Category Archives: Politics

Outrage Without Power is Useless

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I have been seeing a number of social media posts in which people are venting their more-than-justifiable outrage at recent events of which George Floyd’s murder is probably the worst but far from the only case. It’s the worst because of the apparent quiet deliberation with which his execution was accomplished. Many of those posts are directed at the political process that has failed to address systemic racism and that led to the election of Donald Trump. Frustration is widespread, along with anger, despair and related emotions. The country-wide protests are just one manifestation.

There has also been considerable violence, much of it inflicted by police officers who are supposed to protect and defend the people  in the exercise of their constitutional privilege of free speech. We have seen many videos of police protectively escorting armed men and other almost-all-white people screaming about their “right” to refuse to wear masks for public health There have been a few videos of police aligning themselves with the protesters, to be sure, but the majority, based on my unscientific review, involve police engaged in unnecessary and unprovoked attacks on peaceful protesters.

There are also videos of violence perpetrated by mostly unknown people against businesses and police, some apparently just angry random acts and others designed to take advantage of the protest chaos to destroy property and steal whatever was at hand. In my view these acts are unjustifiable by any standard, even as we recognize the anger and pain of witnessing “official violence” over and over again. Violence begets violence and hate begets hate. In the end it doesn’t lead anywhere good for anyone and provides a convenient excuse for people to reject the awful realities that led to the protests.

Most people of good will are united in the belief that Donald Trump is the worst president in America history. The number of white people, of all ages, who have joined the protests has shocked the country. But there are intimations that the outrage and sadness experienced by Black people and now also by an apparent majority of white people may be directed at targets that will not contribute to meaningful solutions. Examples include statements to the effect that “if Joe Biden doesn’t pick XYZ as his VP, I am sitting out the election” and “if Biden doesn’t aggressively support policies A,B and C that were proposed by Bernie Sanders, I’m voting for the Green Party.” There are many variations and references to the outrage felt by “my group” with intransigent statements of “my way or the highway.” Some of them say Joe Biden is just another old white guy and a traditional politician who is a member of the political elite that is responsible for the state of society now.

As another admittedly old white guy, I am deeply troubled by these statements. There is no doubt, none whatsoever, that our society has much to account for. Donald Trump, who is in my view evil incarnate, is not alone responsible for that debt but he is responsible for unleashing the reactionary forces that hold a fantasy view of the America of the past that they somehow believe was “better” than now and thus follow the “make America great again” trope that Trump has promoted. Readers of this blog know where I stand on Trump so I’m not going to belabor that here today.

My main point here is those people whose righteous anger, frustration and pain have stirred their passions to new heights must, if they want American society to improve in meaningful, systemic ways, focus that rage on the right targets. As it stands, our political system, for better or worse, is based on a two-party political system that makes it impossible for third-party candidates to win major elections. It is, I am certain, a truism of American political life that no third-party candidate has a chance to be president. No matter how appealing single-issue or narrowly focused their platforms may be, anyone who votes for them is, in net effect, voting for the re-election of Donald Trump. The mathematics of this are undeniable. If we’re going to begin the process of healing the country and moving forward with a more progressive agenda, the election of Joe Biden is absolutely critical.

I have engaged a number of people on social media platforms on this question. Most of them are immovable. They make statements like “it’s better to vote for a moral platform than the continuation of the politics that got us to this sorry state.” No doubt, a morally superior agenda is to be desired. Accepting, for example, that the Green New Deal is such a morally outstanding program of ideas (which I do, for the record), the fact remains that no Green New Deal candidate is going to be elected president. Anyone who votes for a GND candidate is enhancing the voting power of the Republican Party that supports Trump and assuring that the exact opposite of the principles the GND supports will prevail.

That simply cannot be the morally superior choice among the available options. I have also heard the “my voting for the GND will teach them a lesson, that they can’t ignore us and carry on as before.” Same response. The “lesson” isn’t going to teach anyone anything if Donald Trump is re-elected.

Fundamentally, while the choice of leader is extremely important, in reality it is equally important the chosen leader select exceptional people to staff the key components of the government. The people who surround and advise the president are as important as the president himself. The president’s value system will guide these choices that ultimately control how the government makes policy and otherwise goes about its business. The truth of this principle can be clearly seen throughout the history of the Trump administration. Many of his key advisors and cabinet choices were picked for entirely the wrong reasons, leading to unprecedented graft and corruption. Trump’s administration has had no fewer than 14 indictments of key players, including campaign staff and senior advisors. Multiple cabinet members have left office in disgrace for various offenses against the public good.

The election of a president elects a related value system, a set of judgments about who are the right people to lead the country. While the president has the final word, much of what a president does is effectively controlled by the advisors/cabinet that he selects. This is how the president “forms a government” that can function and deliver on policy commitments for the common good of the people. Under Trump, the “best people” became a sick joke, but moving past that, the reality is that only the “best people” can do the job and you only get the best people if the value system of the president is sound.

I am one of the growing number of citizens who believe the November election is “for all the marbles” insofar as the American idea of democracy is concerned. I accept without hesitation or equivocation that the United States has failed terribly to live up to its aspirations as set out in the Declaration of Independence and as manifested in the Constitution. There is plenty of disappointment to cite, plenty of falling-short of our ideals. The weaknesses of the constitutional structures established in the country’s early years are quite evident, but very hard to change. What makes the US and is citizens “exceptional” is not the purity of what has been achieved but the aspirations to which the majority of our people and institutions continue to adhere.

So, we are left with what we have. That reality is most troubling, but for now, it is the cards we have been dealt. It is, therefore, imperative that the anger, frustration and pain of recent and past events be directed at the real targets of opportunity. Only by acquiring political power can the justified outrage be translated into action that can produce real change. Without power, the outrage is useless. The forces arrayed against change, against justice, are strong because they are also passionate in their beliefs, however much we may deride them. They hold enough political power to impose their craven agenda on everyone. The constitutional system gives them disproportionate leverage. To defeat them requires a massive show of political will and political action by those who believe the present system is fundamentally broken.

Voting on the basis of a single issue-set is not good enough. The choice in the 2020 election is between two different value systems. To give but one example, one of those value systems defends arresting, separating and literally putting in cages thousands of children brought into the country illegally, many of whom will never see their parents again. That value system assigns blame and fault, which drive their actions regardless of the human consequences. The other value system says that approach is morally wrong, that whatever policy we follow regarding illegal immigration, there is no justification for this treatment of minor children. That’s just one of the value choices involved in this election.

Another one, larger in scope, is the value system that maintains that truth is relative and ultimately is whatever the people in power say it is. That value system prevailed in, among others, Nazi Germany. It rejects science in favor of ideology. It is the path to dehumanization and totalitarianism. It is happening here, now. That is the real meaning behind the slogan “fake news.”

To stop it requires a massive show of political will and political action by those who believe the present system is fundamentally broken. We must choose among the real choices we have, not the ones we would prefer. Only with the exercise of intelligent choice now, can we reach the place where we have better choices, not because we are more angry or frightened than others but because we have the power to make the changes we need.

That concludes today’s sermon. Believe.

The Flynn Case — Lying Sanctified by Court

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I am not going to go on at length about this. By now, I hope those of you who watch the news about such things, are aware that the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has, in a 2-1 panel decision, intervened in a District Court judge’s consideration whether to permit the government to drop its prosecution of Michael Flynn for lying to the government.

Flynn admitted twice, I believe, under oath, that he had lied. The prosecution, under orders from Trump’s personal attorney/U.S. Attorney General William Barr, decided out of the blue that the government should not have been questioning Flynn in the first place and, therefore, his admitted lying was apparently unimportant.

The presiding judge, Emmet Sullivan, apparently thought, with justification, that something funny was going on and decided that, before granting the government’s motion to dismiss the prosecution, he would delve more deeply into what might be up. This, of course, sent the Trump administration into a delirious state and it sought a mandamus (a form of a court order, like an injunction, directed in this case to the District Court) from the Court of Appeals, thereby bypassing the problematic course of trying to get permission for an interlocutory appeal (normally one cannot appeal if the lower court has not entered a final order).

As forcefully noted by the dissenting opinion, the decision of the two judges in the majority effectively means there is zero chance for judicial oversight over dubious or corrupt decisions by prosecutors. In the Flynn case, there is good reason to believe that the decision to drop the prosecution was driven by the Attorney General who these days operates as if her Donald Trump’s personal attorney. Not least is the fact, as reported by Politico, that

Just before Barr’s decision to seek to abandon the case was revealed publicly, the Washington-based lawyer and Mueller office veteran who was the lead prosecutor on the case since its outset, Brandon Van Grack, formally withdrew in an apparent protest against the attorney general’s action. The other career prosecutor on the case, Jocelyn Ballantine, also declined to sign the motion.

https://politi.co/2YzNdtE

By granting the mandamus motion, the Court of Appeals took the extraordinary step of taking over the case and deciding it before the District Court had concluded its consideration and issued an opinion. This had the effect, clearly intended, of foreclosing any inquiry that might have revealed disturbing, to put it mildly, facts about the basis for the decision to end the prosecution.

But it’s not over until the last batter is out. Any judge on the Court of Appeals, including Judge Robert Wilkins who wrote the blistering dissent, can ask the full court to hear the case. Judge Sullivan, for reasons not clear, has put all dates on hold. This may signal his intention to seek an en banc consideration or something else. He could be planning to comply with the Circuit Court order but with an “opinion” on the case as he now views it. Time will tell.

Who Am I?

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The current upheaval over the treatment of Black people in America has stimulated some troubling memories and questions for me. I’m sure I’m not alone.

First, some history. It’s usually good to start at the beginning. I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. One of the local “jokes” was that Memphis was actually part of Mississippi. This meant that the “culture” of Memphis, particularly race-related, was more like Mississippi than Tennessee. Tennessee had actually been “two states” during the Civil War, with the eastern part, heavily mountainous and not connected to the cotton-focused agrarian economy of the Deep South, aligned with the “north.”

In Memphis, it was often said that “cotton is king.” Indeed, situated on the mighty Mississippi River, Memphis at that time was a major depot for shipping of cotton delivered mainly from points south. One of the highlights of life in those days was the Cotton Carnival, a huge citywide series of fancy-dress balls, a large parade, selection of a King and Queen and various princesses plus other events celebrating the cotton that sustained the local economy. The reality that the cotton-based economy had developed on the backs of Black slaves was not much mentioned or considered. It simply wasn’t “relevant.”

The history of the Cotton Carnival, started in 1931 and now called Carnival Memphis, can be seen at https://carnivalmemphis.org/carnival-history/ including a brief but revealing video montage of the Cotton Carnival parade and this strange photo:

 

At the time, I did not know the origin of the “cotton is king” mythology but, come to find out, it originated, not surprisingly, with a South Carolina pro-slavery politician (owned 300), James Henry Hammond, who made a speech in 1858, declaring that,

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. … It constitutes the very mudsill of society …. You dare not make war on cotton — no power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king.

https://bit.ly/3fKWzbG That, of course, turned out to be quite wrong a few years later. If you choose to read Hammond’s story in Wikipedia, brace yourself as he is reported to have been, among other things, a serial rapist, a fact that did not prevent his being elected to the U.S. Senate.

Most of the young boys I grew up with were overt racists. The n-word was used in normal conversation to refer to all Black people. These boys thought all Black people were ignorant, dirty, untrustworthy and dangerous. I seriously doubt, however, that any of them actually knew any Black people, except possibly in their role as maids or people who performed menial tasks for their parents. For reasons I still cannot explain, I was the odd- man-out in this racially problematic environment. This was partly because I did know two Black people, one a Black man who worked in my father’s carpet business and the other was Beanie, my grandmother’s maid/housekeeper/cook/attendant. Both of these people were naturally kind, among the best people I have ever known.

I am still bothered by an incident involving Beanie. When I returned to Memphis from college at Christmas holiday time my freshman year, it was expected that Beanie would prepare all my favorite foods for a true feast at my grandmother’s place. Beanie was an extraordinary cook. When it was time for Beanie finally to go home, I insisted on driving her. She reluctantly agreed but insisted on sitting in the back seat. When I pressed for an explanation, she said it would be trouble for her if she were seen in her neighborhood driving in the front seat with a white man. Such were the wages of our sins.

The hostility of whites to Black people, and Black people’s apparent acceptance of that reality, made no sense to me. As a non-practicing Jewish person, I was acutely aware of the oft-heard theme in my family and elsewhere that Jews were the subject of class discrimination, placing them below other white people but above Black people in the social/economic hierarchy. That discrimination didn’t make sense either and felt like a constant wounding. I could not understand what these considerations (being Black or Jewish) had to do with anything important, with what kind of person you were.

In any case, I think my personal interactions with Black people from a very early age likely shaped my thinking and left me “out” of the typical racial attitudes held by my friends. Whenever the subject came up, which was rare, and I asked, “why do you hate Negroes,” no one could ever answer coherently. They just did. They thought it was obvious why they should fear and hate them. And it was not a question they thought was important. It was just how things were.

One of the consequences of my upbringing in this environment was that I “identified” as “southern.” Questions of “identity” as such did not come up in those days, of course, but it was clear to me that I was “southern.” When fate delivered me to Yale University in 1960 in New Haven, CT, the “southern” contingent found its members quickly and during early and long nights in Vanderbilt Hall on the Old Campus quadrangle, students would sometimes open their windows to shout. It was common for someone to scream “I am not a number” and slam his window. A contest of sorts emerged and we “southern” boys met the “Yankees” singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic with robust renditions of Dixie.

This exchange wasn’t about race; there were few Black students in that class, and I don’t believe anyone thought of it as a racial thing. It was just “who we were.” We missed home and this was a way, I suspect, of proclaiming that. We didn’t much think about the complex and troubled history of the key words:

I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten,
….
In Dixie Land where I was born in, early on a frosty mornin’,
….
Then I wish I was in Dixie, hooray! hooray!
In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie….

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_(song) for more on that. Looking back, however, it is horrifying and shameful that we were so ignorant about this subject. The words of the song are prescient because those who still believe in it are stuck in what they imagine are the “old times” and happily proclaim their willingness to “take my stand to live and die in Dixie.” The question is, stand for what?

Fast forward a full lifetime in which I have been blessed to, among other things, have traveled the world and interacted with people from many cultures, some quite alien to our own. From those experiences I came away with one major impression – ordinary people everywhere want pretty much the same things: an opportunity for personal development and security from want. In short, they desire personal freedom, the chance to grow, to have a family, to get an education. Everywhere I went, it was the same.

Fast forward again. The United States is torn apart by the realization by many, almost certainly the majority, that something is fundamentally wrong with our society. While Donald Trump is not responsible for this condition, he has sponsored, promoted and encouraged division from the very first moment of his presidency. The reality is that he is playing on something that already existed. It took the murder of a Black man by police, one of many such events over many years, to once again shatter the veneer that has enabled American society to overlook this gaping hole in our history and in our national morality.

One of the many consequences is the movement to take down the symbols of our hateful past – the statues, the paintings, the flags and other indications of our troubled history. The central question now, at long last though not for the first time, is “what does it mean to be an American?”

That question is really one of identity. What symbols do you identify with? And why?

While enjoying the light breeze in Central Park Sunday morning, my wife observed that there were many statues in the Park whose provenance she did not know. I thought, that’s pretty normal; many of these things we “see” but do not really think about unless we have a particular reason to observe more closely. These are in a sense failed symbols most of the time. Even tourists often don’t pay attention; these symbols are no different to our conscious minds than the trees and rock formations that cover the Park.

But there are some such symbols that we do notice. In our case a good example was the Confederate soldier statue that, until recently, stood in the middle of the intersection of South Washington Street and Prince Street in Alexandria, VA where we lived for many years.  I suspect that we were conscious of it because of its peculiar location that forced you to veer slightly around it when driving north on Prince. We often wondered aloud why the statue was still there in what had become a politically liberal community.

The many proposals to remove these symbols of the Confederacy have sparked a fierce reaction among many Americans who claim that these monuments are not symbols of racism but are only reflective of their “heritage” and their “history.” These are puzzling claims.

It is 2020. Americans are still arguing that statues of Confederate soldiers who fought against the country in order to preserve the system of slavery – the ownership of one person by another in which the slave was forced to provide free labor to enrich the other – on which the economy of the south had been based are related in some way to their current conception of themselves.

The question that puzzles me about this is: why would anyone in 2020 see his identity as tied to the “heritage” of slavery and treason against the country?  The Confederacy lost the Civil War. Why are so many people attached to the iconography of a defeated political entity? Americans typically do not think of themselves as “losers.” Most astute observers agree that the Vietnam War was lost, but even then, many Americans refused to accept the idea that America “lost” a fight.

Why then do so many Americans reimagine the Civil War as a conflict over “states’ rights” when the main, if not only, “states right” at issue was the power of people to own other people for the purpose of extracting free labor from them? These folks are not going around regularly pondering the complex relationship between the federal and state governments or how that relationship is affected by the structure and language of the Constitution.

There are many options available for building an identity, but these people are passionate, sometimes to the point of violence, that these symbols reflect who they really are.

I strongly suspect that the Confederacy identifiers’ actual knowledge about the conditions that led to the Civil War, and its aftermath is shallow at best and for most it is just a set of simplistic and false ideas about what happened and why. And I am even more convinced that they have blocked out, if they ever knew it, the history of what happened after the war and that continued until at least the mid-1950s, sanctioned by the Supreme Court throughout.

I recall that in my own eighth grade American History class, our teacher informed us that in our reading and discussion of the Civil War there was to be no mention of slavery. That was not, she said, what the war was about and therefore we were to avoid the subject. Instead, we spent our time memorizing the names and dates of major battles.

That was in the 1950’s, of course, more than a half-century ago. While I hope that educators today are more informed than that, the truth is I don’t really know what is taught to children these days. Maybe that is part of the answer to my question.

But I suspect there is something else, something deeper, at work and I think it’s just plain racism. I just saw a video on Twitter of a white woman sitting in the back of a pickup truck covered in Confederate flags. She is holding a large such flag and shouting at someone off-camera: “I will teach my grandkids to hate you all,” as she drapes herself in the flag, raises a fist and says “KKK.”

This is not a unique event. Huge swaths of Americans are in thrall of Donald Trump’s overtly racist policies. Neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville chanting Nazi slogans and Trump said there were “fine people [pause] on both sides.” Trump has facilitated the public emergence of an overtly racist class of Americans who are attracted to his idea that America was once “great” and that he will make it “great again.” It is these same people who identify with the Confederate flag and statues of Confederate soldiers and politicians who tried to destroy the country and waged war that killed 750,000 men in arms and an untold number of “civilians.”

Racism seems to be the only unifying principle behind all this. The virulent response to the removal of statuary that, bizarrely, sits in, among other places, the hallowed halls of Congress cannot be explained by anything else. The “history” and “heritage” represented by the Confederate flag and monuments of traitors who fought against the country so they could retain the slavery system is the concept at the heart of racism historically: that Black people are a subordinate and inferior people whose biological destiny is to be under the heel of the superior white race. There is much scholarship on this history, including recently Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram X. Kendi’s National Book Award-winning Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, the documented revelations in which will stun you.

If it’s not racism, what could it be? Adherence to a mythology that conflicts with the very “idea of America,” the notion of American “exceptionalism” on which we have for so long rested our moral-superiority hats, must have a powerful source. If you stood up at a meeting and announced only that, “I want to be identified with losers, people who identify with a vile ideology from the distant past,” most people would think you had a screw loose. But if the meeting were in rural West Virginia or South Carolina and you then broke into Dixie, it’s likely most of the people there would immediately understand and rise to join you in the chorus: In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie.

Good old times are not forgotten.

 

A Hero for the Times

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People who know me well are aware that I have no heroes. All of them were murdered in the troubled 1960s. Since then, no one person emerged as a true hero, although Barack Obama came close. When he was elected, I fooled myself into believing that America had changed, that the bigotry and willful ignorance I had seen growing up in Memphis had receded and that great times lay ahead. I was wrong. As the Obama presidency proceeded, the Republican Party morphed into essentially what it is today and managed to block many of Obama’s greatest potential achievements.

The final blow to my aspirations for the country came when a relic of our ugly past, the Electoral College, worked to put Donald Trump in the White House. Every day of his administration is a tragic reminder that we could have had an intelligent, articulate, committed woman as president. A lot went wrong, of course, not just the flawed Constitutional structures put in place to placate rural and southern interests and that handed the national leadership to Trump with a minority of votes. It doesn’t much matter now. Trump is president and, as fate can do, his incompetence and corruption have been laid bare for the world to see, a bleeding open sore on what was one of the greatest countries on the planet, flawed but pure of aspiration, in need of much work but full of hope and promise.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a catastrophe for humanity. It was also an opportunity for the putative “leader of the free world” to show that, for all his obvious flaws, he could rise to the occasion and steer the country through one of its greatest challenges in a century. It was an opportunity to put to rest the oft-stated concern that, faced with a genuine crisis (threat of nuclear attack, for example), Trump’s staggering incompetence would destroy us. COVID-19 is not a nuclear attack but Trump still failed in almost every way imaginable. In the future I will devote much of my time in this blog illustrating those failures in the hope that the people of this country will rise to the occasion as Trump did not and remove him from office once and for all.

Meanwhile, I want to recognize another leader who emerged from the gloom and despair of the pandemic to do what needed to be done, to say what needed to be said, who did the right thing. He was already an experienced leader of government, the political head of the state with the largest Gross Domestic Product per capita, a major driver of the national economy: New York.

New York City, the centerpiece of the state and the gateway to the nation for travelers from around the world, became the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis. As of today, the World Health Organization reports 8,385,440 total cases and 450,686 deaths worldwide. The United States leads the entire world in both cases and deaths: 118,365 souls lost. New York City, the most densely populated metropolis in the country, quickly developed the most infections and ultimately, so far, more than 17, 546 deaths, as it was flooded by millions of travelers from Europe who brought the virus with them while the federal government hyper-focused on China. In my neighborhood alone, there were 616 cases and 43 deaths. Yesterday, there were fewer deaths than that in the entire city.

Mt. Sinai West Hospital sits immediately adjacent to our apartment building. You can walk to the Emergency Room 50 steps or so down the street. As the city emptied out under the lockdown that started in mid-March, way too late, we were witness to the relentless parade of ambulances bringing critically ill patients to the hospital.

There are two points to be made here. One, the president held a series of daily “press conferences” involving a task force headed by the Vice President and the leading medical authorities at the Center for Disease Control, among others. It quickly became apparent that these events were really for the president to promote himself as the successful defender of the country against the virus, even as the cases and death toll continued to rise. He simply denied any facts that made him look bad. He paraded a random group of corporate leaders in to praise him. He descended into a clown show in which he proposed that the government health authorities investigate injecting bleach into the body or using light of some kind. He promoted the use of drugs for which there was no medical support and which multiple studies indicated could be dangerous to large swaths of the public. He stopped the conferences when his staff finally convinced him that they were counterproductive to his goal of self-promotion and re-election.

Second point: in New York, people who were paying attention saw a completely different approach, one based on scientific facts and evidence. These were the daily briefings by New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo. In the last of these briefings, the Governor reported that a total of 59 million viewers had watched these presentations, each of which involved an opening statement and questions from reporters. The Governor always had staff and sometimes important guests, with him to help address questions, most notably Melissa DeRosa (Secretary to the Governor). In the wake of the George Floyd murder, Cuomo devoted substantial parts of each briefing to addressing the issues around policing practices. He proposed specific legislation that was passed immediately and signed at one of the briefings.

Cuomo proved to be a lifeline for many of us who were quarantined in our apartments.
My wife and I found great comfort in his rational, fact-based approach, his appeal to the better selves of New Yorkers and his repeated admissions that this was personal for him, too. In March he proposed Matilda’s Law, an executive order with the force of law, named for his elderly mother and aimed at protecting the elderly and the vulnerable by putting New York “on pause” with special guidelines for the elderly. We tuned in almost every day, as did millions of people around the world seeking some truth and objectivity in the maelstrom of falsity and self-serving lies from Trump and his enablers.

I won’t go on about this. Cuomo, like all prominent political leaders, has his critics. But whatever mistakes may have been made in his management of the COVID-19 crisis, they appear to be very few and given all the circumstances, understandable and not consequential. I do not believe anyone can legitimately say he did not do his best for the people of New York. The results are clear and undeniable. The cases and deaths attributable to the virus are now the lowest in the country. As the Governor put it, “from the worst to first.”

I urge you to watch this video of Cuomo’s final statement and the video that follows it. It’s less than 13 minutes long. Compare this to Donald Trump’s performance on any issue on any day. This is what actual leadership looks like. What a refreshing experience, even in the midst of the most terrifying situation. Cuomo’s handling of these events will be written about in textbooks and studied in leadership programs for years to come. The 13 minutes you spend watching this will be well spent.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=274891703966298&ref=watch_permalink

Successful Activism is Not a Part-Time Job

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I have seen a number of comments by younger people to the effect that voting is a waste of time because after “activist candidates” are elected, nothing much changes. See, for example, Young Protesters Say Voting Isn’t Enough. Will They Do It Anyway? https://nyti.ms/2AKA2fZ

Given the staggeringly long history of racism in the United States, now combined with the militarization of police departments in the age of terrorism and the wanton use of brute force throughout the country , including federal troops in the Capitol deployed against peaceful protesters, the frustration and impatience with this “just vote” message is entirely understandable. There is no doubt that the sad place at which we have, as a society, arrived, is attributable in significant part to the failure of elected leaders to live up to their promises to bring about a more just society.

I am going to offer some thoughts about how this dysfunction has prevailed for so long. To be clear at the outset, I offer these not as excuses. There are no excuses. The racial situation is and always has been a national disgrace.

These thoughts are possible explanations that might illuminate a path forward and provide some hope to those whose frustration with failed progress has overwhelmed them in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the most recent in a long line of tragedies and surely just the tip of the iceberg in what has gone on when there was no one around to video.

I base these observations on a period in my life when I was active in local politics in Virginia, leading a citizens’ group pitted against a large oil company that had purchased the development rights to finish the master plan for our “planned community.” The situation is not, obviously, analogous to the problem of police violence against people of color, but some of the lessons learned may be useful in thinking about the “is voting useless” issue.

For context, the oil company’s interest typically was in increasing development density – more homes and more people per available acre. Deviations from the original master plan for the town were subject to the approval of a Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors. The Board was the elected governing body for the county in which the planned community) was located.

Our group reviewed every proposed plan deviation and demanded hearings before the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors. The oil company soon began to refer to us as “rabble rousers” and “troublemakers.” It employed lawyers and experts to fight us at every stage. Sometimes we prevailed, sometimes not.

The governing bodies were typical of many local elected governing bodies across the country; regardless of how compelling our case was in any single situation, we faced resistance from some leaders who were more concerned about protecting developers’ “rights” and assuring rapid economic growth than they were interested in the environmental and social issues we often raised.

We were not without champions on these governing bodies, but the reality was that they had to deal with the other members of the bodies on a regular basis. Conflicts required compromise that often felt to us as “selling out of citizens’ interests to the commercial aspirations of greedy developers.” Our champions often fought hard for us but were outvoted. Sometimes their support was simply not as strong as we wanted. We told them so but were usually met with “you need to understand that to get anything done, we have to deal with the opposition in a measured and respectful way.” In those days the very idea of a “planned” community was anathema to many old-line Virginia conservatives and citizens demanding to have a voice in everything was a noxious concept to many.

We learned a few things from these experiences. It was necessary to show up all the time. Being ‘part-time’ advocates simply didn’t work. The politicians, those on our side and the others, needed to understand that there would be no respite. We would always show up, often accompanied by large numbers of supporters carrying/displaying some kind of identification that could be seen from the dais. Nothing disruptive but something clear enough that they would know we were there, watching. Voters in the room for every relevant decision. No respite.

There was pushback, to be sure. Our issues often were scheduled for late on the agenda, allegedly because they were “controversial,” but really so that it would be harder for our “troops” to stick around. Tenacity was important but ultimately many people with jobs the next day would have to leave the hearing for home before our items were taken up. As the group’s leader and advocate, I always stayed, sometimes until well past midnight. Nevertheless, our group’s unmistakable presence in the room, even for a few hours, signaled to the decision-makers that we were watching. Voters in the room. And the decision-makers also knew that by stalling us, they were offending many constituents. We got a few newspapers to write about it. Politicians hate bad publicity even when their names are spelled correctly. No respite.

My argument here is that it is simply not enough to vote. Bearing constant witness and constant engagement is critically important. After a while, our oil company knew we weren’t going away. Their management was furious that they could not control us. Calling us names just angered people even more. We used that against them to stir up more activism.

Well-healed adversaries, including police unions, can lobby all the time. Citizen activists are at a huge disadvantage, but can compensate to a large degree by (1) voting, voting, voting – the constant threat to remove ineffective politicians who can’t/won’t deliver on their promises (if they don’t think your group votes, they won’t care what you think or say), (2) making clear that you and your crowd will always show up for relevant decisions – pack the room, (3) treating everyone with respect, but (4) making clear you will not accept deflection and will use the tools of public advocacy, including particularly the press, to expose aggressively corrupt and indifferent decision-making, and (5) showing appreciation for victories won, even small ones – name the names; reward … and punishment. We are here. We will always be here. Deal with us and our concerns or pay the price. No respite.

Making change, progressing an agenda of challenging ideas is very hard. The natural inclination of most decision-making bodies is to move in tiny steps, if at all. Offend as few people as possible, go along to get along, etc. etc. Protests are extremely valuable for bringing attention to morally outrageous situations, but they are, standing alone, insufficient. Laws still have to be written, lobbied, passed, enforced. Recalcitrant leaders must be brought around. They must come to see that you are not going away. “Enough is enough” is not just a slogan. You cannot wait us out. Talk, talk, delay, study – no. Not good enough. We are not going away until you do the right thing. No respite.

America, We Have a Problem

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Readers old enough or well-versed in space flight history will recognize my playing off the famous statement from Apollo 13 Commander James Lovell, shortly after an explosion aboard the spacecraft enroute to the moon: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” So calm you might have thought he was just reporting routine fuel burn information.

I had the honor of working briefly with Commander Lovell, then retired, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. He was exceptionally gracious and willing to do whatever was asked. Our communications team at what was then the American Society of Travel Agents had the idea to have an astronaut film a public service announcement emphasizing that it was safe to fly again. We filmed it at O’Hare Airport, showing Lovell picking up a boarding pass, confidently going through the new security system. The PSA was seen by more than 200 million people.

I often think of those days in which our country was united in support of intelligently and safely getting the country moving again in the wake of the attacks that shut down air travel.

After the events of the past five or six, or is it 100 or the 56,575 days since the Civil War ended, I also often think of the ending of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet in which the Prince addresses the warring Capulet and Montague families:

See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love.
And I for winking at your discords too
Have lost a brace of kinsmen. All are punish’d.

The Prince’s fine words are ultimately not enough to quell the irrational conflict between the families as they vie for who will create the better remembrance of the dead children. Thus, the Prince ends the play with,

A glooming peace this morning with it brings,
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head.
Go hence to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

As I wrote recently, we seem to have learned nothing. Hate breeds hate. Violence breeds violence. Hate and violence reside in the ignorance of those who only see the “other” as less than human. It has been ever thus. Our beloved Constitution counted slaves as only 3/5 of a free person for purposes of congressional apportionment, thereby increasing the representation in Congress of states that legalized ownership of one person by another. The “North” won the Civil War but lost the peace. After “Reconstruction,” we reverted to Jim Crow and then segregation and it wasn’t just in the South that racism drove our politics.

That is part of the ugly truth of the history of the United States. Having spent my formative years in Memphis, Tennessee, often jokingly referred to as “really part of Mississippi,” I grew up all too familiar with the way racism robbed people of their dignity, their ability to earn a decent living and an equal education and, often of their lives without meaningful recourse.

Now in 21st century not much seems to have changed. Aside from income inequality, educational deprivation, and all the rest, we have again and again seen outrageous acts of white people against black people that go unaddressed. And those acts are often by police who have been given what the law calls “color of authority” to bear arms and enforce the law on the streets. They are given the benefit of the doubt in most close cases.

We all understand that their job is difficult and dangerous. There are many bad actors in our society, as in all societies, and we depend on the police to protect everyone else. The theory is that with good police protection, the citizenry does not have to arm itself and prepare to “take the law into its own hands” when it believes the police power needs to be invoked. That’s the theory.

Most police, I continue to believe, are honest, hard-working people trying to do the right thing. Their job does involve danger. That is why, among other things, they are provided training, advanced weapons and communications tools. I participated in one-day “school” in Alexandria, VA a few years ago, providing exposure to some of the tools and training that the police there were given. It was impressive. It also was discordant with some things I had personally witnessed on the streets of Old Town Alexandria in which police officers behaved in an unhinged way toward citizens who had engaged in minor violations of traffic laws. The line is a fine one.

It is also true that there are many police who cannot conform to norms of conduct. I have read stories of medical personnel saying they have treated many injured police officers and were stunned to see how many “white power” and similar tattoos they had.

So, finally, to the main issue for today. Multiple American cities are in turmoil. Protests have turned violent and the violence has been met with more violence, by the local police backed by state police and National Guard forces in full combat gear with military grade vehicles and weapons. To be sure, the LEOs are usually outnumbered but the protesters are unarmed at least usually. There are exceptions, of course, but the evidence so far is that the protesters’ main weapons are water bottles and traffic cones. And their bodies. Multiple videos have surfaced of police crashing cars into crowds of protesters, pepper spraying passively protesting individuals, physically attacking unarmed women and on and on.

Meanwhile, of course, the inevitable has happened. We are told, and there is no reason to doubt, that much of the violence (burning of buildings, destruction of storefronts, looting) has been caused by people from out-of-state to the city in which they were arrested. I expect that the affected cities will “throw the book” at these provocateurs; surely by now there is a state law everywhere for crossing a state line to perform terrorist acts or something similar.

I say this is inevitable because it simply is. Society, sadly, includes many people who are unwilling or unable to comply with law. It also includes people who, for reasons of ideology, will try to coopt a protest to make the protesters look bad. The right-wing media and the politicians to whom they cater will then try to shift the narrative to “it’s not a legitimate peaceful protest because, look, it’s looters and arsonists, etc etc.” This is a familiar refrain that is often, wittingly or otherwise, legitimized by the mainstream media. It doesn’t take long on the main channels to realize that the violence is getting most of the attention. It always does. And that’s part of why it happens.

The obsession with the violence obscures critically important issues that arise every time we are in this situation.

The major police presence at the scene of protests does not just happen. The police has a command structure. Orders are given. In light of the scenes of police behaving in inexplicably violent and seemingly random ways, it’s more than fair to ask, indeed, it’s essential to know:

What role do the police have? Stop the protest? Arrest as many protesters as possible? Just wait and crack down after the curfew? Why are they on the street?

Without focus, they seem intent on attacking demonstrators. Their role of protecting property seems minor or irrelevant to their reason for being there.

What instructions were the police given?

The videos I have seen tend to show large numbers of police either blocking protesters’ path or trying to push protest groups into particular spaces. If they are resisted, they react explosively. The videos show police using batons in repeated blows to protesters on the ground and multiple instances of pepper spray being used against unsuspecting, fully complying individuals.

Where are the police on-site leaders during these events?

There appears to be little or no leadership. If it’s present, the leadership seems to condone if not actually order these attacks.

One situation that brings the above question sharply into focus is a video of a roughly few dozen police marching down a residential street in Minneapolis, screaming at residents to “get inside.” The person who was apparently on her front porch filming this and expressing surprise at the force appearing on her street is suddenly fired out with either paint balls or rubber bullets. They flee inside. Fortunately, no one was hit in the face or worse.

In another video that has attracted the attention of the Mayor of New York City and the Governor of New York State, a police car drives up to a metal rack, similar to a bike rack, being held by a large group of protestors in the middle of the street. The car stops. Water bottles and a bag are thrown at the car. Another police car appears and passes the stopped car on its right and plows ahead into the protesters. The first car then moves rapidly against the metal rack, driving it and the protesters holding it sharply backwards. Many people go down. It appears, miraculously, that no one was killed. But they easily could have been.

I understand that the police in those cars may have felt threatened. But they could have backed up. If they had a critical reason to advance at that particular moment, despite the risk to the protesters, it will presumably be disclosed in the forthcoming investigation ordered by the Governor to be conducted independently by the state attorney general.

It is difficult to understand how these seemingly random acts of police violence contribute to anything positive.

Why were the police sent into these situations? Do they not employ spotters and have advanced communications to produce high-grade situational awareness?

The police in the Minneapolis residential video can be heard issuing the order “light ‘em up” just before the shooting starts.

Is that what the police are for? To “light ‘em up?” Rough them up so they’ll want to go home?

There is, of course, another way. There is a video from Flint, Michigan, one of the most troubled communities in recent history, in which the sheriff tells the protesters, “we’re with you. We’ve put down our batons. Let’s make this a parade…. My officers love you…. Where do you want to go?…. we’ll march all night. Tell us what you want.” The result: protesters want their selfies with the sheriff and peace prevails.

Another image shows police on one knee in solidarity with protestors, while yet another shows Kansas City police holding signs that say, “End Police Brutality.”

I want to make three other points. First, Governor Cuomo, whose work on the pandemic has been, in my judgment, exceptional, passionately addressed the protests in his briefing today. He, of course, decried the violence. Fine. He also offered several specific proposals to change the way things work. He mentioned having independent review of complaints about police conduct, saying “self-policing just doesn’t work.” He argued for a uniform state law across the country on what constitutes “excessive force.” Both are good ideas.

But they do not go to or anywhere near the root problem, which is the persistence of racism throughout the United States. We won’t eliminate racism everywhere overnight, especially given the history that has brought us to this sad day. But, is it not time to address racism in the police departments around the country? Surely, it is not acceptable to have police be members of white supremacy organizations. Surely, there are ways to detect suppressed racism and subliminal bias and racist attitudes through testing and investigation. What is missing is the will to do it. There is simply no excuse to have racist cops on the force. On any police force. Yet, judging from the events of the past five days, likely to be repeated tonight, there is a staggering amount of racism rampant among our law enforcement services.

Next, I have been disappointed, stunned really, to see that the past five days of protests have seen few if any political or religious leaders on the streets with the protesters. This is not how it was during the Vietnam protests. We often had major political figures with us and “handlers” who understand how to keep the crowd’s “temperature” down when “outside agitators” tried to provoke violence. And it wasn’t that way during the major civil rights protests and the Women’s March.

Finally, I truly understand how horrified many people are about the looting, burning and rioting of some of the protesters. Related to the other points I’ve made, however, is the proposition that if you don’t given people anything to hold on to, they will just choose something at random. This usually has bad outcomes, as it did this week. We might have expected that the president of the country would step into that void but was kept busy throwing red meat to his political base with tweets promising “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” would be used against protesters if they breached the security perimeter of the White House. Then, the president took the day off.  Nothing more need to be said about this total failure of leadership except that it, yet again, shows how unfit Donald Trump is to lead the country.

May I Remind You

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I just published a long piece about the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. As I wrote it, another story kept emerging in my thoughts, a true story from my distant past.

It was 1968. April 5. A nice warm spring day in Washington DC, where I worked as a newly-minted trial lawyer at the Civil Aeronautics Board. The CAB offices were in a building at Connecticut Avenue just below the Washington Hilton. My then wife worked some blocks downtown for an association. Typical Washington jobs.

We got the news the previous day that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, the city where I grew up from age 2 to age 17 when I left for college. Washington was in flames, we were told, and the government was closing. I made my way downtown, leaving my car, a Volkswagen, parked on a sidewalk and walked to my wife’s office. Everyone was confused. There was no internet, no Google, no good way to find out “breaking news” that is now a staple of our daily existence. The rioting had started the evening before but there was no up-to-the-minute news. So, we watched the scene unfolding outside at a major downtown intersection. Gridlock. Total gridlock. No one moving. Horns honking. People shouting at each other from their cars. Panic.

I took a glass of scotch and walked down to the middle of the intersection, threading my way carefully through the cars. I wore my customary work clothes, a vested suit, as was common in those days. I put my drink down in the dead center of the intersection and became a traffic cop. I began “ordering” cars to wait before entering the intersection. Most drivers, though not all, obeyed, and a semblance of order began to emerge from the chaos.

Every so often a car would stop in passing by me, roll down the window and a frantic person, always white, would look out at me and yell “Thank you, oh thank God for you.” I didn’t know what to say except “you’re welcome.” The scene was totally surreal.

White people were fleeing the city by the tens of thousands. Some crying. I could see the smoke from the 7th Street NW and 14th Street NW corridors, just three blocks from where I stood and could smell the acrid odor. For whatever reason, I was not afraid, but fear was all around me. I suspected that those people thought the black people burning Washington were going to come after them if they didn’t get out of town quickly.

The aftermath is well known. One of the major reactive themes was, “those people are crazy because they burned their own businesses.” It was true. Many black-owned businesses in the area were savaged in the rioting. The rage was simply that – rage – and the rioters took it out on what was near them, their own businesses and even homes.

Crazy? Perhaps, but that’s what rage does. White people seem to think that rage should somehow be rational, in the way that a professional boxing match is rational – people fighting by agreement over a prize, winner-take-all. But, of course, that is not rage. That is just business. Rage is something else altogether, and we’re seeing it in Minneapolis and many other cities across the country. We should not be surprised.

My story ended quite simply and quietly. A relatively young police officer appeared out of the chaos surrounding the intersection. He was black, as were many members of the Washington police force. He walked toward me slowly, carefully. I thought, “great, reinforcements.” I looked at him and he looked at me, the anger etched in his face. He was in no mood to have a friendly chat with the white stranger doing a policeman’s job in a scene of total chaos. I don’t recall exactly what I said, but I think I tried to smile and asked if he was going to stay. He said something about taking over and I picked up my drink and backed out of the intersection. He had no time or further interest in me. I understood then and understand now why that was so.

I can still see his face. He was in control of his anger, but it was obvious how conflicted he was to have been ordered to help these hysterical, panicked white people flee the city that was burning just down the road. I suspect he came from that direction, knew what was happening but was here now to do his duty, despite his personal pain and despair.

I confess I was glad to get back inside. But I will never forget the way that young black policeman looked at me. He felt no sense of thanks for me having helped out, no empathy, and I didn’t expect otherwise. I can’t begin to imagine the depth of his suffering even as he continued to do the duty he had sworn to perform.

The coda to the story is that there were mass arrests of protestors and rioters alike. A call went out for lawyers to come downtown to the courthouse to help process and represent those huge number of detained people, many of whom were innocent of any wrongdoing. My good friend and officemate at the CAB and I decided to volunteer. We drove into Washington that evening, passing military guards on the Key Bridge. Soldiers were stationed in the doors of businesses on M Street in Georgetown. Machine gun emplacements were visible on the lawn of the White House. Ultimately, we were rejected by the administrators of the court on grounds that as federal employees we had a conflict of interest in representing individuals charged with federal crimes. We drove home. The rioting lasted for four days.

And here we are again. Fifty-two years later. Same story. Again. And again.

Déjà vu All Over Again – We’ve Learned Nothing

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Minneapolis burns. Los Angeles. Memphis, Louisville. Others.

A police officer in full view of multiple people, including store surveillance cameras, calmly kills an unarmed, non-resisting person accused of trying to pass a fake $20 bill. The unarmed, non-resisting man is a big man, imposing stature, but not resisting. His hands are in cuffs behind his back. The police officer forces him to the ground on his face, or maybe he sits down on his own. Maybe he said something offensive or even threatening. So what? He is cuffed and defenseless. The officer places a knee on the man’s neck. The man complains “I can’t breathe.” Multiple times. The officer ignores him. The other three officers on the scene ignore him. Witnesses plead with the police to check the man, but they are ignored. The man stops breathing. Still the police officer sits on his neck. The man dies.

The man dies in the presence and under the complete control of FOUR ARMED POLICE OFFICERS EQUIPPED WITH PEPPER SPRAY, TASERS, CLUBS, SIDEARMS. IF the man said something threatening to the officer OR IF the man did “resist” by passively dropping to the ground, under what police procedure and training did one of the four officers to think that the appropriate response was to sit on the man’s neck until he died? Is it even conceivable that police procedure condones this practice? Anywhere in the United States?

The prosecutor goes on TV and says there is “other evidence” indicating no crime was committed. What evidence? No comment. Why, then, did the prosecutor think it was a good idea to tell everyone he already had doubts about what virtually every non-racist person on the planet believed was almost certainly a crime – the deliberate taking of a life without justification under color of authority? Again.

All four of the officers have been fired so they are not among the strike force of hundreds of police now sent to suppress the, surprise, rioting and looting that have broken out in the wake of yet another “good people on both sides” scenario. The police use tear gas, pepper spray, fire hoses, among other things, against the crowds of enraged protestors.

Many people who were silent in the immediate aftermath of the video releases that at least raised a presumption that a police officer had, for the how-manyieth-time, killed an unarmed, non-resisting black person have come out clutching their pearls over the terrible rioting and looting. Sure, there may have been a problem with the police conduct – maybe, who knows, there could be an explanation, let’s wait for all the evidence, don’t jump to conclusions –but rioting and looting? Outrageous. Taking property? Unacceptable. Must meet force with force. Law and order. Restore peace by whatever means. Call out the National Guard.

And if you’re the president of the United States, what do you do? Well, our current president calls people names, threatens to “take control” with the military and “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Here is part of Trump’s actual message:

These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!

You don’t need a degree in linguistics to get the president’s message: “I will declare martial law and I approve of the National Guard/military shooting protesters who are rioting and looting. That’ll show ‘em who’s the boss.”

The victim here was a black man named George Floyd. His name joins the pantheon of unarmed black people killed by police in circumstances where other means of addressing the “situation” were readily available. Often the “situation” is really just that a black or brown-skinned person was involved. Involved in the sense of just being there. Despite the availability of other options, the police in these cases chose the lethal option. It’s not an accident. It’s a choice. And in virtually every case, the police are exonerated. There have been a few exceptions, but precious few.

The officer who killed George Floyd had 18 complaints on his record. One of the other four had six complaints and was involved in a settled lawsuit alleging use of excessive force among other things. https://cnn.it/2M8R3mm

All four officers in the present case have been fired. Fine, but not enough. Not even close. They will no doubt face civil suits whether or not the City of Minneapolis takes action against them. Why they are still at large is unknown and inexplicable on the known facts. Reminds us of the initial reaction of authorities in Georgia to the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. The “there is other evidence” position of the prosecutor is very close, too close, to “good people on both sides,” the president’s unsubtle endorsement of the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. The mind boggles at the thinking behind the prosecutor making such a statement while refusing to describe the evidence. But, rest assured, he will study this case really hard and be sure the law is followed. Rest assured.

While you’re waiting for the prosecutor, think about this. What would the operative difference be if, instead of kneeling on Floyd’s neck, the policeman had rolled him over, pinning his cuffed hands under his body, sat on his chest and choked him to death with his fingers? Any real difference?

The Minnesota GOP had plenty to say about the beaches being closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, but I can’t find anything they have had to say about the killing of George Floyd. No doubt, they are “extremely concerned” that there has been violence and property loss. They likely joined the Trump-led GOP chorus of outrage at Colin Kaepernick peacefully protesting by kneeling at a football game during the playing of the National Anthem. They can’t have it both ways. Peaceful protest – Noooo! Riots and looting – Noooo! The real message, obvious to me and others, is, “don’t be black.”

As a society, if that term still applies, we appear to have learned nothing. Armed racists threaten legislators over pandemic lockdown and masking policies, and no one lifts a finger. Police are expected, and do, stand in rows while being screamed at by AR-15 carrying vigilantes complaining about their “rights.” No one is arrested. In Minneapolis, on the other hand, today’s protesters were pepper sprayed by the driver of a passing police car for no discernable reason except a “take that” attitude by an unhinged and uncontrolled police force. The officers surely know they are being filmed but they are not concerned there will be repercussions if they wantonly attack protesters.

I get that police are under a lot of stress. I support the police almost all the time, but not when unarmed black and brown people are killed and there were readily available alternatives to the use of deadly force. Police are supposedly trained and re-trained on the use of deadly force. Presumably their calm under stress is evaluated carefully before they are unleashed on the community carrying an array of weaponry, some of which can be used to kill. Or maybe not. Maybe in Minneapolis and the countless other places where these violations of human rights have occurred the police are not really trained. They are just armed and sent into the community with instructions to “keep the peace” however they choose. Is this possible?

In the George Floyd case, ironically and painfully, the police didn’t need to use anything but handcuffs to kill a man. We have learned nothing from all the prior cases. And the president of the United States just fans the flames with hostile rhetoric, showing yet again his complete unfitness to hold office. Still, the Grand Ole Party is apparently silent. They sat silently and voted to acquit Trump when he was impeached for extorting a foreign government, allowing him to withhold relevant evidence and witnesses. They sat silently while Trump’s henchman Attorney General William Barr lied and distorted the Mueller Report. They preach law and order while the president’s immigration policy separates families and leaves small children parentless, in some cases forever, locking them in cages in concentration camps.

This is but a small sample of what Republican leadership has created in America. All the racism can’t be blamed on them, but they have endorsed and facilitated it over and over. And when the police yet again kill an unarmed and defenseless black person, they sit silently until their leader speaks and incites further hatred, dividing the country even further.

How long does the white conservative establishment think the underclass which is huge and growing is going to continue to tolerate this blatant racism and discrimination? Do they not understand that when large numbers of citizens no longer feel invested in the established order and peaceful change of that order is foreclosed, they lose their connection to that society and their justified but ignored and resisted rage boils over? How long do they think this can continue without serious and violent consequences becoming the order of the day, as the unwarranted killings of unarmed black and brown people has become the order of the day?

November is coming, not soon enough, but it’s coming. The good people of this country had better put an end to the Republican leadership that has brought us to this place. The consequences of failure are too grim to imagine, but it seems certain that the failing light of democracy that, at least in principle, was the founding dream and aspiration of this country will be extinguished if change is not achieved. That sounds apocalyptic, I know, but don’t believe it can’t happen here. It can and it will, unless we stop it. ENOUGH!

 

 

Pandemic Influences on Higher Education Choices

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My good friend and professional colleague, Kevin Mitchell, founded the Business Travel Coalition (http://www.businesstravelcoalition.com/) many years ago and publishes a subscription based daily newsletter of important reporting on the entire travel business. The newsletter, now called tVillage Intelligencer, is seen by thousands around the world.

Kevin is prolific writer and thinker and has published a thoughtful and, as always, well-crafted essay addressing the implications of the pandemic on the decisions being faced by many families and young people whether to go to college or pursue other options. I responded to the piece and, with Kevin’s permission, am republishing the exchange here (without the graphics; his original essay can be seen at  https://publicate.it/p/KqXmdg152169):

A Pandemic Consequence: The Questioning of Higher Education

No idle Memorial Day weekend exercise for some

This weekend as Americans think about and honor the more than one million patriots who gave their precious lives for the promise of America, there is even more on the minds of parents. The economic fallout of the COVID-19 (C19) pandemic is causing parents of children already in college, about to enter college or considering applying to think long and hard if such an expensive commitment is the best and only path for their children.Indeed, there is a counter-push against the American must-go-to-college mantra that is increasing in strength. I believe that like previous pandemics, C19 will accelerate many existing or latent economic and societal trends. The crisis is likely, for example, to push a lot of parents and their children to rethink the cost/benefit of a traditional college education compared with alternative paths.

Sadly, a lot of kids today go to college because all their friends do without considering whether that’s what they really want to do and if it is worth 4 years of their lives and a lot of expense, including lost wages, versus other options. For sure, some have a dream of becoming an architect, physicist, astronaut or the next Olympic track star. However, that’s different in that those young adults have strong personal life-purposes and visions. Still, for others, they want to explore new intellectual, social and cultural experiences that are important and valuable to them to better understand.

Higher education has been justifiably pedestalled as a highly valued tradition in Western and non-Western cultures for its numerous and far reaching societal benefits. My grandmother and grandfather, for example, immigrated from Ireland to America in the early 20th century and originally took jobs in Boston as a maid and policeman respectively. They were determined to put my mother and her sister through college to improve their lives. My mother graduated from Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia in 1940 when very few women of her parents’ means were able to attend college. Both went onto long careers in education touching many thousands of lives and living the American Dream. So, I am all-in for this important tradition of higher education and its linkage to upward social mobility.

Today, however, especially against the backdrop of a C19 economic crisis, where close to 40 million Americans have so far lost jobs in a highly unsure future-looking economy, many are beginning to challenge the assumption that college is the only path on which to responsibly put their children to achieve the American Dream and a productive, fulfilling life.

It’s not just the high cost. Also at issue is the perceived uneven quality of the education itself, the totality of today’s campus experience and the enabling public policy. Many point to the financing model of higher education as a root cause of the $1.6 trillion college tuition debt-bubble that is more likely to burst during this C19 economic malaise as parents making loan payments are increasingly under financial duress. And let’s not forget the superrich buying their kids’ entry to prestigious universities; not a good look for American society or higher education! In combination, these developments reinforce some parents’ weariness and instincts that it’s time for a revalidation of assumptions. This should worry U.S. institutions of higher learning that have already seen student enrollments decline every year since 2011.

It’s fair to ask if recent graduates are better prepared to work hard, take risks and achieve success than if they had chosen to take a different path, or waited for a while until they discovered their keen interests or passions to make the best possible decisions for themselves.

Perhaps with some irony, a pandemic is once again poised to insert itself in the trajectory of higher education – which has been forever short on innovation and long on cost increases. University education was democratized for the masses as an eventual consequence of the Bubonic Plague in the 14th century wherein prior to that time those of us with European roots had ancestors some 75% of whom were serfs largely confined to their lords’ fields and heavy-handed restrictions. However, while there is something very important about the pursuit of university study that should be understood, valued and safeguarded, there is reason for healthy skepticism as well.

I graduated from St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia in 1980 with a 4-year tuition debt of a mere $10K, which I easily paid off in 3 years. Was it worth it for me? Yes, because I learned that jobs in a big company without a degree were virtually non-existent. In my case, a bachelor’s degree in international relations apparently provided an employer with an indication of some competence and/or other positive attributes. I was offered a job by CIGNA Corp.

Beyond getting my foot in the door at CIGNA, did I secure new skills and knowledge from investing four years of my life and working full-time, year-round? Yes. Was it an even-trade for the benefit? Leaving aside that it represented the key to the CIGNA door, my answer is a resounding no. Very little of what I learned in class helped me in my career and I did not benefit from the interactions of living on campus with fellow students because I lived at home.

The university model should be fundamentally reformed. However, it should also be cherished and safeguarded while culturally celebrating the upward-mobility successes available to those in America who want to strike out with personal visions and work hard and achieve their goals without four-year college degrees. Options include self-education, job training, trade schools and technical certifications, as an example, for aircraft mechanics.

The classic American expression “self-made man” was coined in 1832 by U.S. Senator Henry Clay to acknowledge the inner promise and strength of individuals who work hard and succeed irrespective of the circumstances in which they find themselves. There are enough examples in America to fill a university library.

Born poor in Kentucky, and with a total of one year of school, self-educated Abraham Lincoln led our country through its most profound crisis ever during the American Civil War abolishing slavery and fundamentally modernizing the American economy. Lincoln pursued a path that diverged from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Penn, Haverford, Fordham and other institutions accepting students at that time.

Lincoln, instead, chose a version of distance-learning enabled by borrowed books to become a self-taught lawyer at age 25, state legislator, Member of Congress and President of the United States. With some irony, in 1862 Lincoln signed into law the Morrill Land-Grant Act enabling the creation of soon-to-become prestigious universities such as Cornell, MIT, Penn State, Rutgers, Ohio State, Texas A&M, West Virginia and the University of California.

Not such a bad path, role model or agent of change! 

Perhaps it would be counter-intuitive, but fruitful, for colleges and universities to celebrate and embrace alternative paths to four-year degrees and lifelong learning and reinvent themselves by taking a leadership role in a comprehensive national initiative to prepare future generations of Americans to be productive, highly successful citizens. Lincoln, the epitome of the self-made man, was able to appreciate accomplishment without the benefit of a college degree and, at the same time, to champion the strategic importance to our nation of expanding institutions of higher learning.As pandemics are wont to do, I am sure many Americans this Memorial Day weekend are using the reflective time to think over many long-held assumptions about important components of their lives from college, to work-life balances, to placing their parents in nursing homes.

My response:

I read with great interest your essay on the questioning of higher education as a partial result of the economic disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have been mulling this subject for a long time, inspired by some much earlier published pieces in which (1) a successful entrepreneur (one of your “self-made men”) argued that college was useless, that his son would have to make his way as an innovator, just like dad, or fail, without wasting time in college; (2) arguments were presented that the cost-benefit analysis, comparing future earning differentials for college graduates v. non-college people showed conclusively that, as you have suggested, it’s “not worth it.”

Having been blessed with a scholarship-financed liberal arts education at an Ivy League college, also with associated debt to repay, I must dissent.

You are no doubt correct that the economic destruction wrought by the pandemic will force many to rethink their ability to pay for a college education. This is but one of the many tragedies to emerge from the pandemic. But that, I suggest, is a separate issue from whether a college education is so valuable that, if the opportunity exists, it should almost always be chosen. The value is properly determined not simply by traditional “cost benefit” analysis but by a broader range of intangible considerations.

For example, an on-campus college education presents the opportunity for young people to engage with a range of intellectual and other mind-expanding stimuli in an atmosphere that, if properly run, expands understanding of how the world works. It forces students to confront different points of view and to think more deeply about hard questions about which they previously just assumed the answers. They have the opportunity to confront and understand complexity. Ultimately, they learn to think, often about subjects they had no original interest in and would never have been touched by in the absence of the “cloistered” college experience.

Viewed this way, college is not just a trade school, a place where you learn how to do something. It’s a place where you come to understand what you can and should be doing and then you move on to more advanced studies or enter the world and take up the rest through direct experience.

I do not suggest, however, that college is right or necessary for everyone. But it is right for most young people who life paths are still being sorted at the time college is an option .It is not just the ticket to superior employment – it is the essential prerequisite to the fully examined life.

I believe we are seeing now in our society the consequences of having a large population of adults who did not have this experience. The polls refer to them as the “non-college educated white people.” They tend to support Donald Trump, to revere destructive rhetoric, support anti-immigrant and anti-diversity policies, to “hate” the “other,” defined as people not like them. Their thought processes embrace ideas like “fake news” and are unable to distinguish truth from ideology. They don’t think deeply about anything because they’ve never been required to do so. They see themselves as victims and engage in much magical thinking, including attraction to conspiracy theories.

Obviously, not all non-college educated people are like that but I believe the shockingly large segment of the American population that the above does describe is in significant part a function of the lack of higher education and the exposure to “other” ideas and “other” people that such education most often provides.

It would be ideal, of course, if the United States offered both paths, so that those people who only want to learn a trade and pursue the resulting life can do so. In the past the country did have trade schools but the shifting of manufacturing to foreign sources caused job opportunities in many trades to dry up, leading to the closure of many related educational opportunities. The demand now is for computer science and related skills and while there are schools devoted largely to teaching those things, the emerging students will likely lead more rewarding lives, all aspects considered, if they also have some learning experiences in literature, history and the like.

You and I are probably not as far apart as might appear with respect to the above. Where we more seriously diverge, I suspect, is regarding the notion of the “self-made man,” for which you cite Abraham Lincoln as a stellar example of what can happen to individuals with the “inner promise and strength … who work hard and succeed irrespective of the circumstances in which they find themselves.” Lincoln certainly stands out in the pantheon of such people, but I suggest that the chances today of more “Lincolns,” or even more Steve Jobs emerging and doing great works, as opposed to simply making themselves rich with some new technology they imagined, is slimmer than ever.

That is not just a consequence of the greater complexity of today’s knowledge-demands; the system has been rigged to suppress many of the potential innovators. I wrote about this in my blog post entitled, The Larger Meaning of “Hidden Figures” https://bit.ly/2TGx172, the gist of which was expressed thus,

 As bad as slavery, Jim Crow and segregation were for the direct victims, and most of us cannot comprehend how it was to be the constant target of such practices every  day of our lives with no hope of change, the larger lesson from this movie is, I believe, the staggering cost to everyone, in the United States and everywhere, of the lost  contributions and achievements of which these practices deprived us.  And still do.

In the millions of people directly suppressed by these practices, it is a certainty that there were multitudes of people who would, in other circumstances, have become  great scientists, inventors, artists, musicians, athletes, caregivers, writers, teachers and on and on. All of us have lost forever the benefits of the achievements of those  people who never had a chance to develop into their individual potentials as human beings. The frightened people of no vision who perpetuated these practices from    America’s earliest days even to today in some places have deprived the country and the world of an immeasurable gift.

One of the most surprising aspects of that blog post, written in in early 2017, is that visitors to the blog to this day seek it out more than anything else I have written. From where I sit, there may still be some chances for so-called “self-made men” to emerge but the odds are heavily against them. And, I must say, that the term “self-made,” in my opinion, grossly understates the contribution that others made to all such people, including Abraham Lincoln properly understood.

In conclusion, having staked that position, I now declare that I agree strongly with you regarding the need for reform in our education system. Those reforms should certainly include opportunities for future “tradesmen” to learn and proceed with an honorable path through life. They should, I think, also provide for a viable economic path to and through higher education so that everyone who wants to study anything serious should be able to do so without assuming overwhelming debt that take decades to repay and have all manner of deleterious impacts on individuals, families and society at large. I readily confess I don’t know how to get to that idyllic state, but the price we pay as a society of failing at this may well be our undoing, not just as a nation-state but as a civilization.

COVID-19 & New American Mantra: I Only Care About Me

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It was Memorial Day. What is that, exactly? It’s a day to remember and honor Americans who died while serving in the U.S. military, especially those who died in combat. Whether or not you approve or disapprove of a particular war, or indeed all wars, it is, in concept and intention, a somber occasion. It’s a time for reflection and showing respect.

The United States has adopted some strange ways of recognizing this occasion, although the phenomenon is not unique to Memorial Day. Most people get the day off from work. Some watch the televised memorials over the weekend; some watch the president and other dignitaries pay their respects officially by, for example, placing a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery.

Many others see the day only as a holiday occasion and this year, in particular, there was greater emphasis on the “re-opening” of the country following the various lockdowns driven by the coronavirus epidemic. I have no idea what the ratio was of celebrants to serious observers, but if the scene on Alabama’s beaches is any guide, a very large number of Americans saw this day as simply an excuse to abandon caution and head out for a good time. Multiple videos showed massive crowding at swimming pools in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri and the Ace Speedway in North Carolina, among others. Masks and social distancing were largely absent. St. Louis County officials called the scenes an “international example of bad judgment.” https://wapo.st/3gqBjcD

To be clear, I don’t care much what any individual chooses to do regarding protecting himself or throwing caution to the winds in pursuit of belief that he has a constitutional right to do what he pleases. Freedom, American values and all of that, are what each individual decides they mean for herself.

However, the line is drawn when an individual’s choices infringe on the rights and values of others, including the right to be protected from dangerous behavior. This is why we have speed limits, stop signs, protection of minors from certain types of work and many other restrictions on what we might individually be inclined to do. This is not hard to understand. True, there are violations of the speed limit, seat belt laws and the others every day by someone somewhere, often many someones. According to Rhino Lawyers, on average the police issue 112,000 driving citations a day! https://bit.ly/3gndAKd Some of these are for inadvertent mistakes and many are for deliberate decisions to, for example, disobey speed limits. And, of course, most violators of the rules of the road are not brought to justice. Sometimes, these behaviors lead to tragedies, resulting in deaths, disabilities, lawsuits and so on.

We are in the middle of a global health pandemic with similar deadly consequences, so far, in the United States for 100,000 individuals (exactly 99,498 as I write) and roughly as many families. Globally, the deaths exceed 348,000 out of more than 5.5 million cases. It is highly likely that the reported numbers understate the actual case and death toll. https://bit.ly/2ZL3soy No end is in sight. There is no “remedy” or “cure” that can be administered reliably to the stricken. All ages and demographics are affected, some more than others, but no sector is immune. There is no vaccine and none in the offing any time soon. Many more will fall ill and many more will die before this is “over,” if it ever is. Like the flu, COVID-19 may be with us forever.

Returning then to individual behavior, I repeat that if an individual wants to risk his life on the chance that he won’t be infected, so be it. Do whatever you want with your own life, provided that doing so does not place others involuntarily at risk.

Consider these statements from people interviewed at a packed Alabama beach yesterday, where there was no active enforcement of the policy that groups should consist only of same-family members:

“I’m just here to have fun and meet everybody and be cool, you know.”

Recent college graduate: “I don’t want to die but if [death] is what God has in store for my life, that’s ok.”

“If we get it, we get it…. We’re just going to handle it as a family and just get over it because that’s what a family does.”

“People die from the flu also.”

“I get it, I get it. The survival rate is so high…. we’re all going to get sick from something eventually.”

“If he’s not wearing a mask, I’m not wearing a mask; if he’s not worried, I’m not worried,” young male referencing Donald Trump.

“When it’s my time to go, it’s my time to go.”

[https://cnn.it/3d4HG3c]

Such fatalism is fine for individuals who have no contact with other people but most of these people likely have plenty of social contacts. Their “decision” to risk sickness, permanent injury and even death at the hands of the coronavirus thus exposes many others to the same risk whether they want to take it or not.

This is a degree of selfishness, openly and proudly displayed, that should be of profound concern to everyone. These people are living by the “principle” that says, “I only care about me and no one else. My rights and privileges, my freedoms to do whatever I want are more important than the welfare of anyone else that I may come in contact with, including children, elderly people with compromised immune systems or co-morbidities. I am all that matters. Me, Me, Me.”

This comes not just from the very young or the older young restless/reckless who often think they are invulnerable and whose cerebral cortexes, science informs us, are not fully developed and often make bad decisions. People of all ages and with families were interviewed on the Alabama beach. These are our “fellow Americans,” for whose “freedoms,” many men and women gave their lives in foreign wars. I doubt that if we could ask the fallen warriors whether this is what they meant to sacrifice for, most all would say, “no, we did not act selflessly just so others could be so selfish and indifferent to the welfare of others.”

But this is the contemporary reality of life in the United States. It’s not happening in just one place and it’s not just the product of needing to re-open the economy. This is blatant selfish behavior. These people include some of the angry, usually white, people who have carried guns into some state capitols, without being challenged, to demand re-opening. Like the people at the beaches and pools this weekend, they refuse to wear masks or engage in social distancing to protect others. While shouting and waving flags and signs about their “rights,” these selfish people make clear that don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves. Other people’s rights to be free of disease and to avoid contact with high-risk people and behaviors mean nothing to them.

Having witnessed the ravages of this disease up close and personal, my patience with these people has been consumed. The tank is empty. I am fearful of my reaction if I continue to encounter unmasked people on the streets of New York when we dare to venture out. They were everywhere this Memorial Day weekend when we walked for the first time in two months. The Governor of New York has observed that wearing a mask is simply the “right thing to do.” Still, many are unmoved. They just don’t care.

As tempting as it is to wish they all get infected, that would just expose even more people, including health care workers, to the consequences of their reckless and morally bankrupt insensitivity and that would be wrong. So, I try not to be vengeful. It is hard. This kind of indifference to the fate of other people seems un-American. It seems inhuman. No one can claim valid religious conviction to justify this, though many do so. There is no true religion anywhere that says, “do for yourself and to hell with everyone else.” That, however, is where we are.