Small Thinking

A New American Award

Apr 06

Nanoarchaeum Equitans Virus

The smallest known organism

There are scientists who feel that viruses are not the smallest organisms because they lack a cellular structure. Others believe that this condition is not disqualifying and it is this group of scientists whose views are invoked for this noteworthy recognition, The Virus Trophy.

Our nation has been poorly served by many of our leaders. They have engaged in debates over issues designed solely to distract and polarize us. They have refused to do the work to create the actions our nation truly needs and have instead concentrated their efforts on what serves themselves. In short, they have focused on making us small at a time when we desperately need big thinking.

Our country wasn’t built on small thinking or by small men and women. It was built by leaders who were giants and by the American people who worked hard, looked after one another, sacrificed and did the right thing. There was a shared belief in doing whatever it took. We built a country.

Now we find our leaders telling us all of the things that we cannot do. They teach us to lie and to be hypocritical, to diminish one another and to defeat ourselves by rejecting learning and science. They tell us to be afraid of one another.

They say stupid things, like telling us that the way to stop the killing of 33,000 of us every year with guns is for more people to be packing heat. Actually, we tried that. It was called the Wild West and a lot of innocent people got killed, until at last we figured out that it was counterproductive to safety for angry people to be running around with loaded guns. Of course, more people having guns serves the gun manufacturers quite well and it serves those who receive campaign contributions from them, too, but it’s small, selfish thinking.

And so it is . . .

– for bible thumping haters of all stripes

– for social program haters who lie to us

– for those who tell us that austerity will lead to prosperity, this in the face of well known economic principles that make it clear that austerity leads to contraction of the economy and poverty for the people

– for self-serving fools who tell us to “Drill, baby, drill” when doing that is a certain trip to climate catastrophe.

It’s time to stop thinking small.

We need to rebuild America so that our bridges are strong and safe. We need to rebuild America so that we transmit electricity with minimal losses of the power that we generate with renewable resources. We need to embrace all Americans, even those who are different from ourselves, both because our diversity is our strength and because it’s the right thing to do. We need to reaffirm that our true international power cannot be found in unnecessary, punitive wars, but in the strength of our influence, the juggernaut of our culture and the power of our economy. We need to stop pretending that we can kill our way to security and instead take action to make friends. We need to deal with the displacement that will occur when we stop building unwanted and unneeded weaponry and repurpose those skilled workers for building 21^st century America.

It’s time to think big.

That is why the first awarding of The Virus Trophy goes to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. He has spent over four, small-thinking years focused on just one thing: “To make sure that Barack Obama is a one-term president.”

Oddly, I had thought that a senator’s job was to represent the people of his/her state and to provide leadership to move America forward. I had thought that the oath of office required our leaders to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. For McConnell, though, those things seem to have been secondary at best.

There are other stupid, distracting, small-minded things that he has focused his energy upon in order to un-focus us from what is truly important and to keep us small. Most of his energy has gone into opposing anything that President Obama promoted, regardless of the devastating effect of his actions on America and Americans. All of that in the aggregate is what demonstrates McConnell’s true smallness and the richness of his deserving of the first Virus Trophy. Congratulations, Senator McConnell. However, you’re too small for America, so please take your award and go away in 2014.

Perhaps you’d like to extend your congratulations to Senator McConnell for winning this smallest of awards. You can do that here. And be sure to pass this along to the Kentucky voters you know – so that they know.

An Island of Clarity

Mar 18

As a student of human behavior I have been trying to understand the craziness that is our social and political culture. So many blatantly false things have been said with great earnestness and an odd assumption of integrity. The absolutist behavior and mean spiritedness displayed for years has been confounding and dismaying. What’s going on?

I feel as though I am incrementally getting a handle on our collective dysfunction, yet I’ve wanted a social scientist, someone who actually studies such things and does experiments and collects statistics – you know, science stuff leading to actual facts – to help me with this.

Happily, my pal Brian Muldoon and I were exchanging some emails following one of my essays and he pointed me to a Bill Moyers interview of Jonathan Haidt. This is the guy I’ve been looking for. I mean, I’ve wondered how two people can look at the same thing and have such different interpretations and reactions to it. Turns out, they’re not looking at the same thing and Haidt explains that and lots of other things.

I invite you to watch the interview. HIs book was released this week and I’ve just started reading it. It’s a page turner for behavioral geeks like me. More about that another time.

I Hope The President Fails

Jan 20

That’s what he said in mid-November, 2008. A colleague was expressing his fondest hope for the newly elected president. What is most significant about this is that he didn’t say that he disliked the president’s policies or that he fervently wished that they would not become law. He did not hope for a resolute senate that would moderate President Obama’s initiatives. He stated clearly that he hoped that the president would fail.

I put my best effort into making sense of that, of seeing his comments in a constructive light. I imagined that this colleague was simply saying that he preferred a conservative world, so he didn’t want to see progressive/liberal ideas become successful. That thinking refused to last, though, as the full depth of this guy’s meaning sunk in. He really wanted a failed president and presidency.

His is the point at which present day conservatism departs from traditional conservatism, and from patriotism, as well as from any semblance of good sense. How could a true conservative want to see our institutions fail? How could a true patriot want his president to fail? And where in the world did good sense go in wishing for America to fail?

Weirdly, the Republicans hate President Obama more than they love America. They killed the jobs bill, they took the country over the fiscal cliff, they threatened national default, they dragged feet on providing disaster relief from Hurricane Sandy – the list goes on and on and all of the crazy stuff that was designed to make the president fail instead hurt the economy, veterans, job seekers, homeowners, workers, the elderly and even the world economy.

Don’t bother trying to find refuge in this “hoping that the president fails” business by seeing it as solely that of my former colleague or just within the R’s in congress or the far right talking heads. A recent poll showed that 40% of Republicans want the president to fail. Clearly, a lot of them don’t care who else gets hurt by their destructive attitude, as they pursue their agenda of hate.

The real problem is that they don’t just hate the president’s policies. In fact, the R’s themselves introduced and supported many of those same policies that would have helped Americans, right up to the moment when President Obama agreed with them. Then they beat a retreat and shifted into name-calling and derision. It wasn’t about policy at all: It was about hating and wanting to defeat President Obama. For the R’s, that overrode everything else.

Some say that’s race-based, and surely some of the obstruction answers that description. The R’s did the same kinds of things, though, to Bill Clinton. Remember that Speaker Newt Gingrich shut down the government while trying to neuter Clinton. They launched investigations into everything that happened during the Clinton Administration, effectively tying up much of the executive branch resources and the president’s attention.

That’s the single strategy in the Republican playbook: oppose anything a Democratic president supports, national consequences be damned. Our country is tied up in knots by people who don’t care how badly the rest of us suffer, by politicians and pundits who have lost their focus on a better America and instead are focused on destruction.

There was precious little many of us found to support during the eight years of the presidency of George W. Bush, but I never heard anyone hope for his failure. You might want to mention that the next time you hear someone voice a belief in the equivalency of the political parties in their craziness. That 40% of Republicans who want the president to fail are clear about what they hate. Try asking them what in America they love and support. See if they can get past their vitriol. I bet they can’t.

Fundamentalism

Dec 08

Staying informed requires that we do more than exchange views with the smart people – you know, the people who agree with you. Indeed, much more important is that we listen to the people who do not agree with us and hear what they have to say – actually seek to understand. Often that is less comfortable than being validated by those aforementioned smart people who agree with us, but we have to listen to all views if we are to learn anything.

And so it was with great pain that I watched a piece on Fox News with Suzanne Venker telling me that boys and girls are different and that women are either less than men or should act that way, so, honey, get back in the kitchen. Okay, she didn’t say the kitchen part. She does, however, seem to subscribe to the same attitude modeled by Gov. Huckabee (included in her interview video) of women as “other” creatures and needing the protection of men. It’s a “ women as less-than,” paternalistic worldview.

This seems to be yet another piece of retro thinking, the kind of simplistic, anachronistic attitude that has brought us self-justified science deniers, religious extremists, fiscal rejectionists and white supremacists. Come to think of it, that kind of fundamentalist polarization is reminiscent of Islamic fundamentalists. You know, the guys who strap bombs to their kids and send them into restaurants to blow themselves up, all in the comfort of religious justification; the people who learn to fly an airplane but not to land it, so they can suicidally/homicidally fly it into a tall office building and kill lots of people to promote their notion of justice; the butchers who mutilate and kill their own people in the name of Allah.

Wait – Americans are like Muslim fundamentalists? Well, how would you characterize us when President Obama receives over 30 death threats per day – from Americans?

The head scratcher for me is not that we Americans are impassioned or that we disagree with one another. From the time of the Articles of Confederation we’ve always had disagreements and will continue to do so. A case can be made that we are better for our disagreeing. What is curious is how we came to the point where we just shout at one another and don’t listen at all. We have made this a country of self-righteous, “my way or the highway” attitudes.

Us-Them is now the flesh searing brand on the American brain. If that is to change for the better, we have to figure out how we became this dysfunctional. Exactly when did fear and hate take over as the official attitude of American culture?

Recently, I attended a talk by Jim Kenney, co-founder of Common Ground, and I asked him what he thought was behind our fundamentalist, absolutist fervor. He’s a well-educated, well-informed guy and he answered without hesitation that the primary cause is The Big Lie.

That’s “Big Lie” as in Josef Goebbels-type propaganda. It’s about a program of disinformation, telling the lie over and over until people believe what you want them to believe, like calling our president a Muslim or a Kenyan, like dividing Americans into creators and takers, like saying that people of color are not like “us” and, the ultimate, that those who don’t believe in God exactly as you do are doomed: there is neither god nor heaven for them. There are millions of people persuaded by such messages and they eventually carry them and justify their resulting hatred with their fundamentalist fervor. They think they are bedrock right.

Presidents Nixon and Bush II both promoted an us-them attitude by overtly saying that you’re either with us (meaning their administrations) or you’re against us. Bush told us that you either supported the Patriot Act as originally written, including the illegal wiretapping, illegal search and seizure, perpetual detention without charges or trial (the end of habeas corpus) and illegal CIA investigations of Americans in America, or you were unpatriotic.

You can hear Big Lies any time, as they are pounded through the airwaves and online in a nonstop parade of vilification, fear and hatred. The repetition somehow creates an altered perceived reality for many and the divisiveness is expanded. Daniel Gardner’s book The Science of Fear will help you to understand just how easy it is to manipulate people.

Those manipulated by The Big Lie think they are adhering to fundamental truth, but maybe they’re just terrorists, like the thirty nut jobs who threaten the life of our president every day. We can’t let them win, because if they do, America loses.

The way out of this national polarization is not through hitting back with frenzied counter-hatred. It is through seeing those with whom we disagree as opponents, not as enemies and it surely doesn’t mean seeing them as less than.

So, the next time you hear someone saying things you passionately disagree with, observe where you go with your reaction. Are you having an amygdala moment of fear response? Do you instantly judge and dismiss the other person in some way, labeling them with disparaging adjectives and nouns?

Not much will get a lot better until we stop vilifying one another and start listening to someone other than the Big Liars.

Because They Work

Sep 23

That’s the reason the Republicans distort, misrepresent and tell lies. Yes, that’s an incendiary thing to say. Yes, that especially includes those who honor their pledge to Grover Norquist over their pledge to the Constitution. Yes, we’ve been fed a steady, high calorie diet of dishonesty by these people for a long time. And don’t go looking for Democratic equivalency. The D’s surely have had their day (I’m thinking now about Lyndon Johnson’s “credibility gap”), but this is the era of neo-con dishonesty.

The Republicans like to say that President Obama apologizes for America. On the few occasions when those making that claim have been challenged, they have not been able to cite a single instance of apology – not one – yet they continue to spread the lie.

The Republicans charge President Obama of having a failed foreign policy. Of course, they never offer any substance to support their sweeping accusation. That he has a far better record of protecting America than President Bush, that he has focused on aggressively pursuing the perpetrators of 9/11, that he has re-established strong diplomatic ties with most of the rest of the world don’t seem to matter to the Republicans. They continue to make their fatuous charges.

Indeed, President Bush and his Republicans told us repeatedly that President Bush kept America safe. That’s a very interesting claim for a president on whose watch nearly 3,000 people were killed in New York, Washington DC and in Shanksville, PA in the worst direct attack on America in our nation’s history. In some bizarre, Through the Looking Glass logic we are supposed to believe that the Republicans are the ones who are strong on defense and President Obama has failed. It’s strange how the Republicans falsely accuse President Obama of the most terrible failing of President Bush and his Republican Congress.

Since President Obama’s inauguration the Republicans have been telling us that what is most important is “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Oddly, over the past 4 years they have managed to block every job creating bill with only one exception: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “Stimulus”). That bill passed in spite of every Republican in the House and all but three Republican senators voting against it.

The Veterans Jobs Bill was designed to promote employment for our military veterans. It’s an important bill, because our military personnel come home to a veteran’s unemployment rate that is 30% higher than our citizenry as a whole. Nevertheless, the flag-waving Republicans in the Senate blocked that bill with a filibuster, leaving vets to suffer in their unemployment. Still, the Republicans continue to tell us it’s all about “jobs, jobs, jobs.”

Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan told us about a “welfare queen” living on the south side of Chicago. He said that she was collecting welfare under 81 aliases and living the high life. That was just the inflammatory story his base wanted to hear and, with his slick acting skills, he even sold that to middle-of-the-road voters. The only problem with Reagan’s story was that there was no welfare queen with 81 aliases. Reagan lied because it was self-serving and there’s a connection of that to what is going on today.

Mitt Romney is telling lies that blow the same dog whistle that Reagan blew. Romney tells us that 47% of Americans pay no income taxes, that they refuse to be responsible for their own care, that they see themselves as victims and are dependent on government and that they think they are “entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” Oh, those blood suckers, those lazy bums who steal from the rich, Mitt implies. He wants us to believe they’re wealth redistribution lowlifes who have “foreign views” and will vote for Obama, whom Romney says is not like “us”, not like real Americans. Romney does that in order to create an enemy for their followers to hate, just like candidate Reagan did, and it’s just another self-serving lie.

The continuing drumbeat of lies is successful in manipulating less informed voters into voting for the liars. And their votes, coupled with those of “the base” are enough to win elections. That’s especially effective if done in conjunction with preventing legal voters from voting. The Republicans do that through Republican generated state laws to disenfranchise low income, minority and elderly voters, who tend to vote Democratic.

Lie, cheat, steal. That’s the Republican platform and they do those things because they work. It really is so easy to manipulate people. Just inflame them with the Big Lie over and over.

Bedrock

Jul 09

A good friend sent a long response to my recent political essay, taking issue with my comments about what is being said publicly regarding the inclusion of contraceptive care in the health insurance plans of church owned institutions (not the churches themselves). He and I view things quite differently and the way he explained our differences is significant.

He offered his views in concrete detail and concluded his remarks by wishing that I would “ . . . check [my] thinking in light of [my] experiences.” He wrote, “I know you have the depth, but apparently not the will – and I wonder why.”

There is a weighty assumption in his comment that I harbor a willful insistence on blindness. I suppose that’s better than his telling me that I’m too stupid to get it, but a willful blindness? Why the personal attack?

In another section of his comments he asks if I am, “ . . . so corrupted by the left that [I] cannot look at an issue objectively . . . “ Of course, the answer to that is no, I can’t look at an issue objectively, any more than anyone else can. What is more troubling is his notion that I have been corrupted, this view apparently springing from my not seeing things his way. Through some magical transition, the discussion jumped from the issue of contraceptive care to a personal attack – a charge of corruption.

The admonition to avoid discussing either politics or religion in social discourse exists as a warning based upon limitations of the control we have of our own behavior and the consequences we unwittingly engineer. Perhaps the weight of the admonition should be squared when both politics and religion are included in a single conversation. Very often such conversations drift into personal attack, like the comments from my friend and often it gets far worse than his broadsides to me.

To get a finger hold of understanding about this, I consulted The Heart of Conflict, a most accessible text on dealing with conflict. It was written by my friend Brian Muldoon, who has years of experience working to help people resolve their legal and personal conflicts. Here’s a piece of what he has to say:

“There are many kinds of intractable differences, but virtually all of them can be reduced to threats against identity . . . “

“When we breach that boundary between what is me and what is not, when my innermost chamber is threatened, the powerful instincts of the survivor are invoked. At all costs, we defend the “self” . . . Because we humans derive our identity more from our consciousness (who we think we are or imagine ourselves to be) than from our physical form . . . we will fight harder for our ideas than for our actual corporeal survival.”

Muldoon is telling us that we humans have a set of bedrock beliefs that we use to define ourselves and they give us a sense of solidity in a shifting and sometimes dangerous world. Our religious foundation is key among these bedrock beliefs and our safety is anchored in that bedrock. When anything comes along that appears to be different, that threatens to shake our bedrock, we sense the threat to our identity, we man the battlements immediately and, “ . . . we will fight harder for our political and religious ideas than for our actual corporeal survival” (added italicized words mine – JA).

That’s how we get religious extremists willing to blow themselves up in a crowded market. That’s why it’s so difficult to talk about politics and religion with those whose bedrock beliefs seem to be different from our own. That’s why my friend and I won’t be having any more discussions about politics as we enjoy our occasional lunch together. Our friendship, after all, is more important than our political differences.

Yet we have a country of 300 million people, each having their own notions of bedrock, many lobbing personal attack bombs on those whom they see as both different from themselves and, consequently, wrong. Somehow we have to find a way to deal with our quite substantial national challenges, even with our existing bedrock differences. How will we do that?

Conservatives, Have You Reached Your Popeye Point?

Jun 30

Immediately after President Obama won the 2008 presidential election Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, Republican leaders in the Senate and House, announced to the world, “Our number one priority is making sure that President Obama is a one-term president.” That came as quite a surprise to those of us who thought that their number one priority was to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, that they were in Washington to promote the general welfare and the other things outlined in the Preamble to the Constitution. Not so, as we continue to be reminded.

The Republican Party has devolved into nothing more than opposing anything offered by Democrats and the President. They have even opposed their own bills, once President Obama said he supported them. They continue to oppose the mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act, even though it is exactly what the Republicans proposed in the ‘90’s, then accompanied by their battle cry of personal responsibility.

Since the 2010 mid-term election the Republicans have been telling us that what is most important is “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Since that time, though, the House, led by John Boehner, has passed bills against gay marriage and women’s healthcare. They have voted against immigration reform and have had temper tantrums against ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. None of that has anything to do with promoting jobs for Americans. The only job related legislation the Republicans passed was one promoting jobs for our military veterans, and they had to be shamed into passing it.

Two things are clear. First, the Republicans don’t want President Obama to have any wins, so they oppose anything he supports. Second, the Republicans want to run in 2012 against President Obama’s record on the economy and jobs, so they stonewall any effort to make things better for Americans, completely ignoring the suffering of the people in their selfish quest for power.

They have opposed keeping our promises to creditors in hopes of blaming President Obama for a global humiliation of their own making. They have repeatedly called the president a liar, most recently by flagrant fact falsifier Sarah Palin. Oddly, they offer absolutely no proof of prevarication.

They call him “Mr. Obama,” instead of using the proper title, “President.” They accuse him of being an un-American Kenyan, a socialist, a Marxist, a fascist. In short, they have reduced themselves to being pitiful name-calling schoolyard bullies throwing taunts.

Republicans, is that all you have? Tell us you have something more than that, because if that’s all you have, you have nothing.

There is nothing conservative about the party of personal responsibility abdicating its responsibilities. There is nothing conservative about ignoring the suffering of the American people. There is nothing conservative about preventing Americans from voting. There is nothing conservative about going to war and refusing to pay for it and lying to Americans about nonexistent death panels. In short, there is nothing conservative about today’s Republican party. Conservatism is dead. Radical dishonesty has taken its place.

The old Popeye cartoons had a recurring theme. Popeye would get into terrible trouble, pummeled and nearly helpless, when suddenly he would declare, “That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more!” A can of spinach would magically appear, he would eat the contents and be revived and then go about righting the wrongs.

The question now is whether you have reached your Popeye point. Have you had enough of the lies, the abdication of responsibility, the demeaning of the highest office in our land? Have you had enough of being manipulated? Is this all you can stands and you can’t stands no more?

Get your can of spinach right now. It’s time for you to start righting the wrongs and reclaim your party.

The Common Wisdom

Mar 10

We all know that the country is center-right. Perhaps it’s there as a result of a pendulum swing from the socially farther left pendulum of the 60’s and the politicians and pundits now like to tell us we’re center-right almost as throw-away line. Or maybe people just keep saying that and have done so for such a long time that we’ve come to believe it, but repetition doesn’t make the claim accurate. Take a look at just a few issues before us.

Jobs – About 306 million of we 307 million Americans want the government to take energetic action to ramp up the economy and create jobs. The noise from the far right is the only thing that is making it seem like there is huge opposition to that. As a nation, we are left of center now on jobs.

Voting rights – Americans believe overwhelmingly that all of us over the age of 18, with the possible exception of convicted felons, should vote. That’s pretty much smack dab in the center, not center-right. On the other hand, there are Republican strategists who have openly stated that the only people they want to vote are those who will vote Republican.

In the 2010 election many states voted far right legislators into office and they have enacted laws they have fraudulently proclaimed are to protect us from a blight of voting fraud. The thing is that voting fraud almost never happens – not even in Chicago. These laws serve solely as an obstacle to voting for young people, the elderly, the poor and those in minorities who tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Let’s see, righty R’s preventing D’s from voting. Hmmm.

Immigration – Most of us believe that if people do something wrong that they should bear the consequences. And most of us believe that children of illegal immigrants, born in this country and who have broken no laws should not bear those consequences. Righties don’t want to pass the Dream Act and they are completely out of step with the majority of Americans. The R’s continue to oppose it because they’re afraid they’ll get “primaried” in the next election by a fanatic on the lunatic right fringe. That keeps them disconnected from everyone but the aforementioned lunatic right fringe.

This issue is complex, but as a nation we’re pretty much in the center.

Taxes on the wealthy – Depending on the week and the poll, anywhere between 62 – 80% of Americans favor increased taxes on the rich. Only the righties who signed Grover Norquist’s pledge to never raise taxes, along with some already wealthy people are opposed to that. That is to say, the country is center-left on this issue.

Contraception – Do you really need an explanation about this? Even 98% of Catholic women have used some form of birth control and only some fundamentalist righties have a problem with it. It’s just that a few of them have very loud voices. We Americans are far left in favor of contraception.

Women’s choice – The majority of Americans continue to be pro-choice, although by a smaller margin now than in past decades. In part that’s because of the loss of institutional memory of how things used to be before Roe v. Wade. It wasn’t pretty. We are center-left on this.

Global warming – It’s not just all the environmental scientists; most Americans believe that the Earth is getting warmer and that mankind’s activities like burning fossil fuels is contributing to it. The only question is why anyone denies that. To find the answer, follow the money. It’s way on the right. (Ref: “And another thing” below)

Social Security & Medicare – These are the two most popular programs ever created by the federal government and America is far left on them. Only the righties want to abolish or privatize them.

Note to budget hawk absolutist righties: We made a contract with the American people, who pre-paid for these services and we must keep our word. I know you’ll understand that.

Education – The righties want to abolish the Department of Education at both the federal and state levels. They are starving schools of funds, so teachers, administrators and janitors are being laid off. School maintenance and improvement projects are being halted and the disparity between the education of our poor children and the rich kids who get to go to elite schools continues to widen. Our children are suffering, their future becomes bleaker every day we fail them and we are putting the future of America in peril.

Americans don’t like this. They want their children to be educated and think public education is a very good thing. The righties are completely out of sync with America on this. This country is way left on education.

Healthcare – Most Americans want the government to do more to fix it. All that is standing in the way is the resistance borne of the hundreds of billions of dollars being collected every year by the medical insurance companies, big pharma, big hospitals and a few others. We’ve tried letting the market fix this. That has resulted in our having the most expensive healthcare in the world, while at the same time we’re getting just middling results. Only the far righties with megaphones attached to their faces think that continuing to let the free market work is the solution. We want affordable healthcare and are at least center-left on this issue.

The list can go on until sunrise. Those saying that we are a center-right nation have either bought into the Big Lie or think they will benefit by making you believe it.

It turns out that the common wisdom isn’t so common, nor is it so very wise after all.

—————————————————————————–

And another thing . . .

Have you seen the TV commercials with the pleasant looking blonde lady in a black pants suit talking about American energy? She tells us how plentiful it is and all we have to do is go get it. As an example, she walks across a map of the lower 48 and tells us about, ” . . . tapping Canadian oil sands for U.S. consumers.” Sounds great.

Except the plan for the Canadian oil sands crude is to transport that heaviest, dirtiest crude oil with the greatest global warming footprint via the XL Pipeline to our gulf coast for exporting to other nations. I need for them to explain once again how that stuff is for U.S. consumers because I’m not seeing how exporting it makes it for us.

One last comment: That ad and the others like it are sponsored by the American Petroleum Industry, the promotional organization of Big Oil. Just so you know.

“We move through life like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.” – William Landay

Not Very Brave New World

Jan 11

During one of the Republican primary season debates Wolf Blitzer posed a question to the candidates about healthcare. He imagined a young fellow who was significantly ailing and was in the emergency room of a hospital where they determined that he would die if not treated immediately. Blitzer further said to imagine that his hypothetical subject was without financial means and did not have healthcare insurance. His question was about what the hospital staff should do.

After a couple of beats someone in the audience shouted, “Let him die.” There were cheers from others in the audience. And every one of the Republicans running to be the party nominee for the office of President of the United States went silent. Not a single one of them stood up to the hate, nor chastised the meanness of the shouted comment. Not one had the spine to display compassion for a fellow human being.

They displayed that same kind of spinelessness at another debate when a gay serviceman was shown on video with a question about gays serving openly in the military. Audience members booed him and once again these would-be leaders were silent. Be clear that this soldier is a man who puts his life on the line every day to protect those very same candidates and audience members, yet the candidates displayed neither spine nor compassion for him or for others like him.

Those yelling the loudest today are the far right radicals and they are not conservative. They are not even defenders of the Constitution. They are short sighted and closed-minded bullies masquerading as bible thumping Christians. America is suffering through an aggravated case of absolutist minds and it is killing our democracy.

In the early part of the last century one of the hateful signs hung on the doors of some companies read, “No Irish need apply.” There were signs all over the Jim Crow south that read, “Whites only.” And for decades and perhaps centuries there was and, in some places there still is, a “gentlemen’s agreement” to exclude Jews. That’s rapidly metastasizing to include Muslims. It’s more complicated than this, but at root it is a discrimination against anything that is not “us.”

We are seeing a willful brain numbing that says that anything that is not just like “us” is wrong, unpatriotic, godless and perhaps evil. How odd that is in a country that draws its strength from its diversity. We’ve always had that schizophrenic duality, but now the hateful side, the Mr. Hyde personality, is dominating the landscape in a razed earth war against everyone and everything that is not just like him. Worse, those who would be leaders are spineless against Mr. Hyde’s voice of hate and exclusion.

This is America, so the haters have the right to their hate and the candidates have the right to their cowardice. The key question is this: How long will you tolerate the hate?

Fire, Hijacking and Teaching Moments

May 22

“We’re living in an extraordinary teaching moment,” said Thom Hartmann to a Tenth Dems crowd Friday evening, “ . . . [with] the issues of the commons writ large.” That’s “commons” as in what is common to all of us, like our humanity.

Case in point: Have you heard the names of the 11 men who were killed when BP’s Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded? That you likely have not is significant. Next case in point: In a criminal prosecution, Pfizer Pharmaceutical was penalized $1.7 billion for drugs they marketed that killed people, and no one at Pfizer was held accountable for their criminal assault on humanity. That’s significant, too, as we publicly ignore human suffering.

There are countless examples of what is at stake – in common – and the lessons they submit to everyone are what make this a teaching moment. They offer the possibility of drawing all of us toward what Hartmann calls the Radical Middle.

One practical outcome of the Gulf oil spill crisis is that we are going to be paying a lot more for shrimp and fish, if we can get them at all. Another practical piece is that the beaches where we like to vacation may be paved with tar.

The more important and immediate common piece is that people all along the Gulf coast are scared out of their skins as they envision their way of life disappearing under BP’s oil slime. These are our family members, our friends, our neighbors and our fellow Americans. At stake, too, is the American eco-structure. Do we care? Our brains are wired to care. That’s what makes us human and makes this a teaching moment.

We’re in this – all of this – together. That’s why Rand Paul does such harm to all of us when he verbally dances around his opposition to the piece of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits private companies from discrimination based on race, gender and the rest. Taking him at his word that he abhors bigotry, his idealistic notions miss the most important part. He thinks that everyone should be able to do whatever they think is in their best interests without interference from government. That is blind to the fact that people acting solely out of selfishness sometimes act cruelly and for the most hateful of reasons and they do harm to others. Worse, it seems that Rand Paul is the best that the Republicans can offer.

Mainstream Republicans – remember them? – seem to have run out of new and good ideas for America when they embarked on their southern strategy following Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. First, they appealed to people’s basest instincts around race and class and they have continued to offer just two things.

The first is yelling really scary stuff, which often prove to be complete fabrications. In the world of sales this is called the “scare ‘em and save ‘em” tactic. They yell “fire,” tell you who’s to blame and then sell you an empty fire extinguisher.

The second is to say no. To everything. All the time. And they do it with a tone of indignation and self-righteousness. There really is a certain satisfaction that comes from braying absolutes and labeling anyone who disagrees as being both wrong and unpatriotic. Unfortunately, that’s just crass manipulation and it isn’t useful for solving our very real national challenges.

That’s it. Division based on prejudice, phony fear mongering and having “no” temper tantrums. Mainstream Republicans are bankrupt of ideas.

Which is one of the reasons the Tea Bagger far right has been able to steal the show from the Republican Party. What that says is that Republicans have been bankrupt of useful ideas for so long that their party has been hijacked by radicals.

The message – the teaching moment – for us is that sitting on our Democratic hands will produce more of exactly the same result – crazy people taking power.

It is critical that we get beyond yelling at one another and start to find common solutions. That can only happen if we keep radical, crazy people’s hands off the reins of power.

So, use this teaching moment to wake people from their apolitical slumber. Start the conversations right now. Go ahead and teach them in this moment about the truth that will affect them personally. Urge them to vote on November 2. Our decisions today will affect our shrimp prices, our civil rights and our very humanity and it’s up to us to ensure our future. Don’t let the crazies take over. Do it for our common good.

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JaxPolitix

Disambiguation from the political and social musings of Jack Altschuler