The murder of US citizens

Customs and Border Patrol has murdered a law-abiding American citizen exercising his First and Second Amendment rights. News and video of the cold-blooded street execution of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday, Jan. 24 spread rapidly. The blatant criminality of the federal agents was obvious. The regime is trying very hard to provoke a resister to open fire on a federal agent. Resisters are resisting the temptation to jettison public sympathy by a foolish act of violence.

In a country of 340 million people, odds are it won't happen to you. Right around here, we have no large concentration of targets for ICE and CBP. People with empathy and a broader world view are speaking up and demonstrating, much to the amusement of the more conservative individuals who believe that if it isn't happening right in front of them it's someone else's problem. The Puritan heritage adds, aloud or silently, that those people probably brought it on themselves in some way, too. In any case, no point getting all het up over something that probably will never affect you directly.

Won't it, though?

In our business, we cater to a lot of visitors who come to play around the lake when it's thawed, and on the snow in our legendary winters. We also serve the locals. This winter, the customers we've seen have been very normal. They exhibit a normal level of cheerfulness, engage in only normal amounts of chiseling for discounts, and buy at the price levels we commonly expect. However, we wait hours, or even days, between them. Something is suppressing demand. Beyond our narrow interests, the town itself has seemed unusually quiet.

The business presents a scrupulously apolitical front, although upper management is lifelong Republican. Their more politically connected relatives opposed the current occupant of the Oval Office in his first bid for it in 2016. I don't know if they had rolled over by 2020. One of them told me that they did not vote for the current occupant in his 2024 bid, when the state of New Hampshire as a whole went for Kamala Harris.

Down here in the labor pool, I have opposed the conservatives for decades. I don't know where my only co-worker stands, because I don't want to complicate our working relationship. I don't get the sense that he's a fan of the regime. Even just for practical purposes, the destructive rampage of DOGE and the continued smash and grab that has followed have made life more difficult for everyone, by hobbling useful agencies like the National Weather Service. The people I spend time with the most are not the kind to protest, ever. Bitch and grumble, yes. The founders of the shop used to growl all the time about chiseling rich people, but always voted with the rich people's political candidates. I don't see that changing.

As I travel through the semi-rural, heavily wooded suburbia that this once genuinely rural area has become, I see a few shrines to the authoritarian, racist regime, a smaller number of outright public displays of opposition, and mile after mile of noncommittal anonymity.

It's been mostly lousy weather for winter recreation, as the drought makes even downhill ski areas have to worry about having enough water. I don't know how their attendance numbers have been, but I do know that I have seen very little weekend traffic on Route 16. It was a little heavy southbound on Martin Luther King Day, as whoever had accumulated at the ski areas up north all drained south at more or less the same time. In "normal" years, they would have surged in together in more of a cohesive parade. That did not happen this year.

It's hard to watch the news of what's happening in Minnesota, and what happened in Portland, OR, and Los Angeles over the summer as well as the Blackhawk raid on the apartment building in Chicago. The goons have arrived in Portland, Maine, now, where they are faring no better than they have in any other city they've tried to victimize. They may be doing worse. I read one post from a local describing how the immigrant and minority residents are not clustered into contiguous neighborhoods, forcing the goons "federal agents" to have to hunt around for them individually. And resistance groups had already organized many of the mitigation tactics that evolved in Minneapolis, sheltering and supporting targeted groups from having to travel around on daily errands that would expose them to abduction.

If it isn't happening right around you, it can be very hard to imagine it being real. That's no excuse for letting heroic resisters get gunned down, but the isolation from the hot zones of confrontation also limits what a person can do to help. We can send money, hold vigils, contact our elected officials, write op-ed pieces, join bridge brigades that try to raise awareness of the problem. That creates its own problem, as people unaffected by the brutality grow weary of the constant calls to do something, when "something" remains pretty nebulous. 

What would a general strike look like around here where employment is dispersed over a wide area dotted with genuinely small businesses, mostly oriented in winter toward meeting tangible needs of the locals? Maybe a few people from around the general area believed strongly enough in the cult to go to DC for Jan. 6, 2021, but even if their fervor has reversed, and they have turned against their god-king, the kinds of event opportunities offered to them don't appeal to their "storm the fortress" and "hang Mike Pence" sensibilities.

I don't have the kind of snappy answer that appeals to the general public. I don't even have a succinct, policy-nerd answer. I'm not really that great a policy nerd, being rather like the pitchfork and torch crowd when it comes to direct action. So I hang back and wait for cooler heads to lay out the more effective long-term strategy and tactics.

Quit publicizing racist twats

 A racist twat in Rochester, Minn., recently dropped repeated n-bombs on a Black child she suspected of filching something from her bag in a city park. The boy is five years old and reportedly has special needs.

A bystander took video and confronted her. I won't link any of it because you can find it easily, and I don't want to give her any more publicity. I also omit her name, because she has raised a reported $500,000.00 so far, based on the claim that she has been doxed and fears for her safety.

First off, she has a right to say anything she wants, including racist epithets against a child, as long as she doesn't slide into criminal threatening. Representatives of the child might sue her for slander regarding the allegations of theft, but the First Amendment gives her plenty of latitude to spew ignorant garbage. This should never have become a cause celebre.

Our zeal for public shaming has begun to backfire spectacularly. A video meant to embarrass this loser instead gave her prominence to attract her fellow racists to protect a poor waif beset by threatening Black people and their terrorist white allies.

The racists and other far right adherents constantly shift between presenting themselves as badasses that you should just surrender to outright, and poor, noble victims of a legal system perverted by miscegenated Communists. They might walk around with firearms draped all over them, and talk about how they ask and grant no quarter, only to whine piteously when someone publishes their home address. What part of "no quarter" don't you get, tough guy? Total war is total war. Are you advocating for it or not?

America is basically a nation of shit-talkers. In the course of a day, how many thousands of death threats are flung back and forth in the heat of a moment and never go anywhere? In that mix, some may be credible. Most are not. In angry discourse, it's more common to oversell and under-deliver than vice versa.

Racism won't go away if you ignore it. But individual incidents of it won't turn into fundraising opportunities if you give it less air. Racists are not ashamed. Why do you think that a particular club is called Proud Boys? Putting a racist in a viral video is no longer a good strategy.

Along with hardcore racists come fashionable racists and the business interests that simply follow the money. Those business interests were into diversity when diversity seemed to be winning. Now that racism seems to be on top, business interests are okay with it. Corporations have no morals. They try to appeal to buyers with whatever seems to be attracting them at a given time. Some business interests will hold onto their support for diversity because they know that a solid percentage of consumers will choose them on that basis. Rather than compete in the more crowded arena of racist businesses, the "good guys" can depend on a loyal customer base to tide them over until things swing back to favor diversity overall. It is morally right, but also safe business.

I originally headlined this piece Nonviolence versus Violence because of reactions I read from the anti-racist community as the story about the Rochester bitch plays out. Certain Black activists called out their white supporters for a lack of resolve. Supposed supporters take down their Black Lives Matter signs and flags of support for marginalized groups. This may in fact indicate a weak will among some of those allies, but it also acknowledges a sad and frightening reality: the right wing likes to use violence and vandalism more than the left does.

The right wing cites the left's lack of violent propensities as a sign of cowardice and weakness. Paradoxically, they also accuse the left of perpetrating violence or of threatening it as an excuse for their own armament. Back in the Cold War, we did wonder whether the Soviets would outright invade us. Long before that, in the rise of Marxism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Communists did engage in violence. They also didn't act very communistic wherever they gained power, but that's a tangent for another day.

Nonviolent protest emerged as a powerful tool in the 20th Century. However, it was only one tool. Outbreaks of actual violence in support of civil rights, for instance, showed the government that the costs of maintaining the racist status quo were higher than the costs of expanding the rights of full citizenship under the full protection of federal law. Gay rights got their big kick forward from the Stonewall riots in New York City.

Riots are battlefield actions. The combatants form ranks under their banners on a piece of ground that's publicly accessible, often completely public: streets, parks, business districts. There have been spectacularly bloody exceptions in which mobs descended on residential areas. This has most often been white forces attacking minorities individually or collectively. A handy list is provided here.

Slavery in the United States was not ended by peaceful protest. It was ended by a bloody and wasteful war between factions that conveniently lined up with geographical boundaries, allowing the South to secede and pretend to be their own country for four years. They spent those years proving that their economic system couldn't support a long-term military conflict against an industrialized power. They were not only morally wrong, they were economically inferior in an era when business competition was evolving rapidly. But they were so in love with their hateful ideology that they let thousands of their men get killed and their land was laid waste by Union forces. And afterward they merely shifted their tactics  -- still to their own detriment -- in order to maintain racial hierarchy.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country received both Black residents and racist ideologies. Exposure to both has led somewhat to acceptance of Black and brown people as a part of normal society, but also to the persistent cancer of racism. If the Civil War happened today, battles would break out all over the country. You would also find out in a hurry who really had the stomach for it.

When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he thought that he would trigger a revolution against the tyrannical United States government. Instead, he set the militia movement back ten years as people recoiled at the horror of his act. We had those dopes walking around our town in their little Confederate hats, and then poof! they all ditched the regalia and shut the fuck up for a while. It was nice. They probably still met in private. You can tell by the signs and flags around town today that a good chunk of them suck up conspiracy theories and far right propaganda. And the few years of relative peace were bought at the price of innocent people killed and maimed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

My point is that large scale violence is the best advertising against itself. Too bad that it does not inoculate against small scale violence.

Bad actors on the right in this area have engaged in vandalism against targets that they could identify as holding opposing views: roofing nails in driveways, political signs cut down with a chainsaw, slashed tires, broken windows, occasional arson. During one dispute in the tiny town where I live, people were advised to put a padlock on their well cover (if they hadn't already just for general prudence) so that someone on the other side of the dispute didn't drop something unpleasant in there.

Whether to display symbols of a political position calls for a cost-benefit analysis. How many people will be swayed toward your point of view compared to the odds that some destructive, hateful chud will damage or destroy something you depend on, like your car or your house or an outbuilding containing tools you use?

The same Black activist noted that racism always attracts more funding than anti racism does. Anti-racist endeavors depend on mostly small donors. As a small donor myself, I can tell you that I view the many problems that our species faces as interlocked. Racists and destroyers have the benefit of their simple minds to help them focus their contributions on the narrow front pushed hard by their narrow minds. Saving things is much more complicated and delicate than destroying them. Because I tried to be content with a frighteningly modest income, I don't have the money to toss monthly donations totaling a couple of hundred dollars once I have paid my routine expenses and set aside some for non-routine expenses. Before I put a target on myself, I ask what my sacrifice will do to advance the greater good.

Once violence breaks out, it shapes reality to itself. The conflict becomes more important than the stakes in it. Combatants fight for their lives. We talk of the sacrifice of heroes who fall in battle, but that's a very different act from the human sacrifice celebrated by Christian churches, in which their pure messiah was executed just for being too darn good.

In either case, the gruesome deaths don't have a lasting good effect. One dead on a cross in 33 CE and millions dead by 1945, and yet here we are. Thousands obliterated in the 1860s just so some racist twat can raise a half a million dollars on the n-word and speculation that she might receive pizzas she didn't order on a few nights in 2025. I don't know what -- if anything -- will smarten up the racist dipshits. It's reached the point of unreasoning hatred, so no reasoned discourse will sway them. The death toll of racists is in the millions just since the 1860s, and yet there are still millions of them, so you won't "kill the problem out," as violent right wingers like to say.

Should the racists manage to rule the world, they will discover that they cannot make it into their utopia any more than we progressive dreamers could. Maybe the technofascists will achieve their fantasy of entirely automated labor serving a handful of actual humans living in luxury. In that case, the vast majority of people will have died out. It seems like a long term goal at best, except for the part where most humans die out. That part is too easy to achieve.

I can see it: Jesus comes back in about 2075.

"Hey, I'm back! Hey! Where did everybody go?" And then some AI planetary defense system vaporizes him.

In the meantime, we're alive now. How nice or not nice we make it is up to us. One more war or era of bloody skirmishes won't fix a goddamned thing.

Think Woodstock

 Calls are going out now for mass protests in the streets. Citizens opposed to the many illegal acts already committed by the current regime and the policies they tell us are coming plan to meet that crisis by forming large crowds and waving signs.

Proponents of mass demonstration point to the successes of the 1960s (and the '60s part of the '70s) where mass gatherings focused media attention on opposition to the Vietnam War and helped to end it

 Equally dramatic in the media but somewhat less successful were the protests for racial equality that led to civil rights and voting rights legislation, the removal of overt color barriers, and driving the worst of racism underground for a while. Great gains were made at the cost of blood, but those gains fed immediate backlash.

One of the most enduring images of the 60's is that of Woodstock, in 1969. That was a mass gathering, but instead of blocking streets and disrupting a major city with angry shouting and clashes with law enforcement and counter-protesters, it was hundreds of thousands of people coming together to listen to music. It was a pinnacle of Baby Boomer influence on the direction of society. It was also poorly organized and had to be bailed out by the grownups, but the grownups did so with kindness and relatively good humor. Perhaps this was partly because the kids were doing their thing in an out of the way place.

The festival itself did showcase how a huge crowd of people -- estimates have run as high as half a million -- could get together and express their hedonism and grievance for three days without violence and destruction. There was destruction, but only what comes from packing a bunch of people together in a compact area and letting them trample it for a long weekend.

Because the theme was peace and love, it was easier to generate peer pressure to direct the audience's feelings toward that. It was definitely not G-rated, but the focus on nonviolent things made anger socially unacceptable.

The Vietnam War had been a festering sore in American society since about 1964, although US involvement dated back further. Woodstock was part of a short-term campaign compared to Black civil rights protests, even if it felt long to the privileged teens and young adults who wanted to end the stupid war that would ultimately claim tens of thousands of American lives, and probably millions of Southeast Asians.

Unfortunately, times change. The lens of history distorts as much as it clarifies, especially where protest techniques and their results are concerned. For a protest to work, it has to generate sympathy in the larger population witnessing it. This often means that the protesters suffer injuries and deaths at the hands of whoever has been oppressing them. Blood runs freely in the timeline of the labor and civil rights movements, and even the women's movement. None of those movements made gains because of strategic battle victories. They got what they got because they turned public opinion in their favor, against the bullies who were beating them down.

A protest is an act of faith that the public can and will eventually feel sympathy enough to vote in favor of the changes that the protesters request or demand. Anyone who gets shot, lynched, or beaten senseless is hoping that the sacrifice is worth it. Anyone taking part could be a casualty. This is why military services traditionally used a draft system to get enough combatants to fight a real war. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the British navy actually resorted to abducting men off the streets to get enough of them to complete the crews of warships. As war became more industrialized and horrific, men had to be forced to join.

The results of drafted forces in the Vietnam War led the Department of Defense to say "thanks but no thanks" after that. The services recruit volunteers. The coercive forces that direct people to join up are provided by the economy now. No need for a showy draft. Just hype the job security benefits to the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

Protest movements have no draft leverage. Recruiters for a protest event have to overcome the legitimate survival instincts of  working people. Do I have the day off? Will I get fired for participating? Will I get injured, killed, or arrested? Will some provocateur spark violence? Will it do any good?

Protests based in anger and resistance to oppression are automatically more vulnerable to escalation into violence. Protests that inconvenience the uncommitted majority of the population have trouble generating sympathy. "We don't need your stinkin' sympathy," the true believing protester might say. "We need you to get off your ass and join us!" What we really need is effective education. Yelling, chanting, waving what seem like cleverly worded signs, and maybe getting pepper sprayed (or worse) for the cause might provide years of reminiscence for the survivors, but if it doesn't generate a shift in public thinking it was a complete failure.

The current crisis calls for elected officials and government employees at all levels to fulfill their roles and put us back on course to serve the diverse population of our almost-free country. We've been fairly close a few times since the middle of the last century. We keep getting dragged back toward primitive attitudes that suppress women and minorities, and undervalue the lives of laborers at every level.

We do face challenges from nations that don't value their citizens, who use them to advance economic interests. The oligarchs who profit from exploited labor all over the world make a good point when they say that our consumer lifestyle depends on cheap labor somewhere. They never admit that their goal is cheap labor everywhere. Cheap labor sounds great until you realize that the vast majority of us are that cheap labor.

If the United States disintegrates into armed civil strife it will not be a neatly organized Civil War or revolution against clearly delineated tyranny. It will be skirmishes and murders that probably lead to imposition of martial law and real crackdowns that drive resistance underground. Normal people just want to survive. Most of us will do our best to fade into the background and lie low, hoping that the overlords will collapse on their own. On a long enough time line, they will. Their greed and indifference to humans and the natural world will bring ruin. But that time line is long and unpleasant.

A general strike would stop the economy, and need not include any public gathering. Just don't go to work. Unfortunately, most of us can't prepare for the shutdown of nearly all goods and services. Any such action would not last long and would include only a small percentage of the working population.

Effective resistance by private citizens calls for quiet acts of ordinary communication. Call elected officials. I'm terrible at that. More often I will email, but as an individual, not as a co-signer on a canned petition provided by an organization whose position I support. Before that I wrote actual letters. It does take more time than calling, but can be less intimidating if, like me, you don't really like talking to people. It also seems to me that something that lasts, like an email or a letter, allows the reader to review what I wrote rather than just responding with bland courtesy and hanging up.

It's impossible to stay on top of all of the destructive actions unleashed by the current regime. Don't try to chase them all. I do mention in my communications with elected officials that nothing is really unimportant, because everything connects on some level. That level isn't necessarily deeply buried.

Meanwhile, in the government itself, some elected officials are exerting their power, while civil servants are attempting to thwart the blatantly illegal incursion by the minions of DOGE. Nothing that a mass gathering of citizens could do will impress the current holders of power. If anything, it could be spun by them as an excuse to crack down in the name of public safety, to benefit the masses still trying to get through their daily lives. The real resistance is being fought in the courts and in whatever might persuade more voters to start voting in favor of their own pay grade, instead of imagining that they might miraculously find themselves craving those millionaire and billionaire tax breaks.

The answer was only ever education and communication. We survive or fall based on marketing. You can call it something else, but it's all just selling an idea. 

"Hey, let's take care of each other and the planet!"

"Shut up, weirdo!"

What would you do? Way beyond Quinones

As we enter what could be a period of violent upheaval in this country, you might want to think about how you would react in various scenarios.

The ABC show "What Would You Do?" plays with light versions of social issues, but the legitimization of white nationalism, sexism, LGBTQ-phobia and strong-arm tactics in general coming out of the recent presidential campaign has already spawned incidents of violence.

The wonderful Women's Marches all over the country and in the world in general made a commendable display of peaceful protest. However, the climate in authoritarian circles, and in the right wing, is not at all receptive to protest demonstrations.

What would you do if law enforcement covering a demonstration opened fire with automatic weapons? Would you back down immediately, take cover, and run? Or would you march forward to be mowed down, as a rebuke to the vestiges of conscience left in the world? If you fled on the first day, would you come back for a second day? If you fled on the first day, would you begin to organize for civil war?

What would you do if you saw a group of white people beating up a brown person? A non-heterosexual person? A Jewish person? What would you do? How would you intervene, if at all?

What would you do if Jewish businesses were vandalized and ransacked in your town? What about Muslim businesses?

What would you do if lynching began again, law enforcement did not investigate, and district attorneys did not prosecute? What would you do if perpetrators who did face token trials always went free?

The current administration drew heavily on the influence of paranoia and hatred to build momentum for their campaign. They used voters disenfranchised by corporate influence, economically burdened by overpopulation and by technological advancement, feeding the popular myths about poor people, dark people, unfamiliar religions, and government conspiracies to advance the real conspiracy, which is corporate dominance of political, social, and economic life.

What would you do if oligarchy took over your country and you still had to look the word up every time you heard it, or just ignore it and hope it goes away?

It will start so slowly that you can easily tell yourself it's going nowhere. And it may really simmer down. But if it doesn't, you should have some idea what you would do.