Author: Glenn Jacob

Rabbi, Community Leader, Fundraiser, Board Development, Non-profit management, strategic planning, educator, writer, and editor.

A better Recycling Day

Despite all the troubles in the world, we should also take time to compliment and give thanks when people, companies and governments take good actions. Yesterday my local government held one of its ongoing recycling events. This one specifically targeted electronic recycling but also included pharmaceuticals and paper shredding.

County workers directed us from the street through the parking lot to the “Recycle Run” as I named it. They took my name and my categories of recycling materials. I had old CPU’s, monitors, and printers. I followed the cones to the site and never left the car. Huge packing boxes were set out on both sides of the drive. After popping my trunk, the county workers pulled everything out of my trunk, sorted it immediately and placed it the appropriate boxes. If they took 90 seconds I would be surprised.

The United States lags behind most other nations in recycling usable materials. Some nations reach 90% while the U.S. hobbles along at 7 – 10% if the studies are accurate. There is no federal mandate and most states that provided funds at the local level have cut back. Counties and municipalities are left to grapple with their local landfills and trucking fees for getting the garbage out. South Hempstead Township in Nassau County, NY has made shrinking the landfill a priority with the recycling of the most dangerous and poisonous products to the most reusable items found in households.

Hats off to the township. This is a worthwhile program, well-conceived and executed as well.

To understand what a federally mandated but locally run successful garbage pickup/recycling program looks like, read the rules for South Korea here:

http://www.korea4expats.com/article-waste-disposal-recycling-korea.html

Honey is not so sweet anymore

The Honey lobby is lobbying Congress for stricter definitions of what is honey. According to an article published in The Atlantic, the regulations of what constitutes honey are so loose that the product on the shelves may not contain any pollen. What are consumers buying?

Some honey is corn syrup flavored as honey. Some is rice syrup, which is already the same color as honey. The more sophisticated faux honey is the product of bees force fed corn syrup. One cannot determine by price or by label the quality of honey that is for purchase in American stores.

Needless to say, the big honey labels in the United States are protesting against new definitions of honey and further regulations. Honey is just another example of highly-processed food stuffs in the American market. The lack of specific labeling allows faux food to be passed off as a legitimate food substance, in this case honey from bees. Corn syrup is inexpensive and honey prices are quite high.

Unless you know someone with beehives who is willing to share, the probability that you are consuming a partially faux honey product is remarkably high.

While the state of honey in the jar may be legal, there is a moral corruption here. While food processors have the right to produce processed foods, many of the products are clearly identified as highly processed by the list of ingredients. I also have the right not to purchase these processed foods. By hiding the content of honey, my rights are undermined – legal though the mechanism be. The very fact that companies have to hide ingredients, even lobbying regulatory agencies to make sure that ingredients remain hidden, should be a warning that these products are ultimately undesirable.

We are what we eat. Suddenly, that aphorism is a scary proposition.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/the-honey-lobby-is-demanding-that-the-government-defines-honey/380994/

Amen

‘”Amen.” It is not a natural utterance. You must learn to say it.” (Kaddish, Leon Wieseltier, p. 468.) Many believe that amen is a statement of confirmation, as in “this is my life – amen.” Others believe that amen is a statement of affirmation, as in “this is the greatness in my life – amen.” Those who study the word a bit more closely understand that amen contains a strong element of fatalism, as in “Is this my life – amen?”

To recite amen with conviction, the proclaimer must take a long journey. The present has not context without the immediate and often the far past. The journey begins by revisiting the past, not with nostalgia but with clarity. The journey continues with the present and where one stands now and just as importantly, why. Then there is the future and one’s hopes, expectations and fears. Bring all of these explorations together and the word amen falls easily from the lips.

Sound so simple on paper, simply do this or that. Yet amen is the hardest word a person will utter. Amen.

Interfaith Relations snapshot

Interfaith relations in the United States is a convoluted mess of perceptions, international conflicts, and xenophobia. The Pew Trust has released their latest survey of American attitudes towards various religions and no one scores particularly well.

As anyone who works in the field of interfaith relations will confirm, there is a vast difference between doctrinal relations and personal relations between clergy and between informed laity. The doctrinal is always more contentious as mistrust and triumphalism infuse the statements of faith and belief. These relations are usually led by Defenders of the Faith

The best and most productive is the one-to-one relationships between believers of one tradition and another. This is a self-selecting group who meet other traditions a variety of reasons. Some want to explain themselves, some are curious to learn what others believe and a good number seek out other faiths in hope of better informing their own religious beliefs.

Religion can build bridges. Religion should build bridges and yet, religion often does the opposite. This is what Pew found:

Questions of War

The United States is back in the aerial war business again. We did manage to precipitate the fall of Muammar Gaddafi using aerial bombardment and the developing events afterwards have been nothing less than bloodthirsty and heedlessly violent. Now we have threat of Sunni extremists in the region of Syria/Iraq who go by the name of The Islamic State and we have been bombing them for weeks.

Our military learned in Afghanistan that an aerial war is far too indiscriminate to be effective. To see men digging next to a road at 30,000 feet is not the same as forward observers with binoculars. Afghani farmers share the scarce resource of water on a rigid timetable of shared irrigation. One digs up his valve and releases the water only to close the valve and bury it again on a fifteen or twenty minute schedule. The same farmer looks like a terrorist planting an I.E.D. from far above.

Does the new coalition have forward observers on the ground in Iraq and Syria? I doubt it. Then who are we bombing? Are we hitting the correct targets? Who is going to go out into this vast battlefield to identify targets and confirm misses and strikes?

The United States is not sending soldiers onto this battlefield. Who will?

Why is no one asking the hard questions?

Angry Black Woman

Shonda Rhimes, an actress and producer of good repute, responded heatedly to an article by a television critic to the New York Times. The article intimated that Ms. Rhimes has cemented her position in the entertainment world by playing “The Angry Black Woman”. Ms. Rhimes responded appropriately.

Contrary to the Supreme Court decision that gutted a major tenet of the landmark Voter Rights Act of the 1960’s, racism is alive and well, dwelling with mundane comfort throughout our nation. As a nation we have learned not to use the “N” word and to be conscious of using “hyphen” words when more dated, loaded terms are no longer tolerable. We no longer sound racist, biased, or bigoted in public and when someone does use these dated terms, we know what to conclude.

All of these changes in public vocabulary are shallow and trivial. A casual racist will not be swayed by a change in labels; the casual racists of the past decades have not been convinced to turn towards enlightenment. They did learn to promulgate their convictions with subtlety, calm, and legal maneuvers worthy of a master script writer.

However, human beings cannot easily hide their deep convictions, their hatreds and their loves. Last week the stereotype emerged as “The Angry Black Woman” and this week or next, another, probably polite example will pop up. This is not cynicism; this is an argument that the battle to overcome xenophobia is an ongoing dynamic and that there is no one final battle in the public square that will finally defeat stereotyping, neither from the subtle to the extreme.

The point is to get out in the public square and call out racism and bigotry for what it is. We should thank Shonda Rhimes, not for defending herself, but for reminding us that we are all responsible.

Books and National Book Award Books

The 2014 list for the National Book Awards have been released. http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2014.html#.VBxJ3Vd4Vw1 Perhaps the time has arrived for a another slew of good reads because surely all of the books on the list are qualified texts. The content of these contest lists have been a debate on both sides of the English speaking Atlantic Ocean complete with accusations of judges who do not read all of the texts, unqualified readers, and the ubiquitous crossroads of greed, pride, and publishers.

Since the shift from bookstores to online purchasing and ebooks, finding reliable recommendations for books has become more difficult. Barnes & Noble puts its sponsored content first, complicating its site with different levels of paid adverts. The category may be written as “Staff Recommendations” but publishers and authors can pay to be included in that category. The bricks and mortar B&N bookstore is often a showroom for books that will be purchased online. The books laid out on the table are often in purchased slots.

The successful reader-driven sights have been purchased by for-profit companies. Goodreads.com was the largest and most popular of the reader generated recommendation sights but the website was acquired by Amazon. Amazon now controls the recommendation search engine. Alternatively, readers can seek out reviews on Social Media sites such as reddit.com/r/books but the content is skewed by the readership, which is often High School and college. There are other sub-reddits such as r/mystery and r/sciencefiction yet these sites tend to draw the highly motivated fans more than the casual readers who just want a good read because “I’ve some free time.”

The sheer volume of books available has exploded. Many are self-published; many are bland and repetitive as was always the case with pulp novels. What a joy the delete button can be. I miss the sound of a lousy paperback thumping into the bottom of the trashcan but I still get satisfaction when the “Are you sure?” screen pops up and I press “yes”.

Stealing College textbooks

The Washington Post is asking why college students are illegally downloading their textbooks for free. The simplest answer is given in the second paragraph, which states that prices have risen 82% between 2002 and 2012. Prices have risen far beyond the reasonable expectations of inflation and texts are more than reproductions of the previous year with minor changes and page shifts.

There has been a steady, publishing drumbeat that a person with a college education will earn many times more money and enjoy stronger job security than someone with just a high school degree. I believe the studies and I also see that the most likely fields of employment require at BA. The response is a push for college degrees.

Tuition in the United States are set by states in the public universities but large numbers attend private colleges and universities that set their own tuition and fees every year. In most other countries, the universities are funded by the national government, giving the government the ability to get their students into colleges. In the United States, the college system is a non-profit, market-driven enterprise, even the state schools.

The economy stinks. Federal funding for research professors has been curtailed. States trying to balance budgets have jacked up tuition rates and also curtailed college funding. Colleges respond by limiting full professors on tenure track and hiring adjuncts to teach undergraduate courses. College sports teams are doing well for the most part, generating lots of income but not for the benefit of the greater student body.

Imagine going tens of thousands of dollars in debt for a BA. or going hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for an advanced or professional degree. On top of these bills, publishing houses want students to pay $200-$500 for a textbook of recycled material.

Really? You are surprised they are using their educations to afford their education by being internet savvy? The model is unsustainable and the stealing of etextbooks is only a symptom of the endemic problem of funding higher education in the United States.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/09/17/more-students-are-illegally-downloading-college-textbooks-for-free/

Bibles in School

Did you know that in Orange County, FL (Orlando), there is a group that is legally distributing Christian Bibles in the public schools? Matthew Stavers, who represents the book distributing group, is upset because another group is asserting its right to distribute its religious texts in the public schools.

The new religious group demanding the same access is called “The Satanic Temple” and they hope to distribute materials including their forthcoming “The Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities.” This is a situation that brings into glaring focus the reasoning behind the need for a strict interpretation of the Separation of Church and State.

As a public entity, public schools should not be promoting one religion over another. Schools should not be elevating or tolerating religious education or proselytization on its campuses. Bible distribution is one of those activities that clearly crosses the line of a strict interpretation of the principle.

The Satanic Temple demonstrates the danger of allowing religion on campus. This issue has nothing to do with religious people attending a public school but has everything to do with the promotion of a religion in a given public school. Religious people should be able to attend public school without fear of threat or ridicule for their beliefs and also, without fear of proselytization by other religions while on campus.

The Satanic Temple is a protest, a perfectly legal and legitimate one that demonstrates the absurdity of the Orange County Public School System. Lucian Greaves, who is the spokesman for The Satanic Temple is quoted by a reporter at WFTV Orlando as admitting, “The whole point here is not indoctrination but rather counter-indoctrination.”

This episode is another example of why proselytism needs to be kept off of school grounds.

The sad news is how old this battle in Orange County is. I grew up in this county and they were distributing “Bibles” that were only The New Testament when I was in elementary school. This is decades of nonsense.