Still Dreaming: The 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington

untitled2Today marks the 50th anniversary of the March for Jobs and Freedom, more commonly known as the March on Washington. Today, in 1963, an estimated 250,000 people—of all ages, races, and creeds—descended on the Lincoln Memorial in a peaceful show of solidarity for full civil rights for African Americans. It was also the day that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream Speech.”

There have been a number of interesting pieces presenting the story behind the march, behind the people who organized it, and the people who participated. You can find some of those pieces here, here, here, here, and here (linking to writer and broadcaster Jean Shepherd’s incredibly interesting radio broadcasts about his participation in the march; the popular movie “A Christmas Story” is based on Shepherd’s autobiographical stories). Or just click on today’s Google doodle to find a host of links.

While reading a good number of pieces on the march, I realized that I cannot recall once in my entire 19 years of public schooling (elementary and secondary schools, plus public college and law school) that I ever read or heard about that event and never, not once, did I ever read or hear King’s speech.

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The Effect of the Internet on Reading

“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Nicholas Carr

While preparing for this fall semester, I came across the citation for an article from The Atlantic.  In mid-2008, writer Nicholas Carr asked, “Is Google making us stupid?”

Carr, a writer and former deep reader, noticed that after a decade of using the internet, he cannot engage with reading like he used to. “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. . . . The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” His article suggested that the way the internet works not only changes what we read, but how we read, and perhaps even changes the very way we think.

I’ve addressed the internet’s effect on our lives before, but here I want to address what the internet has done to our ability to read and to engage deeply with text. What Carr says about reading is, I notice, true. After spending more than a decade with volumes of information at my fingertips and with the ability to, in seconds, move from one bit of information to another to yet another, it’s much harder now to engage deeply with any single text.

For me, if I have to scroll down two or three or—gasp!—four times to completely read an article online, well, I’m going to be hard-pressed to do it in a single, uninterrupted session. I’m off, after that first screen’s worth of text, to see what’s trending on msn.com, to peek at the headlines on cnn.com, to check my email again, to maybe order that shirt that I like (that I’ve looked at online five times already).  And this is a process I’m likely to repeat not 15 minutes later while trying to read the second or third screen’s worth of text, even though it’s likely that nothing has changed since I last checked those same sites. I’ve come to expect (and maybe at some level, require) my information in convenient bite-sized chunks; in this way, perhaps, I feel I can manage all the information that I will receive during the course of the day. If there’s something long that I must read—or really want to read—I’ll often print it out and save it for a later time, usually when I’ve removed myself from the computer, and even then, I’m still distracted.

Like Carr, I don’t think my experience is unusual. In fact, people’s lack of capacity for deep reading is probably more prevalent today than it was in 2008, when Carr published his article.

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Enforcing Surrogacy Agreements in Wisconsin

scan2Let’s say you are part of a married couple in Wisconsin. Due to a leukemia diagnosis and treatment for that disease, your eggs are no longer viable. Doctors agree that you are currently in good health and the disease is “a nonissue,” but your husband and you want children and you cannot bear them. A friend has offered to help you out. This woman has been your friend since grade school; you’ve each participated in the other’s wedding.  You and your husband are godparents to her youngest daughter. Your friend and her husband have five children of their own and have said they are done expanding their family. Her husband even had a vasectomy. Twice in four years she has offered to carry and bear a child for you.  Finally, you agree.

You and your husband visit a lawyer, and your friend and her husband visit a different lawyer.  The gist of the arrangement is that your friend will be artificially inseminated with your husband’s sperm. She will carry and bear the child, but she agrees that you and your husband alone would raise the child and she agrees to terminate her parental rights to allow you to adopt the child.  She would still be able to see the child; after all, you have long been friends and you plan to continue to see each other through social visits. You’re a bit concerned, though, that your friend may have difficulty giving up a child to whom she has biological ties, but she assures you she can do it. Your lawyers create numerous drafts of your agreement and each revises these drafts until finally all of you agree that what is written accurately reflects your understanding of the arrangement.  You all sign this agreement in November.  By this time, your friend is already almost five months’ pregnant.  She is due the following March.

After all of you sign the agreement, your relationship with your friend crumbles, and before the child is born your friend informs you that she will no longer terminate her parental rights to the child, as she had agreed.  Furthermore, she wants to have custody of the child.  In March, she gives birth to the baby.

Now what?

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