It has been a long time since I have come to put word to keyboard here, due to a busy fall semester and sheer exhaustion from trying to keep up with the endless barrage of dishonest statements, disheartening actions, and destructive policies coming out of the Trump White House. The new "tax reform" bill that will greatly enrich the already greatly rich and over time, bankrupt the government in order to destroy social programs that help the non-rich and the non-white is only the last in a long list of insults and atrocities. I am losing hope that much can be done anytime soon to block the triumphal march of idiocy and hatefulness that Trump is leading, with the docile support of a supine Republican majority, many of whose members may also revile The Donald but are willing to go along with him for the sake of right-wing treats like tax cuts and the weakening of regulations on banks, telecom companies and other powerful corporate interests. I take heart that opposition is rising, and that the election of the Democrat Doug Jones over the disgusting Bible-thumper, child humper Roy Moore in Alabama, coming after the trouncing of pro-Trump candidates.
The defeat of the Roy Moore candidacy had much to do with a highly energized African-American electorate in Alabama, with black women turning out in astounding numbers bespeaking iron determination. There was a definite Civil Rights angle to this situation. Roy Moore had made a shocking statement during the campaign suggesting that he saw the slavery period as one that was better for American families than the current day. Doug Jones, in contrast, had, as U.S Attorney for the northern district of Alabama in the late 1990s, successfully prosecuted two KKK members who had been involved in the racially-motivated terrorist bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist church in Birmingham on September, 15, 1963 that caused the deaths of four young African-American girls. This was remembered and was one of the reasons Jones got such strong African-American support. It is heartening that Jones had the courage to carry out these prosecutions, which resulted in the conviction of Thomas Edwin Blanton in 2001 and Bobby Frank Cherry in 2002 http://www.history.com/news/how-doug-jones-brought-kkk-church-bombers-to-justice. It is equally impressive and inspiring that African-Americans, especially black women, had not forgotten this important history and were eager to elevate a Civil Rights champion over a Civil War apologist in the election.
Of course, another major factor in Moore's defeat were the revelations of his past pursuit of teenaged girls when he was a district attorney in his thirties, in the early 1980s. The women who came forward to speak of their painful experiences being pressured by Moore to go on dates with them and to then, in some cases, endure various degrees of molestation, were denounced by Moore and his most prominent supporter, President Trump, but a large enough segment of the Alabama electorate believed the women's stories, and this lessened white support for Moore, particularly among white women, enough so that the combination of lukewarm white support for Moore and red-hot black opposition made the difference. This came in the context of the flood of revelations of male sexual abuse of women in Hollywood, politics, and elsewhere that has ended the careers of powerful men from Bill O'Reilly to Harvey Weinstein to Matt Lauer to Al Franken. Social media played an important role, with many women using Twitter and the #MeToo hashtag to publicize their personal stories of abuse and pain.
Here, I want to suggest,from a more specifically Pagan angle, that the hashtag of #MeToo could be given an environmental equivalent, an #EarthToo campaign, that could be used to "out" egregious polluters and destroyers of the environment, past and present and to mobilize public sentiment against the devastation and desecration of our natural environment. When we think about the violation of women by men, we who are Pagans might take this a step further to confront the ugly practice of multinational corporations raping the earth for reasons of greed and lust for profit. I recall reading that in Lithuanian folklore, there was once a tradition of farmers asking the earth for forgiveness for causing it pain prior to forcibly opening the soil for tilling and sowing.
May this become a battle cry heard far and wide , so that corporate predators of Mother Earth will be treated to scorn and shame in 2018 as were sexual predators in 2017...#Earth Too! Stop Raping the Earth!
Showing posts with label KKK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KKK. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 27, 2017
Sunday, November 20, 2016
Living in a Foreign Country: America in the Age of Trump
On Tuesday night, November 8th, I went to sleep on an overnight flight to Europe for a conference taking place later in the week. While I was on my way to Helsinki, I assumed that America was on its way to electing Hillary Clinton as president. When the plane touched down Wednesday morning and people began to turn on their smart phones to check messages and get the latest news, a murmuring spread through the passengers. I began to hear "Trump... Trump..." and soon learned the truth: The impossible had happened. The catastrophe had arrived. The arrogant, loudmouthed, ridiculously boastful celebrity businessman with hateful views toward migrants and minorities, who had been caught on tape talking about how he used his celebrity status to take sexual advantage of women, who had zero experience in government and offered little more than vague promises to "make America great again," had narrowly edged Mrs. Clinton to become the new president-in-waiting.
I had had an awful dream on the flight. I saw angry mobs, fires, violence. I woke thinking the dream probably represented my anxieties about the election, but when I found that Trump had been not vanquished but elevated by the election, I now feared the dream was if anything prophetic, a grim premonition of what may lay ahead for country run by an ignorant, erratic, thin-skinned and hot-tempered, right-wing billionaire bully fueled by resentment and egotism.
She had won the popular vote, by a margin that has now proven substantial, but since America awards the presidency through its complicated system of the "electoral college," Trump had prevailed by winning almost all of the rural and less populated states, white majority areas where Hillary Clinton's greater appeal to more diverse populations was not only not an advantage, but actually a disadvantage. Donald Trump had signaled in many ways that he was sympathetic to the far-right, racist, white supremacist wing of American politics, not least by appointing Stephen Bannon, a leading light in the dark universe of the so-called "Alt Right" movement through the "Breitbart" news web site, to a top position in his campaign. Trump's triumph may, I fear, represent a chilling turning away from the social progress that American had painfully achieved through the civil rights, anti-war, feminist and gay rights movements from the 1960s through 2016, and particularly the advances, limited though they were, of the Obama years.
Going, going, gone: an educated, thoughtful President who cares about minorities, women's rights, the environment.... Gone, a Justice Department that looks into the killing by police of unarmed black people.... Gone, any consideration for the rights of Muslim-Americans.... Gone, the protection from deportation that President Obama had extended to the children of undocumented migrants.... Gone, compassion.... Gone, intelligence.... Gone respect for diversity.... Hello, belligerence, intolerance, crassness and braggadocio, implicit support for racism and xenophobia....Hello government by kleptocracy, Donald and his friends and family grabbing up goodies and making deals to enrich themselves....Hello to America as not the leader of the world but a diminished, puzzling "rogue nation," an erratic kleptocracy....
As a Pagan who sees respect for nature as a core, perhaps THE core spiritual value, I am most pained by the potential damage that will be done to the earth by a new government that scorns the threat of global warming and may withdraw from international agreements like the Paris Climate Treaty.... I will be looking for opportunities to join arms with other like-minded Pagans who support policies of protection for the environment rather than opening the door to all-out exploitation of nature and unrestricted extraction of carbon fuels as seem to be favored by our new president. I wonder how many Pagans will stand up for nature, and how many will instead support Trump because they like his nationalistic, tribalistic tendencies?
I do believe that in a democracy, it is important to allow a newly elected leader and government some time to establish their policies and programs before passing judgment. I just do not have much hope for the next four, or eight, years, based on who Donald Trump has been in the past, his inflammatory and ignorant statements during the campaign, and the kind of extreme right-wing people he is surrounding himself with, from appointing the right-wing, "white nationalist" (translation: racist and white supremacist) Stephen Bannon for the nebulous, and thus potentially extremely powerful because invisible and undefined role of untitled presidential "adviser" to selecting the anti-Muslim, Iran-hating, Michael T. Flynn as National Security Adviser to offering the top job in the Justice Department, that of Attorney General, Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions, a throwback to racist politics of the Old South who has in past expressed more sympathy for the KKK than the American Civil Liberties Union or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the venerable civil rights group. I see growing evidence that Trump was not joking about wanting to undo many actions and policies of the Obama years.
Worse still, as I discuss election results with students and others, I am meeting more and more people who are belligerently pro-Trump and quickly turn to anger when this new American Fuhrer is subjected to any criticism or challenge. I have studied the rise of Fascism and Nazism, and I have to say Trump's supporters scare me, as they remind me of nothing so much as the kind of thugs and bullies that Mussolini and Hitler relied on to cement their grip in power. I fear that Trump is laying the groundwork for a new Fascism of the 21st century.
A train conductor on a route that I often use told me that he feels more hope for America now than he has in 16 years. When I told him that I pretty much felt the opposite, he told me that he knew Trump would win because "he harnessed the most powerful force in America...the pissed-off white guy vote!" When I complained that Trump had no government experience, which to me made it rather unlikely that he could work the miracles that his followers expected, he countered, "Well, what experience did Obama have...beside being black?" Though I would concede that Obama was not the most qualified candidate to ever run for President, he did have some important experience. Barack Obama had worked as a community organizer in poor sections of Chicago, had served as an Illinois State Senator and then a U.S. Senator, and had also taught constitutional law at the college level at one point. My trainman then said, "Maybe Obama did some good things for people on his side....I won't dispute that. But he did nothing for people like me." This despite the fact that Obama had rescued the country from the worst economic crisis in 70 years.
The reaction of this trainman and others that I have spoken to in my largely white, conservative area of New York State, including in my classes, suggest to me that there is a substantial white population in this country who are simmering with rage and varying degrees of animosity toward Muslims, immigrants, blacks, and anyone they see as different from themselves, and who are bursting with energy that Trump will give them a government that will celebrate their identity and uphold their priorities and proclivities, and also their prejudices, racial, religious or of other sorts. My made-in-the 1960s heart that beat proudly for the election of Obama as the necessary and positive breaking of a barrier that I thought would open the way for a country more able to handle racial, ethnic, cultural and religious diversity is now pounding with fear and anxiety about what America is going to be like in the 2010s and 2020s if Trump's backward-looking rhetoric about "making America great again," emphasis on AGAIN, means a rebirth of flagrant racism and white supremacy, as if George Wallace had risen from the grave and won the election. I am truly afraid that he has....
I feel myself a foreigner in this version of America. I actually take some small measure of cold comfort in that, remembering that when I came back to America after living abroad in the past, I always felt some strangeness in returning to "my" country, as being away had broadened me and changed me, and coming "home" did not always feel like "home." I saw myself then and see myself now as somewhat of a foreigner in America, among so many countrymen with such a radically different view of what a healthy and sane society is or should be. With my growing international connections to the Baltic States and elsewhere, I will now keep one eye on the possibility of relocating abroad if the situation here goes from bad to worse, from simmering to burning, from quasi-Fascist rhetoric to brutality in practice, presided over by an erratic, intellectually incoherent, ethically questionable, orange-headed celebrity-buffoon who has indeed accomplished an amazing thing, to convert a country that eight years ago seemed to be heading for a new more inclusive future into a country where a considerable number of people are calling for the building of walls to keep out foreigners, the use of prisons to torture suspected terrorists, and the rounding up of Muslims into 21st century concentration camps. I hope that each of these awful items that I just mentioned never comes to pass....but all of those ideas have been voiced by members or supporters of the Trump team.
I am afraid for my country....and do not think I will live along enough to see the damage likely to be done by this new president undone. I hope I am wrong.
I had had an awful dream on the flight. I saw angry mobs, fires, violence. I woke thinking the dream probably represented my anxieties about the election, but when I found that Trump had been not vanquished but elevated by the election, I now feared the dream was if anything prophetic, a grim premonition of what may lay ahead for country run by an ignorant, erratic, thin-skinned and hot-tempered, right-wing billionaire bully fueled by resentment and egotism.
She had won the popular vote, by a margin that has now proven substantial, but since America awards the presidency through its complicated system of the "electoral college," Trump had prevailed by winning almost all of the rural and less populated states, white majority areas where Hillary Clinton's greater appeal to more diverse populations was not only not an advantage, but actually a disadvantage. Donald Trump had signaled in many ways that he was sympathetic to the far-right, racist, white supremacist wing of American politics, not least by appointing Stephen Bannon, a leading light in the dark universe of the so-called "Alt Right" movement through the "Breitbart" news web site, to a top position in his campaign. Trump's triumph may, I fear, represent a chilling turning away from the social progress that American had painfully achieved through the civil rights, anti-war, feminist and gay rights movements from the 1960s through 2016, and particularly the advances, limited though they were, of the Obama years.
Going, going, gone: an educated, thoughtful President who cares about minorities, women's rights, the environment.... Gone, a Justice Department that looks into the killing by police of unarmed black people.... Gone, any consideration for the rights of Muslim-Americans.... Gone, the protection from deportation that President Obama had extended to the children of undocumented migrants.... Gone, compassion.... Gone, intelligence.... Gone respect for diversity.... Hello, belligerence, intolerance, crassness and braggadocio, implicit support for racism and xenophobia....Hello government by kleptocracy, Donald and his friends and family grabbing up goodies and making deals to enrich themselves....Hello to America as not the leader of the world but a diminished, puzzling "rogue nation," an erratic kleptocracy....
As a Pagan who sees respect for nature as a core, perhaps THE core spiritual value, I am most pained by the potential damage that will be done to the earth by a new government that scorns the threat of global warming and may withdraw from international agreements like the Paris Climate Treaty.... I will be looking for opportunities to join arms with other like-minded Pagans who support policies of protection for the environment rather than opening the door to all-out exploitation of nature and unrestricted extraction of carbon fuels as seem to be favored by our new president. I wonder how many Pagans will stand up for nature, and how many will instead support Trump because they like his nationalistic, tribalistic tendencies?
I do believe that in a democracy, it is important to allow a newly elected leader and government some time to establish their policies and programs before passing judgment. I just do not have much hope for the next four, or eight, years, based on who Donald Trump has been in the past, his inflammatory and ignorant statements during the campaign, and the kind of extreme right-wing people he is surrounding himself with, from appointing the right-wing, "white nationalist" (translation: racist and white supremacist) Stephen Bannon for the nebulous, and thus potentially extremely powerful because invisible and undefined role of untitled presidential "adviser" to selecting the anti-Muslim, Iran-hating, Michael T. Flynn as National Security Adviser to offering the top job in the Justice Department, that of Attorney General, Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions, a throwback to racist politics of the Old South who has in past expressed more sympathy for the KKK than the American Civil Liberties Union or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the venerable civil rights group. I see growing evidence that Trump was not joking about wanting to undo many actions and policies of the Obama years.
Worse still, as I discuss election results with students and others, I am meeting more and more people who are belligerently pro-Trump and quickly turn to anger when this new American Fuhrer is subjected to any criticism or challenge. I have studied the rise of Fascism and Nazism, and I have to say Trump's supporters scare me, as they remind me of nothing so much as the kind of thugs and bullies that Mussolini and Hitler relied on to cement their grip in power. I fear that Trump is laying the groundwork for a new Fascism of the 21st century.
A train conductor on a route that I often use told me that he feels more hope for America now than he has in 16 years. When I told him that I pretty much felt the opposite, he told me that he knew Trump would win because "he harnessed the most powerful force in America...the pissed-off white guy vote!" When I complained that Trump had no government experience, which to me made it rather unlikely that he could work the miracles that his followers expected, he countered, "Well, what experience did Obama have...beside being black?" Though I would concede that Obama was not the most qualified candidate to ever run for President, he did have some important experience. Barack Obama had worked as a community organizer in poor sections of Chicago, had served as an Illinois State Senator and then a U.S. Senator, and had also taught constitutional law at the college level at one point. My trainman then said, "Maybe Obama did some good things for people on his side....I won't dispute that. But he did nothing for people like me." This despite the fact that Obama had rescued the country from the worst economic crisis in 70 years.
The reaction of this trainman and others that I have spoken to in my largely white, conservative area of New York State, including in my classes, suggest to me that there is a substantial white population in this country who are simmering with rage and varying degrees of animosity toward Muslims, immigrants, blacks, and anyone they see as different from themselves, and who are bursting with energy that Trump will give them a government that will celebrate their identity and uphold their priorities and proclivities, and also their prejudices, racial, religious or of other sorts. My made-in-the 1960s heart that beat proudly for the election of Obama as the necessary and positive breaking of a barrier that I thought would open the way for a country more able to handle racial, ethnic, cultural and religious diversity is now pounding with fear and anxiety about what America is going to be like in the 2010s and 2020s if Trump's backward-looking rhetoric about "making America great again," emphasis on AGAIN, means a rebirth of flagrant racism and white supremacy, as if George Wallace had risen from the grave and won the election. I am truly afraid that he has....
I feel myself a foreigner in this version of America. I actually take some small measure of cold comfort in that, remembering that when I came back to America after living abroad in the past, I always felt some strangeness in returning to "my" country, as being away had broadened me and changed me, and coming "home" did not always feel like "home." I saw myself then and see myself now as somewhat of a foreigner in America, among so many countrymen with such a radically different view of what a healthy and sane society is or should be. With my growing international connections to the Baltic States and elsewhere, I will now keep one eye on the possibility of relocating abroad if the situation here goes from bad to worse, from simmering to burning, from quasi-Fascist rhetoric to brutality in practice, presided over by an erratic, intellectually incoherent, ethically questionable, orange-headed celebrity-buffoon who has indeed accomplished an amazing thing, to convert a country that eight years ago seemed to be heading for a new more inclusive future into a country where a considerable number of people are calling for the building of walls to keep out foreigners, the use of prisons to torture suspected terrorists, and the rounding up of Muslims into 21st century concentration camps. I hope that each of these awful items that I just mentioned never comes to pass....but all of those ideas have been voiced by members or supporters of the Trump team.
I am afraid for my country....and do not think I will live along enough to see the damage likely to be done by this new president undone. I hope I am wrong.
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
Racism No End? Sickening Tales of White Supremacist America
Dear Friends,
There have been many ugly violent incidents and cold-blooded killings in the last several years that have illustrated again and again how deeply and sickly racist America is. There have been many heart-breaking, stomach-turning examples of African-Americans killed by policemen or others posing as policemen. It seems the police in too many cases and places in America regard African-American men as a dangerous species of vermin to be exterminated at the slightest provocation without overmuch concern for their right to breathe and walk the earth. For an overview as well as a deeper look at the numbers of African American dying from police-inflicted killings in the USA, see the BBC news article "Why do US police keep killing unarmed black men?" at http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32740523.
The most well-known incidents--and keep in mind that many others have never received the benefit of media attention--range from the killing of 17 year old Trayvon Martin in Florida on February 26, 2012, who was walking home from buying a few items at a convenience store, by the police wannabe shooter George Zimmerman to the slaying of 12 year old Tamir Rice on a playground in Cleveland, Ohio on November 22, 2014 by two shots from a policeman's gun to the killing of 53 year old Eric Garner on July 17, 2014 on the streets of Staten Island from the effects of a chokehold administered by NYC policemen who then allowed him to die on the sidewalk, gasping for air, without administering any first aid or medical services, even though they are supposedly trained to do so.
All of these individuals were unarmed, except Tamir Rice, who was holding a toy gun, a pellet gun. Somehow I don't think a white boy with a pellet gun would be judged a threat by police and executed in this same manner. Like Eric Garner, Tamir Rice died on the pavement with no attempt at medical assistance, showing the same callous disregard for the preservation of African-American life. In fact, when his sister came screaming with horror at what had happened to her brother, she was treated like a criminal and rudely tossed into the back of the killer policeman's car.
It seems that "shoot first and ask questions later" has become standard operating procedure for many American cops, along with an assumption that if any black male resists arrest or is in any way uncooperative with police requests, he essentially signs his own death warrant, and it is not the policeman's fault if a death results. Really. Any black man who does not behave toward police like a happy puppy greeting his owner is asking to be killed; That is the sick and sorry status quo we have arrived at. A sad irony is that since police so often kill African-American males, it makes it entirely rational for black men and boys to want to run away from police who approach them. If you knew that many people like yourself had been killed by police with only minimal provocation or justification, wouldn't you run for your life if a cop stopped you? Sadly, if your skin is black and you feel afraid of a cop, or dare to speak back to a police officer who you feel is treating you wrongly, it might just get you killed. That is one ugly truth of African-American life in the USA today.
2015 has shown no letup in the procession of police-administered deaths of unarmed African Americans. I am particularly saddened and sickened by the case of Walter Scott, slain in Charlotte, South Carolina, on April 4th of this year. His crime? He was stopped for a broken tail light and ran from the police, of whom he was quite rightfully fearful. Mr. Scott ran when confronted by a policeman in a parking lot, and was first tasered, and then, when he ran again, was shot to death. He was a former Coast Guard member, with a checkered past, who had recently been trying to better himself by studying Massage Therapy in a local college. I shudder to think how many African-American students I have known like Mr. Scott, who have had their ups and downs and tried to chart a new course through education. To think that any one of them could end up like Mr. Scott, gunned down for the most minor of offenses and for failing to behave as policemen like black people to behave, ties my stomach in a knot, and makes me ashamed to live in a country where this is not only possible, but predictable.
This was followed this year by the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore police on April 19, 2015. Freddie Gray was a 25 year old African-American man with a past history of arrests, which may explain why, when a police officer made contact with him that morning on the street, he panicked and ran away, the police then pursuing him, handcuffing him, and placing him in a police van, where he would meet his death. It should be pointed out that running away from police is not a crime, and might even be considered rational for someone like Freddy Gray in a place like Baltimore, where local people often perceive the police as a hostile force. This perception proved to be entirely justified in this case. When the police finally caught up with Mr. Gray, he was found to be in possession of a knife, though he was not threatening anyone and it is not illegal to carry such a knife in Baltimore. Gray was handcuffed and thrown into a police van, then driven around for several minutes without being secured with a safety belt, with the result that he was tossed around the van at each sudden turn or stop, resulting in injuries to his neck and spine that soon caused his death. This way of placing prisoners in a police van in a way guaranteed to cause them pain and injury was known in Baltimore as a "rough ride." The very fact that this practice had a name, that it was a known thing, suggests that Freddie Gray was not the first African-American to suffer this kind of injury-inducing treatment at the hands of the police. Note too that the practice is designed to inflict harm without the police having to raise a fist or fire a shot; it "just happens" in the course of a ride around the city, helping the police dodge any culpability for the death of individuals under their power. Mr. Gray was right to run from the police, because when they did catch up with him, they killed him. He was brought to a hospital for treatment, but he was already beyond help.
Freddy Gray's death came about as the result of police practices that seem to have been designed for no other purpose than to cause harm and terror to African-Americans in a cynical, sadistic manner, as if watching a black prisoner helplessly tossed around in the back of a van with no way for him to escape injury or even death was someone's idea of good fun, a happy time for the Baltimore boys in blue.
And now comes a new racist killing, not the execution of an single individual by police, like the ones mentioned above*, but a mass murder carried out by a young man with explicitly racist and white supremacist affiliations and motivations. Twenty-one year old Dylann Storm Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston, South Carolina on the evening of June 17th and joined a Bible Study meeting in progress that evening. After an hour, Mr. Roof pulled out a .45 caliber pistol and began shooting, not stopping until nine African-Americans were dead, including the church pastor, Clementa C. Pinckney, who was also a Democratic state senator with a bright future as an inspiring African-American political leader. Mr. Roof was arrested the following evening, and it has since emerged from multiple sources ranging from photos of Dylann Roof proudly displaying symbols of white supremacy such as the flags of the racist regimes of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa in its Apartheid days along with the Confederate flag to blog postings by Mr. Roof spouting standard issue white supremacist ideology to statements by friends and relatives that Dylann Roof had been voicing increasingly hostile racist comments in recent years.
Dylann Roof is a standard issue white supremacist zealot of the sort that the Southern Poverty Law Center has been tracking for years. In fact, I wonder if his "storm" middle name is anything other than a tribute to the racist organization and web site "Storm Front." The only different thing about young Mr. "Storm" is the degree to which he was willing to put his racist animosity and white supremacist principles into practice. On Roof's blog, he explains that he felt a need to take action as he did not see the KKK (the Ku Klux Klan, formerly the leading organization for white supremacist terrorism against black Americans, I will note for younger readers) or anyone else doing what needed to be done to stem what he believed was a rising tide of African-American dispossession and disadvantagement of white Americans and to strike the first blow in what he hoped would inaugurate a race war of white against black. Though some have tried, predictably in cases like this, to put his murderous rampage, his politically driven act of racial terrorism, down to mental illness and to sidestep his ideological associations and motivations, which are quite strongly stated and unequivocal, anyone who looks at the facts I have cited above should have no doubt that Dylann Roof was acting out a plan that was rooted in a long history of American racism, including organized racist terrorism such as that purveyed by the KKK, and which is only explicable in relation to that deep-rooted, widespread and continuing racism, a racism with different forms, degrees and levels, from the unacknowledged, implicit and structurally embedded varieties to the more flagrant, confrontational and openly genocidal type espoused by Dylann Roof and others of his ilk.
His crime is horrible and will sadly win him the place in history that Mr. Roof sought, as a white man willing to stand up for white America and slay black Americans. It is sobering to consider that if Mr. Dylan Roof had approached his mission a little differently, he could have joined the police force in any number of American cities, done even more damage to black Americans over a longer period of time than he did that sickening night in Charleston, and have very likely escaped arrest or punishment. As we mourn the deaths in Charleston and grind our teeth in anger and sorrow over the actions of young Mr. Roof, let us not forget the bigger picture. Sensational crimes and mass murders like the one carried out by the racist terrorist Dylann Roof can actually blind us to the more mundane but cumulatively greater harms, including not only violent deaths but stunted lives, wounded families and broken communities engendered on a regular basis by the less obvious and more insidious forces and faces of racism in this disturbed and violent nation called America.
In future I will speak more about how the continuing reality of racist terrorism in America presents a special obligation and a promising opportunity to Pagans of today.
*granted, George Zimmerman was not a police officer, but he saw himself as a self-appointed public safety officer, and to that extent, Trayvon Martin was also slain by police, albeit a fake, wannabe police man.
There have been many ugly violent incidents and cold-blooded killings in the last several years that have illustrated again and again how deeply and sickly racist America is. There have been many heart-breaking, stomach-turning examples of African-Americans killed by policemen or others posing as policemen. It seems the police in too many cases and places in America regard African-American men as a dangerous species of vermin to be exterminated at the slightest provocation without overmuch concern for their right to breathe and walk the earth. For an overview as well as a deeper look at the numbers of African American dying from police-inflicted killings in the USA, see the BBC news article "Why do US police keep killing unarmed black men?" at http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32740523.
The most well-known incidents--and keep in mind that many others have never received the benefit of media attention--range from the killing of 17 year old Trayvon Martin in Florida on February 26, 2012, who was walking home from buying a few items at a convenience store, by the police wannabe shooter George Zimmerman to the slaying of 12 year old Tamir Rice on a playground in Cleveland, Ohio on November 22, 2014 by two shots from a policeman's gun to the killing of 53 year old Eric Garner on July 17, 2014 on the streets of Staten Island from the effects of a chokehold administered by NYC policemen who then allowed him to die on the sidewalk, gasping for air, without administering any first aid or medical services, even though they are supposedly trained to do so.
All of these individuals were unarmed, except Tamir Rice, who was holding a toy gun, a pellet gun. Somehow I don't think a white boy with a pellet gun would be judged a threat by police and executed in this same manner. Like Eric Garner, Tamir Rice died on the pavement with no attempt at medical assistance, showing the same callous disregard for the preservation of African-American life. In fact, when his sister came screaming with horror at what had happened to her brother, she was treated like a criminal and rudely tossed into the back of the killer policeman's car.
It seems that "shoot first and ask questions later" has become standard operating procedure for many American cops, along with an assumption that if any black male resists arrest or is in any way uncooperative with police requests, he essentially signs his own death warrant, and it is not the policeman's fault if a death results. Really. Any black man who does not behave toward police like a happy puppy greeting his owner is asking to be killed; That is the sick and sorry status quo we have arrived at. A sad irony is that since police so often kill African-American males, it makes it entirely rational for black men and boys to want to run away from police who approach them. If you knew that many people like yourself had been killed by police with only minimal provocation or justification, wouldn't you run for your life if a cop stopped you? Sadly, if your skin is black and you feel afraid of a cop, or dare to speak back to a police officer who you feel is treating you wrongly, it might just get you killed. That is one ugly truth of African-American life in the USA today.
2015 has shown no letup in the procession of police-administered deaths of unarmed African Americans. I am particularly saddened and sickened by the case of Walter Scott, slain in Charlotte, South Carolina, on April 4th of this year. His crime? He was stopped for a broken tail light and ran from the police, of whom he was quite rightfully fearful. Mr. Scott ran when confronted by a policeman in a parking lot, and was first tasered, and then, when he ran again, was shot to death. He was a former Coast Guard member, with a checkered past, who had recently been trying to better himself by studying Massage Therapy in a local college. I shudder to think how many African-American students I have known like Mr. Scott, who have had their ups and downs and tried to chart a new course through education. To think that any one of them could end up like Mr. Scott, gunned down for the most minor of offenses and for failing to behave as policemen like black people to behave, ties my stomach in a knot, and makes me ashamed to live in a country where this is not only possible, but predictable.
This was followed this year by the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore police on April 19, 2015. Freddie Gray was a 25 year old African-American man with a past history of arrests, which may explain why, when a police officer made contact with him that morning on the street, he panicked and ran away, the police then pursuing him, handcuffing him, and placing him in a police van, where he would meet his death. It should be pointed out that running away from police is not a crime, and might even be considered rational for someone like Freddy Gray in a place like Baltimore, where local people often perceive the police as a hostile force. This perception proved to be entirely justified in this case. When the police finally caught up with Mr. Gray, he was found to be in possession of a knife, though he was not threatening anyone and it is not illegal to carry such a knife in Baltimore. Gray was handcuffed and thrown into a police van, then driven around for several minutes without being secured with a safety belt, with the result that he was tossed around the van at each sudden turn or stop, resulting in injuries to his neck and spine that soon caused his death. This way of placing prisoners in a police van in a way guaranteed to cause them pain and injury was known in Baltimore as a "rough ride." The very fact that this practice had a name, that it was a known thing, suggests that Freddie Gray was not the first African-American to suffer this kind of injury-inducing treatment at the hands of the police. Note too that the practice is designed to inflict harm without the police having to raise a fist or fire a shot; it "just happens" in the course of a ride around the city, helping the police dodge any culpability for the death of individuals under their power. Mr. Gray was right to run from the police, because when they did catch up with him, they killed him. He was brought to a hospital for treatment, but he was already beyond help.
Freddy Gray's death came about as the result of police practices that seem to have been designed for no other purpose than to cause harm and terror to African-Americans in a cynical, sadistic manner, as if watching a black prisoner helplessly tossed around in the back of a van with no way for him to escape injury or even death was someone's idea of good fun, a happy time for the Baltimore boys in blue.
And now comes a new racist killing, not the execution of an single individual by police, like the ones mentioned above*, but a mass murder carried out by a young man with explicitly racist and white supremacist affiliations and motivations. Twenty-one year old Dylann Storm Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston, South Carolina on the evening of June 17th and joined a Bible Study meeting in progress that evening. After an hour, Mr. Roof pulled out a .45 caliber pistol and began shooting, not stopping until nine African-Americans were dead, including the church pastor, Clementa C. Pinckney, who was also a Democratic state senator with a bright future as an inspiring African-American political leader. Mr. Roof was arrested the following evening, and it has since emerged from multiple sources ranging from photos of Dylann Roof proudly displaying symbols of white supremacy such as the flags of the racist regimes of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa in its Apartheid days along with the Confederate flag to blog postings by Mr. Roof spouting standard issue white supremacist ideology to statements by friends and relatives that Dylann Roof had been voicing increasingly hostile racist comments in recent years.
Dylann Roof is a standard issue white supremacist zealot of the sort that the Southern Poverty Law Center has been tracking for years. In fact, I wonder if his "storm" middle name is anything other than a tribute to the racist organization and web site "Storm Front." The only different thing about young Mr. "Storm" is the degree to which he was willing to put his racist animosity and white supremacist principles into practice. On Roof's blog, he explains that he felt a need to take action as he did not see the KKK (the Ku Klux Klan, formerly the leading organization for white supremacist terrorism against black Americans, I will note for younger readers) or anyone else doing what needed to be done to stem what he believed was a rising tide of African-American dispossession and disadvantagement of white Americans and to strike the first blow in what he hoped would inaugurate a race war of white against black. Though some have tried, predictably in cases like this, to put his murderous rampage, his politically driven act of racial terrorism, down to mental illness and to sidestep his ideological associations and motivations, which are quite strongly stated and unequivocal, anyone who looks at the facts I have cited above should have no doubt that Dylann Roof was acting out a plan that was rooted in a long history of American racism, including organized racist terrorism such as that purveyed by the KKK, and which is only explicable in relation to that deep-rooted, widespread and continuing racism, a racism with different forms, degrees and levels, from the unacknowledged, implicit and structurally embedded varieties to the more flagrant, confrontational and openly genocidal type espoused by Dylann Roof and others of his ilk.
His crime is horrible and will sadly win him the place in history that Mr. Roof sought, as a white man willing to stand up for white America and slay black Americans. It is sobering to consider that if Mr. Dylan Roof had approached his mission a little differently, he could have joined the police force in any number of American cities, done even more damage to black Americans over a longer period of time than he did that sickening night in Charleston, and have very likely escaped arrest or punishment. As we mourn the deaths in Charleston and grind our teeth in anger and sorrow over the actions of young Mr. Roof, let us not forget the bigger picture. Sensational crimes and mass murders like the one carried out by the racist terrorist Dylann Roof can actually blind us to the more mundane but cumulatively greater harms, including not only violent deaths but stunted lives, wounded families and broken communities engendered on a regular basis by the less obvious and more insidious forces and faces of racism in this disturbed and violent nation called America.
In future I will speak more about how the continuing reality of racist terrorism in America presents a special obligation and a promising opportunity to Pagans of today.
*granted, George Zimmerman was not a police officer, but he saw himself as a self-appointed public safety officer, and to that extent, Trayvon Martin was also slain by police, albeit a fake, wannabe police man.
Friday, July 23, 2010
The United States of Punishment
Readers, this is something I have been wanting to comment on for a long time: a growing spirit of meanness, even sadism, in the thought, behavior and culture that I feel is becoming stronger and stronger in the United States. This country has a lot of problems right now, but it seems to me that there are not a lot of people interested in actually THINKING about what our problems are and trying to solve them TOGETHER. No. What many, and I fear most Americans want, is just to beat up on someone. You can see it in reality television shows and on that internet voyeur known as You Tube, where the great fun is to watch some misguided average Joe or Jane humiliated and ridiculed. You can see it in our obsession with celebrity, in the delight that so many take in seeing the famous brought low.
You can see it in our criminal "justice" system, where there is much more support for punishing the people locked away, even for very minor offenses, than for rehabilitating them so that they will have a snowball's chance in hell of living a normal, productive life when they get out of prison. Why rehabilitate them? Better to let them remain criminals so that we can enjoy locking them up again and again and feeling superior to "those people."
You can see it in the anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic sentiment that seems to be growing in popularity. Look at that one more closely and you will find things like Hispanic people being beaten up and even killed, not in the Deep South, mind you, but on Long Island, just a few dozen miles from diversity central (NYC). You can see it in the popularity of police drama television shows, which give the people a steady dose of a very particular view of American society, in which there is no hope of improving society, only the adrenalin rush of hunting down criminals and locking them up. You can see the real-life ramifications of this media indoctrination in the way states like California have, for many years, been pumping much more money into prisons than schools. Did you know California used to have free university tuition? Not anymore, but plenty of free services for the thousands upon thousands in California prisons, a situation mirrored in states across the country. Priorities are clear! Why educate people when you can punish them? Is THIS the American dream? Most modern democratic countries have abolished the death penalty. Not here! It is a dear and cherished tradition!
You can see it in our national government's foreign policy spending priorities, in that the amount of money devoted to peaceful foreign projects is far dwarfed by what is spent on the military, not only our several ongoing wars that have ripped apart whole societies and left shattered cities, psyches and limbs in their wake that will take decades to heal, but also our "peaceful" military presence in so many countries around the world, which sends a clear message that we are ready to stomp on anyone who disagrees with us or fails to support our military objectives and corporate business interests. Remember that what kicked off both of our most recent wars was a desire to PUNISH: punish the Afghans for 9/11 (even though all or most of the terrorists were Saudis), punish Saddam and Iraq for anti-American weapon programs. Call it "war on terror," call it "nation-building," but I would argue that the root motive is punishment of dark-skinned, non-Christian, uncooperative foreigners.
You can see it in how every city and even very small towns in the USA always have military parades, which for some reason often feature police as well as soldiers, but nothing to honor artists, teachers, or people in non-punitive helping professions. It was a hard-fought battle in this country to establish Martin Luther King day as a national holiday, for the obvious reason that he was a man of peace, as well as an African-American, and in the view of many, THAT AIN'T AMERICAN!! Do you know which state held out for years on accepting the holiday? Same state (AZ) that is now set to implement a law that will give police carte blanche to harass and arrest Hispanics suspected of being illegal aliens. It is also the state with a cruel and humiliating prison system, in Maricopa County, that happens to be immensely popular with the general population, to the point where the head of this police state, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who his fans call "America's Toughest Sheriff," has his own reality television show.
I can't wait until someone finally puts on a show that will televise live executions. "Live from Death Row," sure to be a big hit in the near future! Fun for the whole family, taking America back to the days when people would bring picnic lunches to watch hangings and lynchings. I am not joking about that last point: executions and lynchings were popular entertainments in the not-too-distant American past.
We just love Love LOVE to have someone to beat up on, someone to bomb, someone to throw into prison, someone to hate. And, final irony, some of those on the right-wing side of the political spectrum seem to be gearing up and gunning up to take up arms against our democratically-elected government--and they think of themselves as patriots. The obsession with guns, the fear that you will need to defend yourself in a John Wayne movie always showing in the little cinema in the back of your mind, where does that come from? I suspect it goes back to the culture of the American frontier, when "the west was won" by white Americans shooting and killing Native Americans and taking their land. A great victory, right? Or maybe it was the time not long past in the Jim Crow South when the white man could shoot blacks with impunity? Maybe there is a bit of guilty conscience, fear of payback from people no longer cringing in fear?
What is it that many right-wingers and conservatives shout nowadays? "TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK!!!" Back to what, exactly? They never say...Perhaps the good old days of white supremacy, the KKK, lynching of blacks and gays? I for one have no doubt that there is an ugly racial undercurrent running through the so-called Tea Party movement. First a black man is elected president, and then sales of guns and ammo shoot through the roof. What is that about? And what was it that made Bush so popular for several years post-9/11? His promise to "punish the evil-doers." I wonder, will Obama now be tempted to attack Iran to bolster his own popularity?
I am afraid. I fear that this country is becoming an increasingly harsh and brutal police state. I fear that young people today are being raised in a culture which values and validates violence and aggression over all things, that sees compassion, compromise, gentleness and intelligence as disgusting, undesirable, effeminate qualities. A culture that believes the ONLY solution to social problems is to beat people down, shut them up, lock them up. A mindset that has no doubt that the ONLY solution to international conflicts is to use force to beat and bomb foreign people into submission to our will. A mentality that asserts that the ONLY way to be a man is to be a tough-as-nails, ain't never backin'-down, fist-fightin' gun-totin,' brute (A REAL MAN!!) Women too are encouraged to be more aggressive, more selfish, more mean, maybe pack a gun in the purse along with the lipstick. Now there's some great feminism for you! Real gender equality, all through the magic of gun ownership! And now, thanks to the Supreme Court, it is going to be easier and easier for every American to carry a gun wherever they want! Finally, we will all be SAFE. This is surely what the forefathers dreamed of when they set sail for America: a nation where guns will one day outnumber brains.
I don't believe that violence and aggression will make this world a better place. I think we are WAY off track and completely losing sight of the need for gentleness, calmness, compassion and civility. If it were not the fact that something deep in me resonates strongly with the gods and traditions of the European Pagan heritage, I would be very tempted to take up Buddhism. I greatly respect the Buddhist path of self-control, self-reflection and non-violence. I would like to believe they can also be found in Pagan tradition, but I know many disagree. In American Asatru, there are many who primarily relate to this tradition as a warrior path. I don't want to begrudge anyone the right to their own views and interpretations, particularly military veterans who have a need to validate their battlefield experiences, but I feel that there is just too much war-mongering going on, to the point where other priorities and possibilities are lost. I mean, come on! "Hail Thor, Hail War, Let's drink some beer then drink some more!" Wow, now THAT is really spiritual! Come on, please. Anyone who studies any Pagan tradition, whether Norse or Celtic or Slavic or what have you should realize that warrior machismo is not the only thing going on in these religions. There is so much about nature, about sensuality, about peace, about friendship, about art, about beauty. I fear that the warped priorities of modern American society are being read back into ancient Paganism, and then held up as Pagan virtues that all should honor and obey.
Well, I for one am NOT going to play along with this. I worship the sky, the earth, the trees, the ancestors, and I don't need guns or weapons or fantasies of violence to feel right with MY Paganism. I do NOT accept narrow definitions of "tribe" that would cause me to turn away from my brothers and sisters of all races and ethnic backgrounds. I do NOT see the military punishment of foreign populations and disruption of their societies as honorable or worth emulating. I believe that there are more pleasant and productive forms of travel than military invasion. My Paganism is wide and loving and embracing, not narrow and hateful and punishing. I want to see a Paganism that teaches peace and co-existence, not a glorification of war and aggression. Those things have their time and place, I don't doubt, but that place is not everywhere and the time should not be everyday and every minute.
What kind of world do YOU want to live in?
You can see it in our criminal "justice" system, where there is much more support for punishing the people locked away, even for very minor offenses, than for rehabilitating them so that they will have a snowball's chance in hell of living a normal, productive life when they get out of prison. Why rehabilitate them? Better to let them remain criminals so that we can enjoy locking them up again and again and feeling superior to "those people."
You can see it in the anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic sentiment that seems to be growing in popularity. Look at that one more closely and you will find things like Hispanic people being beaten up and even killed, not in the Deep South, mind you, but on Long Island, just a few dozen miles from diversity central (NYC). You can see it in the popularity of police drama television shows, which give the people a steady dose of a very particular view of American society, in which there is no hope of improving society, only the adrenalin rush of hunting down criminals and locking them up. You can see the real-life ramifications of this media indoctrination in the way states like California have, for many years, been pumping much more money into prisons than schools. Did you know California used to have free university tuition? Not anymore, but plenty of free services for the thousands upon thousands in California prisons, a situation mirrored in states across the country. Priorities are clear! Why educate people when you can punish them? Is THIS the American dream? Most modern democratic countries have abolished the death penalty. Not here! It is a dear and cherished tradition!
You can see it in our national government's foreign policy spending priorities, in that the amount of money devoted to peaceful foreign projects is far dwarfed by what is spent on the military, not only our several ongoing wars that have ripped apart whole societies and left shattered cities, psyches and limbs in their wake that will take decades to heal, but also our "peaceful" military presence in so many countries around the world, which sends a clear message that we are ready to stomp on anyone who disagrees with us or fails to support our military objectives and corporate business interests. Remember that what kicked off both of our most recent wars was a desire to PUNISH: punish the Afghans for 9/11 (even though all or most of the terrorists were Saudis), punish Saddam and Iraq for anti-American weapon programs. Call it "war on terror," call it "nation-building," but I would argue that the root motive is punishment of dark-skinned, non-Christian, uncooperative foreigners.
You can see it in how every city and even very small towns in the USA always have military parades, which for some reason often feature police as well as soldiers, but nothing to honor artists, teachers, or people in non-punitive helping professions. It was a hard-fought battle in this country to establish Martin Luther King day as a national holiday, for the obvious reason that he was a man of peace, as well as an African-American, and in the view of many, THAT AIN'T AMERICAN!! Do you know which state held out for years on accepting the holiday? Same state (AZ) that is now set to implement a law that will give police carte blanche to harass and arrest Hispanics suspected of being illegal aliens. It is also the state with a cruel and humiliating prison system, in Maricopa County, that happens to be immensely popular with the general population, to the point where the head of this police state, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who his fans call "America's Toughest Sheriff," has his own reality television show.
I can't wait until someone finally puts on a show that will televise live executions. "Live from Death Row," sure to be a big hit in the near future! Fun for the whole family, taking America back to the days when people would bring picnic lunches to watch hangings and lynchings. I am not joking about that last point: executions and lynchings were popular entertainments in the not-too-distant American past.
We just love Love LOVE to have someone to beat up on, someone to bomb, someone to throw into prison, someone to hate. And, final irony, some of those on the right-wing side of the political spectrum seem to be gearing up and gunning up to take up arms against our democratically-elected government--and they think of themselves as patriots. The obsession with guns, the fear that you will need to defend yourself in a John Wayne movie always showing in the little cinema in the back of your mind, where does that come from? I suspect it goes back to the culture of the American frontier, when "the west was won" by white Americans shooting and killing Native Americans and taking their land. A great victory, right? Or maybe it was the time not long past in the Jim Crow South when the white man could shoot blacks with impunity? Maybe there is a bit of guilty conscience, fear of payback from people no longer cringing in fear?
What is it that many right-wingers and conservatives shout nowadays? "TAKE OUR COUNTRY BACK!!!" Back to what, exactly? They never say...Perhaps the good old days of white supremacy, the KKK, lynching of blacks and gays? I for one have no doubt that there is an ugly racial undercurrent running through the so-called Tea Party movement. First a black man is elected president, and then sales of guns and ammo shoot through the roof. What is that about? And what was it that made Bush so popular for several years post-9/11? His promise to "punish the evil-doers." I wonder, will Obama now be tempted to attack Iran to bolster his own popularity?
I am afraid. I fear that this country is becoming an increasingly harsh and brutal police state. I fear that young people today are being raised in a culture which values and validates violence and aggression over all things, that sees compassion, compromise, gentleness and intelligence as disgusting, undesirable, effeminate qualities. A culture that believes the ONLY solution to social problems is to beat people down, shut them up, lock them up. A mindset that has no doubt that the ONLY solution to international conflicts is to use force to beat and bomb foreign people into submission to our will. A mentality that asserts that the ONLY way to be a man is to be a tough-as-nails, ain't never backin'-down, fist-fightin' gun-totin,' brute (A REAL MAN!!) Women too are encouraged to be more aggressive, more selfish, more mean, maybe pack a gun in the purse along with the lipstick. Now there's some great feminism for you! Real gender equality, all through the magic of gun ownership! And now, thanks to the Supreme Court, it is going to be easier and easier for every American to carry a gun wherever they want! Finally, we will all be SAFE. This is surely what the forefathers dreamed of when they set sail for America: a nation where guns will one day outnumber brains.
I don't believe that violence and aggression will make this world a better place. I think we are WAY off track and completely losing sight of the need for gentleness, calmness, compassion and civility. If it were not the fact that something deep in me resonates strongly with the gods and traditions of the European Pagan heritage, I would be very tempted to take up Buddhism. I greatly respect the Buddhist path of self-control, self-reflection and non-violence. I would like to believe they can also be found in Pagan tradition, but I know many disagree. In American Asatru, there are many who primarily relate to this tradition as a warrior path. I don't want to begrudge anyone the right to their own views and interpretations, particularly military veterans who have a need to validate their battlefield experiences, but I feel that there is just too much war-mongering going on, to the point where other priorities and possibilities are lost. I mean, come on! "Hail Thor, Hail War, Let's drink some beer then drink some more!" Wow, now THAT is really spiritual! Come on, please. Anyone who studies any Pagan tradition, whether Norse or Celtic or Slavic or what have you should realize that warrior machismo is not the only thing going on in these religions. There is so much about nature, about sensuality, about peace, about friendship, about art, about beauty. I fear that the warped priorities of modern American society are being read back into ancient Paganism, and then held up as Pagan virtues that all should honor and obey.
Well, I for one am NOT going to play along with this. I worship the sky, the earth, the trees, the ancestors, and I don't need guns or weapons or fantasies of violence to feel right with MY Paganism. I do NOT accept narrow definitions of "tribe" that would cause me to turn away from my brothers and sisters of all races and ethnic backgrounds. I do NOT see the military punishment of foreign populations and disruption of their societies as honorable or worth emulating. I believe that there are more pleasant and productive forms of travel than military invasion. My Paganism is wide and loving and embracing, not narrow and hateful and punishing. I want to see a Paganism that teaches peace and co-existence, not a glorification of war and aggression. Those things have their time and place, I don't doubt, but that place is not everywhere and the time should not be everyday and every minute.
What kind of world do YOU want to live in?
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