Category: Issue 3

As we approach the holiday season, I wanted to reach out and thank you for your contributions and responses to TIGERs GPS.  In a world seemingly increasingly polarized and more complex, it is important to create a space for us all to have open and civil dialogue with each other.  One of the things to reflect on in this space is the word “public” in our degree program.

Public comes from the Latin word “publicus” which means “of the people; of the state; done for the state; common,” and from the Old Latin “poplicus,” meaning “pertaining to the people.”  These words historically and today remind me that we are all really in this together. We do not have to agree and we can even strongly disagree, but if we respect each other and value the communities we create for each other, we can find a way forward.

As I reflect on the Holiday season and my own gratitude, I am grateful for the good fortune we have and for all of you who make it possible. I am especially grateful for the hard work that you all do in making our communities stronger – because we are all in this together! Cheers!

Happy Holidays! Dr. Lori Dickes

I don’t remember a time before war. On September 11^th, 2001, I was only in third grade and the events of that day shaped the world I grew up in. I don’t remember a time we weren’t sending troops to the Middle East; I had never flown on a plane before the implementation of the Transportation Security Administration. Fear has been the reigning emotion driving our political climate my entire life. There is no doubt this is a tumultuous time for our nation, but for me, this is how it has always been.

In the most recent election, we saw campaigners use fear-mongering, mud-slinging tactics to slam their opponent; but these methods are not new or unique. In the 1964 election, LBJ used this approach in the “Daisy” commercial, combining video of an innocent child with images of billowing mushroom clouds, insinuating that his opponent’s election would lead to nuclear warfare and the destruction of America’s children. Playing on the most relevant uncertainties of the time, this tactic leaves people grasping for a shred of security.

News media generates additional uncertainty, holding a magnifying glass over events that invoke anxiety. A twenty-four hour news cycle becomes an object of entertainment instead of information, and while most news agencies try to put a brief focus on heartwarming stories, media glosses over the mediocrity of our everyday lives, highlighting only the extremes. It leaves us feeling the constant pressure of insecurity.

These systems fail to consider that for the average American, life continues to move on. We still live and work peacefully with people we don’t agree with on a daily basis, often without a second thought. Thinking back to the events in Charlottesville in August 2017, we saw American people loudly proclaiming they would not put up with such intolerance. Over and over we see that hate and disaster is often followed by community; a sense that we must pick ourselves up, dust each other off, and keep going.

This is not to say I’m not appalled by the hateful, damaging new policies our current president is working to put in place, but I have to believe in the resiliency of the American people. I grew up drowning in a culture of constant fear, but every day we kept going. Our ability to continue muddling through everyday life gives me hope. And while the future of our nation is uncertain, we have been here before. And we have overcome.

With the Harvey Weinstein / Hollywood sexual assault stories in the news lately, I’ve found myself thinking on the perils of the language we use to frame important topics. Publications on instances of rape, assault, and harassment tend to be phrased passively, like the headlines “1 in 4 Women Experience Sex Assault on Campus” from the New York Times (9/21/2015 by Pérez-Peña, or “Every Woman I Know Has Experienced Sexual Harassment or Sexual Assault #MeToo” from The Huffington Post (10/17/2017 by Adcock). We say, “X was raped,” as opposed to “Y raped X,” as if sexual crimes are a phenomenon experienced only by the victim – as if they did not have a perpetrator. We talk about sexual harassment in the work place like it is an unfortunate, and preventable, thing that just happens – not like it’s being actively committed by our coworkers. And we treat those arguments which dismiss harassment and assault – the violation and degradation of another human being – as misguided, but valid viewpoints, rather than as morally repugnant.

We seem to think that our words carry no weight in the world. Yet we’re living in a society where the federal government imposes mandatory minimum sentencing on drug trafficking crimes, but not for rape; where a full 16% of convicted rapists in the U.S. do not serve any time in jail, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Paquette, 2016; Schuppe, 2017). While our Secretary of Education doesn’t find Title IX sexual assault investigation guidelines too important to drag into a war of politics, our politicians are regularly caught victim-blaming and dismissing sexual violence concerns with misinformation (Andrews, 2016; Bailey, 2017; Morris, 2017). Only 44% of Americans agreed that, had Donald Trump been proven guilty of sexual assault, he should have been disqualified from holding the highest office in the nation (Moore, 2016). Obviously, we don’t take sexual crime very seriously.

I’m not making the ridiculous argument that words have gotten us to where we are. I do believe, however, that our thinking is to blame. A culture dismissive of sexual crime is one built out of the objectification and oppression of women, one whose ugly underside reveals an existing systemic problem with the success of women often being dependent on their appearance and fear of the men in power. And government social policy is only a reflection of the beliefs the society it represents. Studies show that words and moods infect others similar to how a virus works (Barsade & Gibson, 2007; Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock 2014). Perhaps if we made an effort to change the way we speak about sexual crimes, we might begin to change the way our society views them, and ultimately, the way our institutions and officials behave when faced with them.

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” -Bobby Kennedy.

References

Andrews, B. (2016, February 29). There are still politicians who think you can’t get pregnant from rape. Mother Jones. 

Bailey, C. (2017, June 10). Indiana state rep. apologizes for ‘how not to be a victim’ of rape post. NBC News. 

Barsade, S., and Gibson, D. (2007). Why does affect matter in organizations? Academy of Management Perspectives, 21, 36-59.

Kramer, A., Guillory, J., and Hancock, J. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings from the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 111, 8788-8790.

Moore, P. (2016, October 18). Most Republicans don’t think sexual assault would disqualify Trump from the presidency. YouGov. 

Morris, A. (2017, May 9). N. H. rep Robert Fisher lambasted by women at hearing about his role in misogynistic online forum. Concord Monitor. 

Paquette, D. (2016, June 6). What makes the Stanford sex offender’s six month jail sentence so unusual. Washington Post. 

Schuppe, J. (2017, May 13). Attorney General Sessions charts course back to long drug sentences. NBS News.

Since the new administration has begun its time in leadership, we have beheld the eruption of social justice issues, a resurgence of communities of hate, and further divide created amongst Americans. I, like so many others, took to the leadership to find direction, and I find it perplexing that we have arrived at a place where the majority of our communication from our President comes from Twitter, especially since eight short years ago, citizens were up in arms at the then President Elect Obama wishing to retain his BlackBerry Smartphone for use while in office. I believe we have seen a large shift in public sentiment, where the esteem of the highest position in the country can be judged in 160 characters. But are we in a moment in time where we, for the first time in history, know the fleeting thoughts of our Commander in Chief? It could be argued that while it is against the status quo, candid sentiments could be seen by citizens and that this is the most transparent it’s ever been.

We operate in a society where we thrive on facts, finding fault in facts and basing large decisions on “alternate facts.” Facts should have a standard, and while opinions can be different from one another, there has to be a baseline, a general level of “truth.” To me, the hardest thing to accept is that facts can actually have no standard and the question of “where do you get your news?” is less of an actual question and much more a statement of judgment. How much transparency is “too much” transparency? Does the left hand really not know what the right hand is doing? Is the use of Twitter, as a means to address the public, too loose? Where should the line be drawn? I find myself appreciating the fact that the status quo of a seemingly “old” way of governing is being shaken up and changed, thus making it more approachable. A new, more modernized version of presidential communication is being ushered in, but I do not think that excuses the insults, attacks on the press, and the general disregard for our international allies. To me, it is too far: it is no longer transparency, it’s showboating.

Is the cost of this level of transparency further loss of public trust? Are certain constitutional rights more important than others? Is the right to a free press less important than the right to bear arms? From where I am sitting, only time will tell.