Month: June 2020

Bounty

The New York Times broke the story Friday night.  United States intelligence sources had convincing information that Russian Special Forces were paying Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan a bounty for American soldiers.  Put simply, Russia was paying to kill Americans, and they were doing it with US dollars. The Trump Administration immediately denied this, but reporting by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, NBC News, the Associated Press, and others have confirmed the story.

Historically that’s nothing new.  During the French and Indian War, the British paid a “reward” for enemy scalps, as much as £130 for male Indian scalps (Hands On).  In a war where much of the fighting was by “proxy”, with both the French and British using varying tribes to pursue their objectives in North America, scalps were a way to guarantee kills.

Real Politk

But why would Russia do this?  The United States has already reached a tentative agreement with the Taliban.  America is to withdraw from Afghanistan over the next eighteen months, though the government of Afghanistan has yet to sign on.  The answer is that the Russians know that the United States is withdrawing to end the loss of “blood and treasure” from the nineteen year Afghan war, the longest in American history.  The driving force for leaving is the pain of that loss, and Russia is making sure that pain continues until the final GI’s are gone.  Then Afghanistan is open to other power persuasion and particularly to Russian influence.

From a pure “world real politik” perspective, perhaps the Russian strategy makes sense.  They are no longer able to “play” as an equal power to the United States, but President Putin can put pressure around the edges of American policy, trying to force acts to Russia’s advantage.  

And from that same “Kissinger-ian” place, the United States should be responding is some proportionate way.  It could be in Russian blood, but it could also be in the form of treasure.  Economic sanctions would work, since it seems that money is the root of Putin’s power and desires.  But, at least publicly, the United States is taking no action at all.  In fact, the US response seems to be denying that the bounties ever happened.

Conspiracy

Here in America, a conspiracy theory holds that Vladimir Putin has some overarching control over Donald Trump, preventing US President from acting against him.  The theory tries to explain Trump’s continual actions towards Putin; perhaps that he’s so indebted to Russian banks that Putin literally “owns” him.  Or, that Putin’s support in the 2016 election was so crucial, that Trump cannot stand against him now.  Or perhaps there is some “Kompromat”, blackmail that the Russian holds over Trump.  

These charges were the basis for the Mueller investigation.  We now know that the former FBI Director was hamstrung in his efforts, and left many stones “unturned”. Charges were never brought against Trump or his family.  Americans were left with a tantalizing “report” that raised hundreds of questions, but failed to “close the deal”, either way.  So when President Trump denies the intelligence information exists, it falls right into the “puppet of Putin” narrative.  

Plausible Deniability

But there is a second, and even more disappointing possibility.  It is well known that President Trump doesn’t want “bad news”; particularly when it comes to Russia and Putin.  It is reported that his aides are often castigated for telling Trump things he doesn’t want to hear and several top advisors, from Bolton to Mattis to Tillerson, left the Administration because of this.  

So it’s possible that no one wanted to tell Trump about the Russian plot.  Even though there was a documented National Security Council meeting last April to discuss the intelligence, perhaps no one could be persuaded to bring it to the President.  Or more insidiously, they could “inform” him without risking his wrath.  President Trump doesn’t like to read. His intelligence briefers have taken to PowerPoint presentations, with graphs and illustrations, to try to keep his interest.  

Maybe they just put the Russian intelligence in writing.  Buried in the PDB, the Presidential Daily Brief, and Trump was “informed” without anyone suffering consequences.  That way when it came out, there was “proof” that Trump was told.  Richard Nixon in the old Watergate days called it “plausible deniability”: maybe the intelligence briefers were looking for similar cover.

Malpractice

Perhaps Donald Trump is “owned” by Putin. Or maybe he’s established an environment so corrosive that his advisors can’t bring him “bad news”.  Or most likely, he simply fails to do the homework necessary to be the President of the United States.  In any case, Donald Trump is demonstrating again, that he is unfit for the office he holds.  

It’s just one more “brick in the wall” of Presidential malfeasance.  Trump himself has said he couldn’t focus on the COVID-19 crisis, because he was being impeached.  After the murder of Floyd George, he has acted to further divide the nation.  And throughout his term he has done nothing to prevent continued foreign interference in the American electoral process.

And now Russia pays dollars to kill American troops.  Trump has launched attacks: but it’s against the New York Times and, his favorite target, the intelligence agencies.   There seems to be no response against Russia.  At worst that’s criminal:  at best, it’s Presidential malpractice.

Sunday Morning

My Sunday mornings are pretty standard.  The dogs are up between six and seven and there’s no going back to sleep, especially now that we’re adopting a new year-old puppy, Keelie.  What used to be a guaranteed post breakfast snooze with “old man” Buddy and three year old Atticus, is puppy playtime – at least for Atticus and Keeley.  So Buddy is now supervisor.  When things get out of control he wades in with barks and growls. Everyone settles down for a few minutes.

So once we’re up, we’re up.  It gives me a chance to drink lots of coffee, and watch an array of Sunday morning news shows.  And this morning I got to watch Velshi on MSNBC, This Week with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Meet the Press with Chuck Todd on NBC, and finally Face the Nation on CBS with Margaret Brennan.  

Headline News

There was lots of talk about COVID-19, from doctors and Secretary Azar, and responses from Governors Cuomo of New York and Hutchinson of Arkansas.  And the breaking news this morning was the New York Times article about Russian Special Operations paying the Taliban bounties to kill American soldiers.  There was a lot to say about that, from Speaker Pelosi to former National Security Advisor John Bolton.

I like to hear the “original” sources, Pelosi, Bolton, Azar and the rest.  I want to hear them respond to questions, even to listen to their dodges.  It tells a lot about what’s going on.  But I also like to her “the panel” talk about the news.  They all seem to have a political “side”.  There are the traditional liberals, the “normal” conservatives, and the “outside of the box” characters on one side or the other.

Talking Points

What stood out to me today was the obvious Trump campaign “talking point”. It must have been passed to all of his supporters this Sunday morning.  Today’s topic:  the radicalization of the Democratic Party.   Everyone managed to work it into their “spiel”: the “Sanders-AOC” Democrats are dragging Joe Biden to the left.   Sara Fagin, on ABC, led the charge with this statement:

“Joe Biden is not the leader of the Democratic Party right now, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are. He put Congressman Ocasio-Cortez in charge of his climate policy”.

Chris Christie, a Trump advisor, former Governor and bridge traffic director from New Jersey added his bit on the same program. He said:

“…The liberal wing, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is very, very suspicious of Joe Biden. They didn’t support him during the primary season. They didn’t want him as the nominee.”

And while Chris Wallace on Fox didn’t specifically reference the radicalization of the Democratic Party, he still did his part. He invited invited Hawk Newsome, a Black Lives Matter leader, to discuss previous comments to Fox News.  Newsome said:

“If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it. I can be speaking figuratively or I could be speaking literally, it’s a matter of interpretation”. 

The President responded by Tweeting that Newsome was speaking of “treason and insurrection”. It all fits well with this weekend’s theme of Democratic radicalization. I guess Chris Wallace got the word.

Hard Left

And, Republican talk show host Hugh Hewitt, who has transited from a Never-Trumper to a Trump apologist (maybe because his son works in the Administration) “discovered” the same theme. His statement on NBC was:

The Democrats have gone hard left, HARD LEFT, and the phantom of Joe Biden on the top of that is not going to cover over the AOC and the Squad’s effect on the Party”.

So this week’s narrative, courtesy of the RNC and Trump 2020, is that Joe Biden is a weak leader, far out of touch with what “real Democrats” want to do.  “Real Democrats”, according to the Trump 2020 talking points, are left, “HARD LEFT,” and Biden somehow just ended up the candidate due to…something that they really don’t explain.

Democrat’s Choice

I can explain it.  Joe Biden became the nominee of the Democratic Party because the Democratic voters, overwhelmingly, chose him.  They voted for him over Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, both candidates of the “harder left” that the Trump campaign wanted to run against.  Democratic voters chose Joe Biden because they trusted him to get elected, and they wanted a return to the decency and honesty that Biden represents.

The Trump narrative is that Donald Trump represents “law and order”, and will put down the chaos of protests and destruction brought on by the death of Floyd George and others.  The flaw in that theory is that most Americans see that it is the lawlessness of the institutions that caused those deaths that is the real problem.

Joe Biden is a man of the center, of decency and civility, of willingness to compromise to solve problems.  He is willing to work with the “hard left” but he is also just as willing to reach across the aisle and work with Republicans.  

The Trump campaign wanted to run with a booming economy, and they wanted to run against Bernie Sanders.  Now they’ve managed to botch the COVID-19 crisis, trash the economy, and they’re dealing with Joe Biden. All Trump 2020 can do is to divide America against itself, using fear of “radicals” as the wedge.  Since Joe Biden doesn’t fit that model, they ignore him and move onto their “dream opponents”.  

The American voter will see through that.

Resign

So let’s dispel some rumors going around.  The first is that Donald Trump is so overwhelmed by the Presidency and his crashing poll numbers that he will cut a deal with Mike Pence and resign from office.  The deal:  a blanket pardon, for anything he may or may not have done, like Nixon got from Gerald Ford.  

Trump certainly seems disappointed by his poll numbers.  But to be overwhelmed by the Presidency, he would have to be aware of his own shortcomings.  Whatever else you think about Donald Trump, self-awareness has never been on the list.  This is the same man whose businesses have gone bankrupt six times. We shouldn’t expect that he would have an epiphany and realize he can’t handle the job.

Polls

And keep in mind that Trump has only a tangential relationship with polls.  He believes in the good ones, he discounts the bad ones.  Trump expects that Fox and other “friendlies” will put out only polls favorable to him. He anticipates that those “mainstream media outlets” CNN, MSNBC, NPR and the like will find the least favorable ones.  He even sent a “cease and desist” letter to CNN for publishing a poll.  But when Fox puts out the bad news, that’s when the President seems crushed.

By the way, Trump has some right to question polling.  After all, he was elected (or chosen by the Electoral College) in spite of months of terrible polling.  That should put into some perspective the incredible impact of the Comey letter on the 2016 electoral results.  From October 6^th to October 28^th, Trump was done.  From October 28^th to November 8^th, Election Day, all of the polling closed to within the margin of error.  The final polls weren’t wrong, just completely reversed from three weeks before.

He’s not leaving.  That would require him to admit failure.

Defeat

The second rumor is that Trump is setting up a rationale to deny electoral defeat.  The constant drone of “fraudulent” mail-in balloting is part of that.  In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox the other night, Trump actually outlined a plan for the Chinese to counterfeit mail-in ballots, discussing the quality of the paper and the layout of balloting materials.  It echoes 2016, “…China, if you’re listening, you need to print mail-in ballots!” (Fox).  

Trump will absolute claim any loss as a “rigged” election.  He was doing the same in 2016, when he refused to tell Chris Wallace in the last debate that he would accept the election results.  This isn’t about some dark plan to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States.  This is all about the number one Trump trait:  victimhood.  He is always the victim, always the wronged individual.  

He was that way as a businessman, refusing the pay contractors because they somehow “wronged” him in their work.  And he was that way with the banks, suing the only bank in the world that would work with him, Deutsche Bank, even while owing them hundreds of millions of dollars.  So he is the victim now, of “Mainstream Media”, “Antifa” and “the Deep State”.   

When he says the election is rigged, he really is just planning his retirement.  It’s “Trump TV” with the former President talking to his twenty percent core about how he was screwed out of office by “the powers” they can’t control.  That’ll bring in enough money to keep Deutsche Bank at bay (Bloomberg), and let the man who made a living as a reality TV star stay in the only limelight where he’s found success.

Military Takeover

And the final, scariest rumor is that the US military will somehow step in, backing Trump’s claims that the election was “rigged”, and maintain him in office after Joe Biden wins. There was a moment, when General Milley was examining the “battle space” walking the streets of Washington, DC, and he and Defense Secretary Esper followed Trump across the pepper sprayed Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church, when that seemed real.  But both Esper and Milley, with the admonition of dozens of former Defense Secretaries, Chiefs of Staff and Four Star Generals (NBC), walked that back quickly.  They made it clear that the military had no intention of intervening in American politics.

What is more concerning is Attorney General Bill Barr’s willingness to use the Justice Department to maintain Trump’s power.  Barr too is raising the cry of fraudulent mail-in balloting, despite admitting there is no evidence that it is occurring (NPR).  Barr is also willing to use every asset of the Justice Department to achieve his political goals:  the anonymous black shirted riot “troops” on the streets of Washington are a clear example (Salon).  Were they from the Bureau of Prisons as Barr stated, or were they private mercenaries as others have suggested?  Either way, Barr had his “guys” on the streets.  

That may be the real worry.

Jorgenson

This week the Libertarian Party introduced their candidate for President of the United States on social media, sixty-three year old Dr. Jo Jorgenson.  Dr. Jorgenson is a PhD in Psychology who runs a business-consulting firm in Greenville, South Carolina.  She has no government experience at all, but based on Libertarian principles, that’s probably a good thing.

The Libertarian Party has run candidates for President since 1980, and has been the most visible “third” party since former Republican Congressman Ron Paul became their flag bearer for the 1988 campaign.  Other better-known Presidential candidates were former Congressman Bob Barr and former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson.  Johnson was the candidate in both 2012 and 2016, when he got greater visibility in 2016 as an “alternative” to Clinton or Trump.  

Platform

The Libertarian Party platform is based on government reform.  They believe about that “big government” caused our current national problems. 

“Big government mandates and programs created these problems. To solve them, we need to make government smaller – much, much smaller”(Jorgenson).

They want to reduce the government, dissolve the Department of Education, and, as they put it, make the United States “…into one Giant Switzerland, armed and neutral.”  And the Libertarian Party advocates free market capitalism.  They want to reduce regulations in health care and other industries, except for energy production, where they take a progressive environmental stand.  

But they are socially liberal.  They support LGBTQ civil rights, and are in favor of legalization of marijuana and the reduction of imprisonment for non-violent crimes.

It seems that the Libertarian Party would be the “perfect” place for the “free market” Republicans, the old “Rockefeller Republicans” of the 1960’s:  socially liberal, but small government conservatives.  The only issue holding them back is what the international role of the United States should be.

It’s also a perfect place for many Millennials, attracted to a platform of less regulation, more independence, and marijuana legalization.  It fits.

Access

The Libertarian Party, like all alternate political parties in the United States, struggles to gain ballot access.  The traditional two-party system has made it difficult for other groups to get on the ballot, though in 2016 Ohio, the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, and Richard Duncan, an Ohio independent, were listed along with Trump and Clinton.  However, the Libertarian Party was able to get on the ballot in all fifty states for the 2016 election, and gained close to 4.5 million votes nationwide.   

So it’s not ballot access that holds the Libertarian (and the Green Party) back.  Both feel ignored by the “mainstream media” unable to access the “bully pulpit” to reach out and expand their views.  Just a simple Google search for the Libertarian Presidential announcement shows coverage by NPR and Fox, but no other major media company.

Their argument is that media coverage is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The mainstream media doesn’t think that a Libertarian or a Green Party candidate can’t get elected, so they don’t cover them.  Since those candidates don’t get coverage, they don’t get exposure to the American people.  Americans don’t know about them, so they don’t vote for them.  So they can’t get elected.

In 2016 though, media coverage wasn’t necessarily helpful.  Gary Johnson was “stymied” by a question from MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews in 2016, unable to name any living foreign leader he admired.  That didn’t help his candidacy, nor did it encourage voters to take him or his Party seriously.

Fear

There are those who fear that Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein cost Hillary Clinton the Presidential election in 2016.  In the key states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by less than one percent.  In each of those states, Gary Johnson received three percent of the vote or more, and Stein earned a percent as well.  

But all of that assumes that every Stein voter would have voted for Clinton if Stein wasn’t on the ballot, or that the Johnson voters would have split in Clinton’s favor.  Neither of those assumptions is necessarily true.

The Green Party is certainly “to the left” of the Democratic Party, but they also are disdainful of Democrats.  Green Party voters aren’t “either Green or Democrat”; they are, at least without Bernie Sanders on the ticket, “Green or nothing”.  

And Libertarian Party followers are economic Republicans.  We can see that with the prior Libertarian candidates for President: Johnson, Barr, and Paul, were all former (and some future) Republican candidates for office.  It’s why Justin Amash, the former Republican now Independent Congressman from Michigan, considered a Libertarian Presidential run.   Without a Libertarian choice, those voters are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats.

Choice

It’s my knee jerk reaction to respond to Libertarian posts on social media and say:  

“Are you nuts!!!!  You’re playing into Trump’s hands.  There can be NO CHOICE in the 2020 election.  You MUST vote for Biden, not because you support HIM, but because we must get rid of TRUMP!!!!!!”  MAYBE THAT SHOULD BE IN ALL CAPS, MAKING SURE I’M ONLINE YELLING MY ENTIRE MESSAGE!!!!!!!!!!!

But the reality is that Dr. Jorgenson is more likely to take votes from Trump than Biden.  And while my personal view is that the 2020 Trump candidacy is so catastrophic for the nation, that the only viable voting choice is Biden, I do get it.  Jorgenson offers an alternate view, one that allows voters to “wash their hands” of the current system.

I am not a Libertarian.  I don’t agree that the United States should be some giant “Switzerland”, and I do think our government has a huge role in making life in America better.  Capitalism has proven to be cruel and cold for many.  The government has the task of making life better for all, not just the successful few.

But if it’s what you’ve got to do – vote for Jorgenson. It’s sure better than a vote for Trump. Just one caveat: I believe that this election is an existential choice about Trump. If you believe that too, then Jorgenson is not the answer.

Writing Trump World

I started writing essays for “Trump World” in February of 2017.  When I began, it was going to be a once a week thing, essays to try to explain the new Trump Administration from the view of the “Resistance”.  I saw the election of Donald Trump as an attack on the progressive changes made by the Obama administration, and on the values of human and civil rights.  How wrong I was.

It’s been three years and four months.  This is the eight hundredth essay in the series; it turned out that I had more than “once a week” things to say.  There are over sixteen hundred people who read this daily, some get angry about what the President is doing, and some get angry about what I have to say.  Some “learn things” from a different perspective than their own.  It has provoked discussion, debate, and denunciation:  the loss of some friends but the gain of others.  And that is, I guess, what I hoped it would do.

What was I wrong about? 

Making the Man

There is an “accepted” historical view, that, “the Presidency makes the man”.  It is based on Harry Truman, a machine politician from Missouri who gained the Vice Presidency as a political favor.  There are lots of great decisions that President Franklin Roosevelt made, but viewing his own personal mortality wasn’t one of them.  For most of my life I viewed FDR as an “old man” when he died, a man who stayed too long.  Now, at my own “advanced” age, I am older now than Roosevelt was when he died.  Sixty-three doesn’t seem so old, especially when the two candidates for President in 2020 average out at seventy-six.

There were much more qualified Vice Presidential candidates than Harry Truman.  And FDR didn’t really have much confidence in him. Truman was left out of most of the decision-making processes.  So when Roosevelt died of a massive stroke, Truman was unprepared for the Presidency.

The end of World War II in Europe, the beginning of the Cold War, the use of atomic weapons:  all were on Truman’s plate when he took the oath.  Looking back historically, it is generally agreed that Truman rose to the challenge and became a greater President than he ever was a Senator or other office holder.  The Presidency “made him”.

Flooding the Swamp

We are nearing the 2020 Presidential election.  Donald Trump has been President for three years and five months, far long enough for us to have an understanding of what the Presidency has made of him.  “What we see is what we get” is the phrase that comes to mind.  The President said he was going to “drain the swamp”.  What we didn’t know in 2016 was that the phrase meant that anyone who questioned the President’s actions would be fired, vilified, and discredited.   

Mr. Trump has found the perfect tool for attacking his enemies and covering his illegal actions:  the Department of Justice.  William Barr, his second Attorney General, has offered up the motto of his Department:  “Who Prosecutes on Behalf of Justice” (Qui Pro Domina Justitia Sequitur) to now say “Who Stands for the President is Immune, Who Challenges the President is Prosecuted”. 

We heard it again in the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, as career Justice lawyers testified coldly about politically motivated prosecutions and protections.  Trump didn’t like California enforcing emissions standards on vehicles?  The Justice Department began anti-trust action against the auto industry.  The President’s friends get in legal trouble?  The investigators are fired, and the charges are reduced or dropped.  No one really thinks Roger Stone will ever spend a day in jail.  Paul Manafort is already home early from his seven-year sentence.  Michael Flynn is an “innocent” liar, a victim of FBI persecution. 

We have watched the President fire the “watchdogs,” the Inspector Generals who have dared to criticize the actions of the President and his men.  Those charged with overseeing the Intelligence Community, the Transportation Department, the Defense Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the State Department all were removed after questioned politically motivated actions (CBS).

Wrong

The reality of the COVID pandemic interferes with the President’s election strategy?  Then ignore the disease, and carry on life as if there was no risk. The Centers for Disease Control says wear masks and socially distance:  the President holds packed rallies (at least one) and openly refuses to wear one.  He denies the truth of the present, and hopes his lies will lead him to control the future.

I was wrong.  Trump is far worse than I thought possible back in the early days of 2017.  It’s all in plain sight, unlike Nixon and Watergate; there is no attempt to cover-up.  Instead, we get it put to us directly.  Russia, if you’re listening, please counterfeit mail-in ballots for this November.  China, please buy more American soybeans so Trump can be re-elected.  Poland, please kowtow to Mr. Trump, and he will move twenty thousand troops to you from Germany.  Angela Merkel won’t come to the US for a G-7 meeting: she must be punished.

Richard Nixon once told interviewer David Frost: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal” (Teaching). That statement shocked many, but it fit with Nixon’s actions as President.  William Barr, the man today charged with enforcing the laws of the United States, believes that as well.  So Mr. Trump, and Mr. Barr, with the tacit acceptance of the Republican Party, abuse their authority and commit criminal acts.  

And they do it all in plain sight.

History Teacher

I did a lot of things in my career in public education. I was high school Dean of Students, President of the Teacher’s Union, and a track, cross country, and wrestling coach.  But for the vast majority of my career, I was a social studies teacher.  I taught American Government, American History, World History, Economics, Current Affairs, and even Psychology to sixth graders through seniors over twenty-six years.  

So the word “history” has deep meaning to me.  And I took my mission as a history teacher seriously.  I understood that, for most of my students, this would be the foundation of what they knew about the “American Experience” for the rest of their lives.  They would participate (or not) as citizens, making decisions about the direction of the Nation, based in part on what they learned in “my” history class.  

That didn’t mean that I wanted them to have a specific “political” view.  I wasn’t indoctrinating my students into any particular ideology, including mine.  In fact, many of those students are shocked reading “Trump World” essays today.  They had no idea of my affiliations.  And that’s how it should be.

So when people today talk about “erasing” history, I take that very seriously.

Texas History

I went to school in the 1960’s and 70’s.  There was no such thing as “Black Studies” back then.  Our textbooks were written with few African American participants.  Booker T Washington, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman were the apparent extent of Black participation in America.

What I didn’t find out until much later, was that our textbooks were written to the specifications of the Texas State Board of Education.  The entire state of Texas purchased a single American History textbook, a massive sale for any publisher.  So texts were written to appeal to them.  There were more pages on the Texas War of Independence, the Alamo and the battle of San Jacinto, than on World War I.  In the 1960’s, Texans weren’t interested in the contributions of African Americans, and so neither were we.

The First Casualty

It wasn’t until college, and my first years as a teacher that I realized the vast contribution of Black Americans to the “American Experience”.  I spent a great deal of time re-learning the American story, this time from the perspective of those brought in chains.  I learned that there was a lot of “erasing” in our history, even before the Revolutionary War.  Take Crispus Attucks, the first casualty of the American Revolution.  He was shot in the “Boston Massacre”, when British troops returned thrown snowballs with musket fire.  

Crispus Attucks was a Black man, a man who escaped slavery. But when Paul Revere engraved the scene of the massacre, he made Attucks white for the prints headed South. The revolutionaries in Boston needed the support of the South; it wouldn’t do for the first martyr of the Revolution to be Black. Erasing history goes back a long way.

Monuments Today

So what about all of the statues and monuments that are in question today?  In the museums and on the battlefields, those monuments make sense.  The figure of Robert E. Lee on horseback, posted on Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg should remain.  He forever overlooks his greatest failure with Pickett’s Charge, a fitting fate for the “greatest” general of his time.

But his position in Richmond on Monument Avenue isn’t about his actions.  That statue was erected in 1890, when the history of the Civil War was being “revised” by Southerners into the mythological “lost cause”.  It was part of the regression of the South to the Jim Crow era, when Black people were treated as little more than the slaves they had been.  It was only a few years later, about when the Lee Monument was erected in Charlottesville, that the Ku Klux Klan became a national power for racism and hate.

Many of the Confederate “memorials” that are being attacked today were erected as part of that revisionist history movement.  They were put up to “erase” the history of slavery and rebellion that caused the Civil War.  Memorials are in places like Brandenburg, Kentucky, just down the Ohio River from Louisville, a town that was part of the Union for the entire Civil War.  They celebrate the losing side of the rebellion, and they stand for those who refused to give up their slaves.

American Sin

The incredibly fierce reaction to the removal of monuments is based on one of two things.  The first is the “Santa Claus” effect.  Through perhaps no fault of their own, long cherished beliefs people had about American history are being challenged.  The “noble” Confederates, battling for states’ rights and their homeland, was a story long told to the American people.  

I saw it again in a middle school curriculum this year: “…slavery was not the cause of the Civil War”.  Just like Santa Claus, that’s just not true.  But for slavery there would have been no cause for the Civil War.  No one likes being told that there is no Santa Claus, or that Robert E. Lee, the noble stalwart of the South, was, in fact, a traitor to the nation to which he had devoted his entire adult life.  He chose to defend sin rather than stand against it.

Or there may be a second, and more insidious reason.  To admit the flaws of the United States, a nation that is a long way from reaching the “more perfect” union of our fore fathers goal, is to admit that the nation was built upon evil institutions.  Slavery was a bedrock of the United States economy, and when slavery was no longer available, folks were still abused to maintain that economic system.  And of course, there is the ultimate sin:  that the United States was built upon land stolen away from its original owners.  

Those are the lessons of history that we choose not to remember.  Those are acts that we choose not to take responsibility for.  And that makes us worse than ignorant:  it makes us accomplices in the original sins.

In Its Place

The flag of the Confederacy still deserves to be flown.  Even here in Columbus, Ohio, it has a place.  Camp Chase, located on the west side of town, was a Civil War prison camp.  Two thousand Confederate soldiers died, mostly of smallpox, during their internment.  They are buried there today, and the flag they fought for still waves over their graves.

Museums, battlefields, and cemeteries:  all are suitable places for Confederate symbology and statues.  But their rebellion to maintain slavery should not be celebrated as some “mythic” history created by their apologists after the thunder of the guns stopped and the smoke cleared.  Those writers erased and re-wrote histories for their own political gain. It’s time Americans learn the real story.

Lesson One

I think I was sixteen years old, which would have made it 1973.   I was working on my first official political campaign, Judge Frank Davis for Juvenile Court Judge.  My teacher and first political mentor, Eve Bolton, was managing it.  I don’t think Davis won, but I remember learning a lot from her in my first chance at “getting my hands dirty” in electoral politics.

One of the very first lessons was never, ever, ever let the candidate speak to an empty room.  Empty rooms meant no one cared, and was an absolute failure of political planning.  In fact, make sure the candidate only spoke to packed rooms, with no place left to sit and people crammed in standing against the walls.  That was always the goal.  If you thought one hundred would come, get a room for fifty.  Expecting a thousand, get a room for five hundred.  Outside: make the “audience area” small enough to feel like it was packed.

Energy

It was important to generate the energy in the crowd.  It was important to get the candidate “ginned up” to gain progress in the campaign.  And it was most important so that the cameras caught the feel of a “packed house”.   The television picture of the camera being jostled because there were so many people gets that energy across on the airwaves.  A picture of empty seats and “socially distanced” crowds (a term we never heard of then) sends all the wrong signals.

In all of my forays into campaigns I’ve applied the “venue rule”.  When we had school levy rallies at our high school, we never had them in the “big” gym.  We packed crowds in the cafeteria, or we used the smaller gym at the middle school. The high school gym only looked “packed” with two thousand people or more.  There was no reason to diminish the impact of five hundred or a thousand by putting them in an “empty” room.

The Rally and the Message

Saturday night, the forty-fifth President of the United States held a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  As often is the case, the Trump Campaign flew in the face of common sense, holding a mass rally in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Oklahoma’s infection rate is setting records daily and the Trump rally would be the first mass event in the area since the pandemic impacted the United States in March. A “super-spreader event” (another term we never heard of) might be the result, but the Trump campaign can’t care about that. 

Trump’s message is that the pandemic is “over” and we need to “open up”.  It’s a simple campaign calculation:  if the economy doesn’t improve, Trump’s chances for reelection are doomed.  So they have to presume that “life” can start up again, and convince America to do that, even if the death toll from COVID continues to grow.  They are pressing that message in the denigration of “science” on social media, in the President’s stubborn refusal to wear a facemask, and now in their campaign schedule.

And they also want to send a message to their loyalists.  In our current era of “Black Lives Matter” and concern for American institutional oppression, the Trump campaign originally chose Juneteenth for the rally date. They also picked Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of one of the United States’ worse race riot, as the place.  The not so subtle message:  don’t worry, we will soon get back to the “normal – whites in charge” world.  We really don’t have to care about all of this “racial stuff”. 

It Used to Work 

Brad Parscale, the Trump 2020 Campaign Manager, announced that there were over a million requests for tickets.  The venue, the nineteen thousand-seat BOK Center Arena, surely wouldn’t be enough, so the campaign set up a second overflow venue outside, enough for another fifty thousand cheering fans.   Big screens, huge sheets of bullet proof glass, and an outdoor concert-style venue was added.  

The Trump Campaign rally strategy is to offer tickets online that grants the opportunity to stand in line to get in the venue.  Actual admission to the venue is not guaranteed:  it allows the campaign staff to literally select the crowd they want to have.  It also lets them weed out potential protestors or disruptors, though it wouldn’t surprise me if they allow a few to slip in.  It all becomes part of the big “Trump” show, and another foil for the President to riff off of at the lectern.

Never, ever, ever, let the candidate speak to an empty room.  Estimates of the Trump crowd in the BOK center are between six and ten thousand (Forbes).  Roughly half the seats in the arena were empty.  And the big outdoor venue:  they started tearing it down before the President even stepped to the podium.  The camera shots were of empty seats behind the speaker, and the giant bulletproof glass sheets being loaded on trucks.  

What’s the Lesson?

Parscale and the campaign are blaming the “media” for focusing on empty seats and loading trucks.  They’re claiming that fear of “protestors” and COVID kept their crowd away.  I guess the Trump fans are the “snowflakes” after all.  

And then there’s the social media rumor that Parscale was the victim of a “dirty trick”.  Rumor is that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of teenagers requested tickets that they never intended to use.  “Shenanigans” is what MSNBC is calling it. I haven’t checked, but I bet Fox News will have a more sinister term for it.

But here’s the reality check for the reality TV star.  He went to the heart of “Trump Country”, and he couldn’t draw a crowd.  Mr. Trump couldn’t fill a room.  He was literally the only show in town, and they didn’t come to see him.  That might get Parscale fired, and it might get Trump panicked.  But, for a campaign that depends on rallies as their mainline strategy, they might have an even bigger problem.  

Maybe, after four years of chaos and incompetence, “the crowd” is looking for someone else.

These horrible and politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republican or Conservatives.  We need more Justices or we will lose our 2^ndAmendment and everything else.  Vote Trump 2020. —  Donald J. Trump Tweet – 6/18/20

Dog Whistles

Buddy is our older dog.  A shepherd, Border collie, Heinz 57 rescue; he’s been through a lot.  He survived being a near feral pup, several failed foster homes, and near-fatal lymphoma to become our “fat and fluffy” elder statesman at nearly eight years old.  And somewhere along the way, he developed an absolute phobia to smoke alarms and the “ping” noise of Facebook Messenger.  Anytime he hears those or even sees a computer come out, he heads for safety: into the bathtub.

We found him heading inexplicably towards the bathroom from time to time, somehow linked to the neighbor calling his dogs in their backyard.  After some investigation, we found that the neighbor had a “dog whistle”, a device that emits a sound above the range of human hearing.  Dogs can hear it, and while it didn’t seem to attract his dogs to the house, it sent Buddy on an immediate bathtub run.

Humans can hear certain kinds of “dog whistles” as well.  Statements are made that require a unique background of knowledge to understand.  While to the uninitiated, a political statement might just sound colorful or even inane, to those “in the know” the message is a clarion call to action.  It’s a “dog whistle” to them, unheard by the masses, but quite clear and compelling. 

Lunatic Fringe 

The Trump campaign uses “dog whistles” masterfully to communicate to the “lunatic fringe” of their support. (Ok, so I was a middle school wrestling coach in the 1980’s, and Vision Quest was THE movie – so if you need that “fix” here’s the link to Red Rider’s video Lunatic Fringe).  But to understand what is really being said, it takes some research into the “Mark Levin, Alex Jones, QAnon” world, where secret communications is not only expected, but also accepted as truth.

The right wing fringe believes that President Trump is secretly on their side, but “has” to play like he’s more “moderate”.  The Charlottesville statement, “…good people ON BOTH SIDES” was a clear signal to them.  He’s “their” President, constantly sending hidden signals that “only they” can hear.  It’s no surprise then that David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, said, “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back.”

Even if you don’t believe in the “dog whistle” messages, they do.  So it becomes important that the White House recognize their “communications” with the far right have an impact.  What they say, even in Tweets, even in a Presidential rage, matters. So when the President loses two cases in the Supreme Court in one week, and vents about it on Twitter, he is sending the message.  Sure he’s telling “the base” to vote for him in November, so that he will have the opportunity to appoint more Supreme Court Justices.  And the “shotgun blast to the face” combined with the threat of losing “our 2^nd Amendment” might just be balancing a phrase.

Court Vacancy  

But the President is certainly aware that there is another way to replace Supreme Court Justices:  have a vacancy occur.  The far right is on watch, waiting for eighty-seven year old Ruth Bader Ginsburg to finally “vacate” the Court.   That way, regardless of the election, Trump would be able to appoint a third Justice, and one that would negate the more moderate Chief Justice.  Another Trump appointee combined with Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Bush appointee Alito and that dirty old man of the far-right, Reagan appointee Clarence Thomas; would significantly drag the Court to the right.

So what “dog whistle” is the President really signaling?  Is he calling for his “supporters” to vote for him in November? Or is there a more insidious message hidden inside the tweet – one partnering “shotgun blast to the face” with “we need more justices”.  Is the President suggesting, maybe even ordering “someone” to “create” a vacancy on the Court; even making it known the method he wants used?

It seems so far-fetched, even a novelist would find the idea rejected out of hand.  But it’s not crazy to those listening for a signal, waiting on command for the President to lead them in “defense” of their view of America.  And the President, and those around him, knows that they are out there, listening, and waiting for “the sign”.  

They know, and they know that the “crazies” know.  So how irresponsible can it possibly be to send that signal?  In Hosea 8:7 it says:  “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”  

When the whirlwind arrives, plausible deniability won’t be an option.

Finally, the Book

John Bolton has written his book.  He is telling us all of the things we thought we knew: that Trump would do anything to get re-elected, including the impeachment offense of withholding funds from Ukraine until they “got the dirt” on Biden.  Bolton added that Trump flat-out asked China to buy more agriculture products so he could be re-elected. He shopped American funds to foreign leaders to gain advantage in the election, and openly invited their intervention into the electoral process.

Bolton laid out all of this and more in his book, five months after the impeachment trial ended in the Senate.  It’s like a witness to the Brown/Goldman murders coming forward and saying that they saw OJ do it with the knife and wearing the gloves and shoes, right after the trial ended.  It’s salacious, and it will definitely sell. To use an old phrase, “Inquiring minds want to know”.  I want to know, and as loath as I am to donate to the “Bolton Fund,” we’ll have a copy here at the house soon.

Sales Pitch

The White House is doing everything it can to increase book sales.   It’s not intentional, but the President has tasked the Justice Department to find a way to bring charges against Bolton, and to somehow stop the book publication.  But the book is already out there, in the hands of the New York Times and the Washington Post and the rest of the mainstream media.  The proverbial “barn door” is wide open; no judge will want to look foolish enough to try to close it with the horses already gone.  All the legal hoopla will just drive the book farther up the New York Times bestseller list.

Bolton flirted with testifying to the Senate during the impeachment trial. He even leaked out some of the Trump’s more significant transgressions.  Yet he never took the unalterable step of publicly saying what happened, in fact; he didn’t do so until the publicity tour started this week. He’s been a masterful salesman, keeping public interest high and bringing the book now, when all of the investigations have quieted in the Congress and he can have center-stage all to himself.

Staying in Power

But with all Bolton’s talk about what the President did, it certainly seems he’s took the coward’s way out. 

John Bolton is a Republican.  While even some other Republicans see him as an outlier, willing to take the Neo-Con ideology to extremes, he still is an “establishment” member of the Party.  And John Bolton runs a political action committee that supports many Republican candidates, gaining financial influence over those new legislators.  He wanted into the Trump Administration early, but it took almost two years and the firing of Generals Michael Flynn and HR McMaster for him to finally be invited to the National Security Advisor role.  He almost shaved his trademark mustache; it was rumored that Mr. Trump didn’t like it.

Bolton claims the President not only wanted help from foreign leaders to win re-election, he also states the President obstructed justice, and was incompetent in leading the nation.  And yet Bolton served silently on as the National Security Advisor for seventeen months.  Instead of stepping forward and letting the Congress, and the American people hear what was going on, he joined the ranks of “Anonymous” and others in enabling a failed leader.  

Oh, he covered his “ass”.  When his subordinates asked what they should do about “Giuliani’s Drug Deal” and Sunderland’s back room negotiations, he told them to “go to the lawyers”.  He wanted no part of that; though he left those same subordinates “holding the bag” in front of the House Intelligence Committee.  Vindman, Morrison and Hill all took the heat from the Committee and the President for telling the truth.  Bolton hid behind a façade of getting “legal permission” from the courts.

Patriot

A patriot would have resigned and made it clear why.  General Mattis followed that path, when the President’s actions went beyond “the pale”.  But Bolton, like so many others, stayed and enabled the disaster that is the Trump Administration. Now he hopes to profit from it.  

He sits righteously on Face the Nation and tells his story.  He lays out a chilling tale of a President incompetent, ignorant and egocentric.  We will have the opportunity to hear it again and again in the next few weeks.

What’s Good for Bolton

Bolton has it figured out.  He could have told his story in January, and the Senate would have been forced to listen.  But he counted the votes, and didn’t see a way that the Republican Senators would be convinced to remove the President.  So, rather than face banishment from his political power base, he simply hinted his story, then let the GOP Senators make the choice.  Call him, sure he would testify.  But Senators wanted cover:  they didn’t want to hear Bolton’s story. That made exonerating Trump’s actions easier – and Bolton could accommodate that.

And if he waited to publish the book later, say in September or early October:  well then he be accused of singlehandedly trying to alter the election.  Instead, it’s now, in June, when there’s plenty of time for the Trump misinformation machine to paper over the mess.  So here comes the book, and here comes the truth of the Impeachment charges.  Bolton gets to keep his profit, and his power. 

Is it good for the Nation?  In an election where about eleven percent or less will decide who the next President will be, everything counts.  So, yes, Bolton’s story is still important.  But Bolton should get no “points” for courage.  That opportunity passed six months ago. 

It’s all about profit now.

Called Out

I was called out on social media the other night.  After weeks of discussion about the police, and Black Lives Matter, and what to do about America:  one of my friends, a law enforcement officer, wearily said about my posts: 

“Sometimes I wish I could read this blog and there would be something positive spoken about our Law Enforcement Officers who protect this great Country.”

I responded then by saying that I’ve written about “you guys” being the “first ones in” during a school shooting, and about how he, a School Resource Officer, in particular was “the right man in the right job”.  I’ve said it in “Facebook debate” and I actually did write that in my blog.

My Friends

But he did hit a nerve.  I have friends, good friends, best friends, who are police officers.  They are people I know well. I’ve taught them, coached them, been to their weddings, and worked beside them.  I’ve been to the funeral of a policeman killed in the line of duty.  His son, a former part of our track team, is on that same police force today.  

And I know those guys.  They all have their good points and their flaws, but they all care about people.  I’ve seen many of them in action, some as police officers, some in other roles, working with folks of all races and backgrounds.  The idea that “all police officers are racist” is simply not true.  These guys aren’t.  And most have never even fired a gun in the line of duty. 

In my eight years as the Dean of Students of a 1200 kid high school in charge of student discipline, I got to know the police as supporting my job.  We were on the “same side”.  We didn’t want violence in the school, or drugs, or theft or bullying.  And, should the worst happen and the school was attacked, I knew they would be the first in line to try to stop it, even at the cost of their own lives. The strategy was as a result of the carnage at Columbine – the first man on scene goes in. 

Compassion

I also saw them care about kids and adults, about the plight of folks that “the system” failed.  I’ve had long talks with them about what we could do to make kids’ lives better.  It didn’t have anything to do with “the law”, nor with the race, gender, sexual orientation, or the rest of the list.  It was about helping individuals, even those who broke the law, even taken into custody, hands cuffed behind their back in my office.

They are some of the finest people I know.  They “have your back”, and are unswervingly loyal to their friends.  In a crisis those officers are cool, and decisive, and don’t “lose it” the way we are seeing some cops do in videos today.   I think, to be honest, their strength and judgment represent most police officers. 

Culture

I am a retired track coach.  I spent forty years, most of them as a head coach (I was twenty-five, a “kid coach” really, when I got the job). As the “person in charge” I learned a lot about how “the culture” of an organization can impact the success of that group.  On our team, we tried to develop a culture where your teammates always knew you supported them.  The saying was, “…you don’t have to love your teammate, but you do need to back him”.  It was track and field; there usually weren’t huge crowds at the meets, nor a lot of pressure from parents and peers to be successful.  But to know that forty other guys on the team had your back, and you had theirs, meant that you’d go “beyond yourself” to perform, if for no other reason, just not to let them down.

What’s Right

That culture was generally a “good” thing, and it certainly generated a lot of success over the years.  But, as I matured as a Coach and as a Teacher, I also found the danger in that culture.  We all got so focused on backing each other and succeeding, on going “citius, altius, fortius,” (higher, faster, stronger) that sometimes it was easy to overlook personal mistakes.  Was someone breaking team rules, were they stealing or using drugs?  But they were your teammate, your “star”, how could you “let down the team” by calling them out on their behavior?  A legendary basketball coach once said; “I don’t have rules, the best players always break them”.  So what did our team culture say about it when they did?

It took a while, but our team came down on the side of “doing what’s right”.  It turned out, our team “family” was more important than “the wins”.  What our family was about was each other.  So we took our losses when a good athlete was removed from the team, and could still look each other in the eye and know that we did the right thing.

Survival

But what if the culture isn’t about wins, losses, or a “team”.  What if it’s about literal survival?  In that one flashing moment when a police officer’s life is threatened; “having your back” means saving that life.  When that becomes so ingrained, it’s hard to imagine that much else can break through.  It’s easy to just “have their back” on everything else, right or wrong.

How did that culture happen?  How did policing become so much a “blue against everyone” world?  I don’t have an answer to that, but I know what it’s done.  It’s enforced a culture of insulation, of protecting “brother officers” from even their own unacceptable actions.  Why?  Because, someday they may have to physically protect you.  There can’t be hesitation.

I love my friends who are policemen.  I know they are decent, caring, compassionate people.  And I expect most policemen are. That’s why they wanted the job in the first place. I trust them to police our society, and trust them to do the right thing. In fact, I would trust them with my life.

But I also know that the culture of the institution they work in is broken.

I hope they can see that, and I hope they can see that I still stand with them, even as I stand with Black Lives Matter.

The Post

I was in my twenties and I lived in Washington, DC. I worked for a Democratic Congressman on Capitol Hill, and took classes at American University.  One of my favorite parts of living there was reading the Washington Post.  In DC, people talk about politics like folks talk about Ohio State Football here in the Columbus area.  It’s their “inside baseball”, and as a political “mind”, I loved it.  The Post was the ultimate index to what was happening inside the government machine.  It had the daily “scoop”. On the bus and Metro everyone was reading, and talking about, what was in the paper.

Today, I can’t get delivery of the Post here in Pataskala, Ohio, but I pay for their “App” on my electronics.  I can read the daily Post “cover-to-cover”. 

Eugene Robinson is an associate editor of the Washington Post, and writes a column for the paper several times a week. He measures his words, and his long experience often lends insight into our political world that others don’t see.  He is a Pulitzer Prize winner, a South Carolina native, and a graduate of the University of Michigan.  Robinson is also a frequent guest commentator on MSNBC programs. I often get to start my early mornings listening to his insights on Morning Joe.   

And he is a black man in America today.

Father to Son

In our current age of racial unrest, Robinson lends personal insight into the political problem of race in America.  He and his wife raised two sons in Arlington, Virginia, a mixed suburb of Washington.  His boys went to integrated schools, and had both black and white friends. Robinson was both professionally and economically successful: at the top of his field. But despite all that, he had two black sons growing up in America.  He had to have “the talk” with them.

“The Talk”, as Robinson describes it, wasn’t easy.  He told his sons that regardless of what their parents did, or what they themselves achieved in school, sports, or life, there were going to be situations where they were going to be treated differently because they were black.  When it came to the police, the assumptions their white friends could make, that the police would assume “the good” about their actions, wouldn’t apply to them.  The color of their skin could determine how they would be treated, and that they should act accordingly.

“The Talk” defined discrimination.  In a nation where the 13^th Amendment ended slavery one hundred and fifty-five years ago, and the Civil Rights Act was passed fifty-six years ago, young black men still have to hear, “The Talk”.  It’s a bitter pill to swallow, and a humiliating warning for a father to give his sons.

Endemic

Tim Scott is the Senator from South Carolina.  He served as a Charleston County Council man, a South Carolina State Representative, and a member of the US House of Representatives.  He was elected to the US Senate in 2013. 

Scott tells the story of trying to enter the Senate building, wearing the appropriate identification pin on his lapel.  He was stopped by a security guard, and despite having the proper identification, was prevented from going into the chamber.  Meanwhile other Senators went on by, showing their pins for entry.  What was different?  He is a black man.  

Here in Pataskala I coached Track and Field for forty years.  Early on, I heard the stories from my athletes about the differences between how the white and black athletes were treated.  “DWB” – driving while black – was a frequent expression among my black runners, when (not if) they were pulled over here in town, just to be questioned.  And there were several schools where we competed, when running a warm-up or warm-down had to be on the competition track. The white athletes might head out on the neighborhood roads, but the black athletes would be “RWB”.  Better that they stayed close.

Atlanta

Two nights ago a man had too much to drink.  He fell asleep in his car, waiting in the drive-thru line at Wendy’s.  Reasonably, the Wendy’s night-shift employees called the police.  The officers woke the man up, got him out of the car, and used a “breathalyzer” to determine his level of intoxication.   His name was Rayshard Brooks, he was twenty-seven, and he was a black man.

The police and the Brooks had a reasonable conversation.  He asked to call his sister, and when she refused to come and pick him up, offered to leave his car and walk home.  After over thirty minutes of discussion, the policemen determined he should be arrested.

Routine

It was a routine police matter.  In Atlanta (and in Ohio as well) if you are drunk at the wheel of a car with the keys in the ignition, you are considered a “drunk driver”.  The enforcement of the law has changed over the years, and what would have been a “get home safe” fifteen years ago, now is a drunk driving charge.  So the police officers tried to take Brooks into custody.

He fought the policemen, and was able to grab one of the officer’s Tasers.  Brooks then sprinted away from the officers.  When he turned towards his pursuers with the Taser, he was shot twice in the back, and died later that night.

This is not a “clear-cut” case of abuse of force like George Floyd. Brooks was drunk, he refused arrest, he assaulted police officers, he was fleeing the scene, and he tried to “Tase” an officer. But none of these should have required a “death sentence” in the parking lot.

The police knew him.  They knew where he lived, and likely where he was going.  Without their pursuit, he wasn’t a danger to himself, or to the community.  Let him go, pick him up later; that would have been a reasonable thing for the police to do.

And the underlying question is this:  if he had been a white man, would the entire chain of events occurred?  If his name was Raymond instead of a Rayshard would he have been given a “pass”?  Would the police have continued a pursuit?  Would they have used deadly force?  Until we can unequivocally answer that question no, then America has a problem. 

And black parents of black children will need to continue to have “the Talk”.

Our Times

Most Americans have never experienced times like this.  Sure, we’ve been through dramatic shifts in the economy, in 1987, 2001, and 2008.  And we’ve been through times of dramatic civil unrest, in the 1960’s, after Rodney King, and after Ferguson.  But, in living memory, we’ve never been through a disease that has killed 117,858 in four months here in the United States, and 436,125 worldwide (as of this writing).  

And those numbers don’t include the hidden thousands and maybe millions in China, Russia, and Iran.  Remember when they made a big deal about hitting 100,000 dead in the US a couple of weeks ago?  So much else has happened since then, but the disease keeps on killing.

It’s not as bad as the 1918 Flu Pandemic (not 1917 as President Trump keeps saying).  About one half of one percent of the US population died then, the equivalent number would be sixteen million today.  Hopefully modern science will be able to put a “cap in the bottle” with treatments and vaccines far before we reach that number. 

Incompetence

Economic upheaval, civil disorder, and viral infection:  it’s all happened in US history before.  And we’ve even had Presidential leadership that seemed unable to deal with the problems.  Woodrow Wilson was so focused on world leadership that he ignored the pandemic.  He then was physically incapacitated by a stroke.  Herbert Hoover was so dedicated to his economic philosophy that he allowed the Great Depression to reach near 25% unemployment.  And Lyndon Johnson, after determining not to run for re-election, focused on the Paris Peace talks to end the Vietnam War, and failed to intervene in the combination of anti-war and civil rights unrest in 1968.

It certainly seems that this President, Mr. Trump, has failed to address our multiple crises.  He has followed Wilson’s example, turning his back on the pandemic.  He recognized Hoover’s flaw of economic purity, and spent trillions to prop up the stock market.  But he still failed to provide for those left without employment.  And, like Johnson, his focus is somewhere else, not the civil unrest that divides us today.  Trump is focused on his own re-election to the exclusion of everything else.

Fanning the Flames

In American History, we’ve never had this combination of all four factors:  economic collapse, pandemic, civil unrest, and Presidential incompetence, at one time.  And then add one more issue, this one new in our history. We now have semi-anonymous social media that allows anyone to add gasoline on the bonfire of public discourse.

Social media lets folks speak their minds without the guardrails of facing those that they criticize.  We now simply tap on the keyboard, without fear of being punched in the nose for the critical things we say.  We can allow our darkest selves to have voice in the public sphere, with little concern for the consequences.  In fact, we have those who seem to relish in creating discord.  This is now even a weapon of nation-states:  using social media to drive more wedges into the political systems of rivals.  It happened to the United States in 2016:  why think that Russia, China and others would pass up the upheaval of today?

The Choice

So here we are, at a true crisis in our Democracy.  To paraphrase Lincoln:  testing whether that nation, so divided and so stressed, can long endure.  We face a choice this fall, to continue with the current incompetence, or to choose change.

For those committed to Mr. Trump because of his choice of Supreme Court Justices, I have to ask, is his failure to protect us from the pandemic worth it?  Is the ongoing sacrifice of current human life the price we must pay to protect the potential human life you so value? 

For those committed to Bernie Sanders’ agenda of social change:  are the compromises that Joe Biden represents so terrible, that Trump is a better choice?

And for those convinced that all politicians are self-centered and corrupt:  isn’t there still a choice that would make a difference in how America responds to disease, civil unrest, and economic collapse? While I do not believe Biden is corrupt, even if he is, isn’t corrupt competence better than the current corrupt disaster?

Fools?

The United States will endure, even though our differences are real, exacerbated by social media, and fueled by foreign influence.  The United States has always found a way to rise above our multiple failures and flaws. Now we face an inflection point, a chance to change the direction of our nation. Biden will not take us as far as many of my more radical friends want to go, and he will go farther than my more conservative friends might like.  But he represents a competence that is clearly not present in the Trump administration.

To quote Lincoln one more time:

“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time”.

A minority of Americans chose a non-politician actor as President of the United States in 2016, for a variety of reasons.  In the past four years, and especially this year, he has proven what he can’t do.

For the sake of the United States, here’s a George Bush misquote of the song Baba O’Reily  by the Who:

This November, “You can’t get fooled again”.

Amy Acton, MD (Northeast Ohio Universities), Master of Public Health (THE Ohio State University), and the Director of Public Health for the state of Ohio, resigned last week.  Her reason was sound:  the effort of managing Ohio’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic were so great, that, as she said, “…it wasn’t a sustainable thing,” (Cleveland).

Ohio’s Response

Dr. Acton led Ohio’s response to COVID-19.   The state got out in front of the pandemic, closing public events much earlier in March then most other states.  This prevented “super-spreader” activities like the Arnold Classic in Columbus or the State high school sports tournaments; large events that would increase mass infections.  New Orleans, for example, suffered significantly from the Mardi Gras celebration, held just a couple of weeks before.  

Ohio’s Governor Mike DeWine listened to Acton, and Ohio did well for the first months of the crisis. Ohio ranks seventh in population in the US, but currently is twelfth in the number of COVID-19 deaths (California, ranks seventh in deaths with double the fatalities).   The shutdown in Ohio was real.  Folks stayed mostly at home, and followed the advice of DeWine and Acton.

Acton took the heat for stopping the March 17^th primary election in Ohio, after the Courts reversed DeWine’s cancellation.  The idea of standing in line to vote while the state was under quarantine defied common sense, but critics from both political extremes were more worried about setting precedent than the medical facts.  It was the first of many public health decisions that would gain Acton a lot of political heat.

Too Successful

DeWine, a Republican Governor, stood firm with Acton until the middle of May.  But somehow the pressure finally reached him, as, like the President, he began to listen to his economic and political advisors more than Acton and the medical field.  Re-opening the economy became the paramount objective, and those health concerns that seemed so important in March now seemed to fall to the wayside.

Acton’s success in stifling the spread of COVID-19 was the reason for her ultimate demise.  Ohioans did so well, they began to believe there really wasn’t an epidemic at all.  The cries from the far Right and Left, encouraged by social media promises of dark conspiracies to take over the world and by Mr. Trump himself; all became too much to ignore.  The fact that picketers showed up in front of her family home in the Columbus suburb of Bexley also made it clear to Acton that she was a personal target (Cleveland).

Eyes Closed

So Acton, while remaining an “advisor” to the Governor, is gone. And with the Federal response muzzled (when was the last time Doctors Fauci or Brix appeared) America is moving on, eyes firmly closed.  

There seems to be a political or regional divide in the state. Go into the city, and most folks are wearing masks, and seem aware of social distancing. Head towards the suburbs and the “masklessness” grows, and crowds grow closer. In the more rural areas, a masked person looks “suspect”, and personal space doesn’t seem to be an issue.

In my far suburb, with corn growing in fields nearby, I stood in line today in Advanced Auto.  Of the fifteen people in the store, I was the only one wearing a facemask.  The signs to “maintain social distance” were ignored.  It’s the same in the local restaurants and bars, where folks are carrying on “normal life” as if Corona was only a Mexican beer.

I drove by a community baseball park yesterday.  The stands were packed and the concession area crowded.  The little kids kicked dirt on the multiple fields or talked on the benches in the dugouts.  It was vintage suburban Americana:  from a not-long ago era when there wasn’t a virus.  

I want to, “Go down to the demonstration, to get my fair share of abuse,” (Stones).   At least most of the protestors there are wearing masks. But it still could be another “super-spreader” event, regardless of the worthiness of the cause.  And whatever Mr. Trump says he believes; his lawyers know the truth.  To attend his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma (now on June 20^th to avoid the “Juneteenth” date) a legal waiver of possible COVID-19 infection is required (Trump). 

Real Numbers, Real Costs

My non-believing friends (and I do have many) tell me to look at the US numbers:  “we have crossed the peak and are headed down the slope,” they state confidently.  But look at individual state graphs, minus the New York City metro area. They show that we did manage to flatten the peak, but remain steady in infections and deaths.  We should anticipate that, with the increase of inter-action, that number would increase as well (do a Google Search – graph of Ohio COVID numbers).

That will become even worse by ignoring Dr. Acton’s advice on masks and social distancing.   She made the ultimate “mistake”:  she did her job too well.  Many Ohioans stopped believing.  I hope the price she has to pay in her career, and the price we will have to pay in Ohio lives, won’t be too high.

History

I graduated from good old Wyoming High School in 1974.  I grew up watching violence on television, from the Bloody Sunday beatings and tear-gassing of civil rights protestors on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 to the Chicago Democratic Convention police riots of 1968.  Like most Ohio students in that time, I took American History twice, once in eighth grade, and once again in my junior year.  

My teachers were my parents’ age, veterans of the Second World War.  History class at both levels was the same.  We started with settlement, then onto revolution, industrialization, Civil War, more industrialization, progressivism, World War I, Depression, World War II.  Anything that happened after World War II was a bonus, and we never got too far into Vietnam, or Civil Rights.  Those were current events, not history, I guess.

History class was predictable, and it was very, very, white.  It wasn’t until I reached Denison University that I began to find the contributions of people of color in American development, and even then, it was more from self-study than curriculum.  So when I graduated from college with a degree in “American Political Studies”, I’d never heard of Tulsa.

Historic Omission

My young friends who are now in the streets protesting today didn’t know about Tulsa either, and they blame me for that.  We teachers didn’t teach them about it.  There’s a book titled Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.  It seems as history teachers, if we didn’t learn it in high school, it’s difficult to accept that it happened.  That’s no excuse, but it still seems to be true.  Revelations of history are questioned, because they aren’t “a part” of the comfortable body of knowledge we grew up with.  

And we’ve passed that onto the next generation, with white “centric” history lessons, because it was passed that way to us.  

Tulsa

So what about Tulsa?  Tulsa is the site of one of the worst race massacre in American history.  And it didn’t happen in some ancient time, when history is vaguely reported.  It happened in 1921, when newspapers, radios, and reporters were at their full powers.  

In 1915, DW Griffith made an epic silent movie romanticizing the Ku Klux Klan, The Birth of a Nation.  It was so popular, that President Woodrow Wilson had a private screening in the White House, a first.  Griffith’s revision of American History made the Union Reconstruction the villain and the Klan the hero.  It resonated with an America returning from World War I.  The post-war economic recession, and the migration of blacks from the South competing for employment throughout the country, was fertile ground for hate.

1921 was the year of the true ascent of the Ku Klux Klan.  They were “above ground”.  There were marches in the streets, with thousands of Klan members proudly waving flags (both United States and Confederate) and robes.  The Klan became a potent political force, in many states. Running without Klan endorsement was a losing political strategy.

Tulsa was an oil boom city.  Highly segregated, the black population was centered in the Greenwood neighborhood.  The businesses of Greenwood were successful, earning the nickname “the Black Wall Street”.  And in 1921, mob justice wasn’t uncommon in Tulsa.  Only a year before, a white teenager was accused of murdering a white taxi driver.  A lynch mob took him from jail and killed him. The police did little to stop them.

The Massacre

On May 30, 1921, a black teenager named Dick Rowland, entered an elevator in downtown Tulsa.  At the time elevators were operated by hand, with an “elevator boy” at the controls.  This elevator had an “elevator girl”, Sarah Page, a young white woman.  Somewhere in the ride, she screamed, and he bolted from the elevator and ran.

Rowland was arrested the next day, and the front page of the Tulsa Tribune reported he was charged with sexual assault.  An angry mob of white men gathered in front of the Courthouse, demanding Rowland.  The Sheriff barricaded the top floor of the building and refused to give him to the mob.  Soon twenty-five armed black men, many veterans of World War I, came to offer help protecting the teenager.  

The Sheriff turned them away.  The white mob attempted to break into the National Guard armory, but failed.  By later in the evening, seventy-five armed black men returned to the Courthouse, and confronted the fifteen hundred white men in the crowd, some of whom carried guns.  Shots were fired, and the black men retreated back to Greenwood.

The white mob moved on Greenwood.  A false rumor spread that there was a “black revolt” going on, but in fact, it was white men rioting.  By dawn of June 1^st, thousands of white people were burning, looting and killing in the Greenwood neighborhood.  The fire department was kept out of the area by armed rioters. Over 1200 homes were burned, and another 215 looted.  The National Guard eventually put a stop to the violence and fires, and arrested many black people.  6000 ended up under guard at the local fairgrounds.

Scrubbed History

The official death total was listed at 36, with 10 whites killed.  Dick Rowland was quietly released, and left town.  The Greenwood community eventually was rebuilt, and the KKK got even stronger.

Evidence of the riot was scrubbed from the record.  The state and National Guard records were literally erased from the volumes.  The newspaper headlines and front pages were removed from the bound records.  It was only in the 1970’s that the Massacre was publicly “remembered”, and years after that the true scope of the damage was revealed.

In 2001, the Race Riot Commission concluded that between 100 and 300 people were killed and over 8000 made homeless in the riot.  There are historians still looking for mass graves in the Greenwood area (History).

Trump Campaign

So why bring up Tulsa today?

President Trump is having a campaign rally in Tulsa on June 19^th.  That day is “Juneteenth”, the day celebrated by Americans for the revealing of the Emancipation Proclamation to slaves.  The combination of Tulsa and “Juneteenth” for the first Trump Rally in the COVID and “I Can’t Breathe” era is one of two possibilities.  

Either the President’s staff is so ignorant of the history that they don’t realize the contrast they are creating.  Or, more likely, they know exactly what they are doing.  They are using the contrast to further polarize the electorate.  The Trump campaign will use the outrage over their lack of sensitivity (they’ll call it “political correctness”) to further “fire up” their base.

They want this first rally to be “the best”.  

Rigged Elections

We see it on social media all the time:  “the election system is ‘rigged’”!!  And we read the President’s continual tweets: 

“There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent,” Trump tweeted early Tuesday. “Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.”

While real examples of election fraud in the United States are few (the most recent an absentee ballot fraud scheme in North Carolina by Republicans), it has been the President’s claim that election fraud is rampant, and supports Democrats.   Mr. Trump has made it clear that he considers any reform that makes voting easier, in fact makes Democrats more likely to be elected.   That means they must be cheating.

Georgia

But the real election-cheating going on is by Republicans who control the elections in several states.  The most recent example happened yesterday, when the Georgia primary election was a disaster.  Absentee ballot requests weren’t honored, forcing even those who requested them to vote in person.  New voting machines broke down, forcing long waits at polling places.  Provisional ballots that could be completed by hand were unavailable.  And, in this COVID-19 world, there was a lack of qualified poll workers.

In spite of the pandemic, people in Georgia came out to vote.  In the Democratic Primary, with the nomination already secured by Joe Biden, more than 666,500 votes have been counted.  Perhaps 100,000 more absentee votes and an untold number of provisional votes are yet to be tallied.  In 2016, in the thick of the Clinton/Sanders battle, 761,218 voted, so it’s likely that even more Georgia Democrats came out yesterday.

Georgia wasn’t ready.  Georgia’s Republican controlled election process failed.  After the failures of the 2018 election, where Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, running for Governor, refused to remove himself from electoral decision-making, we thought maybe Georgia had learned a lesson.  Now Governor Kemp should have instructed his Secretary of State, civil engineer and businessman Brad Rafensperger, to solve the problems. 

And voters in Georgia’s Republican counties didn’t have a voting problem yesterday.  The problems were in the largely minority counties, that also happen to be the largely Democratic counties.  Folks waited in lines for up to five hours.  Some reached the actual polls, only to find that their application for absentee ballots that were never sent disqualified them from voting in person.  Others couldn’t wait that long. Work, children, life, and exposure to COVID-19 risking crowds required some to fail to vote.

Legal Cheating

The President is correct.  There is massive voter cheating in the United States.  It is led by some of the Republican state’s electoral leadership, and supported by the Republican voter suppression program throughout the United States.  Here in Ohio, the State House of Representatives passed a bill reducing the amount of time available to request absentee ballots, and preventing the Secretary of State (a Republican) from sending postage paid absentee ballot requests and ballots.  The bill passed on a party line vote.

It’s not just about COVID-19.  It is the policy of the Republican Party to make voting as difficult as possible.  Mail-in voting restrictions, voter identification requirements, and limited polling place access in “minority” voting areas, all are ways of “restricting the vote,” another way of keeping Democratic voters from participating in the process.

President Donald Trump said that if the United States switched to all-mail voting, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

The GOP speaker of the House in Georgia said an all-mail election would be “extremely devastating to Republicans.”

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said universal mail voting would be “the end of our republic as we know it” (Chicago Tribune).

This week, polling shows Joe Biden running several points ahead of President Trump in national polling.  More importantly, Biden is leading in Florida (+3.4%), Pennsylvania (+3.3%), Wisconsin (+3.4%), and in the latest Fox News Poll, even in Ohio (+2.0%) (RCP).  It’s still five months until the election, but, just as in 2016, Trump needs “everything” to go his way to win re-election. 

 It shouldn’t be a surprise to find Republicans rigging the system.  As Mr. Trump himself said in 2016:

“The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary – but also at many polling places – SAD.”

Many polling places – run by Republicans.

Racist

Once, in our society, there was a range of ways to tell someone that they didn’t understand racial issues.  It would start with saying they were insensitive, then perhaps unknowingly prejudiced.  If that didn’t explain the problem, then defining their actions as openly prejudiced was the next step.  The last step reserved only for those most affirmably and knowingly against another race, was to call them a racist.

Racist was reserved for the Ku Klux Klan and the axe handle carrying Governor of Georgia, Lester Maddox.  Racist was the ultimate insult, not just of hate, but of poor judgment and ignorance.  I knew a lot of prejudiced people in my time, but I didn’t know a lot of racists.  I felt I could change prejudice; reach them intellectually and emotionally.  There was hope.  I didn’t want to know racists.  There was no hope for them.

Not any more.  A look at social media, particularly Facebook, sees the word racist used to describe almost all behavior that fails to recognize the reality of Black America.  Use the words “All Lives Matter” and you are a racist.  Worry about the damage done in riots, without worrying about the life of George Floyd, and you are a racist.  Try to draw some nuance from the polarized debate about America today, and you are a racist.

American Tale

The American story is about redemption, finding faith and knowledge and changing attitudes.  There seems to be no room in our polarized society for that:  once you are a “racist” you are branded beyond absolution.  There are lots of folks who overcame ignorance and prejudice, but it’s hard to find the story of a racist overcoming the hate.  Sure there are those guys who used to be Neo-Nazis or KKK members, who now have “seen the light”.   But they are few, and ultimately not trusted.

Our polarized language isn’t allowing for redemption. 

Another example is the slogan “Defund the Police”.   Even those who use it regularly, explain that it really doesn’t mean what it plainly says, take all the money away from the police department.  It is “shorthand” for repurposing police departments, taking the roles that don’t suit policing and putting them where they belong.  

Drug overdoses, mental health issues, traffic control all might be placed in some other category rather than “policing”.  Call 9-1-1 for a heart attack, and an ambulance arrives.  Call for a fire, and a fire truck comes.  9-1-1 for a break-in and the police show up.  Maybe for a mental health issue, the “Mental Health Service” arrives.  Need to direct traffic, and the “Traffic and Roads Service” takes charge:  no guns, no arrest warrants.

The role of policing will still exist, and it would be a highly defined organization that would serve.  So would the role now filled by SWAT, and by process servers.  It just wouldn’t all be placed under one organization.  Organizers should have painted “repurpose the police” or “redefine the police” or “reorganize the police” on the street.  But none of those terms cut through in our highly polarized language of today.

Divide or Conquer

Hillary Clinton fell into the “polarization game” with her “basket of deplorables”.  Joe Biden is a more nuanced politician.  He refuses to fall into the polarization, refuses to allow the “writing off” of large segments of America. Donald Trump is the opposite, the essential divider.  He is the “perfect” President for a nation hoping to be split.  

Again this morning he asked Americans not to believe their “lying eyes”.  He told us that seventy-five year-old Martin Gugino, pushed down and injured by police in Buffalo, New York, was not actually hurt.  No, he was an “ANITFA provocateur”.  The President states, publicly on Twitter, “…He fell harder than he was pushed. Was aiming a scanner”.  

Mr. Gugino had a police helmet, not a scanner, in his hands.  The video evidence is clear.  But in our era of polarization, some can ignore their own eyes, and see what the President wants them to see.  Here’s the video:  SEE for yourself.

Label or Educate

Calling everyone who doesn’t agree with you a racist won’t solve the problem.  Demanding that they go down on their knees and ask forgiveness for white privilege won’t work either.  Redemption is admitting sin, and attempting not to sin again.  We cannot bully everyone into the confessional of public opinion, and shame them into change.  But we can bully everyone into even harder positions and a more polarized society.  

We need to educate, to persuade, and to move people from prejudice to acceptance.  Perhaps an old man from Scranton, Pennsylvania, himself in need of redemption for fifty years of differing statements, is the perfect fit for the job.  Joe Biden understands the difference between prejudice and racism.  He’s fallen into the trap himself:  “You ain’t black if you vote for Trump”.  And he’s learning from his mistakes, just as we need to ask the nation to do.

We are not just choosing between Trumpism and Democrats.  It’s a choice between polarization and national union.  It’s all in the language.

Nixon Again

“Defund the Police” – painted in bright yellow over six lanes of road. Just down the street, “Black Lives Matter” painted by the Mayor of Washington, DC .  It’s within view of the White House.  A short slogan that means what it says, but not what it sounds like.  What it doesn’t mean is abolish policing, though that’s what Trump 2020 wants you to think.  Trump himself tweeted it out:

“Sleepy Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats want to “DEFUND THE POLICE”. I want great and well paid LAW ENFORCEMENT. I want LAW & ORDER!”

It’s ironic that the President presiding over the biggest protests since the 1968 Civil Rights and Anti-War demonstrations claims that he wants “LAW AND ORDER”.  But if there is one single political truth to the Trump campaign, it is “Do what Nixon did”.  Nixon was able to tie the 1968 disruptions to the Democratic Party. With that he squeaked out a win over Hubert Humphrey.  The difference:  Humphrey was running as the Vice President to Lyndon Johnson, the President “in charge” of the nation during the upheaval.  That’s Trump’s role now.

So, what does “defund the police” actually mean?  

Lunatic Asylums

The way America handled mental health might give us a clue as to what “defunding the police” implies.  In the mid-1800’s, Dorothea Dix, a Boston schoolteacher, campaigned for better treatment for the mentally ill.  At the time, mental illness was treated as criminal, and “lunatics” where put in jail.  Dix campaigned for more compassionate care in a hospital setting, and by the time of her death, 110 psychiatric hospitals were established in the United States.  They were called “asylums;” places of safety for the mentally ill.

Reform

By 1955, over half a million Americans were in state-run psychiatric hospitals.  In 1962, “Beat Generation” author Ken Kesey drew attention to abuses in those hospitals with his book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Medical professionals began to call for community-based mental health services rather than institutionalization.  Over the next decade, the American model moved away from hospitalization.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the Mental Health Systems Act funding community based services. But with the election of Ronald Reagan, funding for that law was cut, and Reagan turned control of mental health over to the states. The “Reagan way” was to give the states authority and cut the money. Federal funding was slashed by thirty percent.  Most of the traditional state-run hospitals were closed.

Reagan never used the phrase “defund mental health”, but that’s effectively what he did.  He didn’t end mental health care in the United States, but he changed the entire model of care for the mentally ill.  The good news:  the large “lunatic asylums” that became warehouses for the mentally ill were closed.  The bad news:  many of those patients ended up as homeless folks on the streets.

The massive hospitals were gone, old relics deserted on a hill; their model of care (or lack of care) discarded.  The institution was altered.  And that’s what “defund the police” is calling for.  There will still be officers enforcing the law.  But what “defunding the police” demands is a radical overhaul of the American concept of “big city” policing.  

Altering Institutions

The institution of policing has suffered from many of our societal changes.  The closing of the large mental hospitals, and lack of funding for more community-based care, have put dealing with mental illness squarely on the shoulders of the police.  The dramatic increase in drug abuse in our nation, with the criminalization of more and more drugs, has also dramatically added to the police burden. They not only enforce the drug laws, but become the first-responders for drug abuse care, with life-returning drugs to reverse overdoses.

And police have taken on the task of anti-terrorism.  Police forces have militarized units, often in camouflaged gear, and with heavy-duty assault vehicles.  It’s just another task added onto the institution with little increased funding, or training, or even looking at other alternatives for achieving the goal.

All of these tasks need to be done, but the current institution of policing isn’t necessarily the best model to do them.  And like the giant mental hospital up on the hill I remember from my youth, the institutions of police forces seems unable to be changed.  In part, the unions, who often refuse to police the violations of their own members, cause this.  But there is also an “us against them” culture in many police departments that sees “the public” as the enemy, and others “in blue” as their only friends.

Slogans

Short slogans are easily misrepresented.  “Abolish ICE” from two years ago, didn’t mean let anyone who could get into the country stay here.  It called for a change in the institution, removing the “black shirted” force that seemed to act with capriciousness and terror in their enforcement of the law.  “Abolish Ice” was shorthand for either reforming the institution, or tearing it down and starting over.  

“Defund the police” doesn’t mean anarchy, much as the President wants us to think so.  It doesn’t even necessarily mean abolishing our current police departments.  But what it is demanding is that we overhaul what tasks the police are asked to do, and choose other, better ways to deal with our community problems.  Say it that way, and it’s worth looking into.

Minneapolis

The Minneapolis Board of Education cancelled their contract with the City Police Department to station officers in their schools.  In the wake of the George Floyd murder by a Minneapolis Police officer, the Board felt they no longer could have officers as part of their educational process.  It probably wasn’t about the individual officers in the buildings.  The Board of Education must feel that the continued presence of “police” in their buildings would continue the hostile environment that Minneapolis minority students already feel outside the school.  The Board felt they had to “take a side,” and chose their students.

SRO’s

The movement to “imbed” police officers into school systems, particularly at the high school level, started back in Flint, Michigan in the 1950’s.  The idea was to create relationships between the students and police officers outside of normal enforcement.  In the 1970’s, some large urban school districts actually created their own sworn police forces (think of the 1984 movie Teachers with Nick Nolte, JoBeth Williams and Ralph Macchio).  But the liability and expense made “school-cops” an expendable item on Districts budget.

That changed in the age of school shootings, and particularly after Columbine.  Districts began to look for ways to get the ultimate protection, a police officer with a gun, full time in the school building.  The speed of casualties in a school shooting meant that the officer presence in the building could save lives.  And, it didn’t hurt that from 1999 to 2005, the US Department of Justice gave $750 million in grants for “School Resource Officers”, SRO’s.   

But today, SRO’s don’t just “sit around” and wait for a school shooter.  They patrol the building and get involved in student discipline issues, including fights and drug use.  SRO’s serve as contact for students who need to report criminal issues, particularly for abuse situations.  They advise school administrators about security needs for the buildings and for large school events.  And they do exactly what the 1950’s Flint plan hoped:  communicate with kids on an informal basis, establishing relationships between “cops and kids” outside of speeding tickets, traffic accidents and regular policing. 

On the Job

As a high school Dean of Students, I had the opportunity to work with several Student Resource Officers.  All of them took their role as a bridge from police to students seriously. They reached out to students that didn’t necessarily have other adults at school they could talk to.  From that standpoint, having an SRO in the building was a good thing.

It was common for the SRO to be “hanging out” in the cafeteria at lunchtime.  What looked like “lunch duty” was really an opportunity for conversation and building relationships.  Our SRO’s even wandered up to the gym, open for lunchtime “recess”, and shot a basket or two.  It made “the police” accessible to students in a non-threatening way.

But the problem today is that what were traditionally “school problems,” in-house discipline issues, now have become criminal issues.  The fight in the hallway, or the kid with a pocketknife or a joint in his pocket now is “automatically” a police report and possible juvenile court referral.  The “school to prison” pipeline, fueled by “zero-tolerance” policies, creates the first contact with the justice system. That record has future consequences in punishment and sentencing.

It’s not that the SRO’s are wrong:  they are doing their job.  A police officer in a public situation like a school environment can’t look away when a weapon is found or an illegal drug is involved.  But what was school discipline; suspension or expulsion back in the 1980’s or 90’s now may result in a criminal conviction as well.

Balancing Needs

It’s not that schools shouldn’t call the police.  There are situations where it’s more than necessary:  a gang-fight in the halls, the rumor of a gun in the building, the adult coming to school to hurt someone.  All of those things happened during my tenure as Dean of Students.  And all of those occurred when the school district couldn’t afford to have an SRO.  We had to handle those things in-house until the police could arrive.

But Districts need to weigh the balance between education and policing.  Having an SRO embedded in the school might work in the suburban district where I was Dean of Students. But it might not work in the more polarized environment of an urban school.  It’s not about being for the cops or against.   It’s about what’s best for the students in that school system.  That’s what Minneapolis had to weigh. And that’s what Districts across the country will have to consider in our new “I Can’t Breathe” era.

The Experiment

The American government is a strange place.  We pride ourselves on being a democracy, “…a government of the people, by the people and for the people” as Lincoln put it.  And we are in the largest sense.  We elect a legislature to write our laws, and the executive is an elected President.  

But the founding fathers were acutely aware of the dangers of democracy as well as it value.  They came from the English tradition of monarchy, and knew the perils of an arbitrary ruler who could, at whim, change the laws and traditions.  And even more significantly, many of the founding fathers were lawyers.  They were schooled in the English common law. In that tradition, rules governing day to day life in society are based on centuries old precedents, tested over time in varying situations.  

Precedent 

On My first day in law school “Torts” class back in 1981 this was made dramatically clear to us. The professor told the story of a town in medieval England, where two boys were seeing who could throw rocks the furthest.  They decided to launch over a hill at the same time.  The rocks soared, then landed out of sight on the other side.  There was a scream, and the boys raced to the top to find that a rock had put a man’s eye out.

Obviously one of the boys’ rocks did the damage.  But which one threw it?  The man certainly didn’t know, and neither did the boys.  Neither boy was fully accountable, so who could be held liable for the damage to the man’s eye?  The judge ruled since each boy had acted equally recklessly, that both were equally responsible for the damage.  If I recall correctly, both boys were required to give the man a pig in compensation.

There was the “rule of the people” as seen in classic democratic ideals.  But there were also the long-standing traditions, the common law. 

American Institutions

In America we have long standing institutions that carry on a common tradition.  We look to them for reassurance in difficult times, and to help guide our democracy to safety.  Institutions like the military, the Department of Justice, the Courts:  all have long standing practices that help steady our government. Our current President sees those institutions as impediments to achieving his goals.  But traditionally they have carried on the ideals of American government, in spite of the arbitrary whims of a given President.

I studied political science at Denison University, and we spent some time on what was then called “the bureaucracy”.   It was the mid-1970’s and “bureaucracy” was seen in two lights.  First, it was a burden, standing in the way of the needed changes in America.  Much as you hear today, it was the “bureaucracy” that favored the military-industrial machine and prolonged the Vietnam War.  It was the “bureaucracy” that was one of the last to favor integration.  And it was the bureaucracy that stood against increased civil rights for women, minorities and gays.

Justice

But it was also the bureaucracy that brought Richard Nixon to justice.  It was in the Department of Justice and the Courts where Nixon’s threats and retributions were ignored, and it was there that the full extent of his crimes was revealed.  Without those institutions, Nixon might well have gotten away with his political abuses.

 And it was also in the Courts, that the full weight of the US Constitution was brought to bear for the rights of the individual.  It was the Supreme Court led by Earl Warren, a former Republican Governor from California, that made the decisions for civil rights, equal education and due process rights in the criminal process.  The Warren Court set the precedents that allow American society to become more accepting, and allowed Americans to address the ongoing problems we still see today.  Without those decisions, we never would have made the progress we did.  

History Lesson

Here’s my “OK Boomer” rant of the day.  The young generation, out in the streets demanding justice, blame generations of the past for not getting things “fixed”.  It’s easy for the twenty-something’s to forget, or maybe they never knew, what changes went before them.  I’m sixty-three years old, and I remember driving through Kentucky as a child, seeing “Whites Only” signs.  As a boy I went on holiday to Washington, DC and my friend in Virginia had school off for Robert E. Lee’s birthday.  I watched on black and white TV as Bull Connor sent the dogs and the fire hoses against black protestors.  We didn’t complete the task of change, but we’ve come a long way since then.  

And today we find those institutions, the bureaucracy, or as former Trump “brain” Steve Bannon would put it, the “Deep State”; are some of the very things holding our nation together.  When the President determined to use the United States military to intervene where he thought state leaders weren’t doing enough to control protestors, even his own appointees stepped in.  Defense Secretary Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Milley made it clear that they opposed using troops in this way.  In addition Former Secretaries of Defense Mattis and Perry, and former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs Dempsey and Mullins all stepped up to protest military involvement.

The soldiers of the 82^nd Airborne are standing-down; most are headed back to base. 

Holding the Fort 

The other institutions of the United States government are also trying to “hold the fort” in this tumultuous time of Trump.  The “deep state” that protects our health, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health have been defunded and ignored by the Trump administration.  Yet they still are trying to get their message out, and are doing their best to control the COVID-19 outbreak.  They are being undercut from many directions, not least from the President himself, but they are still trying to help the states and American people survive.

And the intelligence agencies, ignored and humiliated by the Trump Administration, are still trying to do their job.  They warned of the COVID-19 epidemic early, but were ignored.  And they continue to warn of the external threats to our election, from Russia and China and Iran.  We should listen to them, even if the present White House sees it all as a “Deep State” attack on Trump’s policies.

Bureaucracy, Institutions, Deep State:  they are the “bad guys” when it comes to making rapid change in America.  But “bad guys” is a relative term:  it’s only bad if the changes would make America worse, like the authoritarian changes that Attorney General Bill Barr and President Donald Trump are trying to make. Steve Bannon was right on one thing:  those institutions are protecting America – even from the President himself.

Internet Experts

One of the hardest problems about the COVID-19 pandemic is who to listen to.  In this “Reddit, YouTube, saw it on Facebook” age, there are hundreds of so-called “experts” explaining everything about the virus.  We are told that the virus actually doesn’t attack the lungs, even though most of those who died suffered “lung failure”.  They told us that an anti-bacterial, Chloroquine, used for treatment of malaria, was an effective medication for COVID-19.  And then there are the statistical “experts” who say that since there is such a low chance of dying from the disease, we should just let it happen.

One of the biggest problems is that the “real” experts, the folks who have spent their careers studying viral infections and epidemics, aren’t giving us good news.  They aren’t telling us to “go back to life”, and they aren’t offering miraculous cures.  They are saying that they really don’t know how bad this outbreak will be.  Their best guess: things are likely to get ugly as we open up our society again, and then again in the fall when we all go back inside.

Easy Answers

We want a miracle cure.  We don’t want to wear masks, wash our hands, and socially distance.  And when those are the only real solutions offered, we go looking on the “Internet” for something better.  

We ignore experts at our peril.  It’s happening with this disease, and over 108,000 Americans are dead because of it.  We are still doing it with the environment, and pretending that the consequences “won’t be that bad”. “Anti-vaxxers” do it, pretending that they can ignore diseases and not be harmed by them.  We go to the keyboard, and find excuses.

We are in an age where everyone can become an expert, just by getting on a computer.  And even worse, we don’t even have to read; we can have it spoon-fed to us on YouTube, with cool music in the background and nifty graphics.  This instant knowledge, told by folks that are absolutely certain about their conclusions, is more than seductive.  They are telling us what we want to hear, and they are absolutely certain they’re right. 

And the real experts, aware enough to realize they don’t have the answers look pale and puny compared to the YouTube geniuses.  Take Anthony Fauci, a man who has for almost forty years led America’s battle against lethal viruses.  “Oh, but he worked with the big pharmaceutical companies, so he can’t be trusted!”  He was trying to find vaccines and medications for brand new diseases. Who would you expect him to turn to for help?  Sure Louis Pasteur worked alone, but that was one hundred and fifty years ago.  Fauci went to the experts, the best at creating medications quickly.  And they produced results, for AIDS and Ebola, and for many of the other pandemic viruses we faced.

But it’s not just pandemics and climate.  

Balancing Rights

President Trump finds that the Governors and Mayors won’t listen to his “expert” approach to controlling protests over the death of George Floyd.  But he can control how the Federal District of Columbia responds, so he has created his own “expert” to control DC – Attorney General Bill Barr.

Washington has a duly elected Mayor, a Police Chief, a large metropolitan police department and a full range of city administrators.  But the President seems unwilling to allow those folks to do their jobs.  Instead, from an “FBI Command Center” in downtown, Bill Barr uses Federal agents from across the alphabetical spectrum to take over.  FBI, DEA, ATF, Bureau of Prisons, Customs Enforcement, and National Guard all are “flooding the battle zone” (a football and warfare concept combined), in spite of the protests of the local government authorities.

And the “expert” Barr has an even bigger “card” to play if he wants to:  he’s dragged out the “Insurrection Act of 1807” to allow him to use the US military.  He’s stationed active duty troops just outside of Washington.  That may be a “bridge too far” for the Defense Department.  Defense Secretary Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Milley have just now started to push back against using the military on American streets, late in realizing what may happen.  But that might not stop the Attorney General.

The Siege

Bill Barr’s a high priced lawyer.  He’s twice been Attorney General of the United States, and both times been involved in controversial interventions in the American justice system.  But he’s no expert in crowd control, defending First Amendment rights, or city or police management.  His expertise seems to be in one thing only:   garnering more power for the President, regardless of what the Constitution says.

It’s hard to imagine Bill Barr watching YouTube.  But I bet he’s seen the 1998 movie The Siege starring Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis a bunch of times.  It’s when the 101^st Airborne takes over New York City under martial law.  Mr. Barr must fall asleep in the middle though, because the final message of the movie is that the occupation doesn’t end too well for New York, the Constitution, or America.