Category I want to understand my country.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I’m thinking about the Constitution. About the Second Amendment.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

I have thought about this particular sentence quite a lot over the years. I’ve shifted my position on this several times, generally in the same direction; not because the side I’ve shifted towards is entirely right (Though it is the right-wing position, the conservative position, that doesn’t make it the right-minded position), but because I came into this debate with a pretty extreme view.

See, I was raised to hate firearms. Violence of all types, certainly, but firearms in particular. My mother, a nurse and a pacifist and the kindest person I have ever known, never even let me have a BB gun, no matter how many times I watched “A Christmas Story.” There was one occasion when I was about 8 or so when our family went over to visit friends for dinner; my mom and dad liked this couple quite a lot: he was a computer guy who worked with my dad, and she was a ceramic artist. They all got along great — until Ben, the husband, showed my brother Marvin and I his pistol. I have a clear recollection of the gun — a revolver — being entirely unloaded, the cylinder open with no shells in it; I remember him letting us hold it. And I remember my mother coming in the room and finding us there holding a gun.

We never saw them again. Not only didn’t go over to their house, but we never saw the Kirchners again. I think my mom saw Mrs. Kirchner at some point, because we had a number of mugs that she made; but we never saw Ben after that.

So I’ve never been in a fight, and I’ve never gone hunting, and I’ve never killed an animal larger than a mouse, and I’ve never fired nor even held a gun past that one time when I was eight. I remember being in an online debate when I started taking this topic on, and my opponent accused me (as online debaters — read “assholes,” including myself when I debated online — are wont to do) of being a hoplophobe, someone who is irrationally afraid of firearms (Please note that this is just a politically charged insult recently coined, like “snowflake” or “soyboy” or that kind of bullshit.). And my response, which stunned the asshole who threw the word at me, was, “Yes. Yes, I am.” I did add the clarifications that I was afraid of people wielding firearms, not of the weapons themselves, and that this fear was not in fact irrational.

The response was basically that I should get a gun and learn to defend myself like a man.

This is a bullshit argument.

But it’s not actually the argument behind the Second Amendment.

Let’s be clear: the Second Amendment has been misinterpreted (in my opinion) by the courts, and even more by the general populace. It does not define the right to self-defense: there is no need to define and protect the natural right to self-defense, because self-defense is never a crime. But I don’t believe there is a guarantee in the Second Amendment that an individual has a right to, needs to, or even should, have a gun for self-defense.

The Second Amendment is also not in any way a defense of hunting or target shooting or collecting firearms to display in your home. None of those are rights. They’re amusements, hobbies; you have no right to a hobby. “But Dusty, what about people who hunt for food?” Well actually, you don’t have a right to food, either. People should have food, and it makes sense for us as a country to ensure that people have food and the ability to get food; but we do it because it makes sense, not because it’s a right. If it stops being sensible to provide food — let’s say we all voluntarily go into the Matrix, and survive on pink goo pumped directly into our gastrointestinal systems — then the provision of food will stop, without any violation of rights.

Let me explain a bit before I go too far into the weeds. The Second Amendment states that the people — not a person — have the right to keep and bear arms, in order to defend the security of a free State. The implication is that the main threats to a free State are external: I think that’s the “security” line. If it was primarily about the defense of a free people from the state, then it would say something more like “to ensure the integrity and continuation of a free State.” But I don’t mean to be one of those people who parse every word of the law in order to determine what the point is: I don’t actually idolize the Founding Fathers, and don’t think that their intentions should be the deciding consideration when trying to interpret the Constitution. I think we should look at what the document is really supposed to do, not necessarily what the men who wrote it wanted it to do.

The Constitution is intended to create and preserve a nation based on the rule of law, and not the whims of men. Laws need to be interpreted and executed by people, so our opinions have some importance; but the defining, essential purpose of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers was to escape and prevent the tyranny of powerful men.

You know how you escape the tyranny of powerful men? You spread power out as much as humanly possible. You create separate but equal branches of government, with checks and balances. You ensure that, as much as possible, the people who run that government are beholden to the masses, through the power of the ballot. (It’s probably a good idea to ensure that the people who are in charge of the actual laws are not quite so beholden to the people, but rather to the law itself — but that’s a different topic.) And because physical force is a source of power, you spread out the physical force as widely as possible: you don’t allow it to concentrate in the hand of a few, or even, if you can manage it, in the hands of many: you put it in the hands of all. That’s what the Second Amendment does, and what it does is right to do: the wider the dispersal of power, the less likely power is to be abused.

I do think the Second Amendment is intended partly to ensure that the people stay free and are able to defend that freedom against a rising tyranny in their own government. But it’s not that specific: it’s intended to create resistance to any gathering of power. The Ku Klux Klan have less power when the Black Panthers have rifles: it’s really as simple as that.

That means that we need to have the right to own firearms, as firearms are the most powerful individual force-multiplier we people can own. Tanks would be better, and an entire air force or navy owned by each individual WAY better; but that’s not feasible.  Anyone can own a gun, and a person with a gun is more deadly than one without. That’s why the Amendment defends the right to keep and bear arms. That does also imply that we should have the right to defend ourselves from personal harm using firearms. It makes sense: the point of maintaining a free State is so we free individuals can have a place to live; therefore the purpose of defending a free state also encompasses defending a free individual. Also, not to get too silly, but you can’t defend the state if you get killed by an intruder in your home.

But here’s the thing: there’s nothing in the Amendment, neither the wording nor the logic, that implies that we should not require background checks on every single purchase of a firearm. And a national gun registry of every owned or manufactured firearm. And red flag laws that allow the removal of firearms from dangerous individuals. And mandatory firearms training and testing, just like we have for motor vehicles. And limits on types of firearms (To some extent — there should be a limit on the limits so that the limits do not become a de facto ban), and on magazine capacity, and on everything else that we see fit to regulate. See, the goal here is to ensure that power is spread out: not that power has to be granted and defended for every halfwit who can pull a damn trigger. Not that the power has to allow one sovereign citizen to take on the military, or even the police, and win. The arguments against regulation are all predicated on the (rather paranoid) idea that the main purpose of the Amendment is to limit the ability of the federal government to control people, and that’s just not the case. Anyone who is a threat to us needs to be controlled, primarily by the limiting of power in the hands of those who are a threat. Note that: if we fear the rising power of the Federal government, then clearly the answer given by the Constitution is to limit that power, not to rise up against it. The worst case scenario is that the people will need to overthrow their own government, but the Amendment isn’t the plan for that; the Amendment is part of the plan for preventing that.

Our ability to own firearms is one thing that helps keep the government from the most simple and brutal sort of tyranny (And it really does do that, and I think I’ll have to talk about that at greater length on another day; the topic is too complex for a single post); but to keep us from turning our power on each other (And to keep the citizens from turning their power on the government for corrupt reasons, too; let’s not forget that. Let’s not imagine that most revolutions are idealistic and freedom-loving.), well — that’s why it says “Well-regulated.” Right there in the front of the Amendment. Even before the “keep and bear arms” part.

 

I think this will have to be continued.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about ending gun violence.

Really, the solution is quite simple: after the apocalypse, when we’ve all reverted back to Stone Age savagery (Well, mostly died; those few who remain will revert), guns will be nothing but strangely-shaped clubs that occasionally explode. But since I seek to save lives, the idea of letting things go their course until the majority of people have died (My same solution would work for climate change, too, I’ll note) is antithetical to the purpose. So let’s be serious.

For simplicity’s sake, because I want this to be a short blog, let us assume that the Second Amendment is worth preserving. I’ll come back to it tomorrow and discuss it at length  (Hopefully not too-long length) but for now, let’s just agree that it’s part of our Constitution, that it’s the accepted law of the land, and that fighting against it or arguing against it directly is going to be counterproductive. I hope we can also agree that there is value in it — I think there is — but we’ll save that for tomorrow.

Because the first thing I want to say about this cause, preventing gun violence, particularly trying to put an end to gun violence in schools (This post is a continuation of this one, if you haven’t been reading along.), is this: it doesn’t begin in our schools.

It begins with the military.

There are two reasons. Three, really, but one of them will wait for tomorrow. The first is that we live in a culture soaked in violence, steeped in blood; that culture influences us to see violence as an answer. The military is the first and most prominent source of this idea, that violence is a solution to problems; because not only does our diplomacy start and end with force, but we laud it, incessantly, as the best thing about us: we are the world’s superpower, we are the global police force, we are the shining light on the hill — which we think is the Bat signal. Anyone anywhere needs help, one of the first things we do is send the Marines. Hoo rah. All of our military veterans are heroes, everything good about this country — our freedoms, our values — are due to the military.

And what does the military do? The military kills people.

Of course that’s not all the military does; and the other tasks, I would gladly maintain. I would cherish a global rescue force that sent in manpower and superior engineering knowledge to help with natural disasters. I would absolutely adore a massive collection of dedicated, patriotic men and women who actually lived and worked among real people in terrible places, and helped them, and got to know them; I think those soldiers, the ones who win hearts and minds, are indeed heroes, and the best possible face that we could put on America to people around the world.

But only if those same soldiers don’t kill the people they have gotten to know.

That’s the second reason why the military has to be the first place we do something to end gun violence: because an Iraqi child’s life is not worth less than an American child’s life, and while we grieve sorely for the school children we have lost to gun violence, I don’t hear the same outpouring for the tens of thousands of children in Iraq and Afghanistan whom we killed.

I don’t blame soldiers for the violence they commit and represent; that is their job, and it is we, the people, who ask — who insist  — that they do it. So this is the first place to start, if we’re serious about ending gun violence. Anything else, any attempt to remove firearms from the hands of our civilian populace, while we pay a million men and women to circle the globe with their fingers on the trigger, is absurd. First we have to put down the nation’s gun.

In a practical sense, I’d suggest keeping a massive and essentially unbeatable National Guard, with as much of it as practicable as Reserves: let’s go back the Minutemen, one of the first and most important ideas of the founding fathers, and one of the first that they lost, because a standing army is just such a useful tool. You can use that hammer to smash anything. Or anyone. I’d also suggest that as many of our current assets as possible be transferred to the UN for their peacekeeping forces — or to another similar body if we’re not happy with the United Nations specifically. I do recognize that force is necessary at times, to stop atrocities around the globe; but I also recognize that we are too reluctant to commit our own troops to that cause. So we should participate in the cause, but not be in charge of it. Frankly, we could use the humility.

That’s first. The second step in ending gun violence for real is something that should happen in this country, and it is this: legalize all drugs.

I don’t know that drug users and drug dealers are the biggest source of illegal activity that includes gun violence, but I know they are one of the worst, and also one of the easiest to put a stop to. Legalize drugs, control them, build a market for them, and not only does the majority of crime in this country stop (or take on a different tenor, which is certainly likely; the other thing we need to do to stop crime is reduce income inequality — but that’s a different blog and also a societal issue that leads to property crime more than violent crime. Drugs tend more towards violence, especially between and among dealers.), but also the majority of violent crime and societal instability in Mexico.

Are you listening, Trump? You want to make Central and South America a better place, with fewer gangs and less violence, and therefore less reason for people to emigrate to the US? Here’s your chance. Legalize drugs. Problem — not solved, but certainly ameliorated.

But the legalization of drugs, while it would stop some of the worst gun violence we face, would actually contribute somewhat to what is possibly the saddest cause of gun violence, and the hardest to fix: domestic violence and abuse. This is the third step we have to take. Not only because the thousands of women who are killed by their partners every year are not worth less than the school children we grieve so sorely, but also because it has to be obvious by now that one of the potential causes of school shootings is a violent, unstable home life, generally one cause by abuse and neglect. (And inasmuch as drugs and alcohol contribute to abuse and neglect, my second solution makes this one harder; however, I would hope that legalized drugs would have less stigma attached to seeking help, and maybe that would make some difference, too. There would need to be stiff penalties for crimes committed while under the influence. That’s probably another blog.)

I don’t know how to stop this, to be honest. I can’t understand someone turning in anger and attacking their own loved ones — and I also can’t understand someone living with people they don’t love. Of course desperation is part of it, especially for people who stay with abusers; so maybe solving our income inequality and poverty problems are more imperative in this cause than I thought. I do feel like this one is the hardest and the longest-lasting problem, one that will take at least a generation of hard work to reduce if not eliminate; because the only way to solve this is to break the cycle of abuse. Abusers are broken people; and they break the people they abuse. (Not everyone. But it’s no shame to be broken by someone who seeks to do it, and it does happen, far too often.)

That is, when the abusers don’t simply murder them. Often with guns.

So these are the first three steps we must take. And I’m fully aware that just that first step is essentially impossible in this country in this day and age; everyone in politics is beholden to the military, forced to kowtow to them in a country where even the NFL, a bastion of American spirit if ever there was one, was humbled by the rumor of disloyalty to the military. And of course there is the very real possibility that the military would not allow itself to be dismantled: there are a number of very powerful people with a vested interest in maintaining our addiction foreign wars, and if we think a military junta couldn’t overthrow our government simply because this is America, then we haven’t been paying attention. There’s also the awesome might and influence of the military-industrial complex, and they have less than no morals. I kinda feel like, if this blog were to go viral, they would murder me just for suggesting this.

That’s all right, I’m not scared of them.

I’m scared of someone coming to my school with a gun to kill people. To kill my students, my friends. To kill me. But despite my fear, despite the immediacy of it, if we don’t start with these three steps, then anything we do claiming to reduce gun violence is just hollow.

Let’s do this right.

This Day

Dusty 1 Comment

This day, I’m thinking about Kendrick Castillo. And about Riley Howell. And about gun violence.

Kendrick Castillo was the high school senior, three days from graduating, who lunged at a fellow student who came into his classroom with a gun in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, this past Wednesday. He was shot to death. Eight other students were wounded by the two gunmen, one of whom was detained by a school security guard. Two other seniors tackled Castillo’s killer, and the other people in the classroom credit Castillo with saving their lives.

Riley Howell and another young man tackled another gunman at UNC-Charlotte on April 30. Again, it’s believed that their actions stopped the shooter from murdering more people, potentially many more people. Howell was shot three times, and died of his wounds.

We call them heroes.

We call them martyrs.

We grieve for them, we remember them, we hold military funerals and vigils for them.

And then we make more of them.

I had a brief discussion — not a bad one, though I was a bit rude and I made the other person upset with me — on Facebook about Kendrick Castillo and whether or not he was a hero. I said he was a tragedy, and I was told that his situation was certainly a tragedy, but that calling him anything other than a hero dishonored him and his leadership and his legacy. And I struggled with how I wanted to respond to that. At first I said that I understood the other person’s point, and I agreed with it, for the most part. But really, I’m not sure that I do. I don’t mean to rehash the argument without giving the other person a chance to rebut my points, so I don’t want to get too far into this specific topic, but — I don’t think that my consent and participation are necessary for someone to be honored. I’ve disagreed often with those we choose to view as heroes, as leaders, as those worthy of honor; I don’t think my opinion has much of an impact on their status or their reputation or their legacy. Especially not something I say in a Facebook comment, or even on this blog. I will say that I would not state my opinion directly to the person or their loved ones, I wouldn’t go to John McCain’s funeral and call him an asshole even though I wrote a multi-page essay to that effect during the 2008 presidential race. But I do also think that if I lost someone I loved, if my wife sacrificed her life to save her students from a school shooter, it would not make me feel better if people told me she was a hero. So if I ever spoke to Kendrick Castillo’s family, I think the first and last thing I would say is, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

But none of that is the point I wanted to make here; just the impetus that has me writing about this terrible topic, again. During that same discussion, I wanted to say that I would rather use my grief for the loss of Kendrick Castillo, and for Riley Howell, to try to ensure that this never happened again, that nobody else would ever have to make the choice that they made.

But I couldn’t say that. First because I don’t know that I am grieving. I’ve grieved for deaths before, and this feels nothing like that. I will say that, inasmuch as you can grieve for someone you’ve never met, I do feel genuinely sad and sorry about these deaths, and I have been thinking about them all day; so if that’s grieving, then I am. If it’s not grieving, then I’m doing whatever this is, and maybe that honors their lives and their loss.

More to the point, though, I don’t think I’m going to do anything to prevent this from happening again. I want to, I genuinely do; but I’m not sure what. I can post on this blog, or elsewhere on the internet, and maybe my opinion can sway some others — but first I have to know how to sway them (you)  in order to make a difference, to move us closer to this goal we all share of never again having to hear of a school shooting. I usually think that’s the most powerful impact I can have on issues; because I have this small platform, and I can use it. Though as I said above, I’m not sure how much this blog, my words, these posts, really matter. Probably not much. I could run for office, but I wouldn’t win nor want the job; I could work for a campaign — and I might — but I’d have to be sure that the campaign I was working for was the right one, the one that would help make this happen. Of course I can vote, and will  — but again, I have to know that I’m voting for the right person. And when it comes right down to it, if the options are between someone who doesn’t share my opinions about preventing gun violence, and, say, Donald Trump — well, I’m not fucking voting for Trump.

I suppose I could also carry a gun, and stand guard at a school building. But I don’t think that is the right answer.

So the first thing that I need to do, to actually accomplish, is to decide what I think is the right thing to do. And then look for opportunities to pursue that right thing.

I’m saying this because I want to help move other people to do the same. My opinions may not sway anyone, but I do hope that when I say things that make sense, that aren’t simply my opinions, then people will listen: and this makes sense. We need to figure this out. We should all decide what we think is the best thing to do. We should also be open-minded and willing to listen, and honestly think, about what other people say is the best thing to do. We need to do this thinking because if nothing else, the 20 years between Columbine and Highlands Ranch, and the incessant stream of similar tragedies that have paraded by us over those two decades, should show us that we don’t know what to do. Because we’ve done nothing. Nothing other than drill students in how to deal with school shooters: and that has led directly to this point, these two dead men, these — heroes. We made them. We taught them what to do, we encouraged them, we failed to do anything else to prevent these situations where they chose to sacrifice themselves for others. If they are martyrs, then we are not the inheritors of their gift, the beneficiaries of their sacrifice: we’re the ones who killed them. We’re the Romans, with the cross and the nails. We’re the Inquisition, with the stake and the fire. We’re Jack and the hunters, chanting “KILL THE PIG! KILL THE PIG!” while Simon comes down from the cave.

At best we’re the ones watching it happen. At best.

 

I actually intended this post to be about what I think we should do to stop this. But it hasn’t gone that way, and I don’t want to get into it now. And tomorrow is Mother’s Day, and I don’t want to talk about ending gun violence on  Mother’s Day. So I think I will leave this here, for now, and come back to it next week — probably Monday.

I will end with this last remark. I do not think honoring dead men like Kendrick Castillo and Riley Howell as heroes does one single thing to reduce the tragedy of their loss. In a perverse way, if they are heroes, then that makes their loss worse, because heroes are valuable people, people who improve the lives of others, and they shouldn’t have to die to do that: they don’t have to die to do that. If they die doing it, then that is the end of their heroism, and it is a loss, it is a terrible loss in addition to the unforgivable loss of their lives. I think they probably were heroes, because I think that fighting to stop or prevent harm to others is a good thing, one of the best things, and so people who try to do it are good; if they try to stop harm this horrific, then they are great. I can call them heroes for that.

But still, the only thing I can say is: I am so sorry for your loss.

Image result for kendrick castillo

Kendrick Castillo

Image result for riley howell

Riley Howell

 

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

PART II: Time for the crazy shit.

ClearImage result for crazy pirate

(Have you all told everyone about me? Image taken from here, and it’s for sale.)

(Here’s Part I.)

So all right: we’ve got our floating garbage-land, called Spirit of Trump (Trumpia? Trump-As-Fuck-Land? We’ll discuss. There will be a meeting. One awesome thing about pirates is that they were members of an essentially egalitarian and democratic society.). Now it’s time to talk about our long-term goals. I mean, sure, we can just float around on our trash-berg, but how long will that satisfy us? For my own self, I feel I will need a purpose greater than snickering at Trump while living on a giant mound of waste.

So here’s the plan.

First of all, we’re going to become Lords of Plastic. I’m hopeful that we will have some science-minded people aboard, and they will be willing to experiment with the plastic that makes up our proud island; maybe they can find ways to manipulate it, better than we can now. Specifically I’d like to make plastic that is impervious to bullets and rockets and torpedoes and the like, as I plan to go to war and it would be swell if our plasticontinent didn’t get wiped out by the first salvo. Though really, the main protection from assault would be the sheer size of our rubbishy Nautilus: I want this thing to be so big that the U.S. Navy could blast away at the edges for days and do nothing more than break off a whole lot of plastic confetti. But I figure, once word gets out that we’re creating a free society, with Trump’s blessing and outside of his control, and also helping clean up the oceans? I mean, imagine the brain drain on the United States of Trump: imagine all the brilliant minds who can’t stand to turn on the news every day and see that straw-haired Nazi Cheeto in the White House. Think how many of them would rather live on a giant pile of floating trash rather than a country filled with MAGA hats. I mean, really, which honestly seems more like worthless garbage? So I’m pretty sure we’ll  have all of the greatest minds in America on our team.

Just imagine what they could do, what America’s best minds could do, given free rein and a cause to fight for.

To that end, in addition to plastic shielding, I’m looking for some intriguing plastic-based weapon systems: I want plastic netting that could tangle motors and machines, and maybe trap attacking ships; and I would love some plastic that could adhere to people and sort of cocoon them in a plastic shell. You know what else would be awesome? Sentient plastic. Ooo — and maybe Flubber!

Once we can turn the plastic into our weapons of war, then it’s time to become Lords of Plastic for real. We’re taking all the plastic. All the garbage. All the recycling, too, since 91% of plastic produced ends up in landfills, which means recycling is just another pile of bullshit. Like Trump and his goddamn slogans. I figure we can reach an agreement with the nations of the world — certainly with Trump and his ilk, the megalomaniacal idiots — to take all of their plastic garbage off their hands. They’ll pay us to do it, so long as the plastic doesn’t end up in their landfills, in their rivers and streams, making them look bad for their people; no, indeed, we don’t want that. So we’ll take it all, and we’ll earn some hefty fees, too — garbage is lucrative. Just ask the Sopranos. But what’s even better is that the more plastic we collect, the larger our island will be. Considering the sheer quantity of plastic we produce now, worldwide, I figure we’ll overtake Australia in no time.

But the goal is not to make the largest plastic island in the world. The goal is not even to escape Trump’s America. I want those things, I want fame and fortune, and freedom. But you know what I really want?

I want my fucking country back.

I don’t mind losing a political fight. I don’t mind being wrong; it intrigues me, actually, when I finally shed the blinders and actually understand an argument from the other side; and when I see, just for instance, the economy improving in a lot of ways, even in the last two years under Trump, I have to recognize that there’s something to the idea of lowering taxes and decreasing regulation in order to give businesses a boost. That makes sense, even though my liberal soul says that we need the money from taxes in order to help people who need it. But the truth is somewhere in the middle: taking too much from those who produce wealth really does make it harder to produce wealth, and there are problems with that, including that it makes it harder to collect money that we want to spend on good causes. Things like that make me recognize that Republicans have a point. They’re not inherently wrong. The pull from the right, to draw back the government and keep it small, and to ensure that it is not involved in every aspect of our lives, is a valuable influence on our society. We shouldn’t go all the way to that side, I don’t think, because frequently the government is the best way to ensure a level playing field, and to protect people from injustice. But government unchecked is not any better than capitalism unchecked. I know that. I know that because of conservatives who have won arguments, who have made good points, who have done things when in power that are actually good for all of us. Fiscal conservatives keep us from overspending. Small-government conservatives are a good check on large government, because large government institutions are inefficient and wasteful, and occasionally corrupt; just look at the Senate under Mitch McConnell, the evil fucker with his hand up the dummy-Trump’s backside. I don’t even see that son of a bitch as a Republican, not now after he’s repudiated everything the GOP is supposed to stand for in his naked grab for power. He’s a kleptocrat, just like Trump. Just like 90% of the current Republicans in power, who have given everything up in order to support Trump, just so they can maintain power.

I won’t leave my country in their hands. I won’t.

So once we have our floating continent of filth, we’re going to come back and fight for this giant pile of waste we call home.

What we do is, we go after the oil, first. I’d love to start subtly, by taking all the plastic we can steal: we pirate all the cargo ships carrying plastic goods, and steal them all; shred it and add it to our island, or maybe provide any useful material wealth to the “shithole” countries, and all the ones that Trump cut off aid to because they’re not white. The more plastic we can steal, the more oil they’ll have to produce in order to replace the stolen plastic. Then we go after the offshore oil rigs: it would be great if we could have two garbage islands, one in the Atlantic to go into the Gulf of Mexico, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to hit the coast of California, and/or Alaska. I sorta think all we have to do is float into them, and let our island crush the oil rigs underneath our neverending plasticine bulk; but if not, we’ll use the plastic weapons, nets to foul the drills and to capture the tankers, plastic cocoons to freeze the workers and float them back to shore. Once we stop the oil production, and/or push up the price of crude so high that America’s overheated economy can’t afford to import it, then the economy will crash. (Obviously renewable energy would be the other option, but all of the best minds, and the most liberal ones, will be dancing on a giant ice-shelf of shredded water bottles and Chinese-made toys, flipping off everyone in a MAGA hat.) Once the economy crashes, Trump will not only lose his support, but his only reason for being President, which is his own enrichment and aggrandization; he’s not going to want to be the leader of a poor nation that got beaten by a floating pile of garbage.

A floating pile of garbage with an Ultimate Weapon.

My idea for the ultimate weapon is this: the island has a volcano cone, but obviously no volcano under it. I figure it would just be a hole down into the ocean below. So we make huge balls of plastic, big enough to fill the volcano completely, like ping-pong balls in a giant Nerf gun: then we push down on the whole island with enough force to make the water shoot up through the volcano and launch that plastic boulder for miles. I don’t know how we aim it; that’s why we have all the brilliant scientists. But I know this part: know how we push the island down? That’s easy: when we clear all the plastic out of the oceans, we’ll win the undying friendship of all the whales. So we get them to leap out of the water, and land on the island, all at once. It’ll shove the whole island down, fast and hard, and BOOM! Plastic volcano launches plastic boulder. The whales will be fine; the island’s just plastic, so it won’t hurt them, and we will quickly help them back into the water, so they can swim around and do it again, as soon as we can reload the volcano with another giant plastic pellet. It’s foolproof! And maybe we can make the plastic pellets hollow, and fill them with — I dunno, something good, something that will dissuade anyone from fighting us. Eight tons of butterscotch pudding or something. Radioactive waste (I bet we could get a good deal on that if we agreed to take it off America’s hands when we get all the plastic.). Maybe sewage? That’s be poetic, wouldn’t it? If we dropped a giant plastic ball filled with slimy, festering shit  right on top of Mar-a-Lago?

Anyway, between all of our piratey scalawags, our continent of plastic, the geniuses who were pushed out of Trump’s America, and the allegiance of all the whales, and probably all the dolphins and porpoises, and definitely the sea turtles once we clear out all those straws, I’m pretty sure we can win this fight. Really, I bet all we’d have to do is threaten to destroy every building and golf course named after Trump, and he’d resign in no time.

Really, I think this is the best plan. It certainly seems more realistic than trusting our democratic institutions and trying to heal all the damage that partisan fighting has done to this country.

So who’s with me?

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I’m thinking, Well! That’s quite a line you’re following, there, Dusty! First you rail against science, and then you complain about the foundation of American exceptionalism, capitalism and the profit motive? Why don’t you go for the trifecta?

This morning, I say to my sardonic self (Who uses sarcasm to conceal the quiver in his lip): all righty then.

Capitalism and the profit motive have helped make this country the absolute powerhouse that it is militarily, culturally, and especially economically. The drive to succeed, to win, to gain the maximum benefit for one’s self from one’s labor, have been a powerful motivator for as long as this country has told us we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps; though profit and competition haven’t made that particular impossible feat possible, they have allowed us to turn a thousand other impossible things into realities: they helped us get to the moon (because we had to beat the Commies there) and they helped us invent the first atomic bomb (because we had to beat the Nazis) and they helped us lead the way in the information revolution of the 1980’s (because Apple had to beat Microsoft, and Microsoft had to beat Apple). Our continuous growth, our continuous progress, have been driven largely by exactly this: by money, by profit, by competition for limited resources, whether those resources are time or money or fame or love or just food.

I can’t argue with that. I hate competition, hate the very idea of fighting other people in order to gain greater profit; but I can’t deny the results. America is an exceptional place, and our incredible speed forward has been increased again, and again, and again, by this essential underlying system: the one in front, the one on top, gets what he wants, and other people have to make do with what’s left over, with what’s left behind. Our system of government, our great and wonderful freedoms —  and they are great, and they are wonderful — are predicated on that idea, with this addition: anyone, in theory, can be the one on top, the one who gets all the stuff first. In practice it can’t be anyone, and it’s almost  always been the same type of people — mostly white Christian men — but in theory, it could be anyone, and our ability to pretend that that is true, and our desire to push for greater rights for other people mainly because we think those opportunities will reflect some benefit back on us, are what has allowed us as a society to spread those freedoms to more people, in more situations.

Just as long as we can pretend the people gaining the freedoms are like us. When they’re not like us, when they live on the other side of the world and speak a different language and live a different way, well. Then it’s probably all right if they have less freedom. Particularly if we profit thereby, with, say, cheap consumer goods.

Am I being too cynical? Look: the slaves were freed because it served the purpose of the white men who freed them. Woodrow Wilson changed his stance on women’s suffrage from opposition to support because he needed women to continue supporting the American effort in World War I. At least part of Lyndon Johnson’s intention in signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure the Democratic party would not fracture along racial lines — and that all of them would support his bid for election in November. And so on, so on. I do agree with Dr. Martin Luther King that those in power do not give up their power voluntarily, only when there is sufficient pressure on them to do so; I know that some of the progress we have made towards greater freedom has been because of grass roots movements and political and social pressure. The will of the people does sometimes prevail. Maybe even often.

But far more often, money talks, and people bend and crawl. And that’s capitalism.

Technology, meanwhile, has often been touted as a means of making life easier for the common man; but all too often, it has in fact made life harder. We have more technology, and we work longer hours and suffer more stress. We have longer life spans, now, that much is certainly true; but more of our lives is spent in misery, and often in ill health. We’ve gotten more quantity of life, but not more quality. And even more true is this: when progress has been made, it pushes us forward  —  off of another cliff. The Green Revolution of the mid-20th century, led by Norman Borlaug, saved at least a billion people from starving to death in Asia. A magnificent success, and a great leap forward.

How many billions are going to die now because of climate change? How much of that climate change was driven by the increase in human population made possible by the Green Revolution?

I don’t mean to say it was a bad thing. Lives were saved, and I am in favor of humans, and of living humans over dead humans. The same thing is true of our longer life spans: what I said about quantity but not quality is true, but also, the rise of lingering and terrible diseases that afflict us as we age has come at least partly because we are now still alive to age. We die of cancer now because we don’t die of sepsis like we used to. We have Alzheimer’s now because we’re not all dead at 65-70 from heart disease. Do you realize how many of the world’s greatest authors, along with millions of others, literally drank themselves to death before they were 50? Do you realize how much of that is attributable to a lack of understanding of and treatment for alcoholism? How much was, quite simply, due to the inability of medical science to perform a liver transplant? Medical advancements just mean we die in different ways, and after longer lives — and as a person who would like to live a good, long time before he dies, I see that as entirely positive.

But the problem is, the problem with all of this is, that we think of our temporary fixes, our incremental advances  — our progress– as a solution to the problem. But it never is. All we’ve been doing since the Industrial Revolution if not before, is treating the symptoms and not the real underlying problem. We are better at waging war: but we haven’t figured out how to stop fighting. We live longer lives: but not better ones. We make more profits: but we don’t get greater rewards. We live in a magnificent country: but it survives by exploiting and destroying other countries, other people, and it always has.

Progress is not our salvation. Progress is our drug. We’re not making real progress in our real problems — not much, and not quickly, and too often the real progress is swallowed up by backsliding; we have actually gotten more empathetic and more aware, and the backlash from that is the alt-right and Donald Trump. Which is making us less empathetic and less aware, as we draw deeper into our shells to avoid looking at the shit that is piling up outside. And I am entirely guilty of this, don’t think I’m not: I have stopped listening to or reading the news because I feel powerless to do anything about it. I’m not: I have as much power as any person, and more than most because I am a white Christian man, to help make the world a better place, and instead, I’ve done — well, nothing useful. I’ve probably made some progress. But I haven’t solved anything.

 

I don’t think I’ve been clear enough in this blog. I’ve been having trouble lately making my point clear; and this one is a tough one to get across. Let me boil it down and then I will see if I can explain it at greater length in future posts.

What we call progress, in technology, in the growth of our economy, in the expansion of this nation’s military and political power, are rarely if ever actual progress towards a useful goal, a valuable purpose. Almost always the goal is — motion. Like football: you try to get the first down, you try to move the chains. You hunker down and focus on the immediate task, convincing yourself that that one task, that one all-consuming goal, is a good thing. And in the immediate sense, in a single, narrow context, it is good: football players are successful when they get first downs. Soldiers are successful when they carry out assigned missions. Workers are successful when they bring home a paycheck. Scientists are successful when they complete an experiment as it was intended  — say, by injecting human brain DNA into macaques. We see immediate success as progress, especially when it is followed by another success. We’ve taken another step along the path.

But we rarely, if ever, think about where the path is leading. And too often, the successes right now cause even greater problems down the line.

That doesn’t mean we should ignore the problems, nor that we should try not to solve them; winning World War II was the right thing to do, even if it did start the Cold War and the nuclear arms race and so on. Norman Borlaug absolutely should have saved billions from starving, and Alexander Fleming absolutely should have deciphered penicillin, and Dr. King absolutely should have fought for civil rights.

But we need to stop thinking that progress, movement forward, is the answer, is the solution, is the goal. Movement for the sake of movement will not ever get you to where you need to go, to where you should be. Only purposeful, intentional movement can do that. A plan. Understanding.

So maybe, instead of bulling ahead ever farther, ever faster, ever harder, we should– slow down. And think. Even if it means we don’t solve the problems we’re dealing with right now. Maybe it will help us find a real solution, instead of a solution right now that leads to another problem tomorrow.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about rules. And breaking them.

I don’t have any particular plans to break rules today, apart from  the ones I always break (I am insufficiently formal with my students! I don’t take their cellphones away! I DON’T ENFORCE THE DRESS CODE!!!); since I have become a teacher, I am generally on the side of rules enforcement (Not the dress code. Dress codes are a poor system. I’ll write about that some other morning.), because I recognize that most rules are intended to uphold the One Rule: Primum non nocere. First, do no harm. In my classroom that is the first rule and the only rule that gets regularly and consistently enforced. But other corollary rules are reasonable when they help maintain that one rule: the tardy policy is acceptable because students who come in late miss class, which is harmful to their education; they disrupt the classroom, which is harmful to everyone else’s. It is a minor harm in both cases, and so the punishment for tardiness should be a stern look, maybe a talking to (Especially in the case of schoolchildren, who are rarely tardy on their own behalf; I was late to homeroom for essentially my entire freshman year because my older brother drove me to school, and he didn’t have to be in homeroom, ergo late.), but there is harm, and the rule makes sense.

The more interesting situation is when someone — like me — decides that some rules should be enforced and not others. Because then it becomes a matter of reason and authority; argument, in other words. I have decided that the no-cellphones policy at the school where I teach will not be enforced in my classroom with the sole exception of tests. I confiscate their phones during tests; otherwise I let the students use them during class. Conversely, I insist that essays and projects be on school appropriate subjects. I can justify the enforcement of one rule and not the other, but am I the one who gets to decide that? My supervisors would say No. My students, who like my laxity, say Yes. I do what I want, ‘cause a pirate is free, and I am a pirate.

But then there are the rules, and particularly the uneven enforcement of rules, that I believe are problematic. My administration insists that the students do not talk during fire drills, that the entire school remain in absolute silence. They instruct the teachers, during every drill, to send the students who talk to the administration to be disciplined. They do not have a reasonable argument for this. The district insists, as a precaution against school shootings, that all classroom doors be closed and locked during the entire school day, with the sole exception (Other than when people are coming in and out of the doors, of course — though I have been frequently tempted to slam the door closed and yell, “IT’S A SAFETY PRECAUTION!” when people are trying to come into my classroom. Particularly when it’s administrators.) being when there is a teacher alone in the room with a single student; then the potential lawsuits override the risk of being shot, and so the classroom door must remain blocked open. They do not have a reasonable argument for this. My administration is constantly walking by my classroom and closing my door, which I habitually leave open because I have an open-door bathroom policy, and also because it helps keep the room a comfortable temperature.

Those rules, despite being irrational, are enforced consistently and vigorously. But other rules, such as suspension and expulsion for serious offenses — rules which do have a rational basis — are consistently bent or broken, generally for the same fear of lawsuits that governs our door closings. There are students at the school who should probably not be at the school, because their actions pose a genuine threat to themselves and the other students. But those students are generally allowed to remain, and even allowed to make up work missed during suspensions. I am not one to insist on expulsion; other solutions to the issue could certainly be tried — but those things don’t happen, either.

Let’s imagine, as an example, that a student was running around whipping people with goat skin in order to increase their fertility. (What? That’s where Valentine’s Day comes from.) A student who did that should be suspended, and certainly, if the student was naked as the Romans were when they did that, that student should be expelled and probably arrested. I could understand if, instead, the student was required to attend counseling, GoatWhippers Anonymous and the like; but my school, and the school where I taught before this, frequently did nothing post-suspension. The goat-whipper comes right back, sits in class, makes up work and gets their credits. And frequently, re-offends. With the same result.

I broke the rules almost ten years ago. I wrote angry blogs about my students, while I was in class, using a school computer; I also named former students and insulted them. I’m honestly not sure that my particular actions caused direct harm (largely because none of the students I talked about knew about or read the blog), but certainly the rules that I violated are intended to prevent harm: teachers should not insult their students, we should not post on social media or the internet during class; we should not name our students and violate their privacy. I should not have broken those rules. I was punished for them, and I still pay for it; and that’s as it should be. Especially because I still write this blog, I have to remain aware of where the line is, and not cross it. I suppose you could argue that I do cross it, that I shouldn’t write, that I shouldn’t write about my school or the administration or similar topics; but rules that prevent harm should not cause harm. And censorship is harm. My punishment taught me to be more responsible, and therefore I, who am closest to the potential damage, have become a means of preventing further harm. This is exactly what rules and punishments are supposed to accomplish: reform and prevention. For the offender far more than others who observe, but the idea of a deterrent is not absurd.

There are other instances where, rather than a poor policy or an unfairly enforced rule, specific individuals are allowed to skirt the rules — or simply to break them with impunity. Where, say, family members are allowed to have freedoms and privileges that they should not have, in violation of rules. This is, quite simply, corruption; not only does it allow harm to happen to all involved, but it creates harm directly. It allows others to be corrupt themselves, and therefore the harm spreads. And it begins at the top.

Looking at you, Mr. Trump. And your children.

When  the people who are given the authority to make the rules and enforce the rules do a poor job of choosing which rules are vigorously enforced — generally, rules that allow them to maintain and increase power and control over subordinates, but which do not tangibly prevent harm — and which are laxly enforced or not enforced at all, then the system is broken; then, unfortunately, it falls to those not in the position of authority to make decisions regarding which rules to enforce and which not. That’s where I come into this. If my students were not consistently and adamantly protected, by their parents and de facto by the school in that they do not enforce a schoolwide ban, in their right to have a cellphone with maximal functionality, I would enforce a ban in my classroom. If my administration acted in all ways with the safety and benefit of the students foremost in mind, then I would enforce their reasonable rules vigorously. As none of those things are true, I am forced to pick and choose.

I hope I choose well. I will take responsibility for the choices I make.

I learned that from my punishments.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

(Twenty mornings! Score!)

This morning I am thinking about yesterday afternoon.

Yesterday afternoon, following a full day of teaching, and right on the heels of a vapid and hollow staff meeting (“Let’s sing ‘Happy Birthday’ all at once to everyone who’s had a birthday in the last two and a half months! Then, as a special gift, the birthday people can cut this crappy cake we got for them! Also, teachers with high test scores win all the prizes! Yay math and English!” Except with less energy and verve.), we had an interesting and useful training. It was called Stop the Bleed, and it was about how to deal with critical bleeding, how to apply first aid, tourniquets and wound packing and pressure and the like. I was glad to get the training, because I learned things I hadn’t known before, things that could be useful in a crisis, and I learned them from actual medical professionals and first responders.

But there were a few things that bothered me. Apart from the graphic wound photos and the fake detached limbs with enormous puncture wounds for us to practice stuffing gauze into. Geesh.

The first was the audience participation; we were asked to identify some signs of critical blood loss, and also some consequences of it if left untreated; there’s nothing quite like hearing a bunch of teachers, who are all lovely people, and who also want to be the one to give the teacher the right answer, shouting out, “Spurting blood!” “Missing part of a limb!” “DEATH!” The flip side of this was the trainer’s comment that our practice hemostatic gauze lacked the chemical additive that is in actual hemostatic gauze, which helps cause blood clotting, because our gauze was “educational.” I love the idea that the crappy knock-off version, the one that doesn’t do the critical thing that the actual product does, is the educational version. It’s like school Chromebooks.

Then there were the trainers’ unintentionally strange comments. (At least I hope they were unintentional…) “We are fortunate to have the experience of the military, so we’ve seen tourniquets applied for up to two hours without loss of limb.” “They have tourniquets for the torso now so you can apply them to the lower abdomen, but unfortunately they’re only for the military at the moment.” (I think they had a different understanding of “fortunate” than I do. Is the military really fortunate to have the opportunity to field-test tourniquets for hours at a time without losing limbs? To have access to abdominal tourniquets? I mean, I’m all in favor of saving lives — but “fortunate?”) The better one was the trainer’s attempt at humor: when explaining that wounds to the “torso junctions,” where the limbs meet the trunk, at the shoulders, neck, and groin, the trainer said, “Now, you can’t apply a tourniquet at these places  — although I’m sure many of you would like to…” which is either, if she was talking about the groin, the weirdest and most inappropriate dick joke I’ve ever heard, or else she was joking about us strangling our students to death, ha, ha, ha. It’s especially disturbing that the murder joke is by far the more likely.

That’s especially disturbing because the impetus for this training? Sandy Hook. The program was put in place after the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, because at that horrible scene, the paramedics could not reach the victims in time to stop their critical bleeding because the police had to secure the scene before the medical personnel could be allowed in to help. So that means two things: one, this training is being given to me because, if the worst happens, I’ll already be in the unsecured scene, and so will have nothing to lose  by applying first aid to people who are bleeding to death, because I will already be in mortal danger myself. And two, that means we were sitting in the library of my school, at the end of a day working with students, talking about when a psychopath brought an assault weapon to an elementary school and murdered more than twenty people, most of them under the age of seven: and at least some of those people died by bleeding to death because the paramedics couldn’t be permitted in to reach them.

And this, this, is how my nation and my school respond to those facts, those unspeakable horrors. Not with gun control, not, in the case of my school, with hiring a full-time security guard and nurse: no, no. With training for the teachers in how to apply a combat-tested tourniquet, and how to pack gauze into a wound — gauze that, I learned, comes with an x-ray opaque strip so that once multiple yards of it are shoved into the wound, the gauze can still be found and removed in the hospital. Where the firefighter teaching us pointed out that we had to be careful putting our fingers into the wound because there might be sharp shards of bone inside, or even a bullet — which, he said, would still be sizzling hot.

All I can say is, God bless America.

Investigation

Dusty Leave a comment

There should be an investigation.

Sorry: I assume that I don’t need to give any more explanation than that of my topic here; but in truth, there are several things happening right now that could lead me to call for an investigation, so I should certainly give my audience a little more than that.

There should be an investigation into the accusation of sexual assault made against Brett Kavanaugh.

There. Is that clear enough? Mmm, perhaps not; I know this story has exploded into unavoidability, but I also know that many of my fellow citizens, and many interested parties around the world, make a point of staying away from the mass media and the political news cycles; those people may need more information. I don’t expect that any of them read this blog – not sure that anyone will read this blog once they have realized what my subject is – but in case they do, I should explain.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, currently an appellate judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington D.C. District, has been nominated by President Trump for the seat on the U.S. Supreme Court vacated by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Judge Kavanaugh is on the fast track to confirmation, partly because he’s a fine conservative judge with excellent experience and credentials, and therefore a good choice for the seat (if you don’t mind the fact that he’s a perfect fit for the mold of Republican Honky, having grown up wealthy and privileged and white, attending private schools and Yale, working for the Bush White House, et cetera, et cetera. He’s even married with two children whom he coaches in softball, for God’s sake. He’s a Republican Ken doll. Does that make him a good or bad choice for the Supreme Court? Honestly, I want to help my party stop playing identity politics, because identity politics are bullshit, and so I’m going to say we should let Judge Kavanaugh’s stereotypical markers go, and focus on his actual record of words and deeds), and partly because the Republican-controlled Senate wants to fill Justice Kennedy’s seat before the November elections, when the Democrats may win control of the Senate, and may then cast out any Republican judicial nominations while chanting “Merrick Garland! Merrick Garland!”

I have to say: I had this splendid and insane idea. What if the Democrats, should they win the elections in November and take control of Congress, could call Merrick Garland for a hearing, and then vote him into Kennedy’s seat? I mean, he was nominated for the Supreme Court by a President, and he wasn’t voted down by the Senate, simply never given a chance to be considered. Could they go back and pull his nomination out of the cold case files, so to speak, dust him off and put him through the process now?

The answer is no, sadly. His nomination officially expired when the 114th Congress closed in January of 2017. Too bad. Think how sweet that would have felt. It might even have precipitated the second civil war, and about time, I say. I don’t mean that.

Anyway. Judge Kavanaugh was going forward with his successful bid to become an entrenched 30-year bastion of conservatism, when suddenly the car went off the road and crashed down a hillside. It is currently flying, in super slow motion, over a cliff’s edge; it is not clear yet whether it will flip over, smash into the ground and explode in red-white-and-blue flames, or if it will glide perfectly onto another roadway on the other side of the narrow chasm it may currently be flying over. That is to say: Kavanaugh’s nomination has suddenly gone awry, but it may still straighten out and land him in a seat at the Supreme Court.

The reason the Kavanaugh car went off the road is a woman named Christine Blasey-Ford, Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford, who has stated publicly that, when she was a teenager known simply as Christine Blasey, she was assaulted at a party by a drunken 17-year-old boy who pushed her down, lay on top of her, groped her and kissed her, tried to take her clothing off, and when she tried to scream for help, he put his hand over her mouth to silence her. That drunken assault was committed, according to Dr. Ford, by Brett Kavanaugh.

Okay. Cue outrage. Cue insanity. Cue tens of millions of people all saying, “Oh, shit.” I know I certainly did, several times, when I first heard this story after it broke. But after the outrage and insanity and the Oh-Shits have passed, we now have to deal with this situation. And the question is, what do we do?

It’s not fair to treat this as a special case because of the political ramifications. If Dr. Ford’s story is true, then she was attacked by a drunken savage, who may quite possibly have raped her had his equally drunken buddy, a man named Mark Judge, not jumped laughingly atop the two while they struggled on the bed, knocking all three to the floor and enabling the young woman to get away. (I have to say, though maybe I shouldn’t, but I have to: that’s the part that makes me think Dr. Ford’s story might be true exactly as she said it. That is not the kind of act someone would make up, because it’s so absurd, so entirely dumb; it turns an attempted rape into a bad Three Stooges skit. It makes the rape attempt seem less serious, which would undercut the narrative if Dr. Ford wanted to invent an attack to use as a weapon. But it is also clearly something that a drunk-ass teenaged boy would do. I also think it is something that a guy would do if he thought his buddy was taking a joke too far, and he suddenly got disturbed that maybe this wasn’t a joke, to his buddy: according to the story Dr. Ford recounted, Mark Judge was laughing wildly the whole time, and he jumped on top of them twice, only knocking them off the bed the second time. I can quite easily see that young man doing that intentionally to make Kavanaugh stop, maybe after seeing Kavanaugh do something that wasn’t playful and funny in that Ha-ha-we’re-drunk-guys-assaulting-a-girl-but-not-really kind of jokey way. Maybe putting his hand over her mouth after she screamed? However: I also have to note that there is no indication other than Dr. Ford’s testimony that the two guys who carried out this, to me, realistic-sounding attack, were actually Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge. So I believe the event happened. I do not know for certain if Kavanaugh was the one who did it. That depends on whether we believe Dr. Ford. Is it believable that she would forget who did this to her? It is not; trauma creates strong memories, and she knew both boys’ identities at the time. Is it possible, since memory is often deceptive, that she has mixed up the identities of her attackers in the intervening years? It is possible, and it is also possible that Dr. Ford is lying intentionally. So I can’t be sure; there is a reasonable doubt. Forgive the ridiculously long aside.) Whether that savage would-be rapist is now a judge, or nominated for the Supreme Court, or if he was just some dude who drove a bus or sold insurance or ran a car wash would make no difference. Dr. Ford’s account should be considered carefully, and the reasonable next steps should be taken. We are well past the statute of limitations, so there cannot be any criminal or civil action taken against Dr. Ford’s attacker; but the purpose of acting on an accusation of assault shouldn’t be for the sake of punishing the attacker: it should be for the sake of trying to make things right, however that can be done. The truth is, of course, it can’t be made right, because Dr. Ford can never be relieved of the burden of what happened to her; but that makes it more important, not less, that we try.

At the same time, this case can’t be separated from the politics. The potential stakes have been raised, all the way to the highest court in the land. This may be important not only for those involved, but for the entire country. It doesn’t change the situation, but it changes the extent of it, and therefore changes the extent of our response to it. Howsoever far we might be willing to go for the sake of doing what is right for Dr. Ford – and I’d argue that that should be pretty goddamn far – we have to be willing to go much, much farther to do what is right for all of us.

So what is the right thing to do? Let me start by stating, as I think I’ve been doing all along, the obvious: we should not be playing partisan politics with this. And as is always the case, neither party is innocent of that crime, the crime of exploiting intense suffering, perhaps even causing intense suffering, for the sake of partisan political gain. It is utterly appalling that the Democrats, specifically Senator Dianne Feinstein, sat on the accusation for two months, revealing it only when it was the last bullet in the gun and could be used to delay Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination as long as possible. It seems likely that the political calculus here also sought to make it impossible for President Trump to nominate a replacement in time to get someone confirmed before the midterms if he and the GOP should decide to abandon Kavanaugh, which means they have little choice politically but to stick with the man accused of sexual assault, which will surely be used to make much political hay regarding the President and the rest of the privileged white dudes in power and their tendency towards sexual violence and misconduct. That’s a disgusting abuse of Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh and the entire political system. (Honestly, if I may be allowed another aside, I have to say that I think President Trump did nothing wrong here. I’m already seeing memes associating Trump with all of the sexual misconduct in the GOP, and though he certainly bears responsibility for his own alleged crimes and multiple verified instances of misogyny and sexual misconduct, he didn’t make the Republicans, nor the Democrats who have also committed crimes and sexual misconduct, into the scum that they are. He could not possibly have known about this assault accusation against Judge Kavanaugh, and so he should not be taken to task for picking a man who had this hidden in his past; it was hidden too well and too deep for anyone to know, which is why Judge Kavanaugh has the title and the position that he does. I saw Trevor Noah of the Daily Show making a comment about how Trump seems drawn to other sexual assaulters, and while that may be true, it also hides the truth that people who commit sexual assault are not always, not even often, clearly criminal in their demeanor. There is nothing to show, on the outside, that someone may have committed sexual assault in their past. The nicest guy you know might be guilty of sexual assault, and still seem like the nicest guy you know. There’s no particular reason to think that Trump could sense if Kavanaugh is guilty of this, and he couldn’t have known that Kavanaugh would be accused of it. That being the case, I actually think the honorable thing for the President to do is to stand by his nominee until and unless the truth is proven; and that’s what Trump is doing.) I don’t believe the cover story of protecting Dr. Ford’s anonymity; it wouldn’t even be hard to bring up the accusation without details but with enough information to scuttle the nomination before it went to committee. Senator Feinstein could have gone to President Trump’s advisors and presented the situation, and they absolutely would have steered the President to a different nominee; it’s not like Brett Kavanaugh is the only good Republican Ken doll in the judicial branch, and there were a dozen other possible names floating around for the seat. No, it seems clear that Senator Feinstein held this grenade until the very last second so as to inflict maximum damage, and that is simply gross.

On the other hand, the idea that the Republicans can push this nomination forward to a vote without properly pursuing the matter in a manner befitting the seriousness of the allegation, and the potential impact of putting a man guilty of sexual assault onto the Supreme Court for the rest of his life, for the sole reason that that man is also a conservative, is just as utterly disgusting. I can’t imagine being so cynical that I could do what the GOP seems to have done, which is to find a way to spin this that seems acceptable to enough of their base that they can then go ahead and do what they planned to do before this came to light: put a fifth conservative justice on the Supreme Court and start laying down precedents that will help them win the culture wars. But all I hear from them is, “Well, she’ll have a chance to speak, but we can’t delay this nomination. Don’t have time. Got to get this done fast.” Their reasoning is clear, and grotesque.

The right thing to do politically would be to go to a vote and vote Kavanaugh down, right now, and then get a second nominee through the process as fast as they possibly can; I would also argue that this would be the right thing to do for Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh, because it would take all of the ungodly pressure and scrutiny off of the case, and Dr. Ford could pursue it as she saw fit. It should be pursued, now that it’s out, both for her sake and because even if he is not headed for the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh is currently a judge on the Court of Appeals: he may not be one of the nine most powerful judges in the country, but he is one of the 188 most powerful judges. But bringing an accusation to light, proving the allegations, and potentially calling for Kavanaugh’s impeachment from the appellate court, none of that has the same insane heat as this does. And that way, the GOP could go ahead and get their fifth judge on the Supreme Court. Without inflicting a second justice, along with Clarence Thomas, who may be (is, in Thomas’s case) guilty of criminal sexual acts. (And Democrats worried about the long term effects in the culture wars should keep Thomas in mind. He is 70 years old, and he will not want to live out his last years as Ruth Bader Ginsburg is doing, working into her 80’s through ill health because she needs to keep her seat and do the right thing. Thomas does not have a hundredth part of Ginsburg’s strength, and his moral character is essentially nil. So make sure that Congress is Democratic, and Trump is out by 2020, and you’ll get a fifth liberal judge when Thomas steps down.)

But this is all beside the point. Because this is not a political issue. There are political issues attached to it, which change the dynamics of it; but they do not change the core issue. The core issue is that a woman has said she was attacked. And while there is no evidence beyond her word that Kavanaugh was the man who did it, there is evidence that it happened, both in her willingness to come forward with the accusation when there is little evidence that she gains thereby (I say “little evidence” because she might be using this allegation to hurt Kavanaugh and Trump, and her gain might be their loss. But there’s no evidence that Dr. Ford is a fanatic who would throw away her entire life for the sake of sticking it to Trump, just so he could nominate a different Republican Ken doll to the court after tossing out Kavanaugh. Also note that if her intent was political drama, she would have made the very same play that Feinstein made, coming out publicly at the most intense moment, rather than sending a letter to her congresswoman two months ago.), and in the fact that she recounted the attack to her therapist in 2012, long before she could have predicted she’d make an allegation against a Supreme Court nominee. It is not clear that she is telling the truth, because it is not clear that she definitely recalls the truth; that it happened seems likely, but that it was Kavanaugh is in some doubt. She took a polygraph test and passed it, but that isn’t good evidence; the therapist’s notes from 2012 differ from her story in critical ways (The notes say there were four males in the room when she was attacked. Kavanaugh is not named in them.); she can’t recall many details about the overall situation (though she has not had the opportunity to speak about this and answer questions, so we don’t yet know everything she recalls, only what her initial public statements describe); the other people in the room deny her allegations. That Kavanaugh denied it doesn’t show he’s innocent, because of course he has quite a lot to gain from denying it and nothing to gain from admitting guilt; the testimonials of his good character and the fact that there are many women whom he hasn’t attempted to rape do not, of course, mean anything at all.

So what do we do when there is a credible but not airtight accusation of a serious crime? It depends. What would be gained from pursuing the matter? What would the costs be? If this was just two people with an old trauma between them, then there wouldn’t be much for society to gain, and it wouldn’t be worth very much to pursue it; it would of course be worth the world for Dr. Ford to pursue it, and people who could help her would be, I think, honor bound to do so if they could, for her sake. But this is a 35-year-old crime, and if she brought it to a Maryland prosecutor, even if the statute of limitations didn’t exist (And by the way: it shouldn’t. The statute of limitations is that “Boys will be boys” bullshit made into law – “Well, shucks, he hasn’t raped anybody since then, so what’s the big deal?” – and it’s everything wrong with our justice system.), the prosecutor might not pursue it because there are other crimes and other criminals that pose larger threats. I think the story should be published, because there is not a better way to find out if other women might have suffered similarly; and if there is a pattern of behavior, suddenly there is much more reason to pursue charges against the assailant, to protect other innocents from harm.

I recognize that publishing an unproven allegation would ruin a man’s reputation. I face that possibility myself, all the time, because society believes someone like me, a man in his 40’s who spends all day with teenagers, is already probably 40% of the way towards child molestation; a credible public accusation would be more than enough to end my career forever, and prevent me from ever working in anything remotely like this field again. But the truth is that victims are destroyed by sexual assault, and it is the work of a lifetime to rebuild themselves; many can’t ever do it, particularly not if they are victimized more than once. Coming forward in our society with an accusation is even more dangerous than being accused: Brett Kavanaugh might lose his nomination for the Supreme Court; Dr. Ford has received death threats and has had to move out of her home, just in the last week. There isn’t an instance of public accusation that doesn’t go approximately that way: for all the grief that Bill Clinton (And Hillary Clinton, and Al Gore) got because of Clinton’s misconduct, it wasn’t a patch on what Monica Lewinsky went through. Laughing stock of the entire nation, for – well, for life, really, though she has done an admirable job of rebuilding herself since then. If I were accused of sexual misconduct, I’d be ruined; but the one who accused me, because I am a successful and popular teacher and a good guy, would be the target of every single bit of anger and hate that all of my friends and family could bring to bear. It would be bad. If someone were willing to do that to themselves, it would stand as reasonable evidence that the allegation were true. Proof? Of course not. But evidence. And because I recognize that, I work hard to make sure I don’t ever make it easy for someone to bring a false accusation against me, and I work even harder to make sure that no one could make a genuine complaint about my behavior, could accuse me of harassment or discrimination or something similar.

Plus, I’m not a rapist. Which makes it a lot easier to avoid accusations of rape.

I have to say, I got drunk as a teenager, more than once. Really drunk, sometimes. At parties, even. And I never even jokingly pretended to rape anyone. There is a difference between someone who will commit an act this heinous when their inhibitions are lowered, and someone who would never commit the act. That difference matters. And it has nothing to do with age and nothing to do with alcohol. People who say “Boys will be boys” about sexual assault, or who use a phrase like “drunken hijinks,” need to learn that.

So as I said above, what do we do when there is a credible but not an airtight accusation of a serious crime? We investigate. Of course we investigate. We ask questions. We send professionals in to interview everyone involved, and everyone who might know the truth, and we find out everything we can about it. Everyone should want this: Kavanaugh is already at risk from the accusation; if he’s innocent, an investigation is the best chance to prove it. If it were me, I wouldn’t be satisfied with being able to deny it – even if I categorically denied it, as Kavanaugh has – and then move on, I’d want someone who knew what they were doing to ascertain the truth, and make it known as an objective fact. Dr. Ford should want an investigation in order to prove that she’s telling the truth, and to bring herself one step closer to justice and the good rebuilding of herself from her trauma. And indeed, Dr. Ford has asked for, even demanded an investigation. Well, one out of two ain’t bad. The Republicans should want an investigation because it will be far faster than pursuing another nominee if Kavanaugh is innocent, and far better than either confirming an attempted rapist to the Supreme Court if he’s guilty, or abandoning a man just from an accusation, which is neither good nor politically savvy. For those concerned about how a mere accusation can do irreparable harm to a man’s reputation, an investigation would increase the penalty for those who make false accusations, and show that the accusation alone is not the end of the story.

For all the rest of us, an investigation would help ensure that we get a decent person on the Supreme Court (Partisan politics aside, please: a decent person who is a conservative is a decent person; many and many a conservative Justice have made decisions that have been good for the country. And remember that any decision does not have to be the end of the fight, because even the Supreme Court can be overridden by the will of the people. Even if we don’t get Kavanaugh, we are going to get a conservative: because even if the Democrats win in November, they won’t take control until January, and that’s plenty of time for a whole new nominee. So let’s get a decent one). An investigation would help us learn the truth, and help a victim work through a trauma, and those are both good things regardless of other considerations. An investigation would help us remember how seriously we have to look at sexual assault, and if Kavanaugh is guilty, it may help us start thinking seriously about how we can work to prevent similar things from happening, and also how we can’t assume that all sexual assaults happen in the same way, or that all those who commit sexual assault are the same kind of person, or that finding 65 women who think you’re nice shows that you couldn’t possibly have tried to rape a 15-year-old girl, and gagged her when she tried to scream.

Nobody knew about what happened at that party when it happened, because society has stigmatized victims more than attackers, and girls more than boys, for millennia. We have to change that. We should make sure we all know now what happened then. There should be an investigation, a complete investigation by the FBI, intended to help ensure the best outcome for our national interest, as well as do the best we as a society can do for the victim.

Christine Blasey-Ford has been silenced once before. Now she should be allowed to speak.

Making a New Impression

Dusty Leave a comment

There’s a lot that’s wrong with this country.

We have the highest medical costs combined with some of the worst outcomes; one of the highest rates of infant mortality among the industrialized world, and also one of the highest rates of death in childbirth for women.

We have the largest and most expensive military in the world, and by any estimate, we are one of the most war-mad nations on Earth. We currently have active duty military personnel stationed in 150 countries around the world.

Our education system is inefficient where it is not simply ineffective. As a country, we don’t read. (So really, I’m not sure why I’m writing this.) We have a biased and often irrational media, run by a steadily shrinking number of corporations and consumed by a shrinking minority of the people.

Wealth and income disparity have been increasing, and our rates of poverty, childhood poverty, and especially food insecurity have been increasing steadily for decades. We also, not coincidentally, have the largest and most expensive prison system, with the greatest number of prisoners of any country on Earth – over 2.2 million adults incarcerated, with another 5 million on parole or probation.

And even fifty years after the civil rights movement, every one of these problems is worse for minority populations than it is for white citizens.

There’s a lot that’s wrong. But despite all of that, there is one thing, at least, that we do right, and it’s more important than all of these: this country is still a democracy, where the votes of the citizenry select our leaders; where we have the power to elect, and to remove, essentially anyone in power over us. If and when the people of this country develop the political will to tackle any or all of these problems, we are the ones who have the power to do so: we set the agenda, we determine the government’s size and shape, and we choose its priorities. The only thing stopping us from at least trying to deal with these issues is ourselves.

And that means that perhaps the worst problem this country faces is this: only about 50% of eligible voters actually cast their ballots in an election. In Presidential election years, it’s around 60%; in midterm elections it’s about 40%; the rate is lower for local and special elections. The primary happened here in Arizona this past Tuesday, and we seem to have set a record for primaries: we cracked a million votes cast. Of course, there are more than three and a half million registered voters in the state, so our record is less than 30% of the potential total. Exciting.

Even though we have the ultimate power to determine our nation’s path, we don’t do it. Not that we can’t, we just don’t. The best thing about this country, and we don’t take advantage of it.

So why don’t we? Honestly, there are a lot of reasons: the biggest is that people don’t think that their individual vote will matter, so they don’t cast it; that’s a tough one to overcome, too, because logically, it’s true. There has never been a serious election won by a single citizen’s vote. Small elections can build momentum for large elections, and so there might be a snowball effect started by a single person’s vote; but even an argument like this one I’m making here, trying to convince people it’s important to vote, has to rely on large aggregates of voters: if all of the citizens who didn’t vote in the last election voted in the next one, they could almost outvote the entire election, in which only 58.1% of eligible voters cast a ballot. Certainly that group of voters would have been larger than either of the groups who voted for the two major candidates. But that fact, while disturbing in the extreme, is still about millions of voters – tens of millions of voters. Nobody can argue that one single person’s vote would have turned the tide.

Then there are the institutional obstacles to voting: the fact that U.S. elections happen on a workday, that polling places are limited and sometimes hard to get to, especially in rural areas; in many cases there are factors that cause voter suppression, sometimes even deliberately, such as pre-emptive removal of voters from registration rolls, or the frequent imposition of ID requirements for voting. The 2.2 million prisoners I mentioned above, along with a large number of the 5 million parolees, have had their civil rights suspended or stripped because of their crimes, often including their right to vote. I myself was disenfranchised by my state, Arizona, in the 2016 primary because even though independent voters, which is how I registered in Arizona in 2014, can vote in primary elections, they cannot vote in presidential preference elections, which is what that primary was called, when we were offered the chance to choose between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. I didn’t get to do it because of that rule and the way the state defined that particular election.

Of course there are circumstantial reasons why people don’t vote: they’re busy, they’re sick, they couldn’t find a babysitter, there were unforeseen complications. When we’re talking about 100 million uncast ballots, the number of people who didn’t vote because they had food poisoning that day is probably in the hundreds of thousands. And I don’t really have a solution to offer there, other than to stay away from the clams; they seem a little sketchy. Also, gross.

But avoiding bad seafood is not going to solve this problem. Of course not. However: the argument that one single voter does not change elections, while true, vanishes in the face of another truth: that the 100 million votes, which are more than enough to swing the last election in any direction at all, are made up of individual, insignificant votes. There is little significance in a single vote, but there is nation-shattering significance in the 100 million votes – and that means that each of those votes contains a small amount of that earth-shaking power. Getting people to stay away from shellfish wouldn’t change a national election; but it would change (I’m assuming) some number of potential non-votes into votes: and in conjunction with everything else we might do, it might just change enough non-votes into votes to actually change the election, change the government, change the country: change the world.

So seriously: stay away from the clams, for at least a couple of days before the election.

In thinking about all of this, particularly while reading the President’s Twitter account, where he stumps for every Republican candidate he can think of, and also in my disappointment over the blue wave here in Arizona in the primary this week (The turnout may have been record-setting, but there were still only about 400,000 Democrats who voted, compared to over 500,000 Republicans. That’s not a blue wave, that’s a red splash with a blue ripple.), I thought of one small factor that, by itself, may not amount to much, but I think does have an impact on election turnout. Maybe even as much as the clams do. And if it isn’t directly causative of non-votes, it does, I think, have some influence: and it’s one of those things that would be easy as well as beneficial to change, in ways other than the effect on voter turnout. Also like avoiding clams, which is good for health and also because they’re gross.

The factor is this: our first impression of elections.

We all know that first impressions can make a difference. They don’t always, and even in the cases where they do, subsequent interactions can entirely overwhelm that first impression: my wife’s first impression of me was that I was cute but dumb; then she thought I was an arrogant jerk; and then she realized that I was cute but socially awkward. It’s the third impression that found the truth – though there’s a pretty strong argument for that first impression, I’ll admit. (And probably for the second.) I almost lost my chance at my favorite college job, my position as a custodian at the Civic Auditorium, because my initial interview gave my boss the impression that I could not work with managers – my application said that my previous two jobs had ended because of personal conflicts with management. Fortunately, they listened to my explanations of those personal problems (In one case, the management was badly mishandling the clientele, and I couldn’t abide it; and in the other case, the manager had a crush on the very beautiful woman who is now my wife, and resented that she made it all the way to that third impression of me and the dates that came afterward) and gave me a chance, which led to my five years of work for the Civic.

But those first impressions mattered. I have two examples where a bad first impression was overcome, but that’s because I don’t remember most of the situations where I made a really bad first impression: because those first impressions led to – nothing. Those are the dates I never went on, the jobs that never even called me back. There are more of those than the other kind, for me as for all of us; and first impressions have a lot to do with that.

And what are our first impressions of elections, of voting? In the most informal sense, it’s the mock-democracy – the deMOCKracy, if you will (I’m sorry about that. But not sorry enough to take it out.) – of voting to decide where to go for a night out, or what to do with a group of friends. In essentially every case where we vote for something like that, the outcome is a foregone conclusion, the vote is a sham, and the only point is to make the loudest dissident shut up so we can all just go to Olive Garden. The person who calls for a vote is the one who realizes that they have the majority on their side, and if they can get everyone to abide by “Majority Rules,” then the argument is over and they win, without all the bother of having to convince everyone. In some cases the vote is even shadier, because these are the kind of elections where parents decide that their votes count twice. We’ve all done this, and we do this still, and while it isn’t good governance, it’s also not very easily connected to national elections; as young people we may realize these elections are fixed, but we also realize that it’s probably okay if we just go ahead and go to Olive Garden, and that while it’s unfair that Mom and Dad get two votes each, we also realize that we kids have the power of the Whine Veto. (The Whine Veto is when a child overrides parents’ votes through whining: “Mooooooooooommm, Iiiiii dooooonnnnnn’t WWAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNAAAAAAAAAA go to Olive Garden!” “FINE! We’ll go to McDonald’s!” If Mr. Trump could do the same thing, he’d be the most effective president in history, in the sense that he’d get a lot of things done. Would they be the right things? How much do you like eating at McDonald’s? Or, more realistically, eating Trump brand steaks at Mar a Lago?)

Those votes, in this argument as in life, don’t really count. No: the first place we encounter actual voting for actual elections, on a smaller than national scale, is in school. When we elect student council officers. That, I would argue, is our first impression of the democratic process in this country: and not only does it give us a bad first impression, but it’s also an accurate bad impression, because the things that are wrong with student body elections are also what’s wrong with our national elections.

First of all, there are the candidates. For every serious student body candidate, for every student who wants to do a good job and help out the school and the student body, there is a goofball who runs because they think it’s funny, and at least two candidates who run because they want the attention, they want to win for the sake of winning, they want to put “Student Body President” on their resume. And so it is in our national elections: for every Barack Obama, John McCain or Mitt Romney, there’s a Vermin Supreme, a Deez Nuts, or a Donald Trump. (Note: I don’t mean to ride Mr. Trump in this piece; but I maintain that there was nobody in this country who was as surprised by his election win as he was himself. Actually, his wife might have been more surprised.) And though Harambe, who was at the time of the 2016 election not only a gorilla, but also dead, only got a small number of write-in votes for president, sometimes, the joke candidate wins.

My high school elected two very capable young men to the position of President and Vice President for three years, alternating positions between them. They were good guys; they did a good job. Then our senior year, another guy ran as a joke. He was a nice guy, but not really presidential; he wasn’t involved in student body activities, didn’t have any leadership experience, didn’t really care about school politics; he just thought it would be funny to run. And as students do around the country, the rest of us thought it would be funny as hell to vote for him, instead of the two guys we actually wanted to have as student body president.  And of course, I don’t have to tell my fellow American citizens, he won. And I will say he took it on, tried hard, and did a decent job; but the lesson to be learned is – well, it’s one we clearly haven’t learned as a country, because people wrote in Harambe.

I would argue that it’s student body elections that teach us to vote based on humor and irony, rather than considered and rational opinions.

Speaking of Harambe, one of the student body elections at the school where I now teach featured a poster that made a joke about Harambe, and who he would have voted for had he not been killed. There’s another aspect of elections where student body campaigns echo, or foreshadow, national elections to the detriment of our democracy: because student body election campaigns, even more than the candidates, are a joke. The kids slap up some homemade posters, heavy on the glitter; they make a single speech, usually during lunchtime; and then people vote. That’s not a campaign, that’s a plug for a would-be You-Tuber: Click like and subscribe if you enjoyed this poster, if you laughed at this speech. There aren’t any discussions of issues or causes, no proposals made other than the most basic; student elections are pure identity politics, nothing but a popularity contest. If people don’t vote for their bestie, then they vote with their sense of humor (if they’re not voting for the cutest candidate, that is.).

How does that prepare us for a substantive debate of the issues, for an election that will help set the course of our entire country for some number of years? It doesn’t. It does help to prepare us for elections that run entirely on attack ads, negative campaigning, gotcha media strikes, manufactured scandals, and of course, partisan politics, where people vote for their team and not for the other team for no other reason than that. And look: that’s exactly what we have.

Again, I’m not trying to argue that student body elections are the cause of our current madhouse of a democracy; but first impressions do matter. We see trends in student body elections that recur in national elections, and unless those flaws are inherent in the system, inborn in us and therefore inescapable, then what this repetition shows us is that we vote as adults in the same way and for the same reasons that we vote as children.

So the question is, why do we vote that way as children?

I think it’s mostly cynicism and despair, honestly. As students in school, we are all too aware that we don’t control things. That the student body president, even if we elect one that is after more than a bullet point on a resume, is really not much more than a bullet point on a resume. That the aspects of school life that are controlled by the elected student officers are not the important aspects; that they are ceremonial, maybe even just distractions. Like a president who gives speeches, who hold press conferences, who streams out comments on Twitter, but who doesn’t really do much of substance to change the lives of ordinary citizens, certainly not on his own. We know it as students, and we suspect it as adult citizens, and so the natural response is to either vote as a joke, or to not vote at all: because to participate sincerely is to get played for a sucker. “You thought this mattered?” our fellow says, and rolls his eyes at our naivete; rather than face that, we write in Harambe. We go to work, or stay home, rather than drive to the polling place on the second Tuesday in November. Just like we did in high school. I said “we” elected a pair of nice young men as our student body president and vice president for three years, but that was a lie; I never voted in those elections. I never cared.

When it comes to national elections, that indifference, that desire to avoid looking a fool, is wrong. Elections do matter, now; votes do matter. In high school, they probably don’t: and therein lies the solution I’d like to suggest. Because just like fighting the influence of bad clams, I think it is at least possible that student body elections help to suppress at least some votes, because people who go through elections that don’t matter may not care enough to vote in the very next election available to them, which may be a national election the November after they graduate high school – or even while they are still in high school, if they are 18 their senior year – and if they don’t vote in that one, they may not vote in the next one. I think that probably happens, and when we’re talking about 100 million non-voters, it may happen hundreds of thousands of times.

Here’s what I propose. I say we make student body elections matter. Doing so would be simple, and would actually have a number of benefits: all we have to do is make student leadership positions matter. We have to allow student council members to have real power. They should win a place on the school board. They should have a seat in administrative meetings, at least ones that don’t relate to confidential matters. They should actually be able to speak for the student body, in some way that genuinely matters at the school.

If the position was more than a ceremonial sash, then the elections would become more serious, almost instantly. The students would care who was representing them if that representative could actually make a difference in their lives; and in a high school, that is not only possible, but preferable. There are a large number of aspects of daily high school life that don’t matter much to the adults in the room, but matter quite a lot to students. Like the dress code. Like the tardy policy. Like off-campus privileges. If a student body president could actually fight for and win those privileges, then students would elect a president who could do those things, and they wouldn’t vote for Harambe.

Doing this wouldn’t just change the votes and the elections. It would also change the leaders: it would prepare those students for positions of larger responsibility. It would show all of the students that elected leaders can and should make a difference in the lives of their constituents. It would show all of us that democratically elected leaders can have some impact, despite the Powers That Be looming above and behind them. It would also make public schools more responsive to the will of the student body, which, I would argue, is sorely needed all on its own merits. I’ve watched my school grow more and more autocratic and dictatorial, for no reason other than they can and because they don’t care how the students feel about it; I’ve watched my students grow more angry, and also more cynical and hopeless about it; and then I see my fellow Americans. I see 30% voter turnout. I see candidates like Joe Arpaio, the 86-year-old convicted felon who ran for Senate in Arizona, and pulled in over 100,000 votes – ten percent of the total, almost 20% of his party’s total votes. I see that, and I wish those people had written in Harambe.

But really, I wish to find a way to change these trends, to make our elections and our democracy into what they should be. And though I don’t think I can stop people from eating clams, I think I might be able to get them to make a change in high schools. We can, and we should, for all kinds of reasons. There’s a lot that’s wrong with this country: let’s make this one right.

Book Review: The Demon-Haunted World

Dusty Leave a comment

Image result for the demon-haunted world

The Demon-Haunted World

by Carl Sagan

Published the year he died, Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World is a haunted book. I haven’t read his other work (Though now I plan to), but this one seems darker than what I had imagined his work would be like. It’s not hopeless or despairing; it’s a serious warning about a serious problem, and what seemed to me like a fairly frustrated attempt to cut through a thick layer of hogwash on a specific issue that obviously bothered Sagan quite a lot: namely the idea of alien abduction.

The general warning about the serious problem is the overall thrust of the book, and it is about the need for a free people to think skeptically. Sagan being who he was, he came at the idea from a scientist’s perspective; he describes at length the need for scientists to be skeptical, to be willing to question anything, most particularly their own most cherished beliefs. He gives example after example of scientists describing the need to build beautiful, elegant theories that explain great answers to great questions – and then tear them down completely when those theories are contradicted by the evidence. He talks about the shift from Newton to Einstein to quantum mechanics, and he talks about how astrophysicist Fred Hoyle was able to contribute as much to the field of astronomy when he was wrong as he was when he was right (and in both cases his contributions were prodigious, Sagan says).

Because Sagan is not only talking about science, and because he practiced what he preached, he makes a concerted effort in this book to talk about the flawed nature of scientists, the scientists who did more harm than good, the ones who told themselves they could ignore the ethical responsibility of considering the potential uses of their discoveries – a deception, Sagan argues, as he states unequivocally that the extraordinary power of modern scientific discoveries and the technology that comes from them imposes a greater responsibility than ever before for scientists to act as ethically as possible in considering what potential harm could be done by their work, and taking action to minimize that harm. He talks about the various ways that science can be manipulated and used to do harm; though he is also clear that none of that harm tells us that science is itself harmful or bad or should be feared or avoided. Knowledge is power, and power can be used to do – well, anything; but ignoring the power doesn’t protect us from it, it simply makes it easier for someone else to use it harmfully.

What else is Sagan talking about other than science itself, than the beauty and power of the scientific mindset, of skeptical thinking and a reliance on repeatable experiment and observable data? He’s talking about everything, really. There isn’t an aspect of life or modern society where a skeptical mindset would be inappropriate. The book covers a lot of aspects of society and culture; the exploration of the alien abduction myth, rather than simply being a screed against a continuing falsehood that Sagan, as an astrophysicist, took personally; he goes back through history and connects the alien abduction myth to past myths, of fairy abductions, of divine intervention in the lives of mortals. In addition to showing how a skeptical mindset quickly takes the alien abduction story apart, he also shows how it could be used to remove a dozen other pernicious ideas in our culture, including racism, sexism, and nationalism.

It’s beautifully done. This is a lovely book, fascinating in its ideas and easily digestible in the presentation of them. And as I said, it isn’t hopeless: Sagan also makes sure to express to the reader his unquenchable curiosity and his enormous capacity for wonder, which he also says must be fostered and encouraged along with the skeptical mindset; because when our cherished ideas are disproven by the evidence, when the flaws in our reasoning are found by our own penetrating, skeptical questions, it is our sense of wonder and our need to feel awe that makes us look again for a new answer to replace the one we just discarded. Wonder makes us get up and try again, after we knock ourselves down; and the combination of those two qualities is what gives this book its hope.

The thing that makes it scary is that Sagan wrote it twenty years ago. And on the first page – the first damn page – he said this:

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

[…]

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

Yeah. This book scared me, all right. I hope it also inspired me. I do intend to use one entire chapter/essay in my classes this coming school year, to try to make that candle burn a little brighter, if I can; and I would like to recommend that everyone read this book when you get the chance, because after Sagan finishes talking about alien abduction, he talks about democracy, and the need for scientific skeptical thinking and also scientific wonder and awe, to save our democracy, to save our country. And I for one think he was right.