Blog Archive » 2007 » October

Been to Vegas just once, still get a headache when I remember walking through the vast blinking/clinking/hyper acreage of the gaming floors at Bellagio and Caesar's palace. I have no idea what those people were doing at the green-covered tables with a blank-faced dealer shuffling cards, but they looked profoundly unhappy. That was nothing compared to the naked desperation on the faces of the people pumping their quarters into the slot machines. My friends begged me to try it. I demurred, but later at the airport, when a long delay was announced, I gave in to the one-armed bandits. $5 worth of quarters, gone in an instant. In just a few minutes, I had a small taste of the insanity of slots.

With poker and blackjack and those other games, there's strategy, shifty eyes, sleight of hand. With lotteries, there's a sense of a giant community carnival, take a chance, win a prize. But with slots, you're all alone — almost. You, your quarters, the big machines. Mostly the machines, rigged to relieve you of your small life's savings. You may think it's fair. It's not. You can't beat the machine — don't believe those occasional stories of those who do… they're just good advertising to make you think you can.

Why am I thinking about slots? Well, it seems that the State of Maryland is about to put the question up for the voters to decide — should we allow slots in designated locations around the state? I've heard this pitch for years: the revenue from slot machines can help fund the schools, otherwise, our massive state deficit will rob the students of their books and teachers and functional buildings and great universities in the future.

It's Halloween season. Time for politicians to put on their scariest faces to make us do things we might otherwise not.

Slots for Students? I don't think so. Somehow, I don't picture many parents from Bethesda or Chevy Chase furtively heading over to the local casino to pour money into a slot machine in hopes of sprucing-up the computer lab at Walt Whitman or Blair. They'll vote with their purses, literally, and send the kids to private schools if the publics don't keep up with their very high expectations. Similarly, when in the crunch, I can't imagine the Governor or Maryland State Legislature doing any real harm to the crown jewels at the University of Maryland at College Park, which is now heavily dependent on private funding anyway.

So, who benefits from slots for students? Probably not the students who are in those neighborhoods where the schools are most in need of the revenue. More worrisome, since gambling often appeals to those who can least afford to throw money away, the ready availability of slots is most likely to hurt working class and low income families.

Maryland is the wealthiest state in the nation with many communities of shocking need. We can recognize this same situation in the District of Columbia, where ultra-wealthy, powerful and well-educated communities to the northwest can see, on a clear day, the heights of land to the south and east where some of the grimmest poverty and illiteracy in the nation remain entrenched.

State lotteries are now a fact of life, and they were supposed to provide the income to supplement other "sin" taxes — liquor and cigarettes. Some people contend that the drive for slots in Maryland is really an effort to revive the venerable horse racing industry, but I don't know about that. Others say that business favors slots because that move will stave-off any thought of raising taxes on corporate enterprises, or even personal income taxes. I don't know all the details of that argument, either.

What I do know is that a good society takes care of its needs, particularly the education of its children — and their health care — without resorting to questionable tactics like slot machines, or worse, leading people to believe that if they don't accept slots, education will suffer. We have an obligation as a civil society to get our priorities straight. Nationally, we have an almost-unimaginable situation in which the nation is spending several billion dollars a month on a war nobody wants while at home our domestic priorities like health care wither in the crossfire on Pennsylvania Avenue. Locally, we need the citizens of our states to stand up and demand that our governors and state legislators act with a clear sense of moral priorities, in favor of children and families, resisting the urge to do what is expedient to win powerful friends whose interests are different and more self-interested.

The scenes from the southern California hillsides are apocalyptic — wildfires devouring thousands of acres of brush, forests, homes and communities. Whipped by the Santa Ana winds, sometimes with hurricane force, the flames defy any effort at human control.

My first thoughts are for our alumnae and friends in California. So many alumnae have welcomed me into their homes in those beautiful hills, I hope all are safe. I welcome any news from our alumnae in the area, please send me a message at president@trinitydc.edu or give me a call to let us know how you are faring in this crisis.

I am also thinking of friends at the many wonderful colleges and universities in that area — Mount St. Mary's and Scripps College and Pepperdine University and the University of San Diego and all of the California state institutions. I hope their campuses and communities are safe.

Theories abound about the reasons for this tragedy, as with all modern weather tragedies — global warming, overdevelopment of hillsides, human interference with nature's rhythms. Around the country, other signs of environmental destabilization make everyone anxious: a too-warm autumn in the east, with drought conditions even here in Washington; a water crisis of increasingly great severity in the south; in New Orleans, too much water again; and all year the midwest has suffered floods in the farmlands.

Whatever the cause, the conditions remind us that in spite of our privilege of living in the most advanced civilization the world has ever known, we live on the edge of nature, and often at its mercy. We should remember that whenever we are tempted to disregard the balance and rhythms of nature; as the ashes of multi-million dollar homes on Malibu hillsides sadly remind us, no amount of money or human achievement or technological wizardry can stop the natural forces of fire, wind, water and movements of the earth itself.

See CNN coverage, wildfires, malibu

We can only hope that this year's award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change will have the effect of sparking an epiphany moment among the countless policymakers and business executives who still think that global climate change is some kind of left-wingnut fantasy. Civilization's greatest long-range challenge is the potential for dramatic social and political destabilization resulting from dramatic shifts in climate and weather patterns and their impact on agriculture, industry, international migration and the competition for increasingly scarce natural resources. The Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee stated on its website, "Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds. Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."

Unfortunately, the United States has lagged other nations in exerting environmental leadership. But with a large and varied land mass and vast population, with massive agricultural interests as well as insatiable demands for energy, the U.S. itself has significant exposure to the consequences of global climate change. Candidates for the presidential election in 2008 would do well to pay less attention to narrow interests and focus more on the long-term consequences for peace and prosperity if this planet continues to deteriorate.

More on the "green business" movement in my next several blogs.

See Thomas Friedman's column in Sunday's New York Times

See Washington Post coverage of the Nobel Peace Prize

See al gore

The story is almost impossible to read, yet utterly compelling and urgent.

In Sunday's New York Times (October 7), the front page carried a horrific, unfathomable report of the systematic, brutal and protracted campaign of devastating sexual assaults on women and girls in Congo. The description of the terrible crimes is sickening, but the purpose of these gross assaults is clear. As one doctor said in the article:

"We don't know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear," said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo's rape epidemic. "They are done to destroy women."

Just a little over a week ago, I sat with presidents of other women's colleges in the United States and some from other countries and we talked about how we can bring the power of our unique educational missions to the women of the world. Here in the U.S., while we who are devoted to women's advancement know full well that women and girls still suffer much discrimination and violence domestically, too often we become complacent about the small advances we have made at home, forgetting that millions of women around the world struggle to survive each day. We forget that two-thirds of the world's nearly-one-billion illiterate citizens are women, that the majority of the 65 million+ children who are not in school are girls. In some elite circles, it's become fashionable to scoff at the idea of women's drive for equality, as bogus claims are made that women have "made it."

Women are being destroyed emotionally, spiritually and physically each day in countless forgotten corners of the world, and even here in D.C. We cannot let the successes of our current generation of more privileged women — success stories which are considerable — obscure the even more urgent need to lift as we climb. The world's women need the power of the women who have received the privilege of education at some of the best colleges and universities — our women's colleges. That's what we presidents talked about last week, and will continue to focus on in the years to come.

What can we do about the suffering of women, children and families in Congo, Darfur, Rwanda and so many other places of destruction? The Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur have particularly active ministries in African nations, including Congo. Read more about their work here.
In the months ahead we will revisit some of the themes we explored in 2004 when we celebrated the 200th Anniversary of the SNDs with a symposium focused on Women's Global Education. We had many good ideas then, the time has come to put ideas into action.

Please share your comments with me by sending an email to president@trinitydc.edu or click on the envelope icon below.

See "Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War"

Say, "Sports scandal" and most of us probably think of men behaving badly.

Well, think again. In our new era of women's sports equality (sort of), we now have a tragic morality tale of how a great female athlete can also fall far from grace.

Marion Jones was revered one of the greatest female athletes of this generation, supposedly achieving a record five Olympic medals on her own merits. This past week, sadly, we learned she had a little help — she pled guilty to lying about her long-suspected use of steroids to enhance her performance. She has already returned her Olympic medals, and been banned for two years from competition, but far worse, she faces probable prison time for perjury.

Sometimes, students at Trinity wonder why we are so adamant about the Honor Code. Well, consider Marion Jones, now the latest sad example of the consequences of lying and cheating. Instead of retiring to years of fame after a glorious career, she is flat broke, headed to prison, and unlikely to work again in sports — all because she lied about whether she cheated, a double-whammy of broken honor.

Marion Jones presents a genuine American tragedy. She is not the first or only athlete to have fallen for the lure of performance-enhancing drugs. If any good can be found in her story, at least she has finally told the truth, and has apologized in unvarnished terms to her fans and family.

We're still waiting for some well known male athletes to come clean on these issues. Perhaps they can take a lesson from Marion Jones.

See Sally Jenkins' column in the Washington Post

See George Vecsey's column in the New York Times