At Long Last

Over the weekend I listened to a lengthy Rachel Maddow interview that she conducted with Jon Stewart in 2010. There was a lively back and forth, and contrary to what one might expect there were points of disagreement. Maddow struggled and pushed back, for example, on one of Stewart’s central points; the idea that the media promotes a right-left, red-state-blue-state dichotomy built on a false premise. To Stewart's point of view the real conflict was not between Republicans and Democrats or even between conservatives and liberals. The real conflict, the real heart of the matter was the battle between what Stewart called “corruption” and everyone else. Obama himself made remarkably similar comments in the Marc Maron interview.

Stewart's argument was that corruption was not best confronted by, or at he suggested the fight ought not to be confined by, narrow political views of like-minded Americans. The battle for real right against real wrongs, real evil, was far too important for such a restricted dialogue.

He argued that on this basis both FOX and MSNBC shared certain traits that were worthy of criticism. Maddow, pointing to several cases of well financed and choreographed so-called protest, suggested Stewart was positing a fall equivalency between real protest on one side and movement on the levers of power on the other. For the most part I thought Maddow got the better end of the argument, but Stewart’s idea of opposition to corruption without party affiliation, especially the freedom it must provide in contrast to party dogma, was compelling.

I am so liberal, so attached to my own secular theology, that I get sick of myself sometimes. I am frustrated with the Democratic Party, often finding it a weak counterpart to the colossus of wealth and power which is today’s GOP. Though I prefer no label or category, I find progressive or liberal so much more an agreeable attachment or location to occupy than Democrat. Millions of Republicans have made it pretty clear they feel the same away about the GOP.

So it seems to me that this must mean that there ought to be some things we can agree to, moments when we all should be able to identify the corruption among us. There should be moments when we don't attach our flag of political belief, either in support or opposition, to someone, and we should not always define our most firmly held beliefs in a purely political context.

In recent weeks, we have been subjected to a series of statements that ought to on their own give us pause.

There are over five million undocumented Mexicans in America. Is it possible that all of them are criminals?  I look at all the immigrants in my community. I see mothers and fathers with their children, tiny voices dancing on the summer wind, and workers, sun-baked men with clothes worn from the activity of physical effort.  At the bagel store, the grocery, and in the public space or the bike path, I see my neighbors, and cringe at the words that have been repeated in our public discourse, ad naseum. Do I need to be a follower of one political party or another to denounce the awful things that were said, to feel the urgent desire, indeed the demand, to stand with my neighbor?

Assuming that the practice institutionalized in the term “anchor baby” is actually a real thing, the term still refers to the use of a baby, an innocent and helpless child. The Washington Post has run more than one article pointing out the folly of using your children as an immigration strategy, so much so the political argument, though repeated endlessly, is null and void. But even if the practice were true, have we no mercy for the family or the child at the heart of such desperation?

Critics on both right and left use Nazis and the Holocaust as metaphors for any and all manner of political exercise with which they disagree.  During the Iraq war protesters frequently carried images of Bush and Cheney with the Hitler mustache, and during this administration conservatives have trotted out the Hitler analogies for all manner of protest, including opposition to the Affordable Car Act.  Some, who like me, are extremely frustrated with the militarist policies of are so-called ally Israel have tried to use the imagery of those memories as a blunt sword to cut down Netanyahu. Nothing could be more obscene. Every time I hear these comparisons I feel the wound on the souls of the six million. Rather than a metaphor for evil, the Holocaust is the greatest known example of the existence of evil. Now to score cheap political points rather than point to the final solution as an evil for all times, it’s thrown around like a sports statistic, against which modern day players can be measured.  

And now this.

Appearing at the Eagle Forum, Former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee, said this about the refugees pouring into Europe from the Middle East:

“Are they really escaping tyranny, are they escaping poverty, or are they just running because we’ve got cable TV? I don’t mean to be trite — I’m just saying we don’t know.”

As a political statement this is an awful, appalling, sentiment. But we have grown numb to awful, immune to appalling. The hypocrisy is enraging, especially this statement, coming from a man who has spent the better part of the last several weeks vaingloriously espousing his so-called Christian values.  

I'll be the first to admit that the religious faith of my younger years is lost to me now. I cannot decipher the scriptures in the way many of you can and I’m sure still do. But I understand the admonition-- common to all monotheistic religions-- that places love and charity at the highest altar of human endeavor. 

"For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in;"

I have heard these words dozens of times before. When the challenges are deemed insurmountable we are told to have faith. Heard those words too. I never understood the statements to be orders, but even on the road I now travel they seem to be fairly important aspirations. I posted briefly about Huckabee’s words last night, but they linger with me even now. What Huckabee said is more than out of step with how I feel or the political views of the party I will support in the next election. To me, they should stand, as Stewart suggested, in an area where red-state blue-state should carry little value.  They are more than improper. If we respond to them purely on the basis of our political perspective, don't we surrender something to the inherent political calculation that inspired such immorality?

Are we truly lost to this now? So committed to winning political victory or scoring points in that arena that no morality or shame penetrates the personal armor of our ego or our political arguments?

Joseph Welch was the chief counsel for the United States Army while it was under investigation for Communist activities during the McCarthy hearings. He is famously quoted as confronting the abusive Senator, who destroyed countless lives with the question, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” 

I feel that way now, or rather the way I can only imagine some must have felt then. We are caught in a vortex that only spirals faster and deeper. Every day seems to bring a more astounding surrender of our ethics and values. We are told we are a Christian nation, or at least one of profound faith, but our politics too often either reflect none of that or a distorted fun-house mirror image of what true morality would look like.  Huckabee's comments are cynical, ugly, and selfish, and that is the best that can be said of them. They are easy to condemn, but tomorrow's another day, and another opportunity for fresh moral compromise.

The refugee crisis is a metaphysical crisis for America and for the world. Easy solutions are not in sight. We can choose now to stand with those who are suffering, in spirit and action, or we can excuse corruption.

Does this mean America should volunteer to house 800,000 refugees as Germany has done? Probably not. Is this the time to sort out who was at fault and whether western powers  shredded an opportunity presented  by the Russians in 2012 to get Assad to step aside and leave the country as reported in the Guardian today?  I hope not.

But maybe, just maybe, we can hope and put that hope into action through political power. Let us hope  that in our collective conscience we still have some sense of decency, at long last some tiny shred of decency.

Progressivism V. Cynicism

If you want to know why there is no compromise among the political parties, let this be exhibit one. Wherever one stands on matters in the Middle East, especially is it pertains to Israel and issues that Israel is deeply engaged in, like the recent negotiations with Iran, there is an overwhelming force, one wealthy  individual,  pulling the American political center in one direction.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/sheldon-adelson-is-ready-to-buy-the-presidency.html

Sheldon Adelson is an 82 year old billionaire who made his money in casinos. While he diddles in various issues, he is basically a one issue donor. Israel. Adelson is a huge supporter and personal friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, and his Super-PAC campaign donations have been a primary reason that Republicans have increasingly allied themselves with unquestioning support of Israeli policies, especially those of Netanyahu’s right wing Likuid.

In the last election cycle Adelson donated close to $100 million, much of that going to Newt Gingrich. Adelson’s financial support may be only a tenth that of the Koch Brother’s network this time around, but he expects so much less in policy terms than the Kochs. Other than the Israel issue, Adelson is against marijuana legalization. He favors casino expansion, and generally tilts in favor of low-tax business-friendly policies espoused by most of the other billionaires. But make no mistake. Israel is the fuel that drives Adelson’s political giving.

The Republican brand is already closely tied to the right wing Israeli political movement. Since Reagan, Evangelicals have become far more unquestioning and supportive of succeeding Israeli governments, even those that moved further and further right than the broad diaspora of American Jews supported. Adelson’s narrow focus and mega dollars  have been a magnet, drawing most of the GOP candidates into making a pilgrimage to Adelson's offices in Las Vegas, some with great enthusiasm and some more surreptitiously. As the article points out Cruz and Walker are virtually tumbling over each other to latch onto the teat. Meanwhile, Bush is playing a more nuanced game. All GOP candidates are lined up against the Iran deal though, and the entire field is tilting further and further to the right in policies towards the Middle East generally, and Israel in particular.

Much of Israel's political support is legitimate political principle, but in 2015 there is so much money at stake, it’s hard to tell where principle leaves off and hunger for campaign cash picks up. Since these matters brush up directly against US military policy, the way in which these matters are decided is critical to every Amercian.

As with the ACA, it’s unlikely when the votes for the Iran deal come up in the House, and if they come up in the Senate, that even one GOP elected official will side with the President. That’s the kind of commitment to principle that ONLY money can buy.

This is what democracy looks like in a Citizen’s United country. Americans on both right and left decry the partisan gridlock, but as this article clearly points out if you want access to Adelson’s $100 million, there can be no grey in your policy statements towards Israel. You must do more than support the Israeli people; you must support the policies of the right-wing Israeli government without qualification or hesitation. You must agree that the Palestinians are, as Adelson says, a “made up people”. If you are going to venture anywhere in the direction of the real compromise that would be required to achieve a just and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine forgot squeezing a dime from Shelley Adelson.  As it pertains to policy towards Iran’s containment, you better be willing to put forward an overt military component, almost certainly requiring American troops on the ground. Anything short of these policy positions will be seen by Adelson as little more than milquetoast blathering. If you want a taste of Adelson’s dollars get on board or get lost.

Polarization in the US, driven by campaign cash, has combined with a hard right Israeli Government, publicly hostile to any negotiation, in such a way that no administration since Clinton has wandered into the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Even as Netanyahu made overt appeals to race in the closing days of his campaign, criticism from the US government was muted. Obama let it be known he didn’t like it, but aided by a small cadre of Democrats, the Republican right wing has neutralized any moves towards removing US policy from the noose of Likuid control. Aid to Israel, mostly military, has continued to flow. The whole world watched in horror has Israel bombed Gaza in the summer of 2014. But while the US complained about civilian casualties-- perpetuated almost completely by advanced rockets and other weapons produced in and provided by the US-- the Pentagon simultaneously re-supplied the Israeli stockpile.

In the same way that huge majorities support efforts at gun control, but Congress never enacts legislation consistent with those aspirations, votes in Congress pertaining to Israel follow a similar pattern. Amongst voters, Democrats when polled are far more tepid in their backing, but rock hard Republican support ensures that public opinion is seldom reflected in Congressional votes.

Line up ten billionaires with unlimited resources, each with a narrow agenda, and you will see uncompromising gridlock on ten issues. Line up a dozen corporations or their wealthy overlords, those willing and able to bundle tens of millions of dollars, and you will see Washington hopelessly tied up on 12 additional issues. The resulting gridlock drives more cynicism, which opens the field up further to narrow financial interests. Then more gridlock, then more cynicism, then more narrow interests, and so forth. Sprinkle generously with emotional issues like civil rights, gay rights, and abortion, all of which have proven quite effective in getting poor and working class whites to vote against their own economic interests and you’ll find yourself cruising to a landing in the political environment of 2015.

Ironically the bulwark against these purely financial considerations is the Obama coalition: African Americans, Latinos, the LBGT community and their supporters, young people, and liberals, especially in the Northeast and on the West Coast which account for a huge junk of the Electoral College. I say ironically, because what we are seeing at the moment is that financial interests are empowering extremist candidates, which by their very action are strengthening and mobilizing the progressive coalition.  

In an even match between big money donors and the progressive base of the Democratic Party, all but the most flawed candidates should carry Presidential Elections for the Democrats. Hillary is flawed, though I doubt she’s far enough gone to make people forget the GOP brand, and Sanders for all his principle will have the mighty mountain of “Socialist” to climb if he gets the nomination. That won’t matter, even a little in California or New York, but in the suburbs that ring major cities in every swing state in the country that’ll be a thing.

On the upside, as we have seen over these last months, Republicans are almost constitutionally committed to overreach on social issues. They literally can’t help themselves. The real danger both in this election and beyond is the sense of deep cynicism which is swallowing our politics. There is little danger in my view of the Obama coalition breaking up, but will they show up? Money, as I said, is the most common ingredient in the recipe for political cynicism. Adelson doesn’t care if his hoary cavalcade so disgusts the electorate that half the voters stay home in disgust on election day, so long as those that show up are willing to support candidates that are blindly pro-Israel. The awful choice isn’t really between Democrats and Republicans. It’s between progressivism and cynicism. Regardless of the polls this race is much closer than people think.

 

A Bitter Moment

There are these moments when the road seems long and the legs are weary. This one of those moments. Nine souls lost under almost unimaginable circumstances. Except that’s not true at all. We have learned to absorb these events to such an extent and with such regularity we process them pretty well now. We understand the circumstances all too well. How awful, how truly brutally, awful. Can I just say that I'm angry?  I mean really f***ing pissed. I’ve had to explain a dozen murderous rampage incidents just like this to my now 17 year old son, each worse than the last only by virtue of their repetitive nature.  The truth is they all bear striking similarities. Violence is never the answer I say. If you hear of someone spiraling out of control, you must say something. We have an obligation to each other, and on and on and on, and nothing. Just the emptiness of more meaningless loss.

There are scales in our brains now. We’ve learned how to measure these things, or at least I have. From my point of view Newtown was worse than Charleston, but just barely. The attack at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek Wisconsin in 2012 at which seven people including the shooter died was in ways worse in my mind than the shootout at the Batman showing in Colorado, also in 2012. 12 people were killed at the theatre and 70 were wounded, so much more carnage, but NRA comments after the temple shooting landed in a way with me that I think left me feeling really scarred.

The NRA suggested absurdly in both cases that if only someone in attendance had a gun, preferably a high powered automatic, lives could have been saved. Somehow the suggestion that people would do that at worship cut so deep. Whenever I think of that moment, the thought of a gunfight in a church as an antidote to our loss… “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not…” Pow…pow… pow, pow, pow. I am so angry, and I think part of this at myself, that I’ve developed a thought process by which such heinous acts are categorized, measured, and filed in my brain. We have all learned the language of these events, the basic questions which must be answered, the soulless search for understanding, and the conclusions which must be drawn, even though they never, ever, ever, lead to resolution.

I'm angry that I have had to reteach myself the lesson a dozen times that love is stronger than hate, mostly now I think so I could imbed that in my kids. At 58, I think I have to admit the beloved community is still so far away, we won't see anything like it in my lifetime, and at least tonight while I write this I am not so sure when after that. I think I still believe love is stronger than hate, but evidence suggests that hate dies only after protracted struggle, and even then who knows?

We have become so comfortable with the folly of our violence. Not only the mass shootings, but the destruction of our youth in the violent sub-cultures of our cities. Literally thousands of husband shooting wives and wives shooting husbands each year. A staggering number of suicides, all because of our attachment to guns, and the easy availability we have allowed. 

How far are we away from the beloved community?  A huge number of our leaders are all over the media making a frightful case.  Days after a hate filled young white man walked into a black church and shot nine innocents, politician after politician tells us that we either can't possibly know what happened or that the cause of the rampage was anything other than race, even religious persecution. They leap over the obvious, racist hatred which motivated this shooter-- where the evidence points-- to find anything else, anything besides the killings being a result of America’s untended wound.

Even after the tags on the killer's sweater were identified as coming from the racist white supremacist states of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa some among us could still not ascertain a motive. Even after it was revealed that the domestically bred terrorist had claimed to his victims that he had to do it because they were raping our women and taking over our country Presidential candidates went on TV, scratching their head with uncertainty. F***ing cowards.

How resonant now, Trumps despicable claim of Mexican rapists pouring over the border, words he repeated when questioned two days before this assassin, also referencing  imagined theories on rape, took the life of a South Carolina preacher and State Senator as well as five women, along with four men. Five women. The oldest was 87. She was 87. 87? 87? 87?  Suzy Jackson was 87 years old. Three of the other women who were killed were ministers, aged 49, 74, and 45.

By what twisted logic did five women, three of them ministers, have to die? What social distortion was ringing in the brain of this murderer, a modern day Byron De Beckwith? While all were victims and none earned this in any way, even in this mind how did it translate that without the sin of rape they were still left with the original American sin of skin color? He passes judgement for this sin on his own from the barrel of a high powered weapon. Was the only crime, the only reason he sought to exact justice, that these nine were black in a state where white supremacy still holds sway, where Stars and Bars still flies over the capital? Was it just unbearable to him that the population of “his” country is no longer and will never again be his preferred color?

Was the assassin a lone gunmen or did he have dozens, even hundreds, of fellow travelers,  ranging from anti-immigration politicians and pundits longing for the old days of European immigration to the Police officer in Ferguson threatening protesters with a semi-automatic weapon? Was he a crazed shooter or a committed racist? Or both? Does it matter? And the church, Emanuel AME, so important in the history of our country. Though I am a student of such things I cannot  say I knew that history well until these last few days, but having heard I can understand why Emanuel AME belongs in the same pantheon as Ebenezer in Atlanta, Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, the 16th St. Baptist  Church in Birmingham, and the AME Brown Chapel in Selma. Are we to believe in our color blind, post racial, society that this Bible Study was selected at random. They say the killer asked for Pastor Pinckney. Was that random too?

This past week we have been subjected to another awful tableau. Before the real pain of our racial sickness was shown to us once again in panful detail, the tabloids were filled with the lighter-than–air story of the women who pretended to be black. Late night comedians had their fun, and the today show got their exclusive. Lots of ink, lots of column inches on the web, and lots of pixels devoted to a story of unmeasurable significance, a fifteen minutes of fame moment. We obsess about such cases I think because the real and honest awful truths, the lies we perpetuate out of shame and guilt, are too hard to bear. We hear a lot today about political correctness perpetrated by a bunch of white liberals ashamed and afraid of their past. The PC culture has run amok we are told. Some of that is true I think, but if we are running from anything it seems to me it is the much more basic truth that we are still a country sick with racism.

As Americans we know next to nothing about our history. We know all about the wars, but precious little about the crucible of fire by which African Americans won some measure of their freedom. Victories that too many have come to believe were a ticket for our country to be liberated from any further responsibility. This ignorance of who we are I think is a prime reason commentator after commentator, talking head after talking head, can go on TV and even dare to speak, with arrogant certainty about post racial-America.

This ignorance is how we slide breezily around the words terrorism and assassination as it relates to this racially motivated massacre. Most of us don't know what the reign of terror was like in Lowndes County before and after Selma, or the Mississippi Freedom Summer that preceded it. Southerners, both black and white, know of the history of attempts to silence the liberation voices by bombing and burning churches by the hundreds all across the South. America, so concerned with terrorism now, seems to have slept through or forgotten that chapter of our history. Attacks in the sanctuary are not new, especially those motivated by racial hatred. This massacre, this assassination, did not happen in a vacuum. For Southern politicians of any party to pretend ignorance to this history, and its recent antecedents (including a rash fires as late as 1996) is a blasphemy against every martyr of the Civil Rights movement, especially those silenced now by the cudgel of racist violence. Moreover, one can’t help but notice how we obsess about the phraseology of Islamic zealots, but take little notice of the gentle public treatment of this murderer.

The South Carolina governor made a moving statement about her state waking up to a broken soul and a broken heart. I am certain that her tears were a real expression of the deep hurt she felt at that moment. I suppose she and all the political head scratchers deserve a day of two to collect their thoughts. But for me their first reactions were the most honest. Now feeling pressure most are acknowledging the obvious racist intent of the terrorist assassin. We understand the need for time to process such a heinous act, but the first instinct to cover up and to obfuscate the horrible truth. That, it seems to me, is the terrible predilection of the conservative (and often liberal), southern, (and often northern), politician.

That obfuscation, that dishonesty, feels closer to the real, honest, and ugly truth. Dishonesty is the reason that police departments across the country, now exposed to the searing eyes of ubiquitous smart phones, have been exposed  in case after case to have too many officers hostile to and unknowing about the communities they police. Are we enduring a high time in the cycle of cases of police abuse or are we merely capturing in our hand-held lenses long held truths?

I do not say that all police are bad, but even there I tire of current dialectic into which I find myself so often forced. Those of us who are critical must always sprinkle caveats, but the same people who demand them are so easy to cast blight on whole communities. Condemnation of police misconduct is often met with the canard of black on black crime. Community efforts to fight violence among often desperate young men are routinely ignored. Even when community activists beg for more active policing the events get very little coverage.

The dishonesty is the reason we really can’t admit how isolated so many of our communities of color are, how bad the schools, housing, healthcare, economies, and systems of justice are. The police get all the attention, but it so much more than the crime of police violence that has isolated huge chunks of our population. How uneven the American application of justice. Even in 1976 Richard Pryor defined it as Just-Us. Back then there were 300,000 people held in American prisons today there are 2.3 million, and a lot of that has been driven by a racially biased for-profit prison system. Brother Richard had no idea how bad it would get. 

Economic isolation is the real crime. The nutty NAACP leader in Spokane sucks all the oxygen out of the air, while children in our midst, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters, are allowed to rot and die in substandard, well, everything. And so it goes in post racial America. Who knew subtlety would prove to be an American skill of the first order? If separate but unequal gets struck down by the court, find another way to separate your children from the black neighbors. Class is the easily exchangeable currency of the committed racist. Whatever separation cannot be achieved by color can so much more easily attained by class. 

Americans have come to believe that the advances of a visible few are all the evidence they need that the Civil Rights movement has succeeded and they no longer need to pay attention. Pay no mind to the disproportionate numbers of African Americans swept up into the criminal justice system over the past 30 years. Try to ignore the fact that as a society we have become comfortable spending more to house someone in prison than it would have cost to send them to a university. Tell yourself about how great a justice system we have that locks tens of thousands away at Rikers or the Cook County jail for petty crimes simply because they are unable to make bail. Kalief Broader, a nineteen year-old who committed suicide after being held for three years without trial, is neither your responsibility nor mine. Unemployment is twice that for blacks as for whites, but keep telling yourself there are no historical legacy issues there, it’s all about bootstraps.  Pockets of poverty with inadequate access to healthcare suffering greatly elevated rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and a whole range of preventable disease? Nothing can be done about that I guess.

To be fair these statistics are really driven by segments of the population in the most extreme poverty, but that is not news. The desperate hoods of New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere are the fertile grounds from which both athletes like Allen Iverson, and drug lords like Nicky Barnes rise. In desperation. Deep pockets of abject poverty, in post-racial America that is our chronic condition, just as it was in 1964 when President Johnson declared a War on Poverty. Before Nixon turned poverty into a political weapon the rate of poverty had been reduced from 25% to something in the mid teens, about where it is now.  But we surrendered all those aspirations. How easily manipulated we are on the matter of race, and how deeply dishonest we are in addressing that.  The statistics speak to our national priority, prison over education, white before black, wealthy before the poor.

Even as we soothe our conscience about the progress we have made, political entities at multiple levels whittle away at it. Voting rights are under attack by the courts and state legislatures. Measure after measure, passed to encourage people to vote, by mail, on Sundays and other days leading up to Election Day, on the internet, are all being swept away in a thinly concealed effort to deny blacks, Hispanics, the poor, the elderly and young people the right to vote. The non-existent fig leaf of voter fraud is often mentioned as justification, but just as often some hayseed redneck will tell you, “We’re a-tryin’ to hold down the democratic [black] vote.”

What they don’t decimate with the fraud of these efforts, they invalidate with the free-speech lie of Citizen’s United. Pity the poor white redneck that fell for all this radio-right freedom and liberty bullshit. The man, as he used to be called, is looking to make sure their vote doesn’t count either.  So what you get is enough poor white votes neutralizing black votes, really across the South. This happens just enough so that the states with huge black electorates are still overwhelmingly Republican, and beholden to economic interests that serve neither poor whites nor blacks. This leaves us with Nikki Haley, Stars and Bars, isolation, stagnation, and hopelessness.

This, as Stewart said Thursday night, is who we are and the sad truth is that even armed with these facts, which every politician in Washington and every state capital knows, we won’t do a f***ing thing. This is the back drop against which a 21 year old man, walked into Emanuel AME Church, and feeling his country slipping away, sat through an hour long bible study. Then with ample time to look into his victim’s faces, pulled out a high caliber pistol, a macabre birthday present, and shot nine people dead. 

Then finally, as if all that was not enough, the pain and utter misery of this moment is also made plain by the reality of the American obsession and tolerance of guns. I saved this for the last because any honest assessment would suggest that we will fix our problems of race long before we will address the literal fact that there is a gun in private hands in this country for every man woman and child, more than 300 million. Americans love their guns and their violent past. We have turned the genocide brought down on the indigenous peoples of America into national folklore. We wring our hands over war, but forget in time spans of three or four years what the fuss was all about, and so gear up for the next great evil, the next noble war. We are a militarist and often violent nation who calms its conscience with after the fact justifications for our adventurism.

Back in South Carolina we’ve already heard the comments of the gun industry lobbyists. If only Rev.  Pinckney or perhaps one of the others minsters had been packing as they conducted bible study with a group of seniors, and a few others sprinkled in, all this might have been avoided.  They make the same virulent claim after every mass shooting, and as I said the location matters not. No other advanced country so easily absorbs such violent chaos, but the president barely made a move to call for gun control laws. Everyone knows it won’t happen. Yes-we-can has been soul-crushed by violence and America’s unwillingness to face up to it.

In the battle over guns there are those that despair because the two sides can’t compromise. Their argument sounds fair, as it calls out the polarization in our body politic. If only the two sides could compromise. They envision, I think, two sober, earnest, committed, legislators arguing the merits, finding compromise and common ground. Those making this Solomon-like observations see their centrism as the obvious truth, but they fail to acknowledge that most Americans support moderate gun safety measures such as universal background checks even as they know that might not have saved anyone in Charleston. While there are citizen constituencies aligned on both sides of the argument over gun safety, the real battle lines are between business interests and citizens, and in that battle there really is no hope for the citizens. The gun lobby, and the manufacturers they truly represent, have poisoned our political process in such a way that even measures with majority support cannot pass. This is also who we are—Reform, f***ed in the ass at almost every turn by a commercial interest with political clout and only the morality of the bottom line.  

It is hard not to surrender to the cooling balm of bitter hatred. As I write I feel the beat of my bruised and bitter heart. America is not the greatest country in the world. It is my home and there are many elements of it which I truly love. I have no real desire to live elsewhere, but I have been fortunate to travel abroad enough so I can see that much of our story is built upon a mountain of obvious lies. (Perhaps I did not need the travel to see that.)  As these things go, I know my heart will heal (some) and in the days ahead I will recall the progress which has been made, even as ponder the work still to be done. I will seek out Dr. King’s words as I have so many times in my life. How long, not long, for the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. But if I was being true, I would say that I am so tortured with anger at this moment, so hollowed out with a sense of hopelessness, I just don’t know.

I have been thinking about some of the activists pushing reform at this moment. Rev. Pinckney was one of those. There is a young man named Deray McKesson. I stumbled across him reading coverage from Ferguson, and then the shooting that Charleston was still reeling from when this latest incident took place, the execution of a Walter Scott after a routine traffic stop by a North Charleston Office, Michael Slager. Until earlier this year McKesson worked in the public school system in Minneapolis.  I am sure he pictured a different life for himself, but by any measure the truth of the struggle is his life now. I like McKesson.  I follow him on Twitter (@deray). He posted both of these today.

“As I stand here outside of Emanuel AME, listening to people sing & pray, I keep thinking of their last bible study. I can't sing yet.”

“There is work to be done. It'll take all of us to win.”

He will bring you low with his honesty and his genuine hurt, and then raise you back up with his commitment, and his eyes, always on the prize. We need that I think. Good luck, Deray, America needs you.

What Else You Got?

The thing that gets me is the lengths we are prepared to go, and the money we are prepared to spend, to deal with the fallout of our dysfunction, without actually dealing with the problem directly or really even summoning the need to be honest about it. The US has spent billions since 9-11 arming local police with military weaponry, which this week we saw turned on multi-racial protesters demanding justice for a young black man living in what is “one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States”.

http://www.wupr.org/2013/05/16/st-louis-a-segregated-city/

I have been struck by the response of people from around the world, particularly a man from Gaza who was photographed holding a sign saying: “The Palestinian people know what mean to be shot unarmed because of your ethnicity. #Ferguson#Justice.” Twitter has been alight with comments from Gazans explaining to protesters in Ferguson proper medical techniques for managing a tear gas attack. Things really got going from a perspective of media awareness when reporters from the Washington Post and the Huff Post were arrested and others from al Jazeera were gassed.  Nothing wakes up reporters to injustice quite as much as when an event when one of their tribe is mishandled.

Pundits will no doubt spend the days ahead parsing the events that led to this conflagration. We will hear many levels of sober dialogue about police and community relations. Hearings will be held about the militarization of police forces across the country. Questions will be asked about why a police force of 55, working in a community of just over 20,000, needed a military assault vehicle. I grew up in a town about that size, Streamwood, IL. I was thinking this week what it would have looked like to see an MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicle headed down Parkside Circle towards Monaco’s drugstore. What was absurd is now real. Yet it seems we are not even capable of having a real dialogue about where we are and the problems in our communities.

We can start with the lack of a quality education. For all the talk about the failure of the American education system, the basic differences in educational opportunities between districts located in poor communities and those in wealthier ones are clear. It’s hard to listen to the debates between union types and so called reformer types, without wanting to ask the obvious question: “How can education ever fill the gap brought on by a home broken by poverty?” While it is possible for districts and schools to rise above the limitations of their location, it is so much harder when kids are not getting enough food, or of they reside in an environment of fear and despair, so that what we see in the mean is failure.  From the jumping off point of a poor education the most optimistic path leads to a poorly paying job. Too many do not even get that far.

The great disparity of both income and wealth between African Americans and whites and the divide in employment opportunities between the two communities is worse now than in 1960. With the collapse of manufacturing, income inequality is greater than 1960. While this statistic includes all races it has had an inordinate impact on communities of color who in the early 70’s were just starting to climb the economic ladder out of decades of isolation. Soon after America turned its back on the War on Poverty and programs they felt most benefited other communities. For a brief moment Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy and others shamed America into seeing ourselves as connected, then Vietnam, battles over busing, and targeted racist political appeals growing out of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy"-- which explicitly attempted to racialize poverty programs-- drove poor Southern whites to vote their racial animus over their economic self-interest. This is a pattern that continues today. How quickly white Americans settled back into our comfortable calculation of them and us.  From then on America surrendered its efforts to solve its problem with race, and the poverty that attends it, choosing instead to paper the issue over with fine speeches and a celebration of Dr. King on his birthday.

While it’s true that millions of people of color rose to capture some measure of the middle class American Dream, those that remain are poorer and more isolated in their poverty and neglect than ever. No amount of readings of the “I Have a Dream” speech has or will change that.

Most people know of the staggering number of young African American men under control by one means or another of the criminal justice system. The War on Drugs has turned the increasingly for profit prison system in America into a warehouse of young black and brown men.  Prison populations, which even through Jim Crow and legal segregation were majority white in 1960, have turned overwhelmingly Black and Latino.  Since more than half that serve time return after being released for another crime, the system has become a revolving door of despair, reaffirming a pattern of petty criminality and incarceration rather than breaking it. White liberals, like myself, have spent decades arguing with other white liberals about whether the criminal justice system creates the problem and how to measure the responsibility of the incarcerated, but no amount of research and debate has broken the cycle.

While some may have forgotten or simply chosen to ignore how the problems of poverty exacerbate issues within our communities, there is little doubt that there are two criminal justice systems, one for white folks and one for the poor minorities, two educational systems, two community development systems and so forth. Moreover, willful decisions were made. Robert Moses, the patron saint of New York City Parks, carved massive section of urbanized housing with highways and other development projects in such a way as to totally isolate whole communities. Nicholas Lehman, in his excellent book, The Promised Land, details the ways Richard Daley did the same in my beloved Chicago.   

http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Broker-Robert-Moses/dp/0394720245

http://www.amazon.com/Promised-Land-Migration-Changed-America/dp/0679733477/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408290282&sr=1-1&keywords=the+promised+land+nicholas+lemann

Our schools and housing communities either never escaped or are returning to levels of segregation which were identified as totally unacceptable in 1965. Meanwhile in almost every public sphere a majority of the Supreme Court has taken the position that the battle is over, and in the case of the most extreme justices challenged whether it ever ought to have been fought in the first place. Apparently the good guys won on Voting, in Housing, Affirmative action. Everywhere. Game over, time to move on. Congress has abandoned any desire for governance. Politicians with national aspirations, even the President himself, are afraid to say anything about poverty or race. Every program is measured by its impact on the middle class. It is as if America has surrendered its willingness to address or even talk about the stain of our historical legacy- racism.

Class plays an increasingly important role in some people’s willingness to see themselves as different or better than their brothers and sisters. Well off and well-funded Conservative African Americans now roam the land waving their fingers at those less fortunate than they. We see an increasingly willingness for those that escaped the desperation of poverty to roll up the road behind them rather than encouraging a broader and more expansive effort to pave an even better road, both metaphorically and literally. Infrastructure spending has become a dirty word. Herman Cain ran an ugly campaign of us and them, blame game politics, before he imploded amidst a flurry of not ready for prime time behavior (“Uz-beki-beki-stan”), punctuated by claims of sexually inappropriate behavior. His 9-9-9 campaign was a naked attempt to exacerbate the transfer of wealth from the poor and working class to those already obscenely wealthy and absurdly powerful.

So then we come back to Ferguson, Missouri. Every act by the police and local officials has been and will continue to be minutely dissected. The local police are clearly a bunch of jackasses. In action after action they have shown their contempt for the community. After what we have seen does anyone really doubt a police officer in that department may have felt that almost any show of force would be justified, up to and including shooting a young unarmed man with his hands in the air? After calm is restored, the questions will remain. For these protests are about so much more than the isolation of the police from the community? If calm returns tomorrow, for what reason would anyone abandon their sense of despair? Does St Louis County have some new Fair Housing Plan in the works? Is some new approach to breaking barriers of race in achieving access to good schools being considered? Job training? Summer work programs for young people next year? We see the assault weapons and military equipment. We’ve heard the lectures about bootstraps. What else you got?  

Israel and Palestine: Shared Tragic Loss

Yochanan Gordon is a zealot, made even more dangerous because he does not carry a weapon. Yesterday he wrote an Op-Ed, published briefly, but quickly withdrawn for the Times of Israel in which he concluded with this question:

“If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?”

Gordon is a writer, a demagogue, not all that different than Dick Cheney, for example, someone who provides a rationale for others to fight and die.  Back in the old days when there was 60% to 70% support in the Occupied Territories and Israel for a negotiated two-state solution the big question was always whether or not those in favor of peace and reconciliation would be able to sustain their voices over the hopeless nihilism coming from extreme factions in both communities who do not see the other as even at the level of human. The brutality of bombs landing on hospitals, factories, power plants, schools, and homes we have seen in Gaza, matched equally with the inhumanity of 3000 rockets fired indiscriminately into Israel, has empowered the masters of war on while weakening the peacemakers. Gordon is just one example of it. Even if he represents just a tiny fraction of the thinking  in Israel, his position is so extreme it is bound to drown out others, in the same way that the Tea Party, all 20 or 30 of them in the House, is the only element of Republican Party that gets any ink in this country.
I posted this not only to criticize Gordon, though he is worthy of that, but also because I know there are people of good faith who lean one way or the other, but maybe do not understand or choose to acknowledge the extremism that exists in the side they support or the community they live in. Elements of both the both Palestinian and Israeli nations are worthy of condemnation in my view and there is precious little understating or acknowledgment of that. I understand that some whom may read this and respond by saying what Gordon wrote does not match the sins of Hamas, words not having the same weight as action. But I would ask those people would you same the same for the political leadership of Hamas cooling their heels in Doha. Aren’t they also one step removed from the actual carnage taking place on the ground? Does this distance give them the leeway to speak of the extermination of jews? Does the bullet hate? How about the rocket or the missile?  Or are they merely means by which hatred is expressed? The utter contempt for the sub-human nature of other?

For weeks we have heard how Israel is weakening itself in the court of public opinion or Hamas is being “brought to heel” like dogs by Israeli bombs. This is the classic analysis of power, but the real shift of power is away from those whether in Palestine or Israel who seek peace and reconciliation.  People are fighting for their lives so good polling is not available in Gaza and the West Bank, but we can be sure that support for a negotiated two-state solution is no longer anything close to previous levels.  How do we ask a father destroyed by the loss of a dead child in his arms, or a mother hunkered down in an air raid shelter as sirens wail and her children cry to seek peace?  I make no qualms about my belief that the suffering of Gazans is unimaginably, obscenely greater, but that said, which family ought rightfully to be expected to press their leaders to seek peace?

Through this week I have seen post after post from those who see this calamity primarily through the prism of their personal allegiance. As one might expect most Americans see Israel as the victim, and Hamas as the cause of every hurt, both those inflicted on Israel as well as the Palestinians. But in this amazing new world we live in those of us who care, can also tap into a social network site and see a multitude of comments that can give as perspective as to how others might view these events, people with different perspective and views than our own.

It is easy to tap into the hurt and pain on the other side of the crisis if you are so inclined. There are people of good will and honor all over the world that are expressing their support and honorable hurt for the Palestinian people. There is much righteous and well directed anger towards Israel which I share. Despite the inaction of totalitarian Arab governments fearful of political Islam, across the Middle East there are people speaking in rational terms about the pain they experiencing and the wrong they see.

If one dives deep enough and frequently enough, it is not hard to find Islamic Yochanan Gordons. Like him, all these people do is sit with their phones and type words, they do not carry weapons, and even their audience is for the most part their fellow travelers on Twitter or wherever. Judging from their pictures with their pink hair accessories or American themed t-shirts many of these people would never pick up a gun. Some of the most pro-Palestinian supporters I have seen do not live in the Territories. They are just angry and hurt and for their people, and so they perpetuate a rationale out of their bitterness, for others to fight and die, and in Gaza if we are to be totally honest, simply die. There are estimated to be 15,000 fighters in Gaza affiliated with Hamas or other aligned groups. Still some suggest ultimate victory over a nuclear armed Israel. This is such wrong thinking to the point of being delusional. I was reminded of Dr. King’s words prescient words posted on the MLK Center FB page this week, “The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.”

Most of those committed to their rationale do not see any reason to question it. I find this particularly hard to understand coming from liberals, who in almost any other conflict would criticize any entity that used its overwhelming power so indiscriminately. (Too many centers of Palestinian survival have been struck now to call the Israel effort targeted. Dr Belal Dabour, a Palestinian Doctor @belalmda12 has provided a steady sorrowful representation of the ways in which Palestinian society is being systematically destroyed.)

Many of the liberals now defending Israel and attacking Hamas by practice and seemingly family history almost always stand for peace, often for the underdog, the weaker or more defenseless. But not now. Israel has, for a very long time, been one subject that deeply divides American liberals. Those of us who now criticizing Israel are often accused of being supporters of Hamas. I heard it on during a debate on TV again last night. It was no different in 1982, when Israel blundered out of anger and frustration into Lebanon, and pounded Beirut mercilessly for months. Back then I was in the audience when representatives of the Israeli group Peace Now, explained that Israel was violating international law, using white phosphorus and other anti-personnel weapons in an attempt to terrorize the civilian population. We were told then that civilians were trapped in Beirut. Similar claims are being made in Gaza. What place in Gaza is safe for civilians? How can Israel drop flechette shells on Gaza city?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israel-using-flechette-shells-in-gaza

Back in 1982 many of us felt then that what Israel was doing in Lebanon was wrong and tragically would not bring them closer to their ultimate goal of security. And then Sabra and Shatilla happened and militias working closely with the IDF massacred between 1,000 and 2,000 civilians, killing many as they slept. Where are we now 30 years after Sabra, Shatilla, and Beirut, incidents we were told would so shock the conscience as to require both sides to forge a new path? 95% of Israelis support the recent military invasion of Gaza.

Yet I say for supporters of the Palestinian cause, those that can only see Israel’s mistakes, are we to believe the entire nation of Israel only hates Palestinians? Are we simply to forget that a few years back nearly 70% of Israelis were prepared to sign off on a negotiated settlement which would result in a two state solution?

With Lebanon in 1982 those of us who dared raise a voice were criticized as being pro-PLO. It is pro-Hamas now, then it was PLO. There is a very good reason that this approach is so effective in silencing honest discussion, the deplorable record of the PLO then and Hamas now. Many people do not accept that some of us can support the Palestinian people, while condemning the leadership which precipitates crisis after crisis. The foolish claim that ultimate victory is possible that the PLO told Palestinians then, and Hamas tells Palestinians now is a lie, designed to distract from their own humiliation at the hands of the occupiers, and to maintain allegiances that for any sane person should have long since been extinguished. Some of us find it impossible to disassociate our humanity from the devastation we saw this week in a UN school being run as a shelter where the UN claimed that the IDF was advised 17 times of the coordinates.  To us when supporters of Israel defend the indefensible with “Look at what Hamas has done,” the words feel effortlessly Orwellian. So those of us who seek a path towards peace, even of those of us with some knowledge of history, and the pain of both sides, we have no place. We are simply defenders of Hamas.

Here's the full text of the deleted Times of Israel post backing genocide in Gaza

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/1/5959635/heres-the-full-text-of-the-deleted-time-of-israel-post-backing?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_name=share-button&utm_campaign=vox&utm_content=article-share-bottom

The Author of That Gaza Genocide Op-Ed Is Not Backing Down

http://www.mediaite.com/online/the-author-of-that-gaza-genocide-op-ed-is-not-backing-down/

Yochanan Gordon Apologizes for ‘Genocide Is Permissible’ Op-Ed

http://www.mediaite.com/online/yochanan-gordon-apologizes-for-genocide-is-permissible-op-ed/

Belal:

I read your story about the wounded little boy asking for his father and brother. I have a son. He is nearly 16 now, but at that age he was a skinny little guy just like that boy. My heart is heavy for that family and for all those now suffering such loss.

I will continue to follow and hope that this madness is soon over. We pray for peace and your personal safety.

http://belalmd.wordpress.com/2014/07/23/the-boy-who-clung-to-the-paramedic-the-story-behind-the-photo/

Mohammed, Naftali, Eyal, and Gilad

More than 70% of Israelis and 70% of Palestinians favored a two state solution in 2009. In absence of any progress on Peace Talks those numbers have dropped precipitously, though majorities in both Israel and Palestine still want negotiations which would lead to peaceful coexistence. It is not the will of the people that has killed the chance for peace it is the timidity of political leaders. Netanyahu does not want a two state solution and he has spent two terms as Prime Minister doing everything he can to derail any chance for progress. He has been a major proponent of settlement activity and has taken an eye for an eye approach to every provocation. Thomas Freidman once said that Arafat never missed an opportunity to waste a chance for peace. In the succeeding years every Palestinian leader has pretty much followed that playbook. Though I understand the frustration and political calculations that lead the Palestinian Authority to align in a pact with Hamas, in its way, this is just as great wound to the Palestinian aspirations as Settlement activities by the Israelis in the occupied territories. I would call the alliance a catastrophe, except we all know how many other foolish and damaging steps each side has taken previously. Was the Infitada which sent Palestinian boys into the streets with rocks to battle heavily armed Israelis a catastrophe? Was the 1982 invasion of Lebanon which led to the massacre of 2000 civilians at the hands of militias working directly with the Israeli Defense forces a disaster? In 1946 Zionists, some of whom would later have significant leadership roles in Israeli government, were battling the British occupation and they blew up the King David hotel decades before terrorism was part of the modern vocabulary. Was that a catastrophe? What about Munich and its bloody aftermath?

 Leadership in both Palestine and Israel governed large majorities willing to take a chance for peace, but they have squandered opportunity after opportunity, either out of fear of the militant fringe in their community (which is real) or because the leaders themselves did not have the political desire to seek peace. Arab governments in the area have spent a lot of time exploiting the crisis over the last 50 years, without lifting a finger, or taking any risk, to push any real chance for peace forward. Here in America the hard right is myopically committed to an absolute defense of Israel, no matter the circumstance.

 Considering this history, those who defend one side or the other without acknowledging the sins of those that they defend, miss the point almost completely. Both sides have wronged the other, sometimes with great pain, and sometimes with catastrophic results for their own political goals and any moral standing they would hope to project to the world. In my heart, I think I instinctively feel more defensive about the Palestinian cause than that of Israel, but this is only because while the political wheels spin in the mud, the Palestinians continue to suffer grave depravation of basic human needs like housing, food, and medical care in their everyday lives, not to mention gross indignities as they move through the terrain of occupation. The fact that Israel confronts the land of those they occupy with tanks and other high powered weaponry which is overwhelming in every way to anything the Palestinians can muster feels like it should ascribe a greater moral obligation to Israel. Yet I hesitate. We can be certain that the mothers of those three Israeli teenagers-- slain for the furtherance of no cause-- feel no more or less pain than the mother of the Arab teenager who was kidnapped and brutalized—also for no cause. A dead child is a dead child. As the father of a teenager myself, who lives every day with both the joy he brings and the foolish choices he sometimes makes, my heart feels broken for this most recent loss of life. I see the news, and then I think of my all arms and legs, 6’3, 165 pound, beautiful, son and I shudder, feeling tears of fear and worry that won’t come. As human beings our collective soul is scarred by these heinous acts in the way that Newtown and 9-11 scarred us. We do not recover from these cuts, we merely endure. We are not scarred because I or anyone who reads this wasted those lives, but because we were so helpless and or disinterested to prevent the horror we then had to witness. Those of us who consider ourselves as citizens of the world have a lot of work to do and speaking personally I feel that during the course of my life far too much is left undone. Perhaps, far more than anything else, there remains too much hate in this world, too little love, too little acceptance, and too little commitment to dialogue.

 Which brings me back to the words of Dr. King which I posted yesterday: "That old law about 'an eye for an eye' leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing."
There is no reason for hope right now, except in our lifetime we did get to watch the Berlin Wall come down. Though we lost Steven Biko, we watched the heroic Mandela walk out of prison and lead his beloved South Africa in an inclusive and forgiving way. Though Burma is now besieged by ethnic violence, we saw the magnificent Daw Aung San Suu Kyi leave her house arrest of more than 15 years. We lost Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, Viola Liuzzo, Medgar Evers, both Dr. King, and Malcom X and countless others, but this week we saw one of my great personal heroes, John Lewis, alongside millions of other Americans celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights act. No matter those that would turn back the clock and the miles we still need to go, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act which followed a year later fundamentally transformed America. So, I guess there is also this: “The Arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Our Failure In Iraq

This week John McCain has referred to the crisis in Iraq as the gravest threat to American security interests since the end of the Cold War. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/huffpost-reporter-confronts-mccain-does-victory-in-iraq-mean-endless-war/ Of course, he also said those same words, or something almost exactly like it, about (in alphabetical order) Georgia, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Ukraine. I find the omission of the basic facts about American opinion on Iraq when Obama entered office an interesting cross current in all the commentary about bad choices and feckless leadership. In 2008 a Washington Post poll found that 64% of Americans felt the worth was not worth fighting. Hilary Clinton lost the nomination specifically because she authorized the resolution to go to war. Obama was elected to get the US out of Iraq. So McCain's position is basically that Obama should have voided one of the central rationales for his campaign, the reason that he is President, the reason he in fact beat McCain, to support a failed policy that 2/3 of Americans were challenging. Whatever, McCain says now, there is no clearer example of the statement that elections have consequences.  Any criticism he directs towards the President is also in part a howl against public opinion which abandoned him, his party and his ideas in 2008. I suppose this is McCain’s way of saying he was right and ought to have been elected, but only Americans with absurdly short memories have forgotten how American public opinion had completely shifted in opposition to a war they now realized was wrong, both in justification and execution.  Then again I don’t think it’s possible to lose a bet underestimating the memory of either the shameless American politician or the voters they try to hustle.

Joe Scarborough who has long advocated the departure of American troops from Afghanistan, is now pillorying the President for leaving Iraq too soon. I am glad to hear Scarborough and so many other commentators lay so much blame squarely at the feet of Paul Bremer, Bush's civilian administrator in Iraq. His decisions to force all Baathists from the Army and any role in civilian government ensured that the Sunni would be isolated form the administration of Iraq and is the direct antecedent to the current crisis.  http://pfiffner.gmu.edu/files/pdfs/Articles/CPA%20Orders,%20Iraq%20PDF.pdf When he forced all NGO’s to register with the American occupiers he in effect advised the Iraqis many of whom deeply distrusted America and its new viceroy, Bremer, that America, and the coalition forces it lead were their new master. Problem is the place stopped functioning.  Electricity in Bagdad summers where the temperature routinely reaches 120, became scarce and inconsistent. Water and food were hard to get. Government offices and cultural institutions were looted. A sense of lawlessness took over the streets. Hostilities between neighbors were played out in high noon showdowns. Thanks to Rumsfeld’s disastrous war plan, the Americans were so shorthanded they could not be in enough places at once. This unleashed the savage dogs, butchers from both religious groups, long suppressed by the brutal tyrant Hussein were unleashed.

What Americans did not understand then and are only waking up to now, is that the United States bumbled into a civil war by taking sides between a Shiite majority, now backed by Iran, and a Sunni minority. There was no way this was going to end well. Joe Scarborough, speaking in recent days, surprises me, though I guess he shouldn’t.  He has been advocate for troop withdrawals from Afghanistan for years, putting him to the left of Obama who he’s criticized for moving too slowly.  In Iraq he was a hawk from the jump. He wrote a blistering editorial in 2011 http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70653_Page2.html where he excoriated Bush’s handling of the war and the left’s criticism of it.  Back then we was trying to make the case that the removal of Hussein was a good thing. He called on all sorts of politicians and media types to “apologize” for the politically motivated criticism of Bush, and to finally acknowledge the painful but ultimately positive results in Iraq. He listed Democrat after Democrat that voted for the resolution. And then he ended with this, “The Iraq war framed a disastrous decade for U.S. foreign policy. President Obama should be praised for bringing it to a close. But as we move forward into even more uncertain times, Americans should always remember that the Iraq war was not the product of one man or one party, but of a political system that continues to betray the very citizens it is supposed to protect and serve.” Just three years later in the face of a new crisis, Scarborough is bashing the President for leaving too soon. He generously allows Obama to share the blame with Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, who bumbled into a disastrous war, and Bremer, of course. We all have short memories I suppose. But after 4,500 deaths, and 40,000 or so grievous injuries, we ought not to allow ourselves to be distracted so easily.  The Iraq war, after all, was one Scarborough supported fiercely early on.

We will all watch now as truly brutal masters assert their will in Iraq. This human catastrophe will be worse I think then Sarajevo in 1992 for one simple reason: Americans, or at least any of us capable of honesty, will know in their hearts the significant roles we took in unleashing this fury.  Short of boots on the ground there is precious little we can do that will have any impact, and I am fairly certain that won’t happen, so we will watch, haunted by images of utter brutality.  Let us hope this will finally cause Americans to take stock of the limits of our power. Since 1954, the US has executed its will, often violently on the countries of Bosnia, Cambodia, Columbia, Cuba, Chile, The Dominican Republic, Grenada, Iraq, Iran, North and South Korea, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, North and South Vietnam, Yemen. We have fought the war on communism, the war on drugs and the war on terrorism. Though communism pretty much imploded under the weight of its own failure, drugs, terror, and all means of sectarian violence consume vast portions of the human community here on our very small earth. We have tried to remake the world in our image, often with arrogance and ignorance. We have yet to learn the limits of our power and in allowing and encouraging its use even after we have seen cataclysmic failure after cataclysmic failure we have squandered our morality as a nation.

Let us all now, pray for peace… And forgiveness…