Category: Trump effect

June 9, 2020

    In the two weeks since George Floyd’s murder, we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets to declare that “Black Lives Matter.”  There have been demonstrations in all 50 states and in international capitols like London, Paris and Berlin. Trump’s effort to silence dissent by stepping up a military presence, tear gassing peaceful protestors to clear a path for a ridiculous photo op, backfired spectacularly.  

   Protestors were emboldened, rather than cowed.  Alarmed former military brass went public with their dismay, most notably, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who broke his monk-like vow of silence to pen a scathing takedown of Trump, (Source:  “James Mattis Denounces President Trump, Describes Him as a Threat to the Consitution,” By Jeffrey Goldberg, theatlantic.com, 6/3/20).  In his statement, Mattis said that “Equal Justice Under Law…is precisely what the protestors are demanding.”

       Friday morning, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser trolled Trump in an epic fashion when she commissioned “Black Lives Matter,” to be painted in giant yellow letters on 16th Street in front of The White House and renamed the street Black Lives Matter Plaza.  By Sunday, Mitt Romney (Mitt Romney!) was marching with protestors in front of The White House tweeting “Black Lives Matter.” Time will tell if this was a deliberate echo of his father George Romney’s principled support of civil rights or an early salvo in his 2024 presidential campaign. Continue reading “Talk is cheap”

May 31, 2020

    The fires are real.  The fires are a metaphor.

      Around the country, cities are ablaze.  What started in Minneapolis has spread to Los Angeles,New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Louisville and Portland, and countless cities too numerous to name.  In most cities, the protests and ensuing violence is not merely in solidarity with Minneapolis, but in response to the prevalence of police brutality in each city.

     Rumors have swirled that the instigators of the arson and vandalism were primarily white. Whether they were anarchists unwilling to defer to Black organizers, or white supremacists mobilized to discredit the protest, they have succeeded in changing the conversation from anger over the repeated brutalization and murder of Black people at the hands of the police, (Source:  “Black Organizers ‘Enraged’ by White Agitators ‘Here to F**k Sh*t Up,’” by Justin Glawe, Rachel Olding and Hunter Woodall, thedailybeast.com, 5/31/20).  Yet even if some Black protestors were involved in the vandalism and looting, it is the height of hypocrisy to condemn Black people for breaking the law by destroying property, when our lives are consistently destroyed under color of law with impunity. Continue reading “The Fire Next Time”

May 27, 2020

     Malls are closed.  Offices are closed.  Beaches are closed, but racism never takes a day off.  By now, millions have seen the video filmed by African-American birder and New York Audubon Society board member, Christian Cooper.  In it, “Entitled Amy” reacts to his request that she obey the law and leash her dog while walking Central Park’s Ramble by getting in his face to say that she was going to call the police and tell them that an African- American man was threatening her and her dog.  In the ensuing call, Amy’s voice rises and becomes increasingly frantic in an effort to convey the impression that she is in danger, (Source:  “Amy Cooper’s 911 call is part of an all-too-familiar pattern,” by Anna North, Vox.com, 5/26/20).

    Fortunately for Christian Cooper, the police did not show up with guns drawn and his quick thinking led Amy to suffer actual consequences for her actions, losing her dog and her job within 24 hours. It’s unclear whether she has learned anything, given her complaint to CNN that “her life is being destroyed,” with that passive voice doing the heavy lifting of evading culpability.  Amy is desperately trying to reconstruct her image as a person who is “not racist”, rather than confronting the fact that, without thinking, she weaponized her whiteness to try to harm a Black man because she was annoyed.

      This is the danger.  Far too many self-professed white liberals and progressives won’t hesitate to wield their privilege to the detriment of Black people.  Black people know this and deep down, white people do too. It may not be in as extreme a manner as “Entitled Amy,” but we’ve seen it play out in myriad ways.  Even when white people don’t call the police, they take it on themselves to be the police— to question Black presence in what they deem to be  white spaces.  That is what awaits those who are lucky enough to successfully navigate school systems and other institutions that are indifferent at best and hostile at worst to the fates of Black people.  We live with the knowledge that we can be challenged on a whim in our sleepy suburban hamlets or tony urban high rises.  Our sons and daughters, who we’ve painstakingly shielded and guided, can be brutalized by the cops for the crime of being young and unruly.  Even when the cops are fired, it doesn’t heal the psychological scars our children should never have to bear. Yet we are the lucky ones.  At least we are alive.

       Just as we were relishing Christian Cooper’s karmic victory, we saw the sickening video of George Floyd being murdered in Minneapolis.  A gentle man who “fit the description” of someone suspected of the nonviolent crime of forgery was killed by a cop who ground his knee into George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes as he pleaded for his life.  Three other cops stood by passively and watched their fellow officer calmly murder George Floyd in cold blood, (Source:  “4 Minneapolis cops fired after video shows one kneeling on neck of black man who,later died,” by Ray Sanchez, Joe Sutton and Artemis Moshtaghian, CNN.com, 5/26/20).

     We tweet, we plead, we protest, we litigate, but little changes.  Black people are tired. And scared. And pissed.  We have one question for those of you who call yourselves allies. What are you going to do? Because we can’t breathe.

R.I.P. George Floyd

R.I.P. Breonna Taylor

R.I.P. Ahmaud Arbery

May 21, 2020

     After two months in lockdown, we are bored. The sameness of the days, and the inability to gather with anyone outside of our immediate household has us antsy and irritable. Yet, in our haste to emerge from quarantine, some ugly truths are being revealed.  

      Despite scientific evidence that wearing a mask will stop the spread of the coronavirus, thousands of Americans, like petulant children, refuse to do so.  They blithely venture out unmasked to malls and restaurants, breathing with impunity on the masked workers who serve them, heedless of the harm they’re inflicting on others.   Some have reacted violently to the suggestion that they can’t enter an establishment without wearing a mask.  These people confuse lack of responsibility for freedom.  They demand the “right” to do what they want, regardless of who it harms.  Who can blame them, though, when the tone is set from the top. Continue reading “Wild, Wild West”

May 14, 2020

     We are watching Trump disintegrate before our eyes, erupting in racist tirades directed at journalists; peevish and alarmed that anything has begun to dent his poll numbers.  Yet, any of us tempted to take grim solace in the thought that the escalating death toll might cause his defeat have not been paying attention. In case we have forgotten the knife’s edge on which we’re poised, three developments yesterday should serve as a stark reminder.

      Yesterday, Republican Mike Garcia trounced Christy Smith, 55% to 46%, in the special election in California’s 25th Congressional District.  This marks the first time in 22 years that the Republicans have been able to flip a California Democratic Congressional district, (Source:  “GOP wins special election in California after Democrat concedes,” by Ally Mitnick, Politico.com, 5/13/20).  The DCCC’s decision not to invest heavily in the race probably contributed to the lopsided result, where turnout skewed older and whiter in a district that is 53% Latinx, Asian and Black.  It is critical to remember that this special election was only necessary because the far right wing media forced Rep. Katie Hill from office by weaponizing revenge porn released by her estranged husband. Continue reading “Crisis…or opportunity?”

May 6, 2020

      After weeks of watching white men draped with Nazi and Confederate regalia, armed to the teeth march on state capitols and emerge unharmed and unmolested, we understood the message.  After seeing them get so close to state troopers that you could see the spittle in the corners of their snarling mouths, we hardly needed a reminder of the gulf between what passes for lawful behavior for white people vs. lawful behavior by Black people.  After one after another Republican governor defied science and ignored escalating infection rates to “open up their states,” knowing full well that it would be Black and Brown people forced to choose between their lives and their livelihood, we didn’t need to be told that, to them, our safety doesn’t matter and our deaths don’t even register. Continue reading “Freedom?”

April 30, 2020

Exhausted by isolation, we vainly scour the media for glimmers of good news, whipsawed by stories that alternately induce hope and despair. The hospitalization and death rate in New York State has continued to decline and Governor Cuomo has announced a tentative plan for beginning to re-open the state, starting with the North Country (Source: “Cuomo Details Plans For Reopening New York, Says NYC Needs ‘Summer Activities’ Open For Residents,” by Lisette Voytko, Forbes.com, 4/26/20). Conversely, New Jersey’s Governor Murphy cannot predict when the stay-at-home order might be lifted.

The “President” publicly muses that bleach and disinfectants could be injected or ingested as a possible cure for coronavirus and not only is he not dragged from the podium in a straight jacket, but poison control centers in New York, Maryland and Michigan reported a spike in calls to their poison control centers the next day, from people following Trump’s advice. Continue reading “Down, but not out”

April 22, 2020

      Seemingly not content with the wave of deaths directly attributable to his malignant incompetence, Trump has spent the last several days looking for novel ways to increase human suffering.  Yesterday, his administration announced that undocumented students would be ineligible for emergency assistance for food, shelter and childcare, (Source: DeVos bars undocumented students from emergency aid,” by Michael Stratford, Politico.com, 4/21/20).  This comes on the heels of his announcement of a 60 day ban on immigration, although just how refusing to issue or renew green cards will help combat the virus is anyone’s guess. 

These “policy” moves come after Trump spent the weekend tweeting “Liberate” Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia, encouraging insurrection against democratically elected governors for following federal government guidelines aimed at combating the disease. His exhortations were in support of Astroturfed protests by a ragtag assembly of armed, knuckle dragging racists who want Black and Latinx folks to risk death so that they can go to Applebee’s (h/t Patton Oswalt).

      Meanwhile, Trump is slow-walking the thing that would actually enable the economy to open up, ramping up testing capacity, (Source:  “Governors call Trump’s bluff on testing capacity: ‘The President Is Simply Lying,’” by Igor Derysh, Salon.com, 4/20/20).  None of this is surprising.  Trump has always been a one trick pony who defaults to whipping up hatred whenever the focus threatens to shift to the consequences of his abject unfitness for office.  What is alarming is the number of white voters who still support him, despite evidence that his inaction is directly responsible for the deaths of significantly more Americans, (Source:  “The Huge Cost of Waiting to Contain the Pandemic,” by Britta L. Newell and Nicholas P. Jewell, The New York Times, 4/14/20).  The number of American dead now exceeds the number killed in The Korean War, yet the imbecile governors of Florida and Georgia are opening beaches and bowling alleys.

       We have to face the repugnant truth that fully 43% of Americans believe that their comfort and convenience are more important than the lives of frontline healthcare workers, the Black and Latinx people disproportionately represented in essential jobs and the elderly people trapped in long term care facilities.  All of this is evidence, as George Packer eloquently detailed, that the United States of America is a failed state, (Source:  “We Are Living In A Failed State,” by George Packer, The Atlantic, 6/2020).

Of course, many of us have suspected this for some time, but were too complacent, comfortable or afraid to actually do anything about it. After all, if we were doing well, pushing for big structural changes seemed like an indictment of our own success. Where has that left us? With a planet irreparably damaged by climate change and a country beset by shocking levels of inequality, ruled by a tiny cabal of hideous old white men with no other desire than to amass personal wealth and subjugate the masses.

When this is over and we emerge, timidly and tentatively, from our homes, we will face a choice. We can spend our time rebuilding our 401ks and renovating our homes to “maximize” our children’s inheritance. Or we can spend every waking moment dismantling the structures that immiserate so many and rebuilding this country into a society fit for our children to live in. What will be your legacy?

April 15, 2020

      Each day, we ask ourselves, “how will we get through this? Each day, we wonder when this will end and what lies on the other side of an unprecedented crisis that has wrought incalculable human and economic loss. We feel as though we’re living in a dystopian version of “Groundhog Day,” each morning marked by Governor Cuomo’s somber accounting of the increasing number of positive cases, hospitalizations and deaths, each afternoon marked by the mind numbing effort to feed the gaping maw of Trump’s pathetic ego in the White House daily coronavirus “briefings.”  Those of us with the stomach for it watch Trump spout dangerous misinformation, hog the cameras and try to bully and bluster his way through this crisis, as he has every other challenge in his “presidency.”

        Yesterday, we got a glimpse of what may lie ahead.  Over the weekend, The New York Times published a damning expose detailing exactly how Trump’s determination to ignore and downplay the threat posed by the coronavirus turned what could have been a manageable public health challenge into a full blown nationwide crisis that may send our country into an economic crisis that rivals the Great Depression , (Source: “He Could Have Seen What Was Coming:  Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus,” by Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, Mark Mozzetta and Julian E. Barnes, The New York Times, 4/11/20).  Continue reading “The Tenth Amendment”

April 7, 2020

These are dark times. The unceasing toll of illness and death and this administration’s unrelenting determination to bungle the response and lie about it, saps our ability to remain hopeful. In the fourth week of our domestic Coronavirus crisis, a grimly predictable pattern is beginning to emerge. As with all other social ills in this country, the brunt of this frighteningly virulent contagion is being borne overwhelmingly by Black, Brown and Indigenous Americans, who are disproportionately poor and are concentrated in low wage jobs where they are unable to telecommute and effectively socially distance themselves.

     As Ibram X. Kendi details in The Atlantic, the racial data available is alarmingly clear.  In Michigan, 40% of those who have died from COVID-19 are Black, despite making up only 14.1% percent of the state population. In North Carolina’s Mecklenburg County, where Charlotte is located, Black people are 32.9% of the population, but 43% of the positive cases.  In Milwaukee, Black people are only 26% of the population, but 43.9% of the cases and 81% of the deaths! (Source:  “What the Racial Data Show,” by Ibram X. Kendi, The Atlantic, 4/6/20). Continue reading “Dark Times”