JackTReason

The Civil Rights Act was passed and signed in 1964. As I was born in 1960, the act was something I learned about years later. When my school taught me about this act, about ten years or so after it passed, the events that lead up to it seemed to be part of ancient history. A story in black and white film clips and pictures of men and women marching, of police and firehoses and savage dogs. Of soldiers walking a small black girl to school, and the National Guard forcing a Governor to stand down. Of lunch counters and buses and bridges. Of black citizens and white authority.

I grew up in Chicago, having moved there in 1968. I saw plenty of examples of racism and prejudice and while I learned that it was wrong, I didn’t connect any of it to the changing laws and practices, or to the segregation of the recent past or the integration going on around me and throughout the country. I saw the racism, and as I was a white kid it wasn’t hidden from me. On the contrary, racists took my skin color as a sign of alliance; a mark of confederacy.

And I went through my young life, from high school and into the Navy, having racists assume I would laugh at their racist jokes while almost simultaneously listening to white people tell me that racism was all but gone in the north of America. Sure, there were still racism in the South, but up north we were civilized. This was a lie folks told broadly, and only believed by those doing the telling.

But I didn’t live in the South with separate water fountains and bathrooms, and I didn’t join the Navy before the military was integrated. The America that I knew was functionally integrated yet remained heavily committed to segregation. The instances of black and white personal integration were more rare than intentional segregation. Whether it was at school or aboard ship, people segregated. And we accepted this as culturally comfortable. While the occasional black man sitting with a table full of white people wasn’t all that rare, people actually did a double-take when they saw a solitary white man freely sharing company with a group of blacks. The policies and laws had changed, and some number of the people accepted that as just and good, but so many others rejected it in their own lives and community. The laws had changed, but you can’t stop people from choosing their company.

Many years later I was told that integration had economically hurt the American blacks more than it helped them. My impulse was to reject this. Perhaps it was the source. I often heard from racist whites how things were better for the blacks before the laws had changed. This still goes on today, with the worst of them promoting the benefits slavery brought to African Americans. (Look at how bad things were in Africa before we brought them here! In The States the blacks were housed and fed and clothed. etc.)

Of course it was better to open the whole of the country up to everyone without restriction to race. I read about separate but equal, and redlining, and the Green Book. Integration must have been a positive all around. But I was mistaken, and though I was told this several more times, I didn’t fully understand it for many years. There was truth to that claim, though not for the reasons the racists I knew offered.

In 2009 I bought a small wreck of a house in Michigan, north of Muskegon and inland from Lake Michigan. The idea was to reduce my cost of living to as low as I could, and so afford choices that greater economic freedom allow.

The neighborhood I found my home in had been platted as an addition to the resort community of Lakewood back in the beginnings of the twentieth century but had never been built up. The Great Depression stopped the building of cabins, and the resort closed. The housing became permanent homes to workers who filled their rolls in the arsenal of democracy that was Muskegon during WWII. Eventually that resort was incorporated as the village of Lakewood Club, but without the platted addition across the township line. 

The rapid increase in industrialization Muskegon felt during those war years put a demand on housing. One of the solutions was houses built from kits. All the parts numbered and packed to be put together by the homeowner or contractor. We all have heard of the kit homes from Sears, but there were other companies too. My house was one of those, though it was located in Muskegon proper. Late in the fifties developers wanted the land it and many of its cousins sat on, and an entrepreneur bought up many of these small kit homes and moved them north to this platted but undeveloped neighborhood where they were then rented out. The neighborhood was settled by mostly African Americans, many of whom would eventually buy the houses outright. Many of these homes were gone by the time I arrived, and though some several remain, the neighborhood is nothing like it was in days past.

In my research of these properties and this neighborhood I found that the recently demolished roadhouse a quarter-mile west of me had once been called the Ebony Club, and following that I learned of the Chitlin’ Circuit. The Chitlin’ Circuit was a collection of clubs and theaters throughout the country that catered to black entertainers and audiences. Famous entertainers such as The Temptations played there. As I dug deeper into this I learned about the summer resort known as Idlewild. It was in Lake County, Michigan, and catered exclusively to blacks. It may have been the largest summer camping resort in the country, and was founded in the early twentieth century in response to Jim Crow laws.

The business flourished, as did many other black-owned businesses throughout the country. Across the country, businesses owned by African Americans and catering to the black race were a central part of the wealth in those communities. But when The Civil Rights Act was passed and signed, it legally opened white-owned businesses to non-white customers. It was a practice that many whites had been accepting as a matter of economic advantage. But the end of segregation, both as a practical issue and a legal one, did indeed spell the demise of many businesses that formally had a captive audience. Idlewild exists today as an unincorporated community, with a museum I plan to visit once the pandemic has passed.

Let me be clear as to what it was I realized. Integration put money on a one-way street, going from the pockets of the black community to those in the white community. This is about money.

The real failure here was from the other direction. While much of white America objected to segregation and lauded the Civil Rights Act, they didn’t embrace the practice. They failed in integrating themselves with the black community and black owned business. It was the other side of integration.

And for this discussion I will not dive into the practices of many towns and neighborhoods of establishing covenants to maintain those color restrictions that had been before codified in law. Here I only acknowledge what was never presented to me when I was taught about the end of segregation. While my people were patting themselves on the back for allowing blacks to shop at their stores and eat in their restaurants, there was no effort made to do the reverse.

What should have happened but didn’t, was the opposite movement of some money from the white pocket to black business. Integration became synonymous with allowing blacks to join whites. In truth it should have been (and still needs to be) both whites and blacks joining each other.

And yes, there are those who practice this very thing. But too few do, and too few recognize that this failure on the part of white America is partially responsible for the failure of the proportional success of black business.

I am not here at this moment to address reparations for slavery, or the myriad business practices that banks used to keep the upper hand white, nor all of those other actions taken by businesses and governments to foster economic segregation. I take this moment to offer my commitment to patronize black owned business in my community, intentionally and deliberately. And ask for other white Americans to do the same. Let us integrate some of our money as it should have been done all along.

January 2021 – post insurrection

I imagine that those reading this understand what the First Amendment of the US Constitution says about speech, and they also understand what that speech that applies to. But to summarize, it protects the public from government restrictions on speech. That is all. It doesn’t force anyone to listen, nor does it force anyone to give you a soapbox to speak from. It merely says the government can’t lock you up for what you say. But even in that statement it leaves out, by omission, certain obvious assumptions about speech. As has been decided by the Supreme Court, it is fair to assume that the founders never intended for incitement to violence or speech that could cause panic to be so protected. The classic claim about falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater as an example.
The speech so protected is limited, and applies solely to Government restriction. So, when Twitter banned off their platform the further speech of the sitting US President, Donald Trump, it was not violating his free speech. It is their business, after all. And as you don’t have to let someone come into your house and scream obscenities at your children, Twitter doesn’t have to allow Trump to use their house to say what he will. They could ban anyone they like. Their decision to do so wasn’t based on his politics, but rather on his incitement of a crowd to violence that was to them, the last straw in a series of obvious and deliberate attempts to raise anger to action amongst his followers by spreading lies and misinformation. To bolster this claim, I refer to the numerous tags they added to false information tweets he has made prior to the banning. They have, just as every other social medial platform has, standards of use that give them legal right to eject you from their sites without ramifications.
Facebook and a host of other sites have done the same.

But the larger question comes to mind, how in this world of mass communication through social media is free speech supposed to be delivered if those platforms can shut you down? Could they, one may ask, eject someone simply for political speech that the platform disagreed with? Well, yes. In fact, on the alternate site Parler, it was common for them to kick off users for disagreeing with the far-right agenda they present (despite the irony in their claims of being a free speech platform). As a note, Amazon web service dropped Parler off their servers for failure to curb speech that threatened violence and promoted sedition. Another example of a private entity choosing who they do business with.

Take a walk back in history and see people picking out public corners to speak. There, so long as you were abiding by some rules, you could say what you will, a freedom you would not enjoy on someone’s private property.
And to reach a larger audience, you could find a printer will to print you message, or later a radio station, and still later a television station to allow you to have your say. And if none of those places would let you have your say through their organ, you could build your own press, etc., etc., etc.

Are we then in danger of having a corporate oligarchy controlling our ability to spread our message? Judging from what I have been easily able to access, no. Not anymore than Thomas Paine was while needed someone to print his pamphlets.
And what newspaper is required to print the opinions and positions of the public? Most accept letters to their editors, but use their own discretion which to print.

And when it comes to extreme rhetoric, what exactly is wrong with some of that speech? And why shouldn’t it be allowed? After all, In the marketplace of ideas, the truth will bear out; is a maxim long established by jurists of great esteem over the centuries. The freedom to reasonably argue ideas and debate them in open and frank discussion is at the core of intellectual honesty. Why suppress it at all? Wouldn’t it be better to hear it, and then have it countered with alternative speech?
Well, yes. I suppose it would if, and only if there were measures taken to get that alternate speech out and have it heard. False speech cannot be countered if the reply is not heard. Platforms of social media are built to exclude alternatives to speech. You see those you follow, and are fed posts that correspond to your taste. You are funneled into an echo chamber of those that agree, and away from opinions to the contrary. Such platforms tacitly limit open discussion.
But what I’m talking about here is not the free expression of ideas and your unwillingness to hear others, I’m talking about deliberate falsehoods, propaganda made and built to be fed into that echo chamber to convince people of some travesty that in fact, never happened. Propaganda.

Propaganda can be used by almost anyone. And it is certainly used by all sides to one degree of another; especially in times of war. But the idea that it should be expressed by the President and used against the other branches of government is wrong and should be restriced. And those who believe it do not have a right to hear it on whatever platform they like. But more importantly, we as a people should reject that speech and make it clear to our leaders that we expect and demand honesty and factually based information. When a person in power speaks, they should be held accountable for speaking untruths. I do not think that the application of free speech should extend to the same degree to those who are elected as it does to the public at large. When then President Trump falsely stated that the election was fraudulent and stolen from him by corruption, this should not be protected as free speech. His authority has weight, and his making that speech inspired others to accept his claim as true and act out against lawful authority as a result.
Public officials should be held to a higher standard of speech and be expected to verify the claims they make. The claims he made were actually checked and found wanting evidence. For him to continue to make those false claims should not be protected, but rather they should be viewed as incitement to lawlessness.

We curb free speech in government regularly. During war government censors blacked out parts of letters written by those in the field if they felt they might compromise the war effort. Details of location or troop strength were censored. That speech was restricted and censored. Diplomats are selected for their ability to self-censor. They must carefully gauge what they say with the understanding that their speech could cause other governments to rise to action. And if they fail to be so guided, they are removed. In short, their speech is restricted.

We must set truth as the standard for speech by those elected to lead us. And when they abuse their official platforms to make false claims and incite the masses to action against the lawful elections they should face consequences.

One. More. Time.

400,000 Americans have died of Covid-19.
And Donald Trump could have helped but didn’t. Look at the tapes. It is all on record. He downplayed the seriousness of this virus when he knew how serious it was.
LOOK at the tapes. This was all recorded. He told us it would go away when spring came. He said their were 15 cases that would soon be zero. That is on tape at a press conference.
But at the same time he was also telling Bob Woodward that he KNEW how serious it was. On tape. LISTEN to the tapes.
He refused to wear a mask. He made fun of those who wore masks. He attacked the doctors and scientists who were telling us how serious this was.When Governors took action to save their citizens he mocked them. He called on his supporters to LIBERATE those states. As the cases and deaths climbed he told us everything was fine. As the cases and deaths RAGED he said we were turning a corner.

He lied to you and me and we knew it. And you should have known it. But you wouldn’t listen. He could have done something but didn’t. We just passed 400,000 dead. If you are still defending this DEVIL than shame on you. We told you. The scientists and doctors told you. If you didn’t listen that is on you.

J’ACCUSE!

Tomorrow we start anew. We will try to rebuild this country and heal the wounds. A new President will take over and try to help make things right. I don’t want to hear a GODDAMN thing from those who supported this MONSTER.
You had your chance. Admit you were wrong or shut the fuck up and get out of the way.

A century ago the Klan was popular in West Michigan. While it seemed to have peaked nationally at the beginning of the decade, it was strongly supported by many in the first half of the 1920s. It was less about hatred of blacks in the region than it was about hatred of immigrants and Catholics, though racism was still a part of the story. But support and membership fell dramatically in 1926 after a murder that occurred just a few hundred yards from my current home. A local Klan Knight, who was Constable of Blue Lake Township, angered by the election of a German American Catholic to the position of Township Supervisor, mailed a bomb to the Three Lakes Tavern that the supervisor owned, killing that man, his daughter, and his daughter’s fiancee. Their wedding was scheduled for the following Saturday, and they together opened what they assumed was a wedding present. The bomber expressed regret about the two children, saying that he didn’t think about the wedding. The aftermath shocked the region and caused many to drop their membership in the Klan, though we all know that hatred and group superiority never really goes away.
I know a lot more about this, but this isn’t a history lesson. I bring it up because I am hopeful for a parallel to today. I hope that like then, the masses of Americans who tacitly supported the various factions who raged against the election of Joe Biden, against Black Lives Matter, and against other immigrant and minority groups, will look at this assault against our Capitol and the principals of our nation and reject it, as they did 94 years ago.I am hopeful they will see the worst of what they have endorsed, and reject those who try to continue this action.

Tomorrow is January 14. It has two anniversaries of note to history that I would like to highlight for Americans today.
The first is 1784, which is Ratification Day. It was the day when the Treaty of Paris was signed, officially ending the Revolutionary War. Peace with the other side is possible. Even after a long fight.
The second is 1943, when the Casablanca Conference took place. This was a meeting between our President Roosevelt, Britsh Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and others to plan the next phase of World War Two. The reason this is an important anniversary in my reckoning, is that it is where Roosevelt borrowed a phrase from Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant, and said that the allies would seek only “Unconditional Surrender” of the Axis forces.

We are today facing an uprising not seen in this country since the Civil War, and the last action taken was Impeachment of the sitting President for the second time. This time for inciting to riot those who attacked our national Capitol. The process of electing our leaders is under threat by those in the minority, who having lost a free and fair election seek to impose their will on the majority. They do so with threats to leaders and with direct attacks against the body politic. As the Speaker of the House of Representatives said today, We do not negotiate with Terrorists, I add:
We should not accept anything less than Unconditional Surrender from the traitor that we have Impeached, and the seditious mob that follow him.

To the Republic we stand.

It Failed

The story of what happened at the US Capitol on January 6 has been told in different ways. Apologists for Trump tells us that it was a peaceful protest and a few bad apples broke into the Capitol and rummaged around a bit. Others acknowledge that it was a protest that got out of hand.

But there are some very strong pieces of evidence that point to the most sinister of conclusions: Trump tried to overthrow the nation with an Executive coup.

Legality:

First, Trump’s legal argument had no plausible avenue for success long before he called his followers to join him in DC on that morning. He claimed and seemed to believe that the Vice-President, who had an important but entirely ceremonial role in the counting of the Elector ballots, could simply refuse to accept some of them and send them back to the states. This would leave no candidate with enough electoral votes, leaving the matter to be decided by Congress on a one vote per state basis. Trump might well have been delusional enough to believe this, but he certainly had plenty of lawyers around him who knew that it wasn’t an option. And the Vice-President knew it wasn’t an option and told him so. The simple truth is that such an attempt would be an unlawful act, putting the VP in legal jeopardy. More than that, it would have been a direct attempt to undermine the Constitutional process used to select the President.

That’s right: Trump was asking Pence to participate in a coup. Drop all the talk about plausible legality as there wasn’t any.

The legal arguments ended long before January 6. Legal avenues closed absolutely when the electors from the states voted.

But they should have ended long before. After the separate states counted votes and declared the victories, some room was open for challenges. Some states had results close enough for candidates to ask for recounts. Trump asked for one in Georgia, and also paid for a partial recount in Wisconsin. These operations were done, and the results were the same. These included hand counts of ballots, completely destroying his claim of computers changing votes.

At that point he should have recognized that the election was fair and concede. He didn’t. And when the Department Of Justice said that they found no evidence of large scale fraud, and those several states all declared their elections fair, he should have stopped and conceded. He didn’t.

For all of this, the counting of the electors at the US Capitol by the joint session of Congress had no real legal value. The idea that members of Congress could object to the electoral votes in some state or another is valid, but that would only require those bodies to separate and debate those challenges, and return to vote. There was never a realistic chance that the outcome would be different – unless you add treachery.

If, you might offer, an armed mob of citizens swarmed Congress and captured and detained House and Senate members unwilling to oppose the electoral vote. This would allow the remaining members, Trump supporters all, to form a quorum and reject the electoral votes of those states, throwing the decision to Congress.

This would be straight up treason and a coup d’tat. Dig through historical examples to find similar events that installed governments in other countries that are similar, but none change the basic idea that this would be an overthrow of the nation, and would reject the validity of the Constitution.

This is the only plausible goal that President Trump could have had.

The actors:

For months Trump had been denying his election loss and claiming massive fraud. He took his claims to court almost sixty times and in front of about 80 judges, many of whom he had nominated for their seats. All were either rejected or withdrawn lacking merit or standing. And all of the legal processes with those several states found no evidence of his claims and universally agreed in the stated results. Despite all of this Trump had a devoted following of true believers who accepted his claims without question or examination. Their willingness to turn on anyone who rejected Trump’s assertions was clear and openly announced. Members of Trump’s administration who had been completely loyal to him, and had engaged in operations of questionable legality in his support, such as Attorney General William Barr, and Vice-President Mike Pence were denounced the moment they parted ways. Preceding the assault on the Capitol, his followers were publicly calling for Pence to face a firing squad. During the assault on the Capitol, Trump’s supporters built a gallows on the mall.

Before Trump was President and was still a candidate, he famously said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. His recognition of the cultish loyalty from his base was clear even back then. His regular calls to his supporters to take back their country that had been stolen, and insistence that all who opposed him were the enemy had a calculated effect that he was clearly aware of. Trump knew what would happen if he gave the right encouragement. And like a Mafia don who never actually orders a murder, it happens anyway when he states his displeasure with the victim, and nods at one of his capos.

But let me first separate out some of his supporters.

There were, of course, many of his supporters who went simply to show support and who would never engage in a violent act. They range from those who supported his policies to the civically illiterate. Many, many of his supporters have no real concept of how our Government is structured, or how the process of making laws works. A common belief I have found is that the President is like the CEO of a company, and the other branches are subordinate to him and are required to enact whatever policies he sees fit. These people were there in great numbers, with most having no plan to engage in physical attacks against the government.

But there are also large numbers of those who are very willing to do so; and not only willing, but hoping for that opportunity. Groups like the Proud Boys, to name one, were actively planning actions. They were openly vocal about their intentions. For weeks they talked on social media about meeting in Washington, DC to take back their country. They discussed methods of sneaking weapons into the city (against local law.) They made both veiled and open threats of violence. They had previously presented themselves with arms at state capitols around the country in support of Trump. One separate group in Michigan has been arrested for plotting to kidnap and bring to “trial” the Governor of that state. Their backup plan, which they contacted other militia groups for personnel, was to bring hundreds of armed men to overwhelm the State Capitol and kill those who tried to stop them. Sound familiar?

There are also groups and actors inspired by conspiracy outlets, such as Qanon, who believe that Trump is waging a war against a deep state of corrupt pedophiles. A whole book could be written about the ludicrous claims that are believed by some of these people, so I won’t say more here; but the numbers who believe these conspiracies speak of who was coming to DC and what they were willing to do. And there is little doubt that Trump is aware of their willingness too.

During the assault on the Capitol, countless photographs and videos were taken. As these were analyzed it was noticed that many of these actors brought with them personal restraint devices. Zip tie handcuffs and other tools which would have no place in a spontaneous mob riot, but would be brought if the intention was to capture and hold people. There were actors within the Capitol who went from room to room looking for elected officials, and it appears a concerted effort was made to surround and detain the entire 1st branch of our government. They made an outright assault against Capitol Police, who stated that as they were being attacked and beaten, the attackers claimed they were “doing this for them.” A statement entirely inline with the militant goals of overthrow of government.

The President:

After years of building a base of followers seemingly willing to do anything he asked, and years of decrying all those who opposed him as enemies of the people, and after crafting the image of himself as a victim of corrupt and unfair forces allied against him; he then spent months declaring and restating the false claims of voter fraud. He called his follower to come to the Capital on January 6 to take back the country, and to stop the steal of the election. He gathered them in a rally and stoked the anger of this crowd. A crowd that he knew was full of actors willing and intending to do mayhem. He repeated his claims of fraud, repeated his calls for taking back the government, and then sent them marching (with the false promise of his participation) down the street to the Capitol to cheer on the loyal Congressional allies who were waiting. He repeated his wish for Pence, whose loyalty he now questioned, to take action to overturn the vote.

Trump left the stage and immediately returned to the White House where he watch the events unfold on television.

The police preparedness for such an event was absurdly planned. They had no real defense against such an assault that they should have know was coming. Investigations in the months and years ahead will tell us how and why this was the case.

But when calls were made to activate more police and national guard regiments to assist the Capitol Police, the appropriate authorities held back. It wasn’t the President who released these additional units, but the Vice-President. And when members of Congress called the Governor of Maryland to send his national guard, he was prevented from doing so for more than an hour, even though the Capitol had been breached and Congress was under siege. It appears that they were told not to respond.

All of this points not to an unfortunate and spontaneous riot, but rather a planned event designed to sequester the power of Congress, or at least the members of Congress who opposed Trump, in order to further an Executive coup d’tat. Maybe even to kill them. At the very least we faced the worst hostage crisis the country has seen.

It seems beyond reasonable to conclude that Trump intended for this to happen. His actions leading up demonstrate that, and I believe were it not for the courage of many individuals, and the incompetence of the leader, it would have succeeded.

While we struggle through the effects of this pandemic, and deal with the legions of nut-cases who support ludicrous conspiracies and outrageous attempts to overturn the election result, as well as a President who seems increasingly detached from reality and appears willing to engage in overt sedition and treason to avoid admitting his loss; we must not lose focus that there are actors around the world who are watching for such a opportunity.

Would this be the right time for Russia to assault and occupy Ukraine and other former Soviet block states? How about China launching at last that war of submission against Taiwan? 

Or skip those two major long-term areas of international concern and contemplate the numerous smaller spots of tension where would be belligerents wait for American attention to be distracted homeward, allowing them the opportunity for wars of conquest in their own region?

Will the threat of civil war or unrest open doors for conflict in other locations?

I suppose that if I am considering this, it is likely that trained experts are aware as well. But will the discord and disruption to the country that Trump is sowing, intentionally it seems, allow for wider disturbances? Will either these or US civil conflict become the catalyst for a larger war? Will our 2020 elections become the Franz Ferdinand moment of the 21st century? Are we living in our Sarajevo moment?

I don’t have the answer to these questions. I voice them to help make people aware that the divide in our country can effect more than just us.

I’m a history minded fellow and sometimes I forget that others are not. I tend to study history more than most, but not as much as many others. And there is a sliding scale of interest that ranges across the vast depth of history. Even the most studious have blind spots where our knowledge is weak. Still others have almost no knowledge of a wide swath of our collective history yet are remarkably well informed on a single area that is of interest to them. When I talk about the past and look for lessons to be learned, I am aware that some several or even many are better informed than am I, but still try to write to those who know less.

Today I address authoritarianism. Right now. Right now it is raging around the world. In countries from east to west people are accepting and even warmly embracing authoritarian leaders in ways that trouble those of us who favor democratic rule. I won’t bother to name countries, but strongmen dictators have found themselves in power in countries that had once shunned such concentrated power. And while this isn’t universal, it has grown in the past several years. And even a glance at history through this lens informs us that this recurs in some irregular cycle. I haven’t cracked the books to see just how often this happens, nor to find the papers that explain it in depth, nor do I pretend to know what exactly happens that make a democratic people turn toward dictators. Fear, perhaps, but that is too vague for a real understanding.

But here we are in the most democratic country, the country that invented the modern version of democracy, facing a rabid lust for a dictator by close to half our people. It is frightening. The idea of democracy is to spread power as a check against despotism. Once power concentrates it is damn hard to split it up again.

But we’ve seen this before in America, and perhaps shining a light on this will help those who seek it understand what they are lusting for.

During the 1930s the Great Depression ravaged not only America, but the whole world. People became desperate and often began to doubt the ability of their democratic institutions to address their privations and fears. From country to country they accepted or adopted authoritarian individuals who promised to make things right. There are plenty of history books that will explain each of these cases in depth, and still others to show how doomed the results were in most of those cases. But the string of truth running through all of them was that the individual in question was really seeking power and glory for themselves, as opposed to genuine relief for their constituents. The most famous of these built countries that required war and conquest to survive the changes made. Through the clear glass of history we can see that the people brought death and destruction on themselves in adopting a dictator to lead them.

America was not immune to this. In the thirties it was fascism that we saw grow in Europe. And while it took hold under that name in Spain and Italy, and as National Socialism in Germany, the same fascist desires were growing in Great Britain and the United States as well. There was an organization called the German American Bund. It was a straight up Nazi party in the USA. It boasted 25,000 members and was meant to be sympathetic to the Nazi party in Germany. They even wore similar uniforms and advocated for similar policies.
But this group was limited to German-Americans. But even amongst those who had no ancestry to share with them there was admiration for the dictators of Europe. There were Americans who sympathized with the Nazis before, during, and even after the war. Across the country people of all stripes were turning toward what they perceived as strong, nationalist leaders that made promises of greatness. People were told to blame immigrants and those who looked different. There was always an “other” that was the enemy. Populists gained greater influence. But always it was the power and glory they sought for themselves that drove them. We managed to keep our democratic government structure through all of that, and while people revered President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he resisted the temptation to establish himself as dictator. I say resisted because in the face the crisis at hand, he considered taking powers not afforded by democracy.

But our establishment of democracy in America was a fight against a despot. It was our desire to rule ourselves through collective agreement that prompted us to throw off the yoke of tyranny of a solitary and powerful king. We saw that concentrated power was prone to abuse and corruption. As it was, the people of America, then colonists of Great Britain, had a bad king. But rather than hoping that the next one would be better, or seeking to implant their own, they rebelled and created a country where no one man made the rules.

And we have today organizations lauding those patriots who bore arms and fought to create this nation. We recognize that it wasn’t all of our citizens in agreement to gain independence from the king. No, many of the those in the colonies were loyal subjects of the crown and wished to remain so. We even today have groups that claim (erroneously) that only three-percent of the people fought for the new country. Yet it is true that amongst the population there was a great many who would rather keep the king telling them what to do. Sure, many of these were folks simply preferring the status quo to the struggles of rebellion, but many remained loyal to the crown even after independence was achieved. People went to Canada or back to England.

It is ironic that today many of those who ardently support the authoritarianism that Donald Trump espouses, claim allegiance to the patriotism of the founding armies. They are crying for freedom while supporting the opposite. They are indulging their fantasies of kinship to those who threw off the yoke of regency and tyranny, while proclaiming fidelity to a man trying to subvert the democratic process to retain power. They call on the ghosts of the founding fathers who began a government of the people, while they endorse an authoritarian would-be dictator.

Make no mistake, authoritarianism, by whatever name we call it, has risen its ugly head around the world again. It was the fascists and the nazis then and by other names today, but it seeks to take back what it lost when this country was founded.

The words of President Lincoln ring in my head today. … that government of the People, by the People, for the People, shall not perish from the earth.

As I start writing this piece it is the 79th anniversary of the Japanese attack on US naval and army forces at Pearl Harbor, Oahu, in the (then) US Territory of Hawaii.
I won’t talk about the attack itself, nor the war as a whole. I identify the attack because it was this that brought a state of war between the two countries, and then between the US and Italy, Germany, and several others in the days to follow. In short, after World War II had been going for three years, it was this that brought America into the greater conflict in a complete sense.

But what I want to write about now is not the battles in theater, but the battle of the people at home.

This writing is prompted by an online exchange I had recently over a post asking for examples of “First World Problem” responses to the pandemic we are facing, and in particular in the US. For those few of you who don’t know the expression, first world problem is used to describe situations that would only be called difficult amongst people who faced no actual privation. An example might be a person who says her life is ruined because a store sold out of a particular handbag. Meanwhile billions are facing hunger on a daily basis. In comparison, such complaints seem the acme of self-centeredness and shallowness. A problem that millions would wish they had. And while that expression was generally used to separate those of us in the affluent first world with those in the poverty stricken third world, that divide is increasingly less geographic.

In regard to the pandemic, while we have tens of thousands of Americans lining up at food banks, and millions unemployed and facing eviction and poverty, and hundreds of thousands are dying, some others think that what is really a problem is that they can’t go to the movies or go to a bar to watch the big football game. To the rest of us watching the crisis unfold, people like this seem to deserve our scorn for lack of empathy.

What did we learn as children? Be grateful for your food, as there are starving children in Africa, or Asia, or whatever country was a useful reference for our parents. They weren’t being trite when they said this, but simply trying to convey what they understood to be true. A decent human being accepts the limits of their pantry as a blessing, and wants their children to learn it is their duty to aid that suffering in some way. And to begin they must weigh their complaints against the conditions of those less fortunate.

In any case, in the discussion above, a person was defending those seemingly trivial complaints because they were real losses to their normalcy and effected their happiness. In short, those who couldn’t dine in at a restaurant were actually suffering real trauma.

So I thought I would reflect our country during a national crisis of the past, and I chose WWII because of a coincidence of calendar. It is December 7th.

The world had been in the throes of the Great Depression when the war started. And while it is true that many in the USA didn’t suffer much or at all because of their personal or family wealth or their fortunate positions of employment, they were quite aware of the millions that were. They mostly felt empathy for those who were suffering and sought ways to help; but even if the cold-hearted amongst them didn’t, they had the good sense to refrain from comments that would reflect poorly on themselves. And when the war came to America with the Pearl Harbor attack, the country largely circled the wagons. Huge numbers of men enlisted in the armed forces almost immediately, and the nations industrial might, already having begun large-scale production of war goods, turned the dial up to full blast.

What followed was shortages of the goods and services that normal society relies on. But for a people already accustomed to going without or watching others in those straits, they largely took rationing and other measures in stride. Sure there were those who cheated, gamed the system, and continued their lives as they had before; but most of the country accepted their state. Their sons and the sons of friends were in uniform facing death. They watch newsreels showing bombed out cities east and west. When they felt privation they checked themselves in thanks for their relative safety. They weren’t being bombed. They weren’t refugees. They weren’t facing death. And they mostly all knew these things. People accepted that life was different and rose to the challenge. They grew victory gardens, the engaged in recycling drives, and wore their old clothes for longer, and they made do with what they had. They were part of something bigger than their own wants, and held a dim view of those who focused only on themselves.

Perhaps as a child of those who went through this I learned different lessons than those I see around me today. Perhaps it simply doesn’t occur to those who are complaining about some minor inconvenience of how awful that sounds in the face of the crisis we face. But for those who say we must acknowledge that it is real trauma for them whether or not it pales in comparison to the suffering of others I say no. I say that they need a metaphorical slap in the face if not a literal one. Their behavior is selfish and inconsiderate and it needs to be called out sharply and directly.

Are their hurt feelings more of a trauma than the tears of a hungry child? Should we be worried about the feelings of someone who can’t recognize the suffering and hardship all around them?

I joined the Navy when I was seventeen years old. At bootcamp I got a dose of regimentation and discipline that stunned me. My feelings got hurt quite a bit. I adapted to the conditions of military life fairly easily, but their were others who adjusted more quickly, and those who didn’t. There were even a good sized chunk who couldn’t cope and were pushed out. Unfit for service. Most of us grew up, and right fast. And we had little sympathy for those who didn’t. Manhood demanded the release of childishness. Crying was no longer an acceptable response to difficulty.

And during WWII there were those who couldn’t cope. But people came to recognize the difference between those who needed their help, and those who needed that slap in the face. Then, as now, the time has passed for coddling those who whine about how life has changed. There are too many people who need our actual help for us to be suffering those who don’t but seek our sympathy nonetheless.

Metaphorically, and actually, people need to grow up.

Regarding this latest decision by the US Supreme Court.State lawmakers have tended to view churches in how they are used, while religious leaders view them from subjective importance.The typical church experience consists of sitting in close proximity to others for extended periods while repeating prayers, often in a call and response ritual. In this way they are more similar to theaters and arenas – places where the spread of airborne diseases is greatly increased.And while many churches recognize this and hold there services virtually, others equate the in-person religious experience to be a necessity akin to food and medicine. Thus they compare the church to grocery stores and pharmacies.But people use grocery stores and pharmacies much differently. People tend to get in and out of those latter places as quickly as possible and with as little interaction with others as possible.That millions of people have survived just fine without church for decades but couldn’t survive for even a small fraction of that time without food or medicine seems to prove that the church experience is not a necessity, regardless of how much importance people claim it has. Like going to the movies or to see a basketball game, the necessity of attending a house of worship is hard to argue for from a use standpoint.And when you see religious institutions argue for conduct that has been shown to promote the spread of this virus – even though many others are not – I cannot help but suspect that what they are after is control over parishioners and access to their purses. At the heart of this may be nothing more than keeping their religious power over people, even to their detriment.