It has become something of a cliché to talk about how the country is more divided than it has ever been—politically, economically, and socially. People live in their own constructed realities: their tribes, news feeds, belief systems—religious, political, and otherwise.
Yet there is surprising agreement in one area. People of all stripes tend to agree that the country is more divided than ever and everyone is asking how we got to this point. How did things get so far off track that the country now faces an existential crisis, and every election is framed as the most important in our history? How did we reach a point where we often can't even talk to each other—sometimes not even within our own families?
Interestingly, both the left and the right cite the words and warnings of George Orwell—particularly from his book 1984—to support their positions. For the right, nothing invokes Orwellian doublespeak more than the proliferation of gender categories, the framing of aborting a fetus as a "choice," and the idea that free speech excludes white supremacists, and bullies.
People on the left see an equally Orwellian dynamic in claims that "freedom of religion" means teaching Christian doctrine in public schools, that "freedom of speech" includes banning books or even words like gay or diversity, and in the broader embrace of “alternative facts.”
Times of great division in our nation have often led to gridlock. From the writing of the Constitution to the Civil War, a divided country could not find a way to address slavery short of war. But division also brings the opportunity for change, even if it's not the change we expect. The Civil War restructured the political and economic framework of the country—even if it failed to deliver true freedom to Black citizens.
When the Great Depression hit, there was also initial gridlock, as President Hoover and Congress failed to act, deepening the divide between the economically oppressed and the staunch free-market capitalists.
Such crises create the opportunity not just for change, but for purposeful change. The Civil War briefly opened the door for the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments—amendments that promised, though never fully delivered, real change.
Similarly, FDR used the Great Depression to fundamentally redefine the relationship between the government and its citizens. Despite the Founders’ promise of the "pursuit of happiness," they created a federal government largely focused on national defense and commerce, with a particular emphasis on protecting property rights. They had so little concern for many of their citizens that they initially resisted granting voting rights or guaranteeing basic freedoms—only agreeing to the Bill of Rights as the price of ratification. FDR revived the Enlightenment concept of the social contract, declaring that the government must ensure the welfare and prosperity of the American people—a capitalist interpretation of the pursuit of happiness.
It is possible to view the current political divide and upheaval as another moment of major change. Love him or hate him, Trump is redefining America—and the role of government. How did we move from gridlock to disruption?
The key lies in redefining what is possible. The left did not see it as possible to roll back the Bush and later the Trump tax cuts; did not see it as possible to enact single-payer health care; did not see a way to protect labor or the environment through free trade agreements; and too often did not envision how to lead—only how to regulate.
The genius of Trump, in his demented way, is his ability to redefine not just truth, but possibility—who has voice and agency, the limits of power, and the function of the American government. It’s not that what he’s doing is new; it’s just new in America. It’s new in that he was serious when he said outrageous things—and is now doing them. The left, it seems, truly believed, “It can’t happen here.” And now that it has, they have no idea what to do about it.
Perhaps we can learn something from our history. We've been here before—Jim Crow and white supremacist terrorism, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the internment of Japanese Americans, the Palmer Raids, McCarthy-era blacklists and harassment, and many more injustices. Their legacy lingers, but in those moments, we found ways to make progress. I hope we can again.

​Pete Seeger and the Rebirth of the Hudson River
By Ron Cooke
It was Saturday, August 16, 1969. I was sitting in a field, listening to one great musician after another. It was a festival. For those who might recognize the date, that weekend was the Woodstock Music Festival in Bethel, New York, attended by approximately half a million people listening to a stellar lineup of musicians. I was not among them. The field I was sitting in on that day was in Castleton-on-Hudson, New York, and the music was being provided by Pete Seeger and a host of his friends, loosely known as the Sloop Singers. As magical as the music was, the real magic sat at the dock on the Hudson River right behind the musicians. It was the sloop Clearwater, which had just sailed up the Hudson River for the very first time. The construction of this sloop was both a minor miracle and a leap of faith—a faith that, if people would come to the Hudson River to see this gorgeous ship, they would realize the river was polluted and neglected, and they would want to care for it and clean it up.
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Pete Seeger’s inspiration for building a Hudson River sloop came in 1963 when he read the 1908 book Sloops of the Hudson, written by William Verplanck and Moses Collyer, two retired sloop captains. In the early 1800s, sloops plied the river, mostly ferrying cargo such as furs, flour, lumber, quarried stone, farm produce, and livestock up and down the Hudson River Valley. Tall-rigged sloops with shallow draft hulls and centerboard-fitted keels were able to swiftly navigate the river.

In January 1966, Pete and his friend Vic Schwarz met with naval architect Cyrus Hamlin at the National Boat Show in New York City. In April, Pete wrote Cy a $500 personal check to cover the naval architect’s “advance research” on the Hudson River sloop, and the project was underway.

The link between the sloop and the emerging environmental movement was cemented in a New York Times article written following the organization’s first major fundraiser on October 2, 1966. Pete is quoted as follows:
“Some people might think it’s the most frivolous thing in the world to raise money for a sailboat. But we want people to love the Hudson, not think of it as a convenient sewer.”

Construction of the sloop began in August 1968, but much more money still needed to be raised. There were informational meetings and slideshow presentations at rotary clubs, libraries, and coffeehouses. Numerous concerts were held, including a sold-out performance at Carnegie Hall in April 1969.
Finally, on June 27, the sloop set sail and began a series of concerts at various ports-of-call between Maine and New York on the sloop’s maiden voyage. To that end, most of the sailing crew was made up of musician friends of Pete’s. Billed as the “Hudson River Sloop Singers,” the group included Pete, Capt. Allan Aunapu, Louis Killen, Gordon Bok, Don McLean, Jimmy Collier, Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Tom Winslow. They made about 20 appearances, including at the Newport Folk Festival. The money raised made it possible to begin repaying the loans that financed the Clearwater’s construction.

As the Clearwater arrived in New York, Pete challenged people who came to the river: “Who’s going to clean up this river of ours? No polluter, no politician is going to lift a finger unless we insist on it. So, we have to make ourselves heard. We’re all in this environmental thing together. The idea is simple,” he continued. “We want people to come down to the river again. But the most important thing is to get together. Because we just won’t make it unless we can talk to one another and agree on what we have to do. All of us. Young and old, black and white, rich and poor.”

Don McLean was a member of the first Clearwater Sloop crew in 1969. He put it this way: “This boat is an example of the Seeger genius because it combines the fun of boating with the seriousness of environmental degradation and gets everyone involved at the same time, while also being a public relations dream.”
McLean’s work as the Hudson River Troubadour in 1968 and his experiences with the Clearwater Sloop in 1969 proved to be inspirational learning experiences for him. He is particularly proud of “Tapestry”, a song he wrote while aboard the sloop, which became the title track to his first album. The powerful lyrics remain relevant today as they provide a warning about the consequences of humanity’s exploitation of the environment: “If man is allowed to destroy all they need, he will soon have to pay with his life for his greed.”
https://youtu.be/3AGg_n5ijmQ?si=cF5TiRIkAnSkghhv

Building on the work of pioneers such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, Pete Seeger and the Clearwater community used the sloop and the music to bring people back to the river, back to their history, and back to the connection between nature, people, and community.

Intelligent Life in the Universe


Humans have an insatiable need to assign a cause, no matter how far-fetched, to most anything we do not understand. Deadly diseases such as smallpox, the plague and others were assigned causes such as humors, bile and blood that needed to be purged from the body. This same need probably resulted in innumerable gods that humans have created through out our history.  Ancient Egyptians, the Incas, the Magadha in India, the Greeks and Romans and many more societies created gods and goddesses for every occasion. This need to explain the unexplainable was doubtless also behind an array of superstitions, religions and countless conspiracy theories. On the upside it also motivated scientific discoveries from Galileo to Newton to Niels Bohr.

One area of endless interest and speculation has been the skies. Perhaps because they are so familiar and available (just look up day or night) and yet for most of human history so inaccessible.

Just as we have tended to create gods in our own image we tend to expect that intelligent life in the universe will be like us. That means technologically advanced with the infrastructure, capability and interest to explore the universe. But just as there's highly intelligent life on Earth, such as whales, octopus, and dolphins, that require no constructed infrastructure or technological capabilities perhaps there is even more highly intelligent life on other planets of a similar nature. Given that 35% of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) are water-based (no land at the surface as was once case for the earth) perhaps water dwelling creatures create great art and literature (or video games) completely in their minds and share it telepathically, in essence creating a digital world and a digital culture that humans  are moving toward, but without the need for elaborate computing structures, data clouds and fiber optic networks.
 
The idea of intelligent life in the universe has long captivated human imagination and especially so since WW II and the advent of rockets that could reach ever greater heights in the skies.  As earthlings have developed the rudiments of space travel it has became increasingly popular to speculate that alien life has visited earth and, of course, there have been great efforts to hide this fact.  This seemed to culminate in the recent Congressional hearing (what better venue for fantasy-based speculation) featuring a whistleblower alleging an elaborate cover-up.  In classic urban myth fashion the whistleblower had not himself seen the evidence of aliens but knew people who had.  The folks with the goods somehow are never heard from directly. 

I am not a scientist but my many years working with computer systems taught me two essential things about data and logic. One, if you don't have the logic correct it doesn't matter how much you curse at it, demand a different answer or claim you did it right, the answer is still wrong. And two, if the data is wrong the answer is wrong.  So consider some basic facts and logic.

If you think of the 13 billion plus years of the universe as having occurred in a single Earth calendar year then human life has existed for less than a minute of that year and humans with a technical capability of communicating beyond earth have existed for only one second. So what are the odds that some other intelligent life form might have been looking at us in that one second when we might have been aware of it? About 1 in 31.5 billion. And what are the odds they are looking at the earth rather than another planet?  Given a working estimate of 300 billion planets just in the Milky Way (one of 54 such "near" galaxies) that suggests that the odds of someone on another planet in the Milky Way looking at this planet is 1 in 300 billion.  Now if you combine those two probabilities together the functional likelihood of intelligent life on another planet (without even considering the odds of that existing) looking at, let alone visiting earth, is functionally zero. Your odds are better not just of winning the lottery but of winning it everyday for the rest of your life.  I haven't won the lottery yet and probably you haven't either but someone has so if there's life out there looking for other life they may have found it elsewhere.
 
But if someone was looking what would they see?  Given that the earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old and that the universe is 13.7 billion years old that means that for two thirds of the stars and potential planets that might look our way, the earth does not yet exist. (It's that speed of light thing). But even if the closest habitable planet (believed to be Kepler - 22b) at 600 light years away has intelligent life and is looking at us they would see the earth as we looked 600 years ago in 1423. At that time not only was there no internet, telephone or radio but the printing press had not yet been invented.  In short if an intelligent life form was looking at Earth and tried to communicate with us, we had no way to receive communications or respond unless the aliens showed up in on earth face to face (perhaps to build the pyramids). 
 
In all likelihood the idea that intelligent life from outside our solar system has been visiting earth is a indication of human hubris. Like children we seem to be jumping up and down yelling "Look at me, look at me!" but Mom probably is not looking back.

Hate

Hate is fear directed outward on to something or someone outside the self. It is far easier to hate than to love; easier to vilify than to understand; easier to direct your fear and insecurity on to someone else than to confront your own deficiencies. Hate gives a simple answer to a complex question: what is the nature of humans and our relationship with others.

When guns are added to fear and hate you get violence; you get America.
The nation was founded on fear. From first contact Europeans feared the indigenous people of the Americas, who often out numbered them, whom they did not understand and whose land, resources and often personages (via slavery and rape) they stole. Almost all early North American contact was rooted in violence, either at first meeting, as in the case of Columbus who killed and enslaved the Arawak, Cortez, who attacked the Incas, or soon there after, as the invaders stole land and resources. The common thread was violence and the superiority of guns. America’s gun culture began on day one. Superiority in weaponry helped Europeans convince themselves they were superior in culture and intellect, providing the justification for genocide and slavery. All this was internalized as manifest destiny, American exceptionalism and white supremacy.

What was happening in North America was only one facet of the world-wide rise of colonialism. While colonialism did not invent human conflict, violence or distrust, the historic scale of exploitation and subjugation brought global violence, exploitation and subjugation. Nearly three quarters of the world was turned into property: i.e. lands and people deemed owned by European nations. Fear and violence were the instruments used to control these vast colonies and those instruments were based on weaponry. No where has that embrace of weaponry from hand guns to nuclear bombs equaled what has occurred in the United States.

Hate and fear are self reinforcing. They also tend to be contagious such that additional targets are easily added. In the US, Jews, Asians, Irish, Italians, Gays, Mexicans, Arabs and others have been targets. This expanding web provides fertile ground for conspiracy theories and a deepening entrenchment of fear and hatred. To hate is to deny the humanity of "others" and to assert your primacy. But as occurred with American slavery, the fear flows both ways: both the oppressed and the oppressor live in fear of each other. Perhaps hate and fear were most fully realized in slavery both as a defining institution and in the individual brutality of beatings, rape and murder. Slaves were considered chattel in the same way that livestock were. As someone who grew up on a dairy farm, we understood that our cows provided our livelihood, so our cows were well cared for, properly fed and never abused. Interestingly slaves, to an even greater degree, supported plantation elites with a grand lifestyle and great affluence, yet these very instruments wealth and privilege were brutalized by their owners. Why would that be? Fear. Despite the rhetoric of the happy slave, owners lived in fear, knowing their slaves wanted to escape their bondage and might kill them to achieve freedom. So the slave owners’ fear was channeled into hate and the construct of black inferiority to mask their guilt and justify their abuse.

After the civil war, this hate was reconstituted in Jim Crow economic slavery, i.e. peonage and civic suppression in politics, jobs and property, all enforced by institutionalized violence. Today the legacy of this fear and hatred remains.
This unrelenting violence is but a continuation of the drive for white supremacy, yet with the unrestricted proliferation of guns it has also taken on an unintended consequence. Whites are killing themselves and each other in record numbers. The "good guy" with a gun turns out to be most dangerous to himself and his family. The response, as always, is to buy more guns and have fewer restrictions on ownership. In many places cans of spray paint are subject to more restrictions than guns. Fear has allowed people to believe that guns represent safety while the body count increases.

If hate is spawned by fear and fear with a gun is violence, then to stop the carnage we would need to remove the fear or the gun. Instead we accept the daily killings as what passes for normal in this country. That is something to really fear.
 

​Great
What if Great is not Good?

Do you want to be great? It seems everyone does. Athletes are particularly prone to claiming greatness, sometimes just for one play, other times for eternity, when they are said to be GOATs - greatest of all time. They don't seem to see that they are often the goat in that joke. Greatness seems to exist on a sliding scale rather like dues at the YMCA, ranging from the Queen for a Day to the aforementioned GOAT. Movie stars, singers and performers of all types strive for greatness and are often proclaimed such, sometimes by fans or critics, and oft times by themselves. This would appear to be an automatic disqualification, but clearly humility is not necessary for greatness. Even the country wants to be great, with one side wanting to make it great again and the other wanting to make it great, or at least better, soon. Like so many things, greatness is in the eye of the beholder, and greatness and absurdity seem to be kissing cousins.

I don't strive to be great, nor do I expect greatness in our leaders or for the country. I hope for good. Good has dozens of definitions and is used in a multitude of ways. I like to think of it as meaning competent, capable and fair. That doesn't mean perfect or the very best; it doesn't mean being right all the time or never making a mistake. It does mean owning up to your errors and trying not to repeat them. This is especially important for counties but seems to be most difficult. Neither countries nor people are very adept at that kind of introspection. Both are better at rationalization than responsibility.

One of the problems with great is that it seems too often to give license to a "by any means necessary" approach. Fair doesn't play a part in the path to great. On Wall Street or on the playing field, ethics are ignored and laws and rules are inconveniences to be manipulated and circumvented. Politicians are particularly prone to grandiosity and manipulation. Politics is rife with gerrymandering from Texas to New York, from Virginia to New Mexico and just about everywhere else. Nick Seabrook, in his book One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America, terms New York a "criminal oligarchy" for its uniquely corrupt and bipartisan gerrymandering schemes.

Laws are made by and for the highest bidder and enforcement is the prerogative of "constitutional" sheriffs and progressive DA's, among others. Corporate titans like Jack Welsh of GE not only get rich but are feted as great leaders who are studied in business schools across the land, largely on their ability to game the tax code and fire workers. All this and more is justified and justifiable in pursuit of greatness.

Of course, one is tempted to ask how this came to be. It seems to be endemic in the human psyche, especially when people are inhabiting large, organized groups. In these situations, human competitiveness and aggression flourish and are often rewarded. The situation is much exaggerated by the rise of the media megaphone - 24-hour news and incessant social media found success by yelling: make it louder, make it more catastrophic, make it personal. This constant hyping of everything has accelerated the human tendency toward narcissism and grandiosity, hence the fixation on greatness.
Perhaps it is a generational thing. My mother asked me innumerable times to be good, but I do not recall a single instance when she suggested I should or could be great. Could that be why I was an underachiever? Not only did I never achieve greatness, I never even knew it was something that I should aspire to. Goodness was at my radar screen even if I fell short so often.
I think we would all be better off if no one aspired to greatness. It could result in less greed, less conflict, less bragging and bullying. From the ancients like Peter and Catherine and Alexander, who all claimed the title of Great, to 20th century pretenders of grandiosity like Stalin and Hitler and Mao, to the current crop of self-indulgent narcissists like Putin, Trump, Bolsonaro and Xi, those who would stop at nothing for greatness have wreaked havoc on the world. We don't need great leaders, we need good leaders; we need good people, good citizens - competent, capable and fair.
Great is not good.

​Immigrants and Refugees
 
Immigrants and refugees have been the subject of discussion, debate, division, disdain and empathy in ever changing proportions.  And of course they have been the objects of much political fodder.  This has been especially true in the United States, perhaps in part because the US has a much larger percentage of immigrants than most other countries. 
 
The terms immigrant and refugee are often used almost interchangeably.  The dictionary reminds us that an immigrant is a person who comes to a country to take up usually permanent residence while a refugee is a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster. It seems a clear distinction - the refugee is forced to move while for the immigrant it is a voluntary decision.  It also implies that the refugee hopes to return while the immigrant does not.  In the real world the distinction is not so clear cut and the areas of gray are wide and deep.
 
Lets start at the beginning. The US likes to say it is a nation of immigrants  We don't say we are a nation of refugees.  But consider our origins.  Among the earliest Europeans to settle in what would become the US were the pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower. Many were members of  the English Separatist Church (a radical faction of Puritanism) who sometimes referred to themselves as “saints” or “pilgrimes.” They were immigrants in that they planned to stay in America but they saw themselves as persecuted for their religion in England by the Church of England and were ostracized during their stay in Holland.  As we all learned in grade school the pilgrims came for religious freedom which in the best American tradition they denied to subsequent settlers in Massachusetts. So immigrants in that they decided voluntarily to move to America but refugees who were fleeing perceived persecution. 
 
The US was populated by waves of immigrants/refugees.  One cohort was characterized as  poor and disease-ridden; as taking jobs away from Americans and straining welfare budgets; as practicing an alien religion and bringing crime including being accused of being rapists. Who were these undesirables - Mexicans, Muslims?  No, Irish who were fleeing the potato famine and British oppression.  It is estimated that more than 4 million Irish immigrated to the US, many destitute, illiterate and lacking employable skills. The British were so eager to get rid of them that they sometimes paid their passage to America.  Needless to say they were not welcomed by the "real" Americans who had previously settled here. While most were immigrants in that they remained in America for life, many at least initially aspired to return home to Ireland and given the conditions they fled are usually referred to as refugees especially if they came during the famine in the 1840's and 50's.
 
By the 1880's a new wave of immigrants came, this time from Italy.  By then many of the Irish were being accepted as Americans but the Italians raised new concerns because they were widely viewed as not being white, a claim bolstered by psuedo-science of the time declaring the inferiority of "Mediterranean" people.  This hostility turned to violence with Italians targeted for lynching, most notoriously when 11 Italians were lynched in New Orleans on March 14,1891.
 
The list of immigrants to the US who were vilified, discriminated against and often targets of violence is long and on-going. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII, the Jews targeted by the KKK and most egregiously those fleeing Nazi Germany who were turned away at US ports to recent Muslim bans the pattern has repeated.  Or as Tariq Ali put it "History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away."
 
Refugees do not have to come from another country.  Perhaps the first climate refugees in the US were the "Okies" and others who fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930's and in keeping with the American tradition California set up border stations to stop the influx of desperate people into the state. Using the California Indigent Act of 1933 which made it a crime to bring indigent people into the state some sheriffs set up the "Bum Blockade" to keep refugees out. This ultimately led to a Supreme Court case declaring the actions illegal.
 
The Dust Bowl migration is often designated as the largest internal migration in US history involving as estimated 2.5 million people.  This ignores the 6 million Black people who fled the American south from 1910 to 1970 to escape lynching, Jim Crow laws and economic subjugation in what is termed the Great Migration.
 
Curiously while the people fleeing the Dust Bowl are routinely referred to as refugees, Blacks fleeing the south almost never are. Perhaps this is a not so subtle way of suggesting that the mostly white "Okies" deserved support while the Blacks did not. Labels make a difference.
 
So refugees or migrants? How do we characterize people who fled hurricane Katrina, or the Western wildfires?  Are the women fleeing states where abortion is now illegal refugees?
 
When it comes to immigrants and refugees is anything different now?  One thing that has changed is that currently about 90% of immigrants, even documented ones, are not white.  Despite the initial disdain for Irish and Italian immigrants as well as those from Germany, Poland and the rest of Europe and despite efforts to paint them as non-white, they in fact looked much like the Europeans who had proceed them so that they increasingly tended to blend in and found acceptance.  But as we have seen with Black Americans, people of color have a much harder path to acceptance.
 
It seems we are a nation of immigrants who do not much like immigrants.  The cognitive dissidence aside, perhaps that is because despite all the bravado about American Exceptionalism we see something dark in our national psyche from the unending violence of forever wars and our fixation with guns to the unrelenting greed of our economic system. What is truly exceptional is the temple of individualism that wave after wave of immigrants has built at the expense of the common good, of community and of the nation.
 

New Clips
 
Cat Videos Addictive
The Federal Drug Enforcement Administration announced that cat videos were being added to the list of controlled substances. "Based on the recommendations from a committee of addiction specialists we have determined that cat videos meet all the criteria of an addictive substance. Therefore, they will now be available only with a doctor's prescription to people at least 21 years of age. We need to control this growing menace," a spokesman said.

Russian Strike
A national strike in Russia shut down conservative news outlets around the world. A spokesperson for Fox News stated, "We didn't realize until now that without disinformation we have no news to report." He added that they were hopeful that the Russian strike would be settled quickly and programming could return to normal but said "of course we have no news about that."

Exxon Buys the Sun
A consortium of oil companies led by Exxon Mobil announced that they had bought the sun. "When Elon Musk let us know it was for sale we snapped it up," said Exxon CEO Darren Woods. "Elon said he only recently found out he wasn't the sun and decided not to buy it given the problems he had with the Twitter deal. There is only one sun so the appeal was obvious and then someone told us that all life is dependent on the sun. We had thought it was oil, but just in case, we now have all bases covered. Rates for the use of the sun will be announced soon. It's very complex; one rate will not work for everything. Farmers will pay a different rate than home gardeners, for example. Some uses will be prohibited – such as solar panels, but tanning will continue to be free."

First Black President
Donald Trump asserted today that he, not Barack Obama, was the first Black president. "One good day on the tanning bed and my skin is darker than his ever has been. And remember that more Blacks voted for me than voted for him" said Trump, "Black people love me, especially the women.” Asked to comment, Obama could not stop laughing long enough to respond.

Pro life
Republican leadership announced a sweeping legislative proposal to support women and children, stating that "When we say we are pro-life that obviously means support for the entire life of the individual." The proposal would provide all mothers with 6 months fully paid maternity leave, including payments to mothers not currently working for pay; free health care for all children from conception to age 21; free universal child care; and child rearing leave for parents. When some expressed surprise at the proposal a spokesperson responded, "what do you takes us for, barbarians and hypocrites?"

Transitioning
Some personal news, I'm transitioning. Yes, I am transitioning from being right-handed to being left-handed. I have always been very right-handed but have realized that in the interest of equality and justice that I need to change. I now self-identify as left-handed, although the transition will take some time since my right hand is reluctant to relinquish its dominate role. During this time there may be some awkwardness and this may make some people who have always known me as right-handed uncomfortable. Please bear with me. I want to express my gratitude to members of the left-handed community who have been so accepting and supportive. It makes me believe that I have chosen the correct path.
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Supreme Court News
In a stunning reversal the Supreme Court announced today that after reading the constitution for the first time they realized that there is no provision giving the Court the authority to declare any laws or executive actions unconstitutional. The decision was 6-3 with all the conservative justices supporting the finding. Justice Thomas, speaking for the majority, said "one of our law clerks pointed out the lack of constitutional authority and after the Justices read the document for ourselves we found no such authority existed. As originalists who believe that unless the constitution expressly mentions a right or power then it does not exist. Therefore, we hereby overturn the case of Marbury v. Madison (1803) which incorrectly assumed that power to the Court."

​Race and Education

The intersection of race and education has been a flashpoint since the beginning of the nation. Enslaved Africans forcibly brought to the United States were both exploited and feared. It is easy to understand why slaves would resent their circumstances and attempt to change it. The successful slave rebellion in Haiti (1791-1804) raised great fear among American slave owners that a similar rebellion could take place in the United States. One of the ways to thwart this possibility was to restrict the availability of information and to make communication difficult or impossible. A key element of that was to keep enslaved people from learning to read and write thus reducing the possibility of communication among disparate groups. In many states it became a crime to teach Black people, even freed Blacks in many cases, to read and write. Most slave states passed anti-literacy laws. For example, the Alabama Slave Code of 1833 included the following law “Any person who shall attempt to teach any free person of color, or slave, to spell, read or write, shall upon conviction thereof by indictment, be fined in a sum of not less than two hundred fifty dollars, nor more than five hundred dollars.”

After the Civil War and the supposed emancipation of slaves, white supremacist needed to take different steps to stop the education of Blacks. The problem was compounded by the growing movement for universal public education. In many areas, especially in the Confederate States, universal public education was not embraced and where it was every attempt was made to ensured that black and white children did not go to the same schools and that black schools were funded to the smallest degree possible. Jim Crow laws and the re-institution of slavery via peonage were largely successful in limiting the educational opportunities for Black students.

The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown versus Board of Education raised new problems for the efforts to limit black education. It resulted in a number of states repealing their compulsory education requirements. On every level from the school board to the state house, southerners fought this decision. In Little Rock, Arkansas, where nine high school students who enrolled in all-white Central High School faced angry mobs and threats from the governor, President Eisenhower was forced to dispatch the military to protect the students. On September 29, 1958 six of Norfolk, Virginia's formerly all-white schools were closed to avoid integration. Perhaps most egregiously, Prince Edward County Virginia closed its public schools between 1959 and 1964 rather than allow Black and White children to sit together in the same classroom leaving Black students with no schools to attend. Of course local officials created private white only schools funded by state and local taxes via grant programs - an early form of school vouchers.

As whites have increasingly realized they can not prevent the education of Blacks, they have turned to trying to control the education of white children to inculcate their "conservative" views. I put conservative in quotes to denote that the views being promoted are actually quite radical, racist and authoritarian. A famous early example of this was the effort to stop the teaching of evolution and basic science in public schools in the early 20th century. Unsurprisingly, the teaching of evolution was at least as much about race as about biology. One commentator at the time said "if the entire human race is supposed to have started from a common origin then white supremacist would have to admit that there is no fundamental difference between themselves and the race they pretend to despise".

It is not hard to see the parallels between the attempts to suppress the teaching of evolution and its implications for race with current attempts to control the teaching of issues around race, slavery, sexual orientation/identity, indigenous people genocide and related issues. In state after state and school district after school district teachers are being restricted on how they can teach certain topics, curriculums are being limited to conservative points of view, books are being banned and like-minded parents are being organized to monitor and harass educators, school board members and others who do not fall in line.

Banning the teaching of controversial topics or more pointedly making sure that what is taught reflects the point of view of only one group, in this case white supremacists, is a dangerous approach that undermines democracy itself. Perhaps the reason that some politicians express admiration for a dictator like Vladimir Putin even in the face of Ukrainian aggression is that they see that Putin is able to control not only what is taught in schools but what information is available via all media types. It's a power that the people banning teaching of critical race theory and or banning books aspire to and envy. The Supreme Court in a decision in 1943 in West Virginia State Board of Education vs. Barnette struck down a state statute the required school children to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance saying "those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard." These words resonance loudly today.

On May 10, 2021, in a move reminiscent of the arrest of John Scopes for teaching evolution, Matt Hawn, a high school social studies teacher in Tennessee was fired. Hawn was dismissed after school officials said he used materials with offensive language and failed to provide a conservative viewpoint during discussions of white privilege in his contemporary issues class, which has since been eliminated. Perhaps Tennessee's state motto is "100 years devoid of progress."

But it is not just Tennessee, since January 2021, 42 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching "critical race theory" or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, according to Education Week. A Florida bill goes one step further, giving parents “private right of action” to sue if they believed their children were being taught critical race theory in schools. In Oklahoma a bill would allow parents to challenge schools that teach "lessons related to Critical Race Theory" in court. Any school employee that parents name in their petition could be personally responsible for up to $10,000 in damages seeming to echo that 1833 law making it a crime to teach Blacks to read, This manifestation of radicalized "parent rights" has already had it's intended chilling effect on teachers.

Banning books is another tool to control what children learn and assuring that a white conservative viewpoint is paramount. The not for profit PEN America tallied efforts between 1 July 2021 and 31 March 2022, found that 1,586 bans were implemented in 86 school districts across 26 states. Authors and/or protagonists of color or LGBTQ+ were most likely to be targets of the bans. Perhaps missing the irony, a parents’ group in one Tennessee district challenged the use of an autobiography of Ruby Bridges, who in 1960 was one of the first Black children to integrate an elementary school after Brown v. Board of Education. An Oklahoma school system removed Frederick Douglass’ autobiography from reading lists and, in one Texas case, teachers were advised to present “opposing” views of the Holocaust - perhaps they would find recent remarks from the Russian Foreign Minister appropriate.
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It is tempting to dismiss such absurdities as the ravings of maniacs but as we have seen from Texas to Florida to the halls of Congress and even in the White House such people are increasingly our representatives and our face to the world and notably controlling our world. We would do well to remember Voltaire's words "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." The fight over education, information and truth is a fight over the future for our children and our country.