Monday links – Europe works, the US tax code does not, and thank goodness for subsidized preschool

Going to try something – just links I’ve liked over the past week or two.  It’s everything I would put on Facebook if I did much on Facebook or if anybody who comes here saw my Facebook page.

Why Is Europe a Dirty Word?  - This column from Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times is superficial but important because it recognizes all the ways that Europe works, in contrast to important ways the US does not.  I think most Americans would be surprised to learn how many people see the US as a sort of failed state.

Behind Every Great Woman – BusinessWeek wrote a cover story about the men who stay at home to support their successful wives.  The problem?  It’s about role reversal, not equality.  A very small step.

Homemaker Dad, Breadwinner Mom – In a blog entry at the New York Times, Nancy Folbre takes on my point above.   And she gets into detail about something my wife figured out the first time we did our taxes in the US.  The system is so biased towards a stay-at-home parent that it makes almost no sense for many spouses – men or women – to work.  In Sweden, of course, both spouses have to work, which is another kind of pressure, but at least a more fair one.  Why not support child care activities and others tax breaks that would allow everyone to go to work – while preserving choice – instead of penalizing mostly women who often do go back to work but for what comes out to insulting wages?

Pre-K Converts – Which brings me to this post from DadWagon, in which Nathan Thornburgh talks about the sad state, and ridiculous cost, of pre-K education in New York City, but also the whole US.   Excuse me while I go metaphorically kiss the stable, competitive, yet secure Swedish welfare state.

 

How much does history account for our hate?

In the wake of the massacre in Norway last year, there has been a Scandinavian soul searching that is really moving, especially for someone (me) who lived in the wreckage of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s and then around New York City after September 11 and who now cringes at all this American celebration of death, whether it be Bin Ladin or Qaddafi.

Dagens Nyheter recently ran a feature about Bud Welch, an Oklahoman who lost his daughter in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings.  The headline is “My road away from hate was a long one” and he is now a death penalty opponent and featured in places like the Forgiveness Project. 

I was struck by one quote from the DN story, about why Scandinavians have reacted so differently than Americans to terrorism (you know, with openness and sorrow instead of war).

I’ve wondered about that question. Few in the United States have the attitude that seems to characterize many of the victims in Norway. Maybe it is that American culture is so impacted by hate. We have experienced a civil war, and many struggled against the civil rights movement.

I wrote in the Christian Science Monitor over the summer about the bliss that comes from a Swedish forest that has known no war for 200 years. (Yes, I am well aware of all the Swedish hypocrises on this – Sweden in World War II is not a fun story – but I’m talking about the effect, not the process.) Is that the answer?  Has the United States simply seen too much violence, whether it be slavery, war, the Wild West, or the war on terror?

Pedaling past traffic jams without even knowing it

I live near the traffic jam on the front of our local weekly.  The mess is because they’re putting in a tram line, which is very cool, but apparently a nightmare for drivers.

The beautiful thing?  I had no idea.  I ride my bike to work now, and if I didn’t ride, I would take the subway.  So the traffic patterns of my car-centric (for Sweden) Solna are a mystery to me.  We are talking about getting me a driver’s license but never for the day to day.

Here is something from a passage I wrote on why I still hate to drive:

But it took New York and New Jersey to finally take me from fast to angry, as I completed the crazy car trifecta of the Southland (LA), the Balkans and now the Tri-State area. I took a newspaper job that meant hours of driving up and down a 8-lane stop-and-go boulevard of dusty exurban strip malls. On weekends I suffered the potholes and chaos of New Jersey highways, the hell of the Brooklyn Bridge on a Friday night, and the gridlock of the West Side Highway on a Monday morning. I got buzzed time after time after time, almost always by young guys taking their rage out on me, never with the fastest car, now in a hand-me-down four-cylinder 2002 Dodge Neon.

Mine is not an aggressive rage. It is defensive, built on honor and a sense of outrage. I will not get in your face. But do not dare get in mine. Even then my anger does not ignite into a big ball of flame. I fume, sulk, hold a mean grudge. This withdrawn, quiet anger is just as male as the raving lunatic beating his chest, mirrored in how I cried easily as a child, and then learned not to cry.

Instead I learned to seethe.

The only problem with the bike riding is the dark.  I had to go buy a fluorescent vest today, to go with my bright yellow helmet.  It’s safe.  It’s necessary.  But I shudder to think what my 12-year-old self would say about me now.

Ahhh, to ride free in the California sun.

But I’ll take dorky over dead.  And I’ll take dorky over the traffic jam …

could a third party save the united states (and daddyland)?

I am not a regular Thomas Friedman reader.  I think the prominent New York Times columnist is good at capturing a certain sort of zeitgeist, however, of transmitting the ideas of a certain business-investor-entrepreneur class.  It’s an elite class but not the typical power elite.

So I read with great interest his last column, called Third Party Rising:

Barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her — one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome.

There is a revolution brewing in the country, and it is not just on the right wing but in the radical center. I know of at least two serious groups, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, developing “third parties” to challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady incremental decline.

If you browse Friedman’s most recent columns, I say he has found his voice in the past weeks.  That might sound funny about such a celebrated guy, but if you go back through his columns for months they are a kind of wandering mishmash of topics.  Then he went to China and suddenly he has this clear message – America is in decline, people want change, and they aren’t getting it.

And here is what this has to do with Daddyland – there will never be any significant changes under the current political structure.  For the same reasons that the U.S. is not building better infrastructure or cutting oil consumption – the system just isn’t working.  I got my absentee ballot yesterday for New York State, and I’m sitting there staring at the names, and I just don’t see it.

I’ve met Chuck Schumer, the New York senator, and I’ve written about him.  He gets taken down a lot in newsrooms in the state for being too corny and fake and too quick with the cheesy press release, but this is an impressive guy, at least for a big time politician.  And he is a powerful guy too.  But is he going to fight for paid parental leave?  Nope.  Is he going to risk alienating upstate voters with a gas tax for real?  Nope.

The Swedish government is a mess now too – the racist, ex-Nazi party holds the balance of power in the new parliament – but there is an inherent competence to the political life here that is lacking in the US and that goes down to the people who do not shout about Tea Parties, taxes and guns while collecting government benefits.  No, the people here collect benefit after benefit, but they all know where those benefits come from and the sacrifices those benefits entail (some Swedes might argue this point, but, believe me, compared to Americans, it is true).

So bring on a legitimate centrist third party.  I don’t even have to agree with it – I can almost guarantee that I won’t – but I’m searching for a little competence here, a sign that the US could move forward, whether with the right tax cuts or by adding strands to the safety net.

a long-suffering rhino becomes a star in daddyland

I have a new hero, and his name is Rhino.

Rhino’s story began days after the birth of our daughter.  My boss gave our daughter a couple Sandra Boynton books, including The Going to Bed Book.

This is a classic.  There is a rhino in it.  We read the book a lot.

A year later, we were walking through the Kohl’s in the Town of Wallkill, New York, which is just outside Middletown, which is just outside, ummm, the famed Woodbury Commons Outlet Shopping Mall, which is just outside some forest, which is just outside New Jersey, which is just outside New York City.

And there was the rhino from The Going to Bed Book, and our daughter reached for it, the first time she ever wanted a toy.  We were charmed.  We bought the rhino.

She promptly forgot about rhino, who made the move to Sweden based soley on Mommy and Daddy’s Sandra Boynton nostalgia.

Rhino then spent three years in the bottom of various toy drawers and baskets, never played with, ignored, saved only by a parental memory of the day in Kohl’s – the proverbial neglected toy.

Then the girl’s little brother started daycare.  He had never cared about a stuffed animal.  He had never cared about The Going to Bed Book.  But on day two, we decide to give a stuffed animal a try at nap time.   Why not?

Mamma picked rhino from the bottom of the pile.

And within a day, rhino had become Rhino, and Rhino goes everywhere with Baby B.  Rhino plays in the daycare yard.  Rhino eats, sleeps, rides, runs, crawls, cries and paints with the boy.  A week ago Rhino smelled like curdled daycare so we washed him secretly after the boy went to bed.

His Swedish teachers call the animal Rhino in English because that is the name, not a description.  Rhino is the center of a pretty big world, right now, after all those years of waiting patiently, just hanging out and being rhino, staying ready for the day he would become Rhino.

With a capital R, dude.

a new york real estate nightmare avoided but still afraid in Sweden

When fear overtakes me, whether in the darkest night or suddenly in a ray of sunshine, when fear enters our safe corner of the Swedish welfare state, it brings images of a white house in Port Jervis, New York.

Our house.  The house where our daughter spent her first year.  The house with the giant red couch and the new porch with the view of the swaying tall trees.  The house with the original woodwork and the attic that could be an art studio and the old barber shop in the cellar.

The house with the bats and the bugs.   The house with one amazing set of neighbors and nothing else for miles.  The house far from all our family and friends.

In my nightmares, we do not sell and do not move to Daddyland.  We get stuck.  And I stop, because I cannot go any further.

Well, now our wonderful Victorian in the cute little river town is back on the market – and has been for more than eight months!

This is your chance to get out of the big city, enjoy the forest, the rivers, the cool breezes (just do not have your first child in town with a doctor you do not like and with no network and only one car and with lead paint on the ceiling of your porch).

I guess it didn’t work out for our buyers … who were good, hardworking people moving up from the Bronx.

I would feel worse for them – talk about bad timing, buying a house in the country two hours from your job just when the housing market blows up and gas prices skyrocket – if they had not ripped out our garden, dug up the Japanese maple we planted when NK was born and put up drywall in every room and then painted everything white.

Hmmph.

At least no one has called me, telling me that we still own it, that we have to go back.

Still, however, I won’t be able to sleep tonight … too scared.   (this is our picture, not a current one)

trying to avoid the american daddy wars

RebelDad has a theory that the U.S. is facing the “Daddy Wars,” the fight between men and their employers over a father’s wish to work part-time, from home, flexible hours and so on.

Unlike the mommy wars, which is a media-created fiction in which go-to-work moms and at-home moms are engaged in some sort of rivalry, the daddy wars reflects the growing conflict between fathers and their employers on the exact contours of work-family balance. The old model in which dad trucks off to work for 8 or 10 or 12 hours, then comes home and sits in the recliner is long gone. Today’s dads want to have it all, and — increasingly — they’re going to be asking their bosses to give it to them. That’s instant conflict. Maybe even a cold war.

I find this oddly hopeful because he thinks that more and more men are willing to take on that fight.

Of course, here in Sweden, there are no daddy wars.  I have the right to do things by law, and I either do them or not.  My company has little to no say in the matter.  I get to take my parental leave.  I get to work part-time until the kid is 8.  I get to stay home if the kids are sick. That said, my company is incredibly flexible, even more than they have to be.

Good business too.  Certainly makes me more loyal.  I am not sure why American employers do not get that.

I also had a good experience in New York, actually, at least for being in America.  I had the right to take 12 weeks of unpaid leave after NK was born (which is a joke, but that is another topic).  And by the end of the year, I took all 12 weeks (though I had to produce notes from chiropractors and the like to get much of it).  I also had two supportive bosses and a good HR department.

But would that have continued after the first year, when the law ran out?  As a guy?  At a newspaper?  Hmmm, probably not.

I get lots of questions from Americans on how Swedish companies make it work, with all these parents in and out.  The companies do fine with lots of temporary contracts – you are less indispensible than you think, and how often is an employee on leave, one, two, three times?

I am not guaranteed to go back to the exact same position.  I might not like my new spot as much either.  So there is that risk, I guess.

But that is nothing compared to an American man caught up in the daddy wars.