A Teachable Moment

Went to the Newseum today in downtown DC with my 16-year-old daughter, where we saw a short film on the media and the civil rights movement. At the end of it I said to her, "Just about every single person in that movie who made history, good or bad, from the President on down to the cops and the reporters and the students staging those sit-ins, were Southerners. Now do you see why I still think the South is so important?"

And she said, "Yes."

History is Interested in Us

We are products of our history whether we know it or not.

That's become my mantra after spending years researching the South, where I grew up. The latest evidence of this is a study published today in the New York Times,  which paints a stark geographical portrait of where in this country it is the hardest for a child born in poverty to better his economic condition. 

Guess where it's the hardest? Yup: the Deep South, which is to say a band of counties starting in southeast Arkansas and west Tennessee and curving down and then up again through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South and North Carolina and extreme southeast Virginia. The worst city? Atlanta. 

The reasons for this are undoubtedly complex, but it is not particularly linked to present-day racial factors: researchers noted that the climb out of poverty was just as hard for white children as for children of any other ethnic group. Geographic and demographic factors do play a role, though:

In Atlanta, the most common lament seems to be precisely that concentrated poverty, extensive traffic and a weak public-transit system make it difficult to get to the job opportunities. "When poor communities are segregated," said Cindia Cameron, an organizer for 9 to 5, a women’s rights group, “everything about life is harder.”

And that's where history comes in. Even though its neighborhoods remain, on average, more racially integrated than most American cities, Atlanta still bears the broad imprint of decades of residential segregation: poor minorities live south of I-20, affluent whites north. The fact that Atlanta is crippled today by a lack of rapid rail is directly traceable to the decision in the 1970s by residents of Cobb and Gwinnett counties to opt out of MARTA, because so many affluent white folks in those counties feared more mobility would mean an influx of poor black people into their neighborhoods. (It would have, too, and in the long run everybody would have benefitted.) And finally, the symbiotic link between public officials and private developers--by no means an exclusively Southern phenomenon, but one that flourished in the South's conservative anti-union, pro-business climate--has mean decades of suburban sprawl: more houses, more roads, more traffic, very little regional planning. 

To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, we may not be interested in history, but history is interested in us. 

Life After Air Conditioning

As I type, I am sitting in my air conditioned office and it is a torrid 90 degrees outside. These days it's hard to imagine life without AC, and those times when storms have knocked out the power have made it abundantly clear how much of a necessity it's become. And yet I grew up--in the Deep South, no less--without air conditioning, and managed to survive without even feeling particularly deprived. How did we get from there to here? By making incremental changes in residential architecture and urban design, none of which have made for a healthier planet. Here's one case where the rural South of 50 years ago could show the rest of the world how to live in a post-industrial future. How did they do it?They used:

• Trees. Not those puny little things developers set up on the front lawn after they have denuded the landscape to build another housing tract, but actual trees--the kind that may be older than the inhabitants of the houses they shade. Your basic oak or maple or tulip poplar or whatever is a complex ecosystem that takes in greenhouse gases and turns it into oxygen, while sheltering human beings from heat and preventing soil erosion, providing a home for birds, insects and other wildlife, not to mention the occasional treehouse. Trees are amazing. And yet: the managers at my gym recently cut down a 50-year-old tree because one of the members complained it was dripping sap on his car. There are times when I despair, and start to consider the possibility that human beings deserve extinction.
• Hassock fans. They were round, built like something you'd rest your feet on, and they moved air in all directions around the room at a level where you could actually feel it. Ceiling fans rarely work that well, especially when they are placed 15 feet overhead in a cathedral-style ceilinged living room, where they serve mere decoration. It goes without saying that we did not have skylights, since the whole point was to keep the summer sun out of the house, for pete's sake. (I saw a house the other day with a front porch where somebody had put skylights in the porch roof. Talk about being unclear on the concept.)
• Iced tea.
• Cross ventilation. The "dog trot" style of architecture, where there's a central hallway that moves air from front to back, worked with nature to move the air around. We have replaced this with house layouts with more angles than a pinball machine, one HVAC unit per floor and (often) a humongous generator out back for when the grid goes down. Which it will.
• Sleeping porches. Even in a sultry climate, the night air is usually cool, and there is something mesmerizing about dozing off looking at the stars and judging the passing of the hours by their movement if you wake up in the middle of the night. The cicadas and tree frogs will sing you to sleep, if the hum of the hassock fan doesn't do it first. It beats the frigid woosh of central air conditioning by a mile. 
• Porches, period. The demise of the front porch is one of the major tragedies of late 20th century residential architecture. Front porches invite people out of their house toward the street, where they can watch the neighbors and the neighbors can watch them, where they can converse with each other or gossip about each other as they see fit, where they can simply sit and contemplate the human comedy. They are cool places to sit and catch a breeze when the house is too hot to stand. They are good places to sit while shelling peas or stringing beans, chores that frequently involve long, meandering conversations of and great story-telling. Backyard decks say "we are all hanging out back here to get away from all you riffraff." Poches say, "Come on in and sit a spell." They create community. 

          All this we know, or at least used to know. When will home-builders get a clue? When, oh Lord?

Thank God for....New Mexico?

The South is still the epicenter of child poverty in the United States, but the old "thank God for Mississippi" saying we Southerners all know is no longer operative when it comes to overall child well-being, according to the annual Kids Count report issued by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. For the first time in the 24 years that the Casey Foundation has issued the report--which is avidly read by journalists, social scientists and policy makers around the country--New Mexico has replaced Mississippi as 50th in the ranks.

That's the good news. The bad news is that there still seems to be an inverse relationship between geographic latitude and child poverty rates--i.e., that the further South you go the more child poverty you will find. After Mississippi, Louisiana came in at 46, followed by South Carolina at 45, Alabama at 44, Georgia at 43, Arkansas at 40, Tennessee at 39, North Carolina at 35--and then Virginia, way up at 11. Texas (which is only partly a Southern state these days), Nevada and California don't come out looking so well, either, but for the most part, sadly, the South has got the child poverty thing covered.

The state with the lowest child poverty? It's them dern Yankees up in New Hampshire.

Fantasyland, Southern Style

If a map of rail lines in the United States is like a series of interconnected spider's webs, Atlanta sits like the spider in the middle of a the biggest one in the southeast--a well known fact ever since Sherman set his sights on the city. What's also well known is that outside of Atlanta, vast stretches of rural Georgia are essentially unconnected to Atlanta, or anywhere, except by car. Air service? Don't be silly. Greyhound stopped coming years ago, if it ever did. Many of these small towns have lovely old train stations, which have either been boarded up or pressed into use by some forlorn "civic restoration" committee. The trains that pass by those stations are not passenger trains; they're freight trains headed to some Home Depot or Wal Mart 50 or 100 miles away. If you live in, say, Hogansville or Barnesville, and you don't have a car, your employment options are limited to low-paid fast food or retail jobs. If you live in those places and you work in the Atlanta metro area, you will spend a fortune on gas and half your life behind the wheel.

I've traveled a lot in these areas over the years, and looking at the rail infrastructure that's already there--not to mention the lovely old housing stock many of these small towns can offer--I've wondered many times: what would it take to get passenger rail going again for rural Georgia? Imagine the economic benefits of being able to live in one of those beautiful 19th century homes and commute to work in Atlanta by rail. Repeat that story up and down the old Atlanta-West Point line, and think of the number of cars you could take off the roads. Think of the lifestyle you'd be able to afford. Think of the jobs that people who already live in Hogansville would have access to. Am I nuts for even thinking this would be a good thing?

Yes, and no, according to a an interesting piece in  The Daily Yonder, a blog run by Austin, Texas-based writer Bill Bishop. Reporter C. B. Hall describes the persistent fight it took for rural residents in Washington state to get Amtrak to provide passenger service to their small towns, which Amtrak's Empire Builder passenger trail had whizzed through for years without stopping. I figured there would be formidable obstacles to this kind of thing, but "formidable" doesn't begin to describe it, according to Hall:

• Amtrak is perennially strapped for cash and hasn't bought any new passenger cars for years; its passenger car budget is limited to replacing and repairing what it already has.
• The freight trains that use the existing rail infrastructure are legally required to let Amtrak share the rails, but there's no law that limits how much they can charge Amtrak for doing so. The exorbitant rates they charge Amtrak for use of the rails effectively keeps Amtrak out of the passenger rail service in rural areas. 
• For the same reason, Amtrak requires that the towns themselves pay for the cost of building a train station. Obviously, the towns I'm talking about, there's no building involved--the stations are already there, and in pretty decent shape--but there would be some considerable refurbishing and re-hab. And small towns in Georgia have even less money than Amtrak.

Here's the point where the current state of Southern politics poses the most insurmountable hurdle. If we were living in the days of FDR, angling to get a little federal largesse to jump-start a project like this would be a political no-brainer. Today, in the current "government is evil" climate, it's a political non-starter. A small-town mayor could get away with it; state-wide political figures can do it behind the scenes, as they always do. But get the region's leaders to go all-out for more federal money to re-establish a communal transportation infrastructure that makes all the sense in the world? Hell, no. They can hear their constituents right now. I ain't giving up my car so some dern tree-huggers can live out in the country, and I ain't payin' more taxes for it, neither. Yet the money is there: for starters, all we'd have to do is junk those seven F-22 bombers that Sen. Saxby Chambliss loves so much but that the Air Force has said over and over it doesn't want or need, and that's $1.75 billion right there. 

Yeah, right. When pigs roost in trees.

And so, Southern history repeats itself. In the days after the Civil War, there was federal money available to jump-start rail-building throughout the war-ravaged South. Business leaders knew that's what was needed, farmers knew it was needed--but regional animosity, political shenanigans and ingrained suspicion of the federal government made it all but impossible, except for a few miles here and there. The railroads were built, eventually, by private rail barons who made huge profits for themselves and spread it around, to the extent that they spread it around at all, only as far as the local politicians they needed to buy to maintain their monopolies.  We've advanced past that--today, we have public ownership of the railroads, an idea which was considered radical, even Socialist, back in the 1870s. As the Daily Yonder piece shows, a few rural towns have succeeded in restoring passenger service, in places like New England and Washington state. But in the South, getting public service out of our public rails still seems like a fantasy.