Fifty Years After the Civil Rights Era, Evil Prevails Again

Civil rights demonstrator attacked by a police dog on May 3, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama

Stephanie McCurry, Professor of History at Columbia University, taught History of the Slave South on Coursera a few years ago. In her conclusion she said: 

"The Confederate States of America was transformed by war, and the Confederate political project was undone … when the 4 million African Americans born enslaved in the United States seized the opening history offered.

When they rose on the plantations. When they grabbed up their children and poured into Union lines. When they insisted that the Union reformulate policy to account for their historic mission of emancipation. When men, women, and children alike, risked all to turn the war in the right direction. When they made slaveholders ask for the first time, what do the slaves want? …

And given the pro slavery, white supremacist and anti democratic aspirations of that nation, there was a certain justice, I think, in that."   

A certain justice, but not enough to exorcise the racism ingrained in so many that less than 50 years after the Civil Rights era, white supremacists are on the ascendancy again and the alt-right has dictated the next American president, who is now choosing racists, bigots and warmongers for his crew. Salon.com has an excellent piece on Senator Sessions, Trump's choice for AG. And as Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-IL) said of him:

"If you have nostalgia for the days when blacks kept quiet, gays were in the closet, immigrants were invisible and women stayed in the kitchen, Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is your man. No Senator has fought harder against the hopes and aspirations of Latinos, immigrants, and people of color than Sen. Sessions... He ran for the Senate because he was deemed by the Senate Judiciary Committee as too racist to serve as a federal judge. He is the kind of person who will set back law enforcement, civil rights, the courts, and increase America’s mass incarceration industry and erase 50 years of progress."

Divisions in American society run terribly deep, and hard as people have tried to believe that America, with all its diversity is at heart homogeneous in spirit, it's wishful thinking, and usually on the part of liberals.

Abusers, in politics and even in relationships, get away with a lot as their generous-spirited victims give them chance after chance after chance, desperately holding onto the belief that everybody is intrinsically good if you just give them understanding. Finally there comes a point when the victims face reality. Understanding sometimes does nothing more than enable more abuse.

And so abusive spouses face divorce, abusive friends find themselves friendless, revolutions get rid of dictators. But still, even as history teaches us at a personal and societal level that early warning signals, if ignored, always lead to dangerous eruptions, liberals try to make peace with bigots and racists in the name of democracy and inclusiveness. But liberalism is intrinsically about ensuring that everybody has equal rights. When those who oppose that idea act out their beliefs and in doing so strip others of their rights, they give up some of their own. Basic human rights come with moral accountability. 

It's how society operates and stays moderately functional. So when millions of people vote in a deeply racist demagogue who has whipped up hatred and fomented intolerance until manifestations of it start returning America to pre-Civil Rights days, the last thing liberals need is to try and make peace with those voters.

The alt-right rationale is that their anger has its roots in being excluded. Have they been excluded? No they haven't. They got a superlative president who, more than any Republican president before him, truly believed in his heart of hearts that his presidential responsibility was to everybody, not just those who voted for him. But he wasn't white and those conservatives voted in a GOP Congress who made it impossible for the president to help them in the way that he wanted to.

So no, I don't buy the idea that middle America has been excluded. Middle America has excluded itself. If you want to be part of the human race dialogue and you want to benefit from others' desire for equality, you have to want it yourself and fight against that which thwarts it, not vote it into office.

When good people do nothing, evil prevails. Trying to make friends with supporters of Donald Trump is the equivalent of doing nothing. And we need to face it; evil is prevailing right now. It's not something that might happen next month or next week. It's happening now. And anybody who does anything other than help to strengthen Democrats in this time of crisis is adding to the problem.

Dustin Moskovitz, Compelled to Support Hillary Clinton, Makes Huge Donations

Bravo to Dustin Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook, for sticking his head above the parapet, donating $35 million to help Democrats in the 2016 general election, and showing the way for others in Silicon Valley. Those who follow his lead will prove how much they really care about American democracy. Moskovitz published Compelled To Act, on Medium, explaining his reasons. 

I understand why he had to think twice before doing this. Organizations like the NRA and people like the Koch brothers have used and still do use their power and wealth to lobby for the creation and cementing of policies that benefit the donor and hurt everybody else by keeping the inequality status quo in place and also damaging the environment. The Republican Party has enabled them. The result is that the core of the GOP has eroded away over time, leaving an empty space where true conviction once lay.

Inexorably that has left an environment where somebody like Donald Trump can flourish. So it's easy to say that money in politics is evil.  

But it's a false equivalence. The money isn't the problem; what people do with it, is. And not everybody who donates does so out of self-interest. And in any case, that's only half of the equation. The other half is what's done with the money.

Not every politician who accepts donations feels themselves obliged to accept a chain around their neck that can be yanked by the donor. The accusations that have been thrown at Hillary Clinton for belonging to Wall Street, primarily because she accepted sums of money she deserved for her bank speeches, are utterly unsubstantiated. Notably absent have been specific examples of how she has done their bidding—talking dates, people, policies. The same goes for the accusations against the Clinton Foundation for accepting money from regimes that are sustained on inequality and citizen abuse. Again, money is not the problem.

Republican donors' motives for plowing money into the political system have been about self interest and the corresponding behavior of GOP politicians has been to let themselves be yanked on a chain.

But there is a world of difference between that and Moskovitz's donation—and what will be done with the money. It will be used to further equality and protect the environment. 

And nobody can rationally accuse Moskovitz of self interest, because he is assisting, amongst others, the presidential candidate who wants to raise taxes for the wealthy. 

In his article, Moskovitz's assessment of Donald Trump as a con artist whose only interest in the presidency is to promote his brand is correct. Trump has always been a con-artist above all else, and that brand of humanity is very good at what they do. He's a self-congratulatory, over-enabled, out-of-control, narcissistic ego/megalo-maniac. The comparisons between him and Hitler aren't shallow. The consequences of him winning the election won't be either, not just for America but for the whole world. I think that in this time, sitting on the fence is an abdication of social responsibility. Not getting involved is a definitive choice tantamount to supporting Donald Trump.

Moskovitz has refused to give press interviews to date or reveal his future plans, but he's committed to Hillary Clinton winning. Have a look at his Twitter page.  

Connect with Hillary Clinton on Twitter @HillaryClinton  

Connect with me on Twitter @JenniferJS_

Cutting Off The Chain of Hate And Evil

I'm reading the Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. and came across this passage last night:

“Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil."

Passionately supporting a candidate I truly believe in feels like working towards cutting off the chain. Bernie Sanders supporters really do believe that he's trustworthy and truthful and that the policies he proposes are America’s only chance of escaping the grip of corporate greed and of breathing life into the middle class again.

Hillary Clinton supporters really do believe that she and her polices are America’s only chance of building on what Barack Obama has started and doing it in a way that will last, that she hasn’t been bought by Wall Street or lobbyists, and that she understands the complexities of world leadership better than Bernie Sanders.

How wonderful that there’s so much passion. But, whether I’m supporting Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton, if I trash their opposition and invent stories about them which I spread around liberally to try and turn support for them into revulsion I'm not cutting off the chain; I'm strengthening it.

And let's face it, I'm not doing it for truth and social justice. I'm doing it because I've got unprocessed anger and it feels good to hurt somebody.

“History has thrust upon our generation an indescribably important destiny—to complete a process of democratization which our nation has too long developed too slowly, but which is our most powerful weapon for world respect and emulation. How we deal with this crucial situation will determine our moral health as individuals, our cultural health as a region, our political health as a nation, and our prestige as a leader of the free world.”

It’s still a work in progress, Mr. King.

World Harmony! Good Triumphs over Evil with the Paris Climate Accord

It's incredible when mainstream news is actually something good. This morning when I read about the Paris Climate Accord something mind-boggling happened to me; I was proud of all the world leaders. Great Gods! I’ve never felt that before. 

I feel positively light headed from it and my world view has brightened up considerably.

I've always admired President Obama but I'm especially proud of him now for pushing so hard against Republicans on this issue and I’m thrilled that his good sense has prevailed. 

He so deserves that experience and the accolades he's getting now. We also deserve the experience of good sense running the show. It's enough now, of bloody-minded, short-sighted, dimwit GOP politicians getting in the way of cleaning up the world and messing things up for all of us. Given how much they affect those of us who aren't American citizens, we should all be able to vote in mid-terms and Presidential elections. 

Republican candidates who vow to roll back everything Obama has achieved regarding clean energy and preserving the planet (even for them, not that they deserve it), they'll now have the whole world condemning them.

I've been surprised to see how many people have griped and groused that it's not enough and not even celebrated what's happened here. It's their loss. 

It's easy to promote gloom and doom and spread negative sentiment around but you can't build anything that has any value on it. You have to take the best available and build on that. Sometimes it takes strength of mind to see the good but in this case it’s not hard. As a race we’ve achieved harmony in something monumentally important for the first time ever. Ever. It’s a kind of World Peace.

I understand that this is just a start and that so much more needs to be done but given how recalcitrant leaders previously were to concede that the earth was in grave danger and that they and their countries had any responsibility in that, to have reached accord with 100% accountability is a phenomenal achievement. 

And there’s momentum here, which is what counts. Dirty energy production is still entrenched, sure, but it will never be able to gain back the ground it’s lost, it will never be able to be king of pile again in the way that it has been for so long.

We’ve been heading in this direction for a while, gaining ground. Remember when solar panels were just something out of science fiction? It still is in a lot of places, I know—there’s a town in theUS that is terrified it will suck up all the sun’s heat—but it and all forms of clean energy are more and more mainstream now.

And now we’re closer than ever to the tipping point where big money invested in that dirty energy will see that there’s more opportunity to make fortunes in clean energy. 

Won’t that be a strange sight, to see big industrialists climbing all over each other to clean up the world?  Those like the Koch brothers who have tentacles of power spread far and wide and have brainwashed so many to believe that dirty energy is good will have the hardest time adapting. I feel for them. Not. In this business of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ it’s a triumphant moment for good.

In the Battle of Good vs Evil: the Two Faces of America

These days it seems that America is in the grip of a battle between good and evil of mythical proportions. We see more ‘evil’ so it’s easy to believe it outweighs the good, that this is about David and Goliath and Goliath is on a winning streak. Far right conservatives and Christian fundamentalists, the NRA, the military industrial complex have a lot of power and a massive, well-funded, very vocal, very visible right wing media to disseminate the ideas they uphold.

Massacres happen with increasing regularity. Instead of diminishing the power of the far right conservative ideal they feed that angry, fearful, voracious, rapacious beast. When the horrific shooting at Colorado Springs happened, my first thought was, killing three and wounding nine others is justifiable but an abortion isn’t?

Far right conservatives (rightly) condemn jihadists for slaughtering innocent people and have graduated from that to condemning all Muslims and to treating as a hero Republican GOP candidates who manically espouse and promote bigotry of the worse kind to such an extent that people around the entire world are outraged. Yet these same conservatives don’t even ask the religion of American citizens who massacre fellow citizens with assault weapons, let alone call for them to be persecuted and/or thrown out the country.

Christian fundamentalist Kevin Swanson rabidly calls for gays to be executed at a National Religious Liberties Conference which three GOP Presidential candidates—Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal—attend. How is that different to jihadists and their supporters?

Massive CIA, FBI and police resources are sunk into identifying jihadists and I’m very grateful for that. But nothing is done to follow the movements of Americans obsessed with accumulating assault weapons even though they kill far more Americans than jihadists. And fundamentalist Christians such as Swanson and his followers and those three GOP candidates aren’t even brought in for questioning.

Fundamentalist Muslims who call for and/or commit atrocities under the name of Allah are (rightly) recognized for being a scourge on the planet but fundamentalist Christians who call for and/or commit atrocities under the name of Jesus are elevated by many. Some Muslims are fundamentalists therefore all Muslims are condemned as evil. But the same logic doesn’t apply to fundamentalist Christians. Or to American citizens, Catholics, Protestants, Atheists, all of whom have committed terrible crimes. So the real source of the problem isn’t dealt with.

Presidential candidates are worshipped for their maniacal xenophobia in a country that was built by immigrants.

Women have to fight incredibly hard for their rights but conservative women support Presidential candidates and far right politicians who want to keep them down.

People fight for the right to carry and use as many assault weapons as they want and don’t recognize how they’re being manipulated by the military industrial complex, or how that undermines them.

Far right conservatives and Christian fundamentalists foster a culture of hatred, prejudice, entitlement to kill and destruction of human rights. Massacres like that in Colorado Springs are a direct result. Pus oozing from a rotten and festering wound created by an ‘ideal’ that is counter-intuitive to all that is good in humanity, the Bible and true Christianity.

This is a dark, depressing picture. But I still love America and I don’t think of the far right as representing the country in its entirety. Am I clinging to a fantasy? Am I the perfect example of how love is blind?

My first experience of the US was attending a Catholic school in Zimbabwe run by American nuns. Marymount College. Judging by Facebook, a good time was had by most. Not by me, though, which none of the nuns noticed. They registered that I failed and criticized me for being lazy. They didn’t think to look for a deeper reason or see how their judgment traumatized me further. I fell through the cracks and nobody reached out a hand to stop me falling.  

You’d think I’d have developed an antipathy towards Americans. Somehow I didn’t. I guess I separated ‘American’ from individuals’ lack of empathy towards emotionally wounded children namely me. That, and I blamed myself for my unhappiness.  

In my very naive early twenties I flew with my then husband to New York with our bicycles, planning to ride from there to Key West. I’d heard only romantic things about the Big Apple. We landed at Kennedy Airport in the early evening and headed for Manhattan on our bikes but got lost and took an unintentional detour through Harlem where we stopped to buy an ice-cream.

What did I know about Harlem? The guy who sold us the ice-cream said “What are you doing here? You crazy? You fixin’ to die tonight?”

He told us to get out of Harlem and fast. I had no frame of reference with which to believe him. But we took a subway smothered with angry graffiti that made me think maybe he knew what he was talking about. It was terrifying. Then we got thrown off the train. Man. We reached downtown Manhattan at midnight. I was tired and scared out of my wits. A guy approached me and asked me casually if I wanted to buy heroin. I sat on the pavement and burst into tears. I wanna go home.

Again, not a great experience of America. But then another guy noticed my distress and asked me if I was okay. I told him. He was full of concern and said we must stay with him. And I fell in love. Not with him, but with America.

That guy’s generosity is what has life in my heart. When I think about it, it fills me with a feeling of light, of life being generated, of grand possibilities. Of the other stuff—including my childhood experiences of Americans—some created wounds but they’re healing. The rest doesn’t have any power over me. The moral of the story is that one tiny bit of generosity of spirit outweighs a mass of meanness of spirit or absence of consciousness. 

Which is why, to use archaic imagery, good always wins over evil. Sometimes the dark stuff is really in your face. But that’s when it’s hardest and most important to remember the light and believe in it. 

Contemplating that took me to thinking about the Americans I know now, none of whom have a manically far right conservative atom in their body.

All of them are generous spirited. They’re all outraged by crimes against humanity committed in the name of Jesus and/or the GOP and intensely frustrated by the illogic, lack of intellectual independence and integrity of the far right.

That’s a lot of good. It doesn’t make as much noise as ‘evil’ does but it's life promoting and has longevity; not enough yet to prevent the horrible tragedies happening with such horrifying regularity or the suffering they engender. But I believe there’s more good than seems apparent and it is enough to ensure that ‘evil’ won’t ultimately win in America. Good can’t be destroyed. ‘Evil’ can be overcome.

The painting is by Luca Giodano (1634-1705) Massacre of the Children of Niobe 1685

Petition to Ban Donald Trump From the UK Gains Momentum

Good versus evil. David versus Goliath. Tolerance versus Bigotry. Suzanne Kelly versus Donald Trump. 

Kelly's petition to ban Trump from the UK hit the international headlines yesterday as the number of signatures rose from 42,000 to over 250,000 in one day. That number has reached over 400,000 and is still climbing.

Around the world people have expressed revulsion at Trump’s unashamed bigotry and pathological addiction to untruth. One of his favorite expressions is “I don’t know if it’s true or not but it sounds like it’s true,” but he draws absolution conclusions from the premise that it (whatever the subject of the day is) is true.

Harmless when you’re exaggerating your wealth, but a tremendous danger to society when you’re fabricating lies about people on the basis of their religion or nationality, which is Trump’s trademark these days.

And a danger to himself when he lies about cities like London, saying there are parts that  have such entrenched radicalism that the police fear for their lives. London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, said the only reason he wouldn’t go to parts of New York was the very real risk of meeting Donald Trump.

Sarah Wollaston, MP, tweeted “Do we get to ban Donald Trump?” on December 8, the day Suzanne Kelly started her online petition to the UK Government to do just that.

Per the UK Independent Prime Minister David Cameron was dead serious when he called Trump’s bigotry “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong.” And Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leader, was more to the point, saying Trump’s comments were an “affront to humanity”. He called for people to unite against racism. Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said “For someone trying to be president of America it frankly shows why he is utterly unsuited for the role.” Master of the understatement.

Sunder Katwala, Director of the nonpartisan think-tank British Future, wrote on their website that “...It is important that the UK Government makes very clear that [Donald Trump’s] extreme view is rejected and repudiated in the strongest possible terms.

“The UK Home Office has set out clear guidelines which have led to the exclusion of preachers of hate from the UK.  Theresa May has excluded extreme Islamists on these grounds, and also kept out those who have fanned extreme anti-Muslim prejudice, such as the bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. Trump’s statements are more extreme than theirs.

“Unless and until Trump were to retract these highly prejudiced comments, there is a good case for making clear that he would be refused entry to the UK by the Home Secretary.”

JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, said that Trump was worse than the evil Lord Voldemort of her novels.

And over 400,000 British citizens and residents despise him enough to want to make sure he can’t taint their country with his obnoxious presence.

In Scotland, Ronald Gordon University, which had bestowed an honorary degree on him, withdrew it yesterday after a petition to do so garnered over 7,500 votes. Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish First Minister, fired Trump from the position of Business Ambassador. She said his comments “are obnoxious and offensive, and have rightly been condemned by people across the political spectrum.”

In the US on Tuesday the White House issued a statement urging the Republican Party to denounce  Donald Trump, stating that his inflammatory proposal disqualifies him from the Presidency.

Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, said: “Donald Trump sounds more like the leader of a lynch mob than of a great nation like ours.”

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter wants to ban Donald Trump from the city, St. Petersburg Fla Mayor Rick Kriseman tweeted that Trump should be banned from his city, and Portland, Oregon, city council will vote next week to formally denounce Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims.

Hillary Clinton said that the GOP candidate traffics “in prejudice and paranoia. It is not only shameful. It’s dangerous.” Bernie Sanders, speaking to Jimmy Fallon on Tonight’s Show, called him a demagogue, one who, a few months ago, was telling Americans to hate Mexicans. “Now he wants us to hate Muslims. That crap won’t work in America.”

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls tweeted "Trump, like others, stokes hatred and conflations: our ONLY enemy is radical Islamism."

Süddeutsche Zeitung, a German daily newspaper, ran an editorial with the headline, “How Donald Trump is betraying America.”

Evil versus Good. Donald Trump is execrable, his bigotry offensive. But we’re seeing what amounts to an international, grass roots movement to counter it. And that is something to behold. 

Paris Mourns Again & We Continue to Manufacture Arms for Extremists

Good vs. Evil. It's such a wonderful, black and white thing. I almost envy people who believe they're two opposite absolutes; it's such a simple concept to get your head around. But it never worked for me. It makes more sense to think there's a continuum from absolute ignorance to absolute consciousness of love. We're born with our consciousness being somewhere along that continuum, depending on our last life, and we use our emotions, experiences and intellect to shift along it, always being inextricably drawn towards the light.   

Since I was young I believed that nobody commits evil or hurts somebody else if they've had enough love. That everybody can be reached, no matter how depraved and/or cruel they are, and that the reason a person can't get through to somebody is because that person's understanding is lacking.   

I still mostly believe that but now I also understand that whatever people who maim, hurt and/or kill do or don't have by way of the essential experience of love, they have massive, twisted, distorted, rage and monumental entitlement to act it out, and self esteem is obliterated. It's a lethal combination. Sometimes they can be reached, sometimes you run great risk in trying and it's OK if you choose not to. And I realize now that maybe some people can't be reached in this lifetime of theirs.  

Yesterday, before I heard the news of the Paris tragedies, I watched a news clip about Mohammed Emwazi, allegedly killed by a drone strike. I was glad he was dead. The civilized part of me was overrun by a regret that he couldn't now be made to suffer in the way he inflicted suffering so viciously on others. But I wonder where his spirit is now. I wonder if it was always wrestling ferociously to escape the dark ignorance of Emwazi's consciousness that kept it from finding the light. I wonder if things have to get worse for it in the next couple of lifetimes before they get better, or if this was the nadir.

There’s so much of that horrible man's kind of entitlement, all over the world. It’s terrifying. It's also easy to focus on the extremists but let's not forget that the developed countries enable the violence with their massive arms industries. The top seven weapons exporters are USA $10bn+, Russia $5,9bn; China $1,9bn+, France $1,2bn+, Germany $1,1bn+, UK $1bn+, Israel $1bn+.

Oscar Arias Sanchez, President of Costa Rica, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987, said in 1998; 

“When a country decides to invest in arms, rather than in education, housing, the environment, and health services for its people, it is depriving a whole generation of its right to prosperity and happiness. We have produced one firearm for every ten inhabitants of this planet, and yet we have not bothered to end hunger when such a feat is well within our reach. “Our international regulations allow almost three-quarters of all global arms sales to pour into the developing world with no binding international guidelines whatsoever. Our regulations do not hold countries accountable for what is done with the weapons they sell, even when the probable use of such weapons is obvious.”

So many weapons being sold by countries who then suffer devastating loss, as in the US, UK, France… Governments try to contain the evil, the violence, to protect the innocent. They really do.

But only up to the point of stopping the manufacture and export of arms. That one they won’t do. 

They won’t even talk about it. I don't ever hear analysts, journalists, TV anchors, politicians say “the primary reason for all the violence in the world is that we all make too many guns. We all need to stop. Now. Today. This week. This month. This year.” Well, whether we want to face it or not, it's the biggest and most operative part of the problem. 

It's co-dependency of the worst sort, making weapons so psychopaths can act out their inhumane urges.