Reproductive Health, Public Health and a Country in Crisis

 

The first wave of reaction to the Supreme Court decision declaring Roe V. Wade null and void--the shock and anger and their articulation in the media as well as on the streets--focused on what seemed to be the central issue of access to medical abortion.  There was also the historical shock of seeing a more broadly granted right taken away--something that hasn't happened in America, and which portends more in the future.  (Other rights have been limited by court decisions, but I don't think any have been just totally taken away before.)

But this week I'm seeing a real health care crisis being described, because of the lengths to which Rabid Right states are taking their anti-abortion lawmaking.  I've heard this abortion debate for decades, but only recently have I heard abortion opponents refuse flexibility and exceptions, such as for rape victims and to safeguard the lives and health of women.  Now ignoring both is standard, and it is leading to an array of nightmarish scenarios, some already being realized, such as the ten year old rape victim who had to transport across state lines for an abortion.  Among those scenarios is criminalizing miscarriage.  There are also medical conditions, some of them fairly common, which threaten the mother's life if she has to seek care that may include an abortion at some distance in time as well as place.

For example, Elizabeth Spiers has detailed some of the medical hazards in her badly titled New York Times opinion piece, "The myth that restricting abortion rights won't affect the rich."  David Hackney, also in the Times, is more direct: "I'm a High Risk Obstetrician, and I'm Terrified For My Patients."  Columnist Jennifer Rubin devoted one of her Washington Post columns to this topic.  I'm not including links because unless you've got a subscription (which I don't, on this computer) you can't access them.  Nor can you access the pertinent if again badly titled Times oped by Pamela Paul: "The Far Right and Far Left agree on one thing: women don't count.")

But accessible to anyone is a rundown of fundamental medical misconceptions that add to the tragedy of these laws in Science News, which ends with a pertinent quote from a doctor, that these laws "place priority of a potential life over the actual life of the person sitting in front of me." It is this prioritizing that completely destroys any semblance of a moral position behind these laws, because they are not only willing but mandating the possible destruction of one life for a potential other life. This is not morality; it is insanity.  Anti-abortion is murder. 

Also: NPR exposes the impact on doctors, and Pew Charitable Trust summarizes threats to health, including public health.  These are direct threats on the lives, health and well-being of pregnant women and women in general, but also real threats to families, especially existing children, as well as fathers and potential fathers, and other elements of society.  And if that doesn't get your attention, also to businesses.

The result of this decision is a marked increase in human suffering, which is also a result of the prior decision on a law limiting guns, and a decision afterwards limiting regulation of climate crisis-causing pollution.  Because of the Court-approved insane limitations on gun laws, a toddler in Highland Park, Illinois, who got separated from his parents at a Fourth of July celebration, will never see them again.  His life is changed forever. They were gunned down by an assault weapon by an unseen shooter at distance.  Who seemingly did it, like the Supreme Court, just because he could.

That in essence is also the outcome of our ongoing failure to fully support a robust public health system in this country, more than symbolized by the ongoing absurdity of simply ignoring the current wave of Covid variant infections, just because we're tired of them, and especially of all the conflict over confronting them.  Now we don't have to worry about people dying of Covid--we're just going to ignore them.

In this case, both parties share blame.  Even here in California, the huge buckets of money sent to the states and then to municipalities because of Covid seem to have been spent on everything except one pertinent place: on public health.  That helps the cowardly process of not dealing with the reality, because if you don't gather the facts, how do you know?  Plausible deniability!  So all the states, red and blue, have turned yellow on Covid.

I always have a focus on the overriding threat of our time, the climate crisis.  And if I were to design a scenario for a society unequipped to address either the causes or effects of globally fatal climate disruption, I would do pretty much everything we are now doing. Within the U.S., I would certainly fracture public health systems so they would be unable to cope with all the challenges--the diseases, the results of excessive heat both physical and mental, etc.--of much hotter summers, of fires, of much more volatile weather--tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, days of downpours, years of drought-- that are already in the cards and in fact happening at this very moment, because for the thirty years we've known about it, we haven't effectively addressed the climate crisis.  And all that is now very likely to get very much worse.

I would further weaken healthcare by giving it impossible yet easily avoidable distractions, like trying to treat pregnant women while staying out of jail.  And of course, impossible if easily avoidable barriers, like the too-often inhuman demands and expense of medical insurance and healthcare for profit. 

I would do all these things and more to create as much societal conflict and chaos as possible, and at the very least force people to devote huge amounts of time, energy, attention and resources on coping with and maybe even fixing these otherwise needless and insanely destructive threats and changes.  Anything to keep everyone's attention away from the single enormous threat to human civilization and planetary life. 

And while a congressional committee lays out the evidence of an insurrection and attempted dictatorship founded upon fraud, I would design an election to put back in power the party that supports that fraud and that insurrection, and happens also to be completely incompetent and uninterested in solving actual problems.  Which is what the polls say is likely to happen.  A lot of this is happening because good people have not done enough, have not voted to maintain the integrity of the Supreme Court, and have not sufficiently valued the future over the conveniences of the present.  But not all of it has happened yet.  There are still votes to be cast this November.      

In Action: You'd Do the Same For Me in Pittsburgh

On Wednesday, another three funerals of Jews shot and killed as they prayed in the Tree of Life synagogue.  On Tuesday, a demonstration to protest Homegrown Hitler's racist language and policies, which only accelerated on Wednesday as election day draws near.  He also lied about the size of this "small" demonstration.

Money has been raised in Pittsburgh for the families of the victims, including more than $200,000 from the Muslim community.

The murderer, Robert Bowers, posted on a rabid right social media site shortly before he attacked the synagogue:"HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I'm going in.

HIAS is the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which was founded in 1881 to aid Jewish refugees.  In 1975, the US government asked this nonprofit organization to help in settling refugees from the Vietnam War.  Since then, it has aided and advocated for refugees around the world.  It has helped to resettle more than four million people.  This is "you'd do the same for me" in action.

HIAS has its main offices in Maryland and New York, with an international presence.  But Pittsburgh has an affiliate organization--the Jewish Family and Community Services--and HIAS sponsored a National Refugee Shabbat in October, in which the Tree of Life synagogue participated.

Bowers followed the lead of Homegrown Hitler and Fox News in believing that the caravan of refugees now in Mexico fleeing oppression in central America presents a danger to this country, because it is comprised of violent criminals out to kill American citizens.  Rabid Right racists claim leftist Jews sponsor the caravan.

These baseless charges were amplified Wednesday by an official Republican campaign ad on the caravan that CNN labels as racist.  Meanwhile, early voting in a number of states has set records.

HIAS has also experienced a flood of donations.  Here is their website, where donations can be made.  I've made mine.

You'd Do the Same for Me

The Squirrel Hill community stands together at Murray & Forbes

So far the echoes from the gunshots that killed 11 in Squirrel Hill continue to reverberate and dominate.  I've begun hearing personal stories of current and former residents, and media stories bare the unspeakable and the unbearably poignant.

The Washington Post notes, concerning the shooter Bowers:

"Rep. Mike Doyle, a Democrat representing the Pittsburgh area, said FBI Special Agent in Charge Bob Jones told elected leaders Saturday evening that Bowers possessed 21 firearms. The tally included the semiautomatic assault-style rifle and three handguns found in the synagogue, as well as a shotgun that Doyle said authorities recovered from Bowers’s vehicle. Other weapons were found in his apartment."

CNN reproduced the comments of a first generation American Jew whose parents were caught in the Nazi horror called the Holocaust:

"We all felt the same thing: how glad we were that our parents weren't alive to see this happen in America; how we always felt safe as Jews living in the US and going to services, and how we must be the voices for our parents to make change and hold those who incite hatred accountable..."

USA Today described one of many memorial gestures and events in Pittsburgh:

Jewish girls from a nearby Chabad orthodox school had walked to the Tree of Life Synagogue, prayer books in their hands and blue ribbons tied to their hair and wrists, to sing. They harmonized in Hebrew about how Jews have prevailed despite persecution through generations. They wrapped each other in their arms. They swayed. Their music, from the Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith, told of a time free of war and full of peace.

The story quoted one of the young participants:“I don’t want to be hated,” Talia said. She wore blue bows in each of her pony tails and a ribbon around her neck.“I know how it feels to be hated, and I don’t want that for other people.”

It is a dark moment in America.  When I started calling the resident of the White House by the name of Homemade Hitler, and illustrated posts with photos from Nazi Germany, something like this was part of what could be foreseen.  When the highest official in the country foments hate and incites violence, it focuses violent feelings and gives them permission to be expressed.  This is, as it was for Hitler, a source of his political power.

But the contrast is not only, not chiefly, with songs of peace and love.  The contrast is with a certain kind of civility, that was defined for me in Squirrel Hill more than 20 years ago.

I was reminded of that moment again when I read accounts of most of those who were murdered as they prayed in the Tree of Life synagogue.  I've since learned that the degree of separation between me and several of them is no more than two. All of them were old enough that I may have passed them on Murray Avenue, held a door open for one at the Post Office, or been at an event with others.  A couple sound familiar, though I didn't know any of them well.

My lesson back then also came from a stranger, though not any of these.  It came from a black man who worked at the Eat & Park on Murray Avenue, half a block from the corner with Forbes Avenue where the first memorial vigils took place.

That was my air-conditioned refuge in the sweltering summers of the early 90s, and at any time I could talk myself into a piece of their strawberry pie.  But mostly they kept filling my coffee cup, as I sat at the counter or a table, reading and writing.  For a few years at least it was my clean, well-lighted place.

On one such afternoon I knocked a pen off my table as I read.  Before I could bend down to get it, a black man who worked there had picked it up and returned it to me.  I thanked him.  He was already on his way when he said, softly and simply but with quiet meaning, "you'd do the same for me."

I'd heard the phrase before (just as I've told this story before) but at that moment it hit me with particular force.  I realized that it was nothing less than  a summary of the social compact, of human relationships among strangers.  The Golden Rule doesn't quite cut it--it's a formula that is essentially self-centered.  "You'd do the same for me" says much more.

It is not only a moral formula but a statement of faith, not only in the principles of kindness and helping as automatic responses, but faith that this principle is shared.  It's the faith of every day.  It's how a complex human society works--perhaps the only way it can work.

Reading what others said about the victims suggests to me that they all shared this faith.  It was a basis of their daily lives in the Squirrel Hill community and beyond.  It was certainly something I felt present every day on Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill.

Political action is necessary, voting on Tuesday is necessary, symbols of community solidarity are necessary.  But so is the civility made real by the daily assumption of "you'd do the same for me."

Civility isn't always polite silence, and it isn't ignoring the realities of politically or economically motivated violence--let alone ignoring the reality of evil.  It isn't only a live and let live tolerance, though this itself is clearly endangered.  The only way people in this country are going to get through the challenges of the next decades is if "you'd do the same for me" is the motivating center of  how we live with each other.

Tree of Life

We are heartbroken.  Our thoughts and prayers are with you.  It's what everybody says after the all-too familiar catastrophes, especially mass shootings.

To some extent they mean it, of course.  But this time for me, for Margaret and me, it's more personal than usual.  Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh was once our home.

The candlelight gathering Saturday night after a heavily armed anti-Jewish ultra right bigot shot up a Squirrel Hill synagogue during services, was held on the corner of Murray Avenue and Forbes Avenue, a spot I know very well.  My heart is there with them now.

News stories rightly emphasize that many Jews live in Squirrel Hill, the historic center of the Jewish community well beyond Pittsburgh, and at least some stories also mention that it is now a very diverse area, as it has been for decades.  I'm sure many of the people at the memorial were not Jews but there to bear witness to solidarity with their neighbors.

I lived in Squirrel Hill in the 1990s.  Margaret and her children lived near its northern edge for longer than that, close to Wilkins Avenue where 11 people were shot dead and others injured.  I lived at its southern border, but at the foot of the steep hill that forms Murray Avenue, the neighborhood's commercial center.

Though it is likely I have some Jewish ancestors, I was raised Catholic. I have never been more comfortable in a neighborhood than I was in Squirrel Hill.  I walked up Murray Avenue, and then up Forbes nearly every day.  People in Arcata are courteous.  People in Squirrel Hill were friendly, in a personal way.

A CBS affiliate story included a brief interview with the rabbi who until this year ran the Tree of Life, where the gunman attacked:

Meghan Schiller: Did you ever as rabbi think that you were gonna have to deal with this?

 Diamond: “I thought about it all the time, I have to tell you. When I was there, in the back of my mind, I always have the thought of something like this happening and what I would do, unfortunately, because of the world we live in.”

Or at least the country we live in.  The times we live in.

Save the Children

Tuesday ended with the AP report that begins:

The Trump administration is reportedly operating three "tender age" detainment facilities in Texas, where undocumented babies and toddlers are sent after being forcibly separated from their parents.

The Associated Press reports that at least three facilities housing hundreds of children are already operational in Combes, Raymondville and Brownsville, Texas, while a fourth in Houston is being planned.

Also with a report of Rachel Maddow breaking down on air when trying to report on the AP's findings.

Several reports from the White House and elsewhere today said that the White House is delighted at the growing outrage because they see this only as a winning political issue with their base.  Meanwhile, normally articulate or at least blabbermouth politicians and reporters are practically speechless with horror at what is happening in America.

But Tuesday was also Juneteenth, the anniversary of the end of slavery in Texas and the Confederacy, celebrated as essentially the end of slavery in the US.  On this occasion, Jelani Cobb in the New Yorker noted that slavery had always entailed separating families and for an even longer period, selling African American children into slavery.  In other parts of the country--in California in particular--Native American slavery especially involved selling children.  And in a real sense, this practice has continued:

"Even the current system of child welfare reflects systematic biases regarding the removal of children from their parents’ homes. Black children were overwhelmingly more likely to be taken from their homes than white children, even when they faced problems of similar severity at home."

Now we are embroiled in controversy separating brown families and imprisoning toddlers, and possibly longer term exploitation.  This specifically is the responsibility of the current administration.  Cobb continues:

"On this Juneteenth, we have received the ambivalent blessing of clarity. We recognize the historic demise of an institution that justified the separating of parent from child in Texas only to see that phenomenon occur in a different time, under different circumstances, but with a similar trauma inflicted on children. The central value of history is to serve as inoculation against the stupidity, ignorance, and cruelties of the past. Yet the rearguard implications of Trumpism have been apparent since the day in June, 2015, when he rode down the escalator in Trump Tower and announced his Presidential campaign."

But as Helaine Olene writes in the Washington Post, children are more generally the victims of poor health care, education and poverty itself, as well as racial prejudice:  "Our politics reflects our almost inhuman ability to tolerate making children — especially poor and minority children — take it on the chin again and again."  And this is without even discussing school shootings and gun violence victims more generally--many of them children.

The plight of the children imprisoned at the border should broaden awareness on how often the insidious games adults play are paid for by the suffering of children, the maiming of lifetimes from a tender age.

The Obama Generation Is Here

Ok, this is the "best of times" part.  Start with the New York Times:

Demonstrators flooded streets across the globe in public protests on Saturday, calling for action against gun violence. Hundreds of thousands of marchers turned out, in the most ambitious show of force yet from a student-driven movement that emerged after the recent massacre at a South Florida high school.

Yolanda Renee King, the 9 year old granddaughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the Washington demo:

"My grandfather had a dream that his four little children would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," she said, referencing her grandfather's famous speech. "I have a dream that enough is enough. That this should be a gun-free world. Period."

Celebrities, political and otherwise, joined, including Paul McCartney at the New York demo, held near where John Lennon was shot and killed.

President Obama tweeted:

Michelle and I are so inspired by all the young people who made today’s marches happen. Keep at it. You’re leading us forward. Nothing can stand in the way of millions of voices calling for change.

New Yorker report on the Washington march included:

By noon, it was impossible to move easily through the crowd. Teens waved homemade signs (“Hunting Season is Over”; “No, I’m Pretty Sure Guns Kill People”) and huddled together for photos. Poppy Fleming, a nine-year-old student at Hartwood Elementary, in Stafford County, Virginia, stood with Deborah and Michael Fleming, her grandparents. She held up a sign decorated with the names and locations of various mass shootings. In the middle, she’d written, in magic marker, “Am I Next?”

“We can teach her about civil disobedience,” Deborah said. “We can teach her how to vote.”

Boston

A Politico story included details of the Washington march:

The city’s public transportation system was bracing for long lines and crowds. Restaurants offered discounted meals to marchers and the ride-sharing app Lyft offered free rides to the march. Local families have been offering up their homes to students with nowhere to stay.

It goes on:
Many adults took to the streets, too, saying they were inspired by personal experiences with gun violence. Danny Robb, a 64-year-old retired Air Force colonel, traveled from than 7,000 miles from Okinawa, Japan to Washington. On March 24, 1998 — 20 years ago today— two gunmen shot up his daughter’s middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas, killing five people. She happened to stay home that day, but a friend she sat next to in class was killed.

Now, Robb said he hopes young people will succeed where his generation fell short.  “In the military, you’re taught that to be a good leader you have to be a good follower,” Robb said. “And the kids need to take the lead on this.”

Marches across the world and across the US included an estimated 30,000 in downtown Pittsburgh, one of the largest political gathering there ever.

The Hill: seven memorable moments from the Washington event.

History may see this as the first action of the Obama Generation.  When we marched on Washington in 1963, we changed the country and changed the world. There have been many marches since that have had lesser effect.  Only time will tell about this one.  But it clearly says there is a hopeful element in the coming generations, and their influence may well be felt soon, even if they can't vote yet, through parents and those they persuade with their intelligence and passion.  (They register a ton of voters on Saturday.)

Voices in the Land of Guns

Thousands of students at thousands of schools all over America left class at 10 this morning for a minimum of 17 minutes, one minute for each death by gunfire in Parkland last month.  Commemoration, protest, call for action--the first such coordinated event.

They join the family of activism.  They know the emotions that erupt in the event, the emotions that get focused for their cause. It's not dry politics--it's the head and the heart, it's the soul's statement.  Many will find that they pay a price for their commitment.  I honor them for what they did today.

Present: Hoping for Hope

When Michelle Obama's portrait was unveiled at the National Gallery last month (along with President Obama's), she suggested that girls of color "will see an image of someone who looks like them hanging on the walls of this great American institution. ... And I know the kind of impact that will have on their lives because I was one of those girls."

Another one of those girls was 2 year old Parker Curry.  When a passing photographer snapped a picture of her transfixed before the portrait (her mother kept asking her to turn around for her own photo but she was rapt) and posted it, it went viral and First Lady Michelle saw it.  That led to a visit to the girl in her Washington home, and a dance.

The portrait itself, by the way, led to this interesting essay/analysis in the New Yorker, which I'm glad I found the opportunity to point out.

Then on Friday several online outlets ran stories of a rumor that both Obamas are talking with Netflik about producing programs for that TV streaming network.  Apparently the New York Times started it all, quoting a source saying that the content might focus on "inspirational stories."  The New York coverage ends with the exhortation "Cross your fingers for Hope TV, everyone." Amen.

                                               *

And there was even a little hope in the news this past week.  The Parkland students got something like a win when the Florida legislature passed and its NRA-beholden governor signed a law that...well, doesn't do a lot, but does something in the gun control area.  Even if the bad stuff outweighs the good in practice, it is significant for doing anything at all.  It's the first defeat of the aggressive absolutism of the NRA, which of course is suing to stop it.

Meanwhile, first evidence shows that the new tax cut law is (1)causing chaos because it's so badly written and (2) having precisely the effect that Democratic opponents said it would: instead of  corporations using the money for raises and more hiring they are buying back their own stock to further enrich themselves.  So no surprise that February numbers show wages going down.

But polling evidence suggests that Republicans are not getting any political benefit from the tiny short-term bump in paychecks the law mandated.  After a brief bump in the polls, the law is now less popular than before it was passed--and it was not very popular then.

Present: A Quotation.3

A Parkland student speaks: leading a nationwide revolt of high school students
 and others to demand gun control.Their scheduled march on Washington now aims
 for 500,000 participants.

"With all our focus on the mental illness of crazed killers like Nikolas Cruz and Stephen Paddock, we tend to lose sight that it’s another sign of mental illness that American political leaders and their apologists do nothing while the country literally destroys itself with gun violence."

Frank Rich

You Are Responsible (Updated)

Update Sunday: What seems to be different this time, however, is the extent to which the young survivors of the massacre have quickly and publicly banded together to take political action, urging adults in power to act on gun control. Today, junior Cameron Kasky and his classmates announced that they are planning a nationwide march on March 24th, dubbed the March For Our Lives."

NBC: Students are taking hold of the gun debate in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, by organizing a series of school walkouts across the country and a march in Washington to protest gun violence.

The events begin with the Women's March EMPOWER branch, which is dedicated to youth-led advocacy. It has called for "students, teachers, school administrators, parents and allies" to take part in a national school walkout on March 14.

The goal is for everyone to walk out of their classrooms for 17 minutes at 10 a.m. "to protest Congress' inaction to do more than tweet thoughts and prayers in response to the gun violence plaguing our schools and neighborhoods," the organization said in a statement.

Students from Parkland, meanwhile, are organizing their own event on March 24 in Washington called the "March for Our Lives." The protest will "demand that a comprehensive and effective bill be immediately brought before Congress to address these gun issues," according to its mission statement. "No special interest group, no political agenda is more critical than timely passage of legislation to effectively address the gun violence issues that are rampant in our country."

NY Daily News: "Children are dying, and their blood is on your hands because of that. Please take action. Stop going on vacation in Mar-a-Lago,” Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student David Hogg told Trump on Sunday via an interview with Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.” “Take action. Work with Congress. Your party controls both the House and Senate. Take action. Get some bills passed. And for God’s sake, let’s save some lives,” the student continued."

SATURDAY: Students survivors of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School  in Florida rallied on Saturday, with chants of "No More Guns!" and "You Are Responsible!"

Senior Emma Gonzalez was equally blunt in her speech: If the president wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy, and how it should never have happened, and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I’m going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association. But hey, you want to know something? It doesn’t matter, because I already know: $30 million. … To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you!... They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence: We call BS!"

As the New Yorker commented in introducing Emily's Witt's report on students in Parkland: It was a bad week for a lot of reasons, but at least we had evidence of one incorruptible value: the American teen-ager’s disdain for hypocrisy.

Other Floridians were also mad as hell, and rallied to say they weren't going to take it any more.  The AP reported: Pressure is growing for tougher gun-control laws after a mass shooting at a Florida high school, with thousands of angry protesters at state rallies demanding immediate action from lawmakers, and more demonstrations planned across the country in the weeks ahead.

One prominent Republican donor in Florida announced he wasn't going to give it anymore: no more money for Republicans who don't support an assault weapons ban.

There is Nothing More American Than Gun Control

One of many lies the greedy gun lobby and its deluded followers perpetuate is that restrictions on guns is unAmerican, and specifically an invention of rich liberals to take away their rights so they can be controlled, or just have less freedom and fun.

And unfortunately even those liberals and the establishment press have accepted the premise that gun control is contrary to American history.

But there is nothing more American than gun control, not even guns.  And that specifically applies to the notorious Old West.  If you grew up on TV westerns you would know this but fortunately a recent article by Matt Jancer in Smithsonian Magazine and a book by Adam Winkler provide the actual historical record.  For example, in the West:

“Tombstone had much more restrictive laws on carrying guns in public in the 1880s than it has today,” says Adam Winkler, a professor and specialist in American constitutional law at UCLA School of Law. “Today, you’re allowed to carry a gun without a license or permit on Tombstone streets. Back in the 1880s, you weren’t.” Same goes for most of the New West, to varying degrees, in the once-rowdy frontier towns of Nevada, Kansas, Montana, and South Dakota.

And in the South:

The practice was started in Southern states, which were among the first to enact laws against concealed carry of guns and knives, in the early 1800s. While a few citizens challenged the bans in court, most lost. Winkler, in his book Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, points to an 1840 Alabama court that, in upholding its state ban, ruled it was a state’s right to regulate where and how a citizen could carry, and that the state constitution’s allowance of personal firearms “is not to bear arms upon all occasions and in all places.”

But today we've insanely regressed to the point that this hardly qualifies as a civilization.  Our moral morons who prevent gun control are now as responsible for gun violence and deaths in Florida and elsewhere as the actual shooter.  Perhaps more culpable, if the shooter is mentally ill.

They are indicted by the merest recitation of the facts.  From Think Progress on Wednesday:

A 19-year-old former student opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Wednesday afternoon, killing 17 people.

The suspect, identified by law enforcement officials as Nikolas Cruz, chose the same weapon used to carry out some of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history: an AR-15.

It’s the same assault rifle that was used at Sandy Hook Elementary School, where Adam Lanza killed 27 people, including 20 first graders. It was used in Aurora, Colorado, where James Holmes killed 12 people in a movie theater. It was used in San Bernardino, California, where Syed Farook killed 14 people. And it was used in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Steven Paddock killed 58 people — to date, the deadliest mass shooting in United States history.

The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in the U.S. according to the National Rifle Association (NRA); there are an estimated 9 million in circulation as of 2014. Its popularity is likely due to the fact that it is extremely customizable and accommodates high capacity magazines that can fire off 100 rounds or more within minutes, features the NRA frequently touts on its blog.

The rifle’s popularity is also likely due to how frequently the NRA promotes it. The organization’s Twitter feed has regularly featured messages of admiration for the AR-15, even after the assault rifle was used to murder numerous people in several mass shootings."

From New York Daily Intelligencer on Thursday, noting that since the antipresident took office a year ago:

... the president has rolled back a rule that would have made it more difficult for the severely mentally ill to obtain firearms; made it easier for fugitives to purchase guns; and proposed $12 million in cuts to America’s background check system. He has also tried to slash $625 million from federal mental health programs, and $1 trillion from Medicaid, one of the top sources of health insurance for the mentally ill in the United States.

And, of course, Trump and his party have prevented any piece of legislation regulating the firearms market from making it into law."

By media accounts, the Parkland police did the best they could under current law in monitoring a troubled young man tempted by guns, as did his parents.  The school had practiced procedures in the case of a shooting and were as prepared as they could be.  Teachers acted heroically to protect their students.

But against an AR-15 in an open carry state, and the people running Florida and this country, they were helpless.

Update: 2/16:According to an article in the Washington Post, the number of school shootings in the US in 2018 provided by a nonprofit group and widely reproduced (by ThinkProgress among many others) is inflated.  Their argument is persuasive, and I've removed those statistics from the ThinkProgress quotes.  Inaccuracy in such matters is damaging because it's distracting and, well, because it's inaccurate.

 The figures that the Post accepts are bad enough: An ongoing Washington Post analysis has found that more than 150,000 students attending at least 170 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999...A recent study of World Health Organization data published in the American Journal of Medicine that found that, among high-income nations, 91 percent of children younger than 15 who were killed by bullets lived in the United States...On average, two dozen children are shot every day in the United States, and in 2016 more youths were killed by gunfire — 1,637 — than during any previous year this millennium."

The Post piece is accompanied by the photo below, of a mother outside Parkland school after the shooting.  I noticed the smudge on her forehead: not only was the shooting on Valentine's Day but it was also Ash Wednesday, a holy day of repentance for many Christians.  The ashes are reminders of death.

Regarding Wave

On the day that marked one year since the notorious election of 2016, results from elections on Tuesday showed impressive gains for Democrats and their issues, from coast to coast.  Some call it a Blue Wave, and why not, we need the rush.

For some, it suggested re-thinking conclusions based on 2016 results.  Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post wrote that pundits, like the DNC, underestimated how unpopular and polarizing a figure Hillary was, which doesn't account for other R victories.  Nevertheless one of her conclusions seems borne out by results Tuesday:

Jennifer Rubin:
"...the mood of the country a year after Trump’s victory may not be as anti-government as some thought. Instead of unrelenting hostility toward government, verging on nihilism, we see voters going for pro-government candidates, even ones seeking to expand health care. You never know what you stand to lose until you look into the abyss and see the loss of a politically sane and functional government."

Health care was the top issue in Virginia, guns was second.  These victories in Tuesday's elections aren't the only evidence on healthcare.  Despite the worst efforts of this administration to incrementally destroy Obamacare and discourage participation, new sign-ups are surging.

Analysts also pointed to the educated white vote, which flipped from R to D in Virginia.  More broadly:

New York Times:

The American suburbs appear to be in revolt against President Trump after a muscular coalition of college-educated voters and racial and ethnic minorities dealt the Republican Party a thumping rejection on Tuesday and propelled a diverse class of Democrats into office. From the tax-obsessed suburbs of New York City to high-tech neighborhoods outside Seattle to the sprawling, polyglot developments of Fairfax and Prince William County, Va., voters shunned Republicans up and down the ballot in off-year elections."

At Slate, the emphasis was on the importance of women, as candidates as well as voters.

In Washington, an ebullient E. J. Dionne saw a sea-change:

Forget those repetitious tales about some piece of President Trump’s base still sticking with him. It’s now clear, from Virginia and New Jersey to Washington state, Georgia, New York, Connecticut and Maine, that the energy Trump has unleashed among those who loathe him has the potential to realign the country.

In droves, voters rebuked his leadership, his party and the divisive white-nationalist politics that was supposed to save Republican Ed Gillespie in the Virginia governor’s race, the centerpiece of the GOP catastrophe...

The gun issue was supposed to hurt Democrats whenever it was salient. It was the No. 2 issue in Virginia, after health care. But in a historic rebuke to the National Rifle Association, voters who said they cast ballots on gun policy split narrowly. Sane gun policies are no longer a political third rail. It’s time for fearless opposition to the NRA’s extremism...

Republicans take note: You can demean yourselves all you want by trumpeting Trumpian themes. It won’t buy you gratitude, and — except in the most deeply red parts of the nation — it won’t buy you victory. The leader of your party is a boor, an ingrate and, as Northam declared in his effective Democratic primary advertising, a “narcissistic maniac.”

Dionne wasn't alone, though John Cassidy's  analysis was more tempered.  The most salient observation to me in terms of electoral futures was the impression that since 2016 Democrats recruited good candidates for the kind of offices up for election in a non-presidential, non-congressional year.  This has been a longstanding problem, and is reflected in the apparent dearth of clearly superior candidates for higher offices, including president.  That a not great candidate like Northam could win such a convincing victory in Virginia is fine in the short term, but for years Ds have not matched Rs in creating infrastructure for identifying and supporting candidates.

Another measure of the D wave is that the current internal strife over the 2016 campaign, especially related to Donna Brazile and her book, didn't deter voters.  Her own analysis of the results was: Tactically, Tuesday was nothing short of a blue wave, which proved that grassroots campaigns are the key to the Democratic Party’s success next year. Democrats must no longer cherry pick which states and which dates to invest in the grassroots. We must go everywhere. And we plan on doing that."

This was President Obama's veiled critique of 2016 and advice going forward, which he made shortly after that election.  It seems key to future elections.

Though D leaders anticipate 2018, at least one analyst says prospects are still difficult.  Of course as this tragic anniversary suggests, the damage to the country and the world at a very delicate time will continue and could very well get worse, because Homemade Hitler is still in the White House, and even if it does nothing else, Congress enables the destruction to continue through policy reversals and appointments of the profoundly ignorant, rigidly ideological and thoroughly corrupt.

Las Vegas (and Puerto Rico)

It may seem unfortunate that I chose last night to post the adage below under the title of Today's News, when today's major news story would be a mass shooting in Las Vegas, where guns and gun shows are big business.

 But without demeaning the pain and suffering involved in this horrific event, the adage suggests both the evanescence of the surrounding situation, and in a different way, the depressingly repetitive nature of the event taken as a whole, within the current context.

If the United States survives as a civilized nation for another century, it will have universal healthcare and effective gun control.  As both ideas or ideals and as ongoing policies with bureaucracies and rules to carry them out, these are features of civilized nations now.  They are so important to the needs of civilization going forward that the US cannot continue as an exception over the long run.

But the short term is something else, and a number of essays point out the numbing ritual of political response.  Several (for example, here) also point out that because the shooter is apparently a white guy (with a huge and sophisticated arsenal in a hotel room), it will become a story of a crazed individual, but if it had been someone of a different type, it would be a rallying cry for repression.

James Fallows essay at the Atlantic--Two Dark American Truths From Las Vegas-- covers both aspects: "The first is that America will not stop these shootings. They will go on. We all know that, which makes the immediate wave of grief even worse."  

He notes examples of other countries that have enacted gun control after mass shootings, and have stopped them or at least made them less frequent and deadly."No other society allows the massacres to keep happening. Everyone around the world knows this about the United States. It is the worst aspect of the American national identity."

He points out that the perpetrators of mass killings in America are almost always white men, but what if this one was not?  That's the other dark truth:

"If they had Arab-sounding names, this would be a new episode of jihad. How often has Donald Trump invoked “San Bernardino” in his speeches, as shorthand for the terrorist threat in our heartland?
If they were Mexican, they would demonstrate the perils of immigration, and that Mexico is “not sending its best people.”
If they had been illegal immigrants, they’d dramatize the need to crack down harder, right now.
And if they had been black, I shudder to imagine the consequences."

Further, I point out another set of victims: the people of Puerto Rico and other islands devastated by Hurricane Maria.  With this story diverting the necessary attention to fuel a sense of urgency, their needs are likely to be ignored.  Thirst and hunger are just as deadly as guns.

Dunkirk in Texas

As the effects of Hurricane Harvey continue to unfold in Texas,  and as attention focuses on saving lives, we are also thinking about what it means for the future.

The unnecessary vulnerabilities in Houston, almost always as a result of greed, are again exposed, and as usual the costs are paid more often in the suffering of the most vulnerable people.

While first responders do their jobs with distinction, the failure of government--including the federal government--to engage in preventive measures in a time when such storms and related events are more frequent and ferocious, due especially to the climate crisis, is not a good sign for the future.

We have yet to face the enormity of the tasks, when huge catastrophes hit huge population centers with complex infrastructure. It's bad enough when it occurs in one place. But what happens when--and not if, but when--such catastrophic events occur in more than one place at one time?  This is the cost of denying reality.

But while this event is happening, this is a human story, and an article in the New Yorker ask those human questions that will recur in future disasters, and I'm sure already echo somewhere inside most of us:

"But if we now know more about how the climate will behave, we know less about how humans will react. The experience of frequent storms is one of incredible stress...There is now, too, a double anxiety that greets storms like this. There is the fear about the damage done by wind and rain. And then there is a fear, made stark by the memory of Katrina, about how we will treat each other."

The first news I saw out of Texas, which this piece references in the very next sentence, named one such fear: a homeowner, as the storm began. who saw someone he believed was trying to enter his house, and shot him in the head.

We fear this now especially because we are told we are a severely divided nation, and the politically opposed are often violent in their rhetoric, and vivid in their disdain and especially their suspicions.  That we have a chief executive who is actively inflaming disdain and suspicion, and setting race against race for political gain, only adds to these fears.

The other element of this story is the gun.  The valorization of guns, the encouragement to use a gun as a first resort, can turn a misunderstanding into a mortal wound or death.  Who would want to hold out a hand to a hand holding a gun?

But since Harvey made landfall, the New Yorker has published two new articles, one from a Houston neighborhood which tells how people on a single street--many who have never met--are selflessly helping each other, and the other which focuses on the efforts of  individuals using small boats to rescue those about to be inundated by rapidly rising floodwaters.  Learning of people needing rescue from social media, they coordinate the ferrying of people away from their own rooftops, as well as the forgotten (often elderly and handicapped) in group housing.

This citizen navy is conducting a computerized Dunkirk.  Notably, many of those involved are from Louisiana, who remember the help they got from people in Houston during Katrina and the more recent flooding in New Orleans.

This reciprocity makes literal the ethical rule that I regard as the most basic: "You'd do the same for me."  That's the essential faith of a civilized society, and as long as it prevails, there is hope for the future.

Imagine This

Around here we sometimes employ metaphor to make a point or suggest a texture, or recently, a direction.  Sometimes it's akin to those dystopian tales that are cautionary tales about future possibilities: a warning.

Then something like Saturday happens and we seem suddenly closer to seeing the somewhat metaphorical become actual.

The largest public gathering of white nationalists and neo-Nazis in a generation, or so some say, happened Friday night and Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia.  On Friday they incited violence.  On Saturday a likely white nationalist from Ohio drove deliberately into a crowd of peaceful counter-demonstrators marching in support of diversity, killing one immediately and injuring a score of others.

Then Homegrown Hitler spoke against the violence, without condemning or even mentioning the white nationalist haters.  New York's story quotes his response: But rather than clear the extremely low bar of denouncing neo-Nazis for causing mayhem and death, Trump took a different approach.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides — on many sides,” he said.

He distanced himself from the events by making it clear that such unrest is nothing new, offered a few words of tone-deaf pablum about coming together as a country, and blew a possible dog whistle at racists by calling on Americans to “cherish our history.”

When a reporter shouted out a question about whether he wants the supports of white nationalists, the president ignored it.

After an immediate outcry on social media over Trump’s “many sides” wording, a White House spokesperson confirmed that Trump meant what he said, since “there was violence between protestors and counter-protestors today.”

As for a reason for this response, it was all too clear why:

Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, a Trump supporter who was in Charlottesville on Saturday, quickly replied. “I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists,” he wrote.

Asked by a reporter in New Jersey whether he wanted the support of white nationalists, dozens of whom wore red Make America Great Again hats during the Charlottesville riots, Trump did not respond."

There was almost universal condemnation of his statement, even among Republicans.  One piece by Chris Cilizza of CNN is representative.  He notes that part of the statement appeared to be a pre-emptive defense against those who point to his previous statements and behavior (and lack of them, as in his silence when a bomb was thrown into a Minnesota mosque) as encouraging racist/ alt.right/ neo-Nazi violence.

That's likely the subtext to President Obama's tweet on Saturday quoting Nelson Mandela:"No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion..."

But this is a good deal more chilling than the usually nauseating statements by the apprentice dictator in the White House.  This is getting into Hitler territory in an astonishingly literal way.  Tacit support for actual neo-Nazis? White nationalists (like the one who is Homegrown Hitler's chief policy advisor) chanting the racist Nazi slogan Blood and Soil?  And it gets worse.

Look at this photo (all photos on this page are from Politico.)   The caption reads: Carrying body armor and combat weapons, white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the "alt-right" evacuate comrades who were pepper-sprayed after the "Unite the Right" rally was declared an unlawful gathering by Virginia State Police.

Now we can see the fruits, not only of the 2016 election, but the insane interpretation of the fourth amendment and the result of openly armed neo-Nazis on public streets during a fractious political demonstration.

An unofficial army of armed civilians helped begin the Nazi rise to absolute power in Germany.  Suddenly "Homegrown Hitler" doesn't sound so metaphorical.

I picked some day to turn the page of my current New York Review of Books to read a review of a documentary on the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi crimes and more recent instances of war crimes.  The review quotes Hannah Arendt's phrase "a criminal lack of imagination."  Better to imagine the implications now than to suffer the consequences when the "unimaginable" happens.

The Point

The cultural divide (if that's what it is) was never clearer to me than in these paragraphs from Edward Ball's article, "The Mind of Dylann Roof" in the New York Review of Books, March 23, 2017.  (Though NYRB offers free access to a lot of articles, this one beyond the first few paragraphs requires subscription.)  Who is Dylann Roof?  See paragraph 3.

"Guns are embedded in South Carolina culture, with every attempt at firearm regulation trampled by the state legislature. Fathers give their sons, and some daughters, guns in rites of passage... 

This is cheaper than...

Dylann Roof got his gun. His father gave him money for it on his twenty-first birthday. “Happy Birthday! Here is $400 for the gun and the concealed carry permit,” the card read.

I went to the gun warehouse that advertised AR-15s to see the pistol Roof used for the massacre of nine African-Americans at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June 2015. Palmetto State Armory, in the Charleston suburb of Mt. Pleasant, is the size of a big box store. It was previously a supermarket. (The company’s motto, on its logo, is Desperta Ferro—“Awake the Iron.”) The idea that a young man shops for guns in a 40,000-square-foot store with Van Halen playing on the ceiling speakers is, in this part of the US, unremarkable.

In the middle aisles are ammunition, gun sights, accessories, gun cases, and targets—bull’s-eyes, plus targets in the shape of men, like a guy in a hoodie. On the left side of the store are racks and racks of rifles, shotguns, and assault weapons, propped like rakes, by the hundreds. And in dozens of locked glass cases, like jewelry, the handguns.

I walk along one hundred yards of glass cabinets, past the Smith & Wesson case, the Browning case, past Springfield, Sig Sauer, Kemper Pistol, Uberti, Baer, Beretta, and arrive at the Glocks: engineered in Austria, manufactured in Marietta, Georgia. Roof used a Glock 41, a .45 caliber gun that feels like artillery in the hand—black, nine inches long, thirty-six ounces loaded.

“That’s the big daddy,” says the salesman, “for target and home defense. Holds thirteen rounds, strong recoil.” The salesman is a small man with a tenor voice, which he throws an octave lower to assist in male bonding. “I have a Glock 36”—he pulls back his jacket to show the holstered gun—“smaller, better for concealed carry.”

...this.

Roof added a laser sighting to his Glock, which throws a red dot where the shot will land, and he used hollow point bullets. Hollow points are more lethal. When one hits a person, body fluids enter the tip and cause the metal slug to spread and deform into a spiked wheel, which continues to progress, shredding internal organs. They cost about seventy-five cents each, twice the cost of a standard bullet."

We'd like to believe that the gun culture is primarily about "sport," either target-shooting or some traditional practice of hunting, within the law and with respect.  But this excerpt makes clear that "concealed carry," targets shaped as men and especially the hollow point bullets, have nothing to do with either image of sport.

Hollow point bullets, which have no function other than to shred the internal organs of human beings, sell for seventy-five cents.  You can't get a Milky Way for that.