Innermost Parts

What could come of dozens of the nation’s richest people getting together? The options are limitless.

Bill&Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet, longtime billionaires and philanthropists, have teamed up to create a network of America’s richest people, reaching out to the Forbes 400 in order to ask for donations. However, this campaign, now known as The Giving Pledge, goes further than any have in the past, asking donors to promise 50% of their net worth to charity. Billionaires who have publicly agreed to the pledge include: NYC Mayor Bloomberg, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller, George Lucas, and more. Some of the participants have already promised to give even more, such as Buffet, who pledged to give 99% of his wealth to chaitable donations.

Although the Gateses and Buffet have been arranging meetings with some of the richest billionaires in the nation for the past year, they kept the dealings top-secret until recently, and little was gleaned by the press as to what these powerful people were planning. In June of this year, Fortune Magazine printed a comprehensive story detailing the Pledge for the first time, and estimating its potential. (http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/06/16/gates-buffett-600-billion-dollar-philanthropy-challenge/ )

At its most recent count, the Pledge had signed on 30 billionaires. If it were to reach its goal of obtaining half the networth of the 400 richest people on Forbes List, it would mean $600 billion going towards charity. To give some perspective, people in the U.S. gave an estimated $307.65 billion  to charity in 2008, and is usually the leading country in charity donations.

Reading about this ambitious, admirable cause left me with two questions: first, no statement has been made about what charities the money will go towards, but which causes do you think are the most deserving, the most in need of this money?

Second, how can we create an environment of selfless giving amongst our own community? By no means am I claiming that Brandeisians are akin to billionaires, and what with the recession charitable donations have become a lot more difficult for people to make, but that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be massive efforts to fundraise.

Already this past school year the student body voted overwhelmingly in favor of passing the Brandeis Sustainability Fund (http://innermostparts.org/2010/04/27/win/) electing to pay an extra fee of $7.50 per semester in order to take steps towards ‘greening’ our campus. Another great successes was the Haiti Relief Effort (http://www.brandeis.edu/haiti/ ) which raised over $30,000. So, what steps should we take towards more effective fundraising next?

Want more even more Sahar in your life?

I made a personal miniblog to document things that make me smile and keep track of my adventures.

Also sometimes writing for Innermost Parts feels constricting. I have to worry about style, staying on topic, being witty, etc. So this’ll be a place to let off steam and not let that get me down.

Check it out if you want.

I just finished a reported New Yorker article by George Packer on the modern senate. It’s multifaceted and hard to to summarize. You should read it.

Anyways, it got me thinking about our Senate. You know, the Union Senate.

I don’t think anyone has a good opinion of the Senate. Its composition seems to change almost totally every year – but the bad feelings still remain. Why?

Well, I think the big factor is rather simple – no one really knows what the Senate is supposed to do. Pass legislation? The Union can’t (or doesn’t) enforce any laws, the senate rarely votes to change the rules regulating clubs. Anything that the Union does as a body executive, the E-Board just does without the need for Senate authorization.

So, the Senate is rather useless – and clueless about what it should be doing with its time. Chartering clubs doesn’t take that much time or effort, after all. Yet, Senate meetings are notoriously long-winded and last late into the night. What takes up all that extra time. Some oversight, yes, of a watered-down kind. The rest? Drama.

All that ^ has been my traditional explanation of the situation with the Senate – it’s foibles, it’s failures. It’s a good analysis – many former senators share it.

And yet, now I think maybe I should revise that analysis a bit.

The senate has drama, yes, but perhaps because it is the most democratic of union institutions. Barring high-profile Student Judiciary Trials, it is the one institutions where “common students” can come and confront the powers-that-be.

Real life is messy – people are dramatic, talk too much, and get riled up. Shouldn’t our most democratic body reflect that? I’m not sure.

Stay tuned for part 2

That EJ Dionne article continues to impress. Let me just excerpt 2 paragraphs that I found gripping:

And I must pause to praise the following sentence: “No one is more temperamentally conservative than a Manhattan leftist living in a rent-controlled apartment and holding tenure at a university; his or her way of life is inevitably bound to breed a sense of complacency that is incompatible with liberalism’s historical commitment to be open to the new.” Since many book reviews are written by Manhattan leftists living in rent-controlled apartments holding tenure at a university, that is indeed a brave thing to write.

Compared with Marxism, romantic forms of conservatism, and assertive varieties of nationalism, liberalism can seem terribly boring. For Wolfe, this is an asset, not a liability. While we all like poetic speeches, Wolfe is right to warn about the dangers of allowing poetry to define politics. “Let the passions reign in the museums and concert halls,” Wolfe writes. “In the halls of government, reason, however cold, is better than emotions, however heartfelt.” Is Wolfe channeling No Drama Obama?

I think the thing about liberalism being boring is spot-on. And Dionne/Wolfe counters this by asserting that the rationality of liberalism is what’s needed in the actual work of politics – the long and slow boring of hard boards.

That’s not really a good response, is it? For by confining liberalisms virtues to the political sphere, Dionne procludes (or conceives the lack of) a cultural liberalism, a lifestyle liberalism, the possibility for a liberal movement in the modern era. Without movement, it’s hard not to stagnate.

That’s why I might identify as a liberal if pressed, but at my core I consider myself a member of the progressive movement – something bigger than myself – and yes, somewhat romantic as well.

I’m reading a gangbusters book review by EJ Dionne. This passage really grabbed me:

the historian Michael Kazin has it right when he argues that American progressives have succeeded in improving the “common welfare” only when they “talked in populist ways–hopeful, expansive, even romantic.” Kazin cites the line popularized by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “March without the people, and you march into the night,” adding, “Cursing the darkness only delays the dawn.”

I think this is totally right. I think it’s time to take a more positive tone to my writing and action regarding Brandeis – emphasizing a great future we can reach, not cursing the “darkness” that exists right now.

Treatment of mental health conditions has long been the most underfunded aspect of the American health care system (the other contender is preventive care, but the Affordable Care Act has finally taken steps to address it).  People with mental health disorders are frequently denied not only the funding to seek appropriate treatment but also, all too often, recognition that they even suffer from a disorder to begin with.  Conditions that can be as debilitating as a physical disability are dismissed as existing ‘only in the sufferer’s head’, and schools are forced to deal with a myriad of separate conditions by cramming students into catch-all special needs classes that cannot provide the individual attention they require.

Therefore, it’s disheartening to hear of the double whammy that mental health patients have suffered as a result of the recession.  A new study from Brandeis’s Dominic Hodgkin reports that state and local mental health services have been substantially cut in the past few years; meanwhile, the difficulties of living in a recession economy have caused demand for mental health services to increase.  These effects have been seen on a global as well as national scale.

If all this seems self-evident (of course recessions lead to spending cuts!), then check out the press release for more details or read Hodgkin’s full study in the International Journal of Mental Health.  While the conclusions are grim, it’s always great to see Brandeis researchers contributing to understanding global issues, and I hope that Hodgkin can play a small role in finding a solution to the mental health crisis.