Our Fractured Society

This rainy January morning, with lots of turmoil in the news, has got me thinking as I listen to the great album known as Chicago 2. I can recall hanging out with my friends, especially on the staff at Camp Palmetto during summers, where the little phonograph in the staff lodge was cranking loud with the sounds of "Wake up Sunshine" or "Magic Carpet Ride" or "Eli's Coming." 

The key being we were in this together, doing things together, and listening to music from the LPs or the radio together. No "personal isolation devices" with our own curated personal playlists put together by some computer algorithm. The conversation was "did you catch that bass riff," or "what an awesome drum fill," or "those lyrics were awesome."

During my second class (junior) year at Annapolis, my black roommate, Paul Davis, and I grew together and learned about each other and our wildly different cultures because we had a stereo. One stereo. I listened to and learned to love funk and harder core soul music than was played on Top 40 radio, and heard for the first time the raunchy but incisive and insightful comedy of Richard Pryor. Paul heard Flatt & Scruggs and Reno & Smiley, and we listened to Chicago and Grand Funk and The Guess Who, all together. 

It seems to me that our personally curated reading lists and playlists don't encourage sharing what we like in meaningful ways with other people. And they certainly don't support expanding our horizons in music or books or politics.

Maybe our parents' generation had the same kinds of complaints, bringing even more meaning to the great lyrics from Pete Townshend: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

Thoughts on a President

 This week we are all joined in the death watch for former President Jimmy Carter. The pundits are crafting their tributes, the politicians are weighing in with their usual, and the family no doubt are sitting by the bedside. 

So many of the tributes to Mr. Jimmy, as he's called in Plains, describe him as a good man, too honest or too much a technocrat to be a good President. They often resort to the backhanded compliment as the "best former President ever," pointing to his work for Habitat for Humanity or the Carter Center or to eradicate the scourge of the Guinea worm. Reviews of his presidency are couched in terms that focus on his unpopularity, his failure to inspire, his lopsided loss in the 1980 election. 

Yet when one looks at a list of accomplishments while in office, for only one term, one finds a substantial body of work, including a number of initiatives that have had great influence on the nation and the world. 

• President Carter gets blasted for inflation, but zero credit for appointing Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve, perhaps the single most important step to end the inflation that brushed aside Nixon's wage-price controls and scoffed at Ford's WIN buttons.
• He is vilified for allowing our embassy staff in Tehran to be taken hostage, and mocked for the failed hostage attempt. Meanwhile the tough Ronald Reagan is rarely criticized for the bombing of the Marine barracks at Beirut Airport on October 23, 1983, killing 241 Americans.
• His aggressive push to ratify the Panama Canal treaty was widely panned as surrendering a vital strategic interest, and has even been cited as the cause of the rise of the criminal tyrant Noriega to power in Panama. Yet none of the doomsday scenarios the critics predicted ever came about.
• He was widely mocked for his sweater speech, urging Americans to adjust their thermostats to save energy. Four decades later, we see missed opportunities for global leadership in the 21st-century energy transition, a transition which Engineer Carter foresaw with amazing clarity.
• The Camp David treaty between Israel and Egypt remains an anchor of stability in a volatile Middle East.
• Carter's deregulation of trucking and airlines revolutionized transportation in the United States.
• The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) was landmark legislation that preserved more wilderness than any single action in the history of the nation.
• His amnesty for those who evaded the Vietnam era draft turned another page on a dark part of America's history, helping to heal many wounds.

Perhaps the most telling commentary is that a man who by almost every account is good, honest, full of integrity, and principled, could never be a successful politician in America. 

Capitalism Run Amok

Several seemingly unrelated news stories during this holiday week have pointed to the rise of capitalism run amok in our society. The influence of big money and the desire for making money without legal, ethical, or moral restraint are having consequences on our society that will reverberate for generations.

First, there are stories about the state of college athletics, especially about college football during bowl season and the opening of the transfer portal. Many players are abandoning their teammates and sitting out their bowl games, either to drop out of school and enter the transfer portal, or to drop out of school to prepare for entering the NFL draft. Tampering and big payoffs through the name, image, and likeness money (NIL) are the worst-kept secrets in big time college football. Players are working toward their third, and sometimes even fourth, college football team in search of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And all that funded by big money corporate donors, trying to attach their brands to popular college football players. 

Second, there is the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) by students to write papers for them. One particular app in the news is called ChatGPS, which can take a writing assignment and use AI to generate a paper, complete with references. ChatGPS is making money by selling students the tools they need to cheat. And that leads to other software tools sold to schools and individual teachers to detect the cheating, sometimes by the same companies that develop the cheating tools. And the arms race escalates, with these software development companies laughing all the way to the bank.

All this is capitalism run amok. 

What Does Moderate Mean

 

Much has been said and written about the “mainstream moderate” or “independent” voter, but beyond the labels there’s not much substance or fleshing out these moderates’ specific views on specific issues. The labels are popular especially when criticizing Democrats, who somehow must be careful so as not to offend these “moderates” with extreme positions. 

But to try to figure out what exactly the labels mean, here is a list of specific policy areas. I appreciate the feedback from everyone on what the “moderate” position is for each.

1. Voting rights. Specifically, should Congress fully reauthorize the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and expressly reinstate the pre-clearance requirements struck down in Shelby County v Holder and expand pre-clearance to the entire nation?

2. Abortion. Should Congress codify nationally the framework established by Roe v Wade?

3. Gay marriage. Should the bill currently in the Senate codifying the right to gay marriage pass as is?

4. Policing/criminal justice reform. Should Congress resurrect the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act from the last Congress?

5. Environmental protection/energy. Should the Congress override the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v EPA, reasserting its power to delegate rulemaking authority to Federal agencies? Should the Congress increase support for smart grid, EV, and alternative energy infrastructure? 

6. Immigration reform. Should the Congress resurrect the framework of the 2013 comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the Senate by a vote of 68-32, but was not taken up in the House when Speaker John Boehner invoked the Hastert rule?

7. Firearms. Should the Congress pass universal background checks for every firearm sale/transfer, enact limits on magazine capacity for semiautomatic weapons, beef up enforcement of gun trafficking laws, and enact a nationwide red flag law?

8. Taxes. Should the Congress reform the personal and corporate income tax laws, and in what ways, specifically?

9. Education. Should the government support private schools through vouchers and expansion of charter schools, especially for-profit and online schools? Should the government support universal pre-K? Should community college be free?

A Sober Debate

 Michael Gerson, Washington Post columnist and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, calls for a "sober debate" on abortion in a column posted this week on the Post website. He then goes on and sets up a false equivalence between some extremists on the left who he claims want abortion on demand throughout pregnancy, and the mainstream Republican position that is calling for imposing restrictions on travel and mail-order medications akin to the fugitive slave laws to punish women.

But I agree that we need a sober debate on many of our policies. And I agree that we need to view these policies through the lens of our Judeo-Christian heritage, specifically as that heritage is rooted in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.

• We can talk about "quickening" as the demarcation where pregnancy seems to matter when it comes to legal distinctions.
• We can talk about the vision of a just and righteous society, where doom is proclaimed on those who enact laws that punish the poor, the fatherless, and the widow (Isaiah 10). Where justice is almost always accompanied by the phrase "for the poor" in scripture.
• We can talk about the Kingdom of God described as a time when we turn our weapons into useful implements for agriculture, and instead of standing our ground we talk about putting away our swords (Matthew 26).
• We can talk about the division of the nations between sheep and goats in Matthew 25.
• We can talk about the Imago Dei imprinted in every human being, and how we ignore Christ when we ignore the least of these.
• We can talk about Matthew 6 and the insistence on public prayer and other public displays of piety among so many today.
• We can talk about the command to "suffer the little children" and how the right wing seems to completely misread that.
• We can discuss the command to treat the foreigner among us as a citizen.

So let's have the debate. Let's discuss all this openly, in the spirit of fellowship and mutual respect.

Robb Elementary School

The shooting on May 25, 2022 at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX has again shocked the nation. It has also brought out the usual divisions on firearms safety. I personally come down on the side of groups like Moms Demand Action or Giffords.org, promoting universal background checks, stringent red flag laws, magazine size restrictions, and aggressive enforcement against gun trafficking.

There is also springing up a debate over physical security and law enforcement response, given what appear to be glaring failures in Uvalde despite spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on physical security measures and having a trained and equipped SWAT unit in the local police department.

After the shooting at Columbine HS in Colorado in 1999, physical security of school facilities became a focus of design and construction of new school facilities. Measures to "harden" schools include:

• Single-point controlled access, to include electronic locks and video or physical surveillance and card access control for entry to the building
• Armed school resource officers, whose duties include the typical "security guard" routines to check for unlocked doors
• Perimeter security, including perimeter video surveillance and controlled access to the parking lots and grounds during school hours
• Hardening interior doors, especially doors to classrooms

Columbine also brought forward scrutiny of law enforcement tactics in response to an active shooter on campus. Many police departments formed active shooter response teams, and coordinated with schools to conduct active shooter drills.

All that seems to have been for naught at Robb Elementary this week. The shooter killed his grandmother at her house (shades of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in Connecticut), and then wrecked his car near the school and opened fire at a funeral home across the street from the school (per 9-1-1 calls). Response to those 9-1-1 calls appears to have been slow. The shooter then apparently entered the school through an unlocked door, despite the school having spent lots of money to implement some of the hardening measures described above.

Several minutes later, police responded to the school. But they failed to carry out any kind of tactical response, despite their own SWAT unit. Instead, law enforcement entered the school about 40 minutes later, upon arrival of backup from Federal officers, including Border Patrol officers.

The questions about the law enforcement response and hardening measures at the school must be answered. But we cannot allow that to distract from addressing the ocean of firearms that floods our nation.

And a note about our two high schools in Haywood County, NC. Tuscola and Pisgah High Schools are designed around the "Florida plan," which means the schools have several separate buildings separated by covered walkways. There is no single point of entry to the school building, because each campus has six or seven separate school buildings. That is a physical security nightmare.

Washington Post comments

 I have long said that the basic philosophical difference between Democrats and Republicans is the question, who gets to be an American. Who gets to enjoy the rights and privileges that are clearly laid out in our sacred founding documents.

For Democrats, the answer is that every person born in America is an American, regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, education, wealth/income. Every person is entitled to the inalienable rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, and the rights and privileges set forward in the Constitution and laws enacted thereto. Democrats seek to widen the circle, to help every person realize the dream of that more perfect Union.

For Republicans, the answer is different. Republicans start with the premise that only white Christians are "true Americans." And then when we see this news this morning, we understand that it's really only white male Christians. The rest are obligated to somehow force their way into the inner circle, where it's up to the white male Christians whether they get to enjoy some of the rights that are "endowed by the Creator."

There is nothing more personal and private than health care decisions. And here the white Christian males decide it's time to put women in their rightful place, letting them know in no uncertain terms that they are still not first-class citizens.

 - 5/3/2022 on https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/02/roe-v-wade-supreme-court-draft-politico/

Folks, this abortion ban stuff is the mainstream of the Republican Party, not some radical fringe. Attacking the LGBTQ community, people of color, and immigrants is the mainstream of the Republican Party, not some radical fringe. Saying that protesters should have their skulls cracked in is the mainstream of the Republican Party, not some radical fringe. Slashing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is the mainstream of the Republican Party, not some radical fringe. Denying citizens the right to vote is the mainstream of the Republican Party, not some radical fringe. Dumping pollution in our water and air is the mainstream of the Republican Party, not some radical fringe. Supporting Putin is the mainstream of the Republican Party, not some radical fringe.

 - 5/3/2022 on https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/02/roe-v-wade-supreme-court-draft-politico/