Dueling Insurrections

 In the 250th year of our existence as a declared independent nation, we are fighting the final phase of the war that launched us.

The Declaration of Independence set us against the British government. The new nation was born in insurrection. The signers were united in their agreement that the new country would govern itself on the stated principles of equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Publicly the document was all inclusive. Privately it was understood that slaves remained slaves and women remained inferior. The "all men" who really mattered would be free of the British yoke, to chart their destinies and that of the great new country. We would show the world how it's done.

Capitalism gets a bad rap, and rightly so, since its corporate form does seem to love slavery. But in the initial concept of the United States, inventive (white, male) people would be allowed to come up with new ideas and perfect existing ones, and maybe earn a pile of money in return for creating things that benefit society as a whole. The proof would be in the sales figures.

We all know how that falls apart. Slave plantations were a corporate business model with a captive labor force that also served to suppress wages among the poor non-slaves trying to work in the same region. It was a three-tiered society, but the lower two sat far below the ruling class. Racism was used to bind the "white trash" to the agenda of the self-proclaimed aristocracy. Outside of slave country, a start-up might be subject to pressure from investors. If you couldn't bootstrap your startup, you would need to attract venture capital. At the least, you had employees if your idea was big enough to need more than just one dreamer working his ass off.

The rise of the United States further depended on the established parameters of success recognized throughout the rest of the world: money and power. Could we generate, from our own soil, native-born fortunes to rival those of Europe? Worth as a human being in this country became even more tied to money than it was in the nations from which we had broken away, because no free person had an excuse for falling short other than their own poor character, or perhaps bad luck. Some were already more equal than others, but that was obscured behind the generality that nothing in the law was designed to hold you back.

At the time of the bicentennial celebration in 1976, the country was moving toward greater social equality, under programs established in the 1930s and reinforced thereafter, that supported a strong middle class. The wealthy have always thought on the plantation model. They have no need for a strong middle class. So they looked for leverage to divide the prosperous middle and aspiring lower levels from each other, to drive wealth and power to themselves. They chose insurrection.

The symbols of the American war of independence and the later war between the states roused unthinking enthusiasm in these later generations who had no direct experience of either conflict. Especially in a nation still dominated by one race, the fighting prowess of the South could be admired and celebrated by the North if you didn't really give a shit about the failure of Reconstruction. Hell, by 1976, anyone regardless of color could get served at a lunch counter or sit anywhere on a bus, right? We're good, we're fine, we're moving forward.

Clearly not. We did for a while, but the self-appointed aristocracy will never be satisfied.

The people holding power and jackhammering away at the constitutional rights of individuals still manage to style themselves as insurrectionists, heirs to the founders and their revolutionary principles. This power group even admits to the embrace of slavery and sexism, but insist that those are understood in the poorly-worded founding documents and the social norms of the 18th century. They hold that we should model ourselves on that period while conveniently blending it with the norms and values of the robber baron period of capitalist excess. 

Those of us on the other side also claim the mantle of insurrectionists, revolutionaries, fighting the good fight on behalf of individual rights, as written in the constitution. Fight the power! Outvote the suits! Refuse to cooperate. Take to the streets!

It's all very inspiring. Both sides are warriors for justice as they see it. But the ownership class still insists on global domination by wealth alone, while the more collective side looks at the planet as an island in space, precious for its lifegiving conditions, and shared among us all. We can't both be the righteous rebels. And arguing over who deserves the title gets us nowhere. We need to be discussing policies as they relate not only to survival but quality of life. What can we realistically enjoy without robbing later generations of their chance to have a good time, too? It very much comes down to the definition of a good time and a clinical assessment of available resources.

In a free society, compliance has to be voluntary. That basic truth may doom us, as too many people want to have their cake and future generations' cake as well. How can they be forbidden their theft without having too repressive a government? Where do freedom and sustainability intersect? Can that line be fortified and electrified without creating genuine tyranny by accident?

Lack of ambition is good for human survival. Modest goals don't chew up as much real estate as grandiose empire building does.

To pick one example, where better to shop quickly than Amazon? Jeff Bezos didn't start Amazon to make people's lives better. He did it to get rich off of people's natural taste for convenience. He doesn't need enough money to rent the city of Venice or have his own space program. But he might as well, since he's not pissing it away on taxes and payroll. Convenient shopping is nice. The evil is just a side effect. 

I've harped on this concept before, but it bears repeating until everyone gets it: It's heartwarming when a billionaire does nice things with their money, like endowing some educational institution with no strings attached, or buying millions of acres of rainforest to preserve some fraction of the forest cover needed to produce a breathable atmosphere on this one and only place that supports life as we know it. And maybe it's the best we can do, given the vast amount of cultivated ignorance and stupidity that holds us back from collectively choosing to govern ourselves as better people. I hate to believe it, but we are stalled at the moment by just such a blockage. 

Choose your insurrection carefully. The government as written is not your enemy, but the government operated as a corporate subsidiary certainly is. The answer is to take control of the machinery of government away from the representatives of wealth, not to disable that government. Use the system of laws to redistribute the GDP to serve the overwhelming majority of citizens, not to secure and build the fortunes of the greedy few. 

The inconvenience of being racist

Growing up as an airhead, oblivious to the forces in the world around me, I never realized how much my life overlapped with the era of the great civil rights movements until years later. I was a toddler when we got orders to Brownsville, Texas, for my father's first ship command, and moved steadily northward from 1960 to 1965, landing on mid-coast Maine for my father's second ship command.

In Maryland from 1960 or '61 to 1964, there must have been signs of segregation somewhere, but I didn't run into them. In fact, I remember a Black family in our church and school system. I had no idea how ground-breaking that was. Particularly socially inept, I wasn't mingling well with "my own people," let alone exploring across racial lines. I was still just figuring out toilet discipline and the proper way to dispose of boogers.

There were Black sections of town in Annapolis. I just figured they preferred it there. My own family lived in a weird little rental neighborhood called Rogers Heights. Our finances were artificially strained for the first ten years of my life because my parents were unable to unload the first house they'd bought, in an area of Connecticut they wouldn't live in again for another thirty years. The house did sell eventually, which bumped us up a few notches in the middle class from then on.

In all of our travels, from one duty station to the next, or to make regular visits to my grandparents and the cousins who lived in their vicinity, we just piled into the station wagon and went. Motels might be kind of nice or a little weird, but nothing interfered with our passage beyond the usual risks of travel by car.

Thanks to the Internet and social media, we get to see story after story of famous people who stood up for their Black companions looking for rooms and meals in various contexts during the long era of open and legalized segregation. Travel in white supremacist America placed challenges in front of Black and other minority citizens and visitors that could go far beyond mere inconvenience.

The white people who began to push back on segregation could have retreated if the situation escalated to violence. Only when white activists ventured into the deep South to mess with the foundations of political repression did they fall victim to racist murderers themselves. The movement never hinged on one specific act of white resistance. It built on each and all of them. In the case of entertainers and sports figures, the white celebrities used the leverage of their marketability to force the issue on behalf of Black colleagues. The conflict was much more dire in the trenches of voter registration and integration of general public spaces.

Everyone benefitted from the diminishment of segregation. I would say the end of it, but we know that it didn't end. Racists don't stop being racist when they no longer have as much legal right to express it openly and by force. But the freedom to mingle if you so choose and the convenience to travel in whatever racial mix you happen to collect makes your life simpler.

Martin Luther King, Jr. knew that racism and labor rights were entwined. He presented a threat to the economic order that went well beyond just free movement through the infrastructure of society. Aside from the uber-wealthy, we all benefit from dropping racial and ethnic concerns and talking instead about the division and distribution of resources and the fruits of our labors. The ownership class wants you talking about anything but that. They want you embracing the inconvenience of segregation again. Segregation cements a class structure that benefits the people on top no matter how they got there.

In the old world from which the Americas were colonized, aristocracy led to money -- until it didn't, as the 19th and 20th centuries converged, but that's another story. In the Americas, particularly the one the United States refers to as America, money conferred aristocracy. Fortunes were made, exploiting the land and imported labor, and conning the indigenous people with treaty after broken treaty.

Right now, the top job in the US government is occupied by an actual criminal, a convicted felon with a long history of fraud, wage theft, and bad debts. All signs indicate massive insider trading by the chief executive, his family, his cabinet, and many other elected officials. The corruption and bribery are off the charts, to the outrage of some and the admiration of others. The racism is just bait to keep a passionate minority of segregationists voting Republican. We're all getting screwed by the corruption and incompetence of the party in power.

I don't have Black friends, only Black acquaintances, and I've never been in a romantic relationship with a Black person, but I refuse to let the government tell me who I can associate with. It goes beyond me, to every citizen. I don't want this to be a country where race or political party become more important than human rights and full participatory citizen government. Anything less is just an unnecessary pain in the ass. The people who look back on the period of segregation as some kind of golden age are either idiots or calculating greedheads using bigots as a reliable voting bloc oblivious to the underlying financial motives.

I've written before about how democracy is itself a pain in the ass of a different kind. Government by the people requires that the people, generation after generation, pay attention to what their supposed representatives are doing. All government invites corruption, because officials have power as well as responsibility. Power is a drug. Responsibility is a burden. Which one sounds more attractive? But our only hope at some measure of control over corruption rests in the democratic process at some level.

James Madison believed that educated voters were essential to a thriving democratic republic. He wasn't wrong, although he overestimated the American thirst for education. By the time I came along, school was something to endure until you either dropped out or graduated and got down to the fun part, earning as much money as you could, to spend on self indulgence.

The government had been controlling our information since the Second World War, because of national security concerns. Students succeeded in the social settings of school in various ways, peaking at different times: the high school quarterback and the head cheerleader who went no further afterward; the brainy kid who went to an Ivy League college; the ones who became lawyers or doctors; the vast rabble who just found jobs of some kind and lived their lives while The Government operated in the background. Depending on your era, you might have had to perform mandatory military service, but the Vietnam War finally ended that. Little by little, government got turned into a separate entity, or so it seemed. Our grubby little hands didn't have to be pried off of the levers of power. We just let go.

To meet our constitutional responsibility, adult citizens need to think of ourselves as pre-legislators. The function of the system needs to occupy more of our time than we would like it to. Democracy in this country, or probably any country, has never received the attention that it should. The business of being human  is so much more compelling, and generally easier to connect with.

The citizens of the privileged majority have known intellectually that we have freedoms and powers legally guaranteed, but we leave them sitting, for the most part. The First Amendment protects the press and free expression in general. Provocative shit-stirrers troll the public to remind us that they can. The Second Amendment facilitates the gun industry and enables individuals to amass ridiculous arsenals of killing hardware to remind us that they can. All well and good, but the corporate press has decided to be more corporate than journalistic, and the arsenals will not stop moneyed interests from skewing financial policy to direct more and more wealth their way.

In November, remember that districts don't vote. People do. We don't have the luxury of more than two parties, and only one party is making the slightest effort to maintain and expand the progress we made toward a freer and more convenient society before conservatives started cranking us back the other way beginning in 1981 and ratcheting up steadily to the present crisis.

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.

How it gets worse before it maybe gets better

 Democratic Congressional representatives are getting a lot of advice from political strategists and voters about whether to cooperate with the Republican majorities in both chambers. 

"Obstruct! Refuse to cooperate with the tools of dictatorship!" 

"Vote with them whenever possible to keep the idea of bipartisanship alive!"

You can make a case either way.  If history is any guide, we'll get a blend of both approaches. Success may look disappointing as we slog through the hard times that the new regime's policies are going to unleash on all but the richest of us, and the fortunate laborers close enough to be trickled on directly. The result will provide many anecdotes to confuse voters.

With the country's divisions referred to as Red (right wing) versus Blue (Democratic, progressive), I  predict that things will get redder before they get better. Purple states will turn completely red in the midterms, as voters there are convinced that their continued tribulations are the fault of the surviving Democrats. The Republicans have had an aggressive strategy of gerrymandering, while corporate donors and right wing think tanks have directed them to take control of state and local offices as well. The messaging is dense and widespread.

Two major factors help the Republicans to prevail. A Democrat who votes in favor of Republican bills, because they might be able to insert amendments to reduce the harm to targeted groups will lose Democratic and allied swing voters who might sit out the next election, even if they won't vote outright for Republicans. Republican-leaning swing voters will use Democratic cooperation as an excuse to vote Republican because the Democrats apparently approve of the policies anyway, so what purpose does an opposing party serve? Republicans have long championed the idea of one-party rule, as long as it is their party.

When I was young, growing up in a sane Republican household, I picked up on the fact that my parents would vote for a Democrat if that candidate had better ideas than the Republican in that particular election. Because my father worked with officials from both parties during his tours of duty in Washington, and because he was not a barking mad partisan, he would examine the policies offered by any candidate and vote accordingly. The Republican Party's degeneration turned him officially into a Democrat in his early 90s, when he finally couldn't take it anymore. 

Gone are the days when conservatives were simply people who wanted to progress at a slower pace, who needed more convincing before signing onto the proposals eagerly touted by progressives. That sort of conservative was always in the minority, but they had some influence. Maybe it was only to secure votes to advance their party's power, but they could choke it down. That's all gone now. Anyone like that has been purged from the party. Voters are encouraged to be angry, and contemptuous of anything "liberal." Politicians who want to lead them have to reflect this vitriol and fervor.

Voters ultimately have the power to shape their candidates. Gerrymandering wouldn't work if there weren't enough like-minded voters to weld together into weird-shaped voting districts in the first place. The fact that so many states have right-wing leadership reflects the depth of hostility that has been cultivated in the decades since the 1970s. Lots of factors have contributed, but the worst one was that conservative leaders in politics and business realized that the dark side has way more immediate power than the harder path to "peace, love, and understanding."

Side note here: one reason that the authoritarians are not worried that they will face a successful uprising if they stomp on our heavily armed population too hard is that the armed and dangerous folks will be fighting each other and the kooks and weirdos that they hate, not joining forces with them to tackle the real evil in the seats of power. Up in the seats of power, those folks will just watch the carnage and then hire whoever is left afterwards at subsistence wages.

Voters have the power, at least for a little while longer. It seems like the hardest challenge is to get enough of them to believe it and to want it. Casting a single vote seems undramatic and futile. Rallies and speeches stir up great emotions, but then it just comes down to marking a piece of paper and hoping that enough other  people marked their paper the same way. And after the election you have to wait for  whatever changes you wanted, while they make their way through the legislative process. All the while, a constant argument rages on all media, legacy and modern, to make you angry and doubtful.

Democratic politicians in areas with strong conservative presence face particular challenges between the ends of the political spectrum. Think of Joe Manchin. Now John Fetterman weakens the pure Democratic bloc by looking for ways to balance the pressures he had to overcome to get elected in the first place. Because the Democrats did not manage to gain a solid Congressional majority, they couldn't pile on the programs heavily enough to demonstrate to the public that their methods were undeniably delivering the improvements that voters in both parties said they wanted. Democrats are back to compromising on bills that they should have been able to reject outright. New Hampshire's delegation has similarly made hard political choices that disappoint the "resist at all cost" faction. It still may not be enough to keep them in their seats as each comes up for re-election over time.

It's discouraging to observe how social justice and acceptance of minority and difference are driven by the whims of fashion. In our local schools, our tiny handful of Black students have faced virulent racism from white fellow schoolchildren who think that it's fun and funny to say really horrible things. The little white twerps have never experienced a fully racist society. They have no way to understand all the ways in which a white supremacist society would make life worse for everyone. That doesn't matter when they are willing to add to the voices spreading that crap, making it a factor in political debate. It's the same with any prejudice. It trickles down to idiot kids who spout it to seem tough and cool. Symbols proliferate. Adults who believe similarly feel more and more comfortable spouting the horseshit and pressuring politicians to act on it.

The next couple of elections will give us some idea whether enough voters are tired of fighting about skin color and genitalia and are ready to participate in longer-term planning for the general welfare, and planetary survival.

The stickiness of racism

 Someone posted a picture of Brazil nuts online the other day, as a test of racism, asking whether anyone used a certain term for them. Someone else I know posted a puzzled comment, because she didn't know the term. I, unfortunately, did. I knew right away what the original post was getting at.

I didn't grow up using the term. I was at least in my late 20s before I heard it. But it wedged itself into the jumble of other unnecessarily race-based terminology that had been common and socially acceptable among the people at whom it would never be leveled. A whole bunch of people who disapproved of lynching and would never burn a cross, who might even consider themselves color-blind in their egalitarianism would still chuckle at stereotyping jokes, and allow as how a much more flagrant racist was "entitled to their opinion."

With the expansion of civil rights came a wave of victim blaming that has helped keep racism viable for decades after the advances of the 1960s. "You can vote and go to the good schools now! It's all on you to catch up!" Black people in the media provided highly visible success stories, as well as wry commentary on the white world. Maybe the Black population really was sorting itself out according to its own desires, and we could all joke about our foibles.

Speaking of jokes, have you heard the one about the two Black guys who were told to lie down on top of a load of trash in a truck so it wouldn't blow out on the way to the dump? If you've heard it, it probably just auto-completed in your mind, whether you want it to or not. If you haven't heard it, you have to decide for yourself whether to accept it into your life. It's actually more of a redneck joke than a Black joke, but the punch line has the two rednecks who see the truck using the n-word, and it has the two Black guys in a job where they could be ordered to lie on top of a load of trash.

How about the joke about Black kids learning the alphabet? Or a commonly used derogatory term for improvised construction or mechanical assembly, which, in New England, might be referred to by the more laudatory "Yankee ingenuity?" Or a racist descriptive for an unhealthy selection of food and beverage from processed foods and soda pop as the morning meal?

My record on discarding and resisting these is scuffed and dented from collisions with their use. My transition has lasted since the 1970s. Prior to that I managed to be oblivious enough to the whole situation, as a dumb schoolkid in a lot of places where there simply wasn't much Black population -- sometimes none -- that it hadn't really come up. As soon as I did know about it, I approved of Black liberation in my little juvenile mind, and never changed that stance, no matter how ineptly I lived it. Meanwhile, the culture around me shifted away from blatant suppression and direct violence while it dished up plenty of separated equality, and terms of differentiation. Less visible to the white majority behind the public facade of Black advancement, separation and calculated inequality hollowed out the gains and kept racism thriving.

Guilt and fear drive white supremacy. They know damn well that this country owes a debt it can hardly repay, to the Black people who labored and the indigenous people who were shoved into undesirable corners, subject to extermination whenever they were deemed too inconvenient, so that the mythic greatness of America might rise. White labor was abused and exploited as well. That has contributed to poor white people resisting acknowledgement of the Black and indigenous claims for compensation, because the poor whites know that the rich will find a way to duck the bill and hand it off to people who can't afford to hire lawyers and buy judges and elected officials. Only through voting solidarity do we have the slightest chance of gaining leverage on government. It seems simple, but the concessions it will require from people who have prospered under the existing conditions almost guarantee that it will never happen.

Prove me wrong. The way will involve a few intermediate steps, but we never get anywhere if we don't all share the vision of where we need to end up.

More likely we go down in chaos and blood, because the defenders of the old ways are wedded to violence and willing to destroy everything if they can no longer control it. I don't prefer that, but I'd be remiss if I did not acknowledge it. It probably won't be the "race war" that some of them yearn for. We are at work on too many methods to destroy ourselves: environmental degradation, nationalist and religious militancy, criminal oligarchy, all of these actively erode the general welfare and domestic tranquility.

Knowing all of this, I still deal with the ugly crowd of racist epithets that pop into my mind whenever I see a Black person. These are terms that I never used in aggression, and never wanted to. They were just in the air, all around, and soaked in the same way repeated song lyrics do, as popular tunes go from Top 40 to Oldies, and never go away.

I often wonder what my thinking would be like if I had never been exposed to racism. What would my own brain come up with if it had not been loaded with terms and attitudes reflecting centuries of prejudice? I was probably in first grade when I started to learn that it was a big deal to see a Black person in a position of some authority and power. Instead of just other kids and adults in different skin tones, there was apparently a reason to differentiate, and I needed to have an opinion about that. On top of the basic academic stuff I had to absorb, and all of the other routine human aspects of growing up, I had to figure out the powers and responsibilities of inherited privilege, without feeling particularly privileged.

Not feeling particularly privileged, struggling white people push back hard and quickly against the concept. Racial identity was created by white people. It would have gone away if white people had been ready to accept Black people as fully equal fellow citizens back in the 1860s. Heck, I bet women still wouldn't have the vote if Black men had been given equal and unchallenged voting rights back then. Sexism crosses all color barriers. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's for damn sure a thing. When you imagine all the power that white people would have lost by granting full liberation to Blacks, think about what might have been gained in other precious realms of prejudice.

Lots of blood has been shed and lives have been destroyed trying to convince white men to lighten up. And maybe humans in general are so pig-headed that busting heads really was the only way to move forward. White men might -- for a very limited time -- have represented the least of all evils in our halting evolution into a truly enlightened species. But the iron fist always holds on for too long when a better way emerges. The fingers grip externally and in the mind, and need to be pried loose and melted down.

We don't live in a single-issue world

As any election approaches, I get polling emails asking me to list my priorities for the country. What is most important to me? If I had to pick one or two things, what would they be?

Interesting intellectual exercise, but we don't live in a one-issue world.

Sometimes the poll will ask me to rank a long list of issues in numerical order from most important to least important. This is supposed to provide more detail and nuance, but that's another illusion. I never see a list that I can comfortably organize that way.

It's become a cliche that "everything is connected," but everything is connected. We can't solve one problem at a time. We can't half-solve a problem and call it good enough. Numerous philosophies have tried to blunt the human predilection for selfishness and violence. Not one of them has yet found the balance between permissible self interest and complete submission to the group. The philosophies read well. The basic principles usually include something like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But what if you're a masochist?

The destruction of our environment is not just an aesthetic question. It's become a matter of survival. But we can be personally odious in a pristine environment. We can be greedy, racist, misogynist, bigoted assholes who shoot each other over a petty insult. We can have a profit-driven system of health care services designed to enrich the management and stockholders of a few corporations. So maybe we solve the environmental threat to basic survival and still kill each other off in plenty of other ways. We can produce plenty of carcinogenic chemicals in carefully isolated areas and still maintain just enough natural environment to keep the planet's life support system basically functional. Sound good to you?

All human conflict comes back to well-documented items on the naughty list. We can chip away at those behaviors while the atmosphere rapidly becomes toxic with the untreated exhaust gases of industrial society. Maybe we will enjoy one glorious moment of global unity just before we asphyxiate.

It all seems overwhelming if you look at it all at once, but we've avoided looking at it at all for so long that we can't look away any longer. Immigration and refugee displacement is a problem because the places they live have been made uninhabitable by human policy decisions. Humans decided to make messes that drive other humans to seek safety elsewhere. Humans implement the policies. Humans justify their indifference and hostility to each other just to get from one day to the next.

Political reality is not reality. An elected official has to get into office by appealing to enough voters to get elected, and then fulfill the duties of office under a different set of pressures from ordinary citizens and from information that might not have been available to them before. Sometimes they just lie. Sometimes they are forced to change a position because circumstances change. Government is where the fantasy life of voters comes up against the thorny tangle of real problems. What gets a person elected and re-elected might nurture the fantasy life while letting the tangle grow out of control.

A drunken preppy snot on the Supreme Court

Only the people in the room at the time know the absolute truth about what happened between Christine Blasey (Ford) and Brett Kavanaugh. Each side has its adherents. One side is wrong. There is no debate.

Setting aside that specific issue, the crisis served as a pressure test that the nominee failed. He demonstrated that he is not impartial or dignified or resistant to stressful confrontation. Perhaps that explains why he was comfortable as a law clerk and then on the bench, because in neither case does he have to face adversaries in argument. He was doing research, running errands, and then, after he was appointed to his first judicial position by George W. Bush, he got to sit up there in the black robe and preside over the lowly combatants presenting their arguments before him.

The expensive incubators of the leadership class in this country can't help but foster a climate of unquestioned entitlement to rule. Your Type A achievers already have more than a little of the psychopath in their makeup, just to have a strong enough ego to play to win all the time. You will sometimes win in spite of yourself, but if you want to make a habit of it you must feel that you deserve to prevail. You have to convince yourself that you are at least as good as everyone in the field. When that field has been distilled from the most powerful families, over multiple generations, your ego has to be that much more aggressive. You hope that they're driven to do things society finds beneficial, because they're going to do them anyway.

My own experience as a preppy snot was limited to two years in a fairly minor boys' school in Maryland, after two years in the school just down the road from it, that was coed through sixth grade, and girls-only through 12th. That school was trying to go coed, so they added boys to a grade at a time going up. I could have attended with the first class of boys that went on to graduate from there. Instead, I did as the boys had done in prior years: I went up the road to the one that bolstered the masculine image.

It sucked. I hated it. But it was a good experience to have had. The entire student body seemed to fit itself into a bullying hierarchy. That was educational.

Abused people become abusers. No doubt some of my later actions through the years, the ones I look back on with the most shame and chagrin, stemmed from trained responses I had to the world view created by a culture of bullies and their subjects -- not to say victims. Victim is a very specific role defined by the amount of helplessness and degree of damage suffered. I was miserable, and suffered a lot of symptoms of stress, but most of the immediate oppression went away when I finally snapped and punched somebody in the face. That sums up the boy/man view of interpersonal relations completely. Punch somebody. Repeat as necessary for the relief of whatever is bugging you.

My older brother attended that boys' school for four years, graduating in 1971. He told me about how the boys in his class who lived nearby would go home and drink alcohol at lunch. Their weekend and vacation parties were legendary. We didn't hear anything about gang rape or contrived ways to get young women to have sex with them, only that young women did. The Sexual Revolution was intensifying rapidly from 1967-'71 (and beyond), so a lot of young women were up for more adventure than might hitherto have been the case. It's the alcohol that stands out, given the role of that liquid in the recent shameful circus in the Senate.

My father had been a scholarship student at Browning from 1939 to about 1943. He has never told me stories of underage drinking there -- he saw more of that from fellow Eagle Scouts when he worked for the Boy Scouts of America in New York. He did recount visits to the homes and Long Island "cottages" of some of his classmates who extended some degree of friendliness -- but never equal status -- to this funny little guy from Paris, who got in not because he was connected, but because he was merely smart. Smart doesn't get you shit unless you can convince the privileged people that you can do something to make them more so. He was unable to do this. Classmates of his went on to do things like inherit the New York Times.

In my own teen years in public school, I knew that some of the kids were having very wild parties and going to bars with fake IDs. It's a teen thing, not just a preppie thing. What sets the prep culture apart is their assumption of superiority. Even if an exlusive school requires community service, it's reaching down to help, not pitching in on a struggle that they share in any way.

People can and do learn from their past mistakes and become better people as a result. Or they settle in and become better at being the kind of jerk they were then, only with more experience.

The newest addition to the Supreme Court destroys forever our longstanding illusion of an impartial judiciary. Law is about interpretation. No jurist can be impartial, because the very act of deciding depends on point of view. A result may run counter to expectations, but always for an interpretive reason ultimately formed by ideology. No matter how convoluted the connection may be, any decision they hand down has to satisfy their philosophy. Everything that this young man passes judgment on will pass through the filters of his education, experience, mentors, and vision for the world. There's no longer any point in trying to guess how he will fulfill his duties. From now on we have to deal with how he actually does.

Hogan's Heroes and the Confederacy

Baby Boomers will remember watching Hogan's Heroes on television. It was a comedy about Allied prisoners in a German camp. A comedy. At the same time you could watch the films Stalag 17 or The Great Escape for  more dramatic presentations of the situation, but once a week, for six seasons, our clever heroes outwitted the bumbling Nazis and helped to win the war against fascism.

By the time that show was winding down, Richard Pryor was cranking up. I first heard a Richard Pryor album in the dorm room of a southern white guy who thought it was totally great. Richard seized ownership of the n-word and freely mocked uptight white people. We really were putting all that segregation shit behind us, weren't we?

The answer then was no, but it was well concealed from the white majority, and even from some rising blacks. Now it seems obvious, but back then the vestiges of racism could seem like exactly that: vestiges. We made fun of the South, we made fun of Nazis, starting to feel at ease about mildly confronting the injustices that underpin all of white people dynamics.

Whites don't have an exclusive title to injustice. We just used it very effectively to become a dominant force in the world as we evolved. Injustice is a tool in the arsenal of evil along the continuum that runs from the most sadistic darkness all the way to unachievably pure goodness and light.

Funny how evil is always so much more accessible.

A generation made influential by its sheer numbers got to see these attractive but deceptive portrayals at an impressionable age. I met few openly and aggressively racist people along my path. Only decades later did I figure out how sheltered my life was. Bad stuff might happen in isolated parts of this country and in other parts of the world, but overall we were on a path to potential world peace and good times. It was an easy mistake to make.

It becomes increasingly obvious now that humanity's dark side can't be laughed off. Humor seems to make sense as a countermeasure, but evil notoriously lacks a sense of humor. That's why control freaks hate to be laughed at. If everyone laughed, it could stop totalitarian shenanigans like a punch in the face with an inflated pig bladder. Maybe fascists make everyone stand up at their rallies so that no one can put whoopee cushions on every chair.

Humorless leaders can always find humorless followers to carry out their unfunny wishes. They are joined by people with sadistic senses of humor, who see slapstick entertainment in bloody dismemberment. Laughter may be the best medicine, but power is the strongest intoxicant. An underling in a dominant group enjoys the power of their collective cruelty.

Righteousness sounds good. By the dictionary definition, it describes being "morally right or justifiable." Morality is whatever we say it is, but thousands of years of collected writings have yielded a few common principles that seem to emphasize respect for each other.

Self righteousness is invariably wrong and a gateway to evil. If you sincerely believe that you are living exactly the way everyone should live, you are mistaken, and you shouldn't let it go to your head. It's an easy trap, especially for young adults. From the late teens through the twenties, humans are looking for meaning. We're told that we're adults at that point, fully responsible for our actions and deserving of our rights and privileges. We feel physically strong. This happens to coincide with a period of emotional uncertainty as we leave our homes and childhood behind. Things that feel right and good seem very right and good.

Research that indicates that our brains are hard wired will make your head spin. You can soothe your insomnia and melt the battery in your laptop watching lecture after lecture to help you understand your behavior and other people's. Of course you are drawing your own conclusions through your hardwired circuitry. Maybe you're hardwired to be open minded. Maybe you're hardwired to put up walls and fences topped with razor wire. This makes it an evolutionary question. There are winners and losers in evolution, but evolution does not recognize concepts of good and evil. There is no right or wrong. There is only existence and nonexistence.

The Flipside of The Greatest Generation

Never underestimate the value of a good bad example.

Well-deserved praise has been heaped on those who answered the call of duty to defeat militarily the Axis powers in World War II. If you ignore the fact that we couldn't have done it without our own ally, that sweetheart Joseph Stalin, it really was a clash between Good and Evil.

The Nazis in particular did future generations a favor by being so categorically and undeniably evil. Of course they didn't view it as evil. They considered it an admirable rigidity of principle, and the iron will to carry out a ruthless plan to impose a virtuous monoculture across the globe. The urge itself is evil, but it has its adherents even now.

Because World War II came along when humans had developed film, broadcast, and recording technology, and because the Nazis were so stuck on themselves that they kept meticulous records, we have a lot of detailed history about who did what when. We can rapidly draw parallels to current events and show without a doubt what can happen when the logic of a hateful ideology is drawn out to its grimmest conclusion.

Mass killing is a human tradition. Some instinct impels us to try to wipe out rival DNA, to compete for global domination, starting right in our own back yards. It doesn't happen everywhere, all the time, but it recurs enough throughout history to show that we have a chronic problem. Returning to the bloodbaths of the mid 20th Century, we find plenty of historical records related to every theater of war and land under occupation.  Other examples than the aggressive Nazi regime haven't had the great marketing that makes the Third Reich such a strong brand, but the idea of killing people who don't agree with you needs no introduction, wherever it arrives.

It is this very archive of evil that gives us the graphic rebuttal to plans put forward now in countries that once considered themselves bastions of freedom. The hypocrisy of the United States is unfortunately evident in the persistence of official and unofficial racial segregation after the Second World War, but at least some efforts were made to acknowledge the rights of more than just white guys as the 20th Century passed the half. Those very efforts solidified the core of evil that predated the Nazis by a couple of centuries in our great country, and that sympathized with the actual Nazis in their rise to power.

Recognizing an evil does not automatically cure it, but it is the vital first step. Parallels to the Nazis are too freely drawn, but the sensitivity to Nazi-like encroachments is an early warning system for the advancement of a truly free and inclusive society.

The monoculturists consider the desire for a free and inclusive society to be the evil. They despise the weakness of accommodation. They pride themselves on their admirable rigidity of principle and iron will. That's why we keep having this argument. They must be refuted on principle, not just bested on the field of combat. In fact, combat merely obscures the real issues in a cloud of smoke and a spray of blood. That's why hardasses would rather fight a war than lose an argument. War is exciting, and some day they might win. Until then, they'll take whatever beating they have to, and retire, grumbling, if it goes against them again.

The real Greatest Generation will be the one that confronts and vanquishes its own evil in quiet meditation, and never inflicts its misery on the rest of the world. While I would welcome that at any time, I'm not holding my breath. Every generation has to interpret the world they find, and choose a way through it.

Slave owners shape our history

The yet-to-be United States declared its independence from Great Britain only after southern plantation owners were assured that all this freedom and equality would not apply to the brown people they owned or the lifestyle and economy based on slavery.

The fledgling United States needed a constitution. Southern plantation owners signed on only when assured that the slavery question would at least be pushed way down on the calendar.

In 1861 the slavery issue's heated tensions came to actual warfare. As a result of that war, slavery was abolished. Segregation and suppression continued, aided by laws and beliefs based on principles of racial inequality.

By the end of the 19th Century, a few people had amassed vast fortunes that depended largely on cheap labor and favorable legislation. While the workers were technically free and compensated for their efforts, institutions like the company store and payment in scrip were just a couple of factors contributing to income inequality, insecurity and poverty among workers. The wealthy enjoyed a very close relationship with the elected government.

During the 20th Century, American society showed some signs of improvement in the treatment of workers and minorities. By the end of the century, however, those trends were beginning to reverse. It has only become more obvious as the 21st Century has advanced. A few people control most of the money. The world is their plantation. Their purchased legislators and judges solidify their gains. Restive populations are turned on each other, told that the threat comes not from the concentration of wealth but from the differences of the people around them.

Wealth is measured in dollars. Dollars are measured in numbers. Numbers have no empathy.

Humans have emotions. They measure in feelings, and can be steered by them. In fact, they can be steered by little else. Even supposedly rational people are only rational because they like how it makes them feel.

When wealth is the ultimate good, decisions are made by the numbers to increase wealth. If a bunch of poor people have to take a hit for it, they're a necessary loss, the same as the killed or broken heroes we sent to war to defend our way of doing business. We praise you, valiant warriors. Now get lost.

The wealthy feel better when they're getting more wealth. The impersonal numbers click higher, incapable of feeling the euphoria they inspire in the humans who get to claim them. The owners control society, while the vast majority who make up that society get shoved around by forces they don't have time to understand.

If you have a fantasy of dropping out and setting up a homestead where you can live off the grid and let the whole mess of civilization fall apart, think again. You will go down fighting to defend your little chunk of arable land and potable water from the thousands of desperate people who would want a piece of it for themselves. If that sounds glorious to you, or even doable, you're an idiot.

Like all the ills of human society, the problems of economy could be solved by cooperative effort. So, like all the problems of human society, they will remain unsolved while we argue and let evolution decide for us. It's worked for millions of years. Why stop now?

Civilization was the result of evolution. The collapse of civilization can certainly be the result of further evolution. Here's the thing about evolution: it doesn't care if you live or die. It doesn't care if anything lives or dies. So if we choose to let ourselves slump into a mucky pit of industrial waste, blood and feces, evolution will log that decision and reflect those changes as impersonally as a corporate ledger shows an uptick in profits when thousands of workers are laid off.

American Stubbornness and Confederate Pride

I'm not signing any petitions demanding that the Confederate flag be removed from anywhere it currently flies. It needs to go away, but fundamental American resistance to public coercion always supersedes better judgment. Look what the South did when the federal government told them to ditch slavery. They seceded from the Union and opened fire on Fort Sumter. Reproving petitions elevate the flag issue to another Great Cause.

Southerners like to say that the war was about states' rights, but if the issue had been the right to wear green pants and a pink shirt rather than the right to own other human beings we would probably have avoided a bloody chapter in our nation's history. Note that I did not say we would have avoided an ugly chapter. Depends on the green and the pink, I guess. However, the slavery question did mesh with other aspects of the power of a federal government versus that of the states. This nicely obfuscates the basic question of racist slavery for those who wish to dance around it.

Say for argument that the Civil War had been about green pants. Say you had secession, warfare, a region of the country declaring itself a separate nation with its own flag. In due course, the Union wins the war, the South has to vary its wardrobe and the nation tries to reunify. But resentful adherents of green pants want to remember what they stood for, and how valiantly they fought. They incorporate the Green Pants banner into their state flags and keep their memories of the glorious campaign alive. In a weird way, the South was not part of the United States, and yet, having been once and future states, could they really be considered separate even for the time when they tried to break away? So their flag is sewn into our tapestry, like it or not, because to the green pants people of Dixie that was life for several years in their history. Whatever they seceded over, they came back.

Of course it wasn't about green pants. It was about an evil institution. Like most evil institutions, you can find stories from that time that are heartwarming and show kindness. But the system was not designed to warm hearts and foster kindness. It was designed to exploit a race deemed inferior, bought and sold like animals. Regardless of whether the southern states were on their way to doing away with slavery on their own, when pushed they chose to declare war rather than hurry their own emancipation bills through their various legislatures. That call to arms is quintessentially American. Don't tell me what to do or I'll tell you where to go. And I'll back it up with hot lead. People will dig in when they think someone is trying to force their hand, even if it's in a direction they were already thinking about going. And of course they weren't all thinking about going that way.

One of the hardest things to do in this day and age is wait for enough people to evolve to the point where we might all agree to do what's needed to live together peaceably on a healthy planet. But waiting and advising is all that will work. Even if you exterminated everyone who looks like trouble, if you left two people at the end there would be an argument over something, sooner than later.

Proud displays of the Confederate flag should go away, but the Confederacy can't be forgotten. The Civil War was a national tragedy that more or less ended the most obvious aspects of a national disgrace. But the official end of slavery left us with way more than four score and seven years more of racism and strife. It's been seven score and ten, so far. Remember that many abolitionists did not believe that African Americans were equal, only that they should not be owned. Once freed, the grateful darkies were supposed to nip off back to Africa to take up where they left off. They weren't supposed to assimilate into society, become educated and improve their lot. If they couldn't go away, they should at least have the decency to be well behaved. And that was the mild point of view. Where the enmity ran deeper, the hostility was virulent. While that hostility is not quite as overt and widespread now as it was a mere 60 years ago, a little is still too much, and there's way more than a little.

It will be many more years -- if ever -- before there's a national consensus on what the Confederacy was about. So many versions of any story spin up over time that it becomes impossible to untangle all the myths and legends, no matter what the subject. Its flag is a visually striking banner, brightly colored and boldly designed. Then there's the rebel yell. There's a lot to attract the merely high-spirited, not just the mean-spirited. And in a way, by taking the south back into the union, we tacitly agreed to take their heroes in the great and bloody war, who began as Americans and -- if they survived the conflict -- ended that way as well, whether they liked it or not. But you can't spend too much time reliving the details of the actual war, because that was a horrific waste of lives made necessary by stubbornness and pride. You can't go into it without acknowledging that someone was right and someone was wrong. If you tell yourself that the wrong side won, what stops you from saying we should fight again? If you admit that southern surrender was for the best, how can the war not be a complete bloody waste of lives?

The thing that seems to give humans the most trouble is figuring out when to stand up for what they believe and when to question those beliefs and abandon them. When is a fight the good fight and when is it wrong-headed and cruel? Those are decisions people have to make for themselves. You might force them to comply with your view, but if they don't agree it simply goes on the score card for later reckoning.