Posts Tagged ‘sociology’
Literally Highway Robbery: What Are You Going to Do About It?
Why getting corporate money out of politics is the only solution
Published 07/02/2012 by United Republic
There’s a world full of ways to generate wealth, and many of them do so by providing value. This can be a product or service. You offer something of value – your time, your skills, your knowledge, your money, or a possession. You get something you value in return.
Successful entrepreneurs create value that is widely considered worthwhile. There’s a symmetry in this exchange. In a free market, each participant in the transaction has the power to choose. Trade only happens when both parties agree the deal makes sense for them.
There’s another way to generate wealth — by gaining control of a resource, ideally monopoly control, then charging for access to it. The generic name for this approach is called rent-seeking.
For example, let’s say a major highway, built long ago with taxpayer’s money, is turned over to a private firm. The company begins charging a toll.
In this situation, a company gains monopoly control of a resource – a critical transportation route – and without creating new value, charges for access. The company might be responsible for repair and maintenance, but that work was already being done before with public funds. This is not a hypothetical scenario.
Many drivers will use this route because it’s the only practical path to work. They do not have a choice about paying the toll. They’ve been forced to rent access to their only means of getting to work. This form of rent-seeking is literally highway robbery. Notice the added cost adds value only in one direction – from the users to the owner.
Any time you are coerced into a rent-seeking relationship, you are owned. Your choices are narrowed or removed, you are fenced in and forced down a predefined path by the entity that controls the resource you need.
There are other resources subject to controlled access.
Money. Energy. Votes. Media. Health care. Privacy.
The Occupy movement made income inequity part of our national conversation and exposed our increasing dependence on rent-seeking instead of producing value. This activity doesn’t create value. It simply transfers wealth, from your pocket to someone else’s.
But you needn’t take my word for it. Perhaps analysis by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist would be persuasive?
So let’s see…how is your income subject to rent-seeking? Legislation to suppress wages is one way. Limiting representation in the workplace is another. Then there are banks – we all have to deal with them in our modern financial system – like it or not.
Do I need to recount the media consolidation that has concentrated our news sources in corporate hands?
Or how our democracy has been manipulated again, again, and again.
Privacy – do you have any?
Health insurance – does it bother you that the U.S. spends more than twice as much per capita for health care than nearly every other industrialized country, yet has one of the lowest life expectancies?
You might (rightly) argue there are other influences apart from rent-seeking that affect these issues – but there’s no question that we’re living in an era when rent-seeking is a growing tactic that funnels economic growth to small proportion of the populace.
Here’s the thing:
What are you going to do about it?
Seriously. What are you going to do about it?
If someone broke into your home, you’d take action – call the police or grab a weapon, or even run out the door, but you’d do something, particularly if you have a family to defend. What’s happening to you now may not seem quite as immediate as a break-in and robbery, but it’s real, and it’s just as damaging, if not more so. A burglar might knock off your stash of jewelry, but bankers taking Vegas-style risks can, and do, knock the value of your home down by 30 percent.
What are you going to do about it?
I can hear the refrain already – “What can I do about it? There are so many scams, so many big players. I’m just one person and there are armies of lobbyists. Where to start? What to do?”
Here’s what you do. Narrow your focus. There’s just one thing that must change before we can make headway with all the other issues:
CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM.
Until we get dirty money of out of politics, our efforts on other issues will be circumvented, ignored, and ridiculed.
Campaign finance reform. Roll back the Citizens United decision. Point people to United Republic’s site. Check out the blog roll of groups allied with United Republic. You’ll find multiple strategies for reform. Pick one that makes sense to you and run with it. Practice explaining why the issue of campaign finance reform trumps others with your family and friends. Team with others who get it.
Roll up your sleeves. Act. Or be owned. Your call.
The Bug in Human Behavior
We still think tribally. Team sports? Mostly small bands competing with other small bands, replaying competitions for prized territory. We do mock battles for fun.
Our ancestral hominids emerged as hunter-gatherers in competition with each other and other animal life. The biological imprint of that lifestyle still colors our behavior. We remained hunter-gatherers for over 200,000 years and it wasn’t urban living.
Population densities remained low until farming at scale began 10,000 years ago; the earliest cities formed soon afterward. We are fast adapting to crowded living, but old behavioral patterns persist.
The tribal boundaries we draw are familiar, based on geography, skin color, language, religion, self-identity, profession and — most powerfully — economic interests. These fluid boundaries can intersect and overlap, dissolve, merge and split, through manipulation, cooperation and force.
It’s amazing that we have functional (as distinct from sustainable) cities of 20+ million people. World population today is 54% urban. We are getting better at getting along. Our tribal tendencies are one part of our troubles, but they’re not the bug.
In the deep past, in those small hunter-gatherer groups of mostly family living in a world where hominids are not apex predators, being cast out from your tribe was a death sentence. That was the daily reality. This creates a powerful — arguably instinctual — incentive to stay on good terms with the tribe. It’s still a fundamental driver for human behavior today.
How much of what we do is guided by social convention? We are born immersed in our local culture; it strongly influences our behavior and thinking. We recognize other cultures think and act differently, but we remain focused on our own local customs.
Historically, when your tribe says you must believe something to remain in the tribe, then your own survival and self-preservation requires you to get with the program. That was literally true during the hunter-gatherer stage and remains socially true now. Our musical tastes, language, films, dances, art, all vary between cultures and generations and serve as unifiers, social glue. That’s a positive, right? A feature, not a bug?
Here’s the bug. If you have to deny reality to get along, most people will.
This is why the Emperor’s New Clothes story resonates. We see it happen in fads, in financial swings, rumors, churches.
Social fictions can unify populations and aid problem-solving. They can also divide and magnify problems. Whatever the value set is, when beliefs rooted in social fictions clash with reality, people feel tribal unity is threatened and react accordingly. This intense impulse runs deep.
These contractions of trust polarize by tribe. That warning you feel in your gut regarding current events is real; it’s conditioned by hundreds of thousands of years of tribal living…and warfare.
Let us not underestimate just how malleable people can be. Start with a large group who aren’t the brightest and not conspicuously successful, or a group that lacks access to good education, or has longtime simmering resentments due to suppression by race, religion, geography, etc.
Salt such groups with people who tell them they’re patriotic heroes and their tribe is endangered. Give them weapons and point them to another group. Tell them the fate of the tribe is in their hands.
They’ll do their best. Happens all the time.
Is there a way out? It’s hard to be certain in unique conditions. Given the pressure of climate change, we’d do better do it soon. Humanity could make a good start by discarding social fictions and update our understanding of who we really are. Then can we begin aligning sustainable values with reality.
Edit 2–4–18: Andrew Sullivan gets it. When Two Tribes Go to War
Mapping Behavior to Environment
About 1.5 million years ago, a large group of chimps were separated by a growing Congo river. The south side of the river had more abundant food sources than the north. The chimps on the abundant side are known today as bonobos, and they're very mellow. The women run things. They're neighborly, sharing territory with other bonobo groups. When tensions rise, they have sex instead of fighting. Chimps on the side with less abundance are known today as chimpanzees, and they're much more aggressive. They're very territorial, patrolling their borders in gangs, merciless in fighting, hierarchical and patriarchal. These behavior patterns map to their environments. In times and places of scarcity, competition is more intense. Strength and force become the rule, escalating violence. In abundance, a flat, cooperative society works fine. Violence within our communities is not our default. It's turbulence that emerges when people can't meet their needs. To maximize choice and minimize drama, work for community-wide abundance.
Profit-driven Prisons: Path to Prison Labor?
[One of series written for UnitedRepublic.org in 2012. Original article.]
Every year public companies must file what’s called a 10k report with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). This is a summary of the firm’s financial performance. There are stiff penalties for lying to the SEC, and investors aren’t too thrilled with less than the truth either.
These are powerful incentives for honest accounting, so you can accept 10k statements as reasonably credible accounts of what a firm really thinks.
Here’s what the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison management firm in America, had to say in its 10k about the risk to their profitability:
“A decrease in occupancy levels could cause a decrease in revenues and profitability.”
Well, duh.
Similarly, the Geo Group (formerly known as Wackenhut), the second-largest American prison management firm, reports in their 10k:
“…most of our revenues are generated under facility management contracts which provide for per diem payments based upon daily occupancy.”
Right away, we see a problem. The costs of prison management are borne by you and me, the taxpayers. We want this done effectively at reasonable cost with minimal overhead expense, like a non-profit organization.
Private prison management has a different goal – to make money. They provide a service, and expect to make a profit over and above their costs. Here’s a clear misalignment between the wishes of the taxpayers and the wishes of private business.
Profits can come from cutting costs or increasing income. Private firms can be expected to attempt both.
Cutting costs too steeply has consequences. Here are some of the cost-cutting techniques that private firms have implemented at prisons:
Lower Pay
In 2008, private prisons in Texas paid their corrections officers $24,000/yr – that works out to $12/hr – which was $2,000 less than the lowest salary earned by personnel doing the same work at public-run prisons. Result? A sky-high staff turnover rate of 90 percent. Imagine the chaos in your workplace if 90 percent of your co-workers left each year.
Weaker Security
The U.S. Department of Justice notes that public prisons average 5.6 inmates per officer, whereas private prisons average 7.1. A point and half difference might not seem like much at first glance, but remember some of the population we’re dealing with here has a history of violence and aggression. The lower ratio exists for a reason. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has observed, “the greater the inmate-to-staff ration, the higher the levels of serious violence among inmates.” If security becomes too lax, prisoners escape. It does happen.
Cherry-Picked Inmates
Some prisoners are more expensive than others. Some due to health care, some for behavioral management. Troublesome inmates tend to get transferred out to state facilities, so taxpayers pay twice – once for the inmate, and again to sustain the private firm’s profit margin.
The other strategy – increasing income – requires more inmates, creating a powerful incentive to generate high incarceration rates. That strategy is part of CCA’s proposal to buy and operate state prisons:
“An assurance by the agency partner that the agency has sufficient inmate population to maintain a minimum 90 percent occupancy rate over the term of the contract.”
Now think about that. It creates a contractual obligation to keep the prisons as full as possible. How would that obligation be fulfilled?
CCA already has some ideas. They’ve hired several lobbying firms to support legislation that will – surprise! – likely result in more inmates.
The current focus is on immigrants. After 9/11, the industry saw opportunity in the new anti-immigrant sentiment and spent millions in support of legislation that would increase detentions. Since 2002, CCA alone has spent more than $17 million to lobby Congress.
The Geo Group (formerly known as Wackenhut) saw the value of their contracts with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency expand from $33.6 million in 2005 to $163.8 million by the end of 2010.
In the most recent report available, “Prisoners in 2010”, the U.S. Department of Justice graphs the growth of federal and state inmate populations since 1990:
1990 was the first year that CCA contracted with the federal government to handle immigrant detainees.
Can you think of other areas for prison growth? Remember, the United States already has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and at this writing most prisons are still owned and operated by the public. What could happen to prison growth fueled by the profit motive and contractual obligations to keep prisons full?
Take that thought one step further. What if cheap labor became available in prisons? It’s already happening. The America Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) promoted, and the Department of Justice implemented the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP).
The lion’s share of income from the program pays for inmate’s room and board. An obvious strategy looms — fill prison beds, get the inmates to work off a big chunk of their own costs, and pocket the difference.
Good business? The Wall Street Journal seems to think so. A column by Liam Denning opens with the business perspective:
“Imagine a real-estate business where your tenant finds it hard to move and you provide the barest of amenities. No, this isn’t the world of the New York apartment landlord. It’s the private prison business.”
I’ll leave you with a final question.
If private prison firms succeed in replacing public prisons and expand beyond immigrants, where will they look for further growth?
Why We Fight
[One of a series written for UnitedRepublic.org in 2012. Original article.]
“The gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them. The gross national product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads.
“And if the gross national product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials …
The gross national product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America – except whether we are proud to be Americans.”
– Robert Kennedy, 1968
Money in politics is nothing new — corruption has always been part of governance. It accumulates like rust on steel and barnacles on boatsides. Without regular maintenance, the decay grows and overwhelms the structure it builds upon. We recognize the problem, we understand we must deal with it — especially when there comes a point where corruption crosses a line from gaming the system to being the embodiment of evil.
Case in point: The Red Light Cam Scam. Traffic cameras — specifically the timing of the yellow lights — have been manipulated to optimize the chances drivers will cross the stop line at red lights. Here we have a system of traffic lights, designed to protect the safety of all — ALL, mind you, including children — and it’s being shamelessly perverted to generate money. If that’s not evil, what is?
In Orlando, courts are administering disparate treatment to citizens who fight back against unfair red-light camera tickets and those who passively accept the status quo.
We see a similar pattern emerge in lobbies to defeat efforts to reduce childhood obesity and promote healthier food. While the First Lady is advocating change in how food is created and marketed to children, food industry representatives are working to thwart movement in that direction.
For example, Reuters reports that 24 states and five cities contemplated taxes on soda to discourage consumption. Every single proposal failed, save one in Washington State — a tax of two cents per can. One win in 29 tries. But even there, an industry consortium mounted a $16 million referendum drive that defeated the tax proposal. Zero for 29. All this in direct conflict with a clear good — the health of our children.
There were congressional consequences as well. Supporters of the food and beverage industry saw contributions from PACs increase. Senator Tom Harkin, who supported tougher food standards, got nothing at all from the food and beverage people. That’s how Washington works.
The American Legislative Exchange Council — ALEC — is now working with industry leader ExxonMobil on disclosure rules for the fluids used in gas extraction. Why should you care? Because the ‘fracking’ technique injects these fluids into areas that may also contain groundwater used as drinking water.
If gas extraction products might be contaminating your drinking water, wouldn’t you want to know about it? ExxonMobil wants to limit disclosure by invoking a trade secrets clause in relevant law. And as far back as 2005, at the behest of energy interests, Congress exempted the practice of fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Corporations have, by law, a fiduciary duty to maximize profits. Moreover, CEOs, shareholders, and management all have ample incentive to bolster their income. Everyone wants the best deal. But when business effectively substitutes dollars for votes in our representative government, when it actively subverts our health, safety, and natural resources in the pursuit of endless growth, it has embraced evil.
This is why we fight.
Cultural Differences in Moral Reasoning
[One of 50 articles written and published for Demand Media in 2013]
Cultural differences in moral reasoning are driven by various influences — history, leadership, religious belief, experiences with peace and warfare, available resources and the strategies for extracting and distributing those resources. These cultural differences are not limited to the scale of nations. There can also be differences in the culture and moral reasoning between schools, communities, companies, even families. Moral reasoning has a way of adapting to or being shaped by people’s needs and perceptions.
Absolutes vs. Relativism
There’s an ongoing, cross-cultural debate on whether moral values are absolute or relative. Are there universal morals that apply to all regardless of culture, or are moral values a negotiation between the environment, natural selection and social conditions? It’s a hotly debated topic, but clearly moral reasoning diverges among cultures. In some areas, gay marriage is accepted and not in others. Some countries permit personal firearm ownership, in others you can be jailed. The same is true for possession of certain plants.
National Differences
Overpopulation has led China to impose some restrictions on family size. Today it has over 1.35 billion people and most Chinese live with an average density of 326 people per square mile. People living at that density calls for, and perhaps requires, a moral system that emphasizes cooperation and harmony — exactly what Confucianism teaches. In China, conditions and moral reasoning lead to limits on family size.
In Russia, conditions and moral reasoning lead to an opposite conclusion. Russia’s population density is slightly below 14 people per square mile, with about 143 million total population. Government policy encourages families to have as many children as they can (which also requires cooperation and harmony).
Japan’s situation is complex. They face a rapidly aging population and steep decline in fertility, in part because strong Confucian values demand marriage before children, but marriage rates are dismally low. Japan is caught between cultural values and an inevitable economic decline unless fertility and immigration increase; thus Japanese moral reasoning is now forced to resolve this conflict to maintain national prosperity.
Economic Differences
Consider a simplified example of conflicting interests between a factory owner and a farmer. To remain in business, the factory owner must balance costs and expenses. This may mean discharging pollutants in the atmosphere because it is the lowest-cost way to eliminate wastes. If costs are not well-controlled, the factory could fail and people would lose jobs. From this perspective, cost control is a moral good.
From a farmer’s perspective, if crops are contaminated by mercury particulates from the factory, the moral good of cost control becomes the evil of food poisoning. Similarly, an agricultural society will have a different moral perspective on some issues than an industrial society. Cultural values — morals — tend to dovetail with practical needs.
On the issue of global warming, there’s a clear clash between the view in academic culture, which is driven by several lines of evidence pointing toward anthropogenic climate change, and the views of fossil fuel and other industries, a culture that tends to combat any conclusion that will affect profits. When scientific facts and self-interest diverge, the effect on moral reasoning is illuminating.
Humanitarian Differences
Cultures vary in how they value others in their midst. Slavery is a stark example, and had its advocates. It is now widely condemned, yet persists in the form of human trafficking, or sex slavery. Sexual slavery victims tend to flow from economically insecure areas to regions of relative stability. When times are hard, the young women who comprise the majority of victims can be manipulated and entrapped with promises of phony jobs. Some locales, most famously Bangkok and Amsterdam, tolerate the sex trade by reasoning that it’s a matter between consenting adults. This blurs the line between consent and coercion and complicates enforcement against human trafficking.
Social Stratification
Other forms of devaluation persist, cutting across lines of ethnicity, gender, age and disability, resulting in societies stratified by economic class (U.S.), social castes (India, Pakistan) and ethnicity (U.S, Japan). Social stratification is inherently hierarchical, a pre-rational behavioral pattern, and proactive moral reasoning is working to reduce it through affirmative action programs in the U.S. and India.
Moral reasoning varies by culture in accordance with what the culture values. As noted American author Robert A. Heinlein pointed out, “Man is not a rational animal. He is a rationalizing animal.” It’s clear that moral values are relative in practice. If there are also absolute universal moral values, no clear consensus has yet emerged that identifies them.
Why Parents Shouldn’t Be Able to Refuse Medical Treatment for an Ill Child
[One of 50 articles written and published for Demand Media in 2013]
Legally, refusal to provide or access medical care for children can be termed medical neglect. According to the latest available national statistics, documented child abuse and neglect in 2011 affected more than 675,000 children, or nearly 1 in a 100 kids. On average, 3 percent was stemmed from medical neglect in 41 reporting states. Some states average higher. Arkansas’ medical neglect rate is 7.5 percent, while the District of Columbia, Georgia, New York and Puerto Rico all average about 5 percent. The lowest rates are in Delaware and Utah at 0.04 percent and 0.02 percent respectively, plus both Wisconsin and Nebraska at 0.01 percent.
Causes
Medical neglect can have several causes, including economic hardship, lack of access to care or health insurance, family chaos and disorganization, lack of awareness, knowledge or skills, lack of trust in health care workers, impairment of caregivers, caregivers’ beliefs and children’s behavior, according to a 2007 article in the journal “Pediatrics.” Of these causes, two can involve active refusal of care: caregivers’ belief systems and children’s behavior.
Legal Exceptions
In most instances, medical neglect is legally actionable. The exception is faith-based exemptions, which are written into law in most states, according to Childhealthcare.org. These exemptions vary in scope. Forty-eight states permit exemption from immunization programs. Most states permit exemption from metabolic testing of newborns that can detect developmental problems, including some that can be prevented with treatment. Ten states have religious exemptions for eyedrops that can help prevent blindness in children who contact a venereal disease carried by their mothers. Seventeen states have religious exemptions to felony crimes against children.
Consequences
A study titled “Child Fatalities from Religion-Motivated Medical Neglect” in the American Academy of Pediatrics journal found that of 172 cases of child fatalities attributed to faith-based medical neglect, 140 had excellent (90 percent positive) prognosis with standard treatment. Many of the remaining 32 children were treatable, with good outcomes likely. The consequences of not participating in immunization programs can be widespread. In 1991, “The New York Times” reported on an outbreak of 492 measles cases in Philadelphia that led to the deaths of six children, two of them unrelated to the Faith Tabernacle and First Century Gospel churches at the center of the outbreak. A later check of the Faith Tabernacle school found 201 of the children in attendance had never seen a doctor.
Prevention
Most faith-based cases of medical neglect leading to illness and death are preventable. The nonprofit educational charity Children’s Health Care Is a Legal Duty lists other treatable conditions that resulted in the deaths of children in the care of Christian Science parents between 1974 and 1994; five by meningitis, three of pneumonia, two of appendicitis, five of diabetes, two of diphtheria, one of measles, one of septicemia, one of a kidney infection, one of a bowel obstruction, and one of heart disease. In the Philadelphia outbreak, three children were hospitalized under court order to ensure treatment. However, as long as religious exemptions remain in place, the justice system has legal limits on what they can do.
References
American Academy of Pediatrics: Religious Objections to Medical Care
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Familes: Child Maltreatment 2011 report
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Familes: Child Neglect: A Guide for Intervention
American Academy of Pediatrics: Recognizing and Responding to Medical Neglect
American Medical Association: Miracle vs. Medicine: When Faith Puts Care at Risk
Effective Programs to Help at-Risk Teenagers Stay in School
[One of 50 articles written and published for Demand Media in 2013. Published version here.]
Keeping at-risk teens in school entails a variety of strategies. It begins by identifying who is mostly likely to drop out and the influences that compel them to do so; these can include bullying, homelessness, financial insecurity, poor nutrition, substance abuse, early pregnancy and abuse at home. Solutions can be targeted individually or schoolwide, but whatever the approach, these problems are difficult, widespread and not always responsive to generalized programs. Although, effective programs do exist.
Check and Connect
Developed at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Community Integration, Check and Connect has 20 years of documentation to demonstrate program effectiveness and is highly rated by the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network. It is a relatively low-cost program that trains mentors to check on at-risk students’ attendance, behavior and grades while connecting with them personally to provide coordinated support with school staff, families and community providers. The goal of the program is to build academic and social competence on the path to graduation.
Positive Action
Rated by the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse as a top program, Positive Action’s approach is summarized by its logo, which features three arrows representing thoughts, action and feelings revolving around a plus sign for positivity in a virtuous circle. As the program states, “Positive Action is the philosophy that you feel good about yourself when you think and do positive actions, and there is always a positive way to do everything.” If it sounds like a feel-good program, it is, but it also lowers truancy and increases attendance. Success is compelling.
Ripple Effects
Ripple Effects recognizes the varied influences on dropouts and addresses them by sorting students by risk level, identifying specific behaviors and targeting them with specific, useful interventions. Academic performance is deeply influenced by social and emotional needs. Ripple Effects provides responsive support, aiding students who need to believe in themselves when family, peers or community leads them to doubt. Suspension alternatives are part of the program, steering students toward assessments that also watch for structural unfairness and unconscious bias by school administrations.
Success Highways
This program begins with a comprehensive early warning assessment that not only identifies at-risk students, but determines the reasons underlying their risks and can be reviewed at the district, school, classroom and individual levels. Intervention focuses on six resiliency skills, teaching the essential lesson that failure is occasionally inevitable, but that persistence pays off. Specific skills taught include stress management, intrinsic motivation, academic confidence, balanced well-being, connectedness to others and connecting educational relevance to achievement of life goals.
Evangelism in the Early Seventeenth & Eighteenth Centuries
[One of 50 articles written and published for Demand Media in 2013]
The roots of American evangelism go back to 16th century Europe, when Anabaptists began suggesting that church should be separate from the state. This view did not find favor among governments closely aligned with the Catholic church, and consequently Anabaptism was brutally suppressed. The means, as the Global Mennonite Encyclopedia starkly describes it, was often “the scaffold and the stake.” By the end of the 16th century, most European Anabaptist leaders were dead. Some of the survivors fled to America, where evangelism would later resume, but the Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites who were descended from the original Anabaptists abandoned evangelism in the United States.
Evangelism, Not Evangelicalism
The most common personal experience with evangelism and apologetics in America today is with Jehovah’s Witnesses, who go door to door to advance their faith. Evangelists are the local equivalent of missionaries who go abroad to spread the word. Evangelism is not the same thing as evangelicalism. Evangelism is a practice, a way of sharing belief. Evangelicalism is a dogma and a trend that led to American political activism and megachurches in large U.S. cities.
Early American Settlers
The early 17th century in North America was marked by the establishment of colonies, including Jamestown, Plymouth and Boston. Some settlers came to escape religious persecution; others came to make money. It was a brutal time: many colonists failed to survive the deep winters, and native Indians were a danger as well. Although there was ample religious fervor among the colonists, there was little energy or enthusiasm for evangelism. Simple survival was the priority.
The Great Awakening
After a period of relative quiet in the religious sphere, like the calm before the storm, evangelism suddenly caught fire again in American culture during the Great Awakening. A charismatic preaching style modeled on the fiery, emotional sermons of George Whitefield, paired with dramatic “religious revival” events, drew increasingly larger crowds to Protestant churches in the late 1730s. Beginning in New England over six years, then spreading to the South, revivals were aimed at the faithful whose convictions were weakened by doubt and the unchurched who had little contact or experience with organized religion.
George Whitefield
Whitefield was a central figure in establishing American evangelism, but according to some, he may have also been a factor in sparking the American Revolution. Before Whitefield, sermons were top-down affairs — the pastor preached, the congregation listened. Using the call and response technique, Whitefield established congregational participation and encouraged emotional expression. This exciting new dialogue, together with a generally defiant attitude toward authority, stirred what Nancy Ruttenburg calls the “democratic personality.” The Great Awakening unleashed more than a religious revival; it reinforced a fierce sense of independence. This eventually led to the separation of church and state that Anabaptists had advocated.
Top Advocates for Teens
[One of 50 articles written and published for Demand Media in 2013]
Teen advocacy comes in a variety of forms and purposes, covering issues like juvenile justice, education, civil rights and assistance for at-risk youth in America and around the world. Some organizations are student-led and others, in areas such as juvenile justice, are managed by professionals with experience and expertise in related fields. Many advocacy organizations are nonprofit and work with limited resources and some are politically active. These organizations have established track records for effective and ongoing advocacy.
Juvenile Justice
The Vera Center on Youth Justice works for fairness in policy and practice, promoting reform in the areas of the status offender system, detention centers, treatment placements and the management of justice system data on juveniles. Goals include spotlighting systems that emphasize punishment over treatment, identifying inhumane conditions and disproportionate targeting of minorities.
A similar organization, The Campaign for Youth Justice, has a single, clear aim: to end the practice of trying, sentencing and incarcerating youth under the age of 18 in the adult criminal justice system. It also serves as an information clearing house, with a variety of reports, fact sheets and poll data.
Education
The Energy Action Coalition educates and advocates on a variety of issues related to the extraction, generation and consumption of energy supplies, with an eye toward the future and the risks of climate change. Some of the specific issues the coalition addresses include fracking, the planned Keystone XL pipeline, mountaintop removal, strip mining and coal plant proliferation.
Advocates for Youth has existed since 1980, with a focus on adolescent reproductive and sexual health both in the U.S. and developing countries. Their credo regarding responsibility reads, “Society has the responsibility to provide young people with the tools they need to safeguard their sexual health, and young people have the responsibility to protect themselves from too-early childbearing and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV.”
Civil Rights
The Student Press Law Center addresses First Amendment rights and censorship of student publications, both online and in print. Their website offers links to legal assistance, a Freedom of Information letter generator, legal guides, FAQs, a law library and a blog.
The United States Student Association bills itself as the largest, oldest student-led organization in the country. Their action agenda encompasses student debt, immigration reform and shared governance of campus policies. The USSA policy platform includes 29 items and includes expansion of basic education, voter ID law, the Equal Rights Amendment and support for the Violence Against Women Act.
At Risk, at Home and Abroad
Big Brothers and Big Sisters has paired role models with at-risk youth for over a century, first as separate organizations working with girls and boys, then together as one organization since 1977. They operate in all 50 states and 12 countries. An independently funded 18-month study found that participants in Bigs and Littles programs were 47 percent less likely to begin using illegal drugs, and 52 percent less likely to skip school.
Voices of Youth is a program funded by UNICEF, the United Nation’s Children’s Fund. They are active in human rights for children and teens, poverty and hunger, education, health, the environment and the effects of violence and war.
Influential Prose 
