Let Care, Reliable Facts, and Compassion Be Our Guide, Not Just Fear and Anger: History Can Help Us Understand that an Opposing Viewpoint Can Be a Lesson to Be Understood, Not an Evil to be Destroyed

Do you ever listen to Travel With Rick Steves on NPR? I love the program. It usually focuses on places to visit in different areas of the world. But this time, the focus was on how 3 countries in Europe were dealing with autocracy. Steves interviewed tour guides from each country. They talked about the reality of life in a dictatorship; and how countries that were once dictatorships and now democracies are learning what it is to live with freedom⎼ to live with the power to make political decisions that could greatly change their lives. The program was reassuring and provided clarity to my thoughts and emotions regarding the election.

 

A few countries in Europe had democratically elected leaders who were trying to end democracy. One from the more distant past was Hitler. Another, more recently, is Victor Orban, in Hungary. Both were elected on a platform to stop political instability or stop a perceived immigration crisis. They elected leaders who claimed, “Only I can fix it.”

 

We in the US have lived in a democracy since 1776. People all over the world envy the political power we citizens have. Yet not so long ago many of us were saying, “why should I vote?” Or “there’s not a nickel’s worth of difference between the two parties.” Today, the differences between parties are dramatic.

 

Steves’ program gave me a broader perspective on our own country and the threats we now face from DT and his Christian, white nationalist and/or fascist agenda. It taught me how a country can recover from a dictator or would-be dictator and the hate he can incite. I realized all sorts of changes are possible; change can take away our freedom or increase it. It can undermine our concern for other people or strengthen it.

 

The fear of a loss of our rights, or anger against the threat from a would-be DT dictatorship, is not the only reason to vote, or to do whatever we can to get out the vote.

 

Tomasz Klimek took us to Poland which is now a democratic country. But they had to fight Communism to get their freedom and only succeeded fairly recently. It’s a country that, even since achieving democracy, saw voters swing both right and left in their choices. But the swings were not extreme, more slightly one way or slightly another. Because they had to fight for freedom recently, people vote in large numbers.

 

They don’t tend to treat opponents as enemies, as the GOP in the US are now doing.

 

Klimek said autocrats focus on one enemy, like immigrants, to demonize. But modern Poland united to help the Ukrainian people. They united out of concern for a neighbor.

 

Andrea Makkay, from Hungry, talked about how people elected a leader who then took away many of their freedoms. They had had a history of turmoil, from Mongol invaders to Soviet Communist dictatorship, and so didn’t, and still don’t, know what it is to live democratically. They don’t feel their power or think they can make a change. They are only learning the hard way….

 

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project. Thank you.

Whole Generations Fearing the Horrors of the Past Might Be Repeated in the Future: Facing What’s Difficult

How do we face what is difficult?

 

My wife greets me with a friendly, “Good morning,” and I can’t help but smile in response. One of my cats rubs against me. Outside, a cardinal sings its spring song, despite it being early March. A raven and blue jay join in.

 

Yet, in my head, not my ears, I hear the latest news. California experiencing winds up to 190 miles an hour with ten feet or more of snow. Texas suffering its biggest wildfire ever, and it could get worse. I realize these are further examples of the threats of the climate emergency.

 

The cruel, devastating wars in Gaza and Ukraine continue. DJT gave another deranged speech, dehumanizing immigrant people of color, lying about them, calling them invading criminals “released from jails and insane asylums,” “from countries nobody heard of,” “having languages nobody ever heard of.” Lying about his great border policy, which was in reality a cruel mess, while, according to a CNN fact-check,  President Biden gave a highly factual, rational speech. His speech was not what I wanted to hear but was probably the best we could expect considering he faces a DJT controlled House.  On the other hand, Biden’s State of the Union address was more what I wanted to hear, comforting in his clear, energetic, fiery defense of democracy and our rights. Some say the “media” exaggerates the threat posed by DJT, or they say it until they hear his words.

 

Under DJT’s leadership, the Maga GOP derailed bipartisan border legislation, legislation they previously thought a necessity, and they continued to threaten our rights and freedoms in so many ways. Some GOP controlled states added to their attacks on women’s health and freedoms with limitations on IVF treatments. And, in the same week or so, the Supreme Court forced delays in the prosecution of DJT for his crimes against the nation, and threatening democracy itself.

 

It can feel like we’re in a race. Will democracy win or authoritarianism? Fascism? Will DJT be tried and convicted for all his indicted crimes before the election, or will he go free?

 

I think about World War II and the Holocaust. I was born just after the war ended, so I didn’t know that time firsthand. But I felt immersed in it nevertheless. I read about it, listened to and attended talks by Jewish people from Germany and Poland who had been rounded up by the Nazis, sent to death camps but somehow survived. For years, I had wondered what I would’ve done if I had lived there then. I wondered how Jewish, LGBTQ+ and people of color could have stayed in Germany while Hitler was happening. While too many Germans and others allowed and embraced the hate, grievance mentality, and delusion, or just closed their eyes and hearts.

 

Why didn’t the Jews leave? Or fight back? Of course, many did fight. Many did leave. But so many stayed⎼ and died.  And now we have whole generations fearing the horrors of the past are being manipulated into the future.

 

Am I learning the answer to that question right now?…

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Lies and Hate REVISED: With Disinformation, Antisemitism, and Anti-Muslim Attacks Haunting Us Now, this is a Critical Time to Speak of History

I grew up with a love of Sherlock Holmes. Millions of us have. When I was teaching a class on logic and debate to high school students, I used a book of quotes and incidents from Sherlock’s cases to study critical thinking and teach informal syllogisms. So, when I saw a review of a modern version of the detective, not written by Arthur Conan Doyle, and read about the plot, I was intrigued.

 

The author of the book is Nicholas Meyer, a contemporary scriptwriter as well as novelist. It’s called The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols. The plot is built around actual events from the past that are still haunting the present. And with disinformation, antisemitism, and anti-Muslim attacks haunting us now, this is a critical time to speak of this history.

 

The Protocols mentioned in the title are actual rants, lies, propaganda that were first published in the nineteenth century and, unfortunately, have been reproduced even today. They are called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

 

The document was created to deceive people into believing Jewish leaders had come together to plot the takeover of the world. In the novel by Meyer, Sherlock is asked to find out if the plot is real and, if not, expose the lie so the truth could be revealed.

 

In truth (as well as in the novel), the Protocols were plagiarized from a work of satire called The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, by a writer named Maurice Joly in 1864. It included no mention of any Jew. According to Wikipedia, Joly’s piece was an attack on Napoleon III, elected President of France who later made himself absolute ruler.

 

Joly has Montesquieu speak in support of democracy and argue that the “liberal” spirit in people was indomitable. Machiavelli argues it wouldn’t take him even 20 years to “… transform utterly the most indomitable European character and render it as docile under tyranny as the debased people of Asia.”

 

In the end of the satire, absolutism wins, and Montesquieu is consigned to remain in hell.

 

The piece would have been consigned to oblivion, except probably for Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, head of the Russian Okhrana or secret police of the Tsar Nicholas II. He commissioned a re-write, to replace the attacks on Napoleon with attacks on the Tsar. And to turn the meeting between two dead philosophers in hell to a meeting in Switzerland by Jews.

 

In the original, Machiavelli argues “Men must not scruple to use all the vile and odious deceits at their command to combat and overthrow a corrupt emperor…” Just change a few words and we get the tenth protocol, “Jews must not hesitate to employ every noxious and terrible deception at their command to fight and overturn a wicked Tsar…”

 

And there were in fact meetings by Jews in Switzerland in the nineteenth century, but they were not secret. They were Congresses called to create a Jewish state. Unlike the plot of the plagiarized and fictional Protocols, the meetings had nothing to do with overthrowing the Tsar or any other state….

 

**To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

The Yearning Underlying Each Day, Especially Each Holiday: How Do We Rescue Clarity and Order from Chaos?

We can expect so much from a holiday, like Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s. And it’s not just because of the hype, the commercialization, or the social demands. Just think of what and why we feel as we do about any holiday. The desire for a break, to let loose or rest, to see friends and family, to celebrate inspiring people, our history, culture, and coming together as a community, for a religious observance, or to start life anew.

 

We’ve all experienced the excitement and anticipation that preceded the opening of gifts or the joy of attending celebrations of a holiday. Or the sense of disappointment when things did not go as we wished they would. I remember as a teenager how awful and alone I felt when I didn’t have a date for one New Year’s party.

 

And it’s not just because as children or as adults we got off from school or work on a particular day or week. The social and commercial hype can be so strong only because there’s something in us humans that yearns for what the holiday hints at, something even beyond the social world.

 

Many of us know that Christmas, for example, has roots preceding Christ, in ancient Rome and beyond, in celebrations around the winter solstice; Chanukah, Kwanzaa and New Years are also about the solstice ⎼ and new beginnings.  The first month of the year was named for Janus, the double-faced Roman god of doorways and the portals to Heaven, who looks both forward to the future and back to the past.

 

According to author Diana Ferguson, in her book The Magickal Year: A Pagan Perspective on the Natural World, December 19th was the original date of the Roman Saturnalia. This holiday commemorated a lost Golden Age and was presided over by the fertility god, Saturn. As the old god relinquished his throne, the sun was hidden, and chaos and darkness ensued.

 

When the Julian calendar replaced the old Roman one in 45 BCE, the celebration was moved to the 17th and extended to the 23rd. The people of Rome let loose. All work came to an end, schools closed, criminals went unpunished, and sexual inhibitions were forgotten.

 

After a brief respite, came January. New consuls, or rulers took office. 3 more days of celebrating ensued. Fires were lit. People decorated their homes with laurels and there were celebrations, and groups singing in the streets. When Rome became Christian in the fifth century C. E., the church adopted much of the old revelry.

 

Christmas Day was originally set on January 6 and is still celebrated on that day by the Eastern Orthodox Church. (We now have a very new significance for this date.) With the adoption of the Julian calendar, 11 days were eliminated from the year, and the holiday moved to December 25th. That date had earlier been celebrated as the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, to Mithra, a personification of the sun, who first appeared in Persia around 1,400 BCE, and became popular with Roman soldiers by the first through fourth centuries CE.

 

According to Ferguson, even further back, in ancient Babylon and elsewhere, there were celebrations staged on that date for a seasonal rebirth of light out of darkness, and life out of death. The Babylonians celebrated the first birth of everything, the Creation itself, when the god Marduk was born from the formless, watery womb of the mother goddess, Tiamat (who Marduk killed when she threatened the world with chaos).

 

And before that, ancient peoples must have always wondered, as the world grew dark, would the light ever come again? Were these changes due to some cosmic drama, or just changes the whole universe naturally goes through? And what role if any could we humans play in these transitions?

 

There’s this yearning many if not all of us feel, to get beyond the human social world to something deeper or bigger, something more real, maybe; more meaningful. To feel the seasons in ourselves?

 

If we believe in God, to feel the truth of God. To understand death and its place in our lives. Maybe to get to the home of consciousness itself, to where feelings, thoughts, and explanations are created. To get to where mind emerges from matter, like light from darkness. Or maybe it’s the other way around? Maybe matter emerges from mind, or they both are born together from an indefinable emptiness, like Marduk from the formless womb of Tiamat?

 

How do we bring light to our world and rescue order from chaos? Or how do we bring more clarity and kindness to our moments of life, or to our decisions about how to live? How can we find in nature the strength to bring compassion and justice to the human world? This is one thing we might want from a holiday, time to put aside so we can wrestle with such questions.

 

Happy Holidays! And may some clarity come to us all.

 

*This post was syndicated by The Good Men Project.

 

 

The Road Keeps Changing: The Power in Combining the Study of History with the Practice of Mindfulness Meditation

I was walking up this long rural road, a road I walk or drive on almost daily. And as I looked to the distance ahead, let my mind rest mindfully in the view, I suddenly felt there were layers in this road or under it. Old roads. Unknowns. The road has two lanes now. Was it once only one lane? A path traveled by native Americans? A deer path?

 

What was this hill like in the past before this road was built? What is hidden? I stopped and stared into the distance, imagining what the road might cover. These trees on the side. They are now maybe forty feet high. In many places there is just one lone tree fronting a home. Were the trees that bordered this road once part of a vast forest of interconnected trees, huge monsters reaching up to the sky?

 

We think of our road, village, town, or city as being just this, just the way it is now. The same old thing. But we know this isn’t the only way to see it. Not the only way it has been seen, even by me. This road, for example, was recently repaved and widened. The relationship of me standing here, the car speeding too fast by me, that crow calling, the spongy moth floating down its line never existed before.

 

What does it mean to me, now, that just 39 years ago, the lines of cables lining the road for the internet weren’t here? There was no Facebook, TikTok, texting.

 

What does it mean that 77 years ago World War II ended? A hundred years ago was the roaring 20’s. About four hundred years ago, the first Europeans came to this area, which had been populated up to then by the Cayuga tribe of Native Americans. Before the Cayugas, there were more bears than people. Today, we’re shocked, but maybe secretly filled with joy, when a bear walks down our street or visits the food market. Back then, the bears were shocked to see one of us in the forest. So much change.

 

How is this past alive in this present? What does it mean that our lives can change so much and so continuously? So much pain. So much gain and loss.

 

History is the story of change. Dr. Theodore Christou said history is rooted in storytelling. The Greek root of ‘history’ is historia, which means inquiry, seeking knowledge. And ‘story’, histoire in French, is history  without the ‘hi’.  Both words refer to an account of events.

 

We use stories to organize and shape the moments and events of our lives into memories. How we shape those stories is how we shape ourselves, create an identity or personal history. And we then know ourselves through these stories. Likewise, a culture knows itself through its stories. This history is a collective memory. It shapes how we relate with others and shows us who we are….

 

**To read the whole post, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

No More Hate: We Have A Choice About What Kind of Person We Will Be

Do you know the term ‘grok’? It was invented by author Robert Heinlein, and made its first appearance in 1961 in his science fiction novel, A Stranger In A Strange Land. If you don’t know the word, maybe add it to your vocabulary. It means to really understand something or someone, to empathize, merge with another person, idea, place, or thing so deeply you know them or it from the inside. It would be wonderful to grok something or someone, don’t you think? Or maybe certain somethings or someone, anyway?

 

I’m a straight white male. I don’t grok what it might mean to be Black in America today. I don’t grok what it might mean to be a female, either, or any gender other than mine. Or maybe what it would mean to be anyone other than me, now. Grokking ‘me’ is difficult enough.

 

But I was thinking about racism, especially since today, June 1st, is one hundred years after the Tulsa race massacre of June 1, 1921. When racist hate exploded into mobs of white people burning homes and buildings, killing black people, men, women, children, maybe as many as 300 people, shooting them, setting them aflame, bombing them, Americans bombing Americans just 3 years after World War I. And those in the mob were never held responsible. The people who had the institutional power to do so took part in or supported and turned their heads and hearts away. This is too disturbing to grok, but maybe I need to.

 

I wrote a blog recently about how hate, greed, and ignorance, what Buddhism calls the 3 poisons, cause suffering. Suffering is not the same as pain, but your response to it. For example, interpreting stomach pain as indigestion hurts so much less than thinking you have COVID-19, or cancer.

 

The poisons create a vacuum inside us, a vacuum that can be so encompassing you lose understanding for what you yearn or lust for. You focus on what you want from or how you can use other people. They become dehumanized to you, and you to yourself.

 

Racism may be hard to define but most likely includes hate and misinformation institutionalized⎼ taught, enforced, inflicted on people by legal proceedings, media, education, economics, politics, etc. According to Dismantling Racism (dRworks), it includes many factors, like race prejudice and systemic discrimination to preserve white power, depriving BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities of an equal and just place in society.

 

Hating is not only anger or aggression but a compulsion to hurt. We’ve seen this too often over the last five years, or forever. It shoves people and reality, especially the reality of who people are as individuals, away from you. And it is addictive. You blame who or what you hate for your hate. And for your pain. Pain you might not have initially created but certainly augmented by projecting onto this other person or group the power to cause your suffering. You feel diminished. And you imagine by hating you regain power; you harm them or try to diminish them back. But you carry the hate. So, you hate yourself. The more you hate others, the more you hurt, the more you hate. A spiral of addiction.

 

And this can spread easily and harm everyone you meet. Hate is the denial of compassion, of love, of humanity⎼ of grokking. When you see hate in someone’s face, it is hard not to fear the ill-will is directed at you. So, there’s fear, too. And ignorance. The only community it fosters is a communion of fear, hate, and ignorance. It undermines all other community.

 

When I was a teenager, my family lived in a suburb of New York City. One Sunday afternoon, I was walking my dog up the block and saw a friend. We stopped outside his house to talk. A car full of white teens also stopped, in the street near us. We were Jewish. They were Catholic. I don’t remember how I knew this or if I just presumed it⎼ or if they yelled something at us. There had been several incidents at the time of harassment of Jewish people by Catholics. But my dog suddenly barked. A gun was raised and pointed out the window at us and fired.

 

I don’t know if they meant to kill us. My friend and I jumped more than ducked. It happened too fast for us; we were not used to hate coming from guns. And it was hate. Neither of us was hit, although one bullet did break through a window of the house, just missing my friend’s younger brother. We were lucky. So many others before and since, of so many communities of people, were not. Just consider all the violence over the last five years (or forever) against people who are Black, or Asian, Indigenous, other People of Color, and LGBTQIA, etc.⎼ for example, of Black Americans shot by police for being Black while simply walking (Michael Brown), driving (Duante Wright), asleep at home (Breonna Taylor), or being a child playing (Tamir Rice).

 

Hate can destroy society. We must take action to stop it, neither let ourselves be infected nor forget. We stop it by studying and teaching history. And by learning to better grok ourselves and others, better grok both what supports racism and other forms of hate and what counters it⎼ or what turns us to the better angels of our nature. To compassion. We are capable of both hate and compassion. We have choices about what kind of people we will be. And we can’t allow anyone or anything to convince us otherwise.

 

 

*Here are additional resources to learn about and teach history and stop hate:

Facing History and Ourselves,

The 1619 Project,

Native Knowledge 360,

Asian Americans K-12 Education Curriculum,

The Zinn Education Project.

Others:

USvshate.org,

Anti-Defamation League

Confronting White Nationalism in Schools

SPLC: Hate in Schools

Learning For Justice

Science for the Greater Good: Science Based Practices for Kinder Happier Schools

 

**This blog was syndicated by The Good Men Project.

The Well of Ancients: We Live in a Universe, Not A Room

Have images of someplace you have never been, or of a time or situation you have never lived, ever appeared in your mind masquerading as a memory?

 

Years ago, my parents lived in Atlantic City, New Jersey. One night we were driving on Atlantic Avenue, the main street of the city that runs parallel to and often just a block or so away from the ocean. It was raining and the yellow lights reflected off the wet street. The houses on a long section of the avenue are large, expensive dwellings, some old and going back to the 1930s or before. And suddenly I felt we were back in the 1930s during prohibition when some of the homes were owned by mobsters. The whole mood had changed into a feeling different from any other I have ever felt. This happened two or three times.

 

My great aunt Fanny, sister of my maternal grandmother, died when I was in my thirties. When I think of her apartment, I get something closer to a dream than a memory, and just pieces, not the whole. And those pieces are not from the second half of the twentieth century. They are from sometime earlier⎼ with dark hallways, a bedroom with a wall of ornate glass doors which she didn’t have, a window that looked out not onto modern streets but gray mists, people in dark clothes in a village of wood homes, in the “old country” of Eastern Europe from where my relatives emigrated.

 

And from where do our interests come? Why do some subjects, seemingly from before we were born, excite or shake us up, turn us off or get no response at all? I love the art of Japan, Tibet, Indigenous North America, Central Africa, Ancient Greece, and the Middle East, but other places less so or not at all.

 

Twenty years ago, I was on sabbatical from teaching, and my wife and I went to Greece. I taught philosophy to high school students and looked forward to visiting the birthplace of Western European philosophy.

 

We were on the island of Crete, not far from the city of Chania, driving through the mountains after visiting the ancient City of Aptera. The city had come to an end possibly in 1400 CE due to an earthquake. We stopped at the ruins of a Minoan palace, and Roman and Byzantine structures. My wife saw a herd of sheep grazing on the side of the road and asked me to stop. The sheep were not fenced in but moving freely about.

 

We stopped, got out of the car, and walked over to the sheep. I happened to look down, and there, partly exposed, were ancient bricks, Roman, maybe 2000 years old. An archaeological site was close by unearthing a Roman villa from that time, with sculptures, lintels and other artifacts just lying on the ground. We continued our walk and found ruins of a Roman cistern. Overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, we saw a German bunker from World War II, and later, an Ottoman fortress.

 

What is it like to live in a place where we literally step on thousands of years of human history? …

 

To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

**The photo is of what might be the oldest road in Europe, from Knossos, Crete.

Anger at Boomers: We Can’t Allow Ourselves to be Manipulated Into Setting One Generation, Race, Religion, Gender Against Another

In writing and publishing two of my last three blogs, I ran into people angry at Boomers or the 60s. The anger was sometimes loud and aggressive, and it was difficult, when it was in a one-on-one situation, to say anything in response that the attacker would hear. One person criticized my post on resolving to vote and imagine a true democracy, claiming I was glorifying the Boomers and blaming Millennials for the situation we are in today. I never mentioned Boomers anywhere in the piece, although I clearly spoke from a Boomer perspective, being part of that generation myself. In the other post, I described someone who blamed Boomers for DT.

 

Where is the anger and blame coming from? Certainly, people are feeling hurt, possibly that they were treated unjustly. But what is the source of that hurt?

 

At the heart of one critique was a study by Yascha Mounk at Harvard who had found that the people of the 1930s who fought the Nazis said democracy was extremely important to them, and people born much later (like Millennials) did not value democracy as highly. One reason for this difference, speculated Mounk, was that Millennials and Gen-X’ers had not fought against Nazis or against other non-democratic governments in order to safeguard democracy. The younger generations of Americans were not familiar with the threat to our freedoms these other governments could pose.

 

The critic said I had claimed Boomers had fought the Nazis and thus knew what it was like to face a threat to our democratic institutions. Maybe I wasn’t as articulate as I could have been, but clearly we Boomers could not have fought against the Nazi Germans. We weren’t alive yet. Once alive and speaking, we certainly heard about the war and Nazis quite often, from relatives who had fought, as well as from the news and literature, as we were born right after the war had ended.

 

All of us alive in the US in the 1950s felt the threat of Soviet Russia daily, whose leaders threatened to destroy US democracy. We went through the McCarthy Era, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and “duck and cover drills” that were created in fear of a nuclear war. Likewise, people today are feeling the threats of gun violence, global warming, increasing terrorism, the loss of democratic institutions, etc.

 

While young people in general tended in the past to vote at lower rates then older people, as I said in my earlier blog, this is changing. The Pew Research Center, whose statistics showed, for example, that the number of millennials who voted nearly doubled from 2014 to 2018 ⎼ and more voted than older generations of Americans. Things are changing quickly, and I welcome this particular change. Young people today are leading in several fronts, including the environment and ending gun violence.

 

Boomers are attacked for dropping out of society and also for dropping in and becoming greedy capitalists. For being too idealistic and for not caring at all about democracy. For drugs, sex, and rock’n’roll or being without morals and for being too judgmental. I was attacked for dropping out of society to return to the land as well as for supposedly claiming Millennials were responsible for all the ills of our society today, or for DT ⎼ but I never said they were responsible. Neither are all the Boomers or Gen-X’ers. The people who support DT are responsible.

 

The 60s decade was alive with experimentation, protests, art, music, and the promise of great political and social change, of increasing equity and opportunity. It was the decade that saw not only the anti-war movement but civil rights advanced, and the passing of the Voting Rights Act, Medicaid and Medicare. And early in the 70s, we saw the women’s rights and environmental movement grow, the Clean Air Act passed and the EPA created. The Clean Waters Restoration Act was passed in 1966 and the Clean Waters Act in 1972, all resulting in a great improvement in air and water quality. There was Woodstock ⎼ and there was Altamont, the assassination of a President, his Presidential candidate brother, as well as civil rights leaders.

 

But although we heard President Eisenhower’s warning in 1961 about the Military-Industrial Complex, the people of the 60s grew up in a capitalist society, as did everyone else who was born in the US alive today. Some of the super-rich capitalists are Boomers, but you can’t blame Boomers for capitalism.

 

But much of the promise of the 60s rebellion never bore fruit and fell apart, and there is anger about that. The 60s became the 70s. And then the 80s, Ronald Reagan, and the economic divide between the top 1% and the rest of us started to increase once again. The limitations on the rich that were enacted just before and during the war and were extended through the 60s and 70s, were undermined or terminated in the Reagan years, and the economic divide has been getting worse ever since. And the Boomers did not stop that injustice.

 

According to a study by the Boston Consulting Group in 2017, around 70% of the nation’s wealth will be concentrated in the hands of millionaires and billionaires by 2021. Matt Bruenig of the Peoples Policy Project, said “…the top one percent owns nearly $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half owns less than nothing, meaning they have more debts than they have assets.” And according to CBS news, the rich pay a lower tax rate than most in the middle class. If my math is correct, and we took the total income earned in the US in 2018 ($17.6 trillion) and divided it by the number of full-time workers (128.57 million),  we get $136,890. Imagine that as the salary of each worker. All this accumulation of wealth in so few hands is undermining the future for most Americans.

 

Many factors contribute to the ease by which we attack each other, but one could be social isolation, which can negatively affect our physical and emotional health. How we use social media and other technology plays a big role here. For example, instead of going out to the movies, or to work, or to shop, or even gather with friends, more of us stay home on our computers, Prime or Hulu or Xboxes or FB or texts or whatever. This makes it easier for us to experience loneliness, anger, and lose sight of the humanity of others. Face to face communication is so much more than words. It is the felt presence of a breathing being, and texts, written words, even images cannot replicate that.

 

With all the talk about different generations of Americans, it’s easy to pit one generation against another.  But a generation is simply a group of people born at a certain time in history under a certain set of conditions, and we need to remember that. Any statistics about a generation can be useful to know, but it is just a generalization. In-between the generalizations are the truths about individual people, and it is those individuals who we meet in the gym or on the street ⎼ or who write blogs.

 

There is cause for anger, but it should be directed at the actions of those super-rich people who are trying to undermine democracy right now by setting one generation, one group of people ⎼ or one race, religion, or gender ⎼ against another. And we can’t let ourselves take part in that manipulation or allow it to succeed.

 

 

This post was syndicated by The Good Men Project.

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Holidays! A Time to Remember That What We Need Can Be Fought For and Won

As many people do, I have almost always looked forward to the holidays. When I was a child, I looked forward to gifts. As a student and teacher, I looked forward to a vacation from school. For most of my life, I looked forward to getting together with family and friends. However, there were years in college and as a teenager that I dreaded the holidays, especially the New Year, if I didn’t have a party to go to or a date.

 

The holidays have become so commercial that many now dread them. This commercialization is characteristic of our contemporary culture and it buries the deeper meaning of such moments in time. My wife and I ignore gift-giving for ourselves. The only gift we give each other is our presence.But for the children we know and charities⎼ that is a different story.

 

The holidays could be so rich. Hanukah is a festival of light and freedom. Kwanzaa of family, community, and culture. Christmas of joy in the birth of Jesus. So many holidays.

 

Humans have celebrated the winter holidays possibly forever. The time is obviously near the solstice and the longest reign of night, at least in the Northern hemisphere where I live. For us northerners, it is the darkest and coldest time. It is traditionally a time to engage in rituals to assure that the sun will come again, that spring will follow winter, renewal follow hibernation, warmth follow cold.

 

Many holidays have this sacred dimension or shadow that connects us to a depth of history. This history is not just about days of religious significance. These holidays provide workers a break from intense labor. They signify a recognition of shared humanity, however dim that recognition often was in the past and might be so again today.

 

Every one of us needs time to rest and connect with others. Every one of us needs time to step back and contemplate why we are here on this earth, to renew our selves, our relationships with fellow humans and the earth that sustains us. The fact that we have days of rest is beyond a right; it is a sacred necessity.

 

Americans, as well as people from most nations, fought in the past for a five-day workweek. They fought against those who would oppress them and were successful. But today, the GOP are giving to the rich and taking from most of us, so we need to fight this same battle once again.

 

This year, everything is both normal, like always, and yet totally different from any other time. Never have Americans had a President who has threatened so many of our values and institutions, and who brings with him the possibility of a truly frightening future. Yet, day follows night. We wake from sleep. Many things continue as they have.

 

Much is changing; much is staying relatively the same. It is time to determine exactly what, on the level of our daily lives, might benefit from a change. For many of us, it might be finding ways, each day, we can integrate opposing the President and his cabinet and working for justice and democracy. Or there might be local issues that drive us. We might dedicate ourselves to improving our understanding of history and ourselves.

 

This time of ritually facing the darkest time of year might remind us that in some ways, this is what nature calls to us to do, to face the darkness so the light will come again.

 

Have a great holiday season and New Year. Renew, enjoy, and celebrate with friends and family. It is something we all need, deserve, and share. It is a reminder that we do share so much, and that what we need can be fought for and won.

How Did It Happen?

What a week. Every week, every day, T provides a new outrage. This week, we all saw T fail to hold Putin accountable for hacking into Democratic and Republican computers and emails and the computer systems of state electoral boards. He also sided with Russia against U. S. intelligence assessments. He basically colluded in public with Russia. Yet, the GOP, after a few harsh words early in the week, by the end they let it all slide.

 

How did politics in the US get so bad? What role did economic manipulation play in the increasing divisiveness in the U. S. since the early 1990s or before? Institutional racism, sexism, anti-semitism, etc. played a huge role, but I need to center for the moment on economics or my head and heart will spin ⎼ too much information for me to digest.

 

Why are Democrats seemingly so ineffectual and the GOP so ready to support whatever T does, even when he puts Russia before US interests, dictatorship before Democracy? Why does the GOP walk so much in lockstep, ready to stomp on the humanity, rights, health care and income of so many in the middle and lower classes?

 

And the goose or lock stepping of the GOP is not just an example of politicians afraid of their base or afraid of losing their position, as many in the centrist media portray it. The base of the GOP itself is something relatively new in US politics, even though it has been developing for years. Since Reagan, the GOP has become increasingly intransigent and devoted to only one small group of people—the white super-rich. T is also something relatively new, but he is a poison in a garden that was already laid waste by politicians unable and unwilling to halt the pressure by the super-rich to undermine any restraints on their power.

 

One book I’ve been reading to help me gain some clarity is Billionaire Democracy: The Hijacking of the American Political System by economist George Tyler. This is an important book to read. It talks not only about how democracy has been hijacked, but how to take it back. In 1980, according to Tyler, the richest 0.1% contributed less than 10% of all campaign contributions. By 2012, their share increased to 44%. In 2016, it increased to about 66% of contributions to Congressional candidates.

 

Along with this trend in political contributions is a trend many have noted in wealth controlled by the top 1%. In the 1920s, before the depression, the top 1% owned 44.2% of the wealth. During the depression, and even more, during the war, the taxes on the rich were raised to 94% for top earners, and the percentage of wealth owned by the rich by 1945 was down to 29.8%. By 1979, the percentage owned by the 1% was down to only 20%. Thanks to Reagan, the percentage of wealth owned by the super-rich went up. By 2013, the top 1% owned 36.7% of US wealth. The top 20% of the US population in terms of wealth owned 89%, leaving only 11% for the remaining 80% of people. In 2017, the top 1% owned 42.8%. It has been increasing by 6% annually since the mid-2000s. (See my chart on the last page.) And the GOP tax cut is only making income inequality worse.

 

America’s wealthiest 20 people own more wealth than the bottom half the population, own more than 152,000,000 people combined. Among the Forbes 444, only 2 are African-American.

 

Tyler analyzes how the super-rich used their wealth to buy a political party. They went about this from several directions. They first chose a party that had favored the super-rich since the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in the primary season for the 2016 presidential election, nearly half of all political contributions came from about 158 families. 158 families! 87% went to the GOP.

 

Second, Tyler explains how the party “culled” most of its more moderate members from their ranks or leadership positions. They culled those who would actually work with Democrats, or support Medicare, capital gains taxes, public schools, or work to limit soft money donations, etc. For example, former Senator Olympia Snowe was a moderate Republican from Maine. She was booed in the Republican convention in Bangor because of her history of cooperating with Democrats. Soon after that, she stopped her bid for reelection. (A similar thing occurred with U. S. Rep. Mark Sanford, who was a critic of Mr. T and lost his bid to run again for Congress after T tweeted his support to Sanford’s challenger.)

 

Third, the super-rich bought a movement, the Tea Party. When the Tea Party was just getting organized in 2009, wealthy donors like the tobacco industry and the Koch brothers helped finance their meetings, conventions and advertising, yet so many of their members had no idea this was happening.

 

Fourth, Tyler clarifies how the rich bought media outlets and continue to do so today. The Tea Party movement was created not only with the money of the wealthy but by their control of the media. Rupert Murdoch, for example, bought Fox news and turned it into the propaganda outlet of the rich and right-wing. The super-rich funded media that spread an anti-government, anti-tax, anti-any-social-program that actually was helpful to the lives of most Americans.

 

The rules obliging the broadcast media to provide factual reporting (called the Fairness Doctrine, spelled out in 1947) were undone in 1987 by Reagan. As Tyler put it, “since Ronald Reagan…broadcasters have abandoned objectivity in favor of an afactual, partisan din. Fables foisted as reality have become commonplace…”  (p. 193) The Trumpian attack on facts and truth has been developing for decades.

 

In Federalist 68, Alexander Hamilton warned of “cabal, intrigue, and corruption… chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the union…?” Hamilton greatly feared a misinformed citizenry. His fears were eerily actualized in the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. In fact, as Tyler puts it, the GOP strategy was to undermine exactly what the framers meant to preserve. They “demonize[d] the fact-based information industry central to the framer’s vision of a democracy sustained by an informed electorate.”

 

Fifth, the super-rich went after the legal system, including the Supreme Court. They used the concept of the personhood of a corporation to advance their agenda and diminish governmental restrictions on their power. This concept was nowhere to be found in discussions by the Founding Fathers and was nowhere mentioned in the history of the court prior to the 1880s.

 

According to Tyler, in the 1880s Roscoe Conklin, a lawyer representing a railroad baron, introduced the idea that the 14thamendment was passed not only to protect the civil rights of African-American males but also protect corporations from government interference. Conklin argued for this idea despite the total lack of any evidence for it. There were no records of it being mentioned in any of the discussions that led to the passage of the 14thAmendment in 1867. In 1886, his fabricated doctrine helped win a case protecting the railroads from “bothersome” taxes levied by the county of Santa Clara on the railroads. It has been used since to protect the rich from the rest of us.

 

The founding fathers, explained Tyler, distrusted big corporations and thought contributing to a political campaign was a way to buy a politician. It was, thus, a criminal act. Vote buying undermined the integrity of voting. This criminality became legally protected by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision of 2010, which synthesized two evils. It not only reinforced the personhood of corporations. It released corporations and the super-rich from most restrictions on the buying of politicians. It said that corporations, like people, have the right of free speech. And making political contributions was a form of protected speech, not to be restricted.

 

The whole idea that a corporation should be considered a person is ludicrous. Corporations were never given the vote, don’t give birth, don’t shake hands or die, except metaphorically. The rich who own and manage corporations already have a vote and a voice, if they are citizens. Why give them what amounts to two or thousands of votes? The constitutional guarantee of free speech refers to guarding the content of speech, not its volume.

 

Apparently, most Americans know that the rich have too much influence on the government. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, in 2015, 79% of Americans (63% of Republicans) said our economic system unfairly favors the rich. A similar view is held about the government. And the support shown to Bernie Sanders in 2016 (and maybe even to T himself) seems to confirm this.

 

Taxing the rich is one traditional way to exercise a little control over how wealthy the wealthy can be. It is not socialism, but is how the U. S. financed a winning strategy in World War II. It is how, in the 1950s and 1960s, we experienced the greatest growth of the middle class in our history. From the 1940s to 1980s, the highest earners paid more than double what they do now in taxes. In fact, from the 1940s to 1960s, the highest tax bracket was around 90%. Reagan’s first tax cut lowered the top tax rate from 70% to 50%; in 1989, it was down to 28%. Since then, the rates have gone slightly up and down, down especially with the latest GOP tax cut to the super-rich. (See below.)

 

Meanwhile, today, most of us pay in real taxes about 25% of income, which includes property, sales and other taxes, not only income tax. This puts the US at the lowest tax levels of all nations except for Korea, Chile, and Mexico.

 

So, when we think about how to take back or create democracy, we have to keep in mind who really constitutes the base of the GOP and T. We have to find a way to lessen the influence and control of the super-rich over public policy and all our lives.

 

And we have to find out how Russia fits into the plans and manipulations of the super-rich.

 

 

Chart Showing How Increasing Taxes Lowers Income Inequality (Compiled from different sources.)

Year % of wealth controlled by the top 1% Income tax rates for the wealthiest of us
1929 44.2% 24%
1945 29.8% 94%
1979 20.5% 70%
1983 30.9% 50%
1989 35.7% 28%
1990s 37.2 – 38.1 28 – 39.6%
2017 42.8%
2018 Estimate: 45.3% (6% increase per year since 2008) 37%
2030 Est: 64%