Category Archives: Random Blogging

Don’t Disregard The Good News

Virtually all of my conversations with friends and family these days eventually descend into “gloom and doom” focused on the state of our politics,  the erosion of American liberty and the effect of the administration’s insane policies on the country’s economic health. All of those reasons for despair–and more–are very real, and the need to be persistent in our fight to reclaim the American Idea is urgent, but we really shouldn’t let our obsession with the forces of repression and regression obscure the fact that there are also lots of good things happening.

Take, for example, some welcome news about the nation’s public schools. A recent study focused on the emergence of “community schools”–a movement that has shown great promise in both educational outcomes and community support. The introduction to the study explains what makes a public school a community school:

Community schools are public schools that use the community school approach to transform into a place where educators, local community members, families, and students work together to strengthen conditions for student learning and healthy development. They provide services and support to fit each community’s needs, guided by the people who know students best— families, teachers, and the students themselves. They often partner with outside organizations and local governments to support the entirety of a student’s well-being to ensure they are healthy, well-fed, safe, and in a better position to learn.

The researchers included a number of examples of community schools that have improved student educational outcomes, increased attendance, improved peer/adult relationships and attitudes toward school, and reduced racial and economic achievement gaps. They estimated that for every dollar invested in a community school, the community received $15 back in improved economic performance and well-being, and they offered a collection of stories about community schools that are transforming the way they function and demonstrating progress on a wide variety of outcome measures.

It isn’t only education. The Trump administration may deny the reality of climate change and be intent on enriching fossil fuel companies, but environmental engineers and scientists around the world are announcing breakthroughs every day.

For example, concern about climate change requires significant attention to construction materials. (The concrete and steel industries together are responsible for as much as 15% of global C02 emissions.) But there has been real progress in this area.

Researchers in Australia have created cement from the hundreds of thousands of tons of glass that is no longer being processed in a failing recycling system. They report that the resulting cement is cheaper, stronger and lighter than traditional cement and delivers functional insulation, fire-resistance and a lower emissions threshold. Other researchers are using brown seaweed to create unfired clay bricks as an alternative to conventional fired bricks and concrete blocks, and Swiss researchers are also moving cement-bonded wood products into the realm of weight-bearing wood-based concrete. There are several others.

There’s also good news in the effort to electrify air travel. One solar-powered around-the-world-flight already took place in 2016. And although replacing larger fossil-fuel powered airplanes probably won’t be a reality until at least 2050, there are already electrified short-range planes built for a small number of passengers.

A really exciting innovation is solar glass– windows and doors that can provide electric power to homes and buildings. Researchers at the University of Michigan have invented a solar glass for windows, doors, skylights and other building-related glass applications.

There’s much, much more. We humans continue to demonstrate real brilliance in solving our more technical and environmental problems. I wonder what it would take to apply that brilliance to our political and social life.

That said, even on the political front, there’s encouraging news. The national resistance is growing, and in Indiana, where we’re all too aware of the problems created by one-party rule, an emerging phenomenon is a sign that MAGA can’t take residents of Red states for granted.  Indiana has seen a surge in independent candidacies, and those Independents are winning more often than many people realize—52% of those who made the ballot in 2023–24 were successful.

Nearly half of Indiana’s voters identify as independent, and a growing number of Republicans are repelled by Republican candidates who are increasingly MAGA and Christian Nationalist zealots. (Too many of them still can’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, but evidently they will vote for an Independent.)

I’m actually going to meet some of these officials and hear why they chose to run as Independents. A group called Independent Indiana is hosting a panel discussion Monday night in Indianapolis, and I plan to attend.

We need to cling to those rays of sunshine in our dark times…..

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Old People In A New World

Okay–I know that I rarely exhibit sympathy for MAGA types, but a recent experience has reminded me that the pace of change–particularly, the rate at which the world is becoming digital–can be especially disorienting for older folks. Maddening, actually. And I say that as someone who has a smartphone and uses a computer daily.

My husband works out at our local Y with a couple of older men who still use flip phones. They’re deeply suspicious of all the newfangled technology, and they are also vocally MAGA. I’ve come to believe that–while it seems like a stretch– suspicion and disdain for the tech miracles of our brave new world and being receptive to oversimplified and racist world-views may go hand in hand.

A recent stay at a “chi chi” new hotel in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, has made me a bit more sympathetic to what must seem to some folks as an unwelcome and uncomfortable plunge into a science-fiction future.

Bear with me here.

I checked in and went to the elevator, which failed to open. After waiting for a brief time (and repeatedly pushing the button), I went back to the front desk, where the young man explained that the elevator would only work from lobby if you scanned your room key on a device mounted between the elevators before pushing the button. Nice safety feature–but there were no posted instructions that explained that. Evidently, younger folks found it intuitive.

When I got to the room, it became immediately obvious that the hotel didn’t cater to anyone one lacking a smartphone. There was no telephone in the room on which to call the desk or housekeeping, no printed materials with information about the hotel or its surroundings. What there was was a small plastic stand on the desk with QR codes, and a tiny message alerting guests that they could reach hotel services by texting a specific number.

Older guests unfamiliar with QR codes, or (unthinkable!) guests without smartphones would be unable to access hotel information. Worse–if your phone was out of juice and you’d forgotten to pack a charger (guilty as charged), the hotel didn’t have chargers (I asked). There was also no clock in the room, so if you lacked an operating phone, you didn’t know what time it was.

To say that this was all very frustrating would be an understatement. I tend to think that this particular hotel has gotten ahead of itself, but the experience did force me to recognize that I haven’t been very understanding of the people in my general age cohort (old) who encounter similar frustrations every day.

Noting the accelerated pace of change has become a cliche, obscuring the very real disorientation that so often accompanies it. America is full of people who reached adulthood before computers became ubiquitous–people who grew up with telephones firmly affixed to wires and walls, who drove cars that lacked computer screens and syrupy directions from a female GPS voice, who watched one of three networks on their televisions and read the local news on newsprint delivered to their doors daily. Etc.

Those same Americans have grandchildren for whom the avalanche of technology is intuitive–they grew up with it. Those grandkids are fixated on their screens, comfortable in a world that seems increasingly alien to their grandparents. Add to that the old folks’ daily encounter with the massive increases in America’s diversity, the contemporary prominence of women and people of color in positions of authority and celebrity, and older folks can be forgiven for feeling adrift, if not alienated, in a strange new world.

That alienation helps to explain–although it doesn’t excuse–their willingness to support a movement that blames nefarious “others” for their discomfort.

I realize that I need to be less judgmental, but it’s hard when people ignore the actual reasons for their discomfort and instead look for someone to blame…

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Political Violence

As I write this, the initial accusations about the murder of Charlie Kirk have been confirmed–in an ironic way. The immediate–and not unreasonable– reaction was the assumption he’d been targeted for his beliefs. And evidently, he was–but not by  “evil” Lefists. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the even-farther “groyper” Right that believed Kirk was insufficiently radical.

Obviously, as repulsive as some of Kirk’s beliefs were, they are no excuse for violence. Freedom of speech, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reminded us, is not meant to protect only those who agree with us, it also extends to those expressing the “thought  we hate.”

Following the shooting, denunciations of political violence came from across the political spectrum. And predictably, MAGA folks expressed outrage that was entirely missing when Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was targeted, when Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was nearly killed, and when two Minnesota Democrats were assassinated. 

In the wake of Kirk’s murder, pundits and commentators have rushed to offer their perspectives. One that I found particularly insightful was an article by Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. As he began,

Charlie Kirk’s murder was not just a murder. It was an assassination. That’s the crucial point.

We often forget the philosophical underpinnings of criminal law. Rightly understood, we view crimes as being committed not against individuals, but against society itself. Thus, when someone is murdered, the offense is not against the victim and his family, but against everyone. All of us. It is an offense against nature, heaven, and man.

Assassination goes a step further. In addition to all of the above, assassination is, like terrorism, an attack on our body politic. An attack on how we choose to live together. On our system of government. Which in America’s case, means an attack not just against all of us, but against liberal democracy itself.

Last then reminded readers that this was not a “one off.” As he wrote, it had only been twelve weeks since Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated in their home, sixteen weeks since Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were assassinated outside Washington’s Jewish Museum, ten months since UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was assassinated in Manhattan.

And one could list other examples of near-assassinations from recent years—like the brutal beating of the husband of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the shots fired at an ex-president campaigning to return to office.

It is important to understand that these acts all emerged from a culture of political violence that has been waxing for nearly a decade.

Last acknowledged the presence of political violence in the past, specifically enumerating the attacks on Steve Scalise, Gabby Giffords, Ronald Reagan, JFK and RFK and MLK, and the vicious attacks on Black citizens during Jim Crow. But he pointed to a crucial difference in the way public officials responded.

The difference is that until recently, elected high officials condemned political violence as a matter of course. Their condemnations were not always sincere, but they were nearly universal. They understood that political violence is a wildfire. It spreads. And if it breaks containment, it cannot be controlled. Once unleashed, it burns everyone.

I found one paragraph in Last’s brief essay to be both undeniably true and chilling. As he wrote,

We don’t have to rehearse the litany of how we got here; we can leave that to another day. But we all know what we know. Things have changed and it’s not hard to pinpoint the moment when the normalization of political violence re-emerged among our political elites. To pretend otherwise would be to hide our heads in the sand—to deny the plain political reality of the moment.

That “plain political reality” is what keeps me up at night.

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Put This On Your Calendar

October 18th. Put it on your calendar.

That’s the day that Indivisible and its partner organizations will mount a second “No Kings” day. As the email announcing that event reminded us, organizing a national day of action with millions of people takes time and resources– recruitment tools, map of events, supplies and resources for local protests and anchor events, so the advance notice is intended to allow for fundraising and the other tasks that ensure a successful turnout.

Speaking of turnout–the incredible number who participated in the first No Kings Day was the result of such careful organizing, and the goal is to build on that success–to ensure that the millions of Americans who are deeply opposed to the ongoing destruction of America’s government and our constitutional culture have a vehicle to send a powerful message, not just to the nation’s corrupt and incompetent MAGA administration, but to their cowardly enablers in the House and Senate.

In the announcement of the second No Kings Day, the email from Indivisible reported “round the clock coordination with our No Kings partners” and the intent “to make the next No Kings one of the largest days of protest in US history.”

I have posted previously about academic studies documenting peaceful protests by only 3.5% of a country’s population that have defeated other autocratic takeovers. That percentage would translate to some eleven million Americans–an enormous but doable number.

I frequently hear people minimize the effectiveness of taking to the streets in this fashion. Certainly, if nothing else is going on–if the resistance is limited to expressions of displeasure–that effectiveness will be limited. But that isn’t the case in today’s America. Literally hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against the administration’s illegal and unlawful actions, and–at least at the lower court level–over 80% of them have been successful. I’ve previously noted the multiple efforts being mounted by Blue state Attorneys General and governors.

There are also the numerous, less well-organized and promoted protests that have erupted more or less spontaneously around the country. Citizens have developed on-line systems identifying ICE movements, to assist immigrants in evading capture; small (but not insignificant) groups of protestors have gathered in response to other illegal and unconstitutional incursions. Social media is filled with advice for resistors (granted, not always helpful)–not to mention reports of lesser-known activities protesting our would-be King.

The great virtue of a massive protest of the sort being planned for October 18th is the message it sends, especially but not exclusively to the Republican elected officials who have refused to hold town halls or otherwise interact with angry constituents.  But we should not minimize the extent to which participation in such events also has a number of “spin-off” merits. As someone who participated in the first No Kings protest, I can personally attest to experiencing very welcome feelings of solidarity. Interacting with so many other people who clearly shared my concerns, encountering friends I might not have expected to see at such an event, reading the multiple (often very clever) signs–acted like a shot of adrenalin.

When an individual citizen gets up each morning and is immediately assaulted by emails, newsletters and media “breaking news” items detailing the most recent horrific, bigoted and unconstitutional actions taken by the Trump administration, demoralization can–and often does–set in. Gathering with others who share one’s determination not to surrender is a powerful antidote.

In any event, put October 18th on your calendar. Buy some poster-board, and maybe a t-shirt with an appropriately aggressive slogan. Sign up with Indivisible to indicate your intent to participate, and tell your friends and family members.

Let’s see if we can get eleven million people to send a message…

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Really, DeSantis?

Every day, media reports add to the already ample evidence that bigotry is the basis and glue of MAGA–racism, predominantly, but also very substantial amounts of misogyny and homophobia. If the constant, hysterical attacks on DEI and “woke-ism” weren’t sufficient to display the resentments and animus that fuel Trump’s base, a recent incident in Ron DeSantis’ Florida (or–as a cousin who lives there spells it–“FloriDUH”) provides additional confirmation of both the extent and the sheer pettiness of these Rightwing hatreds.

During his tenure in the governor’s office, DeSantis has waged war against such “woke” targets as higher education and Disney World, but now, as The Bulwark recently reported, he’s extended that war to sidewalk chalk. I kid you not.

A MAN WALKING ACROSS an intersection in Florida was arrested over the weekend.

His alleged crime? Felonious use of pink sidewalk chalk.

The man’s name is Sebastian Suarez. On Friday evening, he crossed a street in Orlando with chalk dust on his shoes, leaving pastel-covered footprints on the asphalt. Members of the Florida Highway Patrol, who had taken up a post on the corner, promptly arrested him.

The backstory to this ludicrous arrest is the 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub by a gunman who killed 49 people and wounded another 53–at the time, the deadliest mass shooting in America’s sorry, gun-soaked history. The street in question is in front of the Pulse, which was a gay club. That street was subsequently turned into a memorial to the victims.

As part of the tribute, local officials and LGBTQ community leaders decided to fill in the empty spaces of a crosswalk outside the site with colorful paint, so that it would evoke a Pride flag.

They got state approval, laid down the paint one year later and turned the crosswalk into a rainbow—which is how it looked until late August, when state workers removed the colored paint. That set off a series of protests by LGBTQ activists and attempts to recolor the crosswalk, which is what police and state attorneys say Suarez was attempting to do with his chalk.

They charged him with defacing a traffic device, which can be a felony, and kept him in jail overnight.

A judge released Suarez the next day, holding that there had been no probable cause for the arrest. But DeSantis isn’t modifying his expanded view of what activities constitute a threat to “law and order.”

On Sunday, police arrested three more alleged street-coloring bandits. They too have been released from jail without charges, but this time the judge found probable cause, evidently because police—perhaps having been schooled by a state attorney in what the law in question actually prohibits—are now claiming that the chalk is causing more than $1,000 in damages.

DeSantis is following the Trump administration’s efforts to obliterate any and all messages of inclusion and acceptance. A Federal Highway Administration spokesperson responded to a question about the crackdown on such communications by saying that  “Roads are for safety not political messages or artwork.” As the Bulwark article drily notes, the safety defense would be a lot more believable if there were some evidence that painted crosswalks were actually endangering drivers or pedestrians. There doesn’t appear to be any such evidence.

On the contrary—and as articles in the Washington Post and Guardian have noted —a key 2022 study using crash data and observational studies from around the country found asphalt art actually improves safety, by making crosswalks more visible to drivers. As it happens, six of the seventeen intersections in the study were in Florida, which has the nation’s fourth-highest pedestrian fatality rate.

The Pulse crosswalk was not part of the study, but last week the Orlando Sentinel published its own analysis of traffic data and reached the same conclusion—i.e., that colorful street decorations make the city safer for pedestrians….

The safety excuse would also be more credible if Duffy, in his initial tweet announcing the policy, hadn’t explicitly singled out LGBT memorials. “Taxpayers expect their dollars to fund safe streets, not rainbow crosswalks,” Duffy wrote. “Political banners have no place on public roads.”

I wonder if the culture warriors determined to stamp out evidence that gay people exist realize how stupid this is–assigning police to monitor chalk use at intersections rather than spending their time catching criminals or even speeders. The men of MAGA must be incredibly threatened by us uppity women, Brown and Black people who have the nerve to act like they’re entitled to equal civic status, and of course, the mere existence of LGBTQ+ folks.  

But really–criminalizing chalk? Pretty pathetic.

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