Robbing Peter...

It is gratifying for me to see the hit the ol’Confederacy is taking nationally in the wake of the Charleston killings.  As a Virginia resident for 34 years I’m tired of seeing that war continued to be fought, not just in race relations, but also against the notion of achieving most any kind of improvement on a national scale.

Such things as healthcare, infrastructure, poverty, safety, environment, or education (to name a few) are somehow viewed as an assault on individual freedom and states’ rights to the Rebel faithful.  Reality plays no part. The Johnny Reb of today would never believe a Confederate States of America would ever have any socialist mechanisms such as, say…taxes.

That said, I am dismayed to see such media debate at this time and with this tragedy.  The major problem that surrounds this shooting is not racism or hate, it is the tools with which people can act out their unhinged fears and the acceptability we, as a culture, tacitly give to their actions.

 The way the Charleston shooting is playing out feels like a script written by the NRA.  At this point the Confederate battle flag will be partially vilified, removed from some (maybe all) public places and folks will walk away saying ‘job well done’. It may feel good, but frankly, nothing substantive will have been accomplished.  We will have robbed a starving Peter and fed a growing Paul.

There is nothing illegal about racism, prejudice, or hate in the United States.  We can, do, and should create laws to restrict how people act on those attitudes, just as our social ethics (laws) seek to protect us one from another for any reason.  Those laws create trends like social antibiotics in a sick nation. We actually begin to change.

The great defeat for the dilatory effects of racism occurred in the late 1950s to early 1970s.  Manifested racism, especially for African Americans, was given a mortal blow and has been dying ever since. That may not be comforting to those blacks that still feel the effect, but it is true. 

We won’t see racism fully replaced by essentially an historical aberration until the baby boomer generation has finally died off.  The reason is that the boomers are the last generation to have lived in and been influenced by people who lived (their entire lives) in an era when racism and the segregationist realities that came with it was more than okay, it was normal.

The Millennials (those born between 1981 and 2000) will take over this country with the knowledge and attitude that no matter how they feel about racism, they know it is ethically wrong.  It will change everything.  The same is playing out with the discrimination of homosexuals.  Women are finally now starting to feel the effects of being unchained.

What’s not happening is even the beginning of an attitude adjustment toward the use of guns in the US. That is not to say that a majority of American citizens don’t want these guns (more specifically handguns) under serious control uniformly across the country.  They do.  It does say that the nation as a whole does not have the political will to begin to take the first steps to change the future. Given the same political will applied to those aforementioned issues, all aspects of this nation would today be exclusively run by straight, white guys. Mad Men wouldn’t have made it past the first season it would have been so mundane.

The major problem to deal with is not the racism of the 21 year old perpetrator of the Charleston church shooting, or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Muslim religion, or James Eagan Holme’s psychosis, or Adam Lanza’s undiagnosed behavioral problems, or Seung-Hui Cho’s being bullied, or any other reason why the deranged run amok.  The problem is that our American society feels it is okay to give them the means to act out their shocking unbalanced mania. 

This doesn’t even address the over 6000 lives taken each year in the US by the use of handguns. All this carnage is because this nation and its leaders lack the political will to find it abnormal and unacceptable.

Okay, stick a fork in the Confederacy, it’s done and way overcooked.  But in the process don’t close your eyes to the war that actually rages around you.  Don’t let Peter be a victim, just to feel good about Paul.

Obama, You Just Don't Get It...

In the wake of the latest mass killing in Charleston, SC I watched a cable news program play a litany of Obama reaction speeches he has made after similar events over his term as President.  They were eerily alike, in both content and tenor, with a little more emphasis this time on differentiating the US with the rest of the world.  They also broadcast comments from other political and social leaders regarding this attack and they too sounded similar with lots of; “we must never let this happen again” and “it’s not how we fall, but how we get up” and “love and faith will conquer evil” and so forth.


If there were creatures viewing this from Space they would find it humorous, just as we might laugh watching a dog chase his tail. However on planet earth and, more specifically, Homeland America, we feel real pain, yet wallow in tragedy more like it is a ritual than any kind of lesson.  When 21 six year old children can be gunned down and murdered in a horrific fashion, in a benign location, and the society they lived in does absolutely nothing to react to it other than to provide sympathy, then we shouldn’t expect that the killing of 9 adults in a church will tomorrow be anything more than yesterday’s news.

President Obama is as responsible as any group or individual for his failure to understand the problem we, as Americans, face as a society, which he so blithely points out doesn’t exist in most other nations.  He has the pulpit but doesn’t use it.  He talks to the nation like a retired college professor might speak to a Senior Center preceding the beginning of bingo night.  I am so tired of it, Mr. Obama. This is the speech I want to hear:

For six years as your President I have misunderstood what we refer to as the “gun debate” and the proliferation of gun violence that we have now routinely addressed with this month’s or that month’s mass killing.  I have also failed to adequately communicate the connection between these mass tragedies and the small ones that occur daily, if not hourly, around the Nation.  I have less than two years left and I will not make this same mistake again, even if my efforts only end up tossed on desert air.

I and other political and social leaders have stood before you and said we need to act so that whatever mass killing du jour was examined such would never happen again.  That was a lie. It was always a lie, even to those like me who were foolish enough to believe it might be true. These killings will happen again and there is nothing we can do to stop it. 


A volcano with all its fury and devastation only spews a fraction of the molten lava that exists beneath the surface.  We have too many guns that can be concealed and, like any society, we have a lunatic fringe. However with 320 million people, that fringe, however small the percentage, is huge in numbers.  There is much that we can do socially to deal with psychotic individuals, those with criminal intent, or poisoned with hate, but we cannot make it “never happen again”.  I am far more fearful that I will see in my life another Sandy Hook or Virginia Tech than hopeful I will not.

However, I am referring to my life.  What about the lives of my children and my grandchildren or yours? Can we make it “never happen again” for them or at least make it the exception rather than the rule? What is it we can do now that will make a difference in the future?

There is a lot we can do, and to the extent we don’t we only push the problem to the next generation and irrationally compound the agony these weapons create among us.

The destruction that high capacity guns that can be readily hidden from public view goes far beyond the mass killings that brings so many of us to our knees.  They allow crime of all kinds, both overt and coercive to thrive.  It is so hard to control that law enforcement across the nation has begun to react offensively, like warriors proactive in their own defense instead of being the stewards of our safety.
  
A clear majority of the Nation does not feel more secure because there is a proliferation of these weapons, quite the opposite.  We need to decide as a Nation, as a Society, and as a culture that these weapons should not be part of the American fabric and begin taking the steps that will ultimately impact the next generation or certainly the generation after that, not simply with the reduction of handguns, but a fundamental change in what they will view as right and normal. No one views today the restriction of smoking in public places as abnormal, while fifty years ago it would have been unthinkable. Why should guns be different? 

How do we do make that change?  Four steps; we propose aggressive laws, we emphatically point out who opposes those laws, we overcome them politically, and we pass those laws. As our children grow to take over this country they will see what we started and, I believe, tend and nurture the seeds we have planted. They will see the commitment that will lead to the new normal.

These are the first laws I feel are essential:  First, that there can be no concealed handguns carried by any individual in the United States unless that individual is in public law enforcement or has been licensed by the Federal Government, second, the magazine capacity of all existing and manufactured handguns be regulated by the Federal Government, third, that a Federal background check must be completed and accepted for the transfer of any handgun, public or private, and fourth, all handguns must be registered with the Federal Government. Violation of these laws and subsequent regulations would be a felony under Federal statute and subject to harsh penalties.

It is no mystery that states with powerful Conservative minorities would fight such laws. They would do so primarily through Republican representatives in Congress and the funding by national interests such as the NRA.  They would wage a dirty fight, manipulating citizens through use of conspiratorial fears and false claims of patriotism, just as they always have. They would evoke the word “freedom” to their own ends.  Perhaps freedom to them is a metal detector at every door of every school, church, pizza parlor, dry cleaner…you name it. Maybe freedom to them is the fear of being shot by a traffic cop as you pull your wallet out of your pants pocket.

The Republican Party will take the shameless position of advancing their political control at the expense of innocent and precious lives.  They too will argue that freedom is in jeopardy, but I for one will no longer be passive to their hypocrisy.  Let them fight; I’m ready to do battle. I have no more elections to win and if my own Party does not back me, so be it.

I ask every American who feels the same as me to commit time and money to make vocal their position and to support those in public office who hold the same.  Even if in a given state a majority is persuaded by the powerbrokers to support Republican opponents of gun control, I will not abandon those who suffer in those states for lack of national commitment.  Anyone who loses their life because we, as a nation, have failed to act is a minority of one.  In this country everyone counts, not just those who feel threatened because they no longer have uncontrolled use of handguns. Join me.

Get real Obama.  What do you have to lose?

I Am

This week a news piece regarding a Caucasian woman claiming to be African-American got national attention.  My first reaction was questioning why this rose to such a level. Sure, the woman (Rachel) was an activist for African-American issues and a spokesperson for the NAACP, but really…with what’s going on in the world – why this?  Outed by her white, estranged biological parents, she was interviewed and edited to look tongue-tied, sounding both evasive and dishonest.  

However, the more I considered the news story the more relevance I found to fundamental problems that our social norms have difficulty surmounting.  It goes beyond race and spotlights at least part of the reason communications and cooperation have been unable to keep up with demographic and technological changes. 

This should have been her response: 

Am I black, am I white? The question itself underlies the reason why our culture remains so divided, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Is President Obama black or is he white? He has identified with and been lauded as the first African-American president, yet his mother was Caucasian. Is he black because of the way he looks?  Is Catlin Jenner a woman or a man? He looks like a woman, his physiology is male.  Which is it? It should make little or no difference how the question is answered, but in our society the question itself evokes amusement, hostile emotions, and/or, for some, an unhealthy need for retribution. 

Like it or not we now physically live in an integrated world. There are just too many of us with communication far too rapid and mobility never more available.  Yet we still apply the historical social and religious mindsets that believe the differences we see need to have us separated, closeted, or protected one from another. This has been fostered by hate, perceived good intention, religious dogma, or simply inertia. 

My biological parents are white, my family is black. How I view myself has meaning for me in a variety of ways, but how does that have meaning to anyone else? Yet that view is somehow considered such a violation that it warrants national attention.  Can anyone else not see where the real problem is here? 

The Nazis killed millions of people because they were born into families that prescribed to a particular religion or chose to be, biology played no part. That is unlikely to happen again, but the mindset survives and atrocities of all kinds continue to flourish because of that mindset. The fact of the matter was; those Jews were just people, fundamentally the same as anyone else. Skin color is no different. Before anyone criticizes me or judges my life with prejudice, whether they be black or white, they need to ask themselves why they are asking the question in the first place. 

This story deserves national attention, but not in the way it has been presented.  It has been reported like a titillating sex story, not dissimilar to the Bruce/Catlin Jennings saga.  The fact that interviewed whites (which interestingly include her biological parents) view Rachel as being a nut case (her parents actually stated in an interview that they believed she was mentally ill) or that interviewed blacks viewed her as a fraud or opportunist shows how the news media places priority on reporting only that which they believe will increase viewership and, therefore, ratings and income.  The real and important news story requires a mirror.  While this young lady has the spotlight I hope she has the ability to pull one out of her purse and point it at the camera.