All Politics (and Food and Education and More) is Local

At a time when advances in technology have brought the world closer together, people with an eye for the future are becoming less global and more local in their outlook. New York is no exception.

One of the most noticeable is with the food we eat. Technological advances in agriculture allow farmers to grow food that won’t spoil as fast and can survive in more extreme climates, and suit the tastes of Americans. We can get fresh fruit all year round that can be shipped to us from tropical climates.

While advances in technology were great, the abuses of that technology in the interest of profit margin have corrupted the purpose of agriculture: to bring healthy food to people. Warnings about pesticides, genetically modified food and serious questions about general food safety have caused people to turn to local food sources. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms that provide food to its local member customers are increasing in popularity. And a new identity has been embraced: “Locavores,” are dedicated to eating all of their food from within their local area (local area generally being defined as within100 miles; I know of no one brave enough to eat a tomato grown in Greenpoint’s natural soil).

While “locavores” have possibly discovered a way to be more obnoxious in restaurants that even surpasses the most grating vegan or vegetarian, they are on the right track. The future will be more localized.

The institutions that were supposed to create a more globally efficient and harmonious world failed miserably at both. People have lost confidence in large multi-national institutions and are looking for ways to do things on their own. We see it starting to happen with food, education and politics right now.

Over the next several years home schooling will not just be for religious fundamentalists anymore. We will begin to see home schooling start to take shape among secular and even liberal-minded people who otherwise would have sent their children to public schools. Public schools in many cities will become more dysfunctional. New York City is somewhat of an exception here because there is a multi-tiered school system where a handful of very competitive high schools continue to draw great students and do a great job teaching them. This doesn’t mean

New York is also ahead of the curve in that charter schools are going to take over more and more from public schools. Public schools have become too bloated a bureaucracy to survive in these continuing austere times. New York can afford the schools better than many places and we can’t really afford it right now.

One big sign for me of the increasing failure of centralized institutions was the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Here we had a government engaged in two overseas wars and fretting over Iraq’s border security while one of our major American cities drowned. The federal government (with the exception of the Coast Guard) was useless during Hurricane Katrina, but thousands of volunteers loaded up U-Hauls and pick up trucks with water and medical supplies and headed for the stricken Gulf Coast, and hundreds of local police and fire departments from around the country sent help.

More and more, the U.S. government appears to be a crumbling empire unable to secure its own borders or serve its own citizens. Just as the Roman Empire devolved into a series of feuding Italian city-states, it’s possible to see a United States fragmented along ethnic, religious and political lines. People are more likely to live in areas that are politically hegemonic; recent studies have showed electoral districts being won by larger and larger margins. Several states have nascent secessionist movements that come from both sides of the political spectrum. Increased cultural diversity creates more insular behavior, even between people within the same cultural or ethnic groups.

Here in New York City, while our stronger local government has insulated us from some of the worst of the federal government’s dysfunction, the can-do spirit of New Yorkers is already hard at work looking for local solutions to our problems.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Bullets

Earlier this week, President Obama said he would not release photos showing Osama bin Laden’s dead body. The President should know: The First Amendment does not negotiate with terrorists.

Obama deserves all the credit coming to him for Bin Laden’s killing (anyone trying to give credit to George W. Bush should stop now and save themselves the embarrassment), but he is not the nation’s censor or moral scold.

The things our government does with our tax dollars are, except in cases of national security, public information. Obama doesn’t have a choice in the matter; no president does. The Freedom of Information Act ensures that we can all admire the bloody sight of bin Laden’s bullet-marked face. Democracies can’t survive when leaders get to decide what the public gets to see about what they do.

Furthermore, the rationale behind not releasing the bin Laden photos is somewhat absurd. The President claims that doing so would harm our interests in the Arab world and among Muslims because it would inflame Arab and Muslim sensibilities. The larger and more substantial policies that have angered Arabs and Muslims for decades—interfering in Muslim countries, giving carte blanch to Israel—will continue unabated, but we’re supposed to pat ourselves on the back because of how sensitive we are to their sensibilities because we’re not publishing a grisly photo of bin Laden.

If the President’s portrayal of the larger Muslim world is to be believed, then bin Laden was rightfully so reviled that showing photos of his corpse should not offend anyone. Fanatics who would be offended by publishing these photos are going to hate us anyway, so why should be bother trying to appease them?

There is no shame in relishing the death of an enemy like bin Laden. He slaughtered thousands of innocent people under the delusion that he was doing holy work. Our obligation to his memory ended when he left the realm of decency and humanity.

A Better Way to Spend the Fifth of May

Cinco de Mayo is the Mexican St. Patrick’s Day, which means that it’s an excuse for people of all cultures to get drunk. Cinco de Mayo actually celebrates the Mexican defeat of the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1862 and is not as widely celebrated in Mexico the way it is in the United States.

But the fifth of May is the anniversary of Bobby Sands' death. Bobby Sands, an I.R.A. member imprisoned in the North of Ireland, died on hunger strike in 1981. People all over the world were outraged that Sands, who had been elected to the British Parliament, was allowed to die. He and his fellow prisoners weren’t asking to be set free, only to be treated as the Geneva Conventions mandate they should be.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, an article about current Irish dissidents (Irish splinter groups that don’t support the 1998 peace treaty) claims that support for Irish republican groups diminished because of the September 11 attacks. This is complete nonsense. The Good Friday agreement was signed in 1998, which is when the I.R.A. began surrendering its weapons; its armed campaign was well over before the September 11 attacks.

Comparing the Irish Republican Army to Al Qaeda is grossly ignorant and extremely offensive. Bobby Sands and his fellow prisoners fought for their country, both with weapons and without. They were Irish nationalists with a leftist political outlook, not bloodthirsty religious lunatics.

Sands’ sacrifice cleared the way for the peace that arrived 17 years after his death. He showed the Irish republican movement that they could be successful at electoral politics. Their cause was just, but people were tired of violence. The use of the ballot box instead of the gun by Bobby Sands deserves to be remembered.

How to Celebrate Osama Bin Laden’s Death

Tonight I am living large and smoking a celebratory cigar to the welcome news of the death of Osama Bin Laden. He killed thousands of innocent people and brought death and destruction to my city and country. He had nothing positive to offer the world and embodied ignorant and blind obedience to a twisted ideology. I hope he was killed with bullets dipped in pig’s blood and that families of September 11 victims get the chance to piss on his corpse.

We should thoroughly enjoy this moment and savor this outstanding event. But it would be a shame if we think that our work is totally done. After we get done congratulating the good people who ended Bin Laden’s sorry life, let’s make sure we do the following:

1. Remain vigilant. Al Qaeda and its imitators will be looking to avenge Bin Laden’s death. There are also many other fundamentalist groups all over the world that remain as committed as every to the sick causes of Al Qaeda. We need to get them too, whether they’re in Kabul or Kalamazoo.

2. Not create another Bin Laden. We funded Islamic extremists in Afghanistan because they were against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Soviet communism was bad, but communism is a dream compared with the kind of world Islamic fundamentalists want to create. Bin Laden’s kind were wacky fundamentalists when we supported them. We’ll make the same mistake again if we support people just because they are against the Middle East’s dictators we can no longer afford to prop up.

3. Stick with the tactics that work. We could have killed Bin Laden sooner if we had used the tactics we eventually used to kill him. It was a small group of special operations soldiers that got the job done. The large-scale invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq hurt rather than helped our fight against Al Qaeda. It’s going to be intelligence-driven, small-scale operations that will find and kill more Islamic terrorists.

4. Stop treating Islam with kid gloves. The overwhelming majority of Muslims are decent people and not terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. But violent fundamentalism plays a larger role in Islam than it does in other religions. And if Islam is ever going to evolve it has to learn to take its lumps like other religions.

5. Make sensible immigration reforms. Don’t think that terrorists can get into the U.S. again? Think again. We do not have enough safeguards to keep Islamic terrorists out of the country, especially from Europe. Make sure people coming into this country are not terrorists before we let them in. If that means we issue many fewer visas as a result and make lots of people angry, so be it. Let the world call us racists. I’d rather be a living “racist” than a politically correct corpse.