Photo by Seth Anderson

Hazleton, Pennsylvania, is a small city (population: 25,000) that once boasted a thriving coal mining industry, but today has an unemployment rate double the national one. It’s best known now as the first American city to pass a law designed to get rid of undocumented immigrants by making their lives exceedingly difficult. Hazleton approved the measure — which prevents illegal immigrants from working or renting homes there — in 2006, four years before Arizona passed its similar “papers, please” law.

On the surface, it seems that little has changed in Hazleton since the law was enacted: the New York Times summed up the situation there last spring with its headline, “New Attitude on Immigration Skips an Old Coal Town.” But there are some folks working hard to make change happen. Their leader happens to be the manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, Joe Maddon.

Maddon grew up in Hazleton, in a time when most of its residents were white ethnics, predominantly Italian and Polish Americans. Since then, the city’s demographics have changed radically. According to census data, the percentage of Latino residents has surged, rising from 5 percent in 2000 to 37 percent in 2010.

In 2008, Maddon’s cousin, Elaine Maddon Curry, helped create Concerned Parents, an organization that provides services to immigrant families in Hazleton. But as the backlash against the city’s Latino population grew, Maddon found himself frustrated by all the anti-immigrant sentiment. He came to believe that Hazleton’s immigrants, and the city itself, needed more than services. It needed to build bridges between immigrants and the native-born, whites and Latinos. It needed a real and shared sense of community.

“We’re the same, just speak a different language,” Maddon says. “The Slovak, the Polish, the Irish, the Italians — we all started the same.”

In 2010, Maddon decided “to do something to repair what has been damaged here,” and since then has joined with his cousin and other like-minded residents of his hometown to establish the Hazleton Integration Project. As part of its first messaging campaign, the group plans to set up billboards throughout Hazleton with photos of city residents of many different ethnic backgrounds, all with the same tagline: “We are from Hazleton.”

The Hazleton ONE Community Center, set to open this summer, will serve as the project’s headquarters. Besides hosting the Concerned Parents group and providing homework help and athletic facilities, the center will offer Spanish-language classes, host cultural events, and sponsor other programs designed to bring together the city’s native-born whites and (mostly) immigrant Latinos. As Bob Curry, the president of the project’s board, describes it:

Yes, we will provide particular services. But the larger mission of integration will guide us everything we do. Services are one thing. Integration is quite another.… It’s a longer-range goal.

The group’s leadership includes both whites and Latinos. Eugenio Sosa, the executive director and himself an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, explains their approach:

This is following our dream…. We are starting with the children because, you know, children do not have prejudice. They are going to be spending time together, playing together, learning together, going to each others’ houses, learning about different cultures, how different people celebrate. It is just a great opportunity.

I learned about the Hazleton Integration Project through an organization called One Nation Indivisible (disclosure: I have donated to this group), whose purpose is to “support and celebrate” efforts at inclusion and integration, in particular those focused on immigrants to this country. Their definition of integration describes exactly what is going on in Hazleton.

Integration refers not merely to the absence of physical segregation. It is an aspiration best imagined by Martin Luther King. “Desegregation,” King wrote, could be accomplished by laws, but “integration,” acknowledges a web of mutuality — a shared fate. Integration is not synonymous with “desegregation” and “diversity.” Integration requires a full acceptance, a richer coming together, a willful expansion of community circles.  Our project tells many stories about what advocates call “immigrant integration.” Used in this context, “integration” does not necessarily refer to the absence of physical segregation, but to a wide variety of practices, policies, and programs that respect, welcome, and fully incorporate immigrants into the communities where they live.

Joe Maddon and his colleagues at the Hazleton Integration Project are working at a grassroots level to improve their city and overcome its ethnic divides. I can’t think of worthier goals.

Correction, June 18, 2013: This blog post originally misidentified the cofounder of Concerned Parents. It is Elaine Maddon Curry, not Joe Maddon. The text has been edited to reflect this.

Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, India.
Photo by Russ Bowling.

A friend posted a quote to Facebook this afternoon that shook loose a memory: “I lost some time once. It’s always in the last place you look for it.”

It’s apparently a quote from Neil Gaiman. Since Mr. Gaiman is famous already, everybody loves his moments of levity. However, the time I used this line, thinking it a piece of original wit, I was conspicuously without fame or, some would argue, much common sense. My subconscious still bears the scars of the aftermath.

The incident happened a very long time ago when I was a tortured high schooler. At the time, I hid my helplessness and anger behind cynical witticisms. If memory serves, my hawk-eyed English teacher caught me sharing my text with a classmate who had forgotten her own book at home. Ms. Teach was furious at this transgression, though only the slightest pretext was needed for her to go off like a firecracker.

The sterling performance Ms. Teach put in equated the act of our sharing a textbook with open contempt for an aged pedagogue. She upbraided my classmate for insincerity and irresponsibility, while I was chastised for the low cunning of concealing my pal’s grave misdemeanor. Toward the end of the tirade came an artful touch of a plot to divide-and-rule. Forgetting books at home, she informed the rest of the class, was part of our sinister plot to bring down the others’ test scores and shoot their academic performances in the knees.

“I can promise you that these two girls — these ‘friends’ of yours — have private tutors waiting for them at home,” she thundered. “They will make up for the time lost here, but you will not. Don’t be surprised if these troublemakers do far better than the rest of you. Instead of sitting there smiling like idiots, like this incident is a big joke, think of what has just been stolen from you by these two.”

The students stared at her in fearful fascination and pondered her vituperative warning. Something had been stolen from them? What magic was this? The girl in front of me absently patted her pocket.

“Time!” exploded Ms. Teach, making the whole class jump. “Those two have stolen your precious, valuable time! Let’s just hope your friends will tell you where they’ve hidden it, so you can put them to good use and pass your exams!”

With that final flourish, she snatched up her bag, her text, the attendance register, and marched briskly out of the classroom.

Several heads swivelled at me. Pairs of eyes shot dagger-sharp accusations.

“Oh, don’t listen to her,” I said with forced lightness, waving my hands dismissively. “Just look for your lost time in the last place you can think of. That’s where us thieves always stash the precious loot.”

I forced out a nervous laugh, for good measure. Heh-heh.

It worked. All around me, hostile looks began to melt into open grins. Everyone loves a winking rebel.

At this very moment of sweet relief, however, the hairs on the back of my neck started bristling. Turning slowly, I saw Ms. Teach, presumed absent, standing a little beyond the doorway. Her eyes cut at me with cold fury.

There is no insult more insulting, I suppose, than the mocking smile of one’s usual prey. The jackal, I imagine, takes the giggling of rabbits very personally.

I’d rather not go into what happened next. Suffice it to say that it will make a very colorful entry in my memoir. But to write a memoir I would have to be famous first, which brings us to the entire point of this story.

Fame makes cheek cool. Everyone else, shut up.

Priyanka Nandy works with structural inequities in public education and public health in India. She blogs at priyankanandy.com/blog and photo shares everywhere.”

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), Majority Leader

Republicans in the U.S. Senate have routinely used the filibuster — and the threat of the filibuster — to deny President Obama and the Democrats their legislative agenda. In their defense, Republicans point out that the use of this parliamentary method of blocking votes is nothing new. Democrats filibustered some of George W. Bush’s appointees. Southern Dixiecrats used it in spectacular fashion to block civil rights legislation for decades.

But now there is evidence that the filibuster has flourished uniquely under the Republican Senate minority of recent years. Professor Sheldon Goldman, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, found that in the current Congress, Obama’s nominees have faced a level of obstruction that is “the highest that’s ever been recorded.… In this last Congress it approached total obstruction or delay.”

Goldman concludes that the level of obstruction since 2010 is significantly higher than in any of the years Bush was president and Democrats were a minority in the Senate — the parallel to the current situation. Furthermore, from the Alliance for Justice:

During President Obama’s first term, current vacancies [in the judicial branch] have risen by 51%.  This trend stands in stark contrast to President Clinton and President [George W.] Bush’s first four years, when vacancies declined by 65% and 34%, respectively.

Today’s partisan maneuvering is far more vicious than what happened under the previous Democratic minority. Back then, Democrats blocked a few individuals here and there, such as when they filibustered Miguel Estrada, Bush’s nominee to the federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (they did eventually allow a vote on the confirmation of Thomas B. Griffith to the same seat). Nowadays, the Senate minority is seeking to block as many nominees as possible in order to prevent Obama from moving the judiciary in a direction that fits with his thinking. Republican senators don’t even have the votes to defeat these nominees because voters elected a Democratic Senate majority as well as a Democratic president.

And the filibuster is not just being used with judicial nominees. Republicans are determined to  stop two major government agencies from being able to function: the National Labor Relations Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Board. The NLRB goes back to legislation passed in 1935, but Republicans have decided that they will filibuster the nomination of any new members, effectively incapacitating the board now that the terms of three of its five members have expired.

As for the CFPB, Republicans plan to filibuster the nomination of anyone to be its director, in hopes of denying the agency certain powers that can only be exercised by someone holding that title. Liberal blogger Kevin Drum, writing in The Nation, has argued that the GOP’s actions here are “explicitly aimed at shutting down these agencies,” and called them an attempt at “nullification.” In other words, if you don’t like a law, use the filibuster to neutralize it. If you don’t like the results of an election, use the filibuster to sabotage the other side’s agenda. It does not matter that Obama has been elected and reelected president. Republicans have made a decision that they will use the filibuster, the hold, and other tactics to ensure that he is simply unable to place people into the judiciary and various executive-branch positions.

Goldman’s analysis gives statistical backing to the claims of many Washington insiders, who acknowledge the ways that Democrats have contributed to political gridlock and yet are increasingly unwilling or unable to defend the scorched-earth tactics of Republicans. In a recent book, political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein — well-respected voices in the Beltway crowd — argue that Congressional dysfunction has reached a dangerous level, thanks in large part to the extremism of Republicans, whom Mann and Ornstein characterize as “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

At last, Obama has decided to push back. He recently nominated three people to the D.C. Circuit, the same federal court that Estrada was nominated for, considered the second-highest court in the land and a stepping-stone to the Supreme Court. It is worth noting that — despite Republican claims that there’s no need to fill the three openings on that court because it is “underworked” — there are now 188 pending cases per judge, up from 119 in 2005. Clearly, those openings need to be filled.

There is talk that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will consider doing away with the filibuster for all nominations to the judiciary or executive branch if this obstruction continues. Obama has told Reid he supports such a move. Reid can do so with the assent of a simple majority of senators, but such an action is so controversial that pundits have taken to calling it the “nuclear option.”

It’s time to go nuclear. The facts that Goldman’s study lays out make it clear that Senate Republicans don’t believe Democrats, even when they win an election, should be allowed to govern. After the last election, Reid agreed to modest measures of “filibuster reform” that Republicans promptly ignored. Now it’s time to call out their strategy of blanket obstruction for what it is: the subversion of democracy.

Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature
By Jodi Eichler-Levine
NYU Press. 253 pages.

In Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Children’s Literature, Jodi Eichler-Levine, an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, warns us that “books for tots are anything but innocent.” She takes a fair and scholarly approach to the way Jewish and African American stories transmit core cultural beliefs to the children and adults who read them, and opens a dialogue about America’s complicated — and often brutal — history of racial, ethnic, and religious oppression.

But what is the cost of passing on tales of Jewish and African American sacrifice and suffering that are whitewashed or inaccurate?

A chronological look at Jewish and African American children’s literature shows that cultural assimilation became synonymous with patriotism. From the American Revolution to 9/11, minorities have had to align themselves with a largely white, Protestant American population in order to distance themselves from a perceived enemy. One way this was achieved was by writing children’s books about Jewish and African Americans that minimize their cultural differences to white, Protestant Americans. This cultural downplaying stripped away anything that might portray a black or Jewish child as “too ethnic” by watering down Judaism or reimaging black stereotypes as comical and, therefore, non-threatening.

Children’s books are often the way white Americans are introduced to Jewish and African American history and culture. This is problematic because, while a black or Jewish family may have family or oral histories to add dimensions to the readings, most white children must rely only on what a story conveys. Eichler-Levine makes it clear that all children are in danger of absorbing messages about minority groups that are manipulative and sometimes downright false.

For example, in Crispus Attucks: Boy of Valor (1965), Dharathula Millender attempts to make African Americans a part of the founding narrative of the United States by portraying Attucks as a patriot. While the goal is commendable, how it is achieved is troubling.

Many historians believe that Crispus Attucks, an ex-slave, was the first person killed during the Boston Massacre in 1770. This event is widely viewed to have prompted the American War of Independence five years later. However, as Eichler-Levine points out, little is known about the circumstances of Attucks’ life and death. His entire childhood is imagined by Millender in order to create a story that will appeal to and reinforce national pride in young readers. Creating a fictional childhood for an American hero isn’t new, but in this case it is done to portray Attucks as a martyr who is willing to die for his country’s freedom.

Millender’s biography isn’t the only book about Attucks to emphasize his supposed patriotic motives. In The Cost of Freedom: Crispus Attucks and the Boston Massacre (2004), Joanne Mattern invents dialog where Attucks says he fought for American liberty because he had been a slave: “I was a slave long ago, Matt. It is a bad life. Now it seems the colonists are slaves to the British. This can’t go on. People need to be free.”

While it may be clear to an adult that this dialog is make-believe, a child might understand it to be an authentic part of history. Without addressing the reality that many blacks fought for their own freedom rather than the freedom of the country, stories like Mattern’s not only gloss over the history of American slavery, but also of African American resistance.

Suffer the Little Children is an incredible resource for teachers, historians, and writers of children’s stories who want to correct the distortion of Jewish and African American histories in the stories for a new generation. The best way for a child to understand and welcome a mix of cultures and religions isn’t by promoting their erasure through assimilation, but by creating a society where diversity is embraced. In a society that favors acceptance, we have a better chance of moving toward a country that truly values liberty and justice for all.

Sakena Patterson is a freelance writer based in her hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. She returned to Pittsburgh after a seven-year spree in Los Angeles, where she earned an MFA in fiction from Antioch University. Sakena’s photos of food, friends, and frolic in the city of champions can be found on tumblr.

Photo by Alyssa L. Miller.

As I wandered around a local craft festival last November, my mind was on my seven-month-old niece. I wanted to give her a Christmas gift that was thoughtful, soft, and sweet. When I’d almost given up hope, I spotted a small stand outfitted with handmade stuffed animals that, upon further inspection, were all velveteen. This, I decided, was the softest, sweetest thing I could give my baby niece.

I picked out a gray rabbit with long, floppy ears. I envisioned the little girl snuggling up to her new sleeping companion, a subtle yet constant reminder of her loving aunt. Unfortunately, this idyllic picture would not come to pass. A few weeks after I bought the bunny, I got a phone call from my brother that irrevocably changed our relationship.

The days leading up to the call had been sleepless and emotional. My brother disappeared for three days, leaving his pregnant girlfriend in a state of panic. She and I were in constant communication, and feared something horrible had happened when my brother didn’t answer his phone and was nowhere to be found. He had left late at night, saying he had an errand to run, and no one had heard from him since. The thing is: this wasn’t the first time this had happened. Actually, it happens all the time because my brother is an addict.

When he re-emerged, my brother called me and acted as if nothing had happened. His girlfriend and I, he insisted, were simply overreacting. I couldn’t pander to his addiction-driven whims anymore, but I didn’t want to turn my back on my family. I didn’t want to give up hope that my brother could get clean.

I tried to set healthy boundaries by telling my brother I was worried about his well being. I tried to make a plea for the safety of my niece. Within moments, our conversation exploded. My brother yelled. I yelled back. He said I was unlovable. I called him a junkie.

Accusing an addict of being an addict is a surefire way to end a conversation. But I was so tired of feeling taken advantage of. I was through with my brother’s lies and enduring his verbal abuse. There is a particular exhaustion that comes from fear-based worry, a specific kind of anxiety that manifests during the hours of wondering when the phone will ring with the news of my brother’s self-imposed death. Desperate to make this misery end, I told my brother never to contact me until he was ready to seek treatment.

I drew a line in the sand, so my brother drew one of his own. He cut me out of his life completely and banned me from contacting his children. He warned that if I sent Christmas presents, he would burn them. And I knew I should believe him.

When my brother hung up on me, my heart broke open and filled with regret. Although I knew I needed to look after my own emotional health, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d made a grave mistake.

Instead of ridding myself of the unhappy relic, I kept the velveteen rabbit in a bag near my bed. The tender toy was a sad reminder of the ways my family was disappearing. Two years before, my mother died suddenly of a heart attack after spending her final years in a state of depression I knew intimately, but didn’t know how to address. In the midst of my grief, my older brother’s alcoholism proved too much for me to handle. One day, we stopped speaking and still haven’t reconnected. I found it excruciating for my intimate world to be shrinking so quickly, but then something happened that changed my perspective.

While writing a magazine article on addiction and rehabilitation, I discovered a program that had been operating discreetly in my hometown in California for almost thirty years. Located on a tree-lined street in Downey, a small Los Angeles suburb, Woman’s Council is an outpatient rehabilitation program for mothers for whom treatment of active addition is a court-ordered condition to regain custody of their children — and it was changing lives.

When I visited Woman’s Council, I had already spent three months observing Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, visiting recovery centers around the city, interviewing recovering addicts, and speaking to counselors and medical professionals about the process of getting clean. But my first encounter with this program blew me away.

Sitting around a circular table, women gathered four times a week to share their stories, vent their frustrations, investigate their personal psychological triggers, and purge themselves of their chemical demons. During each woman’s time to speak, she revealed every hardship and heartbreak, every triumph and tragedy she had endured that lead to current circumstance. The group was facilitated by trained counselors who had their own experiences with addiction, and they provided guidance on how they overcame their own challenges early on in recovery. Despite participation being mandated by the judicial system, the women I spoke with all reported that the program was crucial to their well being.

Week after week, I sat silently in that meeting room and took notes on a legal pad. Although I tried to maintain a professional distance, at times I had to excuse myself and run to the bathroom before my sobs broke through. As I gasped for breath in the stall, a series of emotions ran through me: devastation at the horrifying misfortunes these women had endured, anger at the trauma their addictions had brought upon their children, sorrow for my brothers, myself, and my family. But I always returned to the room with as blank a face as I could muster and forced myself to listen more.

I knew something powerful was happening in that room because something powerful was also happening to me. In empathizing with the mothers in Women’s Council, I was learning how to empathize with my brothers as well. I was beginning to understand the stigma of addiction and how cycles of abuse get perpetuated. Having myself abused drugs and flirted with disaster in an abusive relationship, I saw that the biggest thing distinguishing me from these women was that I’d had a little more luck.

When my article was published last December, I gave the velveteen rabbit to a woman named Nicole who I’d met at Women’s Council and had an daughter named Sofia who was the same age as my niece. Despite it being an unceremonious act of giving, I felt extremely moved by the exchange and became the Women’s Council’s first regular volunteer. I jump in where ever I am needed, cooking food for the graduation ceremony or helping with administrative tasks. My hope is that I can make a difference in the lives of these women in a way I wasn’t able to in my own family.

Before I began volunteering, I had to sit with my family experiences as though they were secrets. I still haven’t reconciled with either of my brothers. But now, whenever I enter the Women’s Council building, their lives and mine make a little more sense and are less cruel in equal proportion.

Lee Rigby, murdered in the London district of Woolwich. UK Ministry of Defence, via Wikimedia

What is it that makes people capable of hacking another human being to death on a peaceful street? It is a question that demands asking after last week’s brutal murder of a British soldier. The suspects, captured on cellphone video, are two men who claimed they were avenging Muslims killed by British armed forces.

One easy answer is: Islam, or a bit more subtly, radical Islam. After the bombing of the Boston Marathon — whose perpetrators similarly cited U.S. military aggression against Muslims — conservative commentator Erik Rush called Islam “wholly incompatible with Western society.” Another alternative is to take the terrorists at their word and characterize these murderous acts as “blowback” resulting from Western imperialism. This is the position taken by people like Glenn Greenwald, who argues that although the U.S. isn’t totally to blame for the attacks by extremist Muslims on Western targets, it must accept the lion’s share of that blame.

Greenwald recently clashed with Bill Maher, another liberal commentator, on this matter. Greenwald certainly has a point, and is far more thoughtful than extremists like Erik Rush. Going back at least to the U.S.-backed coup in 1953 that ousted Iran’s democratically elected prime minister and made the Shah an absolute monarch, U.S. policy has indirectly fueled radicalism in Muslim countries. Britain and other European states have mucked around in the Middle East even longer. Nevertheless, Maher also makes the point that — in the twenty-first century at least — only Muslims react with such widespread violence to blasphemous writings or cartoons. This kind of fanaticism may be waning, however, and Western Christians are perfectly willing to murder innocents as well: recent examples include the Norwegian who massacred seventy-seven people to “protect” his country from Islam and multiculturalism, and the white supremacist who gunned down six of his fellow Americans in a Wisconsin Sikh temple. What motivates any of these terrorist murders?

The question is not easy to answer. What it comes down to, I suspect, is a combination of hate and fear, which feed upon each other. The violence begets more violence, a vicious cycle of bloodshed that becomes increasingly difficult to halt. What I can say with more certainty, though, is that we should be highly suspicious of anyone who claims to have a simple answer.

As many moderate Muslims know well, their communities need to be more vocal in standing up to fanaticism, and more willing to tolerate those who have different beliefs. Yes, there are religious extremists and terrorists among non-Muslims in the West as well. But the Muslim world has numerous theocratic states (Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.), along with radical Islamist movements and insurgencies in a number of countries. So let’s not make false equivalencies.

On the other hand, Western governments need to help the moderates fight extremism in their countries by shrinking its military footprint abroad. With the end of the U.S. presence in Iraq and, a year from now, a drastic reduction in the number of coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, that is already happening, but a greater drawdown there and elsewhere is needed.

At the same time, the U.S. cannot wall itself off from the world’s problems. It must protect its citizens (who include millions of Muslim Americans) from those violent extremists who would harm them — whatever the reason. And it has to figure out a way to do so that does not simply end up increasing the number of such people. Squaring that circle is the only way to end the cycle of violence and hate that has plagued relations between the Western and Muslim worlds for far too long.

In the introduction, Sandel makes it clear that providing definitive answers to the questions he raises is not his intention. Instead, he views himself as the kickstarter of a much-needed, public debate on markets and morality, and offers a philosophical framework in which we might have the conversation. The inquisitive title of Sandel’s book reinforces this position. For now, his focus is on highlighting the questions we haven’t been asking over the last three decades, but probably should have been.

So, what does economics have to do with morality? Since he’s the expert, I’ll let Sandel explain:

“Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if we turn them into market commodities,” Sandel argues.

If the role of markets were simply to allocate goods, Sandel would be hard-pressed to find an ethical objection to using an economic rationale to solve all our problems — but, he explains, the reach of markets goes beyond goods allocation to express and promote attitudes toward whatever is being exchanged. It is our job as members of a just society to interrogate what those attitudes are, and whether they reflect the values we want to promote in our culture. If we determine that the values are out of sync with the ethical standards of our culture, then we need to regulate the markets to avoid the unintentional promotion of morally questionable social norms.

For many Americans, regulation is a dirty word. But Sandel asks us to consider the idea of regulation in the context of the parameters we’ve already placed on things that currently cannot be bought and sold, such as human beings and civic duties. For example, it is illegal in the United States to sell one’s vote in an election or a child through adoption processes. These boundaries were not established by the rules of economics; they were established by our moral compass as citizens in a participatory democracy.

So, what values do our markets presently exude? And are we satisfied with that? Because Sandel isn’t. He believes we need more robust engagement in civic discourse around these issues.

“When we think of the morality of markets, we think first of Wall Street banks and their reckless misdeeds, of hedge funds and bail-outs and regulatory reform,” he writes. “But the moral and political challenge we face today is more pervasive and mundane — to rethink the role and reach of markets in our social practices, human relationships, and everyday lives.”

As funny as it is intellectually engaging, What Money Can’t Buy is an excellent point of entry for those concerned with addressing the challenges of markets and morality. It will augment your view of laissez-faire economics and what is a stake in our society if we don’t intervene.

As evidence of my unruly ways, I’d spent the previous weekend with a group of friends in San Francisco’s Castro District. I threw back doubles of Crown Royal in wonderfully seedy dives and chatted up the oddest strangers I could find. Essentially, I was looking for trouble. But in a way, I’m always looking for trouble, alcohol notwithstanding or required.

By all accounts, I am a responsible adult. During the day, I work, write, and volunteer for a women’s rehabilitation program. I go grocery shopping and cook for my aging father and great uncle. I walk the dog and feed the cat. When the sun sets, however, I get an all-too-familiar itch to seek out the untamed.

So, what does being a troublemaker mean anyway? For me, it means going places I’ve been told not to go, doing things I’ve been told not to do, talking to people I’ve been told not to talk to, and writing about it all with humility and compassion. This lifestyle is deemed unsuitable for a “good Latina” like me. Sometimes you have to toe the line, but other times you have to be willing to step over it and see where the other side leads.

My connection to outsiders started when I was young. I was always attracted to things that seemed out of place, pushed boundaries, or had clearly gone awry. When driving in downtown Los Angeles with my dad, he would lock the car doors and tell me to avert my eyes from the people who were struggling with homelessness, mental illness, addiction, and disease. But his warnings only widened my field of vision and amplified my interest in the troubled lives that were being vehemently ignored.

As a young adult, I spent hours driving around the same dodgy areas with a friend in the middle of the night. When that wasn’t getting me close enough to the action, I ditched the car to walk around on the streets. (This was about the same time Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez wrote a series about Skid Row that would become one of my favorite pieces of journalism.)

I developed an unquenchable desire to understand how this hell on earth came to be. My questions eventually led to anger that my city had failed so many. My anger led to me discovering that I had a gift for deep inquiry and exploration through writing.

Today, my curiosity fuels what I do for a living. It pushes me to want to know the who, what, where, when, why, and how of everything — the more disputed the topic, the more engaging it is to me. My goal is to write about people’s lives respectfully, never dehumanizing or exploitative. I want to tell their stories as honestly as I can and shed a bit of light into some of society’s darker corners.

In many ways, I have been lucky that my curiosity hasn’t gotten me killed. It has placed me in more than a few unsafe situations. I’ve been in cars I shouldn’t have been in, with people I shouldn’t have been with. I’ve been cornered in dark alleys. I’ve been followed. I’ve had my life threatened. My flirtation with danger wasn’t a healthy courtship, and I am fortunate to have sidestepped a messy ending. Still, I go on to the next story.

Not all of my work is focused on situations of heartbreak and melancholy. In fact, much of what I write to pay the bills takes a lighter tone. Juggling this odd combination has landed me with innumerable moments of absurdity. Accidental offense is an on-the-job hazard.

While writing an article for my local newspaper, I went to an elementary school to observe a class of fourth graders. When fishing in my purse for a business card to give the classroom teacher, I accidentally pulled out one for a self-proclaimed “anal expert” I’d met in a bar a week earlier. The card pictured the man in a latex dog suit. Although I quickly pushed the card back into my bag — hoping the teacher hadn’t seen it — the look on her face indicated otherwise. I smiled self-consciously as I handed her the correct one.

I didn’t go to college to learn how to write. In fact, I didn’t finish college at all. Instead, I built my career on being curious and trusting my instincts. As a writer, the only thing about which you can be certain is that those two traits will guide you to where you need to be. And just like those comical kitties, I always seem to land on my feet.

Economic Abe. Via Wikimedia

It’s rare to see a macroeconomics experiment play out in real time in the way we are seeing it right now in Japan and Europe.  Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has embarked on aggressive measures to stimulate Japan’s long-moribund economy since he took office in December, and the result so far has been strong growth — and, perhaps, liftoff after a triple-dip recession. Europe, on the other hand, remains mired in the muck of austerity and economic contraction.

To briefly recap Japan’s economic woes: the Japanese economy has been largely stagnant for the last two decades. Since the financial crisis in 2008, it has gone through three bouts of negative growth. Its economic output per person — GDP per capita — was actually lower in 2012 than it was in 2008.

In the economics profession, this is what they refer to in technical terms as “not good.”

However, Japan’s economy surged in the first quarter of this year, growing at an annualized rate of 3.5 percent. For its part, the Abe administration credits a three-pronged economic strategy, dubbed Abenomics: “unprecedented monetary stimulus, a big boost to government spending, and structural reforms designed to make Japanese industry and institutions more competitive.”

Then there’s Europe, which refuses to shift away from austerity. Its economy shrank for the sixth consecutive quarter — its longest downturn since World War II.

“The real economy is responding [in Japan],” said Adam S. Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “The last five, six months, there’s been a mini consumer boom. All the things that people said could never happen in Japan have turned around.”

He added: “Japan’s central bank is supporting recovery, and it’s working. The European Central Bank is supporting stagnation, and it’s working.”

Some in Europe understand that austerity is the problem, not the solution. Unfortunately, that “some” does not include the people making the decisions:

“The elites in Europe don’t learn,” said Stephan Schulmeister, an economist with the Austrian Institute of Economic Research. “Instead of saying, ‘Something goes wrong, we have to reconsider or find a different navigation map, change course,’ instead what happens is more of the same.”

Schulmeister added that German Chancellor Angela Merkel — austerity’s champion and the one person who could push Europe to change course — is “not willing to learn” the lesson offered by Japan’s recent switch from contraction to growth.

Change in GDP, Japan: 2007-present

Change in GDP, Europe and the U.S.: 2005-2012

Apparently, Europe (read: Germany) sees austerity as a kind of “morality play” whereby the profligate must suffer for their sins. And yet the people most responsible for Europe’s economic crisis are the ones suffering the least from austerity. Although unemployment in the euro zone reached a new high in March, you don’t see bankers and politicians on the unemployment line. What’s really immoral is an austerity policy that punishes the innocent while one guilty party bails out the other.

Regardless of who is hurting, austerity is simply not always the best way to achieve its supposed goal: reducing government deficits. As Europe reminds us, it prevents recession-battered economies from growing. The alternative is to prime the economic pump by having governments engage in fiscal and monetary stimulus. When economies grow under this approach, Keynesian economists like Paul Krugman argue, governments collect more in the way of revenues, straightening out their finances faster than they would by reducing their spending.

Once a country’s economy is again operating at capacity, government should cut spending — and increase taxes on those who can afford it — in order to deal with the problem of deficits in a balanced, moral way that neither grievously harms the economically vulnerable nor sacrifices the long-term investments by government that are necessary to further growth over time.

The lessons to be drawn from the recession are counterintuitive. The dominant morality tells us to tighten our belts and save up. But if the government as well as the private sector hoards cash during a recession, the economy slows to a crawl. That is the kind of economic suicide that Europe has leaped into: painful cuts, no growth, and rampant unemployment. America has avoided the worst of Europe’s fate thanks in part to the stimulus passed in 2009, and Japan, at last, looks to be hurtling in the opposite direction due to its recent stimulative policies. The key question is whether the pro-austerity politicians who currently control the purse strings in Washington and Brussels will take a hard look at the evidence accumulating around them — or retreat back into their comfortable, self-righteous views of the world.

John Maynard Keynes, the father of the proactive approach to economic policy that now bears his name, had something to say on this topic as well.  Responding to a critic who questioned his shifting position on monetary policy during the Great Depression, the British economist answered: “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”

Senator Rand Paul speaks at a town hall in New Hampshire. Last month the Kentucky Republican visited Howard University, a historically black college, in an effort to reach out to the African American community. Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia

The U.S. Census Bureau just released its report on voter turnout in America’s 2012 presidential elections. For the first time, the percentage of eligible blacks who voted surpassed that of eligible whites. Meanwhile, explosive growth in the country’s Asian and Hispanic populations continues to mean that those who go to the polls are increasingly nonwhite.

The turnout story is not just about Barack Obama running for president. In 1996, when the government began to collect this kind of data,  whites outvoted blacks by eight percentage points. Black turnout has increased in every election since then.

The turnout rates for Hispanics and Asians — both just shy of 50 percent — continue to lag far behind the other two groups, with much smaller gains over the years. And yet their share of the voting public almost doubled over that same span of sixteen years, even as the white share of voters dropped nine percentage points, to 74 percent.

Furthermore, partisanship is becoming more racial and regional. In the last four elections, Republicans have tended to get just under three-fifths of the white vote, while Democrats have consistently drawn about nine-tenths of the black vote (only slightly higher with Obama on the ballot). Meanwhile, Hispanic and Asian voters have moved significantly toward Democrats. Between 2004 and 2012, the Asian Democratic vote jumped 17 points, to 73 percent, while the Hispanic Democratic vote jumped 18 points, to 71 percent. Across that same period of time, the white vote for Democrats was lower in the South than any other region, and lowest in the deepest Southern states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama). 

It does not bode well for the GOP that its voters were almost 90 percent white in 2012.  If America’s minority voters continue to turn out for Democrats, and their share of the population continues to grow as rapidly as projected, it will become ever harder for Republicans to win the White House.

I am a progressive, but I don’t celebrate these trends. For the sake of this country’s multiethnic democracy, I want Republicans to do better among nonwhite voters. A society where ethnicity defines the political parties is doomed to disaster. The political process becomes a zero-sum game where each ethnic group fights for its share of the pie. Any commitment to a broader common good is lost, as is any sense that citizens of different backgrounds can come together and feel a strong patriotic bond.

My hope is that the GOP’s leaders read these numbers and adopt both a tone and policy stances that unite rather than divide. Too many on the right — from Rush Limbaugh to Mitt Romney to Sarah Palin — have sought to gin up white anxiety over demographic changes, to motivate white voters by fear.

Giving up this losing strategy is the best way to win over the growing ranks of minority voters. We’ll see in the coming months whether that happens. The impending vote over immigration reform will be a crucial test. But for the health of their party — and the health of our country — Republicans need to change.