Thoughts on Thanksgiving morning

When Satadal and I were riding to dinner in the auto-rickshaw through Chennai last Saturday evening, I could feel the blue prickling in my fingers of oxygen deprivation coming on. We had been swimming through the sea of exhaust since entering the city. I wished that I'd had my handkerchief to cover my nose and mouth as a few of the cyclists and motor bikers do. The auto-rickshaws run on two-stroke engines and the busses have old diesel engines, both of which are noxious polluters, especially when inadequately maintained. America may have lax emissions standards for our autos compared to the rest of the world, but we sure as hell enforce them better in Washington than they do in Tamil Nadu. It is easier to breathe riding a bike hard through rush hour traffic in Seattle than taking a working class taxi ride through the streets of that city at any hour of the day. On the other hand, riding through South Mumbai, where the auto-rickshaws are not allowed and the busses and taxis run on CNG is lots better than Chennai and at times comparable to Seattle. I hope that this small pocket continues to grow.

While we navigated the streets, dodging potholes that had become small lakes and oncoming vehicles that turned on their headlights at the last second, I looked through the haze and imagined a glimpse of my Utopia (not sure I like that word - nonexistent place). In this world, these fume spewing beasts are replaced with modes of conveyance of a more human powered sort. Pedal rickshaws exist now, but are few and far between. And the demons of social and economic hierarchy do their best to keep the bicycle relegated to those who cannot afford an engine other than themselves. But in my mind's eye, I could see this world, where the ringing of bells, snippets of passing conversations, and the chirping of the frogs that becomes overwhelming as soon as one steps off of a busy street replaced the revving of out of tune engines and the unstopping honking of horns. Passengers of neighboring rides discussed the evening's plans, politics, and the latest Bollywood movie. Pedalers jockeyed with each other just as the drivers do, but in my fantasy thay are testing their legs instead of an overheating block of metal. And Instead of zipping around in the latest tricked out Hundayi, trendy young Indians cruised about on Campy and Dura-Ace, or better yet, Hero Cycles' answer to the high end market. Best of all, I could breathe.

Of course, this idea is ridiculous to most people. Nobody would be willing give up sitting in an effortlessly air conditioned moving box, or even a much less protected seat on the back of a motor trike in favor of riding to dinner on a bicycle or being hauled to the theatre in a pedal powered trike. Certainly not enough people to make the honking stop.

So, I thought, what would it take? First off, not everyone, in fact, not most people are going to be willing or able to pedal themselves all the time. Especially in the heat or heavy monsoon. So there would have to be a huge pool of rickshaw pedalers. And how could this possibly exist without pushing a struggling society back towards Feudalism? One partial answer that came to mind is really quite simple, and would generally promote equality rather than stifle it.

What about compulsory service? Many countries are hesitant to give up their systems of universal conscription, and are instead phasing in alternative service options. Suppose that instead of being drafted into the military for a year, every 18 year old had several options, and suppose that one of them was pedaling a municipally subsidized rickshaw around the city. The work would be incredibly hard, but it would not be so viewed as the demeaning task that it currently is, and the fact of its impermanence would make it much easier. Who knows, some people might even like it.

After the reception that the first part of my idea got from Satadal and Munish at the bar, I didn't bother with the rest that night. When I brought up ditching internal combustion for human power, it moved us on to the topic of the reluctance of India's middle class to take jobs in the service sector. Satadal claimed that if the economic obstacles were overcome, that he would not refuse to take a job as a dishwasher. But over breakfast this morning I posed a similar question to some of my friends here. They agreed that the social pressures to see education almost exclusively as a means to a career and not as development of the self were intense. I asked whether my friends could change paths if they found that they were tired of math in 10 years, supposing that the economic disparity between doing what they wanted to do instead and staying put were removed. They shook their heads slowly. Once again, I include the caveat that the people who I am surrounded by are far from being average. I get similar responses when I talk to people in PhD programs at top tier departments in the US. But there, the reluctance to leave that is expressed tends to be more personal, and not less social.

So then I checked my email after breakfast this morning, and found a forward from my mom of an article in the PI that makes reference to another social upheaval. It turns out that Donald Rumsfeld owns a piece of farmland in Maryland containing a hill that earned the name Mount Misery, where Frederick Douglass and many others were once tortured. Perhaps a place can hold a curse. The article finished with a quote from Douglass.

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

I took a look at what other news the PI had to talk about, and was surprised by the luck that dropped me on this article, not twenty minutes after describing my idea downstairs. The subject of the article is the increase in power that will come to Congressman McDermott, reviled by some as "Baghdad Jim" for vocally standing up to Bush and daring to suggest that his reasons for going to war might not be totally honest. But, come 2007, he will be a senior member of the party in power, with a ranking position on the Ways and Means committee. And some of the legislation he might be proposing? One year of universally obligatory public service. In the twenty years of no draft, he maintains, our citizens have lost a great degree of any sense of obligation to contribute to the greater good of society. He suggests that if service were broadened to include things such things as working at a national park or in health care, that this would turn the social evil of military conscription into a social good.

My father graduated from college in 1966. One advantage of continuing on to law school was the deferment. But then when that was done, the war was still going on. Doing legal aid for natives on the Navajo reservation, on US Territories in the Pacific, and in the wilds of Alaska earned him enough of a reprieve that he managed to not end up going over to Southeast Asia and ending up in a very different world. Perhaps he would have taken the same path anyway, but perhaps not. In any case, he found his own alternative option, and was smart enough to make it work. The contacts that he made professionally in those years are still the most important professional contacts in his career, and have led to a lot of good being done at pretty much all levels of our legal system. (Though he did just get snubbed by the Supreme Court, I'd say that's a snubbery to be proud of.)

What if McDermott's ideas became law? What if we didn't require a war and the creativity of someone determined to not fight in it to get people into adventures like my father's that they wouldn't have otherwise? And what if it also served to bring more social and economic equality to the pool from which we draw our current "all volunteer" military?

In fact, what if this didn't just happen once in a life, but every twenty years or so? I could be quite happy to take a year at the end of another decade to go and spend every other weekend heading a crew of 18-year-olds maintaining trails and removing invasive species from the mountains. I'll probably do something of the sort anyway, but I think it would be a better place if we all did. It is all a matter of what choices we are presented with.

Just some thoughts. But remember, Jim once took to the campaign trail on a bike.

Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the day.