The funnel from hate to violence

Ever since I became interested in social justice issues as a young adult, I've been haunted by the idea (the fact?) that it often seems much harder to bring people together in solidarity than to divide them with fear, resentment, hate and the worse angels of our nature. 

Today, we're living in times when hate speech has become normalized and what were once fringe ideas are now spewed in broad daylight. It kind of reminds me of the old story that a frog won't notice when water heats up until it's too late.

 (Please don't try that at home--I love frogs!)

This isn't an original idea by any means, but I think the process by which some people become radicalized into committing acts of violence against targeted groups is like a funnel. In the old days, this was done by hate groups themselves via print, the internet, social media, etc. These would put out a message that a few would pick up on and follow through with violent action, while the groups that prompted it could deny involvement.

That was then and this is now. The process has gone mainstream with major politicians and media outlets casting a wide net using code words  designed to fuel resentment, anger and, yes, hate from people already on edge...then shed crocodile tears or issue angry denials when the violence happens. 

Here's a good analysis of how the process works. Unfortunately, at this point not much progress has been made on how to reverse the process, while the drum beat of resentment keeps getting louder and what were once dog whistles have become sirens.

AFSC statement on Buffalo mass murder and racist violence

The American Friends Service Committee issued this statement today in the wake of the hate-driven mass killing in Buffalo:

This weekend, 10 people were killed and three were injured by a white supremacist at a grocery store in a majority Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Our hearts go out to the victims, their families, and the communities in Buffalo during this time. We are holding you in the Light.

These horrifying acts of racist violence compound the ongoing trauma caused by relentless anti-Blackness espoused not only by individuals like the man who carried out this attack, but also in all sectors of the country. We are holding in the Light our staff, volunteers, and community members who are particularly impacted by these attacks and the ideology behind them, and we deepen our commitments to work for a world without racism and violence.

The suspected shooter is an 18-year-old white man whose actions were motivated by his belief in “great replacement theory,” also referred to as “white replacement theory,” a deeply racist belief that is growing in popularity and is amplified by right-wing media and political leaders. This ideology not only incites violence in the present but is used to justify and even celebrate centuries of violence. It is also intensely anti-immigrant, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, and misogynistic. We stand in community and solidarity with those also named in the manifesto reported to have been written by the killer, which targeted Muslims, Jewish communities, trans people, and immigrants. 

AFSC is committed to eliminating white supremacy and violence wherever they are found. This means being honest and accountable to our history and our present. This means we must embrace a trauma informed approach to community care; believe and support victims and survivors; and above all, make every effort to prevent such violence by eradicating its very root.

Make Orwell fiction again

One of the better slogans I’ve seen lately is “Make Orwell Fiction Again,” a reference to the British writer best known for books like Animal Farm and 1984, and for his hatred of totalitarianism and authoritarianism.

He was particularly concerned with how words can be distorted by the powerful to justify or hide injustice.

Here are some lines from his “Politics and the English Language”:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible…

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer...

Political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

For an example close to home, we need look no farther than House Bill 4011 and Senate Bill 498, which would basically stifle the teaching of history and of issues related to race and gender. They’ve been titled the “Anti-Stereotyping Act” and the “Anti-Racism Act,” respectively.  

(I’ve often wondered lately how different things would be if some legislators were as concerned with sanitizing and monitoring the quality of our rivers, lakes, and streams as they are with the teaching of history and public education…but I digress.)

Fortunately, HB 4011 was turned into a study resolution, but SB 498 passed the Senate and was referred to House Education and Judiciary committees. It’s not clear now what kind of amendments might be tacked on.

It’s hard to know where to start with this, but here are some issues in no particular order:

*This is a solution in search of problems. These bills didn’t originate from any situation in West Virginia. Rather, they’re part of a well-orchestrated national effort to impose cookie-cutter legislation on states designed to foment bogus culture wars and thus distract people from their real agenda of pushing policies that make the very rich richer at the expense of everybody else. 

This is why we can’t have nice things.

*This would have a chilling effect on public education, which is already under attack in West Virginia in so many ways. There seems to be an effort now to punish teachers and school service workers for winning during the historic 2018 work stoppage.  

*Sticking with the issue of undermining public education, these attacks also seem to be consistent with other none too subtle efforts to promote the privatization of education for the sake of profit. And sticking with the theme of history, we’re moving from extracting wealth from strip mining the land to doing the same with public education funds. 

(What’s next? Oh yeah, state parks, as in HB 4408.)   

*It’s impossible to look at American history without considering race, starting with the impact on indigenous people during and after “the Columbian exchange”—another Orwellian whopper—to the Middle Passage of the transcontinental slave trade to the role of slavery in shaping the American economy (agriculture, manufacturing, banking, finance, insurance, transport, etc.) to the Civil War to post-war Klan terror and sharecropping to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Movement to mass incarceration and beyond. Yes, there are some horrific things there, but there’s also a lot of heroic and inspiring acts as well. Keeping people ignorant of them isn’t doing anybody any favors.

*It’s just as impossible to appreciate West Virginia history without discussing race. There are huge events like the biracial raid on Harpers Ferry, the Civil War and the creation of the state in 1863, but we’ve also been graced by brave individuals who made history here, whether they passed through or were born here. 

Those include trailblazing educators like Booker T. Washington and Carter G. Woodson; groundbreaking legislators like Elizabeth Simpson Drewry and Minnie Buckingham Harper; scholars and advocates like W.E.B. DuBois; attorneys like J.R. Clifford; math and science geniuses like Katherine Johnson; rank and file union coal mine leaders like Dan Chain aka “Few Clothes Johnson;” white labor leaders and civil rights champions like Walter Reuther, and more.

*Speaking of history and manipulating education in the interests of the powerful, generations of West Virginians already experienced a censored version in 8th grade West Virginia studies classes that left out the history of our colonial economy and multi-ethnic labor struggles, something that only changed in the 1980s with films like Matewan and books like Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven. 

*Then there’s the idea that sometimes learning can make kids uncomfortable. I get that. It happened to me lot too, usually in any math class after 7th grade--or when I was required to read Great Expectations in 9th. But real education is about challenging our minds. As an adult, I’ve come to appreciate subjects like algebra…and Pip’s journey to insight and adulthood.

*Finally, if we ever want to keep our brightest in the state or invite others to come from elsewhere, it might be good if we stop publicly embarrassing ourselves.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail. There was a public hearing today at which 24 people spoke against SB 498 while only four spoke in favor. Outcome TBD.)

Prophecy and hypocrisy, revisited

 Over the years, I've been to many observations and celebrations of the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. While many of these have been inspiring, there is often the fly of what Lincoln in another context called "the base alloy of hypocrisy" in the ointment, as I noted in this post from two years ago. I still recommend checking out the lyrics there of the late Phil Ochs' song Crucifixion, which sums up this dynamic better than anything I can say.

Specifically, the hypocrisy that grates on me occurs when politicians and people in positions of power who would have feared, hated and despised everything Dr. King  stood for--especially in later years when he turned his attention increasing to issues of economic justice and opposing the war in Vietnam--speak pious words from the pulpit or podium. As Ochs sang, "the drama is distorted to what they want to hear."

This year, the King family has issued a strong statement calling for "no celebration without legislation" for voting rights. As Andrea Waters King was quoted by CBS News, "We can't celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. without having the legislation, the cornerstone of his legacy, the cornerstone of our democracy, solidified."

That message is especially relevant to West Virginia, where Senator Joe Manchin's vote, which looks like a longshot at this point, will be crucial. Ironically, after some struggle by lots of people here led by the state's Black community, Manchin helped to draft the Freedom to Vote Act, which actually  has a lot of positive provisions, especially if partnered with the John Lewis Voting Rights Act...but it looks like he won't vote for it, supposedly out of reverence for senate rules.

Whatever.

This is one of the decisive moments in US history. My advice to Senator Manchin is this: if he doesn't act decisively to protect voters' rights and democracy, don't bother showing up for these events ever again. It would just add insult to injury.

Really.

And while we're at it, please check out this op-ed from the Charleston Gazette-Mail on the same topic by Rev. David Fryson.

Signed. Sealed. Delivered. For real

Whew. It's been a long fight, but the US Supreme Court announced today that it would not overturn the Affordable Care Act. As the New York Times reports,

Striking down the Affordable Care Act would have expanded the ranks of the uninsured in the United States by about 21 million people — a nearly 70 percent increase — according to recent estimates from the Urban Institute.

The biggest loss of coverage would have been among low-income adults who became eligible for Medicaid under the law after most expanded the program to include them. But millions of Americans would also have lost private insurance, including young adults whom the law allowed to stay on their parents’ plans until they turned 26 and families whose income was modest enough to qualify for subsidies that help pay their monthly premiums.

A ruling against the law would also have doomed its protections for Americans with past or current health problems — or pre-existing conditions. The protections bar insurers from denying them coverage or charging them more for it.

This is a big deal for me as I've put a lot of time in on this over the last 12 years, including street actions in support of its passage; bus rides to DC: probably dozens of op-eds; scary town hall meetings, including one where an ACA opponent heckled a priest during an opening prayer; pushing for Medicaid expansion in WV and other states; fighting off attempts to mess with Medicaid expansion; mobilizing to defend it in various ways after Trump's election; urging WV's senators not to undo it when that was a real option; and more. You can probably find scores of posts about it here. I'm also proud that the American Friends Service Committee was part of this effort from the beginning.

I'm hoping this settles things once and for all and that we can keep building out and expanding care, including expanding Medicaid in the twelve holdout states. It's probably no coincidence that eight of those states were part of the Confederacy during the Civil War. As I wrote here in 2014, there's a long and ugly connection between the legacy of racism and denying health care to millions of Americans of all backgrounds. I'm hoping this is a nail in that coffin.

Say it ain't so, Joe

 WV Senator Joe Manchin wrote an op-ed yesterday on his opposition to the HR 1/S 1 For the People Act, which was designed to protect and expand voting rights. No doubt that was good news to white nationalists, insurrectionists and their enablers and apologists, and vote suppressors--but, as this article shows, it was a slap in the face to Black West Virginians, who arguably provided his margin of victory in the last election, not to mention anyone who cares about democracy.

On a positive note, it was nice to see the United Mine Workers Union issue this statement today in favor of the proposed legislation. Union president Cecil Roberts said that  “Congress should be doing everything possible to not just maintain, but expand voting access and create freer and fairer elections. If only one party is interested in doing that, then so be it.”

I think somebody kicked a hornet's nest and I have a feeling this isn't over.

Remembering a very different kind of rebel on Mother's Day

 

On this Mother's Day, a holiday born in WV, I'm reposting this one about my mother, who passed in 2015. 

The recent decision to change the name of Charleston’s Stonewall Jackson Middle School made me think of my late mother. An alumna of the school, she died in 2015 at 90.

She was a rebel of the decidedly non-Confederate variety. And she would have been ecstatic over the change.

A daughter of the southern West Virginia coalfields, she was born in Beckley and spent her early years in Wyoming County. Her father worked in the mines when work was to be found, which wasn’t often in the 1920s and ’30s. Eventually, he caught a break and found a job at the Union Carbide plant. (Ironically, he’d wind up getting killed on the job before I was born. So it goes.)

He moved the family to Charleston. My mother attended St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, now St. Christopher’s. She graduated from Stonewall and was elected as homecoming queen or something to that effect.

While it lasted, the Carbide job made it possible for her to be the first of her family to attend college. She went to Ohio University in Athens, a place I still like.

That was a good thing. She’d wind up raising two sons and losing two more on a West Virginia teacher’s salary with no child support. My father, a World War II combat veteran in the Pacific Theater, had many charms and virtues, but domesticity didn’t make the cut. Today, he might have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

My mother taught junior high math for about 25 years in Milton, where she was something of an institution.

In “The Prince,” the Renaissance philosopher Machiavelli wrote that it was better for a leader to be feared than loved. In her teaching career, my mother somehow managed to hit the sweet spot. She was generally loved by two or so generations of students, but her temper was legendary.

Although she barely stood 5 feet, 2 inches after a stretch, there was a persistent legend across the years of her picking up a heavy school desk and throwing it across the room. In some versions, there was a student in the desk.

I wouldn’t swear to that. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

Her rebellions were multiple. She was hardcore on women’s rights. I still remember the time as a teenager when I was pontificating about abortion. She calmly said that if it were a safe and legal option, she would have gotten one in her last pregnancy, which didn’t end well. That pretty much shut me up on that subject.

She didn’t bat an eye when my late older brother came out as gay. She loved hanging out with his friends, a fun crew. At the risk of perpetuating a stereotype, both were mad about Broadway musicals, a gene which I apparently didn’t inherit.

She was a hardcore union member as well. In those days, the West Virginia Education Association was the only game in town, but I’m sure she would have been just as happy in the West Virginia Federation of Teachers. In the ’70s, she marched with hundreds of other teachers in Charleston for better pay.

One of my favorite memories of her was during the 1990 teacher strike. She had recently retired and was livid that Cabell County teachers didn’t join the walkout. (Some people started calling it “Scabell.”)

At the time, I was a year into my job with the American Friends Service Committee and had spent a lot of that trying to support United Mine Workers of America and their families during the Pittston strike.

As the smoke poured from her ears, she said, “Why don’t you get some of your union miner friends to come up and picket and shut down Cabell schools?”

I thought that was the best idea ever and got right on it. Alas, the teachers settled the strike and won a historic victory before we could pull that off.

Ahh, the ones that got away ...

She hated several things, one of which she called “narrowmindedness,” a catchall term for her that included racism, religious bigotry, homophobia, science-denying, disapproval of card playing, abstinence from wine and other offenses against humanity.

But if you really wanted her to go off, you just had to mention the Confederacy. She hated it with the vehemence of a Union soldier wounded in a bad place at the battle of Fredericksburg. She hated the bogus narrative of racist chivalry and the “Lost Cause.” She hated the idea of any aristocracy. She hated efforts to romanticize it. She pretty much hated everything about it.

Congratulations to those who fought the good fight for a long-needed change.

And if there is anything beyond this life, and if the dead are still interested in earthly things, somewhere someone I know is doing cartwheels.

(This appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

James Baldwin called it

James Baldwin, 1924-1987. Image by way of wikipedia.

 I recently came across a quote from the late great Black intellectual James Baldwin that really seems to be relevant to the moment we're living it:

"An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger: the stranger’s presence making you the stranger, less to the stranger than to yourself."

It seems to be the case that many Americans who strongly self-identify as "white" these days and in recent years are distressed because the superior position they previously took for granted like a fish does water is no longer unchallenged and are responding with rage and paranoia. 

In an essay titled "On Being White and Other Lies," Baldwin also spoke of those who "have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white." He continued:

"Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers. Because they think they are white, they are looking for, or bombing into existence, stable populations, cheerful natives and cheap labor. Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety. Because they think they are white, however vociferous they may be and however multitudinous, they are as speechless as Lot's wife—looking backward, changed into a pillar of salt."

Recent events have shown where this kind of thinking leads.  

Addicted to caste

The late great African American author and social critic James Baldwin spoke of those who have "brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white." Today we are witnessing many powerful elected officials who are actively trying to do the same thing to American democracy--or what remains of it--by overturning the results of an election they didn't like: for pretty much the same reason.

I just finished reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns. In it, she argues that a racialized caste system, itself a lie with real consequences, is at the root of US society. The illusion of "whiteness" has allowed the meanest person who thinks in those terms to feel superior to those lower down the hierarchy--and to feel outrage at those members of subordinate castes who don't follow the prescribed script. And the feelings of superiority and rage have been backed up by state and non-state violence for centuries.

A cursory look at American history, distant and recent, makes that conclusion hard to argue with. I'm convinced that kind of rage from people who think they are white instead of human explains the appeal to many of the call to "make American great again."

I was especially struck by a recent conversation Wilkerson related in Caste with Taylor Branch, the great historian of the civil rights movement, about what the rage of people who think they are white means for the future of the US. 

Branch pondered this question: "if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?"

I think we have a pretty good idea of the answer to that now.

More of a rant really

I'm still shaking my head by the hypocrisy and...other stuff...shown by some members of the US and WV senate. The majority in the former couldn't be bothered to come up with a workable COVID relief bill for the last two months or so but is racing to stack the Supreme Court deck before the election. 

Of course, WV senator Shelley Moore Capito is all on board, despite saying this four years ago when President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the court:

“Before a Supreme Court justice is confirmed to a lifetime position on the bench, West Virginians and the American people should have the ability to weigh in at the ballot box this November. My position does not change with the naming of a nominee today.”

This time around, she had this to say:

 “I support the choice to move forward with the confirmation process and will consider President Trump’s nominee on her merits as West Virginians would expect me to do. In these trying and polarized times, it is important to exercise our constitutional authority and move forward with the process.”

Then there's this: 17 Republican members of the WV Senate signed on to a letter sent to the presidents of WVU and Marshall University that among other things expressed outrage over WVU football players putting BLM stickers on their helmets. Oh yeah, and the senators referred to Black Lives Matter as a "domestic terrorist group," basically saying the assertion that Black lives indeed matter amounts to hate speech.

Apparently this tantrum kept the senators too busy to express outrage at the death of over 200,000 Americans to COVID due in part to a botched response from the Trump administration.

Can't wait to see what happens next...

 

A different kind of rebel

The recent decision to change the name of Charleston’s Stonewall Jackson Middle School made me think of my late mother. An alumna of the school, she died in 2015 at 90.

She was a rebel of the decidedly non-Confederate variety. And she would have been ecstatic over the change.

A daughter of the southern West Virginia coalfields, she was born in Beckley and spent her early years in Wyoming County. Her father worked in the mines when work was to be found, which wasn’t often in the 1920s and ’30s. Eventually, he caught a break and found a job at the Union Carbide plant. (Ironically, he’d wind up getting killed on the job before I was born. So it goes.)

He moved the family to Charleston. My mother attended St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, now St. Christopher’s. She graduated from Stonewall and was elected as homecoming queen or something to that effect.

While it lasted, the Carbide job made it possible for her to be the first of her family to attend college. She went to Ohio University in Athens, a place I still like.

That was a good thing. She’d wind up raising two sons and losing two more on a West Virginia teacher’s salary with no child support. My father, a World War II combat veteran in the Pacific Theater, had many charms and virtues, but domesticity didn’t make the cut. Today, he might have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

My mother taught junior high math for about 25 years in Milton, where she was something of an institution.

In “The Prince,” the Renaissance philosopher Machiavelli wrote that it was better for a leader to be feared than loved. In her teaching career, my mother somehow managed to hit the sweet spot. She was generally loved by two or so generations of students, but her temper was legendary.

Although she barely stood 5 feet, 2 inches after a stretch, there was a persistent legend across the years of her picking up a heavy school desk and throwing it across the room. In some versions, there was a student in the desk.

I wouldn’t swear to that. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

Her rebellions were multiple. She was hardcore on women’s rights. I still remember the time as a teenager when I was pontificating about abortion. She calmly said that if it were a safe and legal option, she would have gotten one in her last pregnancy, which didn’t end well. That pretty much shut me up on that subject.


She didn’t bat an eye when my late older brother came out as gay. She loved hanging out with his friends, a fun crew. At the risk of perpetuating a stereotype, both were mad about Broadway musicals, a gene which I apparently didn’t inherit.

She was a hardcore union member as well. In those days, the West Virginia Education Association was the only game in town, but I’m sure she would have been just as happy in the West Virginia Federation of Teachers. In the ’70s, she marched with hundreds of other teachers in Charleston for better pay.

One of my favorite memories of her was during the 1990 teacher strike. She had recently retired and was livid that Cabell County teachers didn’t join the walkout. (Some people started calling it “Scabell.”)

At the time, I was a year into my job with the American Friends Service Committee and had spent a lot of that trying to support United Mine Workers of America and their families during the Pittston strike.

As the smoke poured from her ears, she said, “Why don’t you get some of your union miner friends to come up and picket and shut down Cabell schools?”

I thought that was the best idea ever and got right on it. Alas, the teachers settled the strike and won a historic victory before we could pull that off.

Ahh, the ones that got away ...

She hated several things, one of which she called “narrowmindedness,” a catchall term for her that included racism, religious bigotry, homophobia, science-denying, disapproval of card playing, abstinence from wine and other offenses against humanity.

But if you really wanted her to go off, you just had to mention the Confederacy. She hated it with the vehemence of a Union soldier wounded in a bad place at the battle of Fredericksburg. She hated the bogus narrative of racist chivalry and the “Lost Cause.” She hated the idea of any aristocracy. She hated efforts to romanticize it. She pretty much hated everything about it.

Congratulations to those who fought the good fight for a long-needed change.

And if there is anything beyond this life, and if the dead are still interested in earthly things, somewhere someone I know is doing cartwheels.

(This appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Off the rails?

The opening sentence in Leo Tolstoy’s classic Anna Karenina is justly famous: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

I’m not sure that’s true of families, but it might be of countries. According to the World Population Review, the 10 happiest countries (we’re not among them) seem to be democracies with functioning governments, less inequality, economic security for all and high degrees of social trust.

There are all kinds of ways for a country to be unhappy. It’s a scary thing when great societies go off the rails. It’s happened plenty of times but looks different each time.

One that I’ve been thinking about was chronicled by the great ancient Greek historian Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War, which raged from 431 to 404 BC. He was an Athenian general and a participant in the strife.

Ancient Greece was composed of independent city states that often fought each other. Their constitutions varied greatly. They were mostly united by language, religion, shrines and oracles, and festivals such as the Olympic and other PanHellenic games.

Despite their frequent conflicts, many of these city-states or poleis (singular: polis) managed to unite to defeat the mighty Persian army in the 490s-480s BC. Then things started to unravel.

The two most powerful poleis were Athens and Sparta. Athens was a slaveholding democracy in which women were excluded from public life. However, for those who had political rights, it was a pretty direct democracy, with many important offices being filled by lot, almost like drawing names out of a hat.

As the great Afro-Caribbean scholar CLR James put it:

“At its best, in the city state of Athens, the public assembly of all the citizens made all important decisions on such questions as peace or war. They listened to the envoys of foreign powers and decided what their attitude should be to what these foreign powers had to say. They dealt with all serious questions of taxation, they appointed the generals who should lead them in time of war. They organized the administration of the state, appointed officials and kept check on them. The public assembly of all the citizens was the government.”

Sparta, on the other hand, was a militaristic state with a constitution that combined a dual monarchy with something like a senate, popular assembly and a supreme court. Although women citizens had more freedom there, the society was based on the subjugation of the Helots, a conquered population whose forced labor allowed Spartan male citizens to devote themselves almost exclusively to training for war.

Pick your poison.

After the Persian war, Athens founded a defensive alliance against the old foe with many other poleis called the Delian League. Members were supposed to support the league by contributing ships, men and money. Over time, it became more like an Athenian empire extracting monetary tribute from those under its power. This alarmed Sparta and its allies. Armed conflict loomed over the political allegiance of various poleis.

To their credit, the Spartans sought a diplomatic solution, but the Athenians in their arrogance or hubris weren’t having it. Pretty soon, it was on.

What made the war so devastating wasn’t so much the fighting between states; that wasn’t all that unusual. The key factor was the conflict within each polis.

Most were pulled apart by internal factions that more or less mirrored and favored either Sparta or Athens. The Athenians often supported democratic factions, although their methods weren’t necessarily democratic, while Spartans supported aristocratic and oligarchic factions. Foreign intervention often accompanied revolutions or counterrevolutions.

This is where it gets scary. The bitterness of conflicting passions broke down all norms of civility. Here are some lines from Thucydides:

“To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man…Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect….

“Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out”

It didn’t end well. For anybody.

Our situation today is totally different, but still I think of those lines when I contemplate some aspects of the current scene, including an increase in hate crimes; overheated, extremist political rhetoric at the highest levels; emboldened racist groups enjoying their day in the sun; an increase in the influence of paranoid conspiracy theories; social and other media outlets distorting news and spewing propaganda; the rejection of science; demonizing those with different views; and rampant inequality in the midst of a global pandemic.

I’m hoping that what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” will kick in soon. Otherwise, a line from a late period Bob Dylan song seems appropriate: “it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”

(This appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Is 2020 over yet?

As the country reels from the events of the last several days, I thought I'd share a few items. First,

here's a statement from the board of the WV Center on Budget and Policy, a group AFSC helped to found more than 10 years ago and one of our closest partners. I'm proud to have been a board member off and on from the beginning:

In Solidarity for Racial Justice

Dear friends,

Like all of you, our staff and board at the WV Center on Budget and Policy have been horrified by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless other Black men and women. These events, occurring against the backdrop of a pandemic that disproportionately impacts Black people and other communities of color, are not an accident. They are embedded in a system of social and economic policies designed to deny freedom and equality to all. It is up to all of us to confront these injustices and build a future where everyone can thrive.

We stand in solidarity and support of those raising their voices and protesting across the country against police and state violence.

Racism is not only individual acts of bigotry and violence. It isn’t just one bad apple here and there. It is rooted in our structures of government and society. Its effects can be seen in racial disparities in policing and incarceration rates, the racial wealth gap, and increased rates of coronavirus infection and hospitalization among communities of color. For those reasons, it won’t be enough to win hearts and minds. We need meaningful, structural policy change. As we rebuild post-COVID 19, we must do so intentionally with an equitable, anti-racist response that is proportionate to the scale of the problem.

We stand in solidarity with Black-led organizations across our state including Our Future WV, CARE, NAACP, Black Lives Matter WV, and the Partnership for African American Churches. We will continue to follow the leadership of these groups to guide our research and policy agenda in this space and reaffirm our commitment to serve as allies in the fight for racial equity and justice alongside them.

Black lives matter.

Signed,

The Board of Directors and Staff of the WV Center on Budget and Policy

I thought this was a particularly good time to share it in light of the idiotic and racist remarks made today by WV Governor Jim Justice, who said today that any president would be welcome in West Virginia but "maybe not Barack Obama." The governor attempted to hide his racism by referring to the myth of "Obama's war on coal," which was in fact mostly driven by market forces.

I find it interesting that he didn't call out other presidents whose administration witnessed a decline of coal jobs. That list would include Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Trump.

Finally, in case you missed it, here's a link to an op-ed of mine on white supremacy by way of Moby-Dick.

Here we go again...

It's been nearly 10 years since I made a pilgrimage to Okinawa. When I was there, I made friends with a freelance writer who likes to ping me on days when some weird news story breaks from West Virginia...

...which is to say, we've been in touch a lot.

The best such days are when it's just something weird, like maybe a real X Files-type story. The worst are those days when WV makes the national news over some acts of bigotry and/or craven groveling to exploitative corporations.

The last year or so has been an X Files bust and a bigotry/groveling boom.

Where are Mothman, Bat Boy, and the Braxton County monster when you need them?

Let's start with groveling. Top of my list in that department was the time when a representative of a business group told legislators that we didn't need to update safe water standards since West Virginians are heavier, drink less water and eat less fish.And won the day.

For real.

That moment was another example of why I want to update the state motto from "Mountaineers Are Always Free" to "You Can't Make This **** Up."

But it's been a real banner year for bigotry. We had the state delegate who made a joke about drowning his children if they turned out to be LGBTQ. We had the Islamophobic outburst at the state capitol. We now have a public library board about to consider banning a non-sexually explicit LGBTQ-friendly children's book.

You can probably guess where I'm going with this.

I agree with what WV Senator Joe Manchin said in the wake of the publication of a photo of corrections trainees raising their hands in an apparent Nazi salute: "This is not the West Virginia I know or grew up in."

But things have changed here over the last few years. Dramatically. And, while the outbreaks are by no means confined to West Virginia,they seem to be occurring more frequently here.

It makes me think of the early phases of an epidemic. In Albert Camus' novel The Plague, a parable about the rise of fascism and Nazism that I've often quoted, the first signs begin when dead rats start showing up in the Algerian city of Oran.

Nobody noticed that much at first. Then it was just a nuisance. But pretty soon, it wasn't just rats any more.

I keep going back to something one of the heroes of that novel said about the epidemic:

"All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences."

The book ends with a warning against being too complacent about such metaphorical outbreaks. The narrator cautions that:

"...the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city."

Remembering John Brown's raid

Today marks one of the hinges of American history, one that occurred in what is now West Virginia.

On the evening of Oct. 16, 1859, 160 years ago, abolitionist John Brown and 18 armed followers, black and white, left their hideout at a farm in Maryland to raid the U.S. armory at Harpers Ferry. Three were left behind as a rear guard.

Brown believed the raid would spark a slave rebellion that would eventually spread throughout the South.

He was a textbook case of what 19th Century psychology would call monomania, meaning the extreme preoccupation of a person with one overriding idea.

Think Captain Ahab, in Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” who was obsessed with the desire to avenge himself on the White Whale. Brown’s White Whale was slavery.

Born in 1800 to an anti-slavery family, he crisscrossed the country on various business ventures, all of which failed. He married twice and fathered 20 children, several of whom would be sacrificed for his cause.

His determination to fight slavery to the death crystalized in 1837 with the murder by a mob in Illinois of Elijah Lovejoy, who published an anti-slavery paper.

At a meeting discussing Lovejoy’s murder at a church in Hudson, Ohio, Brown stood up and declared, “Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!”

When the controversy over slavery’s future in the Western territories grew violent, Brown and his allies, including his sons, joined the fight. His methods could be excessive. One night, in May 1856, Brown and his crew raided the homes of five men associated with the local pro-slavery movement and hacked them to death with swords.

This was just one episode in the violence that gave the place the name of “Bleeding Kansas,” with much of the bleeding done by antislavery settlers.

Brown believed that the mountains of what is now our Eastern Panhandle would be the perfect place to strike a fatal blow against slavery.

He said that, “These mountains are the basis of my plan ... God has given the strength of the hills to freedom; they were placed here for emancipation of the negro race; they are full of natural forts, where one man for defense will be equal to one hundred for attack; they are full also of good hiding-places, where large numbers of brave men could be concealed, baffle and elude pursuit for a long time.”

However, when it came time for the actual attack on Harpers Ferry, everything that could have gone wrong for Brown and his party did. Ten of his men died in the raid, along with six others, including Hayward Shepherd, an African-American baggage handler for the railroad. Most of Brown’s party not killed in the raid were captured by soldiers led by future Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and J.E.B. “Jeb” Stuart. They were later hanged.

Included in the raiding party were three free African-Americans: Anthony Copeland, Lewis Leary and Osborn Perry Anderson. Anderson was the only one to survive the ordeal. He would later join the Union Army during the Civil War. Dangerfield Newby was a former slave, while Shields Green had escaped slavery in South Carolina.

Newby’s case was particularly tragic. His wife, Harriet, and children were still enslaved and in danger of being sold south. In a letter that year, she wrote, “I want you to buy me as soon as possible, for if you do not get me some body else will.”

Newby joined Brown’s group after attempts to buy his family’s freedom failed. He was shot. His body was mutilated by locals. His family was sold shortly thereafter.

Green, nicknamed “Emperor,” met Brown in the company of Frederick Douglass. While Douglass declined to join the venture, Green said, “I believe I’ll go with the old man.”

Douglass would later say that Green “was not one to shrink from hardships or dangers. He was a man of few words, and his speech was singularly broken; but his courage and self-respect made him quite a dignified character.”

Green was captured and convicted but didn’t say a word during his trial. On the day of Brown’s hanging, Green sent word to Brown that he didn’t regret his fate and was glad to have fought with him. Green himself was hanged shortly after.

Brown told the court that, if he had done the same things to help the wealthy and powerful, he would have been called a hero. Because he chose to act on behalf of the “despised poor,” he faced death. He said, “if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!”

The most fascinating thing to me about Brown is that he failed at everything but succeeded in his main goal of pushing the controversy over slavery to the point of no return, like the soldier in the Bob Dylan song who “won the war after losing every battle.”

Over the years, Brown has been called a martyr, a madman, a terrorist and more. I think of him as some kind of meteor forged by God or fate or chance, a monkey wrench destined to sabotage the machinery of slavery.

On this day, as the great African-American poet Langston Hughes wrote, “Perhaps you will remember John Brown.”

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

A tweet-sized rant

The latest bad news to break from the US border (that would be the one about the racist and misogynistic  Facebook group set up by past and current border patron agents in case another story just as bad breaks in the meantime) reminds me of a quote attributed to poet Maya Angelou:

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

I believe. Although it's not the first time.

The better angels of our nature

At least 500 people attended West Virginia's first Black Lives Matter rally Sunday at the state capitol in Charleston. There were some apprehensions going in to this. Rumors spread of armed counter-protesters, especially after controversy surrounding the statue of Stonewall Jackson on capitol grounds, which somehow got added to the mix. BLM organizers took pains to stress that the rally had nothing to do with the statue.

People connected with the event prepared for various contingencies, most of which fortunately didn't occur. Some attended an AFSC nonviolence training. Others were trained as marshals, escorts, legal observers and first aid providers. Several clergy attended as peacemakers and de-escalators. 

Two young African-American women, Takeiya Smith and Gabrielle Chapman, took the lead in organizing the event. Speakers included Adrienne Belafonte Biesemeyer, daughter of Harry Belefonte, who countered misconceptions of the movement: “The phrase Black Lives Matter means we matter also, not we matter exclusively, but also.” 

There were a small number of peaceful counter-protesters at the Stonewall statue and a pretty big militia contingent. Those who came on capitol grounds (see above) were unarmed. However, I'm told that those on the perimeter were packing pretty heavily.Fortunately, the militia guys were pretty laid back, which is a plus. There was a strong police presence, but overall it was calm.

As was the case when Trump came to WV, I was a legal observer under the umbrella of the ACLU. It's a role I enjoy as it gives me an excuse to attend rallies without having to chant (outside of Buddhist monasteries or high church rituals, I dislike the practice). Luckily, there was nothing much to observe.

I'm pleased to note how peaceful it was and how people safely went home without incident when it was over. It was reassuring to see that even in times as weird and tense as these West Virginians are still pretty nice. What Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature" prevailed at least this time.

There was good media coverage.  Here is some from the Gazette-Mail, WV MetroNews, and WV Public Broadcasting.

It was a great event. I have a feeling we'll be doing a lot more of this kind of thing for the foreseeable future.

No two sides

In case you missed it, here's WV Senator Joe Manchin's statement on recent events in Charlottesville:

"I condemn in the strongest possible way the hatred and bigotry carried out by white supremacists in Charlottesville. This hateful ideology has always contradicted the very foundation our country was built on and has no place in our society and our communities today. There are not two sides to the story when the other side is Nazi’s, the KKK and white supremacists. The President should not leave any ambiguity about these hate groups - there aren’t two sides, there is only right and wrong."

Too bad some other people didn't get the memo.

Make it a double

There were two Front Porch podcasts this week, including one I missed. I think both are worth a listen. Here's one featuring Cpl. Errol Randle about how the Charleston Police Department is fighting racism. And then there's a really good one featuring research Joan Williams on what liberals may not get about the white working class. I hope you check em out.

Some days are better than others

West Virginia senator Joe Manchin has been in the news a bit lately, the most recent example (to my knowledge) being speculation that Trump may tap him for energy secretary. This may or may not explain his stated support for the appointment of Jeff Sessions, whose record on racial issues is...let's just say out there.

As if all that wasn't enough, he has also been widely quoted as saying he'd "beat the hell out of" anyone he found burning a flag. I wonder if he feels the same way about hate groups that hide behind the flag?