Apologies and International Flights

I’ve been rather infrequently checking TPBP this week, as I’ve had some entirely exciting and annoying problems develop in my real world life. I’ve been slowly (very, very slowly) working with the Peace Corps on a medical condition: I’ve got a nerve in my foot that’s under pressure and is causing my foot to hurt all the time. It makes walking and standing up all day difficult, which is awkward, since I do a lot of both. The upshot of that is, Thursday, the Peace Corps Medical Office in Washington, DC, has decided I will receive better treatment in the United States (and, apparently, taking care of it myself). Thursday they told me I was being medically separated. This being the Peace Corps, decisions like that proceed with a great rapidity (unlike, say, the treatment of my foot problem, which took over six months of slow useless and pointless treatments and four and a half hour bus rides). I’ll be flying home to Ohio on Saturday, my Bulgarian adventure finally at an end. I’ve always wanted to visit Washington, and I finally will: for about three hours, as I have a layover there. Not quite what I wanted, but what can you do?

It’s unbelievable how much stuff you can accumulate in a year and a half. I have mixed emotions about the whole situation. I wanted to finish my full service. My students were all upset that I was leaving (and you would be too, if you were losing the only teacher in town who let them play games). However, I know that I have completed my service (a medical separation is still a closing), and the more I think about getting back to my family, my friends and my special lady friend, I can’t help but be excited. You should see the teddy bear my eight graders got me as a going-away present.

What I’m not so excited back is moving to the US in the current economy. I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunity to see what it’s like when I get home, and perhaps it will provide some fodder for the blog – which I notice is going well, with strong posts from everybody but me, and even a brand new poster, although he sounds pretty suspicious. Posting will continue to be light since I still have to move. In the meantime, enjoy your holidays and I hope your foot feels better than mine.

Happy Thanksgiving to Those at Home

I hope you guys all enjoy your day off. I got the unmitigated joy of dealing with my twelfth graders. It's almost as good as mashed potatoes and gravy with the family. It was kind of surprising the number of people who knew about Thanksgiving, even over here in Eastern Europe. And I got to draw hand-turkeys with my students: always a hit.

Different Takes, Different Problems

The New York Times has an interesting article discussing European reaction to Barack Obama’s election. The article dwells on the different problems the major EU nations face with their ethnic and religious minorities. The reaction of my community to Obama’s election was diverse, but largely positive: the older the person was, the more likely they were to view the whole thing with disbelief. Younger people, my high school students especially, were enthusiastic and not at all surprised. I was kind of surprised by the degree to which they accepted Obama’s election as a matter of course, but these students view African-American culture (especially hip hop and Rhianna) as more their birthright than mine, so they have an interesting take on ethnic identity in the US. I passed by a newsstand today that was selling a magazine with a large cover photo of Obama, whose title translated as “A History of Obama.” This country was never as anti-Bush as the rest of Europe, but everyone here is excited about Obama in one way or another

It’s different, however, when we talk about ethnic problems inside the country. The idea of one of the several ethnic and religious minorities in this country rising to a position of real leadership is outside what people see as possible. In the parliament, there’s a large, ethnically Turkish party that usually makes up about nine percent of the vote. While that party wields a lot of power in its ability to make or break various governments, it is emphatically a junior partner. Ethnic tensions are largely peaceful here although there is still a great deal of institutional and systemic racism at play.

On thing the article does not discuss and I think is worth mentioning is the degree to which European nations define citizenship and being part of a community in ethnic terms. It simply is not enough to speak German to become a German. One advantage that the United States has over Europe is, whether or not the founding fathers intended it this way (they didn’t), the framework they created allows us to embrace a constantly widening conception of “Americanness.” It doesn’t matter where your ancestors happen to be from, but if you are participating in American life you are essentially American. While that originally was based upon the differences of the major (mostly British) groups making up the thirteen colonies, it’s only a small step from that to everyone else. The racial problems that have long plagued the US do not, at their base, presuppose that those of different races are some how not American. The US is certainly not without problems, but the problems we have exist on a wholly different footing than the problems of Europe. Anyone can move to the US and become an American in relatively short order. If I move to Italy, speak Italian, marry an Italian, become a citizen of Italy and live the rest of my life there, no matter what I do, I will never be an Italian. Maybe my kids, but by virtue of the fact that Italian itself is an ethnic as well as a cultural category, I cannot access it, because I am not ethnically Italian. In the United States, we define ourselves culturally (speaking English, a (somewhat) shared vision of what the US means) and not ethnically. Hence, a mixed race child of a Kansan and a Kenyan with a Muslim name can grow up to be as American as the decedents of John Winthrop.

The Election from Over Here

It goes without saying that if you haven’t voted yet, you should stop reading this and go make sure that that gets done. Take the afternoon off work, if you’re still at work. Democracy is too important to be left to other people.

If you haven’t read PW’s great post about going door to door for Obama this week, you should check it out. I used to live in the same area, and it’s a pretty amazing story to hear. Can the Bush years really almost be over?

I live abroad at the moment and I wasn’t able to do any volunteering for the Obama campaign, although I would have liked to. It’s fascinating to read PW’s take on the sentiment in the US right now. Living in a small town in Eastern Europe, I don’t feel much of a connection with US news. People don’t know a whole lot about it, and they usually care even less. One of the most interesting things about this election, though, is the fact that my high school students know about Barack Obama. Some of these kids are in the eighth grade they were born in 1994 and 1995 – even Bill Clinton is ancient history to them, above and beyond being the president of a foreign (albeit hugely important) country. George W. Bush is the only US president they’ve ever really known. And over and over, they’ve told me that they think Obama is cool. They don’t even know who John McCain is. (I asked them how old they thought Obama was – they thought twenty-seven sounded like a reasonable age, the bastards) These are not kids who have any interest in politics.

Barack Obama is not going to solve all or even most of the US’s problems. If he wins, he’s got a lot of work ahead of him just getting us back to where we were before Bush. But, talking to people about the election it’s really convinced me that Barack Obama is exactly the president that we need right now. Plus, my students think he’s really cool.

A Weather Report

I’d like to mention that it is raining here for the first time in about two months. Fall is on the way! Summers here are incredibly hot and dry. Once it starts raining, though, the weather changes pretty radically. I look forward to it not being a hundred degrees any longer. Falls here are pretty short before the dull, gray and mild winter sets in, but it will be a nice change of pace.

Other than that, I’d like to apologize for yesterdays run of no posts. School starts on Monday and I’ve been busy getting reading for the new year. Should be fun. Plus, I’m teaching eight grade this year! They’re going to enjoy my hand turkeys when Thanksgiving comes around.

Transit in Small Towns

Matt Yglesias is pounding the drum for transit again, and once again I think he’s making a lot of sense. I thought I’d throw in a few of my thoughts on transit issues.

I currently live in a country where the level of automobile ownership is much lower than the United States. For the most part, people get around by public transport. Where I live, in a town of about 35,000, there is a bus system with a limited schedule. Most people take taxis where they need to go if it’s further than walking distance. There are four or five different companies, and there are many cab stands throughout the city. There’s an informally agreed upon rate of about a dollar anywhere in the city – further, to one of the many small villages in the area, and it goes to about thirty cents a kilometer. For me, this works great. I walk most places, but if I need to get someplace in a hurry, I can always take a cab. I would prefer if there was a regular bus service to more parts of town (and if you had been on some of the cab rides I have been, you would to). It’s not perfect, but it works. Larger towns have more options: trams, trollys, heavily frequented bus lines.

Between cities, there are two options: trains and buses. I prefer trains, but they have some major downsides. They’re slower than buses, and they don’t go to as many places. I live in a majority ethnic minority area, and it has traditionally not seen the kind of infrastructure improvements that the rest of the country has enjoyed. The end result is that there are a lot of poorly paved roads and very few rail lines. There is a rail line coming to my town (one of the biggest in the region), though, so I’m able to take advantage of it. The trains are cheaper than the buses – they’re less affected by the price shocks caused by oil price fluctuations. I’ve lived in this area for about a year and a half now, and I’ve seen the price of a ticket to the capital go up by half. Trains also run at night, which most buses do not do. Buses are quicker, but they’re also more annoying – the seats are small, they’re unbelievably hot, and the drivers seem to be having some sort of “most reckless” contest. Their biggest advantage is that they go pretty much anywhere. Every day, people use these buses to travel between cities for jobs that, without a car, they could not ordinarily hold.

This is a pretty sharp contrast with the United States. Before I left for the Peace Corps, I worked as a cab driver for a short while. I drove in my hometown, a small industrial city in Ohio. The cabs were used almost exclusively by low income senior citizens, the mentally handicapped being taken from and to adult daycare facilities and people who had lost their driver’s licenses, mostly due to drunk driving charges. You could purchase tokens for two dollars a piece to take you anywhere in the city, but you had to call and arrange for drop off and pick up beforehand. If you didn’t have a token, a fare inside the city was six dollars. I assume in the almost two years since I’ve driven a cab that those prices have gone up. I once took a woman to the airport in Columbus, Ohio, a forty-five minute drive from town – it cost her sixty five dollars. I can take a forty-five minute bus ride here for about four. Inside the city, the cabs were too inconvenient and too expensive for people to take in lieu of their regular car – it’s just much easier to take a car when you have to call a dispatcher and wait half an hour for a cab (containing one or two other passengers).

The United States desperately needs to reinvest in major transit infrastructure. Most of what Matt Yglesias is talking about deals with urban transit. That is certainly an area that needs work, but in small town and rural areas of the US, people who lose their driving privileges or simply can’t afford a car are almost wholly unable to find work outside of their immediate areas. A comprehensive transit system, including interurban transport, whether bus or train, would allow people to go to where the jobs are, instead of being stuck in dead-end jobs and on government assistance. The US had a system like this, but we dismantled it as the age of the automobile got its start. But now, as oil prices are on the rise and unlikely to come back down, we need to start preparing for the end of that age. Automobiles would never have come to dominate as much as they have if the government hadn’t made a decision to invest heavily in the infrastructure they require – well paved roads, major highways connecting urban centers. We need to make the same kind of investment in other forms of transit.