The Isolation/Rebellion Diaries No. 4

“If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street/’less you wanna draw the heat.” Bob Dylan, Hurricane

America is being taught a hard lesson, one I hope we don’t soon forget. The lesson is that competence in our public institutions matters. As Masha Gessen points out in her excellent book, Surviving Autocracy, Donald J. Trump routinely ridiculed the government while a candidate in 2016, and then continued his assault on competence and expertise when he assumed office. Trump’s former advisor, Steve Bannon, boasted about dismantling the administrative state. Trump filled his Cabinet and federal agencies with unqualified hacks like Ben Carson, Rick Perry, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin. Everyone Trump appointed seemed to share one trait: hostility and disdain for the departments they headed.

Is it any wonder that the Trump Administration response to the pandemic has been so disastrous? Not in the least. Incompetence breeds chaos, and as Masha Gessen notes, “Trump’s incompetence is militant.” I still laugh at people like Van Jones and Fareed Zakaria who opined that Trump would grow into the presidency; others said the office would change Trump, but the fact is that the opposite has happened -- Trump changed the office -- and not for good. I can’t think of an America president who has more thoroughly debased and disgraced the office. 

As his reelection hopes crater, Trump draws from a rancid well of division, hatred, and racism. He speaks about Confederate monuments as if he had been born and raised in Georgia, refers to Covid-19 as the “Kung Flu” even though he praised China’s leader Xi Jinping for his handling of the outbreak, and rambles on about real Americans who believe in real values, all while Covid-19 stages a counterattack and the death toll rises to nearly 125,000. Trump practices a politics of grievance, self-pity and revenge.  Add the scandals, the staggering abuse of power, the self-dealing and blatant disregard for the rule of law and it amounts to a deadly confluence of incompetence and venality. 

I still laugh at people like Van Jones and Fareed Zakaria who opined that Trump would grow into the presidency; others said the office would change Trump, but the fact is that the opposite has happened -- Trump changed the office -- and not for good.

Because the potential for voter suppression or foreign meddling in November is high, I’m in no way counting Trump out -- he’s like a vampire who cannot be considered dead until a stake has been driven through his shriveled heart. November is a long way off and Trump’s capacity for destruction isn’t likely to diminish. Even in the midst of a worsening pandemic, Trump wants the Supreme Court to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, which would cause millions of people to lose their health insurance coverage. Why now, Donald, just because you have some twisted need to act callous and cruel to fulfill your strongman fantasies? 

Cowardly members of Trump’s party play to him, not the constituents they’re sworn to serve. They fear Trump’s Tweets, name-calling, and other retribution. I can’t remember a time when an entire political party has acted with such cowardice. It’s political malpractice. 

The reckoning must and will come. Trump is far too limited a human being to change that which inflicted him upon us in the first place. He knows one dance step, and one only, and he will perform it until the floor collapses beneath his feet. Overcoming Trumpism will not be easy or quick, it will need to be rooted out. The energy and determination on display during the protests and demonstrations against police brutality must continue and expand outwards, to include other forms of social justice, most important among them, health care for all Americans, followed closely by environmental, economic, housing, and electoral justice. These threads cannot be separated; together they form a rope that can hoist millions of people from the basement of precarity. 

The Isolation/Rebellion Diaries No. 3

“The overarching fear was not economic but cultural -- the fear that somehow, black and brown people were going to replace whites.” Bakari Sellers, My Vanishing Country

Father’s Day. Another milestone on the calendar attenuated by Covid-19, the virus that came to visit and stayed because Donald Trump and our spoiled oligarchs became impatient; Trump because he needed a “strong” economy to bolster his reelection chances, and the oligarchs because losing profits is unacceptable. More than twenty states are seeing a new surge or resurgence of infections. 

By all accounts it appears that Trump’s Tulsa show flopped. Attendance was sparse, the images were lousy, and Trump and his campaign looked positively gassed. You eat the same thing morning and night and it will become bland and unsatisfying. Same old is what Trump has to offer. None of his lame bits worked. All he proved is that he can drink water from a cup.

Nearly 120,000 Americans are dead from Covid-19. 

Geoffrey Berman, ousted United States Attorney for the powerful Southern District of New York, sent a very clear message to the GOP in his rebuttal of the announcement that he had resigned. Berman, a Trump appointee let’s remember, gave Attorney General William Barr a procedural middle finger and stayed in place until Trump himself brought the hammer down. What’s up with the SDNY and its multiple investigations of Trump and Rudy G? Or was Barr’s Friday Night Massacre about a Turkish bank? Is SDNY getting close to making indictments? Was Berman signalling to the GOP that the shit coming down is bad and they’d be wise to locate the nearest floatation device? Time will tell.  We know that Barr -- who should have been impeached for dereliction of duty by now -- has long given up any pretence to be acting in the interests of justice. He’s Trump’s fixer, and when he acts, it means he’s trying to neutralize something or someone that might damage Trump. 

If there was ever a time for Republicans to find their Big Kid voices, it’s now, before Trump and Barr do further damage. It’s time for Republicans to come clean and clear and answer one question: Are you for Trump or the American Republic? They’re not one and the same. Trump stands for incompetence, corruption and death. The GOP has to choose, follow Trump into the jagged rocks or remember the lessons of kindergarten and do what’s right by the oath every last one of them swore. It’s called honor, a sense of duty, real patriotism.

How many Republicans need to step to the line and help Democrats move the blade from America’s carotid artery? Two dozen? 

Without Republican hands on deck, the Democrats alone cannot stop Trump from law breaking and self-dealing. Will Republicans enter their names in the historical record as siding with one man over the best interests of this nation? On the record, yeas and nays. What a clear moral, ethical and obvious choice: which side are you on, what flag will you congregate beneath, Trump’s or Old Glory? 

Republicans need to start humming an anti-Trump tune, warm-up their voices, be ready to join the growing chorus of disapproval for Trump and his odious crime family. Time’s running out for Trump, and as the clock winds down, the pressure builds. 

If members of the GOP believe in the oath they swore, one hand raised, the other on a Bible, surrounded by proud spouses and freshly scrubbed children, they will haul themselves from Trump’s polluted moat and raise their voices.  

The Isolation/Rebellion Diaries No. 2

“The only thing foggier than war itself can be the path to its frightening, if too often exciting, outbreak.” David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom 

Upside down, balanced on the head of a pin, sickness on one side, economic and social calamity on the other. Middle ground shrinking, the battle lines clear, all poised to fall or flee when the next shock comes. Flush with impatience, unable to strike out in spectacular fashion and solve the problem with force, the leaders of the crumbling Empire are too blind to see that victory this time requires agility and discipline, patience fed by the river of common purpose.

But years of drought dried the river up. Now you find and carry your own water, every man (woman, too) for himself. Dog-eat-dog and the law of the jungle, survival of the fittest, no mercy, fee-based compassion. Coddle the wealthy few and punish the numerous poor. 60 years or so ago, a large chunk of American workers were card-carrying union members, with the collective power to compel owners to share the spoils or pay a cost. Today Uber is the emblem of the age; individual workers fly the Uber banner, but the ship and its upkeep is a burden carried by the worker who amounts to little more than a digital sharecropper. For the modern capitalist, harnessing the power of want and fear is Nirvana; precarious workers are compliant workers. 

The lies from high places keep coming. The false prophets and carnival barkers slay the truth. The Fraud King is off his nut, his candle burning down to a pool of wax; he’s totally lost, babbling about school choice as more black men die and the Covid-19 wave he and his many enablers ignore gathers force and prepares for another run at the jetty. Christian warrior Mikey Pence is on the loose, bearing false witness, misleading the flock into a false sense of security. “We smote the terrible virus and it is no more. Rejoice. Let us gather under one roof, and may our trumpets blare and banners fly.” 

Frederick Douglass said in 1862: “He is the best friend of this country, who, at this tremendous crisis, dares tell his countrymen the truth, however disagreeable that truth may be.”

The silence of cowards is deafening. 

Covid-19 has altered time, disrupted our uneasy equilibrium, and exposed our weaknesses, just as immoral Capitalism has poisoned our national well, and now the water is contaminated with the carcinogens of greed and cruelty.  

All feels precarious, a strange calm before what is sure to be a vengeful storm. “It’s dying out,” says the Fraud King of the virus as evidence to the contrary gathers like leaves in the gutter. “I made Juneteenth famous,” the Fraud King says, “nobody even knew it existed before.” Bring on the Nazi-style rally in Tulsa, let it be a petrie dish for Trump’s insatiable need for adulation. He’ll say stupid shit, unhinged shit about Biden and the Democrats, John Bolton, his niece, the Supreme Court, Covid-19, anyone else he’s upset with, a river of bile. Trump is ruler of an island being reclaimed by the sea. He loses ground with each passing day. If Trump was smart, and he’s not, he would keep his mouth shut about the Supreme Court. The Court’s holding a potential wildcard against Trump. If the justices rule as they should, for the idea that no one is above the law, including Donald J. Trump, and force him to turn over his tax returns, the gig is up. I’ve said all along that with Trump you have to watch the current to see where the money comes from, and where and to whom it goes. Of all the shit that scares Trump, having his tax returns exposed is near the top of his list. 

Losing rounds for the Fraud King, he’s taken some body blows, shown some weakness, and he knows more is to come. Reality is merciless. 

 

The Isolation/Rebellion Diaries No. 1

“Trump is clearly out of his depth, which is basically the shallow end of the kiddie pool.” Jeffrey St. Clair, Counterpunch

I’ve changed the title of this series because the pandemic and people’s Rebellion of 2020 has for me merged into one event. As I write this, my wife is in Cottage Hospital waiting for a procedure to remove a stone from each of her kidneys. I have to call the pharmacy. If all goes as hoped, I should get a call to meet my wife in the recovery area in about an hour. I’ll see what I can get down here and hope it makes sense. I put in a lot of effort on the day job at the school district today, and as a result I’m tired. Plus, I had a training session in the heat of the afternoon, working my new double-end punching bag for a few rounds.

There’s too much news. My head hurts from trying to process it all. That’s another reason the pandemic and the Rebellion have merged. I am reminded of how things connect, how one thing affects another, and how if you’re aware, you can follow the tracks, treads, wires, and highways to the core issue. I think of the pandemic, and how those Americans who work for wages quickly exhausted their resources, a measure of how poor the economy really is for the majority of citizens. Saving money is damn hard for the working poor.  All the money that comes in goes back out, and when there’s more going out than coming in, that’s when you start letting stuff slide, like insurance premium payments and visits to the doctor or dentist. Debt usually follows, compounding the woe. Maybe this is temporary, you get back on an even keel eventually, but you don’t rebound to where you were, you’ve fallen, for good. Maybe you’ve hit that one-way street that runs straight downhill. You see a lot of people going that way, but when you look at your screen all you hear is how well this or that corporation’s bottom line looks, or how low the “official” unemployment rate is. You hear about bull markets, investor confidence, liquidity and bond yields, the latest pronouncement from the Federal Reserve, and it’s just noise because none of it means shit. We still got the problem: too much going out and not enough coming in. 

Off the tip top of my head, I estimate our out of pocket costs for my wife’s kidney stone procedure will land north of $3,500. The insurance companies always seem to do just fine. The bankers of all sizes and shapes make money coming and going, all legal, all immoral as hell. But who cares about morality when you’ve got the keys to the Treasury, a license to plunder. 

How about Trump. What a motherfucker. He’s one of the dumbest fucks ever, but there are some people around him who are truly wicked. I can summon an image of the dark lord, Stephen Miller, the gray cloud above his head, the faraway look in his eye, his dick hardening by a wonderfully wicked thought. What a way to stick it in their Black Lives Matter faces. What a way to signal them that their pathetic protests don’t mean shit. We have power, and that’s all the matters. Trump is untouchable. Let’s hold a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 19th. 

That’s some shit at this moment. Juneteenth. Freedom Day. Tulsa. The white on black massacre of 1921. Hundreds murdered. Black-owned buildings and businesses torched, black wealth gone forever, up in smoke, ashes in the dirt. To pick that day for one of Trump’s Nazi rallies takes a streak of evilness that makes repeat appearances in human history. To hold that kind of animating hatred, to deliberately use that level of hatred to manipulate people. Trump doesn’t own any hotels in Tulsa that I know of, so he’s probably clueless about the history of the place, not that it would make any difference. Trump’s going to Tulsa for the imagery and images, the backdrop, the photos he can blast out to his diehard base. Trump’s got a jones for footage that can be sliced, diced, and spliced together to create an alternate reality on Fox News, during the Republican National Convention and all the way to Election Day (if there is one). Trump’s itching to release his MAGA Greatest Hits. 

The market’s saturated with Trump’s bullshit, his stock is falling, he’s dumb and can’t adapt because all he’s got in his bag is a driver. 

Covid-19 is with us. But it appears our political leaders are OK with it. We’re not hearing much from the doctors and scientists these days, they’ve been muzzled, although new outbreaks and increased infections in states that refused either patience or prudence are concerning. My sense here in sunny Santa Barbara is that we jumped the gun by at least two weeks. We have to wait and see which way the wave breaks. 

Happy to report that my wife made it through her procedure, and came home last night. Howls when she pees, but is otherwise mending. 

Trump Death Clock

69,005

Estimated U.S. COVID-19 Deaths Due To POTUS Inaction

The Isolation Diaries No. 40

“For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not a gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852

According to the last time I checked the Trump Death Clock, an estimated 67,045 American lives might have been spared if Donald J. Trump had taken the Covid-19 pandemic seriously and acted only one week earlier. 

The entire world saw what Trump and Co. did, for nearly two months. Epic, deadly arrogance and incompetence. 

Here’s something curious in the midst of all the chaos of the pandemic and the rebellion. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, pled guilty twice in Federal court to lying to the FBI. The Trump Administration prosecuted him. So why is William Barr, our doughy, dangerous Attorney General, using his power to get all charges against Flynn dropped? Why is Barr going to extraordinary lengths for Flynn? Why the writ of mandamus? Serious monkey business. 

America’s Most Wanted: William Barr. Mitch McConnell. Donald J. Trump. This merciless trio mocks the rule of law. 

Mr. Barr, in particular, has a track record as a magician for the powerful, including extricating George H.W. Bush from a tight Iran-Contra corner. Don’t let his rotund form and mild manner fool you -- Barr is a dangerous ideologue. 

Barr’s the ladle stirring the toxic brew in Trump’s fortified compound. 

If one considers the juxtaposition of images one might be justified in referring to America as a failed state: doctors, EMT’s, nurses, technicians, all scrambling to outfit themselves with personal protective equipment, while police, National Guard, ICE, FBI, ATF, Park Police, and Secret Service are laden with gear to put down the People’s Rebellion of 2020. It’s a sad but accurate portrait of America in this moment, a clear statement of our inverted and perverted national priorities. 

Violence and social control over the care and well-being of citizens. 

It took Covid-19, a murder, and the twisted madness of Donald J. Trump to awaken the rebellious spirit of the American masses. Three months of enforced isolation, lives disrupted, jobs lost, people dying, and then the broad daylight murder of George Floyd, caught on video for the world to see, the cop nonchalant as he pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck. It was too outrageous, coming close on the heels of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. The focus of the nation, cooped up and tamped down for nearly three months, shifted suddenly to the state sanctioned murder in Minneapolis. Too many black men, women, and children have died at the hands of police for it to be a coincidence. People of all colors, creeds, and ethnicities flooded America’s streets to demand an end to these racist killings. 

It was fucking beautiful. At last, the people awaken. Into the streets, peacefully, but with determination and purpose. A long and terrible roster of victims like George Floyd surged back into the public consciousness. But George was the catalyst, we watched his killing. 

The official, uniformed forces of oppression had gone too far this time. 

After George Floyd’s murder and Trump’s sadistic performance on June 1, when he threatened to unleash the US military on Americans for exercising a Constitutional right, the people will not go back to sleep, not this time. The sleeping giant is awake now, on the move, and sending a mighty message: the corrupt status quo must go. Police in America are out of control, overarmed, overfunded, poorly trained in some cases, asked to intervene in matters not their business or expertise. Why does homelessness fall to the police? Because for nearly half a century public services in this country have been deliberately defunded in an orgy of austerity for working people and the poor. Instead of vital public services like health care, housing, job training, and mental health treatment, our tax dollars have been invested in the wealthy, through massive tax cuts and subsidies, and the bottomless pit known as the Pentagon through the idiotic War on Terror, and more obscenely bloated budgets every year. The spigot at the Pentagon spews champagne, and the generals never skip brunch.

We fund the military-security complex like a prize hog and starve the rest of the farm. 

The outcome of the mass demonstrations remains in doubt, but the activist energy visible around the country is a hopeful sign. People are listening, tuned in, totally engaged. Corrupt regimes often fall with a single push. 

One thing we know for sure: It’s time for white America to get its knee off black America’s neck. 

The Isolation Diaries No. 39

“Ain’t no fun when the rabbit got the gun.” Vic Mensa, 16 Shots

It feels like the pandemic is over, a thing of the past. We went from Covid-19 all the time to the death of George Floyd, massive protests against epidemic police brutality, and a real-time, street-level view of that brutality cheered on by the President of the United States. 

This past Monday wasn’t the first time Donald J. Trump used the US military to serve his political purposes. Remember the migrant caravans in 2018? (I know it seems like ages ago.) Trump ordered troops to the southern border ahead of the midterm elections, hoping the show of strength would boost the GOP’s prospects. It didn’t. The troops looked ridiculous. Their adversaries were unarmed, poor, traumatized by violence in their home countries, and desperate. 

It was power dangerous in Barack Obama’s steady hand. In Trump’s sociopathic hand it could end the American experiment. 

In the demand for justice for George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor I see the reemergence of America’s heart and soul, the true America that overwhelmingly rejects Trump’s ignorance, cruelty and criminality; the true America -- represented by young people of all colors and creeds and sexual orientation and gender identification -- that believes in justice and equality; the true America that rejects white supremacy. The question is -- can this energy be directed toward political ends? Can it remain engaged and impervious to efforts to divide or dilute it? Can it hold together?

The year 1850 might be our best guide to the present moment. The nation was bitterly divided between slave and free. Abolitionists pushed one way and slaveholders pushed back. Today we see a demand for justice against a status quo hellbent on maintaining its power and privilege. It was a tyranny of the minority then as it is today. The Supreme Court and the US Senate were corrupt, as both institutions are today. Trump grows more desperate by the day as he sinks deeper into a pit of failure. It’s a long time between now and November, even longer until January 2021. I expect Covid-19 to return with fury either within the next few weeks or by the fall. I see the economic situation for wage earners becoming more dire. I anticipate a long, hot summer. 

We the people cannot disengage until Donald J. Trump and as many of his acolytes as possible are driven from power, but chief among them, William Barr and Mitch McConnell. Trump is one thing, Barr and McConnell are a two-headed wolverine of graft and injustice; they are Trump’s reliable enablers, they amplify Trump’s worst impulses. Unfortunately, the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act, hatched in the post-9/11 hysteria and launch of the criminal War on Terror, amended and reauthorized with bipartisan support more than once, I believe, gives the president enormous power. It was power dangerous in Barack Obama’s steady hand. In Trump’s sociopathic hand it could end the American experiment. 

If there is justice in the universe, the last words Trump hears will be, “Dominate me, Bunker Boy!” 

As far as Trump is concerned, we must keep our eye on the prize until he is physically out of the White House. There’s a better than even chance that between now and Election Day, Trump will gin up a foreign crisis, declare martial law, or attempt to delay the election. If he loses, I expect Trump will immediately declare the result illegitimate, possibly leaving the outcome to the right-wing Supreme Court. He’ll also goad his God & Guns base into action. Our best short-term hope is that Trump drops dead from heart failure as he attempts to take Melania from behind. If there is justice in the universe, the last words Trump hears will be, “Dominate me, Bunker Boy!” 

Remember this for the struggle ahead: wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. 

Americans are facing an out of control military machine bought and paid for with their tax dollars. 

Watch Barr and posse paint Antifa as the most dangerous threat to our Democracy since the Red Scare. Antifa here, Antifa there, Antifa under the bed, bullets and bombs and sophisticated tactics. A greater threat than Al Qaeda. Watch the estimated size of Antifa’s strength grow. Every authoritarian needs an internal enemy, a bogeyman. 

The Isolation Diaries No. 38

“The best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins -- and he her worst enemy who, under the specious...garb of patriotism seeks to excise, palliate, or defend them.” Frederick Douglass

I can’t dislodge the events from this past Monday out of my head. First, Trump’s bellicose speech in the Rose Garden where he threatened to deploy active duty military personnel against American citizens, then the brutal clearing of protesters from Lafayette Park so Trump could lumber to St. John’s Church for a campaign photo op. In his speech Trump mentioned the 2nd Amendment, one of his favorite dog whistles, and in front of St. John’s Trump held a Bible aloft as if he had never seen one before, as if the book had fallen from the sky. The point of the speech and the photo op was to signal to Trump’s diehard supporters, Guns & God, Law & Order.

The stunt failed as nearly everything Trump attempts fails. He sounded like an authoritarian tyrant and looked like a fool, but this creation of television got the images he wanted for his reelection campaign. Add stirring patriotic music and a voiceover and Trump will be transformed from a pathetic coward to a manly hero.  

Peaceful protesters were assaulted with flash bangs, tear gas, and stampeded by the forces of the state. A military helicopter hovered above the crowd at low altitude, its downdraft bending trees and scattering dust and debris. There is so much to say about this spectacle, and yet, I feel as if words fail. I lived through Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, and believed I had seen the low points of the American republic, but what we must understand about Donald J. Trump is that there is no bottom to which Trump can sink. His basement leads to one sub-basement after another, each one more tawdry and debased than the one that came before. 

What we have witnessed this week is forces of the State oppressing citizens using equipment and tactics perfected by the military outside America’s borders. This is as true today as it was during the Vietnam War era. The police, Secret Service, National Guard, and mounted Feds who stampeded peaceful demonstrators exercising a right enshrined in the Constitution acted as cruel and cavalier and arrogant as graduates of the Israeli Defense Forces do when they brutalize, humiliate and murder unarmed Palestinians. 

The police are out of control. 

Because this is America, protection of property will take precedence over people. The narrative about the nationwide demonstrations is already shifting from police brutality and racism -- the murder of unarmed, handcuffed, face down on the pavement George Floyd in broad daylight -- to law and order. Don’t be outraged about police brutality, meted out with impunity across this nation, be outraged because some lowlifes smashed windows and looted a Target. 

The world we’ve made small is closing in. We’re still in the midst of a pandemic. Millions of Americans are out of work. Glaciers are melting. The power structures constructed on a foundation of white supremacy, war, genocide, and greed can read the demographic writing on the wall. America is changing, people are stirred now because they see the rot, corruption and racism at the heart of the structure. The rich and comfortable hate the idea of solidarity; the powerful squirm when they hear the people speak of justice. That’s why they despised Martin Luther King, Jr.

It’s a long way off still, but through the billowing smoke and the chaos and pain, one can glimpse the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. 

Let justice be our North star. 

The Isolation Diaries No. 37

“MAGA loves the black people.” Donald J. Trump

Complicit too long. Silent too long. Indifferent too long. And as night follows day, the moment of reckoning is here. The dream of justice and equality for African-Americans, for indigineous people, for immigrants from Latin America and Asia, so long deferred, punted, kicked down the proverbial road for the next generation to deal with, is here. As Dr. Cornel West put it, “This is America’s moment.”

For me, the most striking, astonishing aspect of this moment is the outrageous, inexcusable behavior of police forces all across this country. It’s not the actions of citizens, it’s the police in their riot gear, with their tear gas and mace and pepper spray and rubber bullets and flash grenades, it’s the police driving their vehicles into crowds of people, throwing people to the ground, shooting at journalists and camera crews, much like American soldiers and Marines did to the citizens of Fallujah in Iraq and all over Afghanistan for most of the past two decades. Americans don’t understand that a nation cannot be violent abroad and peaceful at home. 

Violence is our fetish, our juice, our faith, our mojo. I think I finally understand what Cormac McCarthy and Blood Meridian are all about.    

We must connect the dots between decades of economic, tax (the wealthy paying less and less), and trade policies, lumped under the umbrella of neoliberalism, with obscene, reckless, and wasteful military spending, a global apparatus of more than 800 military bases, with relentless privatization and under-funding of public services and spaces like libraries, hospitals, and schools. The political and economic masters of this country are so compromised by hubris that they forced a cruel starvation diet on the people and expected them to take it without so much as a whimper. 

The people are angry, demoralized, fed up, scared, tired of crappy jobs that pay a poverty wage, tired of going bankrupt when they become ill, as all people will, tired of being ignored by the powerful. Most of all, people are done with the hypocrisy of the American ruling class. 

We’re in the middle of a confluence, like the point where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean. Treacherous waters. First, the pandemic, then the economic impact of shutting most of the country down, and then the murders: Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and finally, the sadistic killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, captured on camera like Murder Porn. The world saw it, and this time there was no way to explain it away, excuse it on some technicality, or claim the officer feared for his life. Not this time. 

Nothing more is required of black people. They aren’t required to get over slavery, to tolerate glorification of the Confederacy, to forgive the KKK. They have endured for centuries, marched, prayed, sang, contributed economic and cultural riches to this nation that can never be repaid.

To be clear about the American situation requires courage and honesty. Look not to the political elite, most of whom are more concerned about their tenure in office, their  appearance on Face the Nation, their next reelection campaign, and their investment portfolios than they are over the death of another black man. They say the right things but have no intention of turning their words into actions. Our president is the Coward-in-Chief, so limited and twisted as a human being that his one response to every problem is the same: domination. As long as someone else is wielding deadly force, Trump has an insatiable appetite for violence. 

Nothing more is required of black people. They aren’t required to get over slavery, to tolerate glorification of the Confederacy, to forgive the KKK. They have endured for centuries, marched, prayed, sang, contributed economic and cultural riches to this nation that can never be repaid. I’m a 61-year-old white male and the thought of a white dominated America fills me with terror; what a wasteland it would be. No, it’s on us white folks now, we’re the ones who have to get our minds and hearts right, to finally and forever renounce the idea that we are superior, chosen, anointed, selected, and born to rule. Peace and justice go together, but one cannot exist without the other. That’s the critical balance that’s missing in America. We have no peace in this moment because we who have power and money and networks have denied for too long the basic humanity of non-white people. Derek Chauvin is just the latest in a long, twisted line of racist cops. Chauvin not only sought to subdue George Floyd, he meant to dominate him. 

I listened to Gil Scott-Heron this morning and this caught my ear:

“And now it is your turn,

We are tired of praying, and marching, and thinking, and learning

Brothers wanna start cutting, and shooting, and stealing, and burning

You are three hundred years ahead in equality

But next summer may be too late.”

America is burning today, but the fire started long ago. What will we do this time, tamp it down or finally put it out?