I am only one...

Look out!

In the spring of 1872 William Blackmore saw buffalo all along the Arkansas River. The following autumn the whole country was whitened, he wrote, by "bleached and bleaching bones." No buffalo were to be seen until deep within Indian Territory. The market hunter had arrived. This hunter was helped in his business by the coming of the railroads. They provided an easy means for getting buffalo hides and tongues to eager eastern markets. Most hunters were "hard cases" from the East and knew little about the plains or about caring for buffalo hides. Five buffalo died for every hide that reached market.

In 1873 merchants engaged in the business and organized the hide trade. A professional hunter, picked for his shooting ability and his knowledge of bison, now led the standard hide party. His accomplices were usually two skinners and a cook, and their goal was to find a herd and make a stand. A stand was achieved by getting within thirty or forty yards of a herd and shooting a buffalo in the heart. It fell in its tracks and died without disturbing the others. In this way the animals could be shot as they fed. One report tells of 112 buffalo killed within a two hundred-yard area in forty-five minutes by a single hunter. Another successful method was to pick off the bison at a river as they came in for water. Between 1872 and 1874 about 4.5 million buffalo were killed. Before the end of the 1870s the great herds vanished.

Their disappearance also marked the end for the gray wolf. The largest canine in North America, the wolf had depended on the herds for food. With the buffalo gone, the wolf turned to livestock, and massive predator-control programs hastened its disappearance from the plains. By the time of the 1889 Land Run into the Unassigned Lands of Oklahoma Territory, only fifty-seven years after Washington Irving pursued bear, turkey, buffalo, and wild horses near present Norman, all these animals were gone. They had given way to farms, ranches, railroads, industry, and the promise of tomorrow.

- Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History & Culture Oklahoma Historical Society

Imagine the buffalo, secure in their vast numbers, eating sweet prairie grass. There’s an unexpected noise, and a buffalo quietly sags to the ground. “Huh,” another says, “look at that. Tom died.” The other buffalo glance over, shrug their great buffalo shoulders, and go on eating. Another noise. Another quietly drops to the ground. “Wow,” says the observant one. “Now George died.” A few look; most just keep cropping the grass.*

And so it goes. As long as nobody gets excited, the herd can be wiped out. They could trample the hunter into the dirt if they rushed him. Their size and strength and speed are of no use to them, because they never fully realize they have a problem.

I’m suggesting that average Americans today are in something like the buffalo’s position. We have been losing to sharpshooters picking us off --- a bankruptcy here, a foreclosure there --- a little of this, a little of that. The taxes we pay which could provide good schools and hospitals, bridge or highway repairs, support medical research and development of clean alternative energy sources, and more --- instead go to bail out corporations which have gambled recklessly to increase their profits. Tax dollars go to war profiteers who have cut corners and exaggerated costs to enrich themselves while our young men and women face the terrible risks of battle.

The same corporations which are picking us off here are also making huge profits overseas. When they bribe foreign government officials to allow the corporations to walk off with that nation's resources instead of protecting them, the resentment toward Americans grows.

To protect the corporations’ investments against that resentment, our government has built huge military bases around the world (more profits for other corporations that built the bases). The people of those countries see their poverty increase, and their rulers, who have cooperated with the corporate piracy, propped up and armed against the people with American weapons. Little wonder that enmity to America has risen around the world. When enmity toward the US increasing, as individuals we are more and more at risk in the world, and we’re told we must give up freedoms for our own safety.

We are being picked off. We need to stop saying, “Huh, Fred died” --- “Huh, our neighbor’s house is being foreclosed” --- “Huh, another corporation has to be bailed out” --- “Huh, there just isn’t enough money for good health care” --- and start looking for the hunters.

First, the classic rule: Follow the money.

Second: Remember, war is hugely profitable for some.

That’s a good beginning. After that we have to pay attention, and stop assuming that we’re too busy and somebody else will take care of things.

One more thing: Honest vote-counts --- like the sweet prairie grass, something we thought we could always count on --- are not likely to happen without brave and determined activists getting on the matter NOW.

---

*the buffalo's speech "Huh, George died" is not original with me. I remember hearing it some 30 years ago, but can't remember whose it was and couldn't find it online.

Playing the Race Card

Race has been a huge and ugly issue in American life ever since the first European immigrants arrived. Although the immigrants accepted help from Indians, few if any regarded natives as equals and fellow human beings. The long process of taking land from the peoples who had lived on it for thousands of years was rationalized by assumptions that these were not civilized people because they did not have a European-style civilization. African slaves began arriving very soon, and "civilized" people justified their enslavement by clinging to beliefs about the inherent inferiority of dark-skinned people.

Almost everybody finds it comforting to have somebody to look down on, and darker skin has been an accepted stigma through much of the world for millenia. After using this standard for centuries, it's little wonder that a historically-very-new revolution in thinking remains fraught with uneasiness, especially when it's complicated by uncomfortable questions about whether, or how, those harmed by past and present bias should be "made whole."

Most of us with "white" skin wish that we could just pretend none of it ever happened. Seems like a simple solution --- we'll just evaluate everybody on the basis of their behavior and abilities today, and not get into awkwardness about what went before. Unfortunately that approach falls far short of fairness, because it doesn't consider the real situation. It ignores the fact that for a large proportion of African-Americans, slavery did not end with the Civil War; the sharecropper system perpetuated it beyond the 19th century. A huge proportion of Black farmers, however hard-working and competent, were little more able to control their own fortune as share-croppers than if they had still been considered property. Jim Crow laws extended severe restrictions past the mid-20th century, de facto segregation in bad housing and bad schools keep the negative effects operant right up to the current day. Only the most extraordinary individuals emerge from circumstances like that ready to compete with the more privileged; the average person will carry a heavy handicap for life.

This is the setting in which the phrase "playing the race card" has arisen. It's a phrase that offers some comfort to those who want to pretend discrimination never happened or is long gone. As commonly used, the phrase means it is inappropriate to notice race at all.

Perhaps we'll reach a time when that's valid. We simply aren't there yet.

In a culture that had moved beyond racial bias, there could be a real use for the phrase "playing the race card." It would apply to all the subtle invitations to bias --- the use of words and phrases that encourage resurrection of ugly old beliefs. When news stories about a candidate with African-American heritage use words like "pimp" in their headlines (as I saw yesterday about Obama) --- that is playing the race card, however the story below the headline tries to disguise it as hip phrasing. More subtle accusations that he is "presumptuous," "brash," "slick" also stimulate racist thinking.

In a bias-free culture, the phrase also could fit those occasions --- and they do sometimes arise --- when a person who lost a fair competition claims unjustifiably that he was the victim of racial bias, or when he implies that legitimate criticism or critique is motivated by bias.

Today, we see the phrase used far more often against those seriously trying to address and resolve racial issues, and seldom against those trying to exacerbate them. For that reason, I'm going to avoid using it --- and to examine my own attitudes with great care when I find myself tempted to use it.

For now, I think we should hold a rebuttable assumption that anyone using the phrase "playing the race card" is trying to evoke racial bias, or trying to discourage honest examination and resolution of America's terrible legacy.

Listen to Great-great-great-great-great Grandmother..

A story on SFGate this morning tells of a Paris typesetter, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who invented a way to make a visible record of sounds in 1860 (17 years before Edison's first recording).  Scott apparently had no expectation that the sounds could ever be recreated from his picture; his writings indicate just an expectation that they could be read as a visible representation of sound. 

But now Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicists have converted that image back into the voice of the young woman who sang a few words of a song all that time ago.   It's believed to be the oldest recording of a human voice, and we can listen to it right now --- a slightly scratchy recording (well duh) but quite recognizable and individual.

http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune.mp3

Listening to this is for me an exceptional experience of time travel, a sense of immediacy of contact with a person I might be passing as she absent-mindedly sang to herself while sorting clothes.   A fold in time.

Many issues to choose from

In tackling the problems facing our world right now, there's plenty of work to go around, and the efforts are not harmed by some specialization.  If I am talking about gender issues and you are focussed on racial bias --- or if I am talking about education and you are talking about environment --- we are not enemies.  There are enough of us to work on many fronts at once; there are enough fronts to keep all of us busy.  We can cooperate; we can each work on the issue that most stirs our energy at the moment; we can still understand that we are allies in making things better.

If we begin to fight each other over which is the single most important problem, we are wasting energy that could be used to address various problems.  We are also helping those who don't want to acknowledge the problems and don't want to see them solved.

Two very common arguments that serve the purpose of not solving problems are these:

(1)  If the person trying to address the issue is a member of the community (or nation) where the problem exists, the line is "How can you be so disloyal as to attack and criticize your own people."  If the person trying to help is not from the same community/nation, the line is "You are an outsider, you don't belong here, what business is it of yours, why don't you go work on what's wrong in your own home."

(2)  Regardless of whether the problem-solvers are local or not, the line is "How can you even talk about [this problem] when you haven't said anything about [some other problem]." 

Variations of these two arguments show up repeatedly.  They are virtually always distractions from the attempt to solve the problem, though often those who use them aren't consciously aware of that intention.   A good answer may be to describe the solution we're trying to achieve and ask, "Can you agree that it would be better if we achieved this change?  if it would be better, why fight over who helps to make it better?  why say that some other unrelated problem has to be solved before we can work on this one?"

We are neither first nor last

As I've grown up and grown older, I've gradually realized that I had greatly underestimated the generations that went before me, and had believed too much in the speeches in my youth that said our generation was the one that experienced the world in an unprecedented way and could make unprecedented changes. 

I think now that those speakers were trying to inspire us, to give us energy to step out and take action, and in that they succeeded --- for a time.  Many of us set out to change our country, change the world, make things better for all time.  (And many of us stuck to that commitment and are still making the effort in many different ways.)

But too many, I think, believed the exhortations as promises --- promises that we would bring about justice for all, would eradicate poverty and hunger, would end war, would transform our government into a fully effective, fully responsive instrument to maintain all those changes and see to the upkeep on a peaceful world (so then we could go play).  Our efforts made great gains, in civil rights, in ending the Vietnam war, in improving health and social conditions.  Then new problems arose, government continued to work imperfectly, and improved communications brought home to us all that had not been positively transformed.

And many of us felt betrayed and let down.  Too many of us became cynical and hopeless, gave up not just on the idea that our generation would fix it all for all time --- but on the idea that it could ever get better at all.

Over the years, as I've read more history, biographies, first person accounts of past events, I've increasingly realized that my generation really wasn't especially unusual.   We were young; we were hopeful; we meant well, and we had energy that could be dedicated to great causes.   We also had a wry skepticism about old truths, a willingness to cast away convention and be forthright about sex, relationships, all the old rules that took far too much energy from activism and joy and the full experience of life.

Well, what a surprise when I read what the creative youth of the 1920s had to say at their time --- or of the 1910s, or the 1890s, or the 1850s.  The language was a little different, but the ideas and emotions and sense of uniqueness were very familiar.

Now I think that it's important to acknowledge the efforts and the similarities of those who went before --- to learn from them, to honor them, and importantly, to know that progress has come in waves, in tides, with setbacks between.  We need to take the long view.   Achieving human justice is an evolutionary process, and not achieved in one step.  Look back a century, two centuries, eight --- and we can see that for most people, things are better.  The temporarily receding wave, the step back, is not a final loss; the opportunity  for progress arises again and again. 

I think of what I was taught in First Aid class about the Heimlich maneuver:  make each thrust with the expectation that this will be the one that succeeds.  And then, if it didn't, take a moment to position yourself, and make the next with the expectation that it will be the one that succeeds.  (Unlike First Aid, in social activism it's also ok to take a break before we're exhausted, so we're able to return to the task fresh!) 

What does your job cost you?

Last post, I proposed that democracy isn't a place, where we can say we have arrived and now reside comfortably.  Rather it is a tool which we must use regularly and thoughtfully if it is to do us any good.   It follows that being an effective citizen in a democracy is time-consuming.

It's hard --- in recent decades  increasingly hard --- to avoid letting our amusements, our jobs, and the vital concerns of parenting, friends, and family, take up all of our attention and efforts, leaving nothing for the demands of being active participants in the running of the system.  If we let this happen, we run the risk that the fabric in which we (and our children, families, friends, and jobs) exist will be shaped by others to their benefit, not ours.

And this has happened.  Over the past 50 years, America has lost its fairly flat distribution of wealth and very large and reasonably secure middle class.  [On this subject I highly recommend Kevin Phillips' book Wealth and Democracy.]  Increasingly, the middle class has lost power and security, while the wealthy control a larger and larger percentage of all income, with the extremely rich prospering even more.  Most of the middle class households that have more or less held their own, have done so by becoming two-income households. 

America's vaunted "increased productivity" has come in large part at the cost of leisure time and parenting time among the middle and working classes.   Many parents refused to cut back on parenting; as women moved into the workplace, men took a more active part in parenting, and in some ways both have benefitted in depth of experience.  But a prospering middle-class family with two working parents is relatively little better off than an equivalent family was in the past with one working parents; more gadgets, but probably less security.  The intensity and pace of work life have increased greatly.  The sucking sound we hear may be the energy level of working people going into their jobs.  The economic benefits have gone to the top echelons of wealth.

That transfer of wealth has been noticed, at least to some degree.   Few seem to be noticing what goes along with it:  less time and energy for ordinary people to pay close attention to what's going on in governing, or to do much about what they do notice.  More power as well as more wealth for those at the top.

Improving conditions for workers is not only an issue of fairness.  Balancing the highly unequal distribution of income is not only a matter of economic justice.  Both would make it more possible for ordinary people to use the tool Democracy more effectively.