Category: Social Issues

In Post-11/8 America What is Your Personal Call to Action?

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Let’s talk about the word “peaceful” because I’m getting fuckin tired of hearing about “peaceful protest.” | D. Firestein Protest, by its very nature cannot be peaceful. It is an attempt to upset the order of things (sometimes a weak attempt,...

 “A person in a state of dread lives in a miserable forever present. A person in a state of dread is imminently controllable. The choice to protest, on the other hand, is the choice to take control of one’s body, one’s time, and one’s words, and in doing so to reclaim the ability to see a future.”

– Masha Gessen

In my state of dread over the election of DJT*, I keep coming back to one very germane fact: The majority of the American people (54%) did not vote for him. And I presume a sizable chunk of his voters, pulled that lever begrudgingly.

*I can’t bring myself to name him, especially as President. I’m looking for a workable alternative. So far I’ve considered: Trumplisconi, Mr. Minority President Trump, President 46% Trump, Mr. Unpopular President Trump, Abnormal President Trump, or just President Donny J (which, to tell the truth, sounds about right because it conveys his core identity as a celebrity and affords him about as much respect as he’s given the Office of the President so far). I welcome your votes or other suggestions.

So “we who are repelled by the person of DJT,” are in the majority. We need to use our voices. Each one of us needs to find ways to act, which likely means going outside of our comfort zones in one way or another, to save our democracy and ourselves. That sounds corny and hyperbolic – words I never thought I’d say. Sadly, there’s no corn, just these truths which are self-evident:

After 18 months of spewing vile and divisive rhetoric against women, minorities, Muslims, people with disabilities, etc., and exhibiting not one iota of interest in learning or preparing to be president, DJT starts his relationship with the American people in deficit — a deficit in trust, in integrity, in mutual respect, in competence, and in leadership. Since being elected, he’s done virtually nothing to lessen these deficits, nothing to unify the country (in fact, if anything he’s doubling down on the divisiveness, taking a victory lap so he can gobble up the leftovers and lick the plate of rapt adoration that endlessly gushes from his peeps). Unless and until he starts singing a different tune, we don’t owe him “a chance.” We don’t owe him respect. We don’t owe him a damn thing. Rather, he owes us, bigly.

Since being elected, DJT’s initial actions signal autocratic and regressive “code reds” on multiple fronts —

  • Vast and disturbing conflicts of interest he refuses to address meaningfully
  • A cabinet full of unqualified hacks that collectively signals intent to ravage our social safety net and civil rights protections, bolster our billionaire class, and abandon the survival of our planet
  • Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist — a dangerous propagandist, malefactor and chaos-sower who has enabled a cornucopia of hate movements — or for short, a vile human being
  • Ignorance, arrogance or both with regard to international relations as revealed by his casual, uninformed and strategically dangerous calls with world leaders
  • A clear effort to disregard, if not dismantle the capacity of the press to fulfill its role as the ultimate arbiter of the truth.  For example, he has held no press conferences, and I suspect never plans to do so. Not to mention no traveling press corps.

DJT, together with Republican establishment that now controls all of Congress and most of the statehouses, has at his disposal all the levers of government to advance whatever interests he so chooses. And he has shown us what those interests are: His businesses and personal wealth, his popularity, and his taste for revenge. Further, he has shown his willingness to cross lines, violate norms, and disregard our democratic institutions and values to serve those interests.

DJT has secured the presidency not for the country, but for himself. And the extreme Right have burrowed in, like a parasite to a host, aiming to thrive.

Like most people, I’m still sorting all of this out. But for now, until such time that this new president acts to address the deep deficits he’s amassed with the American people, and the far right is defanged, I intend to trade my dread for protest.

For my personal call to action, I commit to:

  1. Starving Donny J (name seems fitting here) of popularity, depriving him –and the corporate “entertainment” media who nourish him with unearned airtime in lieu of real news — of my eyeballs, ears, clicks,  attention or affirmation of any kind. I will not watch the inauguration.  I will boycott all things “Trump” — his hotels, his wife’s and daughter’s merchandise.
  2. Seeking actual truth by being a hyper-discerning consumer of information and news.  I will limit my intake to the very few print/online/broadcast sources and journalists who have demonstrated fidelity to the truth, ability to resist false equivalencies, and journalistic integrity.
  3. Engaging more fully and directly in our representative democracy to promote issues of importance to me.   I will contact my elected officials frequently, for example to demand hearings on DJT’s conflicts of interest and condemnation of Bannon’s role in this administration.  I will actively engage in the 2018 midterm and statewide elections, to begin to right the ship .  And I will participate in organized forms of protest in support of key issues of importance to me.
  4. Supporting and engaging more deeply with advocacy organizations that advance major causes of greatest importance to me. My personal priorities would include those focused on climate change, voting rights, reproductive rights, and civil rights.
  5. Acting with kindness and inclusiveness in my everyday life, and if necessary providing protection to those most vulnerable and marginalized by this new administration.

Those are my marching orders. What are yours?

 

Seeking an Education on Race in America

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MLK

I originally wrote and posted this two years ago.  What I felt then, I feel even more now, so I’m re-posting it. 

Just as the Ferguson Grand Jury announcement was coming out, I happened to be reading a passage in Rising Tide (an incredible and superbly written piece of American history by John M. Barry – more on that later) that was eerily familiar.  The passage takes place in Greenville, Mississippi just after the Great Flood of 1927 which left the entire Mississippi delta, including Greenville, devastated.  Blacks were being forced to carry out the bulk of the relief and rehabilitation work, for no pay.  One morning a policeman named James Mosely had been assigned to assemble a work crew, when he saw James Gooden, a well-respected black man in the community who had just returned from working all night, sitting on his front porch:

“Nigger, you’re going to work.

No, Suh.  No Suh. I just been workin’.

Nigger, don’t give no backtalk.

No Suh, I’m not backtalkin’ you.

Gooden got up from the porch, went inside his house, and closed the door.  Mosely followed him into this home and pulled his gun.  Gooden froze.

Nigger! Get your black ass in that truck.

White man.  Don’t pull no gun on me!

According to Mosely, Gooden grabbed for the gun.  Mosely shot him.  But Gooden told a different version to blacks who carried him to the hospital.  In an effort to save his life, two white doctors amputated his arm. James Gooden died anyway.

The news swept through the black community.  Seething, blacks stopped work . . . Rhodes Wasson recalled, ‘We prepared for a race riot here. . . We thought the blacks were going to uprise.  Everyone was buying guns.’

To calm the Negro community, Mosely was arrested, supposedly to be held for trial.  No one believed that would ever happen.  The county prosecutor was still Ray Toombs, the Exalted Cyclops of the local Klan. (Mosely never was indicted).”

That was almost 90 years ago.

This book, together with several other sources I have recently consumed, have taught me a lot about many things American.  But mostly they’ve taught me one essential thing about myself:  That I (baby boomer white person who considers herself to be relatively enlightened) still have a great deal to learn about the basic truths of the black experience in America, both historic and present.  As a result, I’m now in active search of my education on the subject.  Not to be too preachy, but I think every white person needs to undertake this search, because most of us simply do not know what African Americans know about this history, nor do we know what African Americans know about justice — and so we operate from a different set of truths.  Neither have most of us taken the time to cultivate any real personal insight into the racial biases we almost certainly harbor, though often unintentionally.

By the way, for inspiration, we can look to the young people in our lives.  Their hearts and minds are in most cases still wide open; seeking truth and justice unencumbered by calcified biases.  They will, I think, pull our society forward and through and eventually out of this mess.

So in the interest of sharing, I thought I might recommend a few sources that have contributed significantly to my own enlightenment on the subject, with direct implications for understanding the present tensions and debate surrounding Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and many others.

Rising Tide.  This is the story of the efforts to tame and commercialize the Mississippi river in the 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in the Great Flood of 1927 (about which Randy Newman wrote the song “Louisiana”).  There’s so much in this book about America, about our politics, our identity, and our culture, and so many lessons for today.  But front and center throughout, is the African American story in the deep south.   The factual accounting of events, their description in full detail and context, has been eye-opening, even shocking to me.  As you wind your way through this text, its rich description of the nature and depth of oppression and violence against blacks, is breathtaking.  It is a story that needs to be told in American history classes and taken up in adult book clubs around the country, but to my knowledge for the most part, is not.  I thank my brother for recommending this to me.

The Case for Reparations.  This article by Ta-Nehesi Coates appeared in The Atlantic recently, and carries the African American story forward to more recent history and present day.  It describes how blacks who fled the oppression of the south in search of work and greater justice in the north, encountered a different kind of shackle that appeared in the form of rampant, intentional, government-sanctioned housing and mortgage discrimination.  Coates explains how those practices directly and significantly diminished the wealth of African American families, a legacy that lives on today — having gutted their ability to earn equity in the one asset that is the single biggest source of wealth for most Americans – our homes.  Again, here is an article that deals in details and facts that remain largely unknown (or at the very least, not fully appreciated) by many of us, but which provide critical context for the current debate.

The Central Park Five.  This is the Ken Burns documentary about the 1980’s brutal rape of a white jogger in Central Park.  I’m embarrassed to say that this story was in many ways, news to me – not the crime itself (which I remember very well) – but the truth – which I don’t remember with the same clarity and resonance.  The truth is that the young boys (four black and one of Hispanic descent) who were accused and convicted of this storied crime, were completely innocent. The truth, which came out in 2002, is that the police and prosecutor wielded the full force of their phenomenal state powers against these children (the youngest was 14 years old), to extract false confessions that were entirely constructed by the police.

Why don’t I recall the truth as clearly as I recall the crime and the alleged guilt of the accused?  Because the guilt was captured on videotape — compelling images of young black boys admitting to a brutal crime — seared into the collective memories of millions of Americans like me.  And, if I’m completely honest with myself, it’s probably also because the guilt expressed on those videotapes fit perfectly well with pre-seeded biases I may have harbored, if even just subconsciously.   Those are the ingredients for a memorable story with impact . . . a story that people believe.

The truth on the other hand – that these boys were innocent – communicated as it was in a few newspaper headlines and articles, just didn’t break through in the same way, largely because it lacked compelling images to drive home the message.  And perhaps, just perhaps, it didn’t resonate because it was a story we weren’t too interested in hearing. But thanks to the brilliant Ken Burns, we now have a full account and countervailing images that can compete with the original false ones that were occupying our brains.  We can now more fully know the truth of this deeply disturbing miscarriage of justice, and can appreciate some of what African Americans know and feel when it comes to law enforcement and expectations for justice in this country.  After all, this took place not in early 20th century Mississippi – but in 1980s New York City.   And we know that this kind of raw, law-defying, racial injustice does not live in isolation, but is repeated in kind, throughout our country, as it has been throughout our history.

Note:  Fruitvale Station is another film that speaks to many of these same issues.  It is a dramatization of the story surrounding the shooting death of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer in Oakland, California. In the interest of wrapping up, I’ll leave this as a simple recommendation.  You can also read about it here. 

It is impossible, and irresponsible to talk about Michael Brown or Eric Garner and others, outside of this broader context.  Given historical fact and the present day, lived experience of African Americans, there can be no true finding of fact, or faith in justice served, so long as the too-familiar trappings of injustice pervade, as they do in these cases – the racial disparities between law enforcement and the communities they serve, the disrespect shown by law enforcement toward African Americans, or the failure of white prosecutors to exercise their prosecutorial function with the same vigor that they bring to other cases (after all, if they can “indict a ham sandwich” as the saying goes, why can’t they indict officers who shoot unarmed teens or whose crimes are clearly captured on videotape?).

Michael Brown, Eric Garner and others have lit a fuse I hope doesn’t go out anytime soon.  The burden is on those of us who are not African American, the ones who have generally held all the power, the ones who have not endured a history of violence and oppression and discrimination — the burden is upon us to make the extra effort to learn that history and open our minds to a deeper understanding of the African American reality in America.  The burden is on us to listen, learn and then to act to correct the many flaws in the system, so that this inexcusably long cycle of injustice is finally broken.

To continue my education and assume more of my responsibility on race, I plan to take up a long overdue read of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and to exercise my voice through rallies and writing.

What’s on your syllabus?

Yik Yak – Yuck . . . Taking On a Social Media Menace

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This is a little story about something bad-but-ultimately-good that’s worth noticing – a simple little gem amid the cacophony of fear and war and moral failure and decline and decay that comprises most of our news media diet, day after day after day.  I hope it lifts you up like it lifted me.

A sour and ultimately threatening thread of social media banter recently unfolded on Yik Yak at Kenyon College where my daughter is a sophomore.  If you’re kind of old like me, you might not know what Yik Yak is.  Think of it as a kind of hyper-local Twitter, capturing posts only from those in the immediate geographic area, say within a radius of several miles.  Yik Yak is also 100% anonymous.  It was originally conceived, supposedly, to provide a forum for comedic observations within a community, observations that might venture into more edgy territory than would be normally be tolerated on other social media sites.  I’ve also heard it acts as a kind of “even bulletin board” mostly focused on sharing time and place of campus parties.

At Kenyon, edgy turned ugly in the form of a series of angry, hateful posts directed toward a women’s center on campus.  The authors of this vitriolic speech refused to engage in productive dialogue around the nature of their grievances, despite many attempts by the women they targeted, to do so.  This continued, and escalated into at least one threat of sexual violence.  Then the women’s center was broken in to, and materials for upcoming Take Back The Night activities on campus were stolen.

This activity was bad on its face; but it also seemed to strike at the heart of Kenyon’s identity as a place where differences are celebrated and supported, and mutual respect is assumed.

So how did this community of students, faculty and staff respond?  First, the President of the college posted a blog in which he condemned the activity as unacceptable and counter to the character and principles of the school.   He also provided historical context and other insights that lent heft to his stated positions.  But I think more importantly, he invited and encouraged the entire Kenyon community to stand up to this kind of destructive speech by publicly voicing  support for respectful speech via a newly formed, student-led Facebook page called #respectfuldifference.  The response has been overwhelming.  Student after student, alone, in pairs, in groups, athletic teams, male, female, fraternities, sororities, faculty, staff groups, and arts organizations — all of the diversity of Kenyon has risen up against this low-road hate speech to express allegiance to a higher calling. Here are a couple of examples, but you can see more by visiting the page yourself.

YikYak4YikYak3YikYak2

Now, as I was in the middle of writing this post, I learned of other episodes like this one that have taken place around the country and what colleges are doing to respond.  Rebecca Koenig provides a good review in the Chronicle of Higher Education, if you want some general background on the situation.  Ryan Chapin Match writes on the Huffington Post about the Kenyon experience alongside many others.   He argues, quite persuasively I would say, that colleges should ban Yik Yak from their campuses, likening it to “bathroom stalls without toilets.”  He asserts that there’s no legitimate purpose for such an anonymous forum.  I have to admit, I kind of agree.

But then, I kind of don’t agree.  Because college is, in a way, a final dress rehearsal for life.  It is a last stop for many young people to try on the practices of adulthood while still having the benefit of support and guidance from adults. I would love to ban Yik Yak from the entire planet.  But that’s not going to happen.  Like it or not, our kids are entering adulthood as the most over-exposed generation there has ever been, and I don’t see how that’s really going to change.  How will they know how to go about tackling the onslaught of social media ills, and other kinds of destructive social forces that are almost certainly going to darken their doors in future, if they’ve never encountered them before?

To me, there is real value for these students in practicing the art of owning their community, and learning to actively commit to forging a positive path of living.  It is an exercise in leadership and self-determination and in the essential, critical value of community.

These young people will soon be going out into the world, into their respective professional, personal, geographic and spiritual corners where they’ll be called upon to play a role in building each of those communities.  I think their tangle with Yik Yak will make a difference in that regard.  I think they now know something about themselves, about the nature and extent of their responsibility, about the power of community, and about what they are capable of effecting – that they perhaps didn’t know before.  And for those who were the targets of the attack, perhaps they now know a lot more about what it feels like to be supported by a broader community in a time of need.  Maybe this new knowledge is a good thing that will motivate them in the future, to take action when someone else is in the crosshairs.

Regardless, I am heartened by the way college communities like Kenyon are responding to the yuck in Yik Yak.   I think they’re an example for all of us.