Category Archives: Random Blogging

When Will We Ever Learn?

There was an anti-war song from the sixties that I always loved, titled “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The refrain was “oh, when will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”

I’ve thought about that refrain a lot lately, as America has increasingly retreated into one of the ugliest nativist episodes in a history dotted with them. It’s ironic, in a way, that just as we seem poised to accept the justice of GLBT claims for equality—a recent CNN poll actually found a slim majority in favor of same-sex marriage for the first time ever!—hostility to immigrants and Muslim-Americans has become vicious. And make no mistake, this mindless lashing-out at those considered “other” threatens all of us who come from groups that have been or could be demonized, because it strikes at the very heart of what it means to be an American.

What makes Americans out of our diverse and disparate population is fidelity to a certain set of social/legal principles; a particular approach to the age-old question “how should people live together?” The very heart of that approach is our belief in judging people on the basis of who they are and what they do—on the basis of their behavior rather than their identity. It is that fundamentally American approach that has allowed the gay community—and Jews, and Catholics, and African-Americans, among others—to argue the unfairness of discriminatory stereotypes used to justify unequal treatment.

The arguments against the community center/Mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero are based on just the same sort of anti-American stereotyping that we recognize as pernicious in other contexts. Treating all Muslims as if they are terrorists is no different than treating all Germans as Nazis, all Catholics as pedophiles, all Irish as drunks, all women as weak and emotional, all gays as promiscuous. Every community that has fought for the right to have its members treated as individuals rather than as part of some monolithic whole, and every American who believes in our constitutional principles, should be standing up for our peaceful Muslim neighbors.

I know we’ve been through times like this before, but I can’t help worrying that the internet has dramatically increased the reach and immediacy of the craziness. Propaganda outlets like Fox “News” and political opportunists like Newt Gingrich play on the fears of the economically and socially insecure. It has never been easier to disseminate outright lies: Obama is a Muslim who wasn’t born in the U.S., the Imam of the proposed Mosque is funded by Saudi Terrorists, illegal immigrants are having “anchor babies” who will be raised as terrorists and sent back into the country to attack us…Ridiculous as these and similar claims are, there is a cohort that really does believe them.

They believe them because they want to. And in today’s media environment, it is so easy to create a “bubble” where you hear only those things you want to hear, listen only to those who will feed your paranoia.

My friends and family are tired of hearing me say this, but here’s my theory of what we are living through right now. A group of old, pissed-off white guys (and they are disproportionately old and guys—the average age of Fox’s audience is 65 and it’s largely male) woke up one morning and looked around. There was a black man in the White House, a woman running Congress, gay people getting married, brown people speaking Spanish. And they are throwing a world-class tantrum. They want “their” country back: the country that privileged white, heterosexual, Protestant males over the rest of us.

I hope and believe that this is a final eruption—a last gasp of spleen and bigotry—before their cohort dies off. But it is doing a great deal of harm while it lasts.   

When will we—and they—ever learn?

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Mirror Images

There must be a special blind spot that allows people to engage in precisely the same behavior that they (correctly) criticize in others.

 In one particularly distasteful example, the Anti-Defamation League, an organization founded to counter religious prejudice, recently opposed locating a mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero. Evidently, the ADL’s commitment to civil rights doesn’t extend to Muslims.

Closer to home, a number of local Democrats have savagely attacked three Democratic City-County Counselors for voting to sell the water company to Citizens Gas. They have been especially harsh in their criticisms of Jackie Nytes, one of the most thoughtful, productive and hardworking members of the Council.

These are members of the same party that has complained—justifiably—about the Party of No in Washington. Democrats criticize the GOP for its sustained and uniform opposition to anything the Obama Administration proposes; in just the past few weeks, Republicans have blocked votes on the DISCLOSE Act (increasing disclosure and reporting requirements in the wake of the Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to make direct campaign contributions), a bill to provide medical aid and compensation for 9-11 first responders, and a bill to expand credit to small businesses.   The Party of No has also blocked votes on at least twenty judicial nominees who received bipartisan support in committee.

What is appalling about this behavior is its transparent motivation to deny the Administration any credit for getting anything done, even when the measures being proposed have previously been supported by Republicans.

Local Democrats have been among those who have strongly criticized this conduct, and it is ironic—to put it mildly—that they are now engaging in it by suggesting that a vote for a plan put forward by a Republican mayor is an act of disloyalty.

If I were on the Council, I don’t know how I would vote on the water company sale. I think the transfer itself makes sense; what I don’t like is that we are getting money to fix our decaying infrastructure by shifting the tax burden to ratepayers. We are pandering to the purveyors of the fiction that we can run a city on the cheap, and our cowardice will inevitably come back to bite us in the future. That said, the infrastructure needs are critical, and a direct tax increase is politically untenable.

Councilor Nytes has a well-deserved reputation for integrity and responsiveness to her constituents, and the accusations of betrayal by more partisan members of her party do not reflect poorly on her—such accusations diminish her critics, and reduce the effectiveness of their justifiable criticisms of the Party of No. 

We elect people to the Council to make decisions on our behalf in the exercise of their best judgment, not to play politics. It is one thing to disagree with a colleague’s vote on the merits—that’s fair enough. It is another thing altogether to insist on lockstep partisan voting.

It’s wrong to be the Party of No in Washington—or in Indianapolis.

Game-Playing

When I was growing up, parents and teachers used to tell us “it isn’t whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” Honor was a higher goal than winning. Playing fair, displaying sportsmanship, generosity in winning and gallantry in losing were the goals. Adults worthy of our admiration and respect were those who modeled such behaviors.

Need I say that times have changed?

There has been a great deal written about the Shirley Sherrod fiasco, and plenty of egg for all the faces involved. A right-wing blogger and Fox News favorite, Andrew Breitbart, was evidently offended by the NAACP’s demand that the Tea Party denounce those among them who had exhibited racism. In another echo from my childhood—nah, nah, you’re a bigger one—he posted a videotape purporting to show a speech by Sherrod, an African-American employee of the Agriculture Department, in which it appeared she was sharing anti-White sentiments after receiving an award from the organization. The tape, it turned out, had been doctored—when viewed in its entirety, it was a heartfelt plea to get beyond racism of all varieties.

The elderly farmer who was the supposed object of her bigotry emerged to protest the smear; his wife told how Sherrod had actually saved their farm. Fox News, which had heavily promoted the Breitbart version, backpedaled. Before the whole story emerged, however, the Obama Administration demanded Sherrod’s resignation. No due process, no fact-checking, despite Sherrod’s long and distinguished tenure with the agency.

Let me suggest that none of this was really about accusations and denials of racism. It was about game-playing.

American politics has become so rancid, so sordid, that lying to advance one’s party is evidently considered a perfectly acceptable tactic—so acceptable that even those of us who try to follow the news and separate fact from convenient fiction find it increasingly difficult to know what is true and what isn’t.  Organizations like snopes.com and factcheck.org can help, but most of us haven’t the time to sit at our computers double-checking every “fact” uttered by self-serving politicians.

Historically, we relied upon the mainstream media to do our fact-checking. But in the mad dash for eyeballs and audience share, in the era of the 24-hour “news hole,” even the outlets trying to practice legitimate journalism too often fail to check the accuracy of the charges and countercharges that have all but entirely replaced principled policy debates.

And what about those we have elected, ostensibly to run the agencies of government? The saddest feature of contemporary politics is the wholesale abandonment of seriousness and policy expertise for game-playing.  And what an ugly game it is, where control of a day’s news cycle is more important than the destruction of a lifelong public servant’s reputation. 

It’s bad enough that these political operatives never learned the lesson that how you play the game is more important than winning or losing, but what is really depressing is that self-government has degenerated into a game to be played.

Us versus Them, Redux

When I was growing up in Anderson, Indiana, Jews were often viewed as an alien species. I can remember being asked—in all seriousness—whether Jews had tails, and whether we lived in houses, like “real people.” In addition to these innocent if disconcerting questions, I also remember being called a “dirty Jew” for the first (but not last) time, when I was in second grade.

Fast forward. I was in my late teens and in college when John F. Kennedy ran for President. I vividly recall fellow students assuring me that Catholics were stockpiling arms in the basements of their churches (presumably to be used if he lost, but that was unclear). Those with less vivid imaginations nevertheless muttered darkly about “popery” and warned that a Kennedy Presidency would mean American obedience to Rome.

America has largely moved beyond those particular bigotries, and it would be comforting to believe we’ve matured enough as a society to avoid that sort of crude stereotyping of whole groups of people.

Apparently, many of us haven’t.

Recent news articles have reported on efforts in several cities—including supposedly cosmopolitan New York—to prevent Muslim congregations from building mosques. Opponents of those building permits have characterized Muslim places of worship as “terrorist cells,” and the religion as an incubator of anti-Western, anti-democratic values. Here in Indiana, where perennial candidate Marvin Scott is running for Congress against Andre Carson, one of two Muslims serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, ugly anti-Muslim sentiments are regularly posted to Scott’s Facebook page.

Are there Muslim terrorists? Sure. There are also Catholics whose devotion to the Church trumped their American duty to report child molestation to the authorities. There are Jews who engage in “sharp” business practices. There are lazy black people, emotionally volatile women and gay pedophiles. There are also all-American Christian terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, WASP crooks like Enron’s Ken Lay, strong women like Hillary Clinton and innumerable lazy white guys and heterosexual pedophiles. Judging people on the basis of invidious stereotypes doesn’t get us very far.

One of the foundations of the American value system—embedded in our legal system and culture—is this recognition that people deserve to be judged on the basis of their individual behaviors, not on the basis of their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.  

We are living through some very tough times right now, and it is understandable that many of us are looking for scapegoats—someone to blame for a world that seems increasingly out of our control. It is human instinct to look askance at those who are unfamiliar, who look different, who come from other places or who follow different customs. There are also genuine issues that arise when groups new to the American landscape are in the process of assimilating to that landscape.  But we dishonor the American principles of equality and fair play when we treat any community as monolithic.

 Muslims—like Protestants, Jews, Catholics and other believers and nonbelievers—are just “real people.”

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Paradigm Shift

In a recent column about urban relocation, Neil Pierce noted that “for humans, displacement from their known settings may be exceedingly painful…the psychological impact of forced removal from a familiar neighborhood is like a plant being jerked from its native soil.” He went on to acknowledge that holding neighborhoods static isn’t practical.

Of course, it isn’t just neighborhoods that cannot remain static. The whole world is in a state of flux, what scientists might call a “paradigm shift,” and the pain and discomfort that undeniable fact is causing is manifest in our communications, our economy, and especially our politics. (How else do we understand the angry and frightened voices insisting that they want “their country” back?)

Most of us do manage to handle social change and the discomfort it brings without taking to the streets or indulging in paranoid conspiracy theories. We learn to accept new technologies and discard old prejudices, and to recognize the benefits that accompany the dislocations. But even those who welcome the new paradigm need to recognize its challenges, and that is especially true for those of us who care about our cities.

Let me offer just one example. When I was a young professional, civic leadership in Indianapolis was provided by people like Tom Binford and P.E. MacAllister, people who did not hold—or want—public office. They had deep roots in this community and believed they had a civic obligation to nurture it. Many leaders were drawn from locally-owned banks and industries—enterprises that depended for their viability upon the health of their city. Whatever the benefits of globalization and nationalization, those trends have largely robbed us of the corporate headquarters and local banks from which we used to draw people committed to the civic enterprise.

Political actors and elected officials can’t fill these roles. Furthermore, elected officials are less able to be effective without the help of a cadre of civic leaders who are committed to the long-term health of the community and who are not constrained by political considerations. (Long term to a politician, understandably, is ‘until the next election.’)   

The challenge we face is to simultaneously embrace our roots and our wings: to cultivate a city with a quality of life that rewards our allegiance on the one hand, and to welcome the opportunities that come with increasing globalization on the other. To meet that challenge, we need to figure out how we will cultivate the next generation of civic leadership.

A couple of years ago, a television commercial proclaimed “This isn’t your father’s Oldsmobile.” Today, of course, it isn’t your Oldsmobile either—it is no longer manufactured, and the American auto industry no longer dominates the economy. This isn’t your father’s Indianapolis or America either. If the old saying is right, if change is the only constant, we need to do what previous generations did: accept reality and inhabit the world as it is.

Our job isn’t to whine about the inevitable—our job is to make it better.