An Open Letter To A Young Friend

by Nance

In the responses I received to my last post, The Wedding Bends, my young friend Jeffrey Johnson left one of his thoughtful, gentle comments that opened a heap of reflection for me. Jeffrey is kingcoyote, of Penny Candy & Shady Characters, whom I featured here in Allow Me To Introduce; for a real treat, go visit his most recent post, entitled Rocking Chair.  He writes of his young daughter, Abby, and his new daughter, Olivia, who is one month old.  I found myself writing way too much to Jeffrey. For convenience, I will re-post his comment here and respond to it with an open letter to him and to his generation.


kingcoyote:

About a year ago, I was stuck in traffic, waiting to get onto the highway. In the left lane, people kept going by at a good clip while my land was at a virtual stand-still. As I neared the highway exit ramp, I could see the problem... people were zipping up the left lane to the front of the line, and being let in. I really couldn't decide which one irritated me more, the people cutting in line (holding the rest of us up, as if WE didn't have places to be) or the people letting them in.

I can't help but feel the same way about the Westboro people, and the media. One thing that this interweb community that I've become a part of shows me over and over is that there really ARE many, many good peoples out there. Much more, I think, than the crazy creepers. Unfortunately, it's the crazies that sell papers... if we stopped paying attention to them, maybe they'd lose some of their power.

At any rate, I tend to feel like MFM [My Fellow Men] are (as a general rule) good people, but we tend to get so overwhelmed by the number of GLOBAL needs that it's easy to forget that what matters is an accumulation of LOCAL needs. I read a zen quote(ish) this week about community that went something like "We all see ourselves as waves, but forget that we are part of the ocean."

 Dear  Jeffrey,
You make a very good point, one that always generates some ambivalence for me when I feature Serious Crazy in a blog post:  maybe the Westboros of our world would go away if we ignore them.

I spent most of the last four years of the Bush administration in a news-fallout shelter. I yoga'd and Om'd myself into the present, local moment and stayed there as much as possible--especially after I discovered that New Zealand didn't need any retiring psychotherapists. I poked my nose out in 2007 to see if sanity had made any inroads and became re-engaged enough in '08 to do a little phone work for Hillary Clinton.  And to try to prevent my retirement savings from self-destructing in mutual fund hell.

I've stayed engaged--initially because I hoped that something really good might be happening in my country, something I could support and didn't want to miss. Then, just when I thought I was going to be able to handle the world again, in what seemed like the blink of an eye but was actually March through October of '08, something terrible and unprecedented, something only a few saw coming, began to happen, instead. I had ventured out to enjoy the view and found myself in a bucket brigade.

I think young families like yours, Jeffrey, do well to limit their exposure to the news, at least to some extent; whatever the emotional climate out there, there is a living to be made and there are babies to be rocked--Life demands some self-preservation of its reproductive generation and I'm all for it. For the sake of the species, please learn just enough about the larger world to make the necessary gross adjustments to conditions and then get on with the job at hand. Concentrate on raising children who take solar panels, wind energy, and locally-grown food as much for granted as their parents take cell-phones, gas stations, and strawberries in November.

I sometimes consider dragging out my mats, putting my feet up the wall, spritzing the lavender on my eye pillow, and disappearing into the Yoga Nidra meditation on my iPod. But a funny thing sometimes happens toward the end of our time here: some of us in the aged generation get riveted by imagining the sequel to the movie of Life--the one we won't be here to watch, the one that follows the movie WE found ourselves in and improvised from.  These days, it really is like watching that proverbial train wreck.


We want to do something to make the sequel better.  We do what we do best, naturally.  I'm a professional Warner; just ask my kids.  I've been practicing my entire life to warn you right now about...whatever it is that looms into my view and winds up in my next blog post.  In this case--or, rather, in the next post--it'll be Ron and Rand Paul and the surprising, threatening growth of Libertarianism in America. You're going to need to know about it, if you don't already. 


I like your focus on local needs.  I think it's just right both for managing life with Our Fellow Man and for building a sustainable life, rather than a growth-driven society. I'm probably preaching to the choir or missing the boat or...well, what I meant to say was that I'm convinced that forewarned is forearmed...okay, bad cliche and really AWFUL choice of words!  I'm convinced that the Libertarian movement will grow if it isn't understood and reckoned with. The term LOCAL isn't going to mean the same thing to everyone.


Localism as discussed by Bill McKibben in his book EAARTH is similar to the kind of community I grew up in during the early fifties.  Those were the conditions and the stories that gave rise to my liberalism and they were simpler, more manageable, far more family-friendly times.  And, although we didn't know it, they were the conditions that contained the seeds of the bitter harvest we reap now.  The New Localism will bear similarities to Fifties America, but it will be different in ways that you and I can't imagine yet, beyond some hopes and wishes...a localism that not even McKibben is willing to draw in detail.  It will be a wised-up localism.   It will not be, I feel fairly certain, the kind of laissez-faire localism that the Libertarians imagine.  


McKibben has written on the Libertarians,

I’m not a libertarian, because I think they’ve conflated “human nature”—their sense of the individual über alles—with the effects of the last couple hundred years of consumer society. I think humans are at their best when they’re social creatures; that’s why I’m a Methodist, not a Randian. But I don’t disdain libertarianism, nor conservatism. How could any environmentalist, who at heart is interested in maintaining as much as possible of the world we were born into? But each day that they remain in sly and subtle opposition to scientific fact draws them further into intellectual disrepute. It’s been a tough couple of years for laissez-faire ideology—Alan Greenspan pretty much dumped Ayn Rand overboard when he told Congress earlier this year that his worldview had been “flawed.” But at this rate, it’s going to be a tough geological epoch too—for all of us.

 And, lo!, I am launched on that next blog post before I've even finished this one.  This is not what I thought I'd be doing in retirement. I'm not really politically savvy enough to be weighing in with the heavy hitter blogs. I contribute my mite, and not without a lot of apprehension.  I was all set to gaze deeper into the Lotus, to join the Ocean, to tend my own garden. Instead, I find myself trying to have the courage to keep seeing the whole, ugly parts and all. I'm not very good at it, but, as the yogi would say, I can't stop until I do.

Jeffrey Johnson, Red Herring Illustration

Rock your precious little children with my warmest blessing.  Drop in here from time to time.  Visit the folks in my Blogroll.  Some of us are Warners, some are Scientists, some are Writers, some are scared and most are funny.  All of us want to help you.  Many of us are your web-local elders, and we love you because you are us...as we were and as it shall be.


Peace, honey.

You and whose army?

It's Memorial Day weekend again in the New South. It's nice to know they've finally accepted a holiday they once loathed. Of course it was Decoration Day until 1968 and after I was grown and had a family. It was as you know, about decorating the graves of Union Soldiers and after the next horror of the Great War, the graves of the 117,465 American dead: a day of solemn reflection.

But by the time they changed it to Memorial Day to make it more compatible with our imperialism at the height of the senseless horror in Vietnam, it was about Dad's cremated Hamburgers and Indy; parades and patriotic hoo-ha, but perhaps it's because I now live in the South, it's taken on a new tone. Perhaps too, it's because I live in an area flooded with retired military folks filled with their own importance and those employed by the notorious Military- Industrial Complex -- but my in-box is once again flooded with glorious stories about our glorious military and the glorious things they do. A good part of them are hoaxes and of course there are no mentions of our heroes of My Ly 4 or Abu Ghraib or of the recent glorious heroes who accidentally slaughtered 30 or so civilians using robot planes in air conditioned comfort from halfway around the world.

No, what I get are bogus stories about Marines rescuing babies on 9/11/01 and how it is the Veterans" we owe our freedom of religion, press, speech and the rest of the rights we've had abridged because of the martial spirit of the times -- not the constitution, the courts or the Government of the United States.

Have we forgotten that the biggest enemy of freedom on this continent was the American South? Was anything we can call our own freedom at risk in most of our wars? Andrew Jackson's slaughter and deportation of the Seminoles? the use of Federal troops in slave raids into Florida? The Mexican War? The Spanish American War? The war against Philippine independence? What kind of threat to our freedom of speech necessitated suppressing free elections in Vietnam or the killing of two million civilians? What threat to our freedom of Religion was posed by Iraq? What threat were flower carrying kids in Ohio that they needed to be shot in the back by American troops? Were the troops driving armored vehicles down Chicago's State Street in 1968 there to support our right to assembly or to shut us up?

It' s not that I have any disrespect for veterans, living or dead, but our Constitution wasn't written by the Generals, no foreign power is any threat to it and that we still pay any attention to the Bill of Rights owes as much to the "activist" courts and the ACLU as to anything else. It owes nothing whatever to the Tea Bag flag wavers who hate government power unless it's carrying guns. It owes nothing to Macho flag wavers from John Wayne to Bomb-bomb McCain.

Memorial day has become an encomium not to dead soldiers; an expression not of profound grief. It's not a day when we mourn our losses or of any remembrance of the horror of war and militarism, but to celebrate living veterans, sing praise to the Armed forces and to the glory of war itself. It's a day we now use to decorate ourselves, congratulate ourselves on our military prowess and this in a country that's been fighting all my life but hasn't been on the winning side of a war since 1945. It's a day too often used to obscure the real threats to freedom with red white and blue bunting and it's good to remember that the same folks crowing about military defense of freedom are quite happy to require anyone with tan skin to carry proof of citizenship at all times, quite happy to give the local police the power of Federal Marshals and to forget all about warrants and probable cause. What army is going to protect us against our own smug racism, bigotry and expansionism?

Arizona Draconia

As in most families, mine has a mix of political views. We frequently find ourselves on opposite sides of a debate but because we love each other, we never devolve into shouting or name calling. (Although voices may rise just a little). And so it was that yesterday I had an exchange with a couple of family members about Arizona's newly minted immigration laws.

Their first argument was that why shouldn't everyone have to carry ID? They only need their driver's license to prove their citizens, right? Wrong, the laws do not specify what constitutes proof of citizenship, only that if asked by law enforcement, you must have documentation to prove you are legally in this country. A driver's license does not usually qualify as proof of citizenship.

So then I asked if they routinely carried their birth certificates around and were willing to present them several times a day to anyone in law enforcement who asked for them. Of course, they are too white to have to worry about that, but I did want them to see the irony of this scenario as compared to the laws of communist countries where you used to have to produce your papers on demand.

After this part of the conversation there came this, "Well, they must have a good reason to take this drastic of a step. It must be really bad in Arizona." And I thought, I wonder just how bad it is in Arizona that they felt they needed to trample the constitution in order to stem the tide of criminal activity against bona fide American citizens.

I went HERE to get some information. The link will take you to Arizona Public Safety Dept crime reports for the last several years and here is what I found out.

Using the crime comparison index, with the exception of larceny and rape, crimes as a whole were down in 2009 from 2008.

Bias/hate offenses statistics was interesting; Assaults, intimidation, damage/vandalism were up across the board. The greatest number of bias crime targets were blacks, Hispanics, Jews and homosexuals.

Surprise, surprise...

Looking at drug offenses, specifically committed by Hispanics, there was, overall a 5% increase or about 500 more cases over the course of 2009. These stats include drug sales and drug use.

When you compare statistics of 2005 to 2009 you find that bias crimes against Hispanics and Jews are up, nearly doubled in 2009. Drug offenses by Hispanics overall is down in 2009 by at least 2,000 arrests. Both violent crime and property crimes are down in 2009 from 2005.

With these numbers in mind, what DID prompt the Draconian measures enacted by the Arizona governor and legislature? The argument that they had to "do something" about illegals in order to fight crime sure doesn't stand up in light of Arizon's own numbers.

Dairy Farm's Animal Abuse: Graphic Video and Petition

I've seen some brutal cases of animal abuse but this is without doubt the sickest and most outrageous. I know what I'd like to do with the clamps these bastards are using. The video is graphic and you probably won't be able to watch but a little but please watch some of it. I hope it moves you to sign the petition from change.org.

Jamie Lee Curtis and Christopher Guest write in an open letter to Conklin Dairy Farm:

Mr. Conklin,

Our daughter came to us last night urging us to watch the video of the abuse at your plant. She was overcome with grief that human beings could inflict such cruelty and unconscious hatred at the most benign of creatures and their infants. The shocking images were too much for her father and me but we watched enough to know where it led.

There are moments in all our lives where we face our deepest, darkest truths.

This is your moment.

What will you do?
(snip)
We challenge you to have the courage, as the brave person who filmed this did, to open your doors and your hearts. Become the standard for safety and kindness and actually change -- change your mental state and spend the rest of your lives, and the lives of your descendants, trying to make your farm the leader in humane, clean, loving treatment of the very animals you profit from. You have the opportunity. Certainly one more than those helpless victims of your sick, tortured abuse.

This is your moment. From the ashes of your lives can you re-build yourselves?

We know it is possible, if you have the willingness. But do you?

We are all waiting for your outrage and the outrage of your children and families and friends.

We are all waiting for your next move because we certainly know what ours is....

INCOME TAX INJUSTICE

MoveOn.Org commissioned this cartoon to call attention to one of the worst tax injustices of all time … the infamous Hedge Fund Loophole. It allows a highly privileged group of Wall Street traders to earn over $1 Billion a year, yet pay as little as 15% on the their federal income tax. What does the country get back in return for this extra generous tax break?

The answer is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Hedge fund traders do not create jobs, build factories, extend credit to growing businesses, fund new energy development, or confer any economic benefit to the country whatsoever. They do, however, fight like hell to keep their tax privileges intact.

Consider this: If you are a hedge fund trader earning in excess of $1 billion a year, the difference between a capital gains tax of 15% versus the top ordinary income tax rate of 35% amounts to $200 million a year. With that kind of money at stake, it is easy to buy off an army of politicians … and still have tons of cash left in your pocket. Killing the tax break would add $14.75 billion over five years and $24 billion over 10 years to the federal treasury … and help lift the burden of spending deficits and taxes from the middle class.

Petition your Congressional representatives and demand an end to this tax injustice.

The Oil Disaster -- a Good Site to Visit

The following site (frequented by engineers) has a live video feed of the oil flowing into the Gulf, and an animation of the Top-Kill procedure currently taking place: http://www.theoildrum.com/.  If this works, at least the well will be killed off and the flow halted.  I've been watching the live feed and it looks like the mud is flowing -- here's hoping that's a good sign.

AMERICAN JACKBOOTS ON THE MARCH

It seems our vaunted American news media has turned into the three monkeys that hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil. A British news source is covering this story, but not the MSM within these United States of Amerika?

How To Kick The Oil Habit

The conventional wisdom that we must depend on fossil fuels until we “transition to a new energy future” is a favorite of our political and media betters; problem is, they’ve been saying it for the past 30 years while doing absolutely nothing to further said “transition.” Now we face one crisis after another, after another.


Thanks a lot, assholes.

Never mind. I’ve said all along that this piece of conventional wisdom is false, a lie we’ve been told to make us feel better about our lack of action. Don’t worry, be happy. But sorry, peeps. Time to grow up. Time to call bullshit where we see it and demand some action, some leadership and some honesty.

Here’s a great place to start:

The last time lawmakers truly freaked out about the problem of our oil dependence--when gas prices topped $4 a gallon in the summer of 2008--the Senate Energy Committee called in Skip Laitner, director of economic analysis at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE).

The committee asked Laitner what efficiency--the famously unglamorous energy strategy--could do to relieve gas prices. He gave them an astonishing figure: It could save 46 billion barrels of oil. If the U.S. made an all-out investment in energy efficiency-cutting energy waste out of vehicles, buildings, the electrical grid, and elsewhere in the economy--Laitner believes it could save the energy equivalent of 46 billion barrels by 2030.

Domestic offshore drilling produced 537 million barrels a year over the last nine years, according to the Minerals Management Service. A full-bore efficiency plan would save the equivalent of 85 years of offshore drilling.

Let me repeat what I’ve said before: the oil companies are cutting back on refinery production, even shutting some refineries down permanently, in an effort to keep gas prices high. So I don’t believe conservation will lower gas prices significantly. But that’s not my concern. My concern is ecology, safety, and other areas of the economy that depend on our coastal areas. And it looks like conservation will give us that so-called “breathing room” we’ve been told we need offshore drilling to provide to fuel our transition to renewables.

Most of Laitner's “10 solutions” look fairly painless and easy to implement, but they require will, leadership, and commitment. We need to decide that we really do want to transition to renewables, not just use the words to justify our wasteful ways while we steep ourselves in denial.

There are tons more ideas from folks like Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, whose commentary Freeing America From Its Addiction To oil provides tons more pro-business, capitalistic solutions. But, as he notes, we need “real carrots, not just sticks painted orange.”

We can do this. It’s not hard. We have the motivation. We have the tecnology. We simply need to demand it of our leadership.

Alabama: Push It!

Mash-ups are not the end of culture, but the final form.

The politics portrayed here are not exclusive to Alabama, but my state is a bellwether for such politics nationally. Indeed, the south generally serves as a great indicator of the national direction. That is because southern Alabama is the epicenter of all wingnuttery -- as you can see by our TV ads.

Tim James has pandered his way to national attention. Young Boozer (real name!) has drawn national mention. So has Dale Peterson, a candidate for Agriculture Commissioner (really!). These ads are aggressive shouts for attention; they are desperate moves (no one in Alabama had ever heard of Dale Peterson).

The time had come for a mash-up -- a complete deconstruction of the right-wing Alabama advertisement:



Alabama's politics can be twisted; ironically, Dale Peterson is the most progressive candidate in the race in the ways that really count for the post. That said, I think Alabama is going to surprise the country this year -- and contribute to a sense of disappointment among the right.

For if the election were held today, the man at the beginning of that video -- Artur Davis -- would probably be elected Governor. The heart of Dixie...might just be turning blue again.

Fundamentals of the Social Contract: Why Rand Paul Is Wrong

According to aspiring legislator, Rand Paul, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 went too far in prohibiting racial discrimination by private businesses. All the while asserting that he would have voted yes for the Civil Rights Act, Rand nonetheless believes that private businesses should be allowed to refuse goods or services to black people, at least that's what he told Rachel Maddow in an interview. His words have thrown the GOP into something of a frenzy as they try to distance themselves from his remarks and yet reap the benefits of his popularity with the tea party contingency.

I have a very personal reaction to Paul's observations. I grew up in the era of Jim Crow when segregation was the norm. White Only and No Colored Allowed signs were as common as traffic signs. All businesses were legally allowed to discriminate, to deny goods and/or services based on the color of the consumer's skin. I don't have any desire to return to the good ole days. I also don't hold with the thinking that given time to evolve, Jim Crow would have died a natural death. Jim Crow wasn't born. The system of racial discrimination known as Jim Crow was artificially and intentionally created as a response to the post civil war efforts of black people to claim their rightful place in the social, economic, and political hierarchy of this country. There was nothing natural about it. It couldn't die; it had to be executed. I have no doubt that without government action legal segregation would still be a part of the fabric of this nation.

Rand Paul's position is seriously flawed; however, based on the comments littering the Internet on this topic, there are a lot of folks out there who have succumbed to the same flawed thinking. Much of it stems from worship of the cult of individuality. A characteristic of this cult is a belief that my individual rights supercede all other rights. Of course this is totally irrational. If my rights are more important than your rights, then aren't your rights more important than mine? What about Mary Sue next door, where do her rights fit in this hierarchy? Although said much more eloquently by such diverse thinkers as Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, and Hobbes, it's this tension regarding individual rights balanced against the needs of the whole that necessitates the formation of governments. (My listing of only western philosophers is not intended to suggest that only white males have wrestled with these issues. It's just that as a product of a limited American public education, I am most familiar with the works of Eurocentric writers, which is an entirely separate topic to be addressed someday.)

Society is the whole, individuals are the parts. Societies were formed by the individuals to create a system in which the individuals could agree to live governed by rules to protect the common good. Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, Jefferson and many others have defined this concept as it relates to the purposes of goverment. Those who do not wish to agree to the social contract are free to live outside of it but cannot then also benefit from it. (i.e. you don't have to own a business) This is the basic flaw of Rand Paul's argument that a private business has the right to engage in discrimination. Businesses are by definition public enterprises. Its goods and services are sold to the public and as such the business is part of our system of commerce. The regulation of commerce is constitutionally assigned to Congress. If the businessman wishes to engage in discrimination, he may do so but not via his public enterprise. It's up to him to figure out how to run a profitable business enterprise without engaging in public commerce, if he wishes to engage in discrimination as to whom may partake of his goods and/or servces.

The most extreme example of those who place individual liberties tantamount to the society as a whole are those who commit crimes. The thief believes that his/her needs are superior to the needs of all others thereby justifying their right to take what they need. Indeed, if we follow the argument of the superiority of individual rights to its logical conclusion, then those who commit criminal acts are merely choosing to place their individual needs above the needs of the whole. Under this logic, our prisons are populated by true libertarians.

However, in a society, we all agree to subvert our individual liberties to the benefit of the function of the whole. To not do so results in anarchy and a society in which no one has any security. Whatever property that I may have secured would constantly be at risk of being taken by someone who had the strength to do so in a world governed by the supreme right of the individual. Instead, we have laws, enforcers, and systems of punishment to maintain order so that property rights, mine and yours, are not subject to the arbitrary will of might makes right. Which brings me to the final element of the social contract, governments are not instituted to protect the rights of the strong but rather to ensure that even the weak have protections. Otherwise, in the words of Hobbes,we would be in a constant state of war, and man would be a solitary being living an existence that is nasty, brutish and short.

P.S. A good friend, Mark Olmsted, writes for the Huffington Post. In his most recent piece, People and Property: What Rand Really Wants, he presents an astute assessment of Rand Paul's disturbing views which suggest that civil rights should be optional. Check it out.