Summer                                                                    Park County Fair Moon

Some pundits are asking, “Is this 1968?” Luckily, I can answer that question. No!

Easy way to tell? It’s 2016. That’s almost 50 years since Bobby and Martin were killed. A lot of conservatism under the bridge since then. Nixon and Reagan and G. and G.W. Even, it could be argued, Bill C. That river of economic purity and social reaction, never clear, has rendered public conversation opaque. Barack Obama had the misfortune of serving his two terms with largely Republican Congresses. This forced him, somewhat like Bill Clinton, to govern with a millstone.

That millstone, a public weight pressed from the grit of ground up Tea Partiers, Moral Majoritarians, the Christian Right, rebel flag wavers and just plain angry old white folks, is now slung around the American electorate as a whole. And it’s pulling us down, making us read each new Trumpet blast with slackjawed despair. This may be the moment that the millstone finally proves too heavy and sinks us all.

Or, it could change the balance of power in Congress. May that be so.

This time, this 2016 time, this third millennium time, has come after the old days have passed away. The second millennium, a thousand years of Western history, has been written and shelved.

The connection between the times is the unsolved problem of what some call America’s original sin. Our racist history, born in the middle passage, and steadied by the demise of reconstruction, will not disappear. There is no “color-blind” world waiting on the other side of the Edmund Pettus bridge. My own sense is that our original sin was capitalism, the economic system that made cheap, cheap labor appear desirable. In slavery we bound racism and capitalism together, a poisonous vine connecting 2016 to 1968 to the Klan governors and senators, to Jim Crow and the Civil war, to the 3/5ths compromise.

Each time we try to pull ourselves away from that history just grasping the kudzu of capitalist reinforced racism sickens us as a nation. Why? Because we try to fix issues rooted in white racism without fixing economic injustice rooted in American capitalism. This original sin demands a redemptive price no politician will ever be willing to pay. Salvation in this instance is an illusion until we can find a way to uproot both of these evils.

Summer                                                            Parker County Fair Moon

Dallas. Sniper shootings of police officers. With definite links to Minnesota. A downward spiral, a non-virtuous circle. Shootings begetting shootings. In effect now open warfare. I feel sad, mad. Guns, damn it. Guns. I’ve cited the statistics. They’re easily available and they show the peculiar American fascination with violence and firearms. We are outliers from a norm we should yearn to embrace.

A fragile link exists between public support and government sanctioned coercion. We give our military the right to blow things up and kill people. We give our legal system the right to imprison law breakers. We define the laws, through our legislators and city council members. We give our police guns and allow them to take people out of the common life to incarceration. But when the use of these coercive powers becomes suspect to the people at large then a social upheaval can result.

The American Revolution and the Civil War were both fought by combatants convinced that the current regime’s coercive powers had slipped well beyond the legitimate. In China the Emperor ruled by the mandate of heaven. If the people lost faith in their emperor, he lost the mandate of heaven and rebellion ensued.

The compact between US police forces and the communities they’re sworn to protect has become frayed. The use of coercive force, especially deadly force, against members of African-American communities has become a steady drumbeat, a staccato loud enough to chip away faith in police powers. When the tactical use of violence continues without cease, and when the proportion of minority American prisoners continues to increase, then the criminal justice system may lose, may have already lost among the minority communities, the mandate of heaven. When that happens, rebellion will follow.

And, to add a match to the gasoline, the shooter in Dallas died at the pincers of a robot, pincers holding a bomb. This is too much like a domestic drone attack. Too impersonal. Too callous. It is the very opposite of the kind of response required. The fear, justified in my opinion, is that the police no longer view African-Americans as citizens, perhaps not even as people. Using robots reinforces both the depersonalization of citizen/police encounters and the fear of that depersonalization already so evident in our country.

Summer                                                          Park County Fair Moon

Indiana is indiscernible from a Southern state. If it walks like the Klan and burns crosses like the Klan, then…

from the Indianapolis Star

Sheridan, Indiana

“Don Christy doesn’t care what you think about his parade float. To him, the words “Lying African” in front of a depiction of President Barack Obama was funny.

Many, however, are questioning the town officials, police and organizers who allowed the 73-year-old Christy to drive the display in Monday’s Fourth of July parade in Sheridan, a rural community of 2,900 in northern Hamilton County, north of Indianapolis.

“I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican,” Christy told IndyStar. “I’m a patriot.”

Christy wore a prison jumpsuit and a blond wig while driving a golf cart in the parade. The cart’s roof displayed signs in support of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. On the front was the head of a stuffed animal with a sign reading “African Lion.” On the back, a doll with an Obama mask was propped in a toilet with a sign reading “Lying African.””