Frager's Hardware: 1920-???

In the capstone research practicum for my master's program, we talked a lot about institution building- the creation of processes, political spaces, and common understandings that facilitate democracy- establishing "rules of the game" and giving people a conduit through which to communicate their needs and interests without violence. Societies in transition, we argued, could not thrive without institutions.

Well, the other night, I watched a DC institution burn to the ground.

My roommate and I were having a beer on the back patio when the sirens started. Neither of us thought much of it, but as they blared on longer and longer and seemed to stay unusually close by, we began to get curious. Moments later, roomie handed me his phone, and exclaimed "Frager's is on fire!"

Indeed, the tweeted picture on the screen showed Frager's hardware store with smoke pouring from its rooftop. The sheer number of sirens in the area made it clear that this wasn't some burnt bagel or a spark in a trash can. Frager's was burning down.

As a reasonably intelligent human being, my first instinct was obviously to try and get as close to the blaze as possible. Whatever, I needed to get to the grocery store anyway and at roughly four blocks from my apartment, the disaster zone was basically on my way.

Even though I was already close by, being on the bike made getting there easier than it probably should have been. The police sentries outside the Capitol seem to be the only law enforcement officers in DC who have figured out how to keep cyclists out of places they don't want them. Everyone else either doesn't notice us, can't effectively block us off, or doesn't consider us a threat, any of which I'm fine with. I swung wide around a halfhearted emergency cordon, zipped down an alleyway, dodged a couple of fire trucks, and joined a crowd of my Hill neighbors outside a CVS. I had wondered if the worst would be over by the time I got there, since I always manage to be a latecomer to this kind of thing. I was almost hoping it would be over, and that everything would fine.

Nope.

Can't see the building? Yeah, neither could we. 

To give you an idea of the enormity of the situation, I should explain. Frager's, a three-building operation with  distinct hardware, paint, and equipment rental stores, has been a piece of living Capitol Hill history, serving the community for the better part of a century. During that time, they've stayed family-owned and operated, with as friendly and knowledgeable a staff as you're likely to find anywhere. In an era when most retail employees aren't paid enough to care about customers' needs or their store's image, Frager's hired local summer help, remembered the names of their visitors (and their visitors' dogs,) and could help you navigate a truly dizzying array of products to find exactly what you needed. When I wanted to reinforce a door frame in my first apartment in a misguided attempt to install a pull-up bar, Frager's cut down a 2x4 and helped me select mounting screws. When countless rides up and down Massachusetts Avenue inevitably shook loose some nut, bolt, or washer from my bike, a Frager's employee would disappear into a room full of tiny plastic boxes, and come back with exactly the piece(s) I needed. As one guy I don't know on Twitter put it, "Everyone on Capitol Hill has something in their home from Frager's." It's nothing short of an icon, a symbol of shared identity. So I can say with certainty that all of us in the crowd were hoping for the place to be saved.

As the moments wore on, though, it only seemed to get worse. At one point, flames started jumping up from the roof:

When the wind would shift, you could catch a glimpse of one of the ladder crews through the smoke:

I have no idea how I made this into a .gif.

At one point, I spied Ward 6 council member (Capitol Hill's representative on the DC legislature) Tommy Wells as he walked behind a fire truck near the building with a gas mask in hand:

I'm no photographer, but it IS him.

And proceeded calmly up the sidewalk to confer with other leaders and news media probably only 50 feet from the fire.

Middle ground, white shirt. 

Soon enough, it became clear that the fire department, despite their valiant efforts, were fighting a losing battle, and that all they could really do was try to keep the damage from spreading to the rest of the block. By that time, I had been standing with my fellow gawkers for close to an hour, in awe at the loss of everyone's favorite hardware, lumber, paint, lighting, kitchen, automotive, and cotton candy maker rental shop. It felt odd to stand in a crowd of people, watching each other as we watched it all go down. As we watched something we had all come to know and love die a fiery death. I saw no tears, crocodile or otherwise. Children played and people casually joked about unrelated things. Still, the sense of  sadness lingering over the assembled mass seemed to press down harder and harder the closer the sun sank toward the horizon.

Having absorbed enough collective shock and anguish for one evening, I resolved to take the metaphorical lemons and make some literal lemonade.

After hopping back onto Winona the Kona and going to Harris Teeter for a citrus juicer that I really would rather have bought at Frager's (sigh,) I met a Long Time Resident who said he had been inside when the fire broke out. All the staff and customers got out safely, he said, but it took "a real long time" for the firefighters to get on the scene. Had I bought any salt on my errand, I would  have taken his words with some of it (BAM!) because time tends to stretch and bend in a situation like that, so it's tough to tell how long the fire trucks actually took to show up. I'm sure it seemed like an eternity, though.

Reportedly, it was about 10:00 PM before the last ember died, some three to four hours after the the fire began. CM Wells called the event "devastating," and cast the store as a "family member" that the entire community would stand behind and support. Institutions, after all, are about people and ideas, not buildings or physical spaces. And in one of the frequent displays of just why Capitol Hill is such an amazing place to live, two charities that have very effectively focused community support during past tragedies past have come together to take donations and plan fundraisers, calling themselves "Friends of Frager's."

I think we're all going to be amazed by the efforts mounted to save this institution in the coming weeks. Frager's is gone, but not what it represents. So farewell for now, Frager's, we'll be seeing you again soon.

I guess I'd better go hit that donation link.

-AWG

I don't know where you're going, but do you got room for one more troubled soul?

It Gets Personal, Part III: Religion, Peacebuilding, and You (Me.)

My last couple of posts discussed my ongoing difficulties squaring off with religion, faith, and spirituality in my own life. The current crisis stems from a song I heard a couple of weeks ago that contained some subtle Christian overtones, and I've been using the blog to work through my relationship with these dynamics. Today, we reach the exciting(?) conclusion, where I connect these themes both to my background and my potential future.

A subtle but nonetheless highly salient component of a Maine upbringing is a strong sense of individuality and a corresponding reluctance to push others toward adherence to my own belief system. Casey says that it's because "we're good people," and he may be right. That which makes me uncomfortable with GOP legislation of morality or religious proselytizing also repels me from making judgments about the ways in which others live their lives, but that seems like such a big part of being faithful/religious in the Strange Land.  Here in DC, when I ask someone how they're doing, I'm about as likely to hear "Blessed" as anything else. And I've been repeatedly told that not spreading my faith to others is akin to not having a faith at all. I refuse to accept that, but the fact that so many folks seem to feel that way gives me lot of angst about the role of religion or faith in our daily lives. 

That angst isn't so much a problem in and of itself, but for a peacebuilder, it complicates things. War and violent conflict almost never occur across national borders for reasons of territory or disputes between heads of state anymore. Conflicts are primarily internal and fought over identity, socioeconomic inequity, or political exclusion. Religion and faith, so essential to identity in many cultures and contexts, can be both a key motivator of violence and a strong draw to reconciliation. It all depends on the ways in which the tenets and  symbols of a faith are activated. To wit, my first professor at the School of International Service, Dr. Abdul Aziz Said, was a strong supporter of the power of religion and faith to motivate forgiveness and reconciliation. He often quoted a colleague/mentor of his from the days of SIS' founding, who was wont to explain "I don't believe in God, I see god in everything I do." Both Aziz and his grad assistant, Sheherazade, worked with this personalized notion of holiness and an inner deity to motivate forgiveness and reconciliation in transitioning societies. By the same token, if you neglect to include religious leaders or groups in post-conflict peacebuilding, at best you'll alienate a wide segment of the population, at worst you've made yourself an adversary or "spoiler" who's going to work against your goals. 

Openness to the inclusion of religious elements comes as close to a hard-and-fast rule as anything else in the peacebuilding/development world, and I don't have any problem with that on an intellectual level. Religiously based support for love and justice can be essential to promoting lasting peace. In practice, though, I'm concerned that my discomfort with some PDR or "public displays of religion," will make my life difficult. When it finally comes time to address religious groups as part of a capacity-building exercise or policy workshop, what if I can't properly identify with the faithful? Will I come across as resistant or unreliable because of my trouble integrating spirituality into my life? The harder I try to understand faith, though, the harder some of the faithful seem to try to alienate me and those who think like me.

As the arguments coming from these self-appointed standard-bearers of tradition and societal soundness get eviscerated time and time again, it seems they're turning to more abstract language and ever-greater intellectual leaps. Now, the Archbishop of Paris has spewed a bunch of nonsense about impending violence if France goes ahead with legalizing same-sex marriage:  

Cardinal Andre Vingt-trois taking a break from authoring
inscrutable positions on the state's role in people's personal lives
to take part in the Stations of the Cross.
I wonder if Jesus' cross was that nice and polished.

"This is the way a violent society develops," he told the spring meeting of the French bishops' conference. "Society has lost its capacity of integration and especially its ability to blend differences in a common project."

Quoi?

I'm not entirely sure how a state that's trying to give a broader swath of people equal treatment under the law is doing anything other than showing its capacity for integration and the blending of differences, and the Cardinal doesn't appear to explain his logical gymnastics. But I'm quite sure that he's ignoring structural violence, which can be just as damaging as overt violence, though tougher to see. A major concept in peace and conflict resolution, structural violence refers to the structures and dynamics within a society that allow people to be marginalized or made second-class citizens. In many cases, structural violence actually legitimates overt violence, e.g. our acceptance that a certain degree of youth violence is going to occur among our poorer, darker-skinned, and more urban fellow Americans. If development or conflict resolution interventions are ignorant of these structures or give too much deference to localized, traditional understandings of societal norms and social relations (often based in religion,) they end up doing little more than reinforcing social oppression. And I ain't about that. Drawing on both religious and localized perspectives in conflict resolution is super important, but I'd have a (justifiably) hard time, I think, with the idea that it could end up damaging social inclusion or buttressing oppression.  

Of course, it's unlikely that I'll be in that situation any time soon, so I suppose I have time to iron out my relationship with faith, spirituality, religion, whatever you'd like to call it. Still, if there are even small ways that I can make myself more like the peacebuilder I someday hope to be, continually asking myself these questions will hopefully help me do that. Even if it means I have to bore everyone with an interminable series of idle thoughts I had when singing an OK song by a reasonably skilled contemporary rock/pop/Christian artist. 

I probably should just have my iPod on at all times and stop listening to the radio.

It Gets Personal, Part II: Music, Movies, and Faith on Two Wheels

Welcome back. Earlier this week, I talked about about how it affects me to have a song stuck in my head and then find out it's got religious/Christian themes in it. My inner reactions, though slightly varied, tend to coalesce around No Sir, I don't like it. Today, I'll explain a bit about why I think that might be.

I've encountered situations like this many times over the years. I would find bands like The Rocker Summer, Needtobreathe, Switchfoot, or even Paramore, grow to sort of like them, and then realize that their music was often faith-driven. I suppose it makes sense that this kind of music would be attractive. After all, it's impossible to completely divorce overall sonic quality of a given song from its lyrical content, and "CCM" often contains compelling themes like persistence despite adversity, the search for deeper meaning, struggling with a sense of alienation, and maintaining a positive outlook when things inevitably start looking bleak. Depending on how I feel at the time, those could be very useful devices.

So I can't really say for sure why discovering the band or artist's Christianity frustrates me so much! I suspect it's because I have struggled with my own faith/religion/spirituality for roughly the last 15 years, ever since I began to perceive that part of myself as distinct from the culture I was raised in and around. When, at 12 years old, I suggested that my family start going to church again, it wasn't out of any deep thirst for religion or faith. The truth is, it came from watching "Home Alone" with my family for the gazillionth time.

It was the scene where Kevin McAllister's elderly neighbor, Old Man Marley, who has been presented as creepy and possibly homicidal for the entire movie, is discovered (!) to be kind, wise, a good member of the community, and excellent at relating to children. He's basically Santa's more introverted brother who just looks gruff (due to taking his style cues from Civil War generals) and feels lonely and isolated after a falling-out with his own family some time ago.

"You can be too old for a lot of things-- you're never too old to be afraid."

Old Man Marley reassures Kevin on several fronts- fear is not something he needs to grow out of, his furnace probably isn't trying to eat him, and that they're sitting in a place where both of them (and by extension we) will always be welcome. Kevin, precocious prankster that he is, brings a childlike simplicity to Marley's internal conflict over whether to reach out to his estranged son. That all felt so powerful to me in that moment. In the popular mind, the scene tends to take a backseat to images of Kevin lip-syncing to a mobster movie while firecrackers go off like a Tommy gun, or Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern being continually jacked in the face by a paint can or whatever. Obviously that's a lot of fun, but I think the messages sent in the church scene are ultimately of much more value. 12-year-old me wanted to feel that sense of positiveness and warmth, so the following week we started attending the West Auburn Congregational Church/ United Church of Christ, which I remain a member of today.

For me, it was never really about God, who remained more a symbol or cultural reference point than anything truly active in my life. Much like a song getting stuck in my head, church was about capturing a feeling I had, then and there. Have I gone to a single non-Christmas, marriage, or baptism-related service in the last five years? No. Do I miss it? Rarely. But hearing that type of song or being reminded of those symbols and images brings my own internal conflict over spirituality rapidly to the fore, making me wonder if I ought to find religiosity for real.

It's not as though I haven't tried. Multiple times throughout my adult life, I've made a sincere effort to put religious faith into my heart. Of course, I never actually went back to church, since I considered it to be essentially separate from faith, and it somehow didn't seem right without my family and the people I knew. Maybe that was the missing piece, who knows. Either way, it hasn't worked, and approaching the end of my third decade I still oscillate between agnostic and "secular humanist." Frankly, even secular humanism bothers me, because those guys seem so adamant about the ridiculousness of being religious- they dismiss spirits and souls as constructed, almost immature inventions of humanity. By contrast, though those things do not play a huge role in my life, I do not doubt their importance or value to other human beings, whether constructed or not. We all need some form of mysticism or ritual to help us make sense of the world.

For me, singing songs helps, but I never feel more connected, clear-headed, or capable than when I'm riding a bike. Sure, it's fun to move fast(er,) feel the wind pushing back against me, and play fast and loose with the occasional stop sign, but there's more to it than that. My worries and issues seem to blow away on the wind, my reflexes sharpen, and I begin to feel my consciousness expand beyond my immediate physical body as I become part of a hybrid organic/mechanical form and feel the contours of the city as my wheels connect with the road. It's an incredibly liberating experience, and I don't suppose it's coincidence that an activity which makes me feel so connected to the world is often afforded a somewhat environmentalist bent. This is already sounding incredibly pretentious, so instead of continuing I'll just pose a question. If someone gets a similar feeling from a relationship with a god or similar entity as I do from cycling, who am I to decry that? But that question cuts both ways, and I have trouble with any system of beliefs in which so many of the faithful seem to be trying to force it on others. The idea of being religious feels so tied up in wanting other people to adhere to the same doctrines and mores as I do, and that's just so completely at odds with the kind of person I am.

Next time, I'll explore how that attitude relates (maybe) to my past, and its possible implications for my future. Stick around!

-AWG

It Gets Personal, Part I: I heard a song. Here's what I think about that.

Yesterday, I was bombarded by a rare moment of insight into the way my weird mind works. Obviously, seeing a flash of the inner workings of one's psyche is profoundly disturbing, and my only way to process it was to write a blog post. This series of ruminations turned into a wide-ranging (and ongoing) exposition of my relationship with music, religion, and my chosen career path. Due to sheer length, it'll be in at least two parts, probably three. I hope you get as much from reading it as I did from writing it!

I'm not sure whether "That Awkward Moment" is still a thing or not, but if it were, tonight I would have tweeted "That awkward moment when you realize the song you've been singing to yourself all day and really like has been from a Christian music artist the whole time."

One of the first things you're likely to learn about me is that I sing to myself pretty much always. I like to think that it sounds good. Chances are, I'm wrong on that- although I was in a cappella groups for something like 6 years, listening to one person sing to an audience of one (himself) using a one-foot voice is seldom entertaining. Despite that knowledge, I persist, because it's a good way to carry myself through menial tasks, and most people probably don't notice at any rate.

Some days though, I hum/sing a song for many hours and later learn that the artist belongs to that sort-of-nebulous genre called "Contemporary Christian Music", then feel weird about it. Yesterday was one of those days. The offending song was "Down" by Mat Kearney, which probably came up on my Pandora last week or something. I should emphasize that I can rarely identify the point at which a song got stuck in my head, and almost never recall hearing it recently. If you listen to the song, there's very little reason to be sympathetic to my ignorance of its Christian overtones:

The chorus goes thusly: Can you hear when we call?/ Be there when we fall?/ We're standing, our backs against the wall/ Top of our lungs, Hallelujah/ Where pain and love bleed into one/ Baby when all you see is darkness (it's coming down now)/ We all need forgiveness (it's coming down now.) It tells the story of several people facing varying degrees of adversity, their search for support and their struggle to maintain hope.

So yeah, I probably should have noticed. But that's the (possibly) strange thing about the way I relate to music: it's not usually about the lyrics of a song. Sure, the words can be interesting and engaging, and bands like Mumford and Sons, Say Anything, Motion City Soundtrack, the Decemberists, or Stepdad write lyrics that I want to read, understand, and unpack. But when I'm just listening to or singing a song, the lyrics aren't usually important because of any inherent quality, just for being lyrics. They derive more meaning from their effect of adding a melody and punctuating the overall "soundscape." That completed piece of sound evokes a state of mind or a set of emotions that I can use to frame, interpret, and respond to the things going on around me, or even to my own thoughts and ideas. There's a chicken-and-egg debate in there somewhere: whether the music interprets my thoughts/feelings or I select music based on the thoughts/feelings I already have. Not going to get into it. The important thing is that the framing device created need not have anything to do with what the song is about- I wasn't feeling particularly hard-up or hopeless when going over and over "Down" both in my head and under my breath. The full sound somehow just seemed right for where I was, what I was doing, and how I felt, even if only I could hear it.

And then I looked up the lyrics and realized that it was just a little more God-themed than I would have liked. For some reason, that just sort of...bugs me.

In the next post, I'll attempt to explain why that is. So, um, stay tuned.

-AWG

How Not to Reduce Regional Tensions

North Korea is a tough place for peacebuilders. Not so much in the sense that it's tough for peacebuilders to live there though it most assuredly is that. More that the isolation and insularity of the country makes it difficult to even discuss things like civil society capacity building, or public confidence in nonviolent dispute resolution. Institutions such as courts that can provide checks on central government power have very little traction, as do all the other concepts that a basic search of scholarly or organizational literature on peacebuilding and democracy will.

There is often little that can be done to promote peace and social justice in a given country from the outside, and international practitioners are pretty much unable to enter North Korea for the purpose of empowering the populace to build these things from the inside. Even the United States Institute of Peace, one of the thought leaders covering the Korean Peninsula situation from the West, has not been able to advance peacebuilding efforts much beyond state-level negotiations. Building a communication network of state officials and "Track 1.5" personnel in the region is an admirable goal given the circumstances, but truly effective peacebuilding needs to integrate "top-down" and "bottom up" approaches. That way, central government policies can make sense at the local level and small communities are able to communicate their needs/interests to state leaders. At the moment, though, that doesn't appear to be a strong possibility in the DPR of K. 

Imagine my shock complete lack of surprise, then, when I read the headline of this Reuters article yesterday. 

Not long after the election, I used this very blog to prattle on for 80 pages or so detailing my thoughts about the outcome, and expressed some reservations about the Obama White House's foreign policy agenda. Having noticed that the Obama/Romney foreign policy debate was essentially a neo-realist race to the bottom, where the first instinct is to treat those that agitate us as security threats rather than opportunities for dialogue, I wasn't exactly optimistic about U.S. foreign policy going forward. Continuing on the same path seemed more or less a foregone conclusion. Indeed, we've decided to fly some bombers over Seoul in response to Kim Jong-Un's increasingly fiery rhetoric concerning the South and their United States puppet masters (that's us.)

Now, I fully understand the need to show support for our allies. And in a sense, I also understand the "show of force" language that our military is speaking. I recently heard a bit about life in South Korea from Laura in Laurasia. Her take was basically that Kim is a young man, which puts him at a tremendous disadvantage in the Korean culture of seniority, so it's important for him to demonstrate his willingness to lash out militarily at perceived enemies in order to appear as a strong leader.

It's conceivable, within the realist mindset, that a demonstration of U.S. military might and technological superiority would make sense to such an adversary and convince them to back down. I myself don't trust the line of thinking or the notion that "force is the only language they understand," but it has a lot of currency in the public mind, so there we are. In this case, I really think the U.S. response is playing directly into the hands of North Korea's more bellicose elements. Their rhetoric in this most recent flare-up in tensions has been focused on the idea that the U.S. and South Korea are "aggressors" in the region and the North needs/has a right to defend itself. I guess I don't see how flying a bunch of stealth bombers around within easy striking distance of Pyongyang will do anything but convince NK's military leadership that their paranoia is justified. "Too easily words of war become acts of war," as Maester Luwin from Game of Thrones cautioned Robb Stark in the first book/season, and I'm afraid that this Game of Oneupmanship on the Peninsula is headed in the same direction.

Sure enough, Kim Jong-Un has ordered a higher state of missile readiness in response to our exercises, apparently in order to "settle accounts with the U.S." . Of course, we've taken "settle accounts" to mean something sinister, but I can't help wondering whether it was actually meant more literally as "evening the score" of the tit-for-tat threat making  This sounds a lot like a situation that came up in my Culture and Conflict class a couple of years back. When interacting with certain "high-context" cultures where face and honor are important, trying to bully/shame them into changing their behavior isn't likely to work. If we'd just let Kim and his generals have the last word for the moment, they'd be able to save some face and might not have to keep ramping up the rhetoric/military preparedness out of a need to respond to our latest verbal salvo.

That's probably a little too simple a view, and either way I don't suppose the State Department and military are operating on the same schools of thought as a School of International Service professor.  But maybe, just maybe, changing course on this might show the path to a time where some real peacebuilding is finally able to happen. I know, it's a long shot. But it sure would be nice.

- AWG

I'd like to tell you all my bad ideas...

Getting a new perspective

You probably don't know this because you haven't heard from me since December or so, but this year I resolved to basically quit whining about how my job isn't all that relevant to my degree program (past or present,) and start taking steps to correct my attitude by seeking out opportunities to get some more satisfaction out of my current position. Well, I'm pleased to report that this endeavor has been a (qualified) success. And I don't just mean that I've bought a couple blazers to wear to the office in an effort to "dress for the job I want," though that has certainly been a good time, too.

A few weeks ago, my organization sent out a series of surveys measuring employees' interest in participating in short-term (six months or so) placements in other divisions. It just so happens that a spot opened up in an office I'd spent some time with in the past, covering front-desk duties while the usual person was at a doctor appointment or what have you. Considering that I speak probably 50% of my work Spanish while at this office, I accepted almost immediately. Today was my first day in the new spot, and even accounting for the "new office smell," I have no doubt that I made a great decision.

My duties here remind me a lot of my time as a legal assistant/office manager at a law firm, dealing much less with case work and more with people. My first instinct, since I had already basically done that job in the past, was to wonder whether I would be moving backwards, in a way. But really thinking it through, I realized it couldn't possibly be a bad thing to demonstrate my flexibility and adaptable skill set both to my own organization and on the ol' resume. What's more, I'm generally much happier when interacting with and relating to people, helping them to solve problems and find the right questions to seek the answers they want. Sitting at a desk and waiting for somebody to bring me a folder so I can scan some things and mail them out, being a functionary and having little to no agency has its merits, I'm sure, but the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that that kind of work just does not jive with my personality. Certainly, the first-day luster of the new office will wear off sooner or later, but for now I'm just glad to have been given the chance to try something new.

Meanwhile, the practicum team is plugging along with our project exploring the intersection, or "nexus," as we're terming it, between peacebuilding and democracy building. We've come up with some really interesting stuff so far, one of the central themes of our project will be a "think-piece" for our client. It's going to center upon theoretical support for a concept of trust that underpins both peace and democracy. Basically, it drives adherence to democratic principles and allows people to be creative in building  mechanisms for the nonviolent resolution of disputes. Moreover, if people trust that democratic channels for peaceful conflict management will work, they're less likely to abandon nonviolence the moment that negotiation doesn't immediately get them what they want. That feeling is often absent in new democracies or societies transitioning out of conflict, which makes them more likely to backslide into renewed violence or a system that lacks equity and social justice. All of this is ultimately aimed at movement toward positive peace characterized by social justice and a lack of structural violence. That's a lofty goal, and one that some would say is unattainable, so why fight a battle that you're probably never going to win? Well, a wise man once told me (as often as he was able) that it's better to try and fail than to do nothing and be a success at it. Good mantra for life? Probably. The VERY CORE of a career in peacebuilding? Almost definitely.

Honestly, though, it's a little tough to focus on my capstone research project when I keep hearing all this stuff about American University's campus-wide smoking ban. It was announced this year that AU would prohibit smoking anywhere on campus in an effort to improve overall university health. I can't decide how I feel about this. Sure, I think cigarettes are a little gross except in some very specific circumstances. And what little economics training I do have makes me lean toward disapproval of smoking because it provides negative externalities that are not covered in the price of a pack of butts. How many times has someone (probably not maliciously) blown a cloud of smoke at you while you're passing them on the street? That irritation you experience is what they call a negative externality, one that smokers don't pay for the privilege of causing you. The same goes for the expense to public health when people are treated for heart and lung disease on the system's dime after years or decades of smoking. Tax you pay on cigarettes at the register, I'm fairly certain, doesn't cover that. Which is why you can't trust the system.

Still, I tend to come down on the side of education over legislation- getting people to understand why it's a better idea to do your smokin' off campus (to the extent that's possible, it is a college after all.) The college democrats' link has a much better exploration of the "freedom of choice vs. the public good" topic than I care to delve into, but that tendency is also causing me some angst over the idea of banning giant sodas. The over 16-ounce soda ban for certain types of establishments in NYC, a signature initiative of Mayor Bloomberg, was struck down in court this week by a judge who looks like he could stand to lay off giant sugary beverages for a few weeks himself, if this picture is any indication.

The Honorable Judge Milton Tingling, who needs to fire his PR rep
or whoever took this picture while kneeling at his feet. 

Apparently he blocked the ban because it represented an overreach by the city in its ability to make choices for consumers. Also, he characterized it as "arbitrary and capricious" because it exempted certain places, like 7-Eleven, from selling large-format sodas, and didn't include stuff like milkshakes. So movie theaters and pizza joints are psyched now, because you can still get your 30-oz soda before watching the Hobbit for the 4th time or shoving a bunch of greasy pepperoni down your gullet. I wouldn't recommend the former, because once that soda's in your belly it's going to be really tempting to go make a pit stop by the 3rd or 4th "dwarves fight some guys" scene that's both completely unnecessary and absent from the book. And honestly, who wants to do that?

But saying the law doesn't make sense just because places like 7-Eleven can still sell large sodas, to my mind, completely misses the point because those sodas are, more than likely, going to be in bottles that you can re-close and so you haven't got to drink it all at once, unlike the giant cups in movie theaters or pizza places that encourage you to swallow all that sweet, sweet fattenin' fuel before you leave. The decision would have read much more strongly if it had only been about preventing the city from grabbing too much power and limiting freedom of choice in beverage consumption, and not this silly thing about how a law is ineffectual just because it contains exemptions and caveats. At the same time, I wonder if a better course of action for Bloomberg would be to try and up the tax rates on sugary beverages and frame it as a way to protect freedom of choice while letting the cost of a soda reflect its correllated drain on the public health system. Though come to think of it, we tried that in DC a couple years back and it didn't work out so well, leading some to call for... you guessed it. A District-wide, NYC-style soda ban, which might have more success.(!)

And around, and around we go.

I'm just so glad that we've ended childhood hunger, agreed on a means to combat the human-led devastation of our planet, and stamped out bigotry, homophobia, and religious intolerance so that we can finally get back to  the basic freedom to put liquid sugar into our bodies. Of course, that's basically what I'll be doing when I take down a bunch of warm blueberry soup after the WABA/House of Sweden Vasa Ride this Sunday. Should be a delicious end to a 60-mile ride to kick of "Spring training" or, as I like to call, it, "Riding in the Springtime."

This post mainly involves dogs. There's probably a joke in here somewhere about the word dogpile, and how the Spanish word for pile is a little like the Spanish word for mountain, and a mountain is a larger type of hill, and I live on the Hill.

Just a quick note to get down a couple of thoughts I had while taking a walk this evening to reorganize my brain after several hours of paper writing today...

The smell of the fir trees on display outside Eastern Market almost made me forget about my complete inability to get into the Christmas spirit before finals are done. Almost. I really wish it had happened, even just for a moment. I bought some Christmas colored M&Ms to put in a bowl on the coffee table, maybe that counts?

Saw a woman walking three very dissimilar dogs- a Newfoundland, a lab, and some ridiculous little Cairn terrier type guy. Two things about this struck me as odd....

1. I don't think I've ever seen somebody that owns three different kinds of dog. I've only ever known dog owners with:

• one dog; 
• two dogs of the same breed (like the two adorable elderly gay guys in my old neighborhood walking a pair of identical mini Schnauzers or "old man dogs;") 
• two dogs of a different breed (like a beagle and a Golden, maybe, or a yellow lab/black lab type combo,) or; 
• three or more of the SAME dog (like the guy walking 3 airedales one morning who, when I asked him to remind me what those dogs were called, simply replied "I just call them 'bad dogs!'"

And 2. People who are obviously professional dog walkers seem to be active mainly during the daytime (since folks are mostly at work then and can't walk their own dogs) and usually have, like, a multitude of canines. This woman had only three, and didn't have the requisite high-tech leashes, baggies hanging out of every pocket, or resolute but wild stare of someone who wrangles rambunctious, shaggy beasts for a living. Which led me to believe she was a private owner.

Yeah. Never seen that huge/manageable/tiny combination under one roof before, which got me thinking: I wonder if Capitol Hill is the kind of place where you, as a dog owner, use the listserv to coordinate with the dog owner in the rowhouse to your left and the dog owner in the rowhouse to your right in order to make a schedule of who takes all the dogs out on weeknights. That way, each highly successful couple only has to walk the dogs a couple of nights a week, leaving the others open for dinner at Acqua al 2, alumni networking happy hours, professional conferences with networking reception to follow, and time spent watching the Fox network. Dog owners, how about it?

In case you can't tell...I really want a dog.

-AWG