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Happy MLK Day?

January 15, 2022

        Today is the 93rd birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when we will once again endure mainstream America’s mawkish veneration that flattens and distorts what he stood for.  In the American popular imagination, Dr. King is remembered for one eloquent speech in 1963 importuning white America to judge Black people by the “content of [our] character,” and his death at the hands of a racist assassin.

     Americans prefer to forget Dr. King’s scathing condemnation of white moderates “who are more concerned with ‘order’ than justice; who prefer a negative peace, which is the absence of tension to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice,” (Source:  “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” April 16,1963).

     Americans don’t want to engage with Dr. King’s critique of our country’s vast wealth inequality.  His statement 56 years ago that “depressed living standards for Negroes are a structural part of the economy,” could have been written today.  Dr. King’s observation that, “Certain industries are based upon the supply of low-wage, under skilled and immobile non-white labor,” explains today’s opposition to unionization efforts at Amazon and Starbuck’s, (Source:  “MLK’s Forgotten Call for Economic Justice,” originally published 3/14/1966, The Nation).

      We have completely erased Dr. King’s uncompromising condemnation of the Vietnam War and American militarism more broadly detailed in his incisive speech at The Riverside Church in 1967, when he presciently declared that “when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered,” (Source:  “Beyond Vietnam:  A Time to Break Silence”, delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King at The Riverside Church on April 4, 1967).

     Today, 54 years after Dr. King’s death, we are not only still battling racism, materialism and militarism, but are threatened by a major political party’s dedication to, not only destroying everything that Dr. King fought for in his life, but to burning down our very democracy itself.

     After all, a country where Black, Brown, Asian and Indigenous people have to surmount an increasing number of obstacles to cast a ballot is not a democracy.  A country where states are passing laws allowing state legislatures to overturn the will of the electorate is not a democracy. A country where benighted bigots ban books by and about Black people cannot call itself a democracy.

      In spite of all of this, Congress is still struggling to pass voting rights legislation.  Putative Democrats Manchin and Sinema persist in elevating an arcane procedural rule over the actual Constitutional rights of living, breathing Americans.  They have been unmoved by pleas from civil rights leaders or fiery speeches by Joe Biden.  Manchin and Sinema would rather preen for Beltway pundits than act.  In the battle between white supremacy and multiracial democracy, they appear to have picked a side.  Whether they are “actual racists” is decidedly beside the point.   Manchin and Sinema may surprise us, but all I know is we’d better have a Plan B.

#MLK Day

#Nocelebrationwithoutlegislation

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Happy New Year

December 31, 2021

      As this year draws to a close, it is tough to summon the characteristic optimism with which we usually turn the calendar page.  This has been a year of incalculable loss.  A loss of brilliant and prophetic Blackness, from bell hooks to Greg Tate to Desmond Tutu.  A loss of transcendent artistry and creativity from Cicely Tyson and Michael K. Williams to Chucky Thompson.  The words and the work and the beauty lives on, but we are left in a country awash in ugliness and anger, trying to chart a path forward with inconstant allies.  2021 has been a year of stasis, with one step forward and two steps back in the pandemic; where every gain has been stymied by selfishness.

     On January 6th, we were stripped of any illusion that the center of this republic would hold based on tradition, inertia or a widespread belief in the Constitutional principles of representative democracy.  We could no longer plausibly deny that for  a large percentage of our fellow Americans, our skin color or sexual identity rendered us stateless persons with no rights they were bound to respect.  To them, a President elected with our votes could never be a legitimate officeholder.

     The promise of the spring that vaccines would free us from the tyranny of Zoom cocktails and quarantine pods gave way to a summer of hopes dashed by Delta, aided by the obstinately ignorant, who placed their faith in quack cures or an egotistical faith in their “superior” immune systems.

     The institutions we relied upon to protect us consistently let us down.  They were ineffectual at best or actively malevolent at worst— from a Congress incapable of passing voting rights legislation or a spending bill that would truly help children and families, to a Supreme Court  recklessly undermining the Voting Rights Act or eagerly stripping women of their bodily autonomy.

    Evil seems to be flourishing unchecked.  Windows are closing on our chance to save democracy as state after state enacts a raft of legislation designed to entrench minority power — from laws restricting the franchise to those enabling a Republican minority to invalidate election results they don’t like.  Meanwhile, the CDC’s covid guidance seems more informed by the dictates of CEOs than the needs of public health.

    In the face of these daunting circumstances, it would be easy to give in to despair, but the truth is that acting as if there is no hope becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We still have agency and we can’t afford to squander it. Instead of looking to Washington to rescue us, recommit to focusing on your local school board elections, where hysteria over critical race theory has taken hold, to your local and state election administration, where the will of the people can be thwarted, and to your state legislatures that are busy passing all of these undemocratic laws.     Most importantly, honor those prophetic voices we lost this year and remember that love is a verb.  Real love requires action.  If you love your country or your people, you must act!  No other resolution counts.  Happy New Year!

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Tick, tick…boom

December 6, 2021

     Baby-faced killers, banned books and forced birth.  As the news of the last week makes clear, this is the future that awaits if we don’t remove extremists from power.  Last Tuesday there was another harrowing school shooting in Oxford, Michigan.  The initial facts were devastating enough— a 15 year old armed with a Sig Sauer 9mm handgun, spraying 15 shots in five minutes, killing four beloved young people, injuring seven others and traumatizing countless more, (Source: “Key moments surrounding Michigan high school shooting,” by the Associated Press, APnews.com, 12/5/21).

      As the week wore on, the story only became more bizarre. We learned that the killer’s parents had purchased the murder weapon for him as an early Christmas gift at a Black Friday sale (Source:  ibid).  America has become a place where merchants of death tempt the violent with discounts on instruments of mass murder; where some parents’ twisted idea of love is to gift those guns to a child.

     When a visibly angry prosecutor announced that she planned not only to treat Ethan Crumbley like a Black child and charge him as an adult, but to charge his parents as well, the parents drained their bank account and skipped town. They fled to Detroit, no doubt imagining either that they could sneak across the river to Canada, or that the Black city was such a hotbed of criminality that no one would find them.  Instead they were captured late Friday night cowering in an empty commercial building (Source: “Dramatic Day Reveals Details About the Parents of a School Shooting Suspect,” by Sophie Kasakove and Susan Cooper Eastman, The New York Times, 12/5/21).  From our country’s steadfast refusal to regulate civilian ownership of weapons of war to the spectacle of parents who gleefully arm their troubled children and then abandon those children at the first whiff of accountability, the stench of American rot is inescapable.

      Stench, as Justice Sotomayor noted, was the only way to describe the odor from the contemptuous sophistry displayed by the six conservative Justices during Wednesday’s oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.  Justice Kavanaugh cynically cited landmark civil rights cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefells v. Hodges to disingenuously dismiss the argument that the Court should be bound by a precedent that has guaranteed women bodily autonomy for 50 years (Source:  “Majority of the court appears poised to roll back abortion rights,” by Amy Howe, Scotusblog.com,12/1/21).

      Amy Coney “Aunt Lydia” Barrett blithely ignored the fact that pregnancy itself carries serious medical risks and that the maternal mortality rate of Black women is  2.5 times that of white women, asking whether the “‘safe haven’ laws which allow parents to give up their newborns at designated safe places,” could serve as a substitute for women’s right to control their own bodies, (ibid).

     Chief Justice John Roberts, whose radicalism is tempered by his concern for the Court’s legitimacy, zeroed in on the viability standard in Roe v. Wade, asking why 15 weeks was not a sufficient amount of time for women to exercise reproductive choice, (ibid).

      While the high court’s conservatives were salivating over the prospect of giving the government control over the bodies of America’s women, in state after state Republicans were working feverishly to gain control of the minds of America’s kids.  From Texas to Virginia to Pennsylvania, rabid conservatives seek to ban authors from Toni Morrison to Alison Bechdel.   Radical conservatives are calling for the offending books to be burned and seek nothing less than the erasure of any knowledge of racism, Black history or the existence of LGBTQ people, (Source:  “U.S. libraries report spike in organized attempt to ban books in schools,” by Allison Flood, the guardian.com, 11/25/21).

       This is the current state of our country— awash in violence, ignorance and cruelty, full of people who seek to extinguish or erase anyone who is “different.”  Yet, like stubborn surfers, we mistake the preternatural calm before a tsunami for a permanent state.  We stand still at our own peril, thinking we won’t be drowned by the wave.  

#PasstheWomen’sHealthProtectionAct

#Eliminatethefilibuster 

#PasstheFreedomtoVoteAct

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American Dystopia

November 20, 2021

    The most shocking thing is how unsurprised we are.  Given the all-white jury, the judge’s brazen misconduct and the coddling of a baby-faced killer, we all expected Kyle Rittenhouse to get away with murder.  When the verdict was announced, few of us could summon the raw outrage with which we greeted George Zimmerman’s acquittal, when we still had a faint glimmer of hope that justice could be done.  Now we’re just numb.  We are inured to the fact that killers are not held accountable for taking Black lives and have had to learn anew, that the lives of those who stand with us are not valued either.

     Some thought that a salient difference between George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse is that Rittenhouse’s victims were white. This facile observation ignores the long line of white accomplices from  Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and Viola Liuzzo; to Heather Heyer, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, whose uncompromising advocacy for Black lives cost them their own.

      Analysts have stated that Rittenhouse was acquitted because of the combination of the prosecution’s high burden of proof in self-defense cases and Wisconsin’s open carry law, (Source:  “When It Comes to Self Defense The Burden is Often On The Prosecution,” by Shaila Dewan and Mitch Smith, The New York Times,  11/19/21).  That is technically correct, but ignores the larger context.  Rittenhouse’s acquittal comes while we are in the midst of an extremist project to restore the pre-Civil Rights era status quo— where Black people were denied basic human rights and where no white man was ever held accountable for killing a person of color.  Back then, most white people were in one of two camps — those cowed into silence by the example of white martyrs and those all too happy to outsource rigid enforcement of the racial hierarchy to goons, cops and the Klan.

      The evidence is all around us, from the January 6th insurrection to white nationalist Congressman Paul Gosar circulating a doctored video which depicts him killing Representative Alexandra Ocasio Cortez.  This movement seeks nothing less than to maintain power and silence dissent through violence.  

    Yet this is hardly new.  As detailed in this recent piece in The Atlantic, “each time minorities advocate for and achieve greater equality, conservatives rebel, trying to force a reinstatement of the status quo,” (Source:  “America’s Most Destructive Habit,” by John S. Huntington and Lawrence Glassman, The Atlantic, 11/7/21).  Huntington and Glassman describe the current Trumpist movement as a “counterrevolutionary dynamic,” that has antecedents in the dismantling of Reconstruction and ensuing Jim Crow reign and the “mid-century fight against Civil Rights.”

     All three movements share “a hostility to racial equality;” a tendency to characterize proponents of equality as terrorists or Communists and then use that characterization to justify violence.  To add insult to injury, these conservative counterrevolutionaries then accuse the victims of their violence “of inciting it.”

We need to see the Rittenhouse trial and acquittal as a recruitment video, signaling to other extremists that not only won’t their violence be punished, but that it may be rewarded. These people have shown that they are willing to kill for whiteness. The question for the rest of us is, “What are we willing to live with?”

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We are all we have

November 2, 2021

     We can feel complacency setting in.  Many of us treat the daily drumbeat of alarming stories of how close Trump and his supporters came to violently overthrowing our democracy, and of how committed they still are to doing so, as mere background noise.  Just last week, The Washington Post reported that John Eastman, the architect who wrote the blueprint for the coup attempt in his notorious memo sought to use the Capitol insurrection itself as a basis for stopping the peaceful transition of power, (Source: “During Jan. 6 riot, Trump attorney told Pence team the vice president’s inaction caused attack on Capitol,” by Josh Dawsey, Jacqueline Alemany, Jon Swaine and Emma Brown, The Washington Post, 10/29/21).  Eastman alleged that the fact that Pence displayed a scintilla of decency by allotting his time to shaken members of Congress to speak once Congress reconvened violated the Electoral Count Act by extending debate beyond the specified two hours (ibid).

     Thanks to a massive data dump by Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, we learned just how much Facebook chose “profits over safety,” and refused to take steps to stop the flow of incendiary misinformation because it might cost them money, (Source:  “Whistleblower Says Facebook ‘Chooses Profits Over Safety,'” by Ryan Mac and Cecilia Kang, The New York Times, 10/27/21)[NB:  The irony of my posting this on Facebook is not lost on me].

      Worse still, there is plenty of evidence that those who favor a fascist coup remain a clear and present danger.  The calls for violence against Democrats are escalating, with “almost one in three Republicans believing that violence may be necessary to ‘save’ the country.”  Yet Washington remains stuck, thanks to the performative obstruction of Joe Manchin, who takes perverse pleasure in playing Lucy with the football to the Democrats’  Charlie Brown.

      Frustrated by the sameness of the story, cushioned by rising 401k values and a receding pandemic, millions of us simply tune out.  We can’t be bothered with writing postcards, let alone knocking on doors or hitting the streets.  Many don’t feel threatened, even as women scream that Texas’ S.B. 8 turns us into compulsory baby making machines. Even if we felt heartened by the Supreme Court’s spirited questioning during yesterday’s oral argument, we remember that the Mississippi law which bans abortions after 15 weeks is likely to be affirmed by a Supreme Court more offended by a threat to its supremacy than a threat to Americans’ humanity, (Source:  “The Architects of Texas Abortion Ban Overplayed Their Hand,” by Mark Joseph Stern, Slate.com, 11/1/21).

     Many sit on their hands, even as Black, Brown and Indigenous people, who delivered The White House and Congress to the Democrats, scream that widespread voter suppression is nothing less than the dismantling of democracy.  Many look at the paralysis in Congress and blame the Democrats, rather than the Republicans who prefer fascist cosplay to governing.

     In the face of all of this, the governor’s race in Virginia shouldn’t even be close, yet many are more alarmed at the idea of their fragile children reading the work of a Black woman Nobel laureate whose work dares to depict the horrors of slavery, than of elected officials who cozy up to those who traffic in lies and political violence, (Source:  “Glenn Youngkin Was a Traditional Republican.  Then He Became a Culture Warrior,” by Jeremy W. Peters, The New York Times, 10/29/21).

Those folks have made it clear to the rest of us. Cosseted by comfort, they feel no threat from the destruction of women’s reproductive rights or the civil rights of BIPOC and LGBTQ Americans. They don’t realize that when they’re done with us, there will be nobody left to stand up for them.

#Weareallwehave

#Arepublicifyoucankeepit

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The road to hell

October 16, 2021

    We all feel crushed by the weight.  Eighteen months into the pandemic, ten months into a Biden presidency, we all sit warily in a defensive crouch, wondering where the next blow will come from.  We remember how we felt last November, when Biden’s victory was finally announced.  We spontaneously spilled into the streets in giddy elation, dancing, drinking and singing.  Bells were ringing in Paris and the worldwide sigh of relief was palpable.

     And then, on January 6th, we watched in horror as a marauding mob of Trump acolytes violently stormed the Capitol in an effort to overthrow our democratically elected government and reinstall their deity— a corrupt vulgarian of limited intelligence and unlimited hatred.

     Still, we told ourselves, we had worked hard to not only elect Biden, but to elect two Democratic senators in Georgia, giving the Democrats control of the presidency, the House and the Senate.  Surely they would use their hard won power to protect democracy, confront climate change and hold treasonous malefactors accountable.

     Yet, here we are, almost one year past Election Day, with precious little accomplished on those fronts.  Yes, it’s a relief to have an administration who doesn’t have terrorizing and persecuting the marginalized as its mission.  It’s true that the pandemic persists in spite of this administration’s competence, not because of it.  It is also true that Biden has been rapidly filling federal judgeships with an admirably diverse array of lawyers, but all of it feels like the calm before the inevitable storm.  If the Democrats don’t use their power to protect voting rights and improve people’s lives, we will look back on Biden’s presidency as a mere interregnum in our inexorable slide into fascism.

     Biden has repeatedly tied the bipartisan infrastructure bill to his Build Back Better human infrastructure bill, but the package remains hamstrung by the intransigence of Senators Manchin and Sinema.  Manchin, in hock to fossil fuel interests is insisting on cutting the heart out of the climate change provisions in Build Back Better, happy to fiddle on his houseboat while the world burns, (Source:  “Key to Biden’s Climate Agenda Likely To Be Cut Because of Manchin Opposition,” by Coral Davenport, The New York Times, 10/15/21).  Kyrsten Sinema on the other hand, seems to mainly want attention.  She swans around interning at wineries, running marathons and traveling to Europe,  unbothered by the problems impacting ordinary Americans, like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette.

As for the rest of us, we have lost our way. The pandemic seems to have sapped our capacity for empathy, rather than making us more compassionate. In a society that has long equated wealth or power with intellect, those of us with either, feel comfortable demonizing that which we don’t understand while recoiling at the suggestion of accountability. Far too many of us define freedom as the freedom to hurt those we revile and spend our days engaged in acts of performative cruelty, whether at school board meetings or on concert stages. Too many of us stubbornly refuse to see the humanity of those we endanger. All I know is that we have to find a way out of this death spiral, a way of replacing rancor with kindness or we’ll all end up in hell together. I don’t know if we can find our way back, but I know we’re doomed if we don’t try.

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The Devil They Know

September 25, 2021

     As trouble mounts on every front, from a barbaric Texas law that deprives women of their bodily autonomy to a spate of laws in 18 states that deprive people of color of their right to vote, Democrats in Congress are tied up in Gordian knots of their own making. Hamstrung by fealty to fusty procedures and paralyzed by posturing moderates, they are incapable of even crafting a strategy to avert the government shutdown being engineered by nihilist Republicans.

     Despite the existential threats to our democracy posed by the relentless attacks on voting rights and election integrity, Congressional Democrats are unable to eliminate or even amend the filibuster. The party is hostage to the performative centrism of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are not only torpedoing voting rights legislation, but imperiling Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda by objecting to its $3.5 trillion dollar price tag.  Very few are pointing out the hypocrisy of objecting to spending $350 billion per year over ten years on programs that will help Americans and confront climate change, while not saying a word while the $768 billion National Defense Authorization Act covering one year, passes in the House by a margin of 316 -113.

Last Sunday, our hopes of including immigration reform in the reconciliation bill were dashed when the Senate parliamentarian ruled that “the policy change would far outweigh the budgetary impact scored to it and it is not appropriate for inclusion in reconciliation,”. (Source: “In A Blow to Democrats, Senate Official Blocks Immigration Reform In Budget Bill,” by Claudia Grisales, npr.org, 9/19/21). Given that the proposal was projected “to increase GDP by a cumulative total of $1.5 trillion over ten years and create 400,800 new jobs,” this seems like a political decision made by an unelected bureaucrat. Democrats expressed “disappointment” with the Parliamentarian’s decision, pretending they were powerless to overrule or fire her in order to create a path to citizenship for 8 million undocumented immigrants.

        Meanwhile, at the Southern border, a full fledged humanitarian crisis erupted, which only got uglier by the day.  Last week, we learned that the Biden Administration responded to an encampment of 15,000 Haitian migrants seeking refuge from their dangerously unstable country by announcing a plan to speed up deportations.  The administration shipped 500 migrants back to Haiti in the first 48 hours after announcing its plan, (Source: “Some Haitians at U.S. border released, others deported, as pressure builds on Biden,” by Diana Beth Solomon, Reuters.com, 9/22/21).

     The day after we learned of mass deportations, images emerged of white Border Patrol officers on horseback grabbing and berating Black Haitian migrants, while wielding their reins overhead like whips, (Source:  “Images of Border Patrol’s Treatment of Migrants Prompts Outrage,” by Eileen Sullivan and Zolan Kano-Youngs, The New York Times, 9/21/21).

     The violent anti-Blackness was so sickening that it prompted Daniel Foote, the U.S. envoy to Haiti, to resign.  Foote wrote a blistering resignation letter, stating ““I will not be associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the dangers posed by armed gangs in control of daily life.”

    Foote’s bracing moral clarity does not reckon with American complicity in that instability, but it is a welcome contrast to others in the administration who claim that Border Patrol depravity “is not who we are,” while packing planes to deport more Haitians in the middle of this crisis, (Source: “Biden Condemns Border Patrol Treatment of  Haitian Migrants as Expulsions Continue,” by Katie Rogers and Michael D. Shear, The New York Times, 9/24/21).  There is a marked contrast between the speed with which this administration relied on a reviled Trump era policy to deport Black migrants and its hesitation to pressure holdout Democrats to act to protect the Constitutional rights of Black citizens.  One has to ask – are Democrats more afraid of a truly representative multiracial democracy than of a takeover by fascist white supremacists?  All I can say is — actions speak louder than words.

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American Taliban

September 2, 2021

      Tuesday marked the end of America’s twenty-year misadventure in Afghanistan.  After twenty years, trillions of dollars and thousands of Afghan and American lives lost, the only ones who have profited are military contractors and corrupt officials.  Many Americans are justifiably worried about what fate awaits Afghan women and girls, or of the translators and other Afghan citizens who helped us under the Taliban, but the very threat that the Taliban poses in Afghanistan, is posed to Americans by a radicalized right wing minority eager to usher in authoritarianism.

      Hyperbole?  Consider S.B. 8, the law that took effect in Texas yesterday.  It not only bans abortions beyond six weeks after conception,  but creates a cause of action against anyone who helps a woman secure an abortion after six weeks, from doctors to clinic staff to Uber drivers who provide transportation, (Source:  “Supreme Court, Breaking Silence, Won’t Block Texas Abortion Law,” by Adam Liptak, J. David Goodman and Sabrina Tavernise, The New York Times, 9/1/21).

    The new law is simultaneously cowardly and barbaric.  Cowardly, because it offloads enforcement of the law to an army of faceless anti-abortion crusaders who do not need to have “any connection to the abortion,” and need not even live in the state of Texas to bring a lawsuit which can garner them $10,000, plus their legal fees, if they win.  Yet the law does not entitle defendants to their legal fees if they prevail (ibid)!

    Barbaric, because the legislature knows that this law will outlaw most abortions, since 85% of abortions are performed after the six week point.  Barbaric, because the law contains no exception for rape or incest, compelling women who have already been hideously violated to choose between a life of misery or a back alley abortion.

     The Texas legislature designed S.B.8 to evade judicial review by delegating its enforcement. Last night a majority of the Supreme Court took this easy off ramp and declined to issue a stay, imperiling the Constitutional rights of thousands of women.  Even worse, the one paragraph decision was issued without the benefit of full briefing or arguments, as it arose from the Court’s ever expanding “shadow docket.”

     The majority’s decision was so stunningly irresponsible that each of the four dissenting justices issued an opinion, from Chief Justice John Roberts to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, with the three liberal justices all joining one another’s opinions.  As Justice Breyer stated, the Court should have stayed enforcement of the Texas law because “a State cannot delegate veto power [over the right to obtain an abortion] which the state itself is absolutely and totally prohibited from exercising during the first trimester of pregnancy,” (Source:  “Whole Woman’s Health v. Austin Reeve Jackson, Judge, et al, 594 U.S.___, (2021), Breyer, J., dissenting).

     Although Justice Sotomayor’s scathing dissent notes that the majority “silently acquiesced in a state’s enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents, (ibid, Sotomayor, J. dissenting), the reality of what the Court did was far worse.  It ignored a bedrock legal principle that goes back to the seminal case of Marbury v. Madison (1803), that “where a legal right is ‘invaded’ law provides a legal remedy by suit or action at law, (ibid, Breyer, J. dissenting, quoting Marbury).

      It is no accident that the effective date of S.B. 8 comes one day after the Republican led Texas legislature succeeded in passing its most sweeping voter suppression bill yet.  The new bill prohibits drive-through voting, 24 hour voting and sending unsolicited absentee ballots.  Most ominously, it “empowers partisan poll watchers [and] creates new criminal and civil penalties for poll workers,”(Source:  “Texas G.O.P. Passes Election Bill, Raising Voting Barriers Even Higher,” by J. David Goodman, Nick Corasantini and Reid J. Epstein, The New York Times, 8/31/21).

      These laws are of a piece.  Both laws strip women and people of color of fundamental Constitutional rights and impose heavy penalties on any person who would dare to help them.  Both statutes codify vigilantism by empowering average citizens to enforce the deprivation of citizens’ 14th and 15th Amendment rights. These laws are breathtaking in their audacious contempt for the Constitution.

       Texas is a harbinger of things to come. Every other Republican-led state is taking notes. It is long past time for Congress to get serious about passing laws that protect voting rights and a woman’s right to choose.  Thinking that people of color and women can simply “out-organize” authoritarianism shows an enraging naivete and a maddening disdain for our very humanity.  We can give Congress no rest until they ditch the filibuster and work to preserve democracy.   We must be relentless.  Those who favor fascism clearly are.

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Chickens coming home to roost

August 18, 2021

      Over the last week we have been transfixed in horror watching the rapid Taliban takeover in the wake of American withdrawal from Afghanistan.   The utter lack of resistance from Afghan troops has been stunning to witness, particularly in light of the investment of twenty years, billions of dollars and countless Afghan and American lives designed to prevent this very outcome.

      Images of people rushing American military planes in a desperate effort to flee evoke nothing so much as the fall of Saigon in 1975.  Our current foreign policy debacle may have its origins with the Bush administration, but accountability for it cuts across partisan lines and multiple administrations.  It stems from the American illusion that every country yearns to fashion itself in our image and the stubborn refusal to acknowledge actual conditions on the ground. 

    Meanwhile, stateside, we are trapped in a country seemingly gone mad.  We are in the midst of an out-of-control spike in COVID cases, made all the more enraging because it was entirely preventable.  Unlike 2020, when our only tools were masks, hand washing and social distancing, we have three highly safe and effective vaccines that a frustratingly large percentage of Americans refuse to take.

      That distrust stems from disinformation trumpeted by hypocritical right wing hacks on propaganda networks, or circulated in closed loop ecosystems on social media. That alone would have been enough to contribute to an increase in COVID cases, given the highly infectious nature of the Delta variant.  The fatal accelerant, though, has been Republican governors who believe that their path to The White House lies in being as Trump-like as possible.  They have issued orders prohibiting vaccine or even mask mandates, even as their hospitals run out of ICU beds and ventilators.

     Governors Abbot of Texas and DeSantis of Florida are the worst offenders, by far.  DeSantis not only banned mask mandates, but threatened to withhold the salaries of local school board officials who flouted his order, (Source:  “Ron DeSantis Takes His Hatred of Mask Mandates to a New Level,” by Benjamin Hart, NYmag.com, 8/10/21).  Not to be outdone, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission threatened to pull the liquor license of any restaurant requiring proof of vaccination. Governor Abbott is not relenting on mask mandates, even as Texas has seen a 400% increase in COVID cases in the last month and 53 hospitals have run out of ICU beds, (Source:  “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is literally fiddling while COVID-19 cases burn through overwhelmed hospitals,” by Peter Weber, TheWeek.com, 8/13/21).

     Their actions, in turn, have emboldened an army of belligerently idiotic vigilantes who attack public officials and parents who advocate for common sense public health measures in order to protect children!  In California, a teacher landed in the hospital after a parent attacked him over a mask mandate on the first day of school.   In Tennessee, parents and school board members advocating mask mandates were threatened by protestors who told them, “We will find you….You will never be allowed in public again,” (Source:  “Arguments Break Out in Tenn. Parking Lots as Parents Grow Heated Over School Mask Mandate,” by Rachel DeSantis, People.com, 8/12/21).

     The link between the wretched situation in Afghanistan and our confounding COVID response is the uniquely American tendency to staunchly hold on to opinions, regardless of actual facts, combined with our enduring belief that we can solve any problem with enough guns or money.  In Afghanistan, senior military officials ignored “clear signs of failure or futility,” for years, (Source:  “A 20-year failure to acknowledge a war gone wrong,” by Greg Jaffe and Greg Miller, The Washington Post, 8/16/21).  Here in the U.S., it has allowed the Delta variant to run rampant, as thousands of unvaccinated Americans choose to believe easily refutable myths over scores of epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists, (Source:  “Myths vs. Facts:  Making Sense of COVID-19 Misinformation,” by Doug Most, The Brink, Pioneering Research From Boston University, 8/13/21).  For centuries, American hubris has proven lethal to people around the globe.  With Delta, it looks like the chickens are coming home to roost.

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How to survive a plague

July 18, 2021

     We watch in dismay as a dizzying number of our fellow citizens turn their backs on science in obdurate imbecility and send COVID case numbers skyrocketing upwards.  The willful ignorance being encouraged by the right wing media is having deadly consequences.  In the last week, the average number of coronavirus infections surged 70% and hospitalizations climbed 36%, (Source:  “U.S. cases surge as delta variant takes hold,” by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Frances Stead Sellers, The Washington Post, 7/16/21).  97% of the hospitalizations and “almost all COVID-19 deaths” are among the unvaccinated.  40% of the new cases come from just four states, with 20% of new cases coming from Florida alone, (ibid).

     Still death is no deterrent for the shameless hucksters peddling fact-free fear and hatred.  As the latest surge shows, they are turning their credulous viewers from vaccine hesitant to vaccine hostile, despite the fact that many of them have, in fact, been vaccinated. Trump’s acolytes across the country are turning their backs, not only on the recent scientific advances represented by the vaccine, but on a century of public health best practices.  Eight states have blocked schools and colleges from requiring proof of vaccination as a prerequisite for attendance and three of those— Arizona, Arkansas and Oklahoma— have banned in-school mask requirements, (Source:  “COVID-19 School Mandates for Masks, Vaccines Are Blocked in More States,” by Lee Hawkins and Aydali Campa, The Wall Street Journal, 7/16/21).

     It is hard to understand what the endgame is here.  These laws will undoubtedly lead to needless and entirely preventable illness and death, not only among the stubborn and credulous who buy into these irrational conspiracy theories, but among schoolchildren too young to be eligible for the vaccine, and among Black and Latino frontline workers forced to interact with these people in their jobs.  This lunacy is being propagated to foster distrust in an anodyne Democratic President who took the entirely reasonable position that his most important responsibility was to protect American citizens from a deadly plague.

     Sadly, this behavior is consistent with the peculiar American proclivity for ignoring inconvenient facts and insisting on one’s own reality in the name of “freedom.”  For many Americans, freedom doesn’t mean the pursuit of happiness, but the ability to assert power over the marginalized and more vulnerable, free from consequences.  For these Americans, their freedom is meaningless unless there are others who are less free.  They want, not only the right to live the life that they choose, but to choose the lives the rest of us live. That is the thread that unites these laws flouting common sense public health measures with draconian anti-abortion bills, and dehumanizing anti-trans bills. Their insistence on their own reality has led to a rash of bills banning “critical race theory” which the right wing has redefined so expansively that it would ban teaching students about Ruby Bridges,, whose heroism facing down angry mobs as a 6 year old girl to integrate the New Orleans public schools was memorialized in a painting by Norman Rockwell.

      The people passing these laws know that their positions are deeply unpopular, but rather than moderate their views, their strategy is to disempower the majority.  Since the January 6th insurrection, Republicans have doubled down on The Big Lie, using it to justify a spate of voter suppression laws targeting Black and Brown voters.  Although activists and voting rights advocates have been steadily sounding the alarm, the response from elected Democrats has been hapless and ineffectual. 

     Their single minded focus on passing Biden’s infrastructure package suggests that they believe that the same people rationalizing the January 6th insurrection and supporting the passage of memory laws can be swayed by new roads and bridges.   The Congressional Dems seem oblivious to the existential threat that elected Republicans and their supporters pose to democracy itself.  Their refusal to get rid of, or even amend, the filibuster suggests that they think democracy can be saved with some combination of earnest speeches and Black Girl Magic. We need to follow the lead of Rep. Joyce Beatty, LaTosha Brown and the other Black women activists and descend on the Capitol to remind Democrats who put them there.  We saved democracy once.  We can’t do it again without their help.