Shrimp and Grit
Barbecue and Nation Building
This past week sucked. The shocking reality of President-elect Trump is hitting slowly and painfully. I would be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind that my degree in Government is trash and that public service is dead. That it doesn’t matter if you outright lie or have no real policy plans—the American people will elect you anyway. It’s been difficult to walk around Harvard and feel like someone actually did die, like we collectively suffered a terrible loss.
But in lieu of wallowing in our grief, I want to try to make sense of things by talking about something that always comforts me: Southern-style barbecue.
Learning Democracy
One hour north of New York City, a small school district in Rockland County has been coping with one of the most intense local election battles in recent memory over education and the consequences of tyranny through a simple-majority.
East Ramapo School District is a residential suburban area covering 35 square miles of an incredibly diverse group of New Yorkers. The fiscal monitor for the state’s education department characterizes the district as “high need, low resource.” The community is made up of an Orthodox Jewish population and a predominately African American and Latino community. Orthodox Jewish students are roughly two-thirds of the school-aged population, educated almost entirely in yeshivas, religious private schools where Yiddish is the primary instructional language. Many students in these private schools have disabilities, requiring special educational services and qualifying for additional educational funds from the state and federal government.
The Cost of a Vote
Election Day, or “the Tuesday immediately after the first Monday in November,” is a big deal. Across the country, eligible voters have the chance to go to the polls and fulfill their civic duty to their country. If you’re voting here in Massachusetts, your ballot allows you to vote for the county sheriff or approve the measure to legalize marijuana (Question 4 ballot initiative).
So what is the cost of a vote?
Endeavoring to Shoulder the Moon and Stars
When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt unexpectedly passed away on April 12th of 1945, his vice president, Harry S. Truman, found himself at the helm of a nation recovering from war and the most gripping economic depression in American history.
The day after he was sworn in as our nation’s 33rd president, Truman famously remarked to reporters on Capitol Hill: “Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don't know if you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me."
Stop Rubbernecking Through the 2016 Election
Rubbernecking: the act of slowing down in a moment of morbid curiosity or harmless fascination. The phrase was originally coined in the early 20th century to refer to tourists who slow down the normal pace of things because of their fascination with a new environment (looking at you, John Harvard statute tourists). Synonyms include: curiosity delay, gaper delay, gawk block, and Lookie Lou.
We’ve all been there. An accident on the side of the road causes traffic delays, a four-lane highway is bottlenecked, and cars and trucks have to merge left to avoid the three-car pile up surrounded by law enforcement and emergency responders. Onlookers resolute to identify the cause of the accident (and figure out what precisely caused their 40 minute delay) exacerbate the already slow moving traffic. Is anyone hurt? Whose fault is it? How bad do the cars look?