WHO CARES WHO GETS CREDIT FOR PROGRESS?

In recent days it appears that the anti-gun movement in America has gained significant traction. Much of the credit is going to classmates of murdered students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL. Those kids are receiving plenty of press and have proven adept at utilizing it along with social media to get their message out. How far it will go remains to be seen. So long as Trump is in the White House and we have a GOP dominated congress with various allegiances to NRA campaign funding, I'm not especially hopeful no matter how many magazine covers those well spoken, well meaning kids end up on. But this too shall pass. Fast forward to 2020 and if both the presidency and congress look a lot different than the current dumpster fire, perhaps meaningful action will finally be taken.

Not that I'll be holding my breath. Somehow Sandy Hook wasn't the ultimate game changer, and the victims there were practically babies. Go back further to when beloved Republican icon Ronald Reagan was shot. That got us the Brady Bill and that's about it. No matter how good these Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS kids are on camera, it doesn't mean that their outrage will mean much more than their personal allotments of 15 minutes of fame.

With that said, I'm all for supporting the movement for increased gun regulations while it at least temporarily has a head of steam. I'm not alone in lending support, just as I wasn't alone pre Sandy Hook when writing with great exasperation about why guns seem to have been afforded more of a right to flourish than people. Yet I've noticed something troubling in my twitter feed. Popping up every so often will be a gripe about the attention these kids are getting. I'm not referring to gun owning conservative Republicans who have the words of the 2nd Amendment stitched on their pillow cases. I'm talking about liberal leaning likely Democrats who agree that laws must be enacted to strengthen gun regulations and save lives. They too want to loosen the NRA's vise grip on our national conscience. But they're a little ticked off that this particular set of kids is receiving so much attention for keeping the gun conversation spotlighted rather than certain predecessors whom they feel were snubbed.

This is not a helpful point of view. Envy is not a good look. Who cares who gets credit for progress so long as progress is made? It doesn't matter which particular group of activists spurred on by which tragedy ends up with the most appearances on CNN and MSNBC. So long as something FINALLY happens to bring about change for the better, it's a well earned victory for humanity. Long before the #MeToo movement started popping after certain high profile women spoke up against certain high profile men, there were women who spoke up who failed to earn a hashtag for the effort. What ultimately matters is that the NEXT woman who speaks up, and not necessarily one with a high profile but perhaps your neighbor or perhaps even you, will be more likely to be taken seriously as result of heightened awareness. The Snowball Effect requires a great deal of rolling before what started out small enough to hold in one hand ends up the size of a boulder. So long as momentum is maintained, eventually it becomes too large and weighty to ignore.

Outrage over slowness to arrest the killer of Trayvon Martin. Unrest in Ferguson, MO over the killing of Mike Brown. People declaring that we CAN'T BREATHE when justice is choked out of us in wake of the murder of Eric Garner. Citizens of Baltimore, MD declaring enough is enough after the killing of Freddie Gray. The toppling of confederate statues after so many years accepting their presence along with that traitorous Dukes of Hazard flag. I could easily go on with example after example of matters coming to a boil. Regardless of the varying degrees of results achieved, they can all be seen as watershed moments for a righteous cause. An individual may be moved to more tears of outrage in certain cases than others. Perhaps you wanted the event that struck closest to your home to be the most notable game changer. Jordan Davis murdered by Michael Dunn over "loud music" should have been the tipping point. Valid stance. Renisha McBride shot dead on Theodore Wafer's porch hoping to get assistance after a car crash should have been the start of the revolution. I hear you. How about the sad case of Aiyana Jones? Shouldn't a death that senseless have resulted in urgent willingness to make things make greater sense?

Those tragedies all made splashes. Some resulted in slogans. Collectively they launched an organization/mindset called Black Lives Matter. Politicians have and will continue to utilize whichever one seems most likely to move the needle in their favor. The people will continue to #Resist the corrupt powers that be, and those in power will resist our push for change. Every so often circumstances will align in a way that yields tangible results. Once upon a time the culmination of a very long fight for equality was The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Perhaps The Gun Control Act of 2020 is a reachable star. And if it is, maybe for a variety of reasons more credit will go to white high school kids in Parkland, FL than will go to victims of gang violence in Chicago, IL.

But you know what? If The Gun Control Act of 2020 ends up an actual thing that comes to fruition, mattering most won't be who gets how great a share of credit for it. What will matter is fewer guns on the streets of Chicago and other inner cities. Fewer bullets hitting intended targets as well as unfortunate souls who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. What will matter is fewer mass shootings in high schools and elementary schools and concerts and wherever else they happen. Shootings won't be stamped out completely. Guns bought legally today will be purchased illegally tomorrow, and some of them will be obtained by madmen with evil intent. We can't eliminate senseless violence because we can't eradicate evil. What we can do is make the sudden loss of multiple lives more difficult to be managed by a lone individual with deranged mind plus an arsenal of weaponry. What we can do is act like we give a shit.

Once we do, if we ever do, I won't give credit to any one activist, or politician, or group of kids, or specific march, or particular hashtag. I'll credit everybody who stood up to evil and those who profit from it and said NO MORE. Perhaps it's time to accept that the days of lone heroes/martyrs such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X receiving the lion's share of credit for social progress are behind us. Yes, there will be certain spokespeople with greater face and name recognition than the rest. It could be a football player who puts himself in the line of fire. Or someone paid to talk on TV about one thing who feels compelled to use the platform to speak in their social media feed on another. Maybe a skinny black guy in a blue vest. Perhaps a high school girl with a buzz cut. No matter. In this new age we find ourselves in, what truly heals the world is our collective voice.

FIGHT THE POWER

Love this one pic.twitter.com/XRI7SYRTee

— Janet Jones (@janetjones3001) March 24, 2018

11-year old Naomi Wadler: "I am here to acknowledge and represent the African-American girls whose stories don't make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don't lead on the evening news." #MarchForOurLives (via CBS) pic.twitter.com/o6UkEuxemd

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 24, 2018

11-year old Christopher Underwood, who lost his brother to gun violence: “For me, I would like to not worry about dying, and focus on math and science and playing basketball with my friends. Don't I deserve to grow up?" #MarchForOurLives (via CBS) pic.twitter.com/xiRzZCdGQ8

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 24, 2018

I want greater gun regulation. I want greater measures to reduce police brutality. I want Trump impeached. I want some other stuff too, but nothing at the expense of anything else. I want it all and am thrilled about headway made in each case. Only our own pettiness can stop us.

— Roy L. Pickering Jr. (@AuthorofPatches) March 26, 2018

The Reverend Who Cried Wolf

Every day numerous examples of legitimate racism in action take place in this country. Yes we currently have a brown skin biracial President who most (including him) identify as African American. Yes, while certainly not in the fantasy land of post racial identity existence, this country has come a long way. Yes, no matter how far we’ve come, the legacy of racism by whites against blacks and the institution of slavery will never be fully lived down by this nation. It is an irremovable stain. A black President can’t remove it; Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson and Oprah Winfrey can’t erase it; reparations neither real nor symbolic can erase it. Racism rolls on, this cannot be denied. It takes place in an infinite numbers of ways, sometimes in manners splashy and violent enough to make headline news, but usually in personal exchanges and privately held thoughts. There are white people with undeserved notions of superiority in their heads, and black people who will never forgive and never forget the ugliest part of our history regardless of what the present holds and the future promises.

That said, the fact that racism still exists does not mean that racism is prevalent in EVERY interaction, particularly every negative one, between blacks and whites. My novel Patches of Grey tackles this subject head on. Earlier today I quoted a brief passage from it on Twitter, taken from a scene where a fight nearly breaks out between two groups of young men. Those on one side of the dispute are black and those on the other are white, but the subject matter of their disagreement (at least on its surface) is not racial. As often is the case with young men, the trouble is over a girl. “The respective skin colors of the near combatants could not be ignored. The fact that one of them was black and the other white could not be removed from the equation, rendering the specifics of the altercation inconsequential.”

I’m writing this blog posting, and the words quoted above came to mind, because of Jesse Jackson’s reaction to the infantile public letter written by Cleveland Cavaliers’ owner Dan Gilbert. Gilbert was quite upset that his cash cow LeBron James had just left the team as a free agent (emphasis on free) to ply his trade elsewhere, and by the particularly humiliating way James went about doing it. As LeBron’s former employer I don’t know how you could possibly sit through ESPN’s airing of The Decision and not be incensed. LeBron pissed off millions of people that he doesn’t know from a hole in the wall with his actions, so of course he angered his boss. Dan Gilbert hoped for exclusively selfish reasons that LeBron would be loyal to the state he was born and raised and grew up to be a legend in. Gilbert was hoping that LeBron would be loyal to the only organization he had ever worked for as a professional basketball player. Dan was praying that LeBron would be loyal TO HIM. But the young Mr. James for equally selfish reasons (not implying that selfish must = bad, by the way; thinking of your own interests first is the most human thing we do) opted to go another way. Much has been said (plenty of it by me) about the decision, about why it was made and how LeBron chose to declare it. Much was subsequently said about Dan Gilbert’s public rant of protest, with the consensus being that as the owner of a professional sports franchise, the letter was beneath him. He was fined a considerable amount of money for his immature response by the NBA’s commissioner, and that really should have been the only other chapter to this story.


But before David Stern could get around to weighing in on the issue (which is his job), none other than Jesse Jackson (who one might think could and should easily find far more troubling situations to address) inexplicably did. What did the esteemed Rev. Jackson have to say about an issue that seems like it would be of minimal concern to him? What was his take on the venting of a disgruntled boss about losing his most treasured employee? As you probably already know, Jesse accused Dan Gilbert of having a "slave owner mentality". Now expressing a vague feeling of unease about the motivation behind Gilbert's outrage is one thing, flat out accusing him of viewing LBJ as his own personal Chicken George is another. Jesse crossed the line of concerned speculation and came damn near close to placing a pointy hood over Gilbert's face. He apparently feels that a wealthy white man can’t possibly be upset about losing the paid services of a black man who was routinely employee of the month for any reason other than that he feels he owns not just a sports franchise, but the men who work for it. Or to be specific, the black men who work for his organization. Most of those black men are paid standard American wages and Dan Gilbert doesn’t know their names, nor would he recognize them if they stood before him. But in regards to the tallest of them who get to dress super casually at work and are paid obscene amounts of money since they're who the paying public comes to see, surely they are considered to be slave labor. Why else would Dan dare to get upset when one “escapes”? Apparently the good reverend believes if LeBron happened to be white but otherwise possessed the same skill set and sparkling personality, Mr. Gilbert would be happily throwing him a farewell and thanks for the memories party rather than typing up a manifesto of indignation.

Anyone who knows anything about slavery knows that Jackson's comparison could not be further from the truth, knows that it greatly diminishes the tremendous crippling impact of perhaps the most awful event ever to take place in the history of our planet. Just as it is buffoonish and demeaning whenever Glenn Beck compares every little thing President Obama does to Hitler and the Holocaust and socialism and so called reverse racism. I trust that I don’t actually need to enumerate the countless differences between a slave and a professional athlete to anyone reading these words, or the differences between a team owner and an owner/torturer of human beings. This should not need to be explained to anyone. Yet not only are the differences apparently not clear at all to Jesse Jackson, but a fair number of people actually nodded in agreement at his accusations. Even those willing to concede he may have gone a tad too far still felt it was not Dan Gilbert’s reaction that was within logical comprehension, but rather, Jesse Jackson’s reaction to that reaction. If you see a white man (particularly a rich, powerful one) get angry at a black man (particularly one employed by the white man), what other explanation could there be for the outrage? Gilbert lost some valuable personal property and it ticked him off, no?

Well, that certainly is one way of looking at it if you feel that a black person and a white one cannot be in disagreement about anything at all without race being the underlying cause. But if you believe that people are driven nuts by other people for innumerable reasons, and that just because people are of different races it doesn’t mean this is the only level upon which they can relate to each other, a different interpretation may be derived. You may conclude, may be capable of concluding, that sometimes a black person is angry at a white one, or a white person is angry at a black one, or the two of them are angry at each other, and neither race nor the atrocity of slavery has anything to do with the matter. If you can ignore the respective skin colors of combatants, if you can remove race as the root cause in such an equation and examine the actual specifics of the situation, then consider yourself a better man or woman than Jesse Jackson (who I just can't get too angry at because of what he’s done on behalf of civil rights, plus his fair resemblance to my dad) just showed himself to be. At the very least you’re probably way nicer to be around when you’re in a cranky mood than Mel Gibson.

X X X X X

X X X X X

"He speaks as an owner of LeBron and not the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers," the reverend said in a release from his Chicago-based civil rights group, the Rainbow PUSH Coalition. "His feelings of betrayal personify a slave master mentality. He sees LeBron as a runaway slave. This is an owner employee relationship — between business partners — and LeBron honored his contract." – Jesse Jackson

X X X X X

X X X X X

“I strongly disagree with Rev. Jesse Jackson's recent comments and we are not going to engage in any related discussion on it. Going forward, we're very excited about the Cavaliers and the positive future of our region.” – Dan Gilbert

Share
|

Healthcare Reform - A Start

What has just been taken - the first step on the road to a public option for healthcare insurance that one day will result in 100% of Americans being covered, or the first step in major escalation of racial animosity in America? President Obama's signature may have set both in motion. I've been commenting on this subject via Twitter over the past couple weeks and have gathered my thoughts below. What are you opinions on this matter?

This is how American politics works basically. If Obama presided as a republican, a democrat in name only, republicans would oppose their own policies. It’s all about winning next round of elections by any means necessary. Doesn’t need to make any sense beyond that.

The republican party has one objective now that we have a democrat President. They want him to fail & be a 1-term President. Policies are irrelevant. Only continuous opposition matters.


Are democrats just as bad playing this childish political game when the sitting President is republican? Probably, although not quite as nasty about it.


I'm no healthcare policy expert. Changes to system make sense to me if those changes result in more people covered so more saved lives. Simple.


I'm sure there are plenty of intelligent reasons for opposing the healthcare bill. But it's hard to find it beneath birther nonsense, thinly veiled racism of tea party BS, claims that America is being transformed in one fell swoop to a socialist nation, Hitler comparisons, etc.


If a raving lunatic shouts 9 absurd things and 1 really smart one, the intelligent comment will be devalued & vanquished by the 9 dumb, potentially dangerous ones.


If goal of republicans is to regain power, how is it that they haven't yet realized coming off like mentally unstable, petulant name calling kids isn't best way to go?


I don't really care what party the POTUS belongs to. So long as an intelligent, level headed, humanitarian is at the helm, I'm pleased. That seems to be what we’ve currently got.


I want whoever the POTUS is to do a fantastic job because I'm a citizen of the USA, so his/her success is in my best interest.


Rooting against everything the POTUS tries to do, throwing roadblocks at every turn & disrespecting the office itself seems pretty un-American. This is ironic of course since the favorite tactic of republicans is to call most goals of the democratic party un-American (i.e. socialist) by nature.


But things are starting to turn uglier than merely referring to anything President Obama and democrats do as enlarging of welfare state. It’s getting personal and racist. Beck, Limbaugh, etc. have effectively convinced ignorant bigots that it's okay to emerge from their trailer parks & show their true colors.


In the 21st century all but the most ignorant have usually known well enough to keep their ugliest feelings somewhat on down low. But if you convince them their bigotry is patriotic, they are liberated.


As with Salem witch trials or McCarthy era, if you can dehumanize enemy with evil sounding labels, hatred is made acceptable.


“Obama wants to change healthcare system & defuse power of insurance companies” doesn't sound sufficiently terrifying. "He wants to take away your freedom" does trick.


As a general rule you can't really reason with the unreasonable masses. Wise men know goal is to do your job and watch your back. Such is the task at hand for President Obama.


Tea partiers is just the latest term for racist hate group. No politician who aligns with them will hold national office. Sorry, Mrs. Palin.


If you're going be a hate group have some balls & just say we organized because we hate them, them & them. Don't pretend it's political, not personal. I have a great deal of difficulty believing the rage being expressed by many of these anti-healthcare reform demonstrators is strictly over size of government. Brown face of man in charge is definitely a catalyst.


Why make up death panels & baby killer stuff? If you have a serious, legitimate argument against something, why not make that specific, well thought out argument? Rhetorical questions. I know precisely why they do it. Because it's effective.


Don't simply tell me what you're against either. Tell me what you're for. Anyone can oppose, but many can't propose.


I almost wish Hillary had won so racism would be absent from rhetoric over hcr debate. But losing side would have just resorted to sexism instead.


Maybe if a class act like John Edwards (if only there was a sarcasm font) had become President and gotten hcr passed, the opposition's reaction to it (and to a middle aged white man, since that's what Americans are accustomed to seeing in the oval office) would have been more civil.


I hate profoundly inconsiderate people & would gladly join a group of people who felt the same. We wouldn't pretend our group was about anything other than our disdain for the perpetually obnoxious. We wouldn't hide behind claims that our complaints were over the size of government or tax codes.


Sick people should be able to get medical attention without going broke. What craziness will Obama push next - free oxygen & water for all? Damn Commie! Hey, this game is even easier to play than I thought.


You'd think 1 or 2 republicans would have shown some decency and sense and voted against party line in favor of hcr, just as some democrats conscientiously voted against it. Not hundreds, not dozens, just 1 or 2 brave republicans. Nope. Do I give points for display of party loyalty? Nope.


I assume Obama will wait until his second term to get around to hot button topic of reparations. Just joking republicans, he won't really do it.c Due to purposely spread false rumor that hcr results in government sponsored abortions, the phrase “baby killer” is hurled, and not just from random ignoramuses in the lynch mob, I mean, the crowd. When Obama pulls majority of troops from Middle East he’ll be yelled at for not continuing war & killing more babies.


Not just Rush Limbaugh, but everyone who thinks Obama & co. just turned USA into a socialist country feel free to move elsewhere. Take a true stand. Please don't all go to Costa Rica though. Choose a location I'm much less likely to visit on vacation.


History of this nation has been one long Civil War. Our journey towards a more perfect union is waged one self-contained battle at a time. Nothing worthwhile in America the Beautiful has been accomplished without a fight, and the enemy has usually been ourselves.


This is what change looks like, painfully slow when signficant in size and scope, both beautiful and hideous.

President Obama: "20 million have health insurance that didn't have it because of what we did." pic.twitter.com/FR94Hv2T4F

— The Hill (@thehill) July 23, 2020