Category: Politics

Categories
Politics

Absolutely Wrong

What this country sorely lacks right now is moral absolutes. We’re long on opinions but short on facts, long on rants but short on reason, long on talk but short on action. Until we challenge the idea that everyone is “entitled” to an opinion and all opinions are entitled to equal respect and air time, finding a route out of this moral morass looks pretty hopeless.

One might think that zero tolerance for killing people would be a moral stake that could be driven into the solid earth and around which every last person would rally. It’s absolutely wrong to kill people; therefore, finding a solution to the gun problem–which we alone among the civilized countries of the earth possess–would shake citizens to their knees. It would sound the alarms in the halls of Congress, and finding a solution would be the first item on their agenda in the aftermath of yet another mass shooting. Taking action would be the only moral course; and failing to take action in the face of such preventable tragedies would be the gravest of moral failures, leaving no room for debate or contrary opinions. One might think.

In 21st-century America, however, nothing is absolute. Republicans, Democrats, victims of gun injuries, families of fatal shooting victims, the National Rifle Association, and people who pay no attention to what goes on beyond their own walls have an equal say in how the problem is treated. Or not treated. The Pew Research Center reports this:

“In 2017, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 39,773 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC.” That number is double the population of the town in which I grew up. That’s two Troy, Ohios wiped out in one year.

Of the 39,773 deaths by gunshot in 2017, 60% (23,854) were suicides; 37% (14,542) were murders; 486 were unintentional; 553 involved law enforcement; and 338 had “undetermined circumstances.” I concede that many of those deaths could not have been prevented, but many of them could have been. What’s our buy-in number that makes it worth the effort of having a conversation, sacrificing some of our individual “rights” and freedoms, and taking action even though we know we’ll never satisfy everyone or eliminate the whole problem? Would it be 30,000? 25,000? 20,000? 1,000? Would 100 saved lives be enough for us to care?

What’s your number? I’m reminded of the Old Testament tale of Sodom and Gomorrah. Before beginning to rain fire on those communities, God warns Abraham of what’s about to happen. Abraham, whose nephew Lot lives there, begins negotiating to prevent the destruction. God has determined to destroy the cities because of the exceedingly evil people living there, but Abraham points out that there must certainly be righteous people also, people who do not deserve the same fate as the wicked. He begins by asking God to spare the cities if he can find 50 righteous people; apparently lacking confidence that 50 righteous people can be found, Abraham continues to negotiate, reducing the number to 45, then 40, then 30, 20, and 10. Each time, God agrees to withhold destruction to spare the lives of those who don’t deserve punishment, even if it’s just ten. You remember the end: only Lot and his family can be considered righteous, so they are allowed to escape just ahead of the fire.

What’s your number? How many good, innocent lives would make it worth changing your attitudes, your votes, your principles, your personal lifestyle? For all too many families, just one saved life would have been enough; but lack of moral conviction on the part of their fellow citizens and their elected representatives has left gaping holes in their families that no amount of time will close.

Here’s the point. If we as a people genuinely believed that killing is morally wrong, we’d have done whatever was necessary to save lives years ago. All we have to do is look at how other civilized countries have done and follow their lead. If as I sit here at my computer, I begin to smell smoke, I’m going to take immediate action: leave my seat, check every room of the house, and if I do find smoke or flames, call 911 and get the hell out of here.

I live in Florida, so I know all about hurricane warnings, and I’ve spent a few hours of my life making hurricane preparations, sometimes for storms that never showed up and other times for storms that damaged my home and created a huge mess in my yard. I have rarely regretted making the preparations, even for those which proved to be false alarms, because I know what it looks like when a hurricane actually hits, and I’d rather prepare for nothing than not to prepare for something.

People with moral conviction and courage take action. People who do not take action but who allow themselves to be swayed by “opinions” and false equivalents are willing to accept death as a reasonable trade-off for holding onto some imagined “right.” Even the deaths of children just sitting in their school desks.

I ask again: What’s your number?

It’s not just guns either. For 957 days, we’ve had a “president” who, by all sane evaluation, is a criminal and a con man; is the most uninformed, ignorant person ever to disgrace the office; has  no moral compass; has the emotional stability and the vocabulary of a 5-year-old (sorry, 5-year-olds!); has told over 12,000 lies publicly, in the carrying out of his official duties; has attacked citizens, law makers, and dead people; has been on the grounds of his golf courses 229 times (thegolfnewsnet.com); has blatantly violated the Emoluments Clause of our Constitution by using his own properties for official events and diplomatic visits; was the subject of an extended FBI and special counsel investigation; has a number of close associates now serving or about to serve prison terms; has close associates who have allegedly committed the most vile crimes; is a racist; is xenophobic; is cruel to refugees and other immigrants, both legal and undocumented; stirs division and hatred everywhere he goes; can’t complete a coherent sentence; and is in charge of our country’s nuclear codes. He has alienated our allies and cozied up to our adversaries. He “fell in love” with Kim Jong Un and has never said a single word in denunciation of Vladimir Putin.

Everything in the preceding list is on public record. We know all of this, we discuss it over dinner, we grouse about it at work with colleagues, and we rant about it on social media. We listen to the talking heads parse and dissect it all on the nightly news. Yet we collectively don’t believe any of this is morally wrong, because we have allowed this person to remain in our highest office for 957 days, one of our major political parties is going to nominate him to do it all again for another four years, and millions of our fellow citizens can’t wait to cast their votes for him.

Our Congress says they’ll think about impeachment, take a look at the evidence and see where it goes. So befriending murderous dictators, pissing off our allies, and telling 12,000 lies is not “evidence”? What kind of moral code is that?

Donald Trump famously said after the Charlottesville tragedy that there were “good people on both sides,” and he’s been lambasted for that. But are we any better? We look at life-and-death controversies and take no action because many of us apparently believe there are good people and valid opinions on both sides. Anyone showing too much outrage against a morally outrageous event is judged equally wrong and hateful for calling out wrong and hatred when they see it.

False equivalence keeps us wallowing in the mud of inaction. Every person, every group of people, and every political party is guilty of wrongdoing, but all wrongs are NOT equal. Supporting a criminal POTUS is wrong. Allowing thousands of people to continue being killed by gunshot every year is wrong. Speaking out against those wrongs is NOT wrong. Pointing out a POTUS’s lies is not wrong and not an act of hatred. But unless we draw some lines in the sand, unless we’re willing to declare moral absolutes by which every reasonable person is willing to abide, we’re in a perilous state.

Our house is on fire. A Cat 5 hurricane has already made landfall. Yet we continue to act as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening, as if this is just business as usual, another regular administration to be judged by the regular criteria. Talk is cheap. Right now we have too much talk and too little action.

Establishing moral absolutes requires moral courage, and having moral courage means taking action when action is demanded. Your stated convictions are only as sincere as your willingness to act on them. Some things are absolutely wrong, and if we believe that down deep where it counts, we’ll do something about it. What’s your number? Where is your line in the sand?

I leave you with a few thoughts to ponder.

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” Thomas Paine

“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

 “The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.”
― Iain M. Banks, Complicity

 “Have I, have you, been too silent? Is there an easy crime of silence?”
― Carl Sandburg

“The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'” –Martin Luther King Jr.

“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” –Martin Luther King Jr.

“The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.” –Martin Luther King Jr.

“We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.” –Martin Luther King Jr.

Categories
Politics

400 Years

On August 20, 1619–400 years ago tomorrow–a ship named the White Lion docked at Point Comfort, Virginia, and began selling its cargo to the some 700 settlers who then inhabited the British colony of Jamestown. The cargo consisted of the surviving 20 out of an original 350 African captives, kidnapped by the Portuguese from the native Kongo and Ndongo kingdoms, who had survived the arduous transatlantic voyage and then been captured by a plundering ship near Virginia. These twenty people, stolen from their homes and families and transported to a new and unfamiliar continent across the world, began the African population of the American colonies.

Those 20 humans and their millions of descendants would remain in slavery, bought and sold as chattel, for another two-and-a-half centuries, after which they would be denied the full rights of citizens for yet another century, and would continue to struggle for acceptance and equal opportunity for the remaining half century of their residence in this country.

According to the History website,

“The arrival at Point Comfort marked a new chapter in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which began in the early 1500s and continued into the mid-1800s. The trade uprooted roughly 12 million Africans, depositing roughly 5 million in Brazil and over 3 million in the Caribbean. Though the number of Africans brought to mainland North America was relatively small—roughly 400,000—their labor and that of their descendants was crucial to the economies of the British colonies and, later, the United States.”

The History site also clarifies that technically these 20 people were sold as indentured servants, as were many people from Europe, which means that they would work without pay for a set time in order to pay off their indebtedness and then would gain their freedom. Some in fact were eventually freed; however, as the flourishing southern cash crops demanded great numbers of cheap workers, slavery grew into the institution which was finally ended by President Lincoln 246 years later, but only after a bloody civil war which cost our country roughly 620,000 of its citizens, both black and white. That number is only slightly fewer than the number killed in all of our other wars and conflicts combined (644,000).

Though proponents of the Lost Cause Mythology argue that slavery was not the central cause of the Civil War, that mythology has been debunked by evidence from respected historians. What the Lost Cause folks want us to believe was a battle over states’ rights, others make clear was really a confrontation over only one state right: the right to own slaves. What the Lost Cause people would have us believe is that the Confederacy’s defeat signaled the tragic downfall of a just economic system, which unjustly plunged the South into a period of chaos and rebuilding. Using images of happy dark-skinned people living in peace and harmony on beautiful, sprawling plantations, the Lost Cause Myth makes martyrs of the plantation owners who were deprived of their noble and virtuous way of life.

For perspective, let’s take a look at what the now continental United States of America looked like in 1619. Of course, there was a large Native American population. Although isolated colonies had been settled in North America between 1492 and the early 1600s–mostly Spanish and French–Jamestown, Virginia, was the first permanent British colony and the first stronghold in the region which would become the Thirteen Colonies on which our country was established.

To debunk another myth, not every group of settlers who arrived on these shores was seeking religious freedom or escape from religious persecution. Most of them, and notably Jamestown, came seeking resources (money) and power. Europeans living in densely populated countries saw this new continent as a literal gold mine of free land and all of the wealth that land would yield. Colonial powers saw it as an opportunity for expansion and greater global dominance. Of course, exercising that power and receiving the rewards of their opportunism meant disregarding the one pesky little fact that an estimated 8 million to 112 million native people already lived here in 1492. Those are obviously wildly different numbers, but bear in mind there was no census back then. Whatever the original number, however, it proved no problem for our ambitious ancestors. By 1650, the European colonists had succeeded in reducing the native population to fewer than 6 million. (Statistics from University of Wisconsin Press)

The much-celebrated Pilgrims, British colonists who came here after a brief sojourn in Holland, arrived in 1620 at Plymouth Rock and established the Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts. This group was seeking religious freedom, as was the next major group who arrived in 1630: the Puritans, who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Puritans, in many ways the strongest English settlement, distinguished themselves for both their theocratic government and their financial success. Although the Puritan work ethic, which became so much a part of our culture, was motivated by service to God, it resulted in great accumulation of wealth for some of those hard workers. It’s worth noting that it took this group only six years to found our nation’s first major university, Harvard, which has been in continuous operation from 1636 until today.

But back to the point: the Africans were here before either of the groups which settled New England; yet while the Pilgrims and Puritans are annually celebrated as the groups to whom we owe our heritage, the Africans continue to be marginalized and suppressed a whole four centuries after their arrival. Those who built the flourishing cotton, tobacco, and sugar trades owed their success to the large masses of cheap labor, but those laborers and their descendants were never granted the respect or monetary reward commensurate with their contributions. And although those dark-skinned laborers have fought in every armed conflict in which this country has engaged, they have not been granted the same recognition, honor, and appreciation as their white comrades in arms.

In 1963, 344 years into our national disgrace, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote this about our failure to extend the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to a large population whose roots in this country go deeper than the roots of many who do enjoy those rights:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

(Letter from a Birmingham Jail 4/16/1963)

What a powerful statement and what a damning indictment against a country which celebrates itself as a “land of opportunity”!

The questions this statement bring to mind are reminiscent of the questions swirling around our current gun-law debates. Why are we so slow to take needed and reasonable action? Why have other countries solved the problem while we still wallow in the mud of indecision? And above all, what the hell is wrong with us that as citizens of the most powerful country on the globe we can’t resolve problems which other countries put to rest years ago?

As we mark the 400th anniversary of the first African footsteps onto our country’s shores, here’s all we need to know.

Unless you’re descended from one of the original Jamestown families, those African-Americans you see every day can trace their roots in this country further back than you can. Let that sink in. Even if you are a Jamestown descendant, those native people now living on reservations can trace their roots back hundreds or thousands of years further than you can. Bottom line, white people, is that we’re the newcomers. Wielding power over everyone who’s not like us is not our birthright.

The ridiculous fear that we are losing control of “our” nation to intruders is based on logic both convoluted and destructive. White Europeans became the majority population in this country and gained political and social dominance by decimating the native red populations and by building an empire on the backs of enslaved black people whose ancestors were brought here in chains. Your white ancestors, who you might like to believe built this country all by themselves and are therefore alone worthy of our eternal gratitude, might not have survived the first few winters and certainly would not have built the economy that put us on the map without the support from people of color. Nazi Germany was built on the premise that there is a master race and that non-members of that race should be excluded from existence. Have we learned nothing?

Our history as a people is three steps forward, two steps back. We’re in a stepping-back period right now, so it’s the responsibility of the adults in the room to start the forward movement again. We the adults in the room have to speak out against racism wherever we see it; silence is complicity. We have to vote out leaders who promote anything less than equal justice for all, and then we need to make sure we never again vote for anyone who would impede and reverse our forward progress. We have to devote our time, energy, and resources to supporting, in whatever ways we can, organizations that advocate for social justice–both within our borders and beyond.

As a young man (ages 19 and 22), Abraham Lincoln made two flatboat trips along the Mississippi River from his home in Indiana to the mouth of the river in New Orleans, Louisiana. Historians tell us those two trips made an indelible impression on young Lincoln’s mind as he experienced first-hand the horrors of slavery, including a visit to a market where human beings were buying and selling other human beings. Though few specifics of those voyages have been recorded, historians generally agree that their effects may have shaped the thinking which led to the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment.

Further study of President Lincoln makes clear that his attitudes toward race, though progressive for his time, were far from the best thinking of Americans a century-and-a-half later. Lincoln was, like all of us, a product of his time. He led important strides toward racial justice in America, but he didn’t solve the whole problem.

It would serve us well to remember that we’re probably not going to solve massive social injustices all by ourselves either, but that can’t stop us from running like hell to get the ball a little closer to the goal post. We may not live to see some future generation score the touchdown, but we can rest in peace knowing we did our part and we left the ball closer to the goal than we found it.

And let us never forget these words of President Lincoln, which I have quoted often and will continue to quote:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Those “better angels” will lead us each day to do whatever small or large thing we can do to keep us moving forward. One thing I’ve done for a while now is just in my daily interactions to be conscious of making eye contact with everyone I meet, especially those who don’t look like me. I give them a genuine smile and a greeting and hope it assures them that their presence is not repugnant or regrettable but welcome and beautiful.

It’s a little thing. I don’t sit in congress. I’m not president. I don’t write laws. But I can smile. And I can say “hello” or “what a beautiful child” or “I love your earrings!” I can bring a moment of light into another human being’s world in which moments of light, warmth, and acceptance may be rare.

I can also write my representatives in government, participate in elections, go to demonstrations, travel to Palestine, and generally raise hell wherever my voice may be heard; and I will not neglect to do those things. But I also won’t neglect to give a smile and a kind word. All we really need is love, right?

Categories
Politics

The Way They Were

They were newlyweds, having just marked their first wedding anniversary. They had an almost six-year-old daughter, a one-year-old daughter, and a two-month-old son; they were just 23 and 24 years old. They dropped off their daughter at cheerleading practice, then headed to Walmart for back-to-school necessities and for party supplies because they had invited their family and friends to help them celebrate their daughter’s birthday and to show off the new house of which they were so proud. His life had turned around when he met her, and they were on course for a happier future. The celebration never happened. Both were shot in the El Paso Walmart, she shielding their baby. The headline read “The baby still had her blood on him.”

He was known as a family man, a grandfather who went to the El Paso Walmart on Saturday morning to take food and water to his granddaughter and her classmates who were there raising money for their soccer team. As soon as the gunfire broke out, he moved to shield his granddaughter. His sister described him in a Facebook post as “a beautiful human being, an excellent dad, uncle, husband and brother.” A cousin said, “He always dedicated himself to his family and his work.” He lived 61 years only to die at the hands of a person who should never have been allowed to own a gun.

He was only six years old, attending a popular Northern California food festival with his mother and his maternal grandmother. The mother received two bullet wounds but survived, as did her mother, the boy’s grandmother. The little one was not so fortunate. His father arrived at the hospital to be told that his son was in critical condition and then five minutes later was notified his son had died. He was just six and a “happy kid,” according to his paternal grandmother who agonizes over the tragic unfairness of a senseless death at such an innocent age.

She was thirteen and also attending the garlic festival. She didn’t keep pace with her family as they fled; she stayed back to walk beside a relative who uses a cane. She died from the bullet that may otherwise have struck the relative.

He was not so innocent. A gang member with a long rap sheet of his own for weapons violations, he was on the scene of a Brooklyn block party when an unknown gunman opened fire. He died and eleven others were injured.

He had worked at a Southaven, Mississippi, Walmart store for about 16 years and had recently become a department manager. He was raising three children before being shot dead in the store’s parking lot. The store manager, father of two, was also killed inside the building. The gunman was a recently fired store employee who left five children fatherless.

According to the New York Times, they were “two were friends from work, enjoying a night on the town. One had recently given birth and was finally getting out of the house. Another had just gotten a new job at a place he loved.” The bar, in Dayton, Ohio, just 20 miles from my hometown–Troy, Ohio–was the scene of much celebration on that carefree Saturday night; that is, until a gunman opened fire and left 9 dead and 27 injured in a matter of seconds. His weapon of choice was a military-style rifle and a large-capacity magazine, thanks to which a total of eight children are grieving the loss of a parent.

Between July 28 and August 4, 2019, 37 people died in the United States of America. The cause? An epidemic outbreak of deadly disease? Tragic unavoidable accidents? A natural disaster, placing them at the mercy of the elements? None of the above. Within that 8-day period, those people died from senseless gun violence. These 37 deaths bring the total for 2019 to 255–which is an average of more than one person per day (CBS News). In addition to the death toll, another 79 people were shot in those same incidents, raising the total number of casualties in just 8 days to 116.

As staggering as those numbers are, they don’t include the number of devastated, grieving family members whose lives have forever changed at the whim of a madman given permission by an irresponsible Congress to own and operate weapons of mass destruction. They also don’t account for the average citizens who are terrified when they hear a car backfire or a large object hit the ground, because we all have lost something in this senseless episode of American history: we’ve lost our sense of safety, trust, and security. We keep tight leashes on our children who will never know the same freedoms we enjoyed in our youth; we’re nervous about normal activities like going shopping, watching a movie in the theater, or even attending our houses of worship. We’re constantly watching our backs because we live in a country where some antiquated amendment is more important than our children and our own peace of mind.

A few days ago, during a visit to New Orleans, I needed Benadryl to counteract an allergic reaction. The package, at Walgreens, was encased in a plastic lock box which could be opened only by a store employee. The security check to board the airplanes which took me to and from New Orleans required me to remove my shoes and in one case to have a minor “pat down” on my back because the metal detector had sensed something.

For years, following the deaths of seven people caused by poisoned Tylenol and the discovery that certain ingredients in over-the-counter cold and allergy medications are used to make methamphetamine (meth), the government has placed restrictions on the amount of a product that can be sold to one customer and have kept the products either in locked cases or in a secure area from which they are retrieved only after a customer has requested them.

I and all of my fellow air travelers now remove our shoes to go through security because in 2001, one terrorist, since known as the Shoe Bomber, attempted to detonate an explosive packed in his shoes during a transatlantic flight. He didn’t even succeed, yet that one botched attempt has affected security measures for air travel these 18 years and counting.

Babies rode in the front seat beside their parents until airbags were added to cars for adults’ protection. Now, because of the danger airbags pose to small people, children are required to ride in the rear seat until they reach the age determined by state laws, in many cases age 13.

In 1995, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols used an ammonium nitrate fertilizer as part of the bomb with which they killed 168 people in Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. According to various websites, restrictions on the sale of that type of fertilizer now include the following: “Anyone buying more than 25 pounds [must] register, be screened against a known terrorist list, and require any thefts to be reported within 24 hours.”

In other locations,

“Under the rules, retailers would have to obtain the name, address, telephone number and driver’s license number of people wanting to purchase ammonium nitrate fertilizer and maintain records, including the date of the sale and the amount purchased, for at least two years.

The administrative guidelines would authorize retailers to refuse to sell ammonium nitrate when it was being purchased out of season, in unusual quantities or in other suspicious circumstances.

The proposal, similar to rules in place in South Carolina and Nevada, is designed to make ammonium nitrate more secure and keep it out of the hands of terrorists, said Kenny Naylor, Fertilizer Program Administrator with the Oklahoma Dept. of Ag, Food & Forestry.”

One fertilizer bombing and people have to be registered, provide contact information, and limit their purchases to restricted amounts. Thirty-seven people killed by gunshot in eight days and nothing is done. Nothing. No. Thing.

Time Magazine recently cited a database of mass shootings compiled by Mother Jones, including the numbers of fatalities and injuries up to and including the recent El Paso and Dayton shootings. During the last 37 years, from 1982 to August, 2019, 114 mass shootings have occurred in the United States (mass shooting is defined as an incident in which at least three people are killed, not including the gunman). In those 114 shootings, 932 have been killed and another 1406 wounded. Most were innocently going about their routine lives: attending school, shopping, enjoying a little entertainment, worshiping. Some had lived long lives, others had barely had a chance to live.

If one botched shoe bombing forever changed air-travel security measures, one fertilizer bombing forever restricted fertilizer sales, and one batch of cyanide-laced Tylenol forever changed the way we purchase over-the-counter drugs, why have we had 114 shootings in 37 years? Why didn’t the first shooting motivate changes that would have prevented many of the others from ever happening? Why have we as a nation sacrificed 932 lives, along with our own sense of security, on the altar of the Second Amendment? Why is unrestricted gun ownership more important to millions of our fellow citizens than people’s lives? Why are universal background checks a greater threat than the possibility of getting killed in the mall, at the theater, at a friendly bar, or at church?

Proposals routinely rejected by Congress include mandating universal background checks; treating guns like cars and requiring registration, training, licensing, and insurance; banning private ownership of assault rifles and any type of weapon designed specifically for military use and mass killing; limiting the amount of ammunition one person can purchase, as is done with fertilizer and over-the-counter drugs; closing loopholes such as online and gun-show purchases. The most haunting and perplexing question of all is, what does anyone have to lose by the implementation of these simple, common-sense restrictions?

I rarely if ever hear anyone at an airport grumbling about removing their shoes, walking through a scanner, or placing their carry-on items in bins for screening; and I never see anyone refuse compliance, at least in part because they know their non-compliance would result in a swift removal from the airport. We’ve accepted these security measures as a normal and necessary part of life, and we willingly comply because we feel safer knowing that everyone with whom we share a plane ride has passed muster.

Yet the very mention of similar restrictions on gun ownership erases every trace of logical thought because of 14 words written 228 years ago by men who could never in their wildest imaginations have envisioned modern weaponry. Our Congress bears the blood of every life that has been sacrificed on the altar of the Second Amendment; but sadly, the citizens who have accepted death as the necessity price for their selfish freedom have blood-stained hands as well.

 If that baby who was orphaned in El Paso, that grandfather whose family is left without a protector and caregiver, that six-year-old who will never experience the milestones of life, and the babies of Sandy Hook who were murdered in their little desks are an acceptable tradeoff for the right to unrestricted gun ownership, we are a despicable people. When taking a knee to protest injustice causes greater outrage than the latest slaughter, we are a people of twisted values. When our only response to human agony is the shallow mantra of “thoughts and prayers,” we are a loathsome lot indeed.

The NRA is funded by its five million members (and possibly some Russian allies), and Congress is funded by the NRA. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the NRA has since 1990 contributed $22,723,137 to electing members of congress and has spent $54,557,564 on lobbying since 1998. The top five recipients of NRA contributions for 2017-2018, according to the same source, are Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), $15,800; Ted Cruz (R-TX), $9,900; John Culberson (R-TX), $9,900; John Faso (R-NY), $9,900; and Josh Hawley (R-MO), $9,900. If you noticed all of the R’s in that sentence, it’s because Democrat candidates receive a small fraction of what is given to Republican candidates.

Of course, Mitch McConnell is also heavily indebted to the gun gods; and not surprisingly, their favorite politico is Donald Trump. Here’s what the Center for Responsive Politics says about him:

“The National Rifle Association’s overall spending surged by more than $100 million in 2016, surpassing any previous annual NRA spending totals on record, according to an audit obtained by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The explosion in spending came as theNRA poured unprecedented amounts of money into efforts to deliver Donald Trump the White House and help Republicans hold both houses of Congress.”

I don’t think we need look any further for the roots of the problem. Sadly, the solution is not quite so clear. However, we have to believe that Jordan and Andre Anchondo, Jorge Cavillo García, Stephen Romero, Keyla Salazar, Brandon Gales, Anthony Brown, Lois Oglesby, and Thomas McNichols–along with the other 923 children, fathers, mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, spouses, sisters, brothers, and dear friends who have died senselessly in the last 37 years–are worth our continued diligence in fighting the great forces of darkness which have enveloped our nation.

“America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good,

America will cease to be great.”

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

Categories
Politics

Racist Is as Racist Does

Everyone is familiar with the words of that immortal philosopher Forrest Gump: “Stupid is as stupid does.” My mother had a similar saying which she used any time she felt we were placing too much emphasis on trying to make ourselves physically attractive: “Pretty is as pretty does.” Both sentiments serve to state what seems too obvious even to need saying: what we do is who we are. Talk is cheap. Words can be deceptive. My mother also frequently reminded us “Actions speak louder than words.” Another well-known teacher, Jesus, said it this way: “ You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles?  In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit” (Matthew 7:16-17).

In the current war of words over who is racist and who isn’t, what we’re learning is that in today’s political climate, the word “racist” is more offensive than the racially biased actions are. A person who says racially degrading things may be described as unwise, crude, or careless; but anyone who calls him racist is the real villain. It’s considered racist to call out a prejudiced person and give a name to the person’s actions. We’re lost in a maze of circular reasoning, with no sign of finding our way out any time soon.

One of the reasons we’re not going to find a quick or easy solution to our nation’s polarization is the nature of today’s “conservative” movement.

Donald Trump’s supporters fall into three main categories, as I see it: white nationalists, evangelicals, and the types of people who are most likely to join a cult. As diverse as those three categories may seem, they actually have several common characteristics. Essential to survival for all of them is maintaining an us vs. them mentality. For the white nationalists, it’s white people (specifically white men) vs. everyone of color; for evangelicals, it’s the real Christians (as they see themselves) vs. nonbelievers, Muslims, and Christians who have a different view of Christianity than they have. They are God’s chosen; they are the insiders. For the cultists, it’s the members vs. the outsiders, obviously. But it’s worth enumerating here the characteristics which make people prone to joining cults and the fulfillment they find in membership.

Carolyn Steber (June 21, 2018 on Bustle.com) lists these nine personality traits as the primary markers of those most likely to join cults: wanting to feel validated, seeking an identity, being a follower (as opposed to a leader), seeking meaning, having schizotypal thinking (more on that in a moment), being highly suggestible (falling for conspiracy theories, e.g.), constantly blaming others, having very low self-worth. Important note, Ms. Steber defines “schizotypal thinking” as “walking along the edge of schizophrenia, without actually having the delusions or disconnection from society that’s associated with the disorder”–yet still falling prey to “alien-type,” “conspiracy-type,” or “supernatural-type” beliefs.

I think the cult-like nature of Trump’s base has been well established, but when you add in the characteristics of the people who are attracted to cults, you have a pretty clear picture of who these followers are and the futility of trying to reason with them.

A second distinctive which all three legs of the Trump Base share is reverence for authoritarian leaders. White nationalists, evangelicals, and cult members all exhibit fanatical devotion to their grand exalted leaders, even at times following the leader into their own graves.

A third distinctive, and the one which makes the currently existing critical mass of these types most problematic, is the utter lack of reason in their thinking and their actions. All are taught to accept only what they hear within the group; outsiders are the enemy and are out to steal their brains and deceive them into denying their allegiance to the group. Attempting to present facts or to reason with them has the adverse effect of causing them to cling more fervently to the ideas with which they have been brainwashed. The person attempting to engage them in discourse and expose them to logic becomes the face of the enemy who is trying to lead them astray from the truth. When you consider what’s lost by leaving a cult (one’s identity, validation, meaning, and self-worth), it’s not hard to understand why members cling so frantically to their membership.

A fourth distinctive shared by these three groups is fear: fear of losing their racial majority, fear of going to hell, or fear of being disconnected from the social order. Fear keeps them loyal, keeps them chanting, keeps them deceived, because listening to reason would lead to having to completely revamp their world view and let go of their safety net. And that’s scary for anyone.

All three of these groups, in their fervent devotion to their authoritarian leader, will defend that leader against all critics, no matter how outrageous the leader’s actions. This is how it becomes acceptable for a fascist dictator to tell women of color to go back where they came from, even though they came from here, but not okay to give a name to his statements and his attitudes. Those who do call a spade a spade become the enemy because they have assaulted the untouchable, so they are in fact the ones who are prejudiced.

But racist is as racist does, so here’s what racists do. You may be a racist if . . . Wait, no, you ARE a racist if . . .

. . . you think there are degrees of citizenship.

The United States of America was founded on this premise, written by Thomas Jefferson as the introduction to our declaration that we were claiming our rightful place as an independent nation:

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

What does it mean for a truth to be self-evident? It means it is or should be obvious; it doesn’t need explanation, justification, or defense. It just is. In other words, Thomas Jefferson was not stating ideas or personal opinions; he was putting into words a fundamental principle: there are no degrees of humanity. Of course, we can’t escape the fact that Jefferson’s definition of “all men” was different from ours. It didn’t include black men, and it didn’t mean all humans; it literally meant men, not women. However, as enlightened citizens a couple of centuries later, when we say “All men are created equal,” we mean all human beings. To believe differently assigns degrees of humanity, and assigning people of color to a lower caste is racist, because racism is a form of prejudice, and prejudice is the prejudgment of people based on a particular characteristic. When that characteristic is race, the judgment is racist.

The rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, according to Jefferson, are given by our Creator (more room for discussion there, but let’s save that for later); they are not given by the government, and because they are “unalienable rights,” they can’t be taken away by the government. Depriving certain people of their God-given rights because of their race is a racist act. Causing certain citizens to feel “less than” because of their race is a racist act; placing certain citizens’ lives in danger because of their race and because your fanatical followers have been so whipped into a frenzy that they say a woman of color “deserves a round” is racist, dangerous, and evil.

. . . you agree with and defend other people’s racist statements.

Spreading dangerous and degrading attitudes requires the cooperation of many people, not all of whom agree with the attitudes being spread but some of whom lack the courage to take a stand against them. We have as a culture too long held the belief that discussing politics in polite company is inappropriate. Conventional wisdom teaches that in social gatherings, at Thanksgiving dinner, in school classrooms, and in church, politics and religion are taboo (with the obvious exception of discussing religion at church). In the 21st century, add social media to that list. Make too many political posts and see what happens to your friends list.

Politics is life; it’s our communal beliefs about how we join ourselves into a civil body, how we relate to each other within that body, and how our government should facilitate our peaceful and harmonious existence. How did those subjects become taboo? They should be discussed frequently, and what better places than with family, friends, faith community, and educational institutions. Why can’t a family have a rational conversation around the Thanksgiving dinner table without its ending in a mashed-potato fight? Why can’t a minister point out ungodly government actions without expecting a tirade from a parishioner as he greets people at the door, an angry Monday-morning phone call, or a letter of notification that some parishioners have found a different congregation where they’re not challenged to think about matters of national importance?

. . . you treat people differently–or excuse their inequitable treatment–depending on their race, color, religion, country of origin, or length of residence in the U. S.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar are citizens of the United States of America. Representative Ocasio-Cortez was born in the Bronx, New York; her father was also born in the Bronx, and her mother was born in Puerto Rico, which–contrary to Donald Trump’s belief–means she also was born a citizen. Representative Pressley was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised on the north side of Chicago. Does it get more American than that? Representative Tlaib was born in Detroit to Palestinian immigrants, making her the first generation of her family to be born in the U.S. Representative Omar was born in Mogadishu and lived in Somalia until forced to flee to escape the war. The family arrived in New York in 1992 and were granted asylum, when Ms. Omar was ten years old. The family moved around a bit before settling in Minneapolis. Of the four young elected officials who have been the objects of unprecedented vicious attacks by the POTUS, Ms. Omar is the only one who is not native born; she has, however, been a naturalized citizen since 2000, when she was 17 years old. In addition to her skin color and foreign birth making her a target, she also wears the hijab in respect to her Muslim faith.

Donald Trump is only the second generation of Trumps born on American soil. His grandparents migrated here from Germany. On his mother’s side, he is the first generation native born; she was from Scotland. In other words, his roots in this country don’t go deep. He has been married to two immigrants: Ivana from Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) and Melania from Yugoslavia (now Slovenia). Melania, the First Lady of the United States, migrated here in 1996, a mere 23 years ago. She became a citizen in 2006, a mere 13 years ago. A recent Huff Post article points out that Ilhan Omar has been a citizen six years longer than Melania Trump has, yet so far, Donald has not ordered Melania back to where she came from.

When the person who holds the highest office in our land goes on an unprecedented rampage against four young elected officials, the fact that all four are people of color can’t be a coincidence. To say that he is not motivated by racism is to be either mentally deficient (using my nice words) or so blindly devoted as to be incapable of admitting the obvious. Maybe both.

. . . you ignore or reject the legal parameters governing interaction with people of different race and different national origin.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission makes it illegal to discriminate against anyone because of the person’s national origin:

“It is unlawful to harass a person because of his or her national origin. Harassment can include, for example, offensive or derogatory remarks about a person’s national origin, accent or ethnicity. Although the law doesn’t prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is so frequent or severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim being fired or demoted).

The harasser can be the victim’s supervisor, a supervisor in another area, a co-worker, or someone who is not an employee of the employer, such as a client or customer.”

Based on that definition, Donald Trump’s protracted attacks on those four women would get him fired from Applebee’s, Macy’s, or Walmart. We’ve reached a sad stage in our history when the qualifications for POTUS are lower than for a supervisory position at McDonalds.

We’re in a mess, and we’re not getting out of it any time soon, but complacency is a luxury we can ill afford right now. Truth is our only refuge during troubled times, and we must keep proclaiming it. Silence is complicity.

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor

Categories
Politics Religion

Not Your Old-Time Religion

One of the most baffling, perplexing, even maddening questions of our time is how the “Christian right,” “the far right,” “the evangelicals” have become such a powerful political force and how on earth that movement has thrown its considerable clout behind such an unlikely standard bearer as Donald Trump. I have wrestled with this question, as have many others, for the past several years; and finally I’m ready to offer my answer: The “Christian right” has ceased to be a religious tradition and now exists only as a powerful political movement. In its current expression, evangelicalism bears no resemblance to a faith community except in its use of the Bible and religious dogma as weapons with which to clobber anyone who disagrees with them.

Let’s look at a little history which may shed some light on what has brought us to the place where we now find ourselves. Many of us would have little reason to care about the history of evangelicalism, what evangelicals believe, or whom they will vote for in the next presidential election. That all changed in 2016, when Russia and the evangelicals (the oddest of odd couples) chose our president. Evangelicals were the largest demographic group among Trump supporters in 2016, with 80-81% being the official number compiled from exit polls of self-professed evangelicals who cast their votes for Trump. Evangelicals continue to stand by their man, and a recent Public Opinion Strategies poll reports that 83% of them intend to vote for him again in 2020. Without this group’s overwhelming support, it’s highly unlikely that Donald Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office today. Therefore, I think it behooves us all to take a closer look at who these people are who can’t get enough of guns, cruelty toward refugees, and the most unfit person ever to disgrace the office of POTUS.

Two religious groups in the United States which are often conflated are fundamentalists and evangelicals. According to NPR’s Steve Waldman and John Green, these two groups are not the same but do have certain elements in common. Evangelicalism is a broader movement, of which fundamentalism is a stricter, more conservative, far less tolerant subset. So I think it’s accurate to say that all fundamentalists are evangelicals, but not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. The National Association of Evangelicals’ website quotes historian David Bebbington’s summary of four core distinctives which define evangelical belief: conversion (being “born again”), activism (missionary and reform efforts), biblicism (the Bible as the ultimate authority), and crucicentrism (Jesus’ death as redeeming humanity).

Fundamentalist evangelicals also believe these four distinctives but add to them. Whereas all evangelicals believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, fundamentalists also believe in a literal reading of the Bible; not only, in their view, is the Bible the final source of truth, but they believe every story, metaphor, and poem are literal historic records. Fundamentalists are also, among other things, far more isolationist than other evangelicals. They take literally the New Testament command to “ come out from among them and be ye separate” (II Corinthians 6:17). “Them,” by the way, fundamentalists interpret to mean “the world”–which incorporates everyone who does not share their worldview. They cannot recognize the legitimacy of Catholicism as a Christian faith because it is so different in theology and practice from their own narrow view of what constitutes Christianity. An overriding attitude of judgment against even other evangelicals who take a broader view of certain subjects further isolates fundamentalists into a tight-knit community whose primary goal in life is to avoid being “defiled” by anything which contradicts their beliefs.

The term “evangelicalism” has defied precise definition or agreement on its origin, but many see its roots in early 17th-century changes in the church. Fundamentalism is generally seen as a late 19th-, early 20th-century offshoot that arose in response to social and academic developments such as Darwinism, liberalism, and modernism. Leaders’ attempts to articulate and define the non-negotiable core Christian beliefs resulted in the 1910 publication of a multi-volume set of essays, edited by Reuben Torrey, titled The Fundamentals. Those who accepted this distillation of Christian theology came to be known as fundamentalists.

This little history is greatly over-simplified but serves to provide a general framework for the rise of the movement which has now given us a reality TV show presidency. It’s important to add that not all who call themselves Christians fall into either of these two camps, evangelicalism and fundamentalism. These two just seem to comprise the vocal, disruptive element that has co-opted the modern Republican Party.

Fundamentalists have earned the reputation of being anti-intellectual because of their rejecting  Darwin’s findings and other scientific information which doesn’t coincide with their literal reading of the Genesis creation account and the great flood story among others. Witness their current denial of climate science, and no more needs to be said.

Fundamentalist thought has been widely influenced by leaders such as Dwight Moody, Bob Jones Sr., Jerry Falwell, Jerry Falwell Jr., Tim LaHaye, James Dobson, Rick Warren, Pat Robertson, and Franklin Graham. What all of these men have in common is their belief in a literal, inerrant Bible; their disdain for anyone who deviates from their narrow view and their dismissal of such people as  not “real Christians”; and their view that the United States is a Christian nation and should therefore be ruled by Biblical precepts–or should I say, their interpretation of Biblical precepts.

When asked how a group, which professes to believe in the literal interpretation and inerrancy of the Bible and labels themselves the sole upholders and defenders of Biblical conduct and morality, can so enthusiastically embrace and defend the likes of DT–who violates every moral principle they claim to hold dear–their only answer is that “God often used imperfect instruments in events recorded in the Bible.” No argument there. The Old Testament gives us King David, who lusted after another man’s wife while she bathed on the rooftop, sent his servants to fetch her, had sex with her, impregnated her with a son, sent her military husband off to the front lines where he was sure to be killed, and then married her. In the New Testament, we learn that David was an ancestor of Christ and “a man after God’s own heart.”

David alone would make it pretty clear that, if all accounts are accurate, God’s not looking for perfection. But just to strengthen the case, we have Noah who celebrated safely landing the ark by getting passed-out drunk; Abraham who–impatient with waiting for God to fulfill the promise of giving him an heir–took the matter into his own hands and had sex with the maid; Rahab the prostitute, also in Jesus’ bloodline; Jonah who ran from God’s command to warn the people of Nineveh because they were wicked and, in his opinion, unworthy of God’s mercy; Matthew the tax collector, a profession generally thought to employ the scum of the earth; and Saul the persecutor of Christians who became Paul, the greatest missionary of his day for spreading the Christian faith. I think we get the picture.

Yet if the only thing that can be said in defense of electing a person to the office of president is that he’s no worse than a few people in the Bible, that’s some very thin ice.

What makes evangelicals tick? How can they be won over to a cause or a candidate? For one thing, they have long been conditioned to follow the rules out of fear: fear of hell (real flames here), fear of shame, fear of disapproval by bigger-than-life leaders, fear of ostracization. Donald Trump tapped into that fear in his very first speech, when he broad-brushed all Mexicans as murderers and rapists and continues to stir up fear to persuade supporters to go along with his cruel policies. Never mind that most mass shooters in this country have been white male citizens and we’ve done nothing to curtail gun violence, let’s build a giant wall to keep all of those Mexicans out because a few have committed horrible crimes. Fear is a powerful motivator.

Evangelicals have also been conditioned to accept their literal reading of the Bible over the hard evidence of science. The flood really happened, and the earth really was created in six days, just 6000 years ago–science be damned. Anything not specifically covered in the Bible can easily be  “proven” with a cherry-picked verse or two. Thus, the exclusion of LGBTQ people because . . . Leviticus. And some have validated their prejudice against black Americans with the story about the black race being descended from Noah’s son Ham, who was cursed for some not altogether clear reason and his descendants supposedly doomed to a life of servitude–to the end of time. Yeah, that really was taught.

With so much credence given to faith over fact, revelation over reason, is it such a stretch to understand why those same people would take the word of the person they’ve been told was sent by God over the words of fact finders, scientists, psychologists, journalists, and other smart people? Is it any wonder that they view all intellectuals with suspicion? With their conditioned response of separatism and superiority to those who see the world differently, of believing they’re the ones with the inside track to God, their blind loyalty to a criminal “president” shouldn’t be the least bit surprising.

Another characteristic of the modern evangelical and fundamentalist movements is their adulation of rock-star leaders. Although many outside those circles may know the names of only the most notorious–the Grahams, the Falwells, maybe the Joneses–ask any fundamentalist about Bill Hybels, Jack Hyles, Tony Perkins, Tim LaHaye, James Dobson, and there will be instant recognition. Different groups will give more or less respect to different names, but the names are known and revered by at least some subgroups. These are the gurus whose word is truth, whose pronouncements set policy, and whose approval is oxygen to  their followers. [Update: Some of these names, such as Jerry Falwell Jr. have fallen out of favor since this article was written.]

Should it then come as any surprise at all when one of those esteemed celebrities puts his arm around a man who in no way represents their stated beliefs or anything they ever learned in Sunday school and says “This person is sent by God to protect and preserve our nation,” the masses accept that pronouncement as divine truth and follow that man as fervently as they follow the leaders who anointed him? Sadly, the leader who gets lost in the process is the one they profess to believe above all others: Jesus, who never endorsed any of this baloney.

Donald Trump’s immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, gave the clearest statement of his Christian faith I’ve ever heard from a sitting president. And he backed up his words with a moral and scandal-free life, a ready knowledge of Christian belief, and even a spontaneous rendering of the hymn “Amazing Grace” at a funeral. Contrast that with Donald Trump’s mention of “Two Corinthians” as the only evidence of biblical knowledge he could muster on the spot. Yet President Obama is reviled by evangelicals as a non-citizen Muslim, and Donald Trump is hailed by “a significant portion of his supporters [as] literally . . . an answer to their prayers. He is regarded as something of a messiah, sent by God to protect a Christian nation” (Bobby Azarian, Ph.D., in Psychology Today).

The so-called “Christian Right” has ceased to be Christian. Although they claim unquestioned allegiance to the Bible, I’m going to venture a guess that most have not read much of the Bible; and the parts they have read are twisted to support preconceived beliefs. If they bothered to read the book they claim to follow, they would have run across a few passages which define what the Christian faith actually is. When your only reason for reading the Bible is to find support for what you already believe, you’re missing a lot.

If one wanted to know what the Christian faith is really all about, Micah 6:8 is a one-verse primer: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think locking children in filthy cages with no access to hygiene supplies, adequate food, human touch, or even a real blanket qualifies as justice, kindness, or a humble walk with God. Then again, these children are brown, so perhaps they’re excluded from the general rules? Somehow I can’t imagine those same fine Christian people looking the other way or sending their attorneys to court to defend such treatment of white children.

James 1:27 echoes Micah’s summary: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” “Care for the orphans and widows in their distress.” Yet allowing Puerto Rican Americans to languish in distress after a hurricane, desperate for the bare essentials of life, isn’t given a place on the “conservative” agenda. Nor are the children in the concentration camps or the families without health insurance or the minimum-wage workers who can barely exist on their paychecks and who would be wiped out by one unanticipated expense.

Then there’s Jesus’ own quick summary of what faith is meant to be. Asked by a Pharisee, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest,” Jesus responded: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:36-40). “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” In other words, the whole Old Testament is summed up in 28 words, further reduced to “Love God and love your fellow humans.”

Jesus reiterates those points a few chapters further on, in Matthew 25. There he gives a metaphorical description of a judgment of the nations, in which the nations will be divided into two groups: sheep and goats. The sole criterion for the division is the way in which the nations have treated the disadvantaged, “the least of these.” The sheep are those who have fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, cared for the sick, and visited the prisoner. The goats are the ones who have not done any of that. Those examples illustrate what it means to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Notice the pattern here? What do all of these passages have in common? Each one defines faith as the acknowledgment of God and the loving treatment of one’s fellow humans. Nothing else. Nada. Not abortion, LGBTQ people, public bathrooms, right to bear arms. Nothing but loving God and loving each other. Anything added to those two distinctives is politics, not faith. It’s the attempt to weaponize faith as a means to gain power and control.

When fundamentalists formed not only their own churches but their own schools–pre-K through college–they made it possible to immerse a large enough population in their so-called theology to gain the numbers needed for the political clout they strove for. Today their information network has expanded to include news outlets, mainly one: Fox News. It’s like a virtual commune in which it’s possible to live and die without ever being exposed to any other ideas than those spouted by their powerful leaders. And just recently came this announcement:

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has signed legislation permitting Briarwood Presbyterian Church to establish its own police force for its church and school campuses. The law approved two weeks ago allows the Birmingham-based church to set-up a private law enforcement department to make arrests when crimes are committed on its properties. (Patheos.com)

Legitimate concerns about this move include the strong possibility that such a police force would lead to further cover-up of crimes like sexual assault, since the enforcers would be guided more by their loyalty to the church than by their loyalty to the law of the land.

It should be clear by now that the modern evangelical movement has divorced itself from every religious principle on which it was established and has devoted itself to the accumulation of political power. This phenomenon is nothing new. Theologian Richard Rohr says this:

“Christianity is a lifestyle–a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into a ‘religion’ (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain in most of Christian history, and still believe that Jesus is one’s ‘personal Lord and Savior’ . . . The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on Earth is too great.”

The Christian church has often stood on the wrong side of history. The church did not act to oppose either slavery or the many years of violence against the freed slaves and their descendants. Martin Luther King Jr., in a section of his well-known “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” delivers a strong rebuke against the white church in 1960s America:

I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say that as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say it as a minister of the gospel who loves the church, who was nurtured in its bosom, who has been sustained by its Spiritual blessings, and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen. I had the strange feeling when I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery several years ago that we would have the support of the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests, and rabbis of the South would be some of our strongest allies. Instead, some few have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows. In spite of my shattered dreams of the past, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and with deep moral concern serve as the channel through which our just grievances could get to the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed. I have heard numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers say, follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother.

Abuses of power in the name of religion are not new, but we must never cease to call them what they are. Today’s evangelical movement is built not on faith but on white supremacy and white nationalism. Why else would a grifting, immoral, cruel, ignorant white con man be revered while an intelligent, honest, morally upright, kind, generous black man is reviled? Why else would a pious Senate Majority Leader be allowed to get away with violating the Constitution in whatever way is necessary to continue promoting the “conservative” agenda of discrediting and destroying the legacy of our only black president?

Frank Schaeffer Jr., former evangelical leader turned reasonable person, author of numerous books and articles, offers this history of the modern evangelical-political movement:

The 1970s Evangelical anti-abortion movement that Dad (Evangelical leader Francis Schaeffer), C. Everett Koop (who would be Ronald Reagan’s surgeon general) and I helped create seduced the Republican Party. We turned it into an extremist far-right party that is fundamentally anti-American. There would have been no Tea Party without the foundation we built.

The difference between now and then is that back then we were religious fanatics knocking on the doors of normal political leaders. Today the fanatics are the political leaders.

You can’t understand why the GOP was so successful in winning back both houses of congress in 2014, and wrecking most of what Obama has tried to do, unless you understand what we did back then.

You see, in the late 1960s Dad published the first of many best-selling evangelical books. When Dad toured evangelical colleges and churches all over North America, I often accompanied him while Mom and Dad — unbeknownst to them at the time — were gradually being elevated to Evangelical Protestant sainthood. This meant that a few years later when Dad took a “stand” on the issue of abortion, a powerful movement formed almost instantly, inspired by his leadership, and the evangelical-led “pro-life” movement (and the religious right) was born.

(My Horrible Right-Wing Past: Confessions of a One-Time Religious Right Icon, published in Salon)

Opposition to abortion became the rallying cry for a group also described by Schaeffer: “Evangelical Christianity was now [in the 1980s] more about winning elections than about winning souls.”

Saving unborn babies sounded much more Christian and noble than barring black students from universities such as Bob Jones University and forbidding interracial dating. Make no mistake, though: it’s always been about white male supremacy and the fear of losing that advantage to the influx of other races. Underlying all of the noble-sounding rhetoric, the one-issue litmus tests, and the religious veneer is the belief that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the Charlottesville tragedy and the claim that the Civil War was not really about slavery.

People who follow the simple precepts of loving God and loving each other don’t defend the “right” to own arsenals of deadly weapons; don’t shrug their shoulders and say there’s nothing we can do when the owner of one of those arsenals goes on a rampage and commits mass murder; don’t condone locking children in concentration camps; don’t laugh and applaud when an orange-haired cretin mocks war heroes, women who accuse him of sexual assault, handicapped people, the press, and anyone else who gets under his very thin skin; and they sure as hell don’t vote to elect that person to yet another four-year term as president. People looking for political power and the perpetuation of white nationalism do all of those things.

Let’s call it what it is.

Categories
Politics

Beyond #MeToo

A female member of my family, troubled that her boss had made an unwelcome pass at her, once confided the experience to one of our aunts. The aunt’s response was “Honey, in my day, we considered that a compliment!” Those days are over, and good riddance to them! Today’s women are smart enough to know that the attention of a powerful man is not always a sign he finds us attractive; and being seen as attractive by someone who’s under the influence of a few drinks or is drunk on his own power and authority was never really much of a compliment. We’ve also learned in the years between my aunt and my mother’s generation, my generation, and my daughter’s generation that sexual aggression has little to do with sex and a lot to do with power and control, with men’s desperation to retain their supremacy in a world where that supremacy is being challenged and undermined by women determined to change the old rules.

The #metoo movement has given women a voice to speak frankly about men’s misbehavior and a safe space in which their voices can be heard, believed, and respected. With every freedom and privilege, however, comes the caveat that the freedom must be exercised responsibly, and this safe space provided by the #metoo umbrella must not be violated by women who speak irresponsibly or who fail to understand the impact of their words.

I am keenly aware that I’m wading into a snake-infested swamp by addressing this topic, but these are things I think need to be said. I can already feel the hot breath and see the fangs of those poised to attack, but please at least hear me out. I’d like to begin by attempting to set aside what I anticipate to be some strong objections.

Anything less than full-throated endorsement of every claim made by a woman is most frequently seen as “blaming the victim,” so let’s start with that. Blaming the victim means accusing a woman who has suffered the trauma of sexual assault of “asking for it” by the way she was dressed or by something she said or did, and that’s deplorable. No woman deserves to be assaulted, and no one “asks for it.” If a woman is standing in the middle of the street naked, men should turn away and be responsible for their own actions rather than assuming the woman is inviting their advances. A man who does take advantage of the situation and commits an assault is 100% at fault and responsible for his crime.

That said, blaming the victim does not include excusing women for making irresponsible accusations or suggesting they could have resisted certain misconduct. This seems a good place to distinguish between use of force and other types of unwanted contact. Use of force is criminal and should be treated as such. The perpetrator bears full responsibility for his action, and the victim bears no responsibility; she is a victim who deserves justice, not blame. Many women are not equipped to resist forcible assault, but most of us can resist an unwanted kiss or touch; and if we fail to do so, we have to acknowledge our cooperation with the misconduct. If we say we want more power, we have to accept that power and use it. Not every inappropriate advance is an assault; sometimes it’s just an inappropriate advance, and we have always had the power to resist those advances.

Another issue I think needs clarifying is that one group of people does not gain power by destroying the group that has traditionally held the advantage. Women want respect, we want a level playing field. Our goal, in my mind, should be to make men understand, not to make them suffer, however tempting that latter goal may be. The world needs all of the good, intelligent leaders it can get; some will be female and some will continue to be male. That’s good; and it will require mutual respect, understanding, and cooperation. Anger, vengeance, and divisiveness will be counterproductive to our goals.

There’s one more attitude I’ve always found disturbing, and I’d be a wealthy woman if I were given a dollar for every time in my 40+ years of grading student essays that I read students’ descriptions of the bad old days. Young women like to talk about how things were “back in the day,” when women lived in chains and darkness, before their generation arrived on the scene to set women free and make everything okay. My first response to that is that I do not recall my grandmothers being miserable, oppressed women. Both of them were strong women who were not shy about speaking their minds and who could teach any younger woman alive today a thing or three. Yes, they lived under a different set of societal rules, but dissatisfaction with those norms was far from universal. Nonetheless, social change was already afoot, and my grandmothers acquired the right to vote when one was in her 30s, the other in her 40s. Women were beginning to seek higher levels of education, and World War II provided the impetus for many women to take their places in the work force. That generation’s activism is evidence of their strength and vision, not of their powerlessness. Women continue to struggle today and in some ways I believe are less well off than my grandmothers were. The work continues, but I think we would be better served by a more accurate picture of history.

That brings us to our current situation. The most recent man to find himself in the crosshairs of female accusation and scrutiny is Joe Biden. Upon announcing his possible candidacy for POTUS, he was greeted by the accusations of several women who claim Joe’s touchy-feely style has, on at least one occasion, made them feel uncomfortable. Well, this new protocol for greeting an announcement of political intention by hanging out all of the person’s dirty laundry is making me uncomfortable, and I think some group reflection is in order. There are some questions we’d do well to ask ourselves before making or acting on an accusation.

Here’s the account which I think bothers me most.

As reported in The Intelligencer,

When Amy Lappos was a congressional aide for U.S. representative Jim Himes in 2009, she claims that Biden touched and rubbed his nose against hers during a political fundraiser. “It wasn’t sexual, but he did grab me by the head,” she told Hartford Courant on April 1. “He put his hand around my neck and pulled me in to rub noses with me. When he was pulling me in, I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth.”

Here’s what I find disturbing. Although this encounter was brief, it wasn’t just a quick grab or touch. There was a short process: he grabbed her by the head, put his hand around her neck, pulled her in, rubbed noses. At what point did she begin feeling uncomfortable, and why at that point did she not simply pull away? And if she thought he was about to kiss her on the mouth, why did she not move to be sure that didn’t happen? What I’m reading here is a woman allowing herself to be powerless against an unwanted touch when the perpetrator was not using force. She said she didn’t file a complaint because he was vice president and she was “a nobody,” and perhaps that also explains her reason for feeling she couldn’t resist. But it doesn’t explain her reason for believing that one incident from 2009 should influence our decision on whether Joe Biden should be elected president in 2020.

Joe Biden’s actions were wrong, and he bears full responsibility for what he did, but she bears responsibility for what she did not do but had the power to do. Like every woman I know, I have been the subject of unwanted advances, including attempts at kissing me on the lips. I have resisted those advances and in most cases been able to remain friends with the man without further incident. I can’t think of any incident in my life which, if the man announced his intention to run for political office, would compel me to speak up and share my account of his behavior with the world. If any of them had, however, involved the use of force or been indicative of a shady character, you bet I’d let the world know.

I’m not defending Joe Biden, and I think there are plenty of reasons he should not be president; I just don’t think these accusations should be the things that disqualify him. So how do we weigh accusations of misconduct? How do we decide when they’re deal breakers and when they’re not the most important information about the accused? Most obviously, we all have to be willing to set aside party affiliation and judge each case on the relevant information. No one of any party should be given a pass for sexual misconduct, and no one of any party should have his reputation or his career derailed by irresponsible accusations and sensationalist media treatment of those reports.

I think the most important question and one which is not always easily answered is whether the behavior is a personality problem or a character problem. Personality problems are still problems and should be addressed, but if the accused is willing to admit he has a flaw and do the work of changing, I don’t think that issue alone should be disqualifying.

The seven or so reports against Joe Biden so far seem to indicate that these actions are the result of a warm, affectionate, caring personality, paired with a certain amount of tone-deafness toward the changes which have been in effect long enough that he should have caught on by now. He’s not blameless, but are these actions alone enough to end his career? When Bill Clinton was forced to admit his marijuana use during college, he felt compelled to mitigate the impact by famously claiming he “did not inhale.” When Kamala Harris freely admitted some marijuana use, she added with a laugh, “And I did inhale.” Times have changed, and it’s not always easy to keep up, but those who seek positions of leadership have to keep working at it.

Here is Biden’s response to the allegations:

“I shake hands, I hug people, I grab men and women by the shoulders and say, ‘You can do this.’ Whether they are women, men, young, old, it’s the way I’ve always been. It’s the way I show I care about them, that I listen. Social norms have begun to change, they’ve shifted. And the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset. And I get it. I get it. I hear what they’re saying, I understand it. And I’ll be much more mindful. That’s my responsibility and I’ll meet it.”

Right answer, Joe! Now shut-up and stop making dumb jokes about hugging people on public platforms.

I can’t see a character flaw in a guy who was a little slow catching on to the shifting norms regarding personal space and who promises he’ll do better. How clean does someone have to be to be eligible for public service? Are we eliminating good people by nitpicking every moment of their lives?

I do see an enormous character flaw in a guy who has bragged about grabbing women by the pussy because he can, because he’s a celebrity and they’ll allow him to do whatever he wants. I see huge character flaws in a guy who rapes an unconscious woman behind a dumpster and then leaves her to possibly die there and in priests and ministers who prey on vulnerable children and adults who look to them for spiritual support and guidance. And those character failings are exacerbated by failure to accept responsibility, to repent, and to discard attitudes of white male privilege. Everyone deserves a second chance to be a better human being and a better citizen; but I believe one such strike, revealing a corrupt character, should be an automatic out for serving as POTUS or other high official. And I would say the same thing if Joe Biden were a Republican and Donald Trump a Democrat. Corrupt character is corrupt character, regardless of the labels it wears.

I don’t enjoy being called terms of endearment by strangers, male or female. If I’m not your “hon” or your “honey” or your “sweetheart,” I’d prefer you not call me that. Although I’m human enough to be flattered by an appreciative or admiring look from a man, when that look turns to something more like a leer or threat, I’m outta here. I appreciate men who know how to read signals and who respect the need for consent before even the most innocent of physical contact. I’m also aware of my own tendency to touch and my sometimes negligence to read the signals correctly. As Joe Biden says, norms have changed, and they continue to evolve; so it’s everyone’s responsibility to keep up. But do we really need to pillory every person who has a lapse in judgment?

The #metoo movement is a great start, but we still have work to do if we want true equality and justice. We need to set realistic standards for our leaders, recognize our common humanity, and work toward understanding and cooperation among people of all genders and sexual orientations. Just how clean does a person have to be to qualify for leadership? Are we bypassing good people because of personality quirks? Are we electing people of corrupt character because they happen to belong to our party or promise to advance our own agendas? Are we allowing conduct in candidates and officials within our own political party that we condemn in those from an opposing party? What is the motive behind lodging a public accusation? Is it to humiliate, to avenge, to assert our own power? Or is the matter so serious that we truly believe it disqualifies the perpetrator from ever serving in public office? Are we, with encouragement from sensationalist media reports, focusing so much on accusations of improper personal conduct that we don’t bother looking at a candidate’s policies and stances on important issues?

Perhaps the most important question is, can we handle our own problems and uncomfortable moments without feeling the need to bring everything to the public square? That’s a difficult question in the age of the Internet and social media, where we can’t even eat dinner without feeling compelled to post a photo for our friends to see. But we have to try. #Metoo is an important step, but there’s much work left to be done.

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Politics

America the Beautiful?

On Thursday morning, I awoke to the anniversary of the day I was born. It was not one of the much-discussed “zero birthdays,” but one nonetheless that gives one pause to reflect on one’s mortality and where approximately one is in the overall game. As I thought about that sobering number (I still can’t say it), I realized I’m in the fourth quarter. I’m heartened by the fact that some of the most outstanding touchdowns have been made in the final quarter, often with minutes or seconds left on the clock; so sitting out this quarter on the bench (or rocking chair) is not an option, and I’m excited about what treasures remain to be discovered.

On Saturday morning, I stood at attention in the bleachers–where I was about to watch my two grandsons’ baseball team win a decisive 13-5 victory–listening to a recorded voice belt out the words to our national anthem. The national anthem has always brought a lump to my throat. With all of our country’s problems and moral failings, I’ve been grateful for the privilege of being born here and enjoying the benefits of citizenship in a country which so many have risked their lives trying to reach and be granted the citizenship which I and my fellow Americans may often have taken for granted.

On that particular Saturday morning, however, the lump in my throat and the tears that stung my eyes were inspired not by my pride in the USA–though I am still proud of my country–but by the awful reality of things that are happening which I could never have dreamed possible in my earlier life. I have lived under 13 presidents, not including the impostor who currently lives in the White House. I have lived through four wars, the Cold War, the Jim Crow era, the battles for social change in the 1960s, the assassination of a president and the murders of a presidential candidate and a beloved civil rights leader, the riots of 1968, the Watergate scandal, the impeachment of a president and near-impeachment of another, more recently the mass murders of hundreds of innocent people by crazed gunmen, and plenty more. I’ve witnessed the signs marking whites-only territories, separating them from the spaces relegated to people of color, and I’ve seen those signs enforced. I know that I live in a country stolen from its native inhabitants.

I’m under no illusions, nor have I ever been under any illusion, that the country of which I’m proud to be a citizen is a model of moral rectitude. What has given me hope, however, is the values to which such a plurality of my fellow citizens ascribed that they became known as our defining American values. However dark the day, I believed that there were more good people than bad, that my government would eventually correct its course and move in the direction of greater justice and equality for all, that a champion or hero would always appear on the scene who could grab the confidence of enough people to start a movement which would make things better. Our president has for years been granted the title “leader of the free world,” because so many other countries look to the USA for leadership and support.

The first presidential election I can remember is the contest between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. I recall chanting on the school playground, “We like Ike! He’s our man! We threw Stevenson in the garbage can!” From that time on, I’ve liked some presidents and disliked others, agreed with some and disagreed with others, wished some could have remained in office longer, and counted the days until others would finally leave. I watched through tears, holding my 8-month-old firstborn baby on my lap, as Richard Nixon made his resignation speech. No president had ever resigned during his elected term, and I wondered what kind of country we were leaving our children when such a thing could happen.

With such deep scars on our history, what is it that makes today different from any other time? Why do I suddenly feel I won’t live long enough to see my country restored to its previous level of respect and leadership in the world? What is so much worse now than the way things have always been?

Those questions can be only partially answered at this time; historians will wrestle for years to come to put the events of this so-far young century into perspective and to trace the long-term effects of today’s morass of corruption and scandal. For starters, though, the presidents I can remember–the best of them and the worst of them–have been men of knowledge and principle. They have been bred to conduct themselves with a level of decorum that befits the leader of a great country and of the free world. With notable exceptions, they have acted in what they at least believed was the best interest of our country. More importantly, when leaders have failed, citizens have taken it upon themselves to speak out and take action against injustice and corruption–sometimes in mass demonstrations. Things have always seemed to get better; the good guys usually win. Until now.

The tears that welled up in my eyes during last Saturday’s playing of the national anthem were caused by the bitter reality that none of those things are currently true. We have an impostor living in the people’s house who is okay with ripping apart families, putting babies in cages, and then sexually assaulting those babies. He’s okay with the fact that the thousands of children are living in these obscene conditions may never be reunited with their families because no one thought it important to keep track of which child goes with which family and where all of the families are. He refuses to speak out against white supremacists who commit acts of horror, calling them instead “very fine people.” He threatens and encourages violence against his political opponents, most recently speaking these chilling words to a Breitbart News interviewer: “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of Bikers for Trump — I have tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point and then it would be very, very bad.” Bikers for Trump? Really?

Never before have we had a thug or a mob boss in the White House who is profiting off the presidency. Never before have we had a president who lies every day and whose lies are obvious and easily disprovable. Never before have we had a president who daily attacks private citizens, members of his government, and other national leaders. Never before have we had a president who prefers receiving his information from Fox News instead of classified intelligence briefings. Never before have we had a president too illiterate and intellectually incurious to read daily briefings. Never before have we had a president under FBI investigation since the first day of his presidency. Never before have we had a president who it is credibly reported got elected with help from a foreign adversary.

President Obama is known as the first social media president, since those platforms were just coming into common use during his terms in office; but not until Donald Trump have we had a president who uses Twitter as a weapon to attack his opponents, send dog whistles to his “base,” and incite insurrection. Not until Donald Trump have we had a president with the temperament and vocabulary of a toddler, who expresses his disdain for opponents by calling them childish names. And not until Donald Trump have we had a president who surrounds himself with the most vulgar and criminal element of society. Never before Donald Trump have we had a president cited by a mass murderer as his hero and inspiration.

Yet as sobering and appalling as all of this is, these are not our country’s worst problems. Even worse than having a thoroughly corrupt “president” is the fact that this morally degraded con man has an enthusiastic following that just can’t wait to vote for him again! Trump’s approval ratings have pretty consistently remained somewhere in the 40-something-percent range. While those of us who stay awake at night wondering when and how this long national nightmare may end take comfort in the fact that he has less than a majority, it’s not much less. And given the number of people who don’t give a crap and the number who support third-party candidates and the nonsense of the electoral college, 40-something is enough to win an election. It already did. Those of us who might like to console ourselves with the thought that even if Mueller doesn’t come through, Congress doesn’t impeach, and the Southern District of New York’s actions don’t come to fruition before 2020, our fellow citizens are intelligent enough and morally upright enough to soundly vote him out of office are fooling ourselves.

We’re also fooling ourselves when we lamely recite such mantras as “This is not who we are” and “We’re better than this.” The ugly truth is that when forty percent or more of a country’s citizens look at a corrupt government and applaud it and enthusiastically await their opportunity to extend that government another four years, this IS who we are. We’re not better than this; we really are this bad.

Every day I ask myself the question, “How on earth can that many people see the same things I’m seeing and think they’re okay or good or a dream come true?” How on earth can the people who live in the same country I live in praise the same things I abhor? How can they be okay with a president who attacks dead national heroes and praises dictators and white supremacists? How can they excuse the ignoring of presidential duties such as speaking on behalf of our country to express sincere condolence when another country is reeling from the murder of 49 citizens?

The short answer to all of those questions is that Trump’s supporters share his degraded values; morally, he is one of them. The racism that’s written into our national DNA, that so many gave their last ounce of energy and devotion to overcome, never really went away; it just went underground. This 40-something percent of our fellow citizens seethed the whole time at the restraint of “political correctness” which prevented them from uttering racial epithets and denying citizens of color the rights they deserve. Then along came a candidate who spoke their frustration out loud: Damn political correctness! Every vile, vulgar word that comes out of their leader’s mouth perfectly articulates their own prejudices and frustrations and their fear of losing the only power most of them have: the superior position given them by the accidents of birth, white skin and male gender. They’re terrified of losing their majority, and this leader promises to help them retain it. What’s not to love?

We’ll never have a better president until we become better people. Donald Trump is the people’s choice (and Vladimir Putin’s); and for all of his ignorance, rage, tweet storms, threats, attacks, childish tantrums, and moral corruption, close to half of the people in this country support him. They support him because they are him. There’s no other reason. We’re not better than this; we are this. The tragedy of America is not Donald Trump, it’s the fact that people love Donald Trump, approve of his vileness, and want to extend the nightmare an extra four years. Now what do we do about that?

Trump is who he is; that won’t change. He doesn’t want to change, and nothing any of us can do will change him. The only thing we can change is ourselves. How do we correct the failure of our schools that have neglected to teach students critical thinking skills and left them vulnerable to the rantings of a madman? How do we address the corruption in our churches that have so perverted their theology as to make a Donald Trump not only acceptable but a gift straight from God: a tool of the Almighty to wield justice and usher in the long-sought theocracy? How do we finally once-and-for-all get to the roots of our racism and all of the other isms and cleanse ourselves from these darkest parts of our human nature?

Healing must begin by heeding the appeal of President Lincoln:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

John Winthrop, one of the leaders in the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its governor for 12 of the first 20 years of its existence, said in 1630:

“For we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our god in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world . . .”

Now almost 400 years later, the eyes of the whole world are still upon us; and what they’re seeing is pretty embarrassing some days. Winthrop’s lofty metaphor of a city upon a hill comes with a stern and sobering warning: “We could become a story and a byword through the world.” In other words, don’t take this privilege and position for granted; if you do, you can squander the opportunity to demonstrate that the government our founders envision is capable of succeeding. Those founders saw our nation as a great experiment which was supposed to determine whether humans could live as equals and be trusted to govern themselves, to prove that we didn’t need a monarch. Governor Winthrop warned, however, that if we failed to live out the best  parts of our human nature, our name could become synonymous with the failure of a great human experiment and proof that evil will triumph over good in the end.

Evil hasn’t triumphed yet, but it’s gained way too strong a foothold for my comfort. Forget Donald Trump! He won’t be around forever (it will only seem that way), but our children and grandchildren will live in the world we’re creating right now. I don’t expect to see the full undoing of this corrupt period in my lifetime, but I want my grandchildren and your grandchildren to live in a country governed by men and women in touch with their better angels. What can you and I do right now to help create that kind of world for our grandchildren and their grandchildren? The eyes of the whole world are watching us.

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Politics

What’s in a Name?

Shakespeare’s Juliet raises the question in the often-mislabeled “balcony scene” (there is actually no balcony, just a window). A little earlier, she is spotted by Romeo across a crowded room at her family’s big party to which he has obviously not been invited. He approaches her and makes a romantic speech replete with religious metaphors, they kiss twice, and both are in love. Only then do they learn that they are members of the two Verona families who have been enemies for as long as anyone can recall. Having returned to her room, Juliet laments to the moon, “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore [that’s why, not where] are you Romeo?”

Unaware that Romeo has scaled the garden wall and is listening to her lament, she continues:

‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy.

Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.

What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other word would smell as sweet.

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,

Retain that dear perfection which he owes

Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,

And for that name, which is no part of thee

Take all myself.

So in 21st-century parlance, the speech would go something like this:

Dammit, why do you have to be a Montague? ANY other family in the world would be fine, but YOU had to come from the one family that’s off limits! And why should that be a problem anyway? You are who you are, regardless of the name you’re called. If we called a rose a skunk, it wouldn’t change the sweetness of its fragrance. The essence of a person or an object is in itself, not in the word assigned to identify it. This romance isn’t going to end well because I’m a Capulet and you’re a Montague, but those are only words, not who we are.

Well, as usual, Shakespeare nailed it; yet 400 years later, we’re still put off by words. When my daughter was a child, she hated potatoes; she wouldn’t touch a baked potato, mashed potato, or au gratin potato. But she loved French fries, couldn’t get enough of them. I long debated whether I should let her in on the secret that French fries are potatoes cut into sticks and dunked in hot oil.

When reality is unpleasant, we resort to euphemism to ease the discomfort of talking about it. We often say someone has “passed away” because it’s less jarring than saying the person “died.” I had a hair stylist years ago who one day ended his own life. The person who informed me of his death said that he had “passed away.” I’m not criticizing her attempt to be sensitive, but somehow the language didn’t fit the reality. Dying peacefully in one’s own bed seems more consistent with “passing away”; hanging oneself in one’s place of business is a whole different feeling. In fact, death can be referred to euphemistically by many expressions: “bought the farm,” “bit the dust,” “kicked the bucket,” and a long list of others. The question is why we feel the need to use alternate words for the same reality.

Saying you were let go from a job is easier on the ego than admitting you were fired. Having a negative cash flow sounds so much less catastrophic than being broke. Calling someone frugal or economically prudent sounds more flattering than saying they’re cheap. Breaking wind sounds classier than farting. Over the hill is easier on the vanity than admitting to being old. Calling a jail a correctional facility puts a more positive spin on a negative reality. When parents decide to “have the talk” with their children, “the birds and the bees” induce less nervousness than “sex.” And our high school friends who had been intimate were more likely to confide that they had “gone all the way” than that they had “had sex.”

Language is powerful. Not only can it mask reality, it can sometimes shape reality. I heard a sermon this morning about attitudes 40-50 years ago toward countries like Viet Nam and Cuba. Many of us were taught that people from those countries were our enemies because they were communists. “Communism” is such a trigger word that the very mention of it creates animosity and enemies where they don’t otherwise exist. We now trade with both Viet Nam and Cuba, love our Vietnamese nail techs, and have opportunities to forge friendships and partnerships with people on the island of Cuba, just 90 miles from the southernmost American city.

Since taking office in January 2017, Donald Trump has had journalists searching their thesauruses for ways to describe the lies he tells every day. In these uncharted waters, journalists are struggling with a new reality and how best to label that reality in terms that both respect the office which all of us have been taught must be respected, yet also tell the truth about the current occupant of the office. It just doesn’t feel right to say “The president lied,” so we get the whole thesaurus list of alternatives: falsehoods, false statements, untruths, and many others. With the New York Times tally of provable lies now topping the 8000 mark, most journalists are opting for the raw truth: the president lies.

So call it a French fry and it’s yummy, call it a potato and “No, thanks!” Call it escargot and the connoisseurs will line up at your door, call it sautéed snails and ewww. An omelette du fromage sounds way more elegant than cheese and eggs. The same people who order mountain oysters might pass on a plate full of bull, pig, or sheep testicles; but surprise, surprise: they’re the same thing. Black pudding might sound divine when you’re picturing a rich, creamy dark chocolate confection, but you’d probably change your dessert order quickly when you learn it’s really made from pigs’ blood. Words matter!

The biggest lie most of us were told when we were children is “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me!” We’ve also told that lie. We said it to the bully who taunted us, but little did we know how those words would haunt us. A broken bone hurts, but it heals; flesh wounds are painful, but they grow together leaving barely a scar to show where they were. Unkind, hateful, or spiteful words can linger in our memories and cause pain years later. A hard punch might feel good by comparison to harsh, soul-crushing words. Words matter a lot!

As the 2020 primary race is heating up, the bugaboo word of the year is “socialism.” The very mention of it stirs fear and anger in the hearts of millions (mostly Republicans) and evokes visions of peace, prosperity, and equality in the minds of millions more. Some see bread lines while others see enough for all; some see free loaders living off the state while others see health care and peace of mind for every citizen; some see a welfare state while others dream of a place where no one has to worry about how they’re going to pay for basic necessities and human rights.

The problem is not so much with the facts and concepts as with the word. It doesn’t help either that many people these days have no capacity for analysis, critical thinking, or seeing a subject from more than one angle. The world runs on talking points, not logic. We talk but we don’t listen, or when we do listen, it’s really just a polite pause before launching our next talking point. Conversation has virtually ceased to exist, if by conversation we mean listening to what another person says, absorbing it, understanding it, giving it a moment of serious reflection, and then uttering a thoughtful response. Hence, calling one’s philosophy “democratic socialism” makes about as much impact on those for whom “socialism” is evil as announcing that you’re serving “Moroccan Fried Beef Liver and Onions” to a table full of confirmed liver haters. Dress it up, give it a fancy name, and it’s still liver–or socialism.

Many fear socialism because they equate it with communism. Socialism, simply defined, is “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” Ideally, of course, such a system would insure an equal slice of the pie for every individual citizen, but we all know that things don’t always play out according to the ideal. Communism, simply defined, is “a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs.”

A website called Investopedia offers the following comparison among the systems of communism, socialism, and capitalism:

Communism and socialism are economic and political structures that promote equality and seek to eliminate social classes. The two are interchangeable in some ways, but different in others. In a communist society, the working class owns everything, and everyone works toward the same communal goal. There are no wealthy or poor people — all are equal, and the community distributes what it produces based only on need. Nothing is obtained by working more than what is required. Communism frequently results in low production, mass poverty and limited advancement. Poverty spread so widely in the Soviet Union in the 1980s that its citizens revolted. Like communism, socialism’s main focus is on equality. But workers earn wages they can spend as they choose, while the government, not citizens, owns and operates the means for production. Workers receive what they need to produce and survive, but there’s no incentive to achieve more, leaving little motivation. Some countries have adopted aspects of socialism. The United Kingdom provides basic needs like healthcare to everyone regardless of their time or effort at work. In the U.S., welfare and the public education system are a form of socialism. Both are the opposite of capitalism, where limitations don’t exist and reward comes to those who go beyond the minimum. In capitalist societies, owners are allowed to keep the excess production they earn. And competition occurs naturally, which fosters advancement. Capitalism tends to create a sharp divide between the wealthiest citizens and the poorest, however, with the wealthiest owning the majority of the nation’s resources.

As you can see, both communism and socialism have their downsides, but capitalism doesn’t come off looking so good either. The United States today is seeing the end result of centuries of free enterprise. The divide between the richest and the poorest is the widest it has ever been, and the middle class has virtually disappeared. The Willy Lomans who have spent their entire lives chasing the American Dream find themselves in old age without the ability to retire or to pay their bills, not for lack of hard work but as the result of a system that has rewarded the wealthiest and penalized the poorest.

Yet those most affected by the inequity are the loudest critics of any changes that might better their quality of life, because they are often the most easily duped by rich, powerful leaders who want to preserve their wealth and power at the expense of those on whose backs their wealth was amassed. Those who want to keep the 99% poor and vulnerable are evil but not stupid; they know what buttons to push to keep the masses voting against their own best interests. Just label an idea socialist and you’re guaranteed a majority vote against it.

A February 24, 2019, article in the HuffPost bears the headline “Republicans Have Been Smearing Democrats as Socialists Since Way Before You Were Born.” The latest round of accusations from Trump and others that this or that progressive idea is socialist may seem new to many; but according to the article, it is “the oldest trick in the book.”

Contemporary political conservatism has been focused on blocking social change that challenges existing hierarchies of class, race and sex since its founding in response to the French Revolution. Socialism emerged as the biggest threat to class hierarchies in due time and conservatives have called everything they don’t like socialism ever since.”

”Every single political actor since the late 19th century advocating for some form progressive social change ― whether it be economic reform, challenging America’s racial caste system or advocating for women’s rights or LGBT rights ― has been tarred as a socialist or a communist bent on destroying the American Free Enterprise System.

Examples begin with William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and center on the president most famously accused of socialism: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who by the way was elected to four terms and was the reason term limits were imposed on the presidency. So it would appear that not everyone was frightened by the accusations that the New Deal was a socialist agenda aimed at destroying America.

Never one to pass up an opportunity to further deceive and control his base, Donald Trump is tossing around the S-word a lot these days. Just this week, in his two-hour speech to CPAC (two hours of his rambling, whining, and childish, churlish attacks would send me to the psychiatric ward!), Trump made lavish use of the S-word to discredit congressional Democrats–certain ones in particular–and any proposal that threatens to upset the imbalance of power that keeps people like him in control. Among other things, he said:

“Socialism is not about the environment, it’s not about justice, it’s not about virtue. Socialism is about only one thing — it’s called power for the ruling class, that’s what it is. Look at what’s happening in Venezuela and so many other places.” (reported by CNN)

Power for the ruling class? Isn’t that what we have now and what he’s determined to protect?

So you want to kill an idea? Want to defeat a progressive candidate? Call them socialist, and millions of people will jump to your side. Yet how many citizens and voters know what they’re objecting to? A March 29, 2012, article in Daily Kos lists 75 organizations and programs that currently exist in America which, by definition, are socialist. The list includes our taxpayer-funded military; our public schools which guarantee equal access to education and are paid for by tax money; public libraries, also funded by tax payers; police, fire, and postal services; congressional health care, provided by your tax money for the people who spend their days and nights fighting to be sure you don’t have access to the same quality healthcare you buy for them; Social Security; Medicare and Medicaid; public parks; sewer systems, which I’ve never heard anyone complain about; public street lighting; and about 62 other things which most people would never think to label as socialist but in reality are just that.

So what is it about socialism that makes it so scary? Is it the individual benefits of it? Obviously not. It’s the word. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and socialism by any other name is still socialism and would still bring the benefits of equal access to necessities and human rights. What’s in a name? A lot of power but not much logic.

I’m not advocating for the United States to become a fully socialist country; I am advocating for my fellow citizens to start thinking and stop the knee-jerk reactions to words that scare them because they’ve been conditioned to fear rather than think. I’m advocating for my fellow citizens to reject either-or/black-white comparisons and consider reasonable shades of gray alternatives. Our democracy depends on it.

Categories
Politics

Blame, Shame, and Zero Tolerance

I live in Fort Myers, Florida. On May 23, 2001, our local newspaper reported that a senior at Estero High School had been found to have a steak knife on the passenger-side floor board of her car while the car was parked on school property. The 18-year-old was arrested and jailed and was also suspended from school for five days. Because May is graduation month, this young woman was denied the privilege of marching with her classmates in the high school graduation she had anticipated and worked toward for thirteen years.

A National Merit Scholar with no record of disciplinary issues was suspended and incarcerated on “a felony charge of possession of a weapon on school property” (Associated Press) because of the Fort Myers school system’s recently adopted zero-tolerance policy toward having weapons on campus. The young woman and her family said the knife was inadvertently left in the car after she had moved some possessions over the weekend, and she was not even aware that it was there until school officials spotted it and approached her. According to the May 23, 2001, Associated Press article, “Sheriff Lt. Bill Byrus said he sympathizes with Brown, but said the arrest is not up to the discretion of the officer or based on the student’s behavior record.”

I don’t know this young woman, but my heart went out to her when I read her sad news almost 18 years ago. I’ve been reminded of the incident recently because of the zero tolerance attitudes of government officials and the media toward any wrong-doing of those in public life, regardless of how isolated the incident or how long ago it occurred. President Clinton famously claimed not to have inhaled the marijuana he smoked in college to appease critics who thought any use of weed at any time in one’s life constituted a disqualification from ever serving in public office.

Examples such as these demonstrate clearly the down side of zero tolerance. Zero tolerance is right-hearted but wrong-headed. It focuses on the worst day of a person’s life, whether or not the actions of that day were done with malicious intent or were the result of accidental circumstances, carelessness, youthful indiscretion, or plain ol’ human stupidity. It gives no credit for the hundreds of other days on which the person may have done quite outstanding things such as earning the rank of National Merit Scholar or gaining the public trust necessary for election to high political office.

News flash! Human beings do stupid things. All of us. We do them when we’re young, and we do them when we’re old. Powerful people do them, and not-so-powerful people do them. The question is which stupid things warrant altering the course of another person’s life. Does any one of us want our epitaph to set in stone the worst thing we ever did? I certainly don’t. I’ve done some pretty stupid things, but I hope when I’m gone those won’t be the first things that come to mind when my name is mentioned. I hope I can do enough good things to make love, compassion, intelligence, activism for social justice, and caring for my family my enduring legacy. I want to be remembered for my best day, not my worst; and I feel certain every person reading this article will say the same.

Zero tolerance is right-hearted. Everyone, especially our leaders, should be held to high moral standards; and even the occasional racial slur or act of bigotry must not be allowed to be considered normal. Laws for carrying weapons should also be uniformly enforced.

Yet individual circumstances can’t be ignored, and grace must always be an option. My mother lost a small pair of scissors to the TSA in 2002 because of the new zero-tolerance policies for carrying any potential weapon onto an airplane. I was shown grace in 2011 when I stupidly tried to board a plane with eight steak knives in my carry-on. When I explained to the kind TSA agent that we had just buried my mother five days earlier and that these were some of her possessions and that my head was obviously not screwed on straight at that moment, she allowed me to exit the screening area and return to the ticket counter where I could check the bag. Same rules, same offense, different circumstances, and different results.

And that’s why zero tolerance is wrong-headed. Such policies ensnare officials in a web of their own rigid rules. They allow no room for judgment, for considering mitigating factors, for looking at individual circumstances, for showing grace. Should students ever be permitted to deliberately carry any kind of weapon onto a school campus? Absolutely not. I believe, however, that intent is the key. When a sheriff’s deputy has to say that he is left with no option other than incarcerating an 18-year-old and denying her the privilege of participating in the high school graduation ceremony for which she had worked and which is for most of us the highlight of our first two decades of life, something is clearly wrong. When a man or woman demonstrates his or her qualifications to serve as president, should minor drug use decades earlier carry more weight than the person’s more recent accomplishments and qualifications for the job? Zero tolerance policies cause officials to be hoist with their own petard (caught in their own trap, hanged on their own scaffold), to summon Shakespeare.

So I guess you’ve figured out by now where this is going. In recent years, photos and videos, along with personal accusations and testimonies, frequently emerge from closets to be spread across social media with the speed of a blazing wild fire. Many political aspirations have been dashed by such discoveries, and many more reputations have been tarnished by photographic evidence of past unacceptable behavior. In some cases, the judgment is warranted, but can the same rigid standard be applied to every situation? Does elapsed time mitigate the offense? Do cultural changes have a bearing? Does the accused person’s overall character and pattern of behavior temper the severity of the single action?

Most recently on the media hot seat, as you know unless you’ve spent this week in coma, is Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia. Governor Northam is a Democrat, but the calls for his resignation are bipartisan. Thirty years ago, he was photographed for his medical school yearbook wearing either blackface or a KKK hood. He initially admitted to being one of the two young men in the photo, then later denied that he was either of them. The changing story is grounds for concern and possible censure. But is the fact that he did this one stupid and racist thing thirty years ago enough to disqualify him for the rest of his life from serving in elected office? Do the things he has done since that photo was taken count for anything? According to reporting in The Washington Post, ” In public office, Northam worked to expand Medicaid, the health program that serves the poor, and he helped to restore voting rights for felons, a policy that helps many black men. Many in the black community saw him as an ally, and as one of the good guys.” One stupid moment vs years of being “one of the good guys.” Which should prevail?

Most disturbing of all is that most of the conversation surrounding this debate has little to do with Governor Northam, his compensating qualities, or his being a human deserving of a chance at redemption. It’s all about what these allegations mean for his party’s chances at dominating Virginia government. It’s politics, not a human life, that’s keeping people up at night.

Another incident you’re also aware of if you’ve remained conscious for the last eighteen months is Al Franken’s forced resignation from the Senate on January 2, 2018. Many still have not reconciled his offense with the severity of the punishment. Allegations of sexual misconduct before his 2008 election to the Senate led to bipartisan demands for his resignation, to which he acceded; yet many still feel conflicted about his being driven from an office in which he did so much good. The zero tolerance of the #metoo movement defined his life by a few mistakes, admittedly reprehensible, instead of allowing him to apologize and continue his leadership in reforming health care and other causes on which he brought his strong progressive values to bear. Did we as a nation lose more than we gained by forcing a flawed but decent and intelligent leader from the power chambers of our government?

Should Brett Kavanaugh have been denied a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court because of Christine Blasey-Ford’s allegations of sexual misconduct when they were in high school? Although I believe what she said, her claims were uncorroborated, so it’s difficult to say what their effect should have been. I’m far more disturbed by his entitled attitude and public temper tantrums during the Senate hearings. He lacks the temperament to sit on our highest court, and he fails to recognize that such an appointment is a high honor and privilege, not his birthright for being born into wealth and entitlement. I’m also disturbed by his failure to own past misconduct, such as his irresponsible drinking habits, and to show evidence of having evolved and matured. I don’t think it’s necessary to go back thirty years to disqualify him.

Here’s another question: What’s culture got to do with it? My sister once confided in one of our aunts, who was born in 1926, that a man my sister worked for had made an inappropriate pass at her. Our aunt’s response was, “Honey, in my day we considered that a compliment!” Does that justify the man’s action? Of course not. Wrong is wrong, but cultural norms alter our response and what we’re willing to accept and condone.

 Was wearing blackface, during a time when doing so seemed an innocent entertainment costume, a racist act? Was Al Jolson racist? Wrong is wrong, no matter when it is done, but I think the cultural norms of the time have to be considered. When I was growing up, the N-word was in common use. Was it morally right? Nope, not then or now. But by the cultural norms of the mid-twentieth century, it was accepted. Should everyone who used the N-word during that time be forever banned from public service? I would say that those who still use the word are demonstrating their racism and should be disqualified. Those whose use of the word was limited to a period in time and who have been willing to evolve to more enlightened standards of conduct, however, I would not consider racist. I believe we would deprive ourselves of many good leaders if we accepted only those whose conduct has been above reproach on every day of their lives. In fact, no one would qualify by those rules.

We must distinguish between people who have done a few stupid things and those for whom racism and corruption have been patterns of behavior. Did I mention that ALL human beings have done a few stupid things? Okay. Then which of us is qualified to throw that first stone? We also have to ask ourselves where we’re going to draw the line between flawed human stupidity and patterns of behavior that indicate moral deficiency. Look to some of our most esteemed leaders, and you’ll find in every one of them some record of moral failing.

Punishing folks for violating standards that were not part of the cultural norms at the time of their actions is retroactive enforcement of current rules. If the City of Fort Myers posts a No Left Turn sign at an intersection today, can they issue me a ticket for turning left there last week? If making a left turn at that intersection is considered dangerous, it was just as dangerous last week, last month, and last year; but no one had yet determined that the danger was great enough to warrant prohibiting left turns left at that place. If Costco starts charging for their samples (Relax! It’s not happening!), can they force me to pay for all of the samples I’ve eaten while they’ve been free? That would be both unfair and impractical. Retroactive rule enforcement doesn’t work.

In January 2011, the newspaper The Guardian announced the soon-to-be-published new, sanitized edition of Mark Twain’s masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In a move to counter the censorship that had landed Huck Finn on banned books lists and caused it to be dropped from many school curricula, a publisher decided to expurgate the more than 200 occurrences of the N-word from Twain’s work. I don’t even know where to start on this. I taught this novel many times, and before each reading of it, I talked with classes about whether the language would be a problem for them. Not a single student ever refused to read the book because of the language; they consistently responded that they understood the novel was set in a specific time and culture. We did not use the word in my classroom, but I felt college students should be mature enough to witness another culture and perhaps to grow from the experience.

Mark Twain was a master of dialect. In an introductory note, he explains:

“In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit the Missouri negro dialect, the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect, the ordinary Pike County dialect, and four variations of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike, and not succeeding.”

He signed it “The author.”

As a reader, I felt my experience was greatly enhanced by being able to “hear” the characters’ speech, instead of just reading standard-English words on a page. Oral reading of passages made the characters come to life even more vividly.

Written dialect records the common speech of a region, and that speech consists of both pronunciation and vocabulary. The N-word in Twain’s time and location was even more common by far than it was during my youth. Have we become so delicate that we can’t look honestly at other cultures’ ways of life and speech without judging them by our own standards and banning them from our education? If so, we are greatly impoverishing our education, and that’s a tragedy.

The Guardian article quotes Dr. Sarah Churchwell, “senior lecturer in US literature and culture at the University of East Anglia,” who said the changes in Twain’s work made her angry.

“The fault lies with the teaching, not the book. You can’t say ‘I’ll change Dickens so it is compatible with my teaching method’. Twain’s books are not just literary documents but historical documents, and that word is totemic because it encodes all of the violence of slavery. The point of the book is that Huckleberry Finn starts out racist in a racist society, and stops being racist and leaves that society. These changes mean the book ceases to show the moral development of his character. They have no merit and are misleading to readers. The whole point of literature is to expose us to different ideas and different eras, and they won’t always be nice and benign. It’s dumbing down.”

Have we reached the point that masterpieces of the past have to be dumbed down for us to tolerate them? If so, how pathetic we are.

And from the same Guardian article:

“Geff Barton, head of King Edward’s School in Bury St Edmunds, described the idea of changing Twain’s language as ‘slightly crackpot’. ‘It seems depressing that we are so squeamish that we can’t credit youngsters with seeing the context for texts.’”

It’s even more depressing that adults can’t be credited with seeing texts in their context. We can’t erase our national guilt for racism, sexual misconduct, and all the rest by denying their existence or attempting to expunge the record. Nor can we erase our collective guilt by singling out individuals to be offered up as scapegoats or sacrificial lambs so that we can feel better about ourselves.

Our country (and every other country in the world) has always been led by imperfect humans who have a few skeletons hanging in their closets. Would our country be richer or poorer if we had banished Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Martin Luther King Jr from national leadership?

Can we set a few reasonable criteria by which we judge the merits and demerits of our fellow humans? How long ago did they do the stupid thing for which they’re being called to give account? Was it a one- or two-time incident or part of a morally degenerate pattern of behavior? Have they honestly owned their moral failing? Have they made amends for it? Have they in the intervening years grown and behaved differently? Does the conduct reflect a moral deficiency or just a lapse in judgment? These are not black-and-white issues; and although I fully support holding people accountable for their behavior, I can’t condone writing the final judgment on someone’s life based on their worst day. As the saying goes, “Let him who is without sin . . .”

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few photos to burn.

Categories
Education Justice Politics Religion

Go Tell Your People Our Story

Sadeek, our first three days’ tour guide, said it. Tony, the spice shop owner, said it with pleading eyes as he carefully sealed our bags of fragrant lavender. Ali, our guide through Old Jerusalem, said it as we sat in a circle listening to tales of his time as a political prisoner. “Go home and tell your people our story” was the resounding plea. I promised I would; so here is the story of Sadeek, Tony, Ali, and the thousands of other people who live, labor, and love in the land of Palestine, where I was privileged to visit for two weeks in October.

Their story begins thousands of years ago when the land which is now home to both the Israelis and the Palestinians was inhabited by an ancient people called the Canaanites, from whom the Palestinians are descended. The Israelites (named for Abraham’s son Jacob who was later called Israel), according to modern archaeological account, branched out of the indigenous Canaanite peoples. The roots of both people groups and their cultures run deep in the dry, rocky soil; and for centuries they coexisted in peace.

Israel-Palestine has been conquered and controlled by many tribal groups and armies throughout history. Beginning with the first exile in the 8th century BCE, the ancient Israelites experienced a long period of diaspora (dispersion), which resulted in resettlement of various groups all over the globe. The following account, from the booklet “Life under Occupation” by the Joint Advocacy Initiative, sums up the movement of the Jewish people to return to their homeland.

In the late 1800s, European society was becoming increasingly anti-Semitic, and some Jewish thinkers concluded that physically escaping this discrimination was the only way to prevent it. As a result, the idea of Zionism emerged. Essentially, Zionism is the desire to return to Mount Zion, a hill in Jerusalem which is an embodiment of the Jewish faith. However, the Zionist idea to establish a Jewish state in historic Palestine was only supported by a small minority of European Jews. During World War I this dream became feasible for the first time, when Britain achieved control over Palestine and warranted the creation of a Jewish state.

That action by the British government during World War I is known as the Balfour Declaration, which reads:

His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The British Mandate for Palestine, issued by the United Nations and made effective on 29 September 1923, established the “national home for the Jewish people” promised in the Balfour Declaration and made the U.K. the administering mandatory.

According to the Joint Advocacy Initiative, 167,000 Jewish settlers arrived in the homeland between 1882 and 1928 and another 250,000 between 1929 and 1939 (this time because of the Nazi Holocaust). In total, by the end of World War II, over half a million Jews had immigrated to the land, prompting “the uprising of the native Arab population which was being deprived of land and resources.”

In another summary from “Life under Occupation,” the Joint Advocacy Initiative explains the next few important dates and events:

Riots and violence had grown substantially by 1947, which caused the United Nations to propose a partition plan of the territories. More than half of this territory–56%–would go to the Jewish immigrants, who made up 30% of the population and owned less than 7% of the land. Despite this internationally accepted solution, the Zionists, who were superior in military power, began to forcibly remove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their lands. To this day this even is referred to as the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”). By May 1948 the State of Israel was proclaimed on 78% of historic Palestine.

During its “Six Day War” in June 1967, Israel eventually occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem and thus all of historical Palestine. Since that time, more land has been confiscated for erecting illegal Israeli colonies (settlements), building the Apartheid Wall, and creating military zones in these lands. As a result, Palestinian communities are isolated from the outside world and from each other.

These are the historic facts, which Sadeek reduced to their essence in a single sentence: “They fucked us.”

The situation today in every way fits the definition under international law of apartheid, and it’s time for the world to begin calling it by its proper name. Many observers and scholars have said the situation is far worse than the apartheid that existed in South Africa. Palestinians are restricted to designated areas; must go through checkpoints to enter certain other areas (and depending on the mood of the guard on duty that day may or may not be granted entry); are not permitted to use Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv (the main airport for the region); must stay on their own side of the border wall, must keep large water tanks on their roofs because their electricity (hence pumps) is sporadically turned off by Israeli power companies; live under constant threat of having their lands and livelihoods confiscated and destroyed; and endure the indignity of having settlers rain down their garbage, dirt, stones, and sometimes raw sewage into their villages and market places.

These facts are not up for argument. I have seen and experienced them first hand. I went through some of those checkpoints. I saw the trash thrown by settlers into Palestinian areas. I walked along the dividing wall. I saw the armed Israeli soldiers everywhere we went. I heard instructions shouted over loud speakers. I saw the balloons holding surveillance cameras. I picked olives for Palestinian farmers because the Israeli soldiers would have prevented them from working their own land and then after a year have legal justification for confiscating that land because it had not been worked. I walked through a Palestinian refugee camp. I twice visited a Bedouin village under order of demolition and witnessed hundreds of advocates who slept on foam mats to support the villagers and stave off destruction. (And they’ve succeeded, for now.) Although as an American I am permitted to use Ben Gurion Airport, I dare not take anything into that airport which might suggest that I intend to visit Palestinian territory or leave with any mementos easily recognized as having come from Palestine. I received my shipment this week of items I mailed home because I’d have possibly been detained at Ben Gurion if they’d been found in my luggage.

The displacement of native Palestinians is the largest and longest-standing displacement of a population in the history of the world. Currently, 66% of Palestinian people live as displaced persons, divided into two categories: refugees and internally displaced persons (IDP). Refugees are those who escape or are driven to other countries; IDPs are those who remain in the land. The difference between the two groups is geographic only; there is no difference in human rights between the two. The one right Palestinians crave most deeply is the right to live in dignity; I heard those words from the lips of almost everyone I met.

Please allow me to introduce you to three of the people I met and share with you just a little bit of their stories.

Sadeek Khoury, as I mentioned before, was our guide for the first three days during our touring time. He took us, among other places, to the village of Iqrit, now only the rubble of what was once the home of 400 Palestinians who lived, loved, made babies, raised their young, cared for their old, and buried their dead high on a windy hilltop. That peaceful life ended in 1951 when  Israeli forces showed up and ordered everyone out of the  village; it was for only two weeks, they said, so that security measures could be implemented (“For security” is a phrase often used to justify actions by the Israeli government). As soon as the evacuation was complete, the village was bombed. Now all that remains are the church and the cemetery.

College students take shifts staying at the church round the clock so that former villagers and their descendants can continue to hold their life rituals in the ancestral sacred place. Down the long, rocky trail and over the barbed-wire fence is the ancient cemetery where new crypts have been added to the mausoleums as recently as 2017.

Sadeek is earnest as he lingers on the hilltop, choosing that place to spread the table for the lunch he and his wife had prepared, allowing his charges to soak up the essence of the place, making sure no one would leave without having established an indelible connection with the spirit of the past and the souls whose lives were represented there.

Ali Muhammad was our guide through the Old City of Jerusalem. His ancestors came from Chad, in Africa, and he lives in the Afro-Palestinian sector of Old Jerusalem. He walks slowly, using a cane for balance, and is a tough school master. Anyone caught in a private conversation or shopping the goods which surrounded us in the market would be brought back to class in a deep-voiced gentle reprimand.

Ali strolled us through the market, pointing out the various sites of historical interest, but for what he really wanted us to know, he took us to the privacy of his apartment. There, he told us of his 17 years as a political prisoner for participating in placing a bomb in 1968 when he was a young man. From his more mature perspective, he knows that “the work I’m doing now is more effective than placing bombs.” The work he’s doing now is informing and educating those of us who consistently hear only one side of the narrative regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and I have to agree, knowledge is far more effective than violence.

Other snippets from Ali include his assessment that the only solution to their problem is not a two-state solution, which he says would never work, but “one secular democratic state” which would extend equal rights to residents of all ethnicities and faiths. He also said the media in our country is bullshit, because they continue to tell only the one-sided Zionist narrative. He also gave us the Arabic word for “bullshit,” but I’m not sure of the spelling, and you’d really have to hear him pronounce it for full appreciation. He challenged us to speak to our representatives, since the continued apartheid is made possible primarily by aid from the United States and Russia. He encouraged us to keep up BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) of companies that promote and fund the oppressive regime. He said, “Your holy mission is not here. Go back to your country and tell what you have seen here.” The majority of settlers (colonists) are American Jews. Palestinian desires are simple: no more occupation and the ability to live their lives in peace and dignity. All Palestinian protests currently are peaceful, but Israeli responses are not. The army and the settlers continue to inflict violence and death on unarmed Palestinians.

Ali ended his talk with a humorous assessment of several of our recent presidents. He said President Clinton had a serious problem in the lower part of his body, President Bush (W) had a serious problem in the upper part of his body, and Donald Trump has problems “both up and down.” You may have guessed, DT is not at all popular in Palestine.

Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, perhaps the clearest and most compelling speaker I heard, said 100,000 Palestinians have been killed and another 800,000 injured since the conflict began. He has been arrested more than a dozen times for petty offenses. He advocates non-violent resistance but emphasizes that there must be resistance and that no one can be neutral on a situation involving the rights of hundreds of thousands of human beings.

Mazin echoed Ali’s assessment that the only viable solution to the problems is a single democratic, secular state with equal rights for all. He went on to explain that colonization can never end in a two-state solution because colonizers can never recognize the rights of the colonized. To recognize those rights would cause their system (existence, power) to collapse.

He outlined three possible stable outcomes:

One, the colonizers can be kicked out and sent to Europe, as happened in Algeria.

Two, there can be genocide of the colonized population, as has been done in Australia and the United States.

Three, and most common, colonizers and colonized can live together in peace, as has happened in over 140 countries.

At the end of our almost ill-fated walk along the highway in search of the Bedouin village which we had visited once and had been invited to revisit, we sat on foam mats and listened to a former PLO member, also a political prisoner for ten years (and three days), who told us more about the horror of living under apartheid and who said he will forgo having children so that he can devote his entire life to the mission of ending his people’s oppression.

One of our bus tour guides nearly sputtered with anger and indignation as we passed one of the large red signs marking the divisions of the West Bank into three zones: Palestinian, Israeli, and both. The sign for Zone A, the Palestinian zone, warns Israelis that they are forbidden to enter because their lives would be in danger. Our guide said it’s one thing to forbid Israelis to enter but another altogether to warn them of danger, “as if we’re animals.” The assault on his people’s dignity cuts deep.

A man I met on our first visit to Khan al-Ahmar was there with other activists trying to stay the demolition. He is an Israeli citizen who lives in Tel Aviv but is passionately committed to justice and equality for Palestinians. He said about 65% of Israeli citizens favor equality; it’s the government and a minority of private citizens who keep up the oppression. No one in our group, including the leadership and the leaders of the Palestinian activist organizations, hates Jewish people or wants to give Palestinians freedom and justice by taking it away from Israelis. Everyone I met wants the same rights to be held by all who live in the “Holy Land.”

I met Palestinian farmers and looked into their eyes, eyes that beamed back love and gratitude, because our efforts will assist them in holding onto their ancestral lands awhile longer.

Everywhere I went I met beautiful children, playful and happy and loved in spite of their oppression and poverty. Arriving at Khan al-Ahmar, the Bedouin village, at dusk, our group was greeted by children riding donkeys and bicycles and playing happily in our meeting area; doing normal “kid things,” they could have been in any country anywhere in the world.

I’m not telling you things I read in a textbook or in U.S. media reports. I saw firsthand what oppression and apartheid look like. It’s uglier than anyone can imagine without seeing it; and it’s enabled largely by aid from the U.S. and Russia. Let that sink in, and remember it every time you vote.

I affirmed with my own senses that Arabs and Muslims are, as a group, not violent terrorists. Two Muslim women will flag down seven American and British women lost on a busy highway and guide them to their destination. Muslims and Arabs are warm, loving, well-educated (among the most well educated in the world), well-spoken, industrious people whose only wish is to live their lives in dignity and peace. They open their arms, open their homes, and spread their tables and ask only one thing in return: please go and tell your people our story.

This is what I know to be true: I know that a promise from God will never come with license to oppress another group of human beings. If claiming a promise necessitates harassing, demeaning, imprisoning, killing, surveilling, restricting free movement, interfering with the pursuit of livelihood, stealing ancestral lands, and demolishing ancient habitats, one of two things is true. Either the promise did not really come from God, or some human beings are manipulating their religion as a weapon to gain power and control–actions which are the polar opposite of anything I know about God.

Now it’s up to you to keep the story going. Please share the story with everyone you know. Share this article in every forum you possibly can. This is not anti-Semitism (Arabs are also Semites); it’s pro-justice. Justice for ALL.