The Economic Cost of Hate... And a few more thoughts.

Now that I’m retired, my brain is craving some interaction with people who want to teach me something! Last week, I attended a webinar, via Zoom, on the economic cost of hate. This talk was focused on the cost of hate aimed primarily toward the LGBTQ community.

This event was provided by Ken Stern of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate. The presentation was made by Lee Badgett, an economist who recently authored the book The  Economic Case for LGBT Equality: Why Fair & Equal Treatment Benefits Us All. 

Here is a summary of the points made by  Dr. Badgett:

Her work is focused on the economic quantification of bigotry. It is all about numbers and data and is meant to appeal to those looking at the “bottom line.” 

The cost of hate begins to accumulate as early as elementary school. One person who was bullied as a child said that it was like going to war every day. And like a war, bullying can be costly. Studies have shown that bullying reduces GPAs, increases absenteeism and drop-out rates.  An LGBT student is more likely to be bullied. Not surprisingly, bullying is bad for the entire school and this is reflected in test scores and rankings. 

This cost continues into adulthood. Gay men, with the same education and work history as their straight counterparts, make, on the average, 11% less. In studies where applicants’ resumes reflected an affiliation with the LGBT community, the applicant was much less likely to move onto the next phase of a job interview. Studies show that for every nine interviews made, a straight man will get the job. It takes a gay man fourteen interviews to do the same. 

Stigma makes you sick. Minority stress is a real thing and it just doesn't affect LGBT people, but all people whose demographics are underrepresented in a field. Women in predominately male professions, black people in a predominately white profession, etc. 

Discriminatory policies prevent businesses from hiring or keeping good employees. Studies back up the fact that businesses with anti-discriminatory policies increase their stock prices, their productivity and their profits. 

She talked about the so-called bathroom bill which North Carolina put in place preventing transgender people from using gender-appropriate restrooms. This move cost the state four-billion dollars in lost revenue. Businesses that were going to relocate there, didn't relocate. Conventions and events that were going to take place there, went some place else. 

Countries with progressively better treatment of the LGBT community, had a progressively better GDP. In emerging economies, one additional LGBT right afforded brought in an additional $320 increase to the per-capita GDP. In already-established economies, this one additional right brought in a $1,065 increase to GDP. On the flip side, the stigma of becoming incrementally anti-LGBT costs a national economy. The conservative estimate of this cost was a loss of one-percent of GDP. 

Making positive LGBT policy changes in an organization or a state or nation complements that entity’s promotion of human rights and opens doors. 

The author concluded that three things should come out of these studies:

1. There needs to be more resources for LGBT organizations.
2. Policies and laws need to change.
3. There needs to be more and better data. 

Dr. Badgett took about 20 minutes to outline her book and the rest of the hour was devoted to questions. 

I believe that this “economic cost” perspective is an important vector for our community to push in promoting equity and justice for all. But, one thing kind of nagged at me, so I asked the question: “Short of boycotts, In your experience, have you found that anti-LGBT politicians (not business leaders) in the United States are swayed by the data you presented?

Her short answer was “probably not.”

Here is the webinar if you are interested.

 

Or a link can be found here. 

Of course, the webinar made me think about some issues. If you want to know what I am thinking, please keep reading.

I suppose that if the only way to get a business to do the right thing is to show them the bottom line, that’s better than them not doing the right thing, in spite of the bottom line. 

I applaud the work being done to promote anti-hate as a “logical” position for financial success. Fortunately, today we live in an era where that can happen. In other words, in the past, a slave-based business enterprise might be be hard-pressed to acknowledge the economic logic of anti-hate.

The question I asked Dr. Badgett underlies my main concern. Politicians whose base is composed of ideologues will not be swayed by a logic which endangers their livelihood. In fact, if conservative politicians decide to follow the logical route, thereby creating a platform position which contradicts the programmed worldview of their constituents, they will be “primaried” out. 

This is not a new phenomenon, nor is it endemic to the extreme right. Any longterm plan of promotion of “liberty and justice for all” cannot ignore it. I think this closed mindset deserves to be studied and addressed, in order to understand and eventually overcome it. 

The Rand corporation conducted a study decades ago which highlights this problem. The conservative think tank found that it was five times more economical to spend money upstream when it comes to the prevention of crime. In other words, for every dollar a government spent on childhood education, free breakfasts and lunches in school (or any government spending which studies have shown prevents a child from slipping into a life of crime) the state would not spend five dollars to incarcerate these children later on in life. 

You would think that this would have spurred an increase in Head Start and other programs. Again, this study was made by the conservative-leaning Rand Corporation. They did not address altruism, just the economic bottom line. This study had almost zero impact on politicians, let alone their constituents. 

One might project this phenomenon into the larger world, as well. We used to spend a lot of money in other countries to win the hearts and minds of those citizens. It was an effective foreign policy too, and brought results. Many people in our nation decried this as a “waste of money.” So much so, that today the United States is at the bottom of the list of nations which render foreign aid (as a percentage of GDP). Now, we find that the United State’s defense budget is more than all of our potential enemies’ budgets combined. I believe the budget number is closer to the rest of the entire world’s defense budget combined. Yet, you don't hear much of an outcry about this spending from those who, otherwise, like to think of themselves as “conservative.” But, you did hear from them complaining about our more effective, more economical foreign aid - a lot. Why is this?

In my opinion, it is pretty obvious that we are more than willing to spend money ineffectively, and without any regard to the outcome, as long as that money is spent satisfying a visceral desire to hurt others and not help them. 

I don’t think we used to be this way. Today, I don't think the majority of our nation operates this way, either. Those who embrace a costly hate-based economics are in the minority. But due to voter suppression, gerrymandering and an undemocratic system which gives this minority of people in our nation sway over the majority, it really doesn't matter. This minority seems outspoken in their desire to spend more money to exacerbate a problem than less money to solve it, especially when this spending promotes cruelty. Witness the economic cost of locking hundreds of children up as a deterrent to immigrants seeking to cross our border. You can almost hear their chants “Lock them up!” Granted “Effective immigration policy, now!” is not very catchy.

Now that we have lost track of the parents of our child prisoners, we have a dilemma  - hundreds of children that we must now do something with. Whatever the solution, it will be costly. And knowing that a hateful minority calls the shots, rest assured, it will also be cruel. What the Trump administration did to these children (and what they might yet do to them) is an expense we bare, not only in dollars, but also costs our national character and our standing in the world. We have shown the world who we are, and all Americans will forever bear the brunt. For the promoters of this cruelty and to the average Americans who support them, this seems well worth it. They will continue to feel this way right up until the time when the economic and societal chickens come home to roost. When this happens, they will conveniently forget they were ever supportive of this international crime. 

Most who supported incarcerating these children will forget they did so. More than likely, these are the same ignorant, arrogant bunch who rah-rah’ed us into the Iraq War and then when things went sour, said they were never for the war in the first place. As a point of clarification, when I say “ignorant” and “arrogant” I say this not as a pejorative. I mean it in the sense that, in my life, I have never witnessed so many average citizens who proclaim they know more about global warming than climate scientists, know more than epidemiologists about pandemics, know more than constitutional scholars about the constitution, know more about human gender biology than biologists, etc. In other words, “ignorant” and “arrogant.”

You might be picking up from me that, in the United States, our political decisions often do not reflect an underlying logic  but only an underlying cruelty. This cruelty, oftentimes, does not only extend to others. Sometimes, we turn this illogical cruelty inward, toward ourselves.  

A worker whose employer spends a thousand dollars a month for that worker’s health insurance, on top of the thousand dollars a month the worker themselves pay, might take a look at the world and note that the United States is the only place where this bilking takes place. They may also note that, not only do we spend twice as much as the next highest spending nation, our health outcomes are near the bottom of all nations in the world. An employee, if motivated by the bottom line, or their health, might want to vote for politicians who would work toward changing this system. All other countries have already done so. But here, the ignorant and the arrogant do not change course, no matter what the data says. That is, again, until everything crashes down around them. When this happens, they will forget they were ever driving the train. As stated before, these folks are the minority, but, thanks to what our system has become, they call the shots. 

If I wanted to promote a self-interest rationale for not automatically excluding others because of the color of their skin, their “LGBTness,” or any other bigotry, I think I have the ticket. Namely, just from a selfish perspective, why would I want to arbitrarily narrow the field of people who have the potential to be in my life? Why would I not want to meet and befriend someone who would care for me, make me laugh, help me out or otherwise hang out with me? If I was a business owner, why would I want to exclude some candidates who possessed the skill-set my business needed? Maybe the best candidate might be among the excluded. 

When Trump instituted the ban on transgender people serving in the military, some of my conservative friends thought this was a good thing. They said, “Being in the military is not a right but a privilege.”  Really, they said this. Apparently, they unwittingly now understand the concept of “privilege.” My response to them was one that I have heard every general and admiral echo in asking, “Why shouldn't we want to hire the best people for the job? Sometimes, these people are transgender.” Quite simply, the reason why my conservative friends held this irrational belief contrary to the logical belief held by leaders of our military, was that they did not care so much for the success of our military, as much as they wanted to exclude others and hurt them. This brought them some emotional pleasure. Cruelty once again “trumping” logic.

I understand that excluding a group of people from possible economic success, from taking part in society, sweeping them from the mainstream and pushing them to the margins, might make some people feel better about themselves. For some reason, hurting other people - like jailing adults instead of feeding them as children, or locking up undocumented immigrant children in cages really appeals to a certain ideological bent. Think about the people who fought against marriage equality. It had nothing to do with their religion. No one was forcing any religion to marry same-sex couples. It had nothing to do with same-sex marriage being an attack on other-sex marriage. It was simply a way to ensure gay people did not have the same rights and opportunities that they had. Same with not letting trans people use the restrooms of their gender. Like marriage, being able to go to use a public restroom is a pretty basic human right. Remove that right, and the people you don't like cannot go out to eat, go to movies, go to school, etc. Cruelty’s triumph over logic.

I think the problem is that our country is now divided into two basic groups. There is an inflammatory term for one of these groups, which I will refrain from. So, how about "Empathetic people" and "Sociopaths"? "Kind" and "Unkind"? "Logical" and "Irrational"? Whatever you want to call them, there are two distinct groups of people - those who are irrational and want to hurt others and those who are logical and empathetic. 

I am glad that business are looking at the bottom line… now, and that most businesses know that hate costs. I believe that in our public life there has to be a multifaceted approach to ensure rationality and justice eventually overrule hate and inequity. Here is what I would suggest:

1. Restore a type of democracy to the United States. Fix the electoral college. Eliminate gerrymandering. Make one person’s vote count the same as another person’s vote. Make the senate more representative. Eliminate voter suppression. Institute campaign finance reform.
2. Show voters what their decisions cost them economically. Send them a bill for locking children up. Send them a bill for the Iraq War. Send them a bill for incarcerating people that would not have been incarcerated if we took care of the problem early on in their lives.
3. Show people that it is a courageous thing to change one’s mind when one is confronted with facts. In other words, show how news outlets like Fox may make you feel more comfortable, but they are not helping you become more informed. In fact, they are making you more ignorant and lazy. The data is there for the ignorant part. The laziness factor is my own hypothesis. 
4. Know the costs to your children when you raise them to be unempathetic (sociopaths) and illogical. Know the costs to yourself when you operate the same way. 
5. Teach children critical thinking in school. I suspect that there may be a bigger backlash for this than the current brouhaha over sex ed. Some parents may be fearful that their children will become critical thinkers. Logic may undermine their household.  
6. Instill pride in our nation. Not blind faith, but a realization that we collectively own what we are and what we will become. Be an active fixer for what is broke. When we eventually have a democracy, our national character should be a reflection of the overall character of its people. Right now, it is not. 

I’m sure there are more, but this is a start. 

Making apples into apple-ade

 A couple of years ago, I bought one of these telescoping fruit pickers.

So much of the fruit in our prune tree was inaccessible and having one of these eliminated the need to climb up and down a ladder, and kept overripe fruit from being squished into the sidewalk and street. 

This September, we had a harvest of about 100 pounds of really nice Italian prunes. Dried some and ate a bunch right away. So good! There’s also five gallons of wine and another five gallons of plum/ginger/hopped melomel fermenting downstairs.
 

After walking past so many apple trees this year with fruit rotting underfoot, I resolved to contact neighbors to see if I could use my fruit picker to pick some of their apples before they too were wasted. If I remember correctly, my friend John had done a similar thing with abandoned apple trees he had found around town. 

A hallmark of apple trees in Spokane is that, if you don't spray them with chemicals, they are bound to be badly damaged from apple maggots. They can really look quite gnarly, However, they still have juice in them. And where there is juice, there is always the potential for fermentation. 

For most of my life, I have been a person who is a little shy (I know some of you will find that hard to believe), and have never been an overly sociable sort. And now being an out trans person, I know I can make some people feel uncomfortable. But, damn it, I wanted apples! 

I utilized my Nextdoor app on my phone. Hitherto, I had only used it to post things like “I found a can of beans in an intersection. Did anyone lose a can of beans?” or “I am thinking of thatching my roof with thatch brought up from my lawn. Does anyone have any suggestions?” You know, “conversation starters.” For the first time, I had an actual request: 

APPLES NEEDED

Hi, if you have an unsprayed apple tree (aka wormy) that you would like to have picked before the fruit hits the ground, please let me know. I bought a very small cider press and want to give it a whirl. Thanks!

The response was almost instantaneous. I received invite after invite. I settled on those neighbors closest to me. Many were within walking distance. One very kind neighbor said that she was at her daughter’s place in Idaho and would bring me back some apples. She did. About one-hundred pounds of some very beautiful apples and some gorgeous plums. So very kind! 

Sometimes the apples that I picked were plentiful and beautiful. Sometimes they were beautiful but not so plentiful. Other times there were just a few almost perfect apples on the tree. Sometimes, the apples were too far gone to use. But, no matter what the tree was like, I met so many wonderful neighbors! I had great conversations with them. I stepped out of my comfort zone and really enjoyed their company. Now that I am retired, like a lot of people these days, my social interactions are pretty limited and mostly over Zoom. While picking, I kept my distance as we chatted and, thanks to my awesome new hearing aids, I could hear our conversations! I also had my buff around my neck ready to pull up over my nose and mouth just in case. 

My son Aidan and I weighed the apples, and they came in at just over two-hundred pounds. According to what I have read, it takes 80 pounds of pressed apples to make five gallons of cider. 

 

Now on to the pressing matters!

Last month I bought a small cider press (1.6 gallons). I searched all over town to find one and there were none to be had. I spent $65 for one online. The plan was to use it to press the Italian prunes from our trees. I did and it was a mess! I finally just ran the plums through the blender and made fermentables out of that. 

So, along with my plum picker, this little press was crying out to be used. 

Sarah and I have made cider before at a friend’s home. One of the crucial pieces of equipment is an apple shredder or chunker. When you press apples, you don't usually press the whole apple. It's the chunks (pomace) that get pressed. Again, there were no chunkers to be had in town so I looked to buy one online. They were all over $100 and it was going to take a very long time to get one. So I had to improvise. 

On the morning of the cider making, Aidan and Natalie came over and we went through all the apples, got rid of some of the more rotten ones and the ones that had been chewed up by squirrels. We then washed all the apples with a very mild very watered-down solution of detergent. Then the apples were rinsed off and we moved them into the garage. 

It was raining so hard that day! My newly-placed rain barrels (another project) filled up fast. So, with the rain, we had to move the whole operation indoors. We moved the cars out of the garage. Gave the mess a good sweep and set up our operation. 

We put up a screen and had The Cult of Chucky playing in the background for a good Halloween vibe.

We couldn't really follow what was going on, but we enjoyed the voice work of Brad Dourif as Chucky (his daughter is in the movie too. Like Aidan says, she has her dad’s eyebrows).

We then decided to put Dune on instead. I haven't seen that movie in a couple of years. And then I remembered that Brad Dourif is in this movie, as well. He played Piter De Vries, the mentat for the Harkonnens. 

 

Ike and Aidan, when they were little, wanted to be Harkonnens for Halloween. We talked them out of it. 

Anyway, I digress….

Apples were quartered. Really bad pieces were thrown into the compostable bin.

Quartered apples were placed into a bucket until the bucket was about a third full. This was the improvised apple chunker. A sanitized sledge hammer was used to churn these apples in the bucket. The apples were further demolished by using a drill attachment used for mixing drywall mud. It had been sanitized as well. This made an OK slurry of apple juice, finely chunked apples and some remaining quartered apples.  

The slurry was dumped into the press. The press has a mesh bag in it. There is a hole in the bottom of the mesh bag to allow the jack bolt to protrude through it. I had made a frame that the press was screwed into. This frame was clamped to the work table.

The juice ran into the bucket until it was almost full. I am guessing that each 1.6 gallon basket of apples rendered 3 cups of juice. Maybe. 

The juiced chunks were saved to make compost. 

Out of the 200 pounds of apples pressed, we gathered about seven gallons of juice. This was a lot less than I expected. We should have pressed just under 15 gallons (if my math is correct). I believe the poor job of chunking contributed a lot to the shortage. 

Five gallons of the juice is now fermenting as a straight-up cider. No sugar added. Just some yeast. The cider took off - fermenting really quickly. 

The two gallons of juice that were left was mixed with some cinnamon, nutmeg, honey, sugar and dehydrated cranberries that have been in our cupboard for the last 10 years. 

This wacky mix, which I guess one would call a cyser (usually a mix of honey and apple cider) did not take off. The specific gravity of it was really very high. It should be bubbling away! I put a heating mat under it. I even stuck it in the sauna for a bit. I pitched more yeast into it. I was puzzled. Then, at 3 a.m. this morning, almost a week later, it dawned on me - THE CRANBERRIES! I bet those suckers were loaded with preservatives. Hence why the big bag of them looked the same last week as they did ten years ago. No wonder there was no fermentation. Dang…

This morning, with Sarah’s help, I strained out the cranberries (and also removed the nutmeg and cinnamon). I don't know if this will be enough to get the mix going again. We will see!

Next year, my plan is to start earlier. I will try to get more apples. I have had many people since tell me about their trees they would also like to have picked. I am going to get a larger press. At least five gallons. They are not much more expensive than the 1.6 gallon version. But, I will have to remember to order one before autumn, because there seems to be a rush on them in September. Also, I really do need to get an apple chunker. I don't like having one tool that can only be used for one purpose. Maybe there are more things to do with an apple chunker. But, the lack of one was really the shortcoming in the whole operation. It is an absolute necessity. 

The best part of this operation was getting to meet so many nice people and reconnect with so many neighbors. I kind of helped them by removing from their trees the wormy little suckers that they were going to have to pick up later. They really helped me by letting me have their apples. Over the last few months, between my recent retirement and the Covid restrictions, I have had really limited contact with others. It felt so good to talk (socially distant) with people who I had never met before. That was something I did all the time when I worked for the fire department. I miss that a lot.  

The time with my family was so good too. The four of us - Sarah, Natalie, Aidan and I worked together in a common project. This will be a great memory!

And hopefully, we can ring in a better year for everyone, with a glass of cider or two!

Brad Douriff also played Grima Wormtongue in the last two installments of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy - The Two Towers and The Return of the King. 

 

Beware the goat...

 

After many years of backpacking, fishing and hunting, I recently had my first experience of meeting a creature with malice in its heart. 

Sarah and I had planned for two days at Heart Lake, up  in the mountains, on the Idaho-Montana border. Part of our itinerary was a side trip from Heart, past Pearl Lake and into the Trio Lakes. Sarah had been there earlier and had noted that the trout were good-sized. 

A couple of years ago, my brother had given me a Tenkara fishing rod and I had never had a chance to use it. I haven’t gone fishing for the last three years. I have to admit that the thought of harming a fish was becoming more distressing and the whole ritual of prepping for fishing was becoming too much of a hassle. I had spent years getting my kayak dialed into a delightful ramshackle fishing platform and had sold it last year. So, I really wasn’t thinking much about fishing lately.

And then there was the whole name change and gender marker change to look forward to in getting a new fishing license. No thanks.

But this Tenkara rod intrigued me. There is no reel. It telescopes out to 12 feet from a stowed position of about 16 inches. It weighs almost nothing with only about 20 feet of line on it. With just a few flies and some spare tippet, the hassle would be minimal and the weight in my backpack even less so. So, I purchased a nonresident Montana fishing license and Sarah and I started our hike up the mountains about 15 miles north of Superior.

The trailhead parking lot was pretty full. It turned out they were all day hikers. It’s a little over three miles from the trailhead to the edge of the lake. So, a nice day hike. At the trailhead was the obligatory “Know the Difference Between a Black Bear and a Grizzly” fact sheet. Why a hiker would need to know the difference is beyond me. I know they say that you can climb up a tree to escape a grizzly, but I think that would be hard to do whilst shitting one’s pants. 

A really nice hike up to the lake. 

Upon arrival, there are these signs:

Now these are all nice signs. Much nicer than the bear one. In my only encounter with mountain goats in the past, they seemed shy and cautious. Not really worth the sign. I wasn’t planning on feeding one anyway. And I didn't think one would get close enough to be thumb-sized.

We hiked to the end of the lake, investigating campsites. We boulder-hopped around the inlet to the lake and discovered that the trails in and around the campsite looked like an empty goat freeway. The paths were all coated in white fur. We looked high into the ridge line above and we could make out a mountain goat peacefully snoozing on a cliff. My thoughts turned to the evening and what it would be like having pitched our tent on this goat thoroughfare, so we went back up the lake and into a nicely forested area. 

It was a well-used campsite with nails in trees for us to hang our water filter bag. We found a good tree about 50 yards behind us to hang our food bag. 

I walked to go get some water at the creek right behind us. The little clearing there was a certifiable mess, with toilet paper and exposed turds rising out of the soil. Obviously this was the latrine. I couldn’t really bring myself to pull water out of a creek with all that shit around it. So, I hiked to another creek a little further away. 

I had prepared a zucchini coconut curry for dinner and we had a little wine. For dessert, we had some really good candy of an herbal nature. We were both feeling really good. For the first time in a long time, we brought our Crazy Creek chairs ( a wedding present from 29 years ago) backpacking with us. Sitting there looking out at the lake, I felt so peaceful. Then, I experienced a feeling like I was being watched. I slowly turned around and there was a big-ass, gnarly mountain goat, about 20 feet away walking toward us. Sarah and I both rose to our feet and started shouting at it. It stopped and then reluctantly walked away. 

We cleaned the dishes and then went to go put the food up in the tree. The goat had been making occasional appearances, but seemed to be enjoying munching the soiled toilet paper in the latrine area. Yuck. We were raising the bag up the tree when the goat started walking up to us. Again, we started yelling. The goat wasn’t having any of this. It kept on coming toward us. Big shiny pointy horns, mangy hair, muscly, skinny. Sort of like a starving pit bull only about four times bigger. And its eyes. To quote Robert Shaw as Quint in Jaws. 

“It’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When it comes at you it doesn't seem to be livin'... until he bites you, and those black eyes roll over white.”

We started yelling louder. It stopped. Lowering his dagger-horns atop his boulder-skull, he started pawing the ground. Shaking its head and ass, it was getting ready to send that fucking blockhead with its  pointy horns right into the soft parts of me, and, or Sarah. Worse than that, if I held my thumb out, it would have been much bigger. 

I slowly brought the bag of food down. It was now to be a weapon - a bludgeon of crackers, coffee, couscous and faux jerky. I didn’t feel that scared, just kind of befuddled that this was really happening. We stopped yelling. It stopped coming at us. It lifted its head and then walked away. We walked the short distance back to the tent, always keeping the goat in our sight.

I asked Sarah for a short tutorial on the bear spray. From then on out, one of us would always have it ready to go, as we protected the other when cleaning up or peeing far from our camp. 

As we  climbed into the tent, I paraphrased another line of Quint’s. 

“We go in the tent. Tent in is the forest. We are in the forest. Goat is in the forest. Our goat.”

I fell asleep almost immediately. About three in the morning. I started thinking about the prospect of cutting our trip short. Maybe Sarah would think this was an overreaction. Maybe it was. 

I have been dealing with anxiety and depression over the last 10 years. About a year ago, I started on some medication and it has really helped. Instead of reacting to things almost automatically, I have been able to hold things at arm’s length and look at them and think about the issue. Also, I retired from work almost two months ago. My job was one where some big decisions had to be made immediately. Whether on a fire or with a patient, the decision to act and the direction of that action was instantaneous. And as I laid in the tent - Sarah snoring peacefully beside me, I realized that I didn’t have to make decisions like that anymore. That felt really good. 

In the morning, I told Sarah of my concerns. And she was in agreement, so we started packing up our camp. And then a baby goat sauntered into camp. And it did look pretty harmless and cute. Just like a baby shark. 

I now understood the need for these signs. It was a quick hike down the hill.