Category Archives: Random Blogging

A Point Of Light

There are two possible endings to the saga we are currently experiencing. (Well, there are obviously a lot more than two, but most fall within one of two general directions.) Inhabitants of the globe can continue to revert into contending “tribes” screaming at each other from the false security of their particular “bubbles” while the earth warms, species disappear and we eventually all die off; or we could emerge from this difficult era recognizing that the current upheaval has been an unpleasant and perhaps unavoidable side effect of our transition to a more inclusive, more mature, social order.

Most of us have imagined what that “more mature” society might look like–a society in which humans care for each other and protect their environment, where our various differences are cause for celebration rather than suspicion. Those fantasies usually include fairly significant changes to our intellectual and economic life–less consumerism, more respect for science and expertise, a more robust social safety net, and so on. (I’ve actually put my own fantasies into a book– Welcome to the Club: Mending a Fractured America, which is currently being peer-reviewed. When and if it actually hits print, I’ll let you all know.)

Depending upon where you look, you can find lots of evidence for either scenario.

In this blog, I tend to obsess about problems that, left unresolved, might bring on planetary doom. But as several people have pointed out, there is a lot of positive evidence “out there”–mostly bottom-up, grass-roots efforts by mostly younger people–that we might call (per George H.W. Bush) “points of light.”

One of those recently struck me. A Detroit resident named Halima Cassells has started something I think is significant.

Cassells is co-founder of Free Market of Detroit—a place where you can probably find the things you need, and then some.

It started in 2012 like this: Cassells had a year-old baby, and since her other daughters were so much older, she no longer had the baby supplies she needed. So, she decided to host a backyard BBQ, invite all her family and friends, and ask them all to bring baby items they no longer needed. People could take what they needed, as much as they needed. The result was all the moms in need left with more baby gear than they could have imagined. Their needs were met. And they didn’t spend a dime.

 Fast-forward to 2019. The Free Market has grown into a regular event, with one or two held a month, dozens of people attending each one, serving a thousand or more annually. There is a DJ, there is a dance space, and everyone brings as much to give away, or as little, as they are comfortable doing. Some people who might not have an item to give will offer to teach people something, like knitting, crocheting, or yoga. They can also pledge to host a Free Market in their own communities.

 In this way, the Free Market of Detroit is a multi-genre interactive installation, while at its heart it is an old-fashioned swap meet—although nothing is technically traded. It’s all given, freely, says Cassells.

Too often these days, the term “sharing economy” means the exploitation of some people by others for profit–Uber is good example. Cassells’ effort, however, is not only genuine “sharing”–it  has multiple spin-off benefits as well.

When Cassells realized how abundant her community was, she asked herself, “How can we put this [idea] to good use? It amazed me how much stuff people were really happy to get rid of, and happy it would be used. That was the beginning, and a lot of those questions continue [to] inspire more questions like, ‘What is value? How do we place value? Is it time specific? Beauty specific? Status specific?’ …How do we place value on objects and people and usefulness of time and information?”

Not only does the Free Market allow people to acquire needed items without monetary outlay, it facilitates the recycling of consumer goods that would otherwise wind up in a landfill. It undermines mindless consumerism, and it helps to build community.

It’s one of a multitude of grass-roots efforts that can and will usher us into a better future–if we don’t kill each other and destroy the planet first.

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Funerals

Like many readers of this blog, I’m at “that” age–the age at which you experience what seem like weekly losses of long-time friends, acquaintances and family members.

Last Friday, I went to yet another funeral.

My deceased friend left an accomplished and loving family. He died after a lifetime of service–to his profession, which was (ironically) that of funeral director–and to his various communities: the Indianapolis Jewish community, of which he was a part, the political community (he was a longtime, passionate liberal Democrat), and especially and always the larger human community, for which he demonstrated infinite love and compassion.

It is a tired phrase, but so true of this particular individual: he never met a stranger.

What struck me during the service were the characteristics the clergy focused on (a number of them participated). One after the other, they remarked upon his integrity, praised his compassion, and admired his willingness to stand up for what he believed. They repeatedly noted that he was a man of his word–that no matter how difficult, if he made a commitment, he kept it.

If he gave you his word, you could “take it to the bank.”

To use an old-fashioned but entirely appropriate word, he was righteous. Yes, his smile could light up a room, his personality was warm and his laugh infectious–but he was also righteous. He was incredibly kind. He was unfailingly moral, but never judgmental.

He was righteous.

As I listened to the (entirely accurate) glowing eulogies, all I could think of was that as those in the (jam-packed) room mourned the loss of a good man, we continue to live in a country with a chief executive whose word is worthless, whose commitments are laughable, and who has displayed absolutely no connection to–or comprehension of– integrity or righteousness. At Trump’s funeral, no one will be able to say with a straight face that he was a good or loving– or even nice– person, let alone honorable or righteous.

There is a growing abyss in our country between truly admirable people (of whom there are more than we sometimes realize) and the empty and pitiable “captains of industry,” political posturers, and pious hypocrites who currently occupy positions of authority and power in this country.

My friend saw that abyss, and it troubled him greatly.

There were hundreds of people at my friend’s funeral. They had to put up a tent outside the capacious funeral home to accommodate the large and diverse crowd who were there to pay their respects to a man who exemplified the attributes of human kind we most admire–a man whose smiles and hugs reached into multiple neighborhoods and constituencies.

At the end of the day–and we are all closing in on the end of our days–the genuine affection of our fellow humans, the earned respect of our peers, and the honesty of a celebratory eulogy is all the success that any of us can really hope for. To repeat another hackneyed truth: we can’t take anything else with us.

It’s the memory of a life lived with integrity, love and compassion, not the trappings of power or wealth or celebrity, that ultimately matters. The hundreds of people who came to my friend’s funeral were there to comfort his family and mourn the passing of someone they genuinely cared about. I’ve been to a number of funerals where that wasn’t the case.

In the Jewish tradition, there’s a saying: may his memory be for a blessing.

Leaving a memory that is a blessing is beyond the ability of today’s self-engrossed wanna-be autocrats to achieve.

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Edging Toward Civil War?

A few days ago, I shared one of the essay questions from my Law and Policy final exam. The question required students to consider the very different–actually opposed–beliefs about what constitutes American “greatness.”

A number of students chose to respond to that question, and although virtually all of their essays were thoughtful, several of them were depressing. As I noted yesterday, at least a couple suggested that we might be heading toward civil war–that Americans’ approaches to the legitimacy and purpose of government are so incommensurate that common ground is simply unattainable.

Nearly all of them blamed social media for many of our inconsistent realities.

As I said yesterday, I would love to dismiss their observations and concerns as overblown, but stories like the one yesterday and this one–which I referenced a few days ago– are becoming more common and more worrisome.

A small group of white nationalists stormed a bookstore in Washington, D.C., to protest an event for a book on racial politics and how it’s impacting lower- and middle-class white Americans.

The group stormed the Politics and Prose bookstore on Saturday afternoon, interrupting a scheduled talk by Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University who released his book “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland” this spring.

Videos filmed by those in attendance showed the group standing in a line before the audience chanting, “This land is our land.” At least one man was yelling white nationalist propaganda into a megaphone while people in the bookstore booed him.

The man identified the group as “identitarians,” a far-right white nationalist group which is linked to Identity Evropa, which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an extremist group.

This exhibition of racial and religious animus took place on the very same day that a 19-year-old white supremacist fired on worshippers in a synagogue in Poway, California.
Before he mounted the attack, the shooter had  gone online and posted an eight-page manifesto, in which he boasted about his “European ancestry” and expressed hatred of Jewish people.

Metzl told NBC Washington that before the protest broke out he was speaking to a man who had helped Metzl’s father and grandfather flee Nazi Austria.

“Not five minutes before, I had acknowledged him and said this is how great America can be when it is bold and generous,” Metzl recalled to NBC.

He told the Post that the incident was “very symbolic for me.”

Actually, the incident should be symbolic for all of us.

The man who had helped Metzl’s father and grandfather escape the Nazis represents what many of us–certainly, the people who occupy my own “bubble”–think of as American greatness: generosity of spirit, a willingness to use our own good fortune to assist others, an instinctive impulse to protect people who are weaker or who are being marginalized.

We see America as an idea and citizenship as a diverse polity’s common devotion to that idea.

The “very fine” people who rioted in Charlottesville, who shot up the synagogue in California, who demonstrated in that bookstore and who cheer anti-immigrant slogans at Trump rallies cluster around a very different version of American greatness.

In their morally impoverished reality, only white Christians can be Americans, and only when straight white Christian males are dominant can America be great.

My students are right about one thing: those worldviews are impossible to bridge. They do not lend themselves to compromise. And thanks to Donald Trump and his constant appeals to the basest among us, we are confronted daily with evidence that many more Americans than I ever would have guessed share a significant amounts of  “identitarian” beliefs.

And a hell of a lot of them are armed.

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That Dangerous Alternate Reality

A week or so ago, I noted that, in their final essays, several students had suggested America might be heading for another civil war.

Despite our polarization, despite our increasingly toxic politics, that seemed farfetched. I still find it overblown–after all, this country has gotten through plenty of rough patches since our one (and so far, only) civil war without repeating that horrific experience. Granted, some episodes of civil unrest have been bloody, but they haven’t constituted civil war.

We’ve grown up, right?

Maybe not. This recent story from the Guardian made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Washington state Republican representative Matt Shea and several associates regaled an audience with conspiracy theories, separatist visions and exhortations for listeners to arm themselves ahead of a looming civil war, at a gathering at a remote religious compound in the north-east of the state last year.

In recordings obtained by the Guardian, Shea and Jack Robertson, also known as radio personality John Jacob Schmidt, invoked their visions and fears of a violent leftist revolt in speeches at the 2018 God and Country event in Marble.

The Guardian last week published leaked chat records in which Shea and Robertson were revealed to have discussed the use of surveillance, “psyops” and violence against liberal and leftist activists.

Robertson – who aired fantasies of extreme violence against liberal activists in the leaked chats – told the audience at the 2018 event that they should be prepared for civil war.

In his speech at God and Country last June, which immediately followed Shea’s speech, Robertson said: “Of course, you all know that you should have an AR-15 and a thousand rounds of ammo, right? Because Antifa is kicking up and getting ready to defend, right?”

Barely a week after the Guardian reporter contacted Shea and asked for comment, Shea linked to an Australian white nationalist website post which had criticized the reporter making the call.

Robertson and Shea are evidently regular guests on each other’s broadcasts, which air  on a local “Christian” network. According to the Guardian article, the two of them often share a stage at “patriot movement” events. They’ve been associated with the Christian Identity movement, which interprets the Bible as establishing a racial hierarchy in which Jews and blacks are enemies of the white race, who are the true Israelites.

According to Christian Identity doctrine, the United States should be a theocracy governed by Christians in accordance with divine law (as they interpret divine law).

Years ago, a friend of mine told me, in all seriousness, that 20% of the people we pass on the streets–20% of our countrymen– are mentally ill, and that some number of them are delusional and dangerous. At the time, I thought his estimate was high; I no longer think so.

What neither of us foresaw was the election of someone who is seriously disordered (and none too bright), and the encouragement his Presidency would offer to others who live in a  dystopian alternate reality.

We’re in uncharted territory.

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Facebook Is Making Me Suicidal

I’ve been trying to escape the torrent of stories about the constitutional crisis Trump has precipitated by claiming “Executive Privilege” over the entire Mueller Report and refusing to allow White House functionaries to testify to Congress.

The administration’s escalating assault on constitutional and democratic norms has plunged me into a depression–not just because there is an insane moron in the Oval Office, but–more critically– because not a single Republican Senator is willing to place fidelity to the country over fear of electoral retribution by the party’s rabid base.

Not a single one. They are all fellow-travelers to treason.

As my introductory diatribe probably indicates, I spend a lot of time muttering and despairing…so, recently, I went to my Facebook feed for distraction. (That wasn’t the brightest thing to do, because most of my Facebook friends are as politically irate as I am.)

Here’s what I saw on just a quick scroll:

  • A picture of the student who died in the most recent school shooting, in Colorado. He was three days from high school graduation, and rushed the shooter, saving others. I’m sure the f**ing NRA sends thoughts and prayers.
  • An economic analysis of Trump’s steel tariffs, showing that the cost of each American job created was $900,000. (That is not a typo.) I couldn’t tell whether that number included the extra couple hundred dollars Americans are paying for their washing machines thanks to those tariffs…
  • A NYTimes report that Trump lost 1.17 billion dollars over a decade–the paper obtained tax information detailing the massive losses by our self-proclaimed “deal maker” and also showing that he didn’t pay a dollar of tax during that period. (Now if we could see the more recent taxes he’s so frantic to hide…)
  • Several posts about new anti-choice legislation in Ohio and Georgia. The Georgia version would impose criminal penalties on women who couldn’t prove they didn’t cause their own miscarriages, and would charge women who left the state in order to get legal abortions elsewhere with conspiracy to commit murder.
  • Several posts highlighting despicable statements and blatant lies from Mitch McConnell, aka the most evil man in America. (No, Mitch, it wasn’t Obama’s fault that Russia interfered with our election.)
  • News reports about a group of Neo-Nazis who shoved their way into a Holocaust Memorial ceremony in Arkansas, shouting “Five Million More!” (I’m sure our American Fuhrer would say the group contained some “very fine” people.)
  • A news report that Betsy DeVos’ Department of Education rejected 99% of the applications for loan forgiveness filed by students who were bilked by bogus for-profit “educational” institutions.
  • And this story about a Texas Republican representative who labeled vaccinations “sorcery.” After reading this one, I couldn’t go on.

After deriding public health science as a “scam,” the Representative, one Jonathan Strickland, doubled down on the crazy, telling a pediatrician who works with impoverished children that he was a practitioner of “self-enriching science.” He then engaged in a couple of other illuminating twitter exchanges:

Replying to @RepStickland and 2 others
You are wrong in all particulars, Congressman. As a civil servant, I would expect that you would listen to experts (Peter surely is a leader here) and be…civil. BTW “self enriching science” is myth for almost all of us, but has likely saved your ungrateful life more than once.

Jonathan Stickland@RepStickland
Typical leftist trying to take credit for something only The Lord God Almighty is in control of. Repent!

David Gorski, MD, PhD
✔@gorskon
Notice how, to these “parental rights” antivaxers, it’s all about THEM: THEIR rights. THEIR religion. THEIR freedom. The child’s right not to be medically neglected, not to be left unnecessarily vulnerable to disease, never even enters the equation. It doesn’t occur to them.

Jonathan Stickland@RepStickland
Replying to @gorskon and 3 others
… You can’t seem to understand the notion of freedom and liberty…you have no right to come between me and my doctor of choice, or between me and my religious beliefs. Leave us alone.

Personal responsibility and parental rights confuse you, I get it. You’re a brainwashed commie, not all your fault.

 What makes all of this so frustrating is the absolute inability to have a rational conversation, grounded in reality and evidence, with the dangerous and demented cult that is today’s GOP.

They aren’t interested in policy, they disdain science, and they’re contemptuous of the rule of law. They have invented a “Christian” theology that is consistent with their fears and hostilities. They are motivated entirely by their visceral hatred of the women and minorities that they fear are “replacing” them.

Bottom line: Facebook didn’t distract me. It just reminded me that I’m powerless to “change the channel.”

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