Ryan and Debi Cragun’s Blog

I was discussing race in my Introduction to Sociology classes this week and talked about how race continues to be an issue in the U.S. for a lot of reasons (e.g., income, healthcare, quality of life, racism, etc.). To illustrate that racial tensions have not disappeared, I linked to this NYTimes article about a principal receiving a noose in the mail. We talked in my classes about the symbolism behind the noose - it has come to be seen in the black community as a symbol of oppression and a reminder of the Jim Crow era in the U.S.

One of my brighter students then pointed out a controversy I had not heard of yet - that some people decorating for Halloween have been hanging fake corpses with nooses in their yard to decorate. The NYTimes is now covering this controversy as well.

Here’s where my conflicting feelings come into play: Growing up in admittedly almost 100% white Morgan, UT, my family always decorated for Halloween. Halloween has long been one of my favorite holidays, maybe because I always had so much fun on Halloween dressing up and scaring kids coming trick or treating. For a a number of years (this would have been from around 1990-1995 or so), one of our decorations was a dummy hanging from the house with a noose around its neck. I learned how to tie a noose along with other knots in Boy Scouts - and there was no perceived connection to race when we were taught it. It was more for entertainment than anything else. What we would usually end up doing is, on Halloween night, I would slip into the clothes the dummy was wearing, put the noose around my neck and put the mask on, then pretend like I was the dummy as kids would walk up to the house to trick or treat. When they got close enough, I’d come alive and scare the crap out of the kids (I usually wouldn’t come alive if they were really young). It was loads of fun and, honestly, had no racial over or under tones.

As I reminisced about what I thought of as good times this year leading up to Halloween, I saw this story and thought to myself: Okay, I know there is a symbolic association with a noose and racism in the US. But does the noose always have to have that symbolism? It’s not like the noose was used exclusively to hang black men in the South - it was widely used out West to hang criminals and has been used around the world for similar purposes. There are plenty of other examples of items having different symbolic meanings depending on the context: the swastika is generally seen as a symbol of Nazi fascism, but has its roots in Jainism and indicates a oneness with the universe; the cross is both a symbol of Christianity, a simple grave marker (with no indication of religious preference of the deceased), and a useful tool at times for helping plants grow or for holding a scarecrow. When I recently visited a Jain temple in West Chester, OH, they had a swastika decorating an altar. I know there has been no uproar over their use of this symbol, rightfully so!

Is the current uproar by the NAACP about the use of the noose as a Halloween decoration an attempt to push political correctness too far? Basically every person who has put up a noose as a decoration has said straightforwardly that there were no racial connotations - it was just a Halloween decoration. Can it be that sometimes a noose, is a noose, is a noose, and not a symbol of racial oppression?

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Now playing: Relativity - Sium Ni Dhuibhir
via FoxyTunes

I don’t blog enough about what I do and the insights it provides on the world around me. A story developing here in Tampa caught my eye and I have to say something about it as a Sociologist. Don Swartout, a 59 year-old single father and recent widower, was recently arrested for leaving his 7 year-old son alone in a van while he went to work. Normally I would find this just as disturbing as most other stories about child neglect that go something like the following: neglectful parent locks young child (usually under 4) in a car with the windows up and the temperature soaring only to come back later and find the child dead from heat stroke, etc. Yes, that is awful and I’m not defending behavior like that. But this story is different… (Note: I am taking a few literary liberties here to tell the story.)

Mr. Swartout’s wife died a few years ago from cancer and now that he is a single father without a lot of qualifications, he is, like most Americans, struggling to make ends meet. He works at a call center (Consumer Sales Solutions), probably for not much money, and does his best to provide for his son. Things were working fine, but then his company changed his work hours, moving him to an evening shift. Mr. Swartout, needing to make money, agrees to the change in hours, but now realizes that finding child care for his seven year-old while he is at work is going to be much more difficult. Most day care centers and child care workers take kids during the day, not during the evening. So, what does he do? He scrambles to find someone who can watch his kid, but it’s not like his work gives him advanced notice about the schedule change - they just tell him he has to start working different hours. He now has zero days to find a child care center or babysitter that watches kids in the evenings. Since he can’t find one, he does the only other thing he can - he puts his 7 year-old son in his van with books, food, and whatever other necessities he thinks he will need, rolls down the windows, parks the van in the shade in the parking lot of his work, and checks on his son whenever he has a break. He’s still looking for child care, but until he can find some, he’s stuck. He knows he can’t leave his son home alone - he’ll be arrested for that. His work won’t let him bring his son into the building, he’ll lose his job. So, he goes with creative option C - do his best to take care of his son while working.

His company, completely disregarding his needs, then tells him he can’t park his van in the company parking lot because, well, because they are assholes. So, he moves the van a block away to the parking lot of a church, leaving even less time during his breaks to check on his son. He’s still trying to find evening care, but to no avail. Then someone from his work rats him out to the police - they find his son in the van, make up a story about the son being in diapers (which isn’t true but makes Mr. Swartout look like a big villain), and take the son into protective care while they arrest Mr. Swartout. Thank human grace that someone bailed Mr. Swartout out of jail. But it’s not like the media is being kind to him (though I have to admit they are being kinder than I thought they would be).

So, where’s the Sociology in all of this? Mr. Swartout may not have made a great choice, but as a Sociologist I can’t help but point out that his choices were limited to such a degree that he didn’t really have any better options. Let’s consider the alternatives:

Mr. Swartout quits his job to take care of his son. People criticize him for being lazy and not wanting to work and he has no money to care for his son. Not a great option.
Mr. Swartout leaves his son home alone. He’s arrested for neglect. Hmm… Not a great option.
Mr. Swartout leaves his son with a stranger. The son is molested. Mr. Swartout’s son suffers for the rest of his life and so does Mr. Swartout. Hmm… Not a better option.
Mr. Swartout pays $10 to $14 per hour to have his son cared for in the evenings (see this profile of a sitter who charges this rate). At that rate, Mr. Swartout is actually losing money at his $12/hour job. He would actually be better off staying home and starving to death with his son so he at least isn’t in debt when he dies.

Hmmm… So, Mr. Swartout chooses option E - None of the above. He makes the only viable decision, is arrested for it, and demonized in the media. Something is wrong here!!! What people need to realize is that it is increasingly the case in the U.S. that work and family life conflict to such a degree that people cannot do both. If Mr. Swartout wants to support his child, he has to work. But if he works, he can’t take care of his child. And this system makes sense how? U.S. society has a serious problem, but people in positions to do something about it (like Mr. Swartout’s managers, the company owners, and politicians), tend not to have the same problem. Why? Because they make enough money that their wives can stay home to take care of the kids or they can afford to pay someone else to do it. It’s just the people who make just enough not to qualify for welfare who get screwed.

I’m sure some conservative or some economist out there is going to say, “Oh, you Sociologists, all you can do is make everyone out to be a victim. Mr. Swartout made bad decisions and that is why he is paying the price now.” Sure, that’s possible. I mean, Mr. Swartout did make at least one “bad” decision here - he had a kid. The bastard! What was he thinking, procreating like that. He should know better than to want to have a child when, well, when he isn’t making enough money to support the child. Or maybe we could claim that Mr. Swartout should have applied himself earlier in life, gotten some education, and gotten a good job. I don’t know enough about Mr. Swartout to argue this point, but I do know that isn’t an option for a lot of people simply because of their socioeconomic background - they may have been raised by poor parents, reducing their educational opportunities to begin with. No, I don’t think Mr. Swartout is just a victim. But I do think he is a victim in the sense that the current system is not fair and it doesn’t care about people like Mr. Swartout.

If you don’t mind, help me find some contact information for Mr. Swartout and/or the kind person who bailed him out of jail and we can contribute to his bail or maybe to his son’s evening care. And while we are at it, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to send a nasty email to Mr. Swartout’s former employer either (davido@cssllc.biz).

Lastly, not to commercialize this sad story in any way, but if any Sociologists out there need a story to illustrate the conflicting demands of work and family, here you go. Of course, it may yet turn out that there is more to this story than it currently seems. Who knows, maybe Mr. Swartout is just a terrible father. It could be. But if you watch the video linked in those news stories, he doesn’t come across as a terrible father to me. Just a poor guy in a poor situation - an average Joe, screwed by capitalism, greed, and an uncaring social structure!

(Note: Maybe the reason I don’t write much about Sociology is because it makes me seem so negative. Well, how’s this for positive - someone out there is saw the conflict with enough clarity and had enough good will as a human to bail Mr. Swartout out. That is a positive!)

In a new twist, a post by budding skeptic, Debi:

Ryan kept insisting that the little store around the corner from our house (it’s called “Nutrition Works” and is owned by Raj Patel) had a flashing sign saying DNA Testing. Being curious I finally told him I had to go check it out. The store sold “organic”, “health” stuff. Ryan urged me to go talk to the owner who had said hi when we walked in. He seemed nice, and I didn’t want to cause him stress or make him feel stupid. Anyway I did ask what the DNA testing was and he informed me that they could send off for any type of testing. When pressed he provided examples such as paternity or ethnicity testing. He reiterated at least two or three times that they could do DNA tests for medical conditions, but later couched this by indicating that would require interpretation by a doctor. He clearly didn’t understand what I meant when I said I didn’t think the company did that type of testing or looked at any of the pieces of DNA necessary for that type of testing. Had I not been so nice I am sure I could have made him look more like an idiot. He asked me if I had ever done genetic testing at which point I disclosed that I trained as a genetic counselor and at that point he didn’t have much to say. Looking back I should have gone in and asked him if he could do BRCA1 testing for breast cancer, my fear is that he would have said yes. Paternity and ethnicity testing cost between $250 and $500, which is about the same as what the company charges if you do it directly through them.

This is a good illustration of companies jumping on trends to make money regardless of any evidence supporting what they are claiming. We got a card from Mr. Patel and it says, “We offers (sic) DRUG TESTING, DNA TESTING, PATERNITY TESTING, STEROID TESTING.” I don’t really want to be mean, but this is remarkably misleading.

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Now playing: Eileen Ivers - The Rights Of Man
via FoxyTunes

We spent the weekend in Portland, OR, attending a conference called: Challenging Assumptions: Religious Faith, Genetic Science, and Human Dignity. It was an intriguing conference. There were probably 50 to 75 people who attended at some point. This was both nice and awkward. It was nice because we couldn’t help but get a chance to meet some of the more notable attendees (e.g., Dean Hamer, Joseph Graves, Jr., Ted Peters), but it also meant we only had about 4 people attend our paper presentation. Overall, the experience was definitely worth the trip. (Ask me some time about Dean Hamer’s thoughts on his recent book, The God Gene - funny story. Also, for future reference, Ted Peters said in his presentation, “I don’t think there is a future in therapeutic cloning.” Just a note for when therapeutic cloning takes off.

We arrived Friday around mid-day and checked into our hotel (Hotel Deluxe) then headed to a local vegan restaurant, Blossoming Lotus, for lunch. We then stopped by a coffee shop to do some work (i.e., prepare our presentation for the next day). The conference started later that night, at around 7:00 pm. Saturday we spent the entire day in the conference, attending presentations and giving our own. The conference technically ended Sunday morning with a breakfast with the authors, but we had too many other things to do and ended up missing it.

Given we were flying across the country, our flights were very odd. Our flight to Portland got us there very early, but our flight home left at 11:35pm and we flew overnight to Tampa (not fun). That left us with most of the day Sunday to explore Portland. We rented a car and headed up the Columbia River Valley, stopping at Multnomah Falls and the Bonneville Dam along the way to Hood River, where we stopped for lunch at an inexpensive pizza place - Pietro’s (I had hoped to stop at a nice place, but it only opened for dinner). From Hood River we headed south and looped around Mount Hood, which is a truly amazing mountain. We then headed back to Portland, stopping at the Rose Garden before heading to an awesome vegan restaurant for dinner - Nutshell (no website, but a must for vegetarians visiting Portland).

Here are a couple pics from the trip:

Debi at Multnomah Falls

The amazing Mt. Hood

Debi at the Rose Garden

I had to teach all day the Monday we returned. Our flight got in around 10:15 and I had class at 11:30. We drove, literally, straight from the airport to campus where I brushed my teeth, combed my hair, then headed to class. I basically collapsed when I got home Monday night. Flying over night is never fun; following that up with classes all day is a nightmare.

In other news - I got the “bright” idea a couple weeks ago while making a scrumptious butternut squash soup to, instead of discarding the seeds, let the seeds dry up then plant them to see if we can raise some squash of our own. We went out and bought a few clay pots and some planting soil and planted a few of the seeds (we have tons of seeds from just the one squash). It only took about 5 days before we had sprouts. Now we’re trying to figure out what to do with them as our little pots aren’t going to be able to hold full squashes. We’ll see if we can keep these alive until they actually produce some squash - it’s kind of a fun experiment.

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Now playing: David and Steve Gordon - Empowered
via FoxyTunes

The staff of SNL couldn’t let Mahmoud Ahmadinejad get away with homosexuality denying:

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Now playing: Jon Hendricks - Jive Samba
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