Summer                                                                           Park County Fair Moon

What’s going on out there in this silly season turned mad?

Scared, angry white folks. Siding with the Donald. Promises have been made to them. Promises of rising tides and jobs if only the unions and the regulators would get out of the way. If only the death tax and the onerous corporate taxes and the capital gains taxes were lowered or eliminated, then capital would rejuvenate the economy. Unleash the entrepreneurs, unshackle the men of Wall Street. Return public lands to the states. (they weren’t the state’s to begin with, but, hey, what’s a fact in this election year?)

The Donald has revealed the lie behind these ideas. A Glass-Steagall freed banking system drove us all to the brink of ruin, set back wage growth for the middle and working classes, crashed the savings vehicles of those about to retire. The tax breaks for the wealthy have served to enrich the 1%, not tune up the engine of capitalism.

The gloom unveiled in the Trumpet blast as he received the GOP nomination reflects the fears of those whose unearned privilege has eroded. And fast. The racist and nativist elements of the Donald’s civil war with the very elite of which he is a part are wrong and must be battled by every decent American, Republican or Democrat. But. The woes of the white middle and working classes are real. They cannot be explained away or discounted because those subject to them hang on to myths about their origins.

African-Americans, whose promissory note cannot find a decent bill collector, see their children shot, jailed. Their communities are often without investment, services. Each African-American, no matter their level of achievement, is at risk on the street or on the highways. Every day. They have been promised much and had so little delivered. And even that must taste like ashes in their mouths. The dead cannot be lifted up by affirmative action.

Latinos have similar problems today, though the root of their life here in the U.S. is different. They are largely voluntary immigrants, forced out of their countries by lack of economic opportunity. Their numbers are increasing and the full weight of their cultural influence on the U.S. is not yet felt. Many Latinos are here without documents and many of those are children born in this country. Their lives are unpredictable because our government cannot solve the problem of their futures.

Native Americans continue in their struggle to overcome the Indian Wars, sequestration on reservations, Indian Schools run by the BIA. The direst poverty in this land of opportunity exists on the res.

LBGT folk have made progress, real progress, but the recent legislation in North Carolina about transgender bathroom use demonstrates the often thin veneer of hope that progress offers.

Women still get paid less for equal work. Women still are vulnerable to the male gaze and the male sense of privilege over their bodies. Yes means yes. No means no. Yes, a woman may sit in the oval office for the first time, but it’s not enough and it seems very, very late.

My point is that the major political parties have had decades to resolve these fundamental problems of our democracy and they have failed. There are legitimate grievances felt by a majority of the total U.S. population. Where are the statesmen and stateswomen who can rise above party and find workable answer? The Donald is too childish, too self-congratulatory, too ill-informed to do more than give voice. Though that contribution should not be diminished. The next-up Clinton has ideas, but her personality and her character make her unlikely to be the healer, the unifier, the move us forward person we need.

What we may have in this mad season is a loud, chaotic revelation about the need for a functioning government. Perhaps it is not this election. Perhaps it is the next one that will produce candidates alive not only to the problems of our nation, but to the need for solutions that bind us together rather than pull us apart.

Summer                                                                     Park County Fair Moon

My brother asked, “What do you think is the cause for the recent turmoil in the U.S.?”

We used a promissory note to build our early republic. Its collateral was the freedom of African men and women captured and brought to the New World as forced labor. Slavery. The transaction made economic sense. The winding together of these two, slavery and economic advantage, created a long rope of unearned privilege, unearned wealth. This rope supported, and, to our everlasting shame, continues to support a bridge, a suspension bridge, whose terminus is Edina, the Upper East Side, Nantucket, Orange County, Cherry Hill, Jackson Hole, Vail, Aspen, the Gold Coast, Hyde Park.

As in the Monty Python movie the Holy Grail, there is a bridge keeper, one who lets only certain people cross from the realm of the ordinary to the realm of the moneyed, the elite, the one percent. The first question he asks is, “What color is your skin?” The second, “Where did you go to school?” The third, “Who is your family?” If you answer, give the wrong answer, you immediately fly away from the bridge back to the ordinary place from you which you came. Read the recent novel Sport of Kings if you want a literary explanation.

The turmoil so painfully evident right now is but one instance of an attempt to collect on the promissory note, but the debt collectors have little power and those who cross the bridge are far away from them. Affirmative action, reparations, integration, voting rights, model cities, all of them attempts to change the bridge keeper’s questions, have altered, to a modest extent, the foot traffic on the bridge. But only for a very, very few.