What Happened in West, Texas

With all of the coverage of tragic and bizarre events in Boston this week, a calamity of size and scope several degrees greater took place in a small town called West, Texas, Population just under 3,000. Many people have seen the story, or at least the spectacular fire ball of the explosion at the fertilizer plant we are told was felt 50 miles away. Little has been reported about the cause of the tragedy in West that left 14 dead, eleven of whom were first responders. Five members of the 28-strong force of volunteer firefighters are dead.

A story that should have garnered far more attention barely registers on the radar of most Americans. This is so because up in Boston two men with an abundance of bad intentions, matched only by their severely lacking sense of humanity, chose to flame out in a ritualistic nihilism.  Every news resource in the country has been focused on Boston and that is understandable, but that has obscured a far more deadly and in ways more disturbing series of events.

The factory that exploded, the West Fertilizer Company was owned by Adair Grain, Inc. They have been in business since 1961, and Donald Adair, the company’s owner, actually lived in West.

To put the size of the calamity in some perspective a local TV reporter noted that the Oklahoma City bombing was precipitated with the use of 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, a little more than two tons. The Washington Post reported that 270 tons were ignited at the factory. In addition to the death toll, every house within a ½ mile radius of the factory is reported to be severely damaged.  Hundreds of homes are damaged or destroyed as is the small town’s downtown business sector.

The size of the fertilizer operation should have made the factory a focus of interest of OSHA, the EPA, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), but the factory failed to notify either the EPA or the DHS that it housed 270 tons of Ammonium Nitrate the explosive accelerant which caused the catastrophe.  OSHA last inspected the factory in 1985. The EPA did an inspection in 2006, and fined the firm a paltry $2,300.

Reuters reported that the EPA notification was not a legal requirement, but in a sign of how priorities have shifted, the DHS notice was. The factory did inform the State of Texas as required by state law. However that information was not passed onto Federal authorities by the State of Texas and it does not appear states are required to do so by law.

It remains to be seen whether the local Fire Department understood the extreme danger they were facing as the battled a fire at the plant before the explosion. The requirements of Texas law are in place specifically for the protection of first responders and the edification of communities. However, the rules require only notification to the state and more than 65,000 businesses file reports in Texas. This raises questions as to whether the whole system provides any layer of safety for communities or the first responders in place to protect them.

Much has been made of the resilience of citizens of Boston, Watertown, and all of eastern Massachusetts and their response to the mindless violence perpetuated by two nihilistic brothers.  Most of us feel that Boston will stand strong, and recover from these events. We can hope that the Boston Marathon next year will be a celebration of the spirit of the community and its defiance to of those that would try to bludgeon it into cowering submission.

Tragically, there is far less certainty for the citizens of West. The factory, actually more of a distribution center was undoubtedly the biggest single employer in the small town. Unlike Boston there is no infrastructure to fall back on, and maybe as importantly no reporter like the Boston Globe’s Kevin Cullen,  to tell this story. West is decimated. As of yesterday residents of 200 homes were still not being allowed to survey the damage on their properties. The USA Today reported that of four schools “only one of which survived unscathed. The elementary school on the other side of town was fine, but the intermediate school for fourth and fifth grades, the middle school and the high school were all closed because of damage.”

Both the Federal and Texas State governments have pledged an aggressive response and the community is working hard to recover. The notoriously anti-government Texas Senator Ted Cruz is pleading for Federal help. It remains to be seen whether this story will ever rise above that of “tragic accident”. What facts I managed to gathered here were gleaned from more than a dozen articles covering small elements of the story. I wonder about a nation that can focus so much anger, so much rage, and so much commitment to get to the bottom of the events in Boston, and yet we muster so little interest over the events in West.

Already dozens of reporters have converged on the home of the father, Makhachkala, the Capital of Dagetstan, deep in the Caucasus, along the Caspian Sea. News gathering resources are abundantly available to make that trip, but those to make a trek to a small town, 20 miles from Waco and 80 miles from Dallas, are in short supply.

Am I the only one who finds the events in West to be compelling and worrisome? Does anyone care to know if shortcuts were taken in the name of commerce and profits?  Did Texas, in its efforts to be the most pro-business of pro-business states, look the other way and so avoid any examination of the dangers of the factory in West?  Do these kinds of facilities pose any special concerns in the arc of terror events which have become the story of our lives? We know that EPA, DHS, and OSHA, are all responsible for assuring the safety and security of such facilities. Do any of them have adequate resources to fulfill that responsibility?  Does anyone care? Will we ever find out what happened in West, Texas?

Numb To The Violence

I drove my son, Ben, to the bus this morning. It is a short, two minute, drive. Along the way I tried, as I do many days on that trip, to express a thought or idea. I try to leave him with a few words to ponder. I guess I’m hoping his sleepy mind will receive messages more easily than his active and awake mind which as a boy of nearly 15 is increasingly poised for mental combat with his parents, God Bless him. Usually I tell the boy to “Do great things today.” We are always preaching how hard it is to stand up for what is right, and I hope that message might encourage a protective instinct for others in him. Then of course there are the grades. Ben gets good grades, but his mother and I know quite well he is capable of better.  So the word “focus” comes up quite often in our two minute drives.

This bright and sunny morning, after watching as a family a few minutes of coverage of the Boston tragedy, I found it difficult to maintain and control my emotions.  “Bastards”, I thought. Mother fucking, bastards. The violence is as usual horrific. Three deaths and apparently scores of people maimed. Two brothers, roofers, waiting for a friend, each lost a leg. One, calling his mother from the ambulance, said, “I’m hurt real bad, Ma.”  I’m thinking of how many calls there were like that.  I read a posting on Twitter last night, a young woman, looking for another young woman, a runner. The post said the runner did not speak English. Poor woman was look frantically for her friend.  I can taste every horrible memory of 9-11 this morning.  The recollections are as fresh and as acrid as if it was yesterday.

For a brief moment in 2001 I harbored some hope that the horrific events at the World Trade Center, In Washington, and Pennsylvania, might lead to some soul searching. As I stood outside the Ed Sullivan Theatre that day, wandering to find a way home, I remember telling my wife, that there was just so much "hate in this world". In the days that followed we would learn that there was more love that day, more sacrifice than we might ever imagine. So many gave their all so that others might live. I have often wondered if in some ways all those fire fighters and first responders weren't in some ways crucified  so that others could be saved.

This morning as I stared blankly out my window into the gathering light, I thought of the images I have seen of the children killed by American drone strikes across the arc of the Southeast Asia. If we can imagine for a moment that we are all human beings, children of some god, before we are Americans or Pakistanis or Yemenis, we might for a moment imagine the horror of those parents. I keep thinking about a thought, or an image of Dr. King, I can’t really recall which, but it was after some moment of violence in the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King often questioned whether “we”, the collective we, really what I think he saw as the soul of the country, were ready for change.  He worried that the Non-Violent movement he led was in fact inspiring violence. Thank God, he was wise enough to continue. Ultimately I think he saw Non-Violent civil disobedience and the violence it often confronted as a necessary purification.  He knew we were not clean. He knew he himself was not clean, so he sought to purify his soul through sacrifice. But I wonder this morning are we ready for change? How much more violence is required so that man can see reconciliation as the more preferred course. This morning, it is painfully clear we are not even close.

Eventually Dr. King sacrificed everything for us, for humanity, for the world, and still we are not pure. If you believe in the Bible, your spiritual fountain is fed by the certain knowledge that Jesus sacrificed everything for us. We are told that his blood is our purification, but we are not pure. The human soul is stained with violence. We are numbed to its presence in our lives.

I have good friend, Steve. I told him a few months back, after some terrible tragedy—I can’t remember which—that perhaps Judaism, his faith, was more logical than Christianity, the faith in which I was raised. We are often so violent towards each other, often times so dismissive of our shared humanity. The light in them is no different than the light in us, yet we often times barely perceive it. I remember telling Steve that maybe it is more logical that the messiah has yet to arrive, maybe the Jews are closer to the truth. It’s hard for me at least to think how little we have done with the teachings of Jesus, especially to love one another as ourselves, when I consider the human condition which is all too often tolerant of violence as an acceptable means of defining and advancing our cause in conflict. Is it possible now, 2,000 years after the birth of Christ, this world is all we can show for that miracle?

20 children are killed in a school in Connecticut and one of us rises up and says the solution of this heinous act is to bring more of the destructive tools of violence into proximity of our children. Six worshippers are gunned down in a Temple in Oak Creek Wisconsin. In response some states pass laws that allow people to bring their concealed weapons to their places of worship. We are so lost. I know myself I have had to fight the urge to hate. The flickering image of LaPierre, the money changer for the arms manufacturers, so often makes me think of the word hate. In response I have poured over Dr. King’s words these past weeks. I just reread the Letter from the Birmingham Jail ( 50 years old this week). Perhaps Dr. King’s words and his spirit have kept me from uttering the word hate, but my soul is bitterly wounded by the shameless greed of La-Pierre’s argument.

So I asked Ben today to consider the mothers and fathers of those children killed by drones. I told him I worried that the nature of our violent world—one which we are often told is so less violent than in the past—will leave him and his friends in a so much more confusing place. I cried a little. He asked if I was OK. Yes, I lied. I mentioned briefly that I could not understand how anyone could suggest that more guns were an answer to Newtown or Aurora.  I told him to do great things. And then I drove back home, numb to the Violence.

Peace…

It so happens that this is social activism week at he school Ben attends. Today's event is a day long fast in honor and recognition  of those who have less than us. My wife and I decided to fast to honor Ben's sacrifice. As a family we will be thinking about the events in Boston, praying for peace, hoping for purification.

The Death of the Southern Strategy

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that...but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

--Kevin Phillips Interview, New York Times 1970

Kevin Phillips, educated at Harvard is often considered one of the Republican Party’s wise men. He has written extensively about National Republican politics. Even if you don’t know the name, many would probably say, “Oh yeah,” if they saw a picture. He’s been on the chat show circuit for decades. This does not mean he was not strategically, destructively, cynical. Nixon, his boss in the 1968 campaign, liked them that way. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Colson, were not namby-pamby feel-me, touch-me, guys.  They played to win. Hard, ugly, and painful as the circumstances required.

In 1968 the year Nixon first won, the country was tearing itself apart—Over race, the rising role of women, Vietnam, cultural changes, and on and on and on. Race issues were not confined to the South either. Frank Rizzo ran the Philadelphia Police like a racist paramilitary strike force. A few years before Nixon’s election, in 1966, Dr. King exposed the deep seeds of racism in the North when he marched in Chicago, staying for a time in an apartment in a deep pocket of poverty on the West Side. Race relations in the city did not improve in the interim. In a Chicago Police raid in December 1969, BPP leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed.

The slow pace of change, especially in economic terms, after the landmark Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, led to riots and conflagration in cities large and small across the country. It started with Watts in the summer of 1965 and after that the heat was never below medium high.  Rising frustration with police brutality led to riots in Detroit in 1967 which resulted in 43 deaths.

African American frustration, especially over issues of economic justice, often ignited over brutal treatment by the Police in their communities. It was met with a rising tide of white anger. There was a lot of fatigue and a lot of, “What do they want now?” Rather than sooth the wounds Republicans found an electoral wedge.

In 1968 George Wallace ran for President as an unabashed champion of white anger.  He scared the GOP operators and that made it worse. Outflanked on his right, and determinedly more committed to the consolidation of power, Nixon, and the Republican Party hatched and executed a southern strategy designed to separate southern whites from their traditional allegiance to the Democratic Party while simultaneously protecting their right flank. Republican campaign rhetoric increasingly skewed towards defense of “State’s Rights”, long held code for the defense of segregationists. Whatever other liberal domestic items he succeeded in passing, and this included the first attempt at federally sanctioned Affirmative Action, the Southern Strategy assumed a long term demographic tilt in favor of whites, and sought to exacerbate the racial divide for the benefit of the Republican Party.  The cynicism inherent to the Southern Strategy was so deep, there was no way it could not hurt the country. Though gerrymandering and other factors exacerbate the problem, the polarized, bitterly divided. political crisis in Washington is the bastard child of the Southern Sttrategy.

The lasting legacy of the Southern Strategy is the Solidly Republican South. Mississippi, for example, with a population which is over 35% African American, has not voted Democratic since 1960. In the last election 55% of its vote went to Romney. The state nominally voted for Kennedy in 1960 (unpledged electors actually carried the electoral college), Goldwater in 1964, and Wallace in 1968 and has never looked back. Locally, African Americans do well in areas where they are in the majority in Mississippi, but at the state level and in national elections not so much.

This is no secret to anyone who really cares to know. The principle of a racially polarized, but politically  unified and Republican Southern electorate was not brought about because of battles over taxes, government spending, or even cultural issues, though it’s fair to say God, Guns and Abortion motivate a lot of folks at the polls today. Racial politics perpetuated willfully, and even skillfully, by national politicians and their handlers have created the schism. The sad result has been a cascade of elections where poor Southern whites place their loyalty in the Republican Party based on the legacy of race. In turn elected Republicans, go up to Washington and vote for spending cuts which would really hurt their multi-racially poor states. They go on to support tax cuts for rich folk, who for the most part don’t live in their state, residing in much greater numbers in places like New York and California.  Ironic, isn’t it?

Though long referred to as a Southern Strategy the cynical mastery of the racial divide has been played on the national stage with lasting effect. Willie Horton was not meant to be a bogey man for the redneck Alabama voter. Alabama was not going to vote for Dukakis anyway.  The Horton Campaign was designed to bring that “Alabama” voter out wherever he lived, even if it was Pennsylvania or Kansas. The strategy as a political approach worked pretty well. Until now.

All of a sudden, the board shifted. And it turns out that the racially hostile rhetoric that drove 90% Democratic majorities in the African American community does not play well with Hispanics, young people, and an increasing number of suburban whites. Holy Crap, now what do we do?

Well, gosh darn it, we gotta go talk to those people. Hello, Rand Paul. Welcome to Howard University, perhaps the most prestigious historically black university in the country and one of the hardest to get into. Even this effort is not really about making a case to African Americans as to the reasons they should support the GOP. A more reasonable goal, and the one I am sure they had in mind is showing moderate suburban whites that this new GOP cares. White sheets are NOT are preferred Saturday night attire.

The well-educated, well-informed, Howard students seemed to get that perhaps they were just props. Paul went with a speech and talking points that were so dishonest and over the top patronizing I was surprised the crowd was respectful as they were. Of course Paul lied about his past objections to the landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, and he stumbled over the name of the first African American Republican Senator, Edward Brooke. He managed to mangle both the first and last name. I might have tripped there too, but you’d think if he wanted to make some of these points he would have had a staffer hit Wikipedia. Good thing for Paul he actually wasn’t specifically speaking to the audience of bright, well informed kids in front of him.  

The highlight for me was the cringe-worthy exchange with the students over the party affiliation of the founders of the NAACP. This is where you really get a sense of the size and scope of the problem.

“How many of you—if I’d said, who do you think the founders of the NAACP are? Do you think they were Democrats or Republicans, would everybody here know they were all Republicans?”

When the students nodded affirmatively—nearly in unison -- that yes they did know about the political provenance of the founders of the NAACP (duh)… Well, it was painful. While I’m sure he wanted to make some other point his message came across as I don’t you well. Really, I don’t know you at all. I thought I could come up here and whip some factoids on you, I’m going to go now.  Except he couldn’t.  The students did not miss core of Paul’s history lesson about great African American Republicans--Like Lincoln, for God sakes. One asked, “Are we discussing the 19th-century Republican Party, or are we discussing the post-1968 Republican Party of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan? My question for you is: Which one do you identify with?” Stumble, mumble, stumble, game over. As I said painful.

There is ample reason for African Americans and anyone really concerned about the plight of minorities and the poor to challenge the allegiance shown to the Democratic Party.  If the question is’ “What have you done for me lately”, the answer is not much. Paul to his credit is proposing a drug policy that would greatly reduce the blight of the War on Drugs, which has been disproportionately harmful to people of color since its inception. In addition, an isolationist Paul would see that far fewer people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder would be sent off to fight and die for wars of questionable need.

Those two policy standards alone place Paul well outside the mainstream of his party—especially his suspicions about the use of military force. In concert these policies will resonate with young people, so I would not be too dismissive. But in larger sense the parade has already passed Rand Paul by. The country is on the move on guns, on immigration (where Paul is also in front of his party) and gay marriage. While Paul is in front of his party, Americans are far in front of the GOP, far in front. On that last point, gay marriage, conservatives are threatening to bolt the party if Republicans succumb to public opinion.  I hope they do, a fracture of that proportion would wreck the party or at least isolate its reactionary, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-immigrant, and I suspect anti-science, core.

Either way, the Southern strategy is dead. I know the ugliness of Jeremiah Wright is just two election cycles back, but it seems like a lifetime ago. Though race will play out in different ways in political campaigns we will never see a Willie Horton featured nationally again. The price has gotten too high. Fear of the other is giving way to ever greater levels of acknowledgement and acceptance of who we actually are.

The dialogue is changed and the coding is much deeper. Guns are a great example. The gun rights crowd is overwhelmingly white. For all the images we have seen over these past months people of color are seldom seen in the gun shops, and non-existent at the NRA type protests. The camouflaged survivalist, the wild-eyed, Ted Nugent is the poster child of the post Charlton Heston NRA. That is not a minority friendly image.

What’s really playing out is a deeply held fear from some who see their country slipping away, especially since we reelected an African American President named Barrack Hussein. There are those who make the name a curse, a slander or worse. But for many of us it is a matter of pride now, a hard won fact that we will fight to retain and uphold. This is not to suggest that ignorance has been outlawed. The internet (and Jon Stewart)  bring us fresh examples nearly every day of unalterable bigotry of a lot of Americans. People have such strange views about homosexuality. Some of the comments are really astounding. The war on women’s reproductive rights and in larger sense their human rights is a long way from settled. But I still feel that something has shifted. Increasingly we see an intolerance of intolerance. As this movement gets bigger and louder, it will become increasingly clear that while Phillips may have been right about 1968 he was wrong about America.

The King Center in Atlanta is honoring the 45^th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King with a campaign called "The 50 Days of Nonviolence."

Dr. King’s words have been very much on my mind. His call to make non-violence a profound commitment--which includes countering the bitterness in our own hearts and souls-- sort of shook me from some anger and gloom that had overtaken me. A piece that started out as a nearly vengeful diatribe against the NRA, and its woeful leader, Wayne La Pierre, turned into this.  This may not be a statement of love (I am no Dr.King), but it is at least intended as a statement of hope, and for that I am grateful for the memory of Dr. King.

http://www.thekingcenter.org/news/2013-04-king-center-national-park-service-commemorate-45th-anniversary-mlk-assassination