I had kind of a grumpy day today: an early morning meeting was cancelled over twenty minutes after it was supposed to begin; they were painting in the hallways at my job and the smell was gross; I was really busy at work and didn’t get to take a proper lunch (I don’t do well when I miss meals); I’ve done a bunch of things today but still have a bunch more to do before the end of the evening…and The New York Times started charging for digital access to its website.

How. Dare. They!

Well, I know exactly how they dare. Several studies and several hundreds of thousands of dollars later, the Times completed a cost-benefit analysis that told them their online readership would be willing to pay for access to articles and archives on nytimes.com.  Now, the plan is not entirely cut-and-dried. The new fee scale acknowledges that there are plenty of casual readers out there who only read a few stories a month, and so the first twenty articles you view are free; the Times has also figured out that it will be important to keep relevant as a news source in the era of blogs, Tweets and re-posts, and so accessing the site from an outside link also doesn’t count toward your monthly total. There are checks built in so that an occasional reader can still get his or her Times fix without payment or hassle. But me? Well, I’m sunk.

So far this month I have accessed 151 articles via The New York Times’ website. That’s way more than 20. I am going to have to figure out a way to get my news without paying the monthly access fee, the lowest of which starts at $15.00/month, and which I can’t afford right now. If I had a daily, weekend, or even just Sunday subscription, access would be free, but the prices for home delivery in Arizona are so high that it doesn’t really pay to get the paper delivered every morning. Plus, it’s wasteful to print on all that paper when I can get the same stories in environmentally-friendly fashion on the Internet. What to do? I was already plotting establishing several different email accounts to use when accessing articles, and switching browsers when I hit my limits, and doing vast web searches for links so that I could get to the site that way, when I stumbled across this article on lifehacker that helpfully provides your average surfer with several ways to bypass the 20-article limit.

Victory! (Or so I thought.)

Unfortunately (for my conscience), some overriding super-ego made its presence known when I was about twenty seconds into reading this article (nineteen seconds into feeling like I had won the lottery). I started to wonder about just how ethical this course of action would be – after all, I am basically asking somebody to provide a service to me for which I refuse to pay, even as I know that people’s hard work and, at times, personal risk go into creating the content of which I am so fond.  Am I making a fair assumption? That because news on the web is largely free, I should be entitled to having every news source I want present its goods to me without charge?  What about the fact that every time I do go on the page, even now, I’m bombarded with advertising – advertising that the Times makes a pretty penny selling to major national and international companies? Does that excuse my refusal to pay? Wait – does the fact that I’m on a tight budget make it okay for me to sneak free stuff for now, with the understanding that once I can afford it, I should pay the subscription fee? And more than all of this, an essential question of ethics: am I so sure that I deserve these wares that I’m willing to circumvent the “rules” (such as they are) and go around the business’ back in order to get what I want?

The answer: I don’t know, but for right now, I’m headed online to read the paper, free of charge, as I try to figure out what’s “right” – or if that even matters in this circumstance, given our digital age.

What do you think?

You’ve probably seen the utterly inappropriate, extremely racist and ultimately befuddling video posted to YouTube by Alexandra Wallace. This obscenely ignorant undergrad decided, for reasons I cannot possibly fathom, to film herself criticizing the entire Asian student community at UCLA, accusing them of (among other things), lacking self-sufficiency, foregoing American manners (whatever that could possibly mean), and, worst of all, speaking on their cell phones in the library. Her rant was immediately denounced by the university’s administration, a vast majority of its students and various anti-defamation leagues, and Wallace issued an apology soon after the video went viral. But in the wake of her stupidity arose the most amazing thing: a host of videotaped responses, serious and funny ones, parodies, angry tirades, musical answers and related satires. An entire collection of genius work that can be viewed as incisive commentary on not just Wallace’s video but on the nature of modern racism and the Internet age in general.

Despite this, a majority of the news coverage regarding the event has centered around the hate speech with which some chose to respond to Wallace’s rant. In the same way that her tirade, which is essentially three minutes of stupidity, got way more press than is probably deserved (and I am well aware that I’m helping to foster that), the dangerous and violent responses of a decided minority have entirely captured the public’s attention. They haven’t escaped Wallace’s notice, either; she released a statement to UCLA’s Daily Bruin stating that she was withdrawing from classes at the college due to “the harassment of my family, the publishing of my personal information, death threats and being ostracized from an entire community.”

Whether or not Wallace should have dropped out of school is not a question I feel comfortable answering. I’m inclined to say that she should have ridden out the storm and that, given enough time, things would have died down to an annoying buzz rather than their current thunderous roar. Ultimately, though, that decision is hers and her family’s to make. What concerns me is a twofold problem that I see happening again and again: firstly, that people feel like the way to respond to ignorance is with more and greater ignorance, and secondly, that all of the good that came in the wake of this incident – all of the satirical creativity, all of these new ways to tackle issues of race and racism via technology, all of the intelligent conversation that has sprung up around those silly three minutes is utterly lost among the ugly and rash decisions of a few.

As becomes the case with so many saddening things, it turns out that there have been some bits of genius during these past couple of weeks, light spots to move toward, to reflect on.  Instead of celebrating them, though, we as a society continue to be focused on our darkest recesses rather than our lightest selves.  There are lightness and goodness in the ways in which we’ve learned to use technology and the instant gratification it provides to educate each other, share with each other, and learn from each other. The Internet is not some theoretical demon, and the series of interconnected tubes is not going to swallow us whole. Wallace’s story stands as one of the boldest so far in reminding us that the Internet is not a private playspace.  However, this is a lesson most of us have already learned; what we need to focus on now are the ways in which the public nature of the medium can be used and celebrated for the good that does exist.

I learned something new this weekend!

There’s a little-known provision in the United States Constitution that states members of Congress “shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest.”  Similar provisions are also contained within a number of state constitutions, including (you guessed it), Arizona’s, which holds that legislators are “privileged from arrest in all cases except treason, felony and breach of the peace, and they shall not be subject to any civil process during the session of the Legislature, nor for 15 days before the commencement of each session.” This was brought to my attention in the wake of Arizona State Senate Majority Leader Scott Bundgaard’s recent, um, “conflict” with his (now former) girlfriend; apparently, as they were driving home together in February after attending a charity version of “Dancing with the Stars,” (I’m not even going there), they started beating on each other (not going there, either). After throwing each other’s things out of the moving car (I’m going here: littering, people! Get it together!), the pair stopped at the side of the road where they were approached by an officer and where Mr. Bundgaard, according to Phoenix police spokesman Tommy Thompson,  invoked Article 4 of the state constitution. His companion was arrested for domestic violence and was hauled off to jail; Mr. Bundgaard, presumably, just went home.

This isn’t the first time an Arizona state legislator has used Article 4 to sidestep legal responsibility. In 1988, then State Senator and now (sigh) Governor Jan Brewer was involved in an accident, failed four field sobriety tests,  and was also sent on her way (to continue her stellar legislative career and become, arguably, Arizona’s most notorious governor).  The federal statute has been invoked as well; in 1999, Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WVa) referenced the constitutional provision when involved in an accident, although, according to the New York Times, “he later backed down and had an aide ask the police in Fairfax County, Va., to issue him a citation.”

Okay, seriously? I mean, seriously? Legislators are immune from arrest and prosecution for a whole host of crimes that would send the average Joe or Jane to jail? Something doesn’t seem right about this. As I was contemplating just how ridiculous and arbitrary our justice system can be, I realized that I wasn’t being entirely fair. After all, there are other circumstances in which people are determined to be not accountable for their crimes. Specifically, if they are children or if they, in some other way, demonstrate diminished capacity at the time of their infraction, i.e., if they are developmentally disabled or insane.

So basically, the law treats legislators as though they were either children or crazy people.

I guess I can’t really argue with that.

The New York Times ran a front-page article in yesterday’s (March 6^th 2011) paper describing the plight of a Pennsylvania psychiatrist, formerly a “talk therapist,” who, due to insurance companies’ refusal to pay high premiums for once-standard cognitive therapy, has turned his practice exclusively into one of medicinal intervention and prescription adjustment. Basically, instead of talking to patients for 45 minutes about their problems, working through various root causes and developing working solutions to improve their lives, he now meets with his clientele for a maximum of 15 minutes per patient, dashes off a prescription for one of any number of anti-depressants, -psychotics, or –anxiety medications and sends them on their most decidedly not merry way.  The article goes on to explain that the movement away from talk therapy solutions and toward medication-based solutions has dominated that field of psychotherapy in recent years. The reason? Simple economics.

In its profile of Dr. Donald Levin, a practitioner for nearly 40 years, the Times goes on to explain that, due to insurance company policies, “a psychiatrist can earn $150 for three 15-minute medication visits compared with $90 for a 45-minute talk therapy session.” And so Dr. Levin, like so many of his peers, has completely adjusted his medical practice to one that doles out literally hundreds of prescriptions a week to patients whose names he “often cannot remember.” His caseload has gone from between 50 and 60 individuals to 1,200. By Dr. Levin’s own admission, he has “had to train [himself] not to get too interested in their problems…and not to get sidetracked trying to be a semi-therapist.”

Wait, what?

Since when did psychiatry become a profession in which acting as a therapist was a bad thing, a practice that needs to be actively protected against?  More to the point, just how is it possible that insurance companies have so much power that they can dictate not just the amount patient care is worth but the nature of patient care itself? The reason here is once again, simple: doctors have let them.  By and large, medical professionals, instead of banding together and fighting against the insurance companies, have simply rolled over, accepted the policy changes and adjusted their practices to ensure that as individual practitioners they continue to make top dollar.

Now, I understand Dr. Levin when he (rightly) points out “[n]obody wants to go backwards, moneywise, in their career…[w]ould you?” But there is an inherent selfishness in his statements about wanting to continue the same lifestyle that he and his wife have held for the past 40 years. Because in his refusal to challenge absurd and business- rather than patient-centered insurance mandates, he is effectively saying that he gets to maintain his lifestyle at the expense of the millions of people in need of adequate mental health services. While drug therapies are viable options in many cases, they are not in all circumstances, and to this day most practitioners recommend talk therapy as a complement to prescription management. In their quest for more money, doctors talked themselves out of the maxim they are required to swear to when they take the Hippocratic oath – “abstain from doing harm” – and have convinced themselves that it is okay to provide less than the full complement of treatment to patients because to do so would mean to take less monetary compensation for themselves.

Most of us reading the Times article or this blog post will find themselves at least mildly outraged at the failings of the industrial-medical complex and the increased burden that some people’s greed places on the middle-class American consumer. However, we have to acknowledge that the only way in which this system changes is if Dr. Levin, and others in his profession, are willing to change the way they view the world and their role in it; in short, they have to act against their own interests – in this case, financial – in order to maintain the formerly held standard of patient care.  It’s easy for us to look at people who make a lot of money and argue that they should take a little less of the pie to benefit the greater good, but who among us would actually be willing to make a similar sacrifice? In fact, who among us does, regularly, make similar sacrifices?

Each day, we are faced with a world filled with problems and concerns that, though seemingly beyond our control, can in fact be influenced by our actions. Psychiatrists aren’t the only people (although they are a particularly strong lobby in this case) who can stand up to insurance companies; we can do so as well, through the power of our votes and a commitment to elect legislators who are determined to end unfair practices and put patient care at the top of their concerns.  Instead, we rail against politicians for implementing “universal” health care and threaten to vote them all out of office for being socialist madmen who might cost us a fraction more in insurance premiums to ensure care for all. There are plenty of other ways in which we, as individuals, refuse to put the interests of the greater good before the concerns of our pocketbook. We rail against higher municipal taxes and then complain that our streets are unsafe and our parks untended; we argue against property taxes and then criticize the local school district; we send up a hue and cry when unqualified, immoral candidates storm Congressional offices in sweeping election “reforms,” but the percentage of eligible voters going to the polls during midterm elections hasn’t hit 40 since 1970, and hasn’t risen over 60% in a presidential election since 1968.

Making democracy work takes sacrifices from us all, whether those sacrifices involve spending time, money, energy, or thought on the way our government is run, and yet all too often we look to the left or right and avoid the mirror when change is required in our society.  Change starts within us all, and we determine its impact; it is not enough to complain about the wrong that exists in the world. It is only enough when we spend resources of our own to stand up for the things we believe in and to attempt the creation of new paradigms for society, business, and government. Sometimes, these resources may be ones that we are readily willing to spend, but other times we will be called upon to truly examine whether an extra twenty dollars in our pocket over the course of a year is worth the rippling damage cutting health care subsidies (for example) will cause. It might seem a stretch to use the death of psychiatric talk therapy as a logical stepping stone to calling for greater societal participation in general, but I disagree. Rather, I think that Dr. Levin’s particular plight can stand in as a microcosm for every individual’s need to sometimes look beyond their own gains and consider the larger society, and the greater good, when making decisions about how to lead ethical lives in a participatory democracy. It behooves us all to first, do no harm.