Working On My House

I=m working on my house. So are many other people, much more skilled than I am. Teams of painters and roofers have transformed my house in a fraction of the time I would have needed to do a much worse job. One man has reversed decades of deterioration to recreate the built-in gutters that direct water to a few ancient and a few new downspouts. That restoration is really an upgrade. Chalmer Herring is lining the channels with copper, replacing the galvanized metal that did not survive 120 years. He works alone and deliberately, because it=s not easy to find younger people who will be as deliberate as he is. Everything he sees gets fixed right.

I=m stripping paint. Less skill than persistence. The 26 columns around my 1895 porch are a triumph of the woodworker=s art. But turned and carved details have disappeared under countless coats of paint, so I=m removing those globby, uneven layers to find the wood underneath. It=s the kind of work I have been doing since we bought this house, wonderful to us for the history revealed in every room, yet still well below the average price of new houses. I=ve taken paint off doors and tarnish off hinges, shined doorknobs, refinished woodwork.

While I=m working on my house, it doesn=t matter who is President. Or who=s in Congress, in the Illinois Statehouse, or in my city offices. Their words and their actions play little role in that part of my life. I=m free to do my work.

Well, almost free. Every level of government makes some rules about what I can do to my house. Probably the biggest restriction is the most local: my house is part of a district of old homes in Jacksonville recognized by the National Register of Historic Places. I can=t just tear off my porch or build out my attic or add a room to the side without getting the approval of Jacksonville city=s Historic Preservation Commission. Their appointed task is to prevent such alterations in the outward appearance of historic homes in the district. The Commission is less about prohibiting than about persuading, in the interest of preserving for everyone a unique collection of American homes, made with materials and by craftsmen no longer available. Except maybe for Chalmer.

I believe in that work and have served on the Commission for seven years. All I want to do is bring back the original beauty of this house.

When I get tired, I can watch whatever I want on TV. There are dozens of channels of addictive trash, but the breadth of choice and the lack of intrusion by government makes America the promised land of media opportunity. I grew up with a handful of stations in New York, more than most Americans had access to, all very carefully walking a narrow path in the middle. I don=t watch a lot of TV, but if I want, I can now switch from movies made before I was born, to liberal or conservative news, to the wonderful source of information about everything that is public television. Someone else can do the opposite. We both might end up at the Olympics or the World Series.

Those are just two examples of how I can control my own life here in the US. The list is endless. I know that such freedom of choice is a privilege made of good luck and years of good work. Many in America face a more restricted range of choices, because they have too little money or too little health or just bad luck. Many of those people voted for Trump, because he promised to get them more.

There are many others whose circle of freedom is smaller because of who they are. In my lifetime, women and blacks and gays have broken out of very constricted circles. Their gains have been wonderful, but the remaining restrictions are still significant. Government contributed to restricting them and then made their increased freedom possible.

Because I am an ordinary citizen, I need the American democratic system to protect those freedoms. If the great powers of America, media, corporations, and governments, decided to narrow my freedoms, to tell me more often what to do and what not to do, I could fight them, but I=d lose.

Trump has never needed the protection of our democratic system. Every moment of his life has been privileged by wealth. He acts and talks as if he has deserved all his freedoms from birth. He has disdained the freedoms of others to enlarge his own.

I worry about two things. I don=t think Trump will help the Americans who voted for him because they hoped he could get them better lives. Trump has never shown the slightest interest in people without a lot of power and privilege. He has often used his power and wealth to take theirs.

I do think Trump might hurt the Americans who didn=t vote for him because he disparaged who they are. He has made his contempt for large groups of Americans perfectly clear. Now he=ll have much more power to hurt them.

We=ll have to wait and see.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 15, 2016

This Election Makes A Difference

Most people know about Chobani yogurt. Few know that it represents a remarkable story of immigrant success in America. Hamdi Ulukaya is a Turkish immigrant with Kurdish heritage, who arrived in upstate New York in the 1990s. He used a family recipe to make feta cheese. With a $800,000 loan from the Small Business Administration, he bought a local yogurt factory and started selling Chobani yogurt 9 years ago. He opened the world’s largest yogurt manufacturing plant in Twin Falls, Idaho, in 2012.

Chobani is now the number one selling yogurt in the US. Ulukaya offers his 2000 employees 6 weeks of fully-paid family leave for new parents and recently gave them shares in the company, which could make some of them millionaires. He sponsors the US Olympic team.

But Ulukaya and the Chobani brand are a new target of a right-wing campaign of disinformation, led by Breitbart News, home of Donald Trump’s campaign CEO Stephen Bannon. Ulukaya employs more than 300 Iraqi, Afghan and Turkish refugees in his factories. He has created a foundation to assist refugees, gaining direct support from IBM and other giant corporations. Breitbart began publishing stories which falsely linked his company with tuberculosis cases in Idaho and a sexual assault case in Twin Falls. This spawned online calls to boycott Chobani and online death threats to the Twin Falls mayor and his wife. Many of these threats come from Trump supporters. Helping refugees become productive citizens in America is a crime in the eyes of those who love Trump.

Certainly this election will make a difference in government and laws. Here’s a big example – the health of our planet. If Trump is elected, we can expect no action to slow global heating. His repeated insistence that climate change is a hoax might mean that his policies, backed by a Republican Congress, would make temperature rise faster. We would lose four crucial years in the race to save our planet for the next generations.

How our laws are interpreted by the Supreme Court would also be starkly different, depending on who wins. Trump promises to appoint very conservative justices, which could mean an end to legal abortion and to our progress toward equal treatment for gay Americans.

But the difference this election makes will not only be in concrete actions of government. If Trump wins, then women who are sexually harassed will have a harder time gaining justice. A Trump victory would be victory for “locker room talk” and worse, sexual assault. Bragging about sexual predation and getting away with it would be confirmed as winning male behavior.

A Trump victory would be a victory for discrimination against Muslims, not only foreign Muslims, but American Muslims, too. Even if he couldn’t pass the discriminatory laws he promises, a hater of Islam in the White House would mean encouragement for haters of Islam all over America.

A Trump victory would be a victory for white racism. About half of Trump supporters hold racist views of American blacks and Hispanics. They attack “political correctness”, because it prevents them from openly espousing their racist ideas. The “great” America they seek is a white America.

A Trump victory would be a victory for the politics of insults and lies. Having the Insulter-in-Chief leading our country would encourage every jerk in America to unleash his nastiness, to spew hatred, to try to win in life by making everyone else small. We see that happen at his rallies, where verbal attacks on reporters are now common.

The people who concoct the wildest stories about evil refugees, terrorist Muslims, lazy blacks and whining women will be able to look at President Trump as their role model. A country in which the President’s closest advisor tells racist lies about a good man, a good employer, and a good yogurt maker is not a great country.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 8, 2016

Walking With Dogs

This crazy election is only a week away. I need relief and find that my dogs ease political stress. Their simpler lives are not affected by politics and they help me recognize what is important in this life.

I like to let my dogs, two Boston terriers, run free. Dogs on leashes are terribly constrained to go where their owners go, to walk a narrow path through their lives. Modern extension leashes give them a bit more latitude, but not any more freedom. I don’t like them, because dogs don’t learn how to heel, one of the most important disciplines for our canine friends.

I believe in a combination of strict training and free running. I want my dogs to come when called, to behave around other people, to sit or stay or lie down when I tell them. I have trained a series of Bostons to walk with me (heeling) without a leash. That effort has not been so successful now that I have two brothers, because they distract each other, so I have to use leashes when we are around other people.

What happens when dogs run free? I don’t go to the tiny “dog parks” which have recently proliferated, because they usually provide little room for exercise. Wherever I live, I find places where I can walk and dogs can run.

Every breed is different. Boston terriers like to stay relatively close to their human companions, so Homer and Hector stay within sight as I walk, but run backwards and forwards, stop when and where they want, and chase each other. They make their own decisions about what to do and where to go, but we can walk for 10 minutes without my saying a word. I get to observe dogs doing their own thing.

My dogs listen to me, but think mostly about each other. Homer and Hector have been together since the day they were born and they pay close attention to what the other is doing. When one stops at an interesting spot, usually marked by another dog, the other comes running and their heads come together to smell the fine aromas. But they have their own personalities. When Homer rounds a corner, he stops and stares ahead, searching the landscape for prey ( I think). When I let him out the back door of our house, he insists on going through the door first, but then stops immediately to survey the back yard. Hector just runs past him, less interested in other animals, following his own path. He tends to wander further afield, so I have to call him occasionally to come closer. They sleep next to each other or on top of each other, keeping warm contact since they were puppies.

People often assume that the way they do things is the only possible way. German dogs and dog owners behave differently, at least what I have observed in cities. Leashes are unusual. People walk crowded streets with dogs nearby, following the same general path, but their own way. Dogs accompany diners in restaurants, sitting quietly at their feet.

I think we underestimate canine intelligence. As I watch my dogs running around, I wonder what they are thinking about, what is important to them. We often say that dogs are smart when they obey commands. That’s a human perspective on dogs. More interesting to me are dog decisions. We know little about how dogs make decisions – go left or right, stop and smell, run or walk, pee here or there.

Dog researchers believe that our best friends are particularly good at figuring out what we mean by our communicative gestures. I have seen my dogs figure out what I mean by various gestures that I repeat in similar situations. They want to know what I am doing and going to do, and the gestures help them make sense of their world. I had to be disciplined about using particular gestures to mean always only one thing and to reward the dogs for figuring out what they mean.

This communication goes the other way. Hector and Homer try to tell me what they want, because I control so much of their lives – let me out, feed me, pet me. I need to figure out what they want and respond, even if it’s not what I want, because that encourages their efforts at communication.

The more we observe our animals, the more freedom we give them to make choices, the deeper our relationships. Dogs are not just pets. They can be our partners in life.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, November 1, 2016