Journal of the Plague Years

March 29, 2018

Tuesday we were assaulted with the completely unsurprising news that the Attorney General  of Louisiana had decided not to indict the two Baton Rouge police officers responsible for the murder of Alton Sterling.  By now, we are accustomed to the pattern.  A black person suspected of a petty crime or a minor traffic violation is killed by an officer of the state.  There is an anguished outcry from the black community and a litany of excuses from many in the white community.  The officers responsible are never charged, or if charged, not convicted.  The murdered person’s name becomes a hashtag and is added to the long roster of names of black people whose lives were snatched prematurely and are fated never to receive justice. Rinse and repeat.  When asked whether Trump had a role to play in interrupting the pattern of deadly police violence against black Americans, White House spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it was a “local matter.” Continue reading “Freedom isn’t free”

March 27, 2018

Consider the paradox of Black women.  At once hyper-visible and invisible, we labor under the burden of toxic stereotypes.  On an individual level, we are ubiquitous avatars of beauty and culture, like Beyonce and Rihanna, but as a group, we are alternatively derided or ignored; our political clout and contributions minimized.  Society views far too many of us through a distorted lense that is literally killing us (Source:  “Nothing Protects Black Women From Dying in Pregnancy and Childbirth.  Not Education.  Not Income. Not even being an expert on racial disparities in healthcare,” by Nina Martin and Renee Montagne, Propublica.org., 12/7/17).   Continue reading “Share the stage”

March 24, 2018

Today, in Washington, D.C. and 800 cities around the globe, teenagers will spearhead the March for Our Lives, demanding a radical course correction in our American culture of death. The 16 and 17 year old leaders from Parkland, Florida have been inspirational in every way. They have turned their pain into power, consistently calling out the nihilism of the NRA and the craven opportunism of those who take their money. The Parkland kids use their privilege to highlight the young Black activists that the media ignores who have been protesting gun violence for years. Continue reading “March for our lives”

March 20 2018

While we watch Trump lash out, flailing and descending further into chaos as Mueller seemingly closes in, we experience a weariness borne of familiarity. The playbook is the same —baseless attacks, boneheaded policy moves likely to tank our economy (Chinese tariffs anyone?), the addition of TV pundits/conspiracy theorists to the White House staff, and most consistently, a default to vindictive cruelty. In a speech in New Hampshire on Monday, Trump suggested that a solution to the opioid crisis was to execute drug dealers! He has justified the proposal to scrap Obama era rules designed to lessen the racial disparity in School discipline with the claim that it would prevent school shootings, despite the fact that the majority of mass shooters are white men. Trump’s solution for every problem plaguing this country is to punish as many people of color as possible. Continue reading ““Beloved community?””

March 17, 2018

Last night, retired four star General, Barry McCaffrey tweeted, “Reluctantly I have concluded that President Trump is a serious threat to U.S. national security. He is refusing to protect vital U.S. interests from active Russian attacks. It is apparent that he is for some unknown reason under the sway of Mr. Putin.” (@mccaffrey3, Twitter.com, 3/16/18). Continue reading “Clear and present danger, Part 2”

March 14, 2018

We woke up this morning to the news that Democrat, Conor Lamb, squeaked past Rick Saccone by the thinnest of margins to win a victory in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District.  Although the margin was less than 600 votes, it is an incredible feat in a district that Trump carried by 20 points merely sixteen months ago.  Lamb was powered to victory by a combination of grassroots activists and organized labor.  He ran a campaign that focused on issues that mattered to the voters in the district, such as protecting Social Security, saving the Affordable Care Act and fully funding miners’ pensions.  Lamb’s campaign offers a blueprint for how to re-take Congress in November  –  take positions that are important to voters in the district and harness the energy of grassroots activists and labor unions to get out the vote.  We should note that the $10 million dollars that Republican outside groups poured into the race was not enough to beat Lamb, who raised $3.7 million dollars without accepting money from PACs and with minimal help from the DCCC. Continue reading “The fate of the world”

March 10, 2018

The thud you hear is the collective sound of thousands of heads hitting their desks as we try to process the increasingly tawdry and bizarre news coming out of this administration. This week we had to endure the news of Stormy Daniels’ lawsuit against Trump asserting that the NDA she received $130000 for signing was null and void because Trump had failed to sign it.

The Daniels’ litigation seems to be nothing more than fodder for late night comedians; an opportunity for schadenfreude as we watched the blisteringly stupid Michael Cohen be outmaneuvered by the lawyer for a porn star. In reality though, it is forcing disclosure of evidence that the payment was in violation of campaign finance law, (Source: “Stormy Daniels Lawsuit Opens Door to Further Trouble for Trump,” by Jim Rutenberg and Mike McIntire, The New York Times, 3/8/18). The entire episode would have been unthinkable with any other President in the last 100 years, yet we look on wearily, knowing that Trump is unlikely to face any civil or criminal penalties for this flagrant disregard of the law. Continue reading “Ready on Day One”

March 7, 2018

On any given day in Trump’s America, we cycle through the emotions of rage, fear and hope.  We consume the news with a strong sense of gallows humor filtered through a lens of incredulity.  On some days, we experience all of those emotions simultaneously, as we did on Monday, watching the slow motion trainwreck of Sam Nunberg’s series of increasingly unhinged, defiant interviews on MSNBC and CNN.  While stating his intention to flout the Special Counsel’s subpoena and openly court being thrown in jail, Nunberg intimated that Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice and conspiring with the Russian efforts to interfere in our elections. Continue reading “Defiling the presidency”

March 4, 2018

This week, we learned that Jared Kushner secured a $184 million dollar loan from Apollo Global Management after discussing an administration post with Apollo head, Joshua Harris in a White House meeting (Source: “Kushner’s Family Business Received Loans After White House Meetings,” by Jesse Drucker, Kate Kelly and Ben Protess, The New York Times, 2/28/18). We also discovered that the administration “coincidentally” backed the Saudi blockade of Qatar (location of U.S. Central Command, a base housing 10,000 American military personnel) after the Qatari Fund rejected Kushner’s request for a loan (Source: “Mueller team asking if Kushner foreign business ties influenced Trump policy,” by Carol E. Lee, Julia Ainsley and Robert Windrem, NBCNews.com, 3/2/18). Continue reading “The writing is on the wall”

February 28, 2018

Subtext has become text.  For the last fifty years, racism was hinted at in coded metaphors, dog whistles like “law and order,” and “welfare queens.”  After the brief halcyon days of the Civil Rights movement, a backlash ensued in which policies were enacted in the name of “neutrality” or “fairness” that deliberately overlooked literal centuries of injustice and had the effect of arresting or erasing any progress that the nation had made towards equality.

The Reagan presidency ushered in an era of selfishness that encouraged us to define our self-interest as narrowly as possible. School funding was slashed such that many kids’ sports and music instruction became the sole province of the affluent.  Unions were weakened and profit as a value was elevated to the point where companies eliminated pensions and moved jobs overseas, leaving large swathes of the industrial heartland hollowed out, consigning their denizens to despair.  The result was that millions of Americans, Black, white or Latino, were left with no path to prosperity.  The conservative solution was to demonize and imprison as many Blacks and Latinos as possible through the War on Drugs and to mine the rich vein of racism and unthinking Christian fundamentalism to keep white Americans from turning on the wealthy. Continue reading “Blood on our hands?”