed some voters’ minds one way or another?

The answers could prove a fascinating study in civics, civil rights, and democracy.

California’s special election

California’s budget problems have to do with the state’s political history going back a century to a progressive movement that instituted the initiative process. That process, in turn, has bound the budgetary hands in Sacramento…

I covered the aftermath of California’s special election today for the newscasts on NPR (National Public Radio).

All five measures that would have partially addressed the state’s massive budget shortfall were voted down by a margin of almost 2 to 1. That’s a huge margin in elections. The only ballot measure that passed capped pay for elected officials during years that the budget is in deficit. I can’t imagine a clearer signal of voter anger that doesn’t include voting everyone out of office.

After wading through the complex ballot measures and budgetary problems, I better understood why voters so angrily voted down anything having to do with the budget crisis.

In short, it seemed as if everything we’d been hearing before the election – we’ve heard before. California’s coffers have gone through rough periods time and time again. Every time the economy declines, state funds plummet – apparently much more so than in other states.

Of course, with the country’s economy in a severe recession and job losses adding up at a staggering pace (a month’s job losses today equal a year’s job losses during a normal period of economic decline), the budget crisis this time is particularly severe.

The reason why California’s budget is so precarious is often explained as something like this: California’s budget problems have to do with the state’s political history going back a century to a progressive movement that instituted the initiative process. That process, in turn, has bound the budgetary hands in Sacramento through initiative after initiative, and a massive property tax law revolt known as Proposition 13. All this has left lawmakers with little wiggle room in terms of how state money is spent, on what it’s spent, and how much. And the state is left too dependent on fickle income tax revenue, which has reportedly plummeted to levels not seen since the 1930s (I couldn’t confirm this from a second source for my reporting today, and so I didn’t include it in my story.)

So with the budget problems seemingly nothing knew, it seemed to me that proponents of the budget ballot initiatives had a credibility gap – including Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had campaigned to fix California’s budget and tax problems, and has not been able to fulfill that pledge.

Voters have heard gloom and doom scenarios many times before. So why should they approve yet more borrowing of money, and an extension of tax hikes during tough economic times?

At the same time, the state has been borrowing heavily to limit the severity of budget cuts. Just months ago, lawmakers had to close a more than $40 billion deficit.

So there’s multiple ways to analyze the failure of the budget initiatives: voters were angry and didn’t believe politicians knew what they were doing, they rejected higher taxes, they rejected cuts in spending, they didn’t fully understand the issues at hand, they hadn’t quite yet felt the pain of the budget problems (by way of major cutbacks) so they didn’t understand the urgency of passing the ballot measures proposed.

But I also wonder if there may be another way of looking at what happened on election day. Perhaps at least some of the voters looked at the proposed solutions, the scope of the budget problem, and scratched their heads. Afterall, how can $6 billion raised by ballot initiative help alleviate a $20 billion deficit? And, at that, the initiatives would have raised that money at a heavy expense – not just tax increases, but cuts in social services for kids and new borrowing against future lottery proceeds (which theoretically could affect education funding, if lottery money was actually used to pay back the loan).

Perhaps voters simply decided that the solutions proposed were too little to solve the problem and took the wrong approach.

This is all speculation on my part. But it does lead to a broader point. There were few clear-cut decisions on the California ballot. And it may not be that surprising that in the absence of clearer, more concrete solutions, voters chose the status quo.

The Miss California quandry

The current Miss California may lose her crown tomorrow – pending the decision of none other than Donald Trump. And I find myself wondering how to think of this story.

At one level, this whole beauty pageant industry seems an anachronism that has little to do with today’s world. But for better or worse, this young lady has now reached some level of celebrity and she is listened to.

Should she have not spoken out about her views opposing gay marriage? To punish her for that would seem strange since most politicians have said the same thing – including almost all of the presidential candidates last year.

Of course, officially, she may lose her crown for posing in scantily clad, suggestive poses. But don’t the contestants come just shy of doing the same thing in the swimsuit portion of the pageant?

I’m left a little confused as to what the controversy is about. And being a Californian, I have not heard anyone I know speak of the issue in a way that might actually impact their life in any tangible way.

So why are news outlets paying any attention to this story? I’m confused.