Category Archives: Politics

Politics

A Leader? No.

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Lughnasa                                                    Lughnasa Moon

A commentary in the StarTribune today spoke to me. Titled “Do We Have A Leader? No.” this opinion piece makes a clear and important distinction often lost. Civil rights leaders in the mold of the MLK era do not speak for, to, or with the racial underclass. The peaceful protests, the calls for action, the analytics that pillory (with good reason) the policing of a largely black community by a largely white and militarized police force are beside the point for the hustlers, drug dealers, entrepreneurs and long term unemployed.

(pic: answercoalition)

This underclass is the focus of Alice Goffman’s On the Run, the book I mentioned here a week or so ago. Her closely and compassionately observed telling of life in a poor Philadelphia neighborhood reveals the twisted, gnarled relationship between young black men (and the women who love them) with the justice system. Their life resembles that of the citizenry in dystopian movies like Judge Dredd or Blade Runner. The threat of some form of summary judgment lies moments away, day or night, at home or on the street.

 

This split between the underclass which responds with raw rage and the older, more political civil rights leaders creates a dynamic rife with tension and exploitable by the racist public. The youth have no leader. They have only an anarchic energy expressed by rocks through windows, looting, angry confrontations with the police or the national guard or the highway patrol. These are the actions of people with no future, no present. No hope.

As these two streams within the black community flow in different directions, the legacy of enslavement continues to place its foot on the necks of African-Americans. A community with a large complement of its young men who can find no purchase in the civil society will find long term solutions difficult. This rift must be bridged if our nation, now emerging as a racially diverse people, is to fulfill its own promises.

Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

Boys and their Tractors

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Into St. Paul this morning for another America Votes meeting at the Minnesota Nurses Association. Solid, information packed as usual.

On the way in I listened to a radio discussion of masculinity and on the way back an Ira Flatow Science Friday story on regenerative farming. NPR is listening to my brain.

Men in America has its main hook in the changes since the 1970’s in men and women’s education status. Women have pushed ahead of men, or girls ahead of boys steadily, until today girls dominate boys in all of the academic disciplines through high school. While in itself this is neither alarming or surprising, when joined to the decline in manual labor and other manufacturing jobs, a disturbing picture emerges. Men begin to look left behind in the contemporary labor market. There are a lot more matters to discuss here. Another time.

Regenerative farming pushes forward the no-till farming movement, moving beyond merely sustainable agriculture to an agriculture that positively enhances the soil. In this show a number from the book The Soil Will Save Us by Kristin Ohlson got my attention. She says that if 11% of the worlds agricultural land were to convert to no-till farming the resulting natural sequestration of carbon dioxide would balance the climate change equation. Don’t know if this is true, but it’s intriguing.

It took me immediately to rain follows the plough which I mentioned here not far back. That was the belief that created the vast agricultural lands of the plains where industrial agriculture has combined with center pivot irrigation to drain the Ogallala aquifer and destroy the once ten foot deep top soil created by prairie plants. If that land were to convert to no-till agriculture, water use would plummet and the plains could begin to heal themselves. Might be the 11% right there.

Cinema and Television, Commentary on the news, Politics

Fame and Race. Four letter words

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Lughnasa                                                                      Lughnasa Moon

Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall, both dead. Celebrity is a harsh idea and exacts a penalty from both those who perceive it and those perceived to have it. Celebrity has to do stand in work in American culture for nobility, since the land of freedom and equality for all insists on not discussing its class system. As a result certain of us who become well-known thanks to athletic gifts or a handsome face or an ability to become someone else, perhaps also those who have a lot of money or political visibility, musical talents and in the rarest of cases here, literary ones, have an elevated stature.

In the same period, the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner point to a grimmer side of our passion for those seen to be above the culture’s average and that is our disregard for those seen to be below it. Seeing does not make it so, however, in either case. Lauren Bacall and Robin Williams are not more than the rest of us just as Michael Brown and Eric Garner are not less than the rest of us. But perception in a media saturated public square is often all we have to go on.

Who among you who read this knew Robin Williams or Lauren Bacall, Michael Brown or Eric Garner? If you did, you may have grounds for knowing what kind of persons they were, but for the rest of us, we “know” them only through news report in the case of Brown and Garner and their work in the instance of Williams and Bacall. Neither way of knowing comes close to the fullness of personal acquaintance.

Yes, this is obvious I suppose, except it isn’t. Celebrity carries its own luster, a stage light cast by approval or notoriety. Racism carries its own dimmer light which shades the person from full view, making them appear less than they are while celebrity luster makes people seem more. Both are inaccurate and do a disservice to the people effected.

Racism and celebrity might rarely be considered in the same paragraph, but together they reveal the deep chasm between what we think we know and what is actual. They both teach us to rely on secondary characteristics for taking the measure of a person. And, in both, we lose and so do those we see through those lenses.

Politics, US History, Weather +Climate

Positive Signs

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Summer                                                             Most Heat Moon

Some positive signs. News about climate change has gone from whether to when, how much and what do we do. Though this is a fight that will require joint effort beyond anything I’ve seen short of a war, the U.S. can lead if it finds the will. A change in the public opinion atmosphere, in this case, may lead to a change in the less gaseous atmosphere.

Another. News reports have begun to notice inner city America. Again. Urban poverty became prevalent long before climate change arose. Roman and Chinese cities in ancient times already grappled with its problems. Over the course of my life urban issues have had their cycles, reaching a zenith during the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson and his Great Cities programs.

Today’s Star-Tribune has an article that grazes the issue written by Chicago Tribune conservative Steve Chapman who quotes Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic.  This link to the Atlantic collects several of Coates’ fine essays on urban America, particularly urban black America with a focus on Chicago. He’s making a case for reparations, that is, some form of restitution for all those effected by chattel slavery. Well worth reading.

Cities and their issues were the focus of my professional and political life. It’s heartening to me to see these matters beginning to take up space in various media. The amount of human heartache and the egregious loss of raw talent occasioned through urban poverty is stupefying.

May both climate change and urban poverty see more of our combined attention over the next few decades. They both need it. (Another bit on the intractability of urban poverty later.)

Politics, US History

On the Run

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Summer                                                                   Most Heat Moon

Started a new book last night, On the Run, by Alice Goffman, a recently graduated sociologist Ph.D.  Her father was Erving Goffman, also a sociologist. You may be familiar with his work on social interactions. For example, in a work on human interaction he observed that the amount of space people need when conversing while standing differs by culture.

On the Run recounts Alice’s 7 years of living in a poor black neighborhood of Philadelphia, but recounts it from a sociological perspective. I’ll write more about this as I get into it, but I wanted to note two things I’ve learned already. Things that disturb me quite a bit.

First, in the introduction she cites devastating statistics about the incarceration of black males. This one really got me. 60% of black males who don’t finish high school end up in jail. 60%!

Second, she remarks on a coincidence that’s been staring us in the face for a long, long time, but is even more devastating. The rise of tough-against-crime legislation and the war on drugs-both of which are primary drivers in what one sociologist calls “mass incarceration”-began in the 1970’s. This is the period just after the passage in 1964 of the Civil Rights Act and the victories of the civil rights movement. Think about those two things together. They should give you pause.

More later.

Colorado, Family, Politics

Demos (people) Kratos (power, force)

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Summer                                                       Most Heat Moon

This world is rapidly changin’. Dylan

Today Kate meets with the first of the Colorado realtors, tomorrow the second. She’s in full Kate mode which means intelligent, decisive, energized, sensitive. An excellent scout. She is our advance team, sent to reconnoiter while the main force of four canines and one human plus all our stuff remain behind. We will follow.

Her task, eventually, is to narrow the options in Colorado to three. Then the other human will travel with her, probably joined by the Denver Olsons as a consultancy. We will decide together. This may seem clumsy to many of you, but it is the way I have learned throughout a lifetime of politics and one I adhere to out of conviction.

No decision can be made independent of the effected parties and if I could include the dogs, I would. In their case we have to imagine their feelings and response to a particular place, then act accordingly. Yes, I suppose it is true, as many tyrants say, that people want only food, housing, security, that they really don’t want to be involved with the messy business of guiding their own lives in the larger frame.  Over that same lifetime in politics, however, I have acted with the precise opposite assumption.

That is, people need to guide their own lives in the larger frame. To do this they need to join each other, sometimes in unions, sometimes in political parties, sometimes in issue driven organizations, sometimes in neighborhood organizations or rural co-operatives, sometimes in businesses, but always with others who share their convictions and have similar life situations. This is democracy with a small d, one driven not by the constitution or by the greater idea of democracy as a political philosophy to organize nations, but democracy itself which means, in its original Greek etymology, people (demos) power or force (kratos).

This remains a radical understanding of how to organize the commonweal, but it is just such an understanding that many of us soaked in the culture of the late 1960’s came to embrace. Yes, it is at times unwieldy. Yes, it is often prone to lengthy decisions. Yes, it can be perverted by a determined minority or damaged by a narrow-minded majority, but it is the best way of turning aside the tyranny of oligarchy which is the bane of our late stage industrial capitalist society.

And so, even in the small decision of which home to buy, small in the grander scheme, but large in ours, there will be many voices, all significant. And Kate and I will listen to them.

Politics, US History

Never Again

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Summer                                                              Most Heat Moon

Patriot. Or not? If patriotism is a libertarian in a tri-foil hat, Revolutionary musket slung over her shoulder and ready to hunt elephants, then I’m not one. If patriotism is a flag-waving, bible-thumping, climate change denier, then I’m not one. If patriotism is a Love or Leave It bumper sticker and an NRA decal on the back window, then I’m not one.

If patriotism is a swell in the heart when, on returning from a trip abroad, a customs officer says, “Welcome home.”, then, yes, I’m a patriot. If patriotism is a love of this land in all its geographic and geological diversity, then I’m a patriot. If patriotism is a belief in equality, not only before the law, but within society, then I’m a patriot. If patriotism is a belief in the shared journey of those who live in this nation, then I’m a patriot.

I am a patriot and I claim this day as a celebration of my nation, one committed to justice, to fairness, to equality, to brotherhood and sisterhood among all peoples. We cannot allow the nativists and the bigots and the chauvinists and the jingoists to be the only ones who love this country and stand up and say so. After the 60’s, I said never again would be that true. Never again.

Memories, Politics, US History

Be the Change or Change the System?

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Summer                                                                  Most Heat Moon

1968. Martin dies. Bobby dies. The Chicago riots at the Democratic National Convention. Local boy Hubert challenges Richard (enemy’s list) Nixon and Nixon wins with a knockout 301 electoral votes. This brought Spiro (nattering nabobs of negativism) Agnew into office, too. Oh, what a time it was.

On the outside, including certain rioters at the Chicago convention who would become famous as the Chicago 7, was a massive, incoherent largely college student uprising known as “the movement.” In those days there was a split within the movement about whether to engage the political system, the establishment (a term borrowed from American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson), through protests and (usually) alternative candidates for election like Dick Gregory, or, to drop out.

Tune in, turn on, drop out was a favorite mantra of those who contended the establishment was too corrupt to change and instead must be ignored while a new culture was built. This was the time of communes and the back to the land movement. The split within the movement identified hippies who wanted to live together in a participatory democracy, often rural, but not always, and radicals, who thought protest and work in congress could bring an end to the Vietnam War and usher in an era of peaceful, socialist-style politics.

These two groups, the hippies and the radicals were, within the movement itself, seen as opposite, if not opposing camps. At its core it was a political equivalent of the debate within Western Christendom between quietist monastics who retired from the world into a life of prayer and contemplation and the engaged church which tried to influence the lives of people in their worldly home.

Today the camps divide less obviously but they cluster around, on the one hand, folk who might have a “Be the change you want to see in the world.” bumper sticker, and on the other, those who have a 99% button or a Sierra Club hiker on their car.

I never understood the conflict myself. I became a committed back to the lander, purchasing a farm in northern Minnesota while remaining, at the same time, committed to political action. It still seems to me that living the change and acting politically go together. They are points on a continuum of belief turned toward action, not dialectical opposites.

 

Family, Politics

Domestic Courage

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Summer                                                         Most Heat Moon

Sexism rides through the institutions of our culture: through church and corporation, through the military and onto the athletic field, through higher education and elementary, too. Take medicine for a contemporary example. Since the days of NOW and conscious raising, many, many women have become doctors. According to a recent survey there are approximately 234,000 women physicians compared to 535,000 men. (kaiser fdtn.)

Those 234,000 women are disproportionately in the lower paying medical disciplines though not dominant in any of those either. Pediatrics is the sole exception with women making up 55% of all pediatricians in 2008.  But. They earned 66% what male pediatricians did. (Center for research into gender and the professions.) This link gives more detailed analysis.

Continued activism by feminists (male and female) in the workplace will be necessary for years, perhaps generations, to come.

Personal bravery, I called it domestic courage in a eulogy for Ione, a working woman who raised three daughters on her own, working evenings as a bookkeeper, is necessary though when the political gets personal.  When the issue is culturally determined sex roles, then the political comes home. It has to because there is no social nexus more culturally determined by gender than marriage and family.

Kate is an example of domestic courage and institutional courage. Here are three instances. In high school in Nevada, Iowa during the early 1960’s, Kate did outstanding academic work. This would not surprise anyone who knows her. In time long before advanced placement classes, the International Baccalaureate degree or any other now common place for accelerating advanced students, she asked to graduate in her junior year and then attend nearby Iowa State. Her request, though unusual, was granted. Until it came time to make it happen. Then the school went back on its word.

It’s difficult to imagine in our current educational reality, how much courage it must have taken for a young, beautiful girl to pass up cheer leading and the prom to push for an education that met her intellectual talents. That her attempt failed is neither surprising nor a reflection on the domestic courage it took for her to put herself forward. (I say domestic courage here because of the enmeshed nature of small towns with their elementary and secondary educational systems, an enmeshment I know only too well from my own experiences in Alexandria, Indiana.)

Becoming a physician, after first overcoming sexist objections to her becoming a nurse anesthetist, (a telling picture of her class at Mt. Sinai shows her with seven men), she applied to medical school over the objection of her then husband. The admissions personnel at the medical school told Kate that since she had a physician for a husband what was the point to her ambitions? They slapped a good deal of preliminary work on her, which she did, then accepted her reapplication.

The domestic courage in this instance involved persisting in her own ambitions, in spite of being a young mother and in a demanding marriage. She got through this by studying in the morning, early, before Jon and David got up.

Then, once in medicine, Kate continued her fight against sexist restrictions and organizational assumptions.  The clearest of these was her insistence that low income working women couldn’t afford to take time away during the day for a doctor’s appointment. The Coon Rapids Allina Clinic needed to offer appointments after traditional daytime hours.

When the resistance became obdurate, Kate volunteered to do it herself, which she did for several years until the Clinic decided to open an after hours clinic.

Now, as a grandmother, Kate feels (and I do, too.) a necessity to pass on this kind of consciousness to our grand-daughter Ruth. Sexism will not be eliminated by the time Ruth hits college or the work place. She needs an understanding of her own power and her right to her own path. We can help ensure she gets that.

 

 

 

 

Politics

The Boys and Girls of November

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Summer                                                         New (Most Heat) Moon

The boys and girls of November have begun to pick up steam, as have those who swirl around them. Polls get taken, then scrutinized. Messages tested. Mail pieces and literature designed. Voter and district targets identified. Photographs collect in files, ready for use. Ad buys begin to mount up. $300,000, I learned today, will keep a major candidate on TV and radio in the Twin Cities media market. For a week.

Elections, which seem to happen only on election day, are underway all year long. As a person outside the political realm, you may count yourself knowledgeable if you keep up with pundits and tv news. You notice mail pieces and you might talk to a campaign worker, sure, but these seemingly isolated encounters make sense only in light of the day you go to the poll.

Months before the election the professionals and hardy amateurs are already at work. In fact, for some people, the next election starts the day after election day. Or even before.

An example of the not obvious, but crucial strategic and tactical thinking that goes into campaigns is made clear by a look at Minnesota’s 8th district. The 8th seems to the casual observer to be a northern and isolated Congressional district with elections that only matter to the iron range and cities like Duluth, Virginia, Brainerd and Grand Rapids. But elections in one area matter not only to their immediate area, but to others in a complex layering that makes electoral politics very challenging.

The key layering in Minnesota happens in the eighth Congressional district where the iron range and its strong labor constituency tilts Democratic, but often in a way that is not compatible with the politics of state wide candidates like governors and senators. That conflict is strong this year with iron range miners and their families standing behind the Polymet Mining proposal while downstate environmentalists and those environmentalists who live north fight against it.

This is important not just because of the fate of the Polymet mine, but because of its effect on Rick Nolan’s chances in the 8th and its direct impact on Mark Dayton and Al Franken as they run statewide elections. A strong 8th Democratic vote is often necessary to counter the strong southern and suburban gains piled up by Republican candidates. If the 8th splits its tickets, then it can be hard for state wide Democratic candidates to win.

Look for the races to become increasingly evident after July 4th. And, if you’re annoyed by them, the pros would say, good. You’ve probably been reached the golden 7th time it takes for a message to stick.