Whether you like someone or not is irrelevant. Everyone on the planet deserves a safe place to exist, a sufficient amount of food to eat, healthcare without prequalifications, personal dignity (respecting how they identify), and love.
You don’t get to deny them these rights. They don’t get to deny you, either. That’s the way it has to be.
IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, THAT’S JUST TOUGH. SIT THERE AND BE BITTER BUT STAY THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY.
FOREVER.
Dreams are odd and unusual things that sometimes have a meaningful message and other times are nothing more than a series of bizarre images that have no noticeable relationship to real life. Sometimes, dreams are replaying events of the past, especially those one wishes they could change. Other times, dreams indulge in fantasies, things we might like to do if we didn’t have to suffer the consequences of doing them. Dreams are not trustworthy. Dreams are not predictable. They are glimpses into a part of our mind that science has yet to understand. So, when I dreamed of a movement to eliminate billionaires the hard way, I woke up trying to tell myself that it absolutely does not mean that I’m bloodthirsty.
In my dream, we (those faceless individuals with me) commandeered a submarine and torpedoed Jeff Bezos’ yacht. We (presumably the same group) then used a surface-to-air missile to take Elon Musk’s plane out of the sky at 30,000 feet (Is that even possible?). Immediately, the world started being a better place as the billions of dollars they hoarded were distributed more equitably through charities named in their wills. While their deaths were news for a moment, people quickly forgot all about them and went on about their business.
Reality would be much different, however. For all the calls to “eat the rich,” killing rich people isn’t sufficient to redistribute billions of dollars of wealth equitably. Billionaires have wills, trusts, and succession plans already in place to make sure that whoever comes behind them continues to build on the wealth they already have. Like fighting the legendary Hydra, cutting off one head only causes two more to pop up in its place. If we’re really going to put an end to billionaires, all of them, then we are going to need a much better plan, one that ensures money is getting to where it’s most needed.
First, let’s take a look at who, exactly, we’re talking about when we use the term billionaire. Forbes just updated their list last week. Consider who’s hoarding the most wealth.
The number of billionaires has increased by 141 over last year, up to 2,781 with an aggregate value of $14.2 trillion. The US has the most, by far. China comes in second and India third (up significantly from last year). It is almost impossible to wrap one’s head around how much money these people have. Let’s examine the obligatory comparisons.
Excluding war, these are the four biggest problems addressing the world at the moment and they could all be completely eradicated by 2030 and our group of billionaires would still have more money than they can possibly spend. Think about that for a moment. All the world’s most critical needs can be met if the world’s billionaires would kindly get their heads out of their collective asses.
Apparently, all those billionaires need some incentive. The go-to response is that they need to be taxed. That sounds like it should be an easy solution. However, the US government wastes approximately .51 cents of every dollar on bureaucracy. Even at the most streamlined methods, it would still double the cost of any endeavor. Other countries are worse. Then, once the government has the money, there’s the fight over who gets how much. Inevitably, the military, which doesn’t need any more fucking money than it’s already getting, would be yelling and screaming for more and there are far too many politicians willing to give it them because of the pull the military-industrial complex has. Several billion would be lost to pork projects in individual states under the guise of “creating jobs.” The inefficiencies of government cause very little actual help to reach the people who need it.
A much more efficient way would be for the billionaires to get together and handle these matters themselves. They already have the people and the structure and, unlike governments, have reason to operate in the most efficient way possible. Think of all the good Chef Jose’ Andres is doing with World Central Kitchen and he isn’t a billionaire! These problems are fixable without involving governments and the solutions would almost certainly last longer and be more effective than any government-funded project would be.
The problem is, that billionaires don’t want to work together and don’t want to let go of the money they’ll never spend. The motivation has to come from people like us. We have a couple of choices: either we stop buying their products and dump their stocks (which puts more money in our own pockets), or… we start buying rocket launches and putting them to good use. How many billionaires do you think we’d have to blow out of the sky before they got the hint?
Before you get all self-righteous about murder being wrong, stop and think about the degree to which billionaires who could help world problems and don’t, are accessories in the deaths of millions of people who die because they didn’t have enough food, protection from the elements, enough education to survive, or sufficient access to healthcare. MILLIONS of people that they could and should be helping.
There is a moral responsibility we all have to help those in need. Hoarding wealth in extreme amounts does not excuse anyone from that responsibility. Knowing that you could completely eradicate an inhuman condition and doing nothing more than throwing pennies at it (donations less than $100,000,000) makes you just as inhumane. Billionaires are the real animals in our society, and yes, that includes the ones you like.
This all brings to mind the French Revolution and the solution they found for the inhumanity of the rich: cut off their heads. The advantage of using rocket launchers is that you don’t have to get as close to the filth.
A few weeks ago, model Syd K. Innoveria hit me up about doing an ACAB photoshoot. Desperately wanting a new face in front of my camera and impossibly bored from not being able to shoot the past several months, I jumped at the opportunity, not bothering to ask what ACAB might stand for. Sure, it was obvious that it was something anti-establishment, and that usually is all the information I need; I’m all for anti-establishment causes. When I finally got around to checking on the acronym, though, I had some hard thinking to do.
ACAB=All Cops Are Bitches.
Okay, we have to stop and consider the ramifications. Do I agree with this underlying philosophy and how does it relate to my existing opinions about policing and incarceration? ACAB isn’t an actual, formal organization but more of an Adhoc social media tag for highlighting the discrepancies committed by police officers. Am I being unfair and unreasonable to police officers if I do this shoot?
Then, as I wrestled with the concept, I was reminded, repeatedly, sometimes loudly, of a couple of adages that apply to too many situations. One is, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” and the other says, “You don’t build strong houses when all you have is a jackhammer.” Police departments, as they currently exist, are hammers looking for nails. Prisons are jackhammers, destroying rather than constructing.
I expect some people (perhaps most) to respond with, “but it’s only a few bad cops.” Please. Stop. As long as good cops are not reporting bad cops, as long as the system allows bad cops to not be held responsible for their crimes, as long as police who commit murder are allowed to keep their jobs, the problem isn’t “a few bad cops.” The problem is that All Cops Are Bitches in a dysfunctional system fucking over everyone but the elite.
So yeah, we did the photoshoot.
What’s important to me, though, is that the pictures come with an explanation of the problem and a strong proposal for a workable solution. Those who are familiar with Old Man Talking know that I’m rarely at a loss for words, especially on matters I feel are important. This is one of those matters. So, if you want to see the pictures, you’re going to have to read the article, or at least scroll through it. Maybe a paragraph here or there will grab hold.
And if you’re inclined to comment, know that I will absolutely ignore you if you haven’t read the whole thing and followed up on every resource (yes, I can tell). I don’t consider anecdotal evidence factual. Your opinion doesn’t carry substantial weight. We’re dealing in facts here, so if you don’t have source materials at the ready, don’t bother challenging me.
The problem here is undebatable. What matters is the solution. Enjoy the pictures, but consider the words carefully. The time has come for a change.
The police blotter from overnight recently has too many entries for my comfort. Among them are these:
What disturbs me about those events is that they all occurred within a two-mile radius of our home, a neighborhood that, when I moved here seven years ago, seemed quiet and peaceful compared to much of the rest of the city. If there’s a sobering thought here it’s that it still is quieter and more peaceful than much of the rest of the city.
Then, as I’m writing, another alert comes in: Man attacked in stabbing, suspect fled in a car.
Spread the search out to include the entire city and the picture grows darker. Within the past 24 hours, these are just some of the additional incidents that have occurred.
That’s all within less than 24 hours and doesn’t include things like domestic disturbances or other forms of domestic crime that take longer to discover.
Such a list raises a lot of concern. There have been a lot of ideas and conversations around how to address moments of increased violence and very little has worked—nothing that can be emulated over any broad area. More policing hasn’t worked. Gun laws haven’t worked. Faith-based programs haven’t worked. Anti-violence campaigns haven’t worked. To find ourselves in this position in 2020 raises a philosophical question that may be uncomfortable to answer: Are we, as humans, predisposed to violence? Is it possible that we simply cannot help ourselves and that violence is going to happen no matter what we do?
Well, maybe. But then again, maybe not.
Mythology is littered with accounts of early violence in conjunction with early human development. The story of Cain killing his brother, Abel, comes to the mind of those familiar with Abrahamic religious traditions. Other mythologies have their moments of fratricide as well. Madea killed her brother Apsyrtus. In Nordic mythology, Höǒr kills his brother Balder. Romulus killed Remus. Osiris murdered Set. The Pandavas killed their brother Karna. There hardly seems to be a religious tradition of any kind without some form of fratricide in the earliest stories.
But none of those mythologies can be considered authoritative and may have been merely cautionary in their intent rather than attempts at documenting any real history. Making assumptions or conclusions from unreliable and likely fictional accounts is hardly helpful in addressing real-world problems.
Where mythology suggests, science can confirm. In 2001, the late Phillip L. Walker, at the time of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a well-respected anthropologist (and Indiana native) known for developing methods of extracting sociological knowledge from archeological remains, published an article in the Annual Review wherein he laid out a detailed argument that interpersonal violence, especially among men, has been prevalent throughout history. He argues that “no form of social organization, mode of production, or environmental setting appears to have remained free from interpersonal violence for long.”
How deeply ingrained are we talking about? Walker quotes evidence from a 1986 study showing that as much as 600,000 years ago our earliest ancestors in what is now Ethiopia were “defleshing the heads of other people.”
We, mere mortals of the non-scientific world, are enamored with the tales of ancient violent crime as much as we are the not-so-ancient. Our predilection with police procedural television programming is sufficient evidence of our grotesque fascination and it’s at this point that we want to fancy ourselves as kitchen table philosophers, pondering why our ancestors were so violent, as though we have somehow risen above our past. If anything, we have gotten worse. Walker states, “The social anonymity and isolation of modern urban society has also created opportunities for new forms of violence that, as far as we know, did not exist.” He points specifically to serial killers and shaken baby syndrome, two forms of violent crime that did not exist among our earlier ancestors.
Neither does Dr. Walker consider the argument of nature versus nurture to be anything more than “a sterile exercise,” stating that, “We are the products of both our biological and cultural heritage and their combinations are, for all practical purposes, inseparable.” He calls materialist/ecological models simplistic and the myopic focus on chasing after prestige, mates, or gender-based “binaristic” thinking as suspect.
The only strong causal pattern seen over a survey of millennia of violence is the tight, almost forecastable relationship between climate instabilities and large-scale outbreaks of violence. Crop failures caused by dramatic shifts in climate stimulated frequent outbursts of warfare and civil unrest. Most Americans like to think we are immune to that problem, but with one in three Americans not having enough food to eat, should we be surprised that our hunger drives frustration that turns to anger, resulting in acts of violence we would never consider were our lives, all our lives, more financially sustained.
A young mother with a one-month-old baby at home is shot in the chest as she’s driving her car. As her close friends and family ask why, we realize the futility of the question. The young woman was not involved in a declared war. Therefore, her homicide can only be considered an act of malevolence, whether intentional or accidental. Someone irresponsibly handled a loaded firearm resulting in death. End of story.
So, we sit here faced with a couple of soul-stirring questions. Can this tidal wave of violence be stopped and how do we appropriately respond to those who commit these crimes?
Growing up in rural Oklahoma, the predominant belief fell along the lines of “an eye for an eye.” Beyond that, institutionalization, prisons, and mental hospitals were supposed to remove the violent perpetrators from society, theoretically for “rehabilitation” purposes until they are “fit” to be released into society.
Here’s the problem with that philosophy: It doesn’t work.
Granted, once upon a time, it was, marginally, effective. Don Steman, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Loyola University, wrote in 2017: “Overall, the increased use of incarceration through the 1990s accounted for between 6 and 25 percent of the total reduction in crime rates.” There is no metric by which a maximum result of 25 percent can be seen as a good thing. Even at its best, incarceration hardly proves itself to be effective at reducing crime.
Steman continues, though, and in the next sentence states, “Since 2000, however, the increased use of incarceration accounted for nearly zero percent of the overall crime reduction.” Zero. Incarceration stopped helping at all.
Steman’s research drives home four critical points:
Putting people in jail does not keep anyone safer. Instead, prisons create an illusion that the government is “doing its job” by keeping “bad people” off the streets. The illusion is crumbling before our eyes and now is the time we must realize that if we want safer streets, safer, neighborhoods, and better relationships between people, we need to be looking for a better solution, probably one that doesn’t involve prisons at all.
Yet, there’s that police blotter that just keeps growing.
There was a time when a blotter like that would have meant a busy day for local news media. In 2020, though, none of those stories even made it past the first cut. Instead, they are overshadowed by stories of more dramatic violence, such as the arrest of several men for attempting to kidnap a governor. It’s not enough that violent crime is increasing, but violence on large, extrapersonal scales threatens not only communities but whole sections of society. Consider some of these recent examples.
Seem excessive? Those all happened within 30 days and were only the largest of what qualified as mass shootings during that time.
We are a violent species. Looking at statistics based on homicides per 100,000 people, the United States ranks 20th, with 5.35 intentional homicides per 100,000 people. There are 19 other countries whose numbers are considerably higher. However, Russia (10.82) is the only other country that would be considered “developed” or “first world.” The expectation, not only among ourselves but around the world, is that we should do better—we should be better people.
Why are we not better people? We can make a lot of excuses, but when one looks at the numbers it comes down to these few things:
What would baffle us is the fact that none of those causes are new or surprising. We’ve been collectively aware of these causes for at least 50 years and in many cases longer. The evidence supporting these causal events only piles up. Yet, we still have not responded directly to any of these in ways that are lasting and meaningful.
Let’s consider mental illness, for example. We have known for multiple generations that things like child abuse, domestic abuse, and bullying contribute to creating a more violent society. There’s not a worthwhile contradiction to that argument. Yet, we fail to provide any treatment where it can do any good or intervention where it should reasonably be applied. We ignore both the victims and the perpetrators, never treating the PTSD and other mental health issues that perpetuate violent behavior.
Widely accepted studies claim that one in five adults, over 46 million people in the US, experienced serious mental illness in 2018. If that number seems a bit low, it probably is. Testing for mental illness in the United States is extremely low and doctors often don’t report what they consider to be “minor” or “temporary” situations that are treated without medication. Without appropriate levels of diagnosis, anything approaching adequate treatment is impossible.
Mental illness is a massive umbrella that, on its own, fails to get enough attention because for too long the very idea that one would see a therapist or a psychologist was an admission that one was “crazy” and instantly made that person a social pariah. Psychiatry was looked on as a form of voodoo medicine and their practices considered suspect by the mainstream medical community.
I was a young twelve-year-old when my mother was hospitalized for a month in a mental facility. Publicly, church members and friends, even family, were told that she was ill and receiving treatment. Later, much later, Mother would say she had a nervous breakdown. The fact? Mother had clinical depression and was hospitalized following repeated announcements of suicidal ideations. If she were alive to experience the same symptoms today, especially if she were in her late 30s as she was then, she would be treated with medication and therapy and no one would think anything of it, but then, in the early 1970s, few of those options existed, especially in rural Oklahoma. Mental health was strictly for “crazy people,’ and too many of our public perceptions and public policies regarding mental health were shaped by those attitudes.
While acceptance might have changed socially, laws have yet to catch up with the countless ways in which mental health affects our behavior and treats people suffering from acute and critical diagnoses are treated as mere criminals and not given the treatment they need, leading to even stronger anti-social behavior. Even today, with most of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) still in effect, federal law does not require health insurance providers to provide any kind of mental health coverage. In fact, according to the most recent data available (2011-2017), over 7.5 million adults with mental illness remain uninsured. Uninsured means untreated and untreated means they are more likely to exhibit antisocial activities.
One of the challenges that has recently come to light is the degree to which dopamine and serotonin affect one’s perceptions. This is critical as we look at the increase in violence as well as the increase in police shootings of unarmed people. The scenario works something like this: A person walking or running at night, let’s say it’s a person of color, is on alert. Dopamine kicks in, making them more aware of sounds and smells and anything that might present a danger. They’re looking around, anxious to get to their destination without anything bad happening.
Into this situation now impose a couple of police officers, or worse yet, a single officer on patrol. They’re following a report of a “suspicious person” in the neighborhood. They see the person of color running and racially-biased training tells them to stop the person and investigate. The officer’s serotonin levels immediately spike, affecting their ability to make rational, informed decisions.
What happens next is the tragic tale of too many unarmed black people. Anxious and scared, the runner’s dopamine makes them chatty and their gestures exaggerated. The officer, equally anxious and possibly equally frightened, has serotonin flooding their brain telling them that every move the runner makes could be a move toward a weapon. In a split instance, the officer, who, at that moment, would clinically be considered mentally incapacitated by the serotonin, pulls their service weapon and fires, not once, but multiple times, killing the unarmed runner for no reason other than the tired excuse, “the officer felt threatened.”
The relationship between serotonin and violence is well documented. Serotonin inhibits one’s impulses, doesn’t allow for reasonable responses, impairs cognition and social affiliation, and dismantles the regulation of emotion. For anyone who already tends towards violence, especially those with police and military training, serotonin is what pushes them to pull the trigger, throw the grenade, or launch the rocket.
Serotonin also affects aggressive acts in a broader social context. Menahem Krakowski (see previous link), states, “… serotonergic function has an effect not only on the individual but also on the group dynamics, and it is in turn influenced by these dynamics.” We see this in the manner in which political rallies can incite violence. The president whips up the crowd, gets them chanting, and serotonin levels for everyone influenced by the speech increases. They, then, under the influence of increased serotonin levels, are more likely to commit acts of violence toward those the president demonizes. This makes the president culpable in those acts because he is inherently responsible for the irresponsible actions of those in attendance. He is responsible for the serotonin increase.
This is the effect of mental illness on our society, though. Serotonin dysfunction is just one of the many diagnoses that can lead to violence and yet is routinely unrecognized in the majority of people it affects. Therefore, if we are going to reduce violence in our streets, we have to immediately address the mental health problem. Not only do our insurance laws need to change so that mental health coverage is universal, the situation demands that social workers, not armed police, be available to address situations that are not already presenting violence. We’ve tried teaching police de-escalation tactics but that defies their own serotonin dysfunction which ultimately wins out.
Poverty is another significant issue that not only leads to initial violence but recurring violence after incarceration. The Brookings Institute published an empirical study in 2018 showing the strong connection between poverty and crime rates, something that was already evident anecdotally but carried even more punch than expected. Among their findings was this statement:
“Three years prior to incarceration, only 49 percent of prime-age men are employed, and, when employed, their median earnings were only $6,250. Only 13 percent earned more than $15,000. Tracking prisoners over time and comparing employment and earnings before and after incarceration we find surprisingly little difference in labor market outcomes like employment and earnings. …In the first full calendar year after their release, only 55 percent of those previously incarcerated have any reported earnings, and the median earnings of those that do are just above $10,000.”
Poverty doesn’t just lead to violent crime, though that is an area where crime has been increasing. Poverty also influences burglary, shoplifting, and online scams resulting in mail fraud charges. Scroll back up to the first list of police blotters. See that entry about foot pursuit of a candy bar thief? That’s a perfect example of how poverty results in small and relatively meaningless crimes that then end up putting people into a criminal system that is nearly impossible to escape and contributes to further poverty in the future.
The severity of poverty as a factor in crime is not something that can be understated. According to the Brookings Institute study, “In almost all states, between 40 and 50 percent of the prison population grew up in families in the bottom quintile [20 percent] of the income distribution.” Additionally, it found that “Neighborhoods and social inclusion matter to incarceration and labor market outcomes. Prisoners are also disproportionately likely to have grown up in socially isolated and segregated neighborhoods with high rates of child poverty and in predominantly African-American or American Indian neighborhoods.”
To be fair, poverty doesn’t affect only affect people of color. Caucasian families account for roughly ten percent of the total poverty population. If we’re going to look at who is most affected by poverty, there are better ways to chop up the numbers.
24/7 Wall Street reviewed 2017 American Community Data from the U.S. Census Bureau to identify 11 distinct groups that are more most prone to poverty. Nothing here is remotely surprising to those who are in the listed groups, but for those who are privileged, it helps to go over them yet again.
SERVICE WORKERS
Poverty rate: 10.7 percent
• Total in poverty: 26.2 million
• Service workers as percentage of U.S. population: 8.2 percent
• Service workers as percentage of poor population: 6.6 percent
WOMEN
Poverty rate: 14.5 percent
• Total in poverty: 23.6 million
• Women as percentage of U.S. population: 51.0 percent
• Women as percentage of poor population: 55.4 percent
HISPANICS AND LATINOS
Poverty rate: 19.4 percent
• Total in poverty: 11.2 million
• Hispanics and Latinos as percentage of U.S. population: 18.2 percent
• Hispanics and Latinos as percentage of poor population: 26.2 percent
CHILDREN UNDER FIVE
Poverty rate: 20.2 percent
• Total in poverty: 3.9 million
• Children under 5 as percentage of U.S. population: 6.1 percent
• Children under 5 as percentage of poor population: 9.2 percent
NON-CITIZEN IMMIGRANTS
Poverty rate: 20.4 percent
• Total in poverty: 4.5 million
• Non-citizens as percentage of U.S. population: 7.0 percent
• Non-citizens as percentage of poor population: 10.6 percent
BLACK AND AFRICAN AMERICANS
Poverty rate: 23.0 percent
• Total in poverty: 9.1 million
• African Americans as percentage of U.S. population: 12.5 percent
• African Americans as percentage of poor population: 21.4 percent
ADULTS WITH LESS THAN A HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA
Poverty rate: 24.7 percent
• Total in poverty: 6.3 million
• Adults w/o a high school diploma as percentage of U.S. population: 8.1 percent
• Adults w/o a high school diploma as percentage of poor population: 14.9 percent
AMERICAN INDIANS AND ALASKA NATIVES
Poverty rate: 25.4 percent
• Total in poverty: 670,571
• American Indian and Alaska Natives as percentage of U.S. population: 0.8 percent
• American Indian and Alaska Natives as percentage of poor population: 1.6 percent
AMERICANS WITH A DISABILITY
Poverty rate: 25.7 percent
• Total in poverty: 9.6 million
• Disabled as percentage of U.S. population: 11.8 percent
• Disabled as percentage of poor population: 22.6 percent
THE UNEMPLOYED
Poverty rate: 30.4 percent
• Total in poverty: 2.6 million
• Unemployed as percentage of U.S. population: 2.7 percent
• Unemployed as percentage of poor population: 6.1 percent
SINGLE RECENT MOTHERS
Poverty rate: 44.3 percent
• Total in poverty: 592,588
• Unmarried recent mothers as percentage of U.S. population: 0.4 percent
• Unmarried recent mothers as percentage of poor population: 1.4 percent
As frightening as some of those numbers are, consider that they are looking at a society well before the current recession caused by the global pandemic. Economic shutdowns have caused a severe boom in unemployment that adversely and disproportionately affects service workers and people of color. For those who fit within multiple categories, the situation only grows direr, and too often the result is crime, and too often that crime results in violence.
The United States has never done well in addressing poverty. From the earliest moments in the Jamestown colony, we have held to the notion that those who don’t work, don’t eat. While that sounds like a fantastic hedge against laziness, it’s a moronic capitalistic concept that ties a person’s value to their occupation. Moreover, in contemporary terms, having what is considered a full-time job doesn’t mean one is still not in poverty. In 2016, the last year for which numbers are available. 3.4 million full-time employees were still below the poverty line. Again, during the pandemic recession, those numbers have significantly increased.
If we are going to put a dent in poverty-related crime, the United States is going to have to get more creative and more aggressive in addressing poverty. We’re not simply talking about employment opportunities, either. If we are going to address poverty, we need to make sure the federal minimum wage is sufficient for a full-time worker to afford a two-bedroom apartment reasonably close to their place of work. If we are going to address poverty, we need to make sure no one, regardless of employment status, goes without food, shelter, education, and health care. If we are going to address poverty, we need to look more at comprehensive public transportation, remove prohibitive insurance requirements, and improve overall infrastructure.
There’s a lot to be done, a lot that can be done that doesn’t involve police or prisons. We should focus on every possible alternative before turning to something like policing that has not only failed to stop violent crime, but itself has become rife with corruption and outright murder.
Hand-in-hand with poverty is the issue of hunger. Hunger and poverty are not the same, though. Even where people have incomes that one might consider sufficient to take care of food costs there are often extenuating circumstances, especially in minority and/or single-parent households that leave people, especially children, without enough to eat.
The 2018 Report on Food Crises reported that conflict and insecurity are the primary culprits behind food insecurity in 18 countries, accounting for 60 percent of the global total. The number of food-insecure people needing urgent humanitarian action is growing and in nearly all regions. Climate disasters, such as droughts, are also a main driver.
The World Food Program reported earlier this year that the COVID-19 pandemic will lead to an 82 percent increase in global food insecurity, affecting around 270 million people by the end of the year. WFP Executive Director David Beasley said that “until the day we have a medical vaccine, food is the best vaccine against chaos. Without it, we could see increased social unrest and protests, a rise in migration, deepening conflict, and widespread under-nutrition among populations that were previously immune from hunger.”
In 2016, Alex Piquero authored a study looking at the link between nutrition and violence. He wrote for the El Paso Times, “…37 percent of the study’s participants who had frequent hunger as children reported that they had been involved in interpersonal violence. Of those who experienced little to no childhood hunger, 15 percent said they were involved in interpersonal violence.”
José Graziano de Silva, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) wrote in 2016, “For human beings to prosper, they need to enjoy peace and freedom, and they shouldn’t live in fear. Together with the eradication of hunger and poverty, these three elements are vital if we are to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals agreed by all countries. Assistance to guarantee food security and protect and rehabilitate the agricultural sector is an important contribution that often goes unnoticed. Together with its clear role in the fight against hunger, it can also help to mitigate and even prevent conflict.”
That many Americans think it is perfectly acceptable to allow people, especially children, to starve right under their noses is inexcusable. The studies showing the links between hunger and violence are numerous and conclusive. If we want to reduce violence, hunger is one of the first and more important areas that has to be addressed.
What’s important to realize, however, is that hunger problems have to go beyond food pantries and school lunches. Hunger affects adults at similar proportions as it does children and adults are the ones more likely to commit acts of violence as a result. Food stability is the key, not occasional handouts from charitable sources that may be present one day and gone the next. People need to know that the meal they’re eating tonight isn’t going to be the last one they have for the unforeseeable future. Confidence in keeping families fed is critical to holding down incidents of violence. Where American cities fail is thinking that one-time programs make a long-term difference and that concept has yet to produce viable results.
Compounding all these problems and adding critical elements of its own is racism and to this end, there has been so much scholarly study and research done over the past 30 years that one would think the matter is incontrovertible. Yet, continued backlash and reluctance on the part of predominantly white government officials to commit to any worthwhile change beyond mere symbolism is deeply disturbing.
Let’s be clear: painting Black Lives Matter on a street, pulling down statues of Confederate generals, renaming institutions to minimize the popularity of racists is a nice gesture, but gestures don’t change the long-standing policies that have caused systemic racism throughout the United States long before its founding. If we are going to see a reduction in violence, more than anything else, white people are going to have to get on board with a truckload of changes for long-standing policies they didn’t realize were holding back black, indigenous people of color (BIPOC).
There’s a ton of data to unpack on this topic, so hold on to your eyeballs, I’m going to throw a lot at you all at once. I’ll leave it to you to chase down the rabbits that cause you the most concern.
Then, there’s the president, the 45th one, the one who thinks racists can be “nice people.” Putting aside rhetoric and anecdote, the Brookings Institute looked at the influence of the president in the rise of race-related crime, not just that committed by BIPOC, but crimes committed against BIPOC. Looking at the data, stripped of personal bias and emotion, they found, “FBI data show that since Trump’s election there has been an anomalous spike in hate crimes concentrated in counties where Trump won by larger margins. It was the second-largest uptick in hate crimes in the 25 years for which data are available, second only to the spike after September 11, 2001. Though hate crimes are typically most frequent in the summer, in 2016 they peaked in the fourth quarter (October-December). This new, higher rate of hate crimes continued throughout 2017.”
They continue: “ In a 2017 survey, researchers randomly exposed some respondents to racist comments by the president, such as:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems… They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Other respondents were exposed to a statement by Hillary Clinton condemning prejudiced Trump supporters. Later in the study, the respondents were asked their opinion of various groups, including Mexican people, black people, and young people. Those who had read Trump’s words were more likely to write derogatory things not only about Mexican people, but also about other groups as well. By contrast, those who were exposed to Clinton’s words were less likely to express offensive views towards Muslims. Words do matter, and data prove it.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified over 900 cases of harassment following the 45th president’s election.
An analysis of FBI data over the years by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino yielded more specific results when it came to intense political debates.
It found that during August 2017, the month of the violent clash between white supremacists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia — when Trump infamously said there were “very fine people on both sides” — reported hate crimes nationally increased to 663 incidents, the second-highest tally in nearly a decade.
November 2016, immediately after the election, saw hate crimes increase to a record-setting 758 incidents.
Speaking of the FBI, their own data in 2019 shows a 16-year high in hate crime-related violence. Understand, the vast majority of hate crimes are never reported. The ones that the FBI does receive are especially egregious, heavily violent, and involve more than a single person.
Would pictures help? Here, try this:
Should we analyze that chart for a moment? Yes, we should. One sees that peak in violence occurred in 2001, largely attributable to the events surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks that precipitated violence against anyone who remotely looked as though they might be Muslim. That violence remained high through President Bush’s two terms in office. The numbers dip considerably during President Obama’s tenure, not completely disappearing, but staying low until the rhetoric around the 2016 election began in late 2015. Since the 45th president’s inauguration, the numbers have gone back up to a level not seen since 2001 and have continued to rise.
There is a preponderance of evidence for the myriad ways the system established by governments, local, state, and federal, participate, encourage, and maintain the atmosphere of violence that generates sufficient fear so that we think we need the system they’re providing, despite the fact we know the whole thing is a broken mess of power manipulation and greed.
I am further frustrated by those who, upon seeing anything regarding violence, comment to the effect, “Oh, that’s just a black thing.” No, it’s not. Anti-Semitic violence spiked in 2019. Anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes have increased by 43 percent. Disabled people are 2.5 times more likely to experience violent victimization. 64.0 percent of the women who reported being raped, physically assaulted, and/or stalked since age 18 were victimized by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, boyfriend, or date. Crimes against homeless people increased by 24 percent in 2019. Violence affects all of us and the solution must, of necessity, include all of us. This isn’t something that privileged white people get to sit out. Set aside your white fragility and let’s tackle this.
When I first started hearing calls this year to “abolish” the police and, subsequently, to abolish prisons, my response was like that of many people, “That can’t possibly work.” Such an attitude is an aspect of privileged fragility, however. When I sat down and listened to the people talking, listened to what historians and sociologists and scientists are saying, my attitude began to change. Now, I am thoroughly convinced that not only can we dissolve policing and incarceration as we currently know them, we must rebuild the system from the ground up if we are going to begin addressing the problems leading to violence.
First, I think it is important to understand the racist beginnings of policing in the United States. Believe it or not, police, as we know them now, did not exist in colonial America. Nothing close to what we call police roamed the streets of early New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. Our country started without them. For a while.
What appeared first were slave patrols. That fact alone should cause a full stop in how we think about policing. They started in North Carolina, and by the time John Adams became the second U.S. president, every state that had not yet abolished slavery had them. They could enter anyone’s home, at any time, without reason or warning, to investigate allegations of harboring those who might be hiding or helping escaped slaves. We should find it disturbing the degree to which those same tactics are still being used even if the technical reasons have changed.
Larger cities in the North, particularly Boston, New York, and Philadephia, created night watch patrols that, in theory, were to warn of impending danger. You know, “the Red Coats are coming,” type of deal. That didn’t work either. Watchmen were often drunk or asleep. While they were supposed to be volunteers, many were conscripted by the town as a form of punishment. Others took the watch positions to avoid military service. The first day watch didn’t come until 1833 in Philadelphia and the concept was slow to catch on around the rest of the country. [Gaines, Larry. Victor Kappeler, and Joseph Vaughn, Policing in America (3rd ed.), Cincinnati, Ohio: Anderson Publishing Company, 1999.] Gradually adding to the watch system were constables who could arrest and fine troublemakers but also performed civic functions such as land surveyors and verifying the accuracy of weights and measures.
By the late-1800s, most cities had a more formal municipal police department in place. The construction of these police departments was fairly simple.
What’s interesting is that at no time was there any evidence of a “crime wave” spurring the formation of police departments. Instead, they were a response to “disorder,” a definition that changed according to the needs of business owners in each town. Things such as putting down migrant uprisings, wage strikes (unions were not yet a thing), and the maintenance of the “public good,” a phrase that still is in use today. A public police force was better able to balance municipal interests than the private security employed by larger businesses. [Spitzer, Stephen and Andrew Scull, “Privatization and Capitalist Development: The Case of the Private Police,” Social Problems 25, no. 1 (1977).]
Given this beginning, it didn’t take long for the concepts of social control and criminal control to merge. The demonization of the “underclass” included accusations that they were biologically inferior, morally intemperate, unskilled, and uneducated. We should not be surprised that this underclass was composed largely of the poor, immigrants, and free blacks. Neither should one be surprised that many of the “crimes” they were accused of committing, such as public drunkenness, only occurred because of the rise of corporate venues that encouraged public drinking. [Lundman]
As the United States entered the 20th century, the presence of police departments leads to a change in how their purpose was perceived. Instead of reacting and responding to specific crimes as they happened, the emphasis shifted to crime prevention by subjecting everyone to surveillance and observation, especially the “dangerous underclass.” Here’s where we see the worthless excuse, “If you’re not doing anything wrong you don’t have anything to worry about,” take hold as an authoritarian police state slowly takes over. [Parks, Evelyn, “From Constabulary to Police Society: Implications for Social Control,” In Whose Law? What Order?, edited by William Chambliss and Michael Mankoff, New York, New York: Wiley (1976).]
Being that this is the United States we’re talking about, no one should be surprised to learn that early police departments were notoriously corrupt and bent on violence. Under the control of local politicians, who were often also the tavern, brothel, and casino owners, police routinely took payoffs from illegal businesses, participated in vote-buying schemes, and organized professional criminals, trading immunity for bribes. [Walker, Samuel, The Police in America: An Introduction, New York, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.] Police were little more than what Walker calls “delegated vigilantes,” given the authority to use overwhelming force to deter the criminality of the “dangerous underclass.”
What exists in the majority of American cities is simply an extended and modernized, militarized version of that same concept. Police are taught to watch for specific characteristics, including race and religious beliefs, that might indicate a person is likely to commit a certain kind of crime. While racial profiling is technically illegal, it still occurs in other forms and is one of the most common field tools used by police in their attempt to “deter” crime.
Why did I spend so much time with the history lesson? Because it speaks to why police departments can’t be reformed. We’ve been talking about police reform all my life and none of those discussions, none of the alleged changes, have improved policing or brought about any reduction in violence, especially officer-involved shootings. The core of the system has been corrupt from the beginning. Therefore, like treating any disease, the only logical option is to remove what exists and replace it with something better.
Easy for me to talk, sitting here in my office chair typing away at 3:00 in the morning, isn’t it? What do I know? I’ve never actually been arrested (came close once, but that’s another story). I’m not routinely followed when I’m driving my light blue minivan. I’ve never stared down the barrel of a service revolver. I’ve led a ridiculously privileged life in that regard. So, what reason do I have for criticism?
The answer comes in listening to the voice of people who have never had and never will have the privilege I’ve known. My privilege creates an obligation for me to magnify their voices, to repeat their stories, to amplify their ideas, their needs, their worries, and their concepts. So when Naomi Murakawa, Princeton African American Studies; Abolitionist Papers series editor, Haymarket Books, talks about the failures of attempts to “reform” policing, not only am I going to listen for myself, I’m going to repeat her words because they ring with realism I can’t deliver on my own.
Writing for LEVEL, Ms. Murakawa addresses the many ways in which attempts to “reform” policing has failed. Here are a few of the high (low) points:
What spoke to me most clearly was this statement: “Courts validate endless police stops. Stopping someone for walking in a “high-crime area”? Perfectly legal. Searching a car for drugs because the Black driver paused too long at a stop sign? Perfectly reasonable. As police commonly joke about racial profiling, “It never happens — and it works.”
A story I’ve told multiple times bears repeating right here. When I first moved to Indiana, in April 2005, I lived in the small community of Brownsburg, a place small enough that, at that time, I had to leave town to find a coffee shop but could walk to the grocery store. At least, I thought I could until I tried it.
The distance was less than a mile from my house to the store. All I needed was a gallon of milk. I walked down, bought the milk, and was walking back, on the sidewalk, when I was stopped by a Brownsburg police officer who demanded to see my ID and asked what I was doing, as though he didn’t see the gallon of milk. His excuse for violating my civil rights was that a woman, in the neighborhood to which I had just moved, had reported a “suspicious-looking character” matching my description. The stop was wholly improper from beginning to end, but completely legal.
That experience has only happened to me once in almost 60 years, but for most who identify as BIPOC, stops like that, routine violation of their human rights, constant harassment, and profiling, accusations, and mistreatment at the hands of law enforcement are routine and none of the attempts to “reform” police has made the situation any better. The only thing that “reform” has done over the past 50 years is reward police with more toys and more ways of harassing and killing innocent people.
Right now, as I’m writing at 3:44 on a Friday morning, my phone dings with an alert. “Gunfire heard, 1.0 miles away.” I listen for the unmistakable sounds of a police response. I hear nothing.
Mychal Denzel Smith, Author of Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream wrote a compelling article for the September 2020 issue of The Atlantic. As tempted as I am to copy/paste the whole thing, which is illegal and disrespectful, I won’t. However, pay attention to this specific statement:
When asked “What would you have us do with the police?” I make a point of saying, unequivocally, “Abolish them,” because that is what I mean. I seek a world without police. When I explain that achieving such a world would require us to enact a number of redistributive policies and educational programs aimed at providing for everyone’s basic needs and reducing violence, both interpersonal and state-sanctioned, I’m asked why I don’t lead with that rather than the potentially alienating “Abolish the police.” And my answer is that I believe in stating, in clear language, what you want, because otherwise you are beholden to the current state of consciousness and accepted wisdom. I want a world in which the police do not exist, and there is no clearer way to say that.
In the past, I have been accused of hating the police. And I do. Such an admission may be taken to mean that I hate each police officer as an individual whom I have judged unfairly on the basis of his or her occupation. But I hate the police the same as I hate any institution that exists as an obstruction to justice. It’s important here to define justice, as the U.S. legal system has perverted our sense of it. It cannot be punishment or retribution for harm caused. Justice is not revenge. Rather, justice is a proactive commitment to providing each person with the material and social conditions in which they can both survive and thrive as a healthy and self-actualized human being. This is not an easy thing to establish, as it requires all of us to buy into the idea that we must take responsibility for one another. But it is the only form of a just world.
The police have never been capable—historically, presently, either in statement of purpose or in action—and, I believe, will never be capable of fostering such conditions. And so I hate them, because I have grown past impatient with injustice. I am incensed by the delusion, so prevalent among the country’s supposedly serious thinkers, that tinkering around the edges of an inherently oppressive institution will lead to freedom.
Abolishing the police, doing away with prisons, is where a lot of white people who claim to be allies start dropping off. “We can’t completely do away with the police,” they say. “We still need some form of incarceration for the really bad people. What are we supposed to do with terrorists and murderers? What about white-collar crime?”
Questions come from a place of fear, a comic-book enhanced perception that, without severe policing, the world becomes like the Gotham of DC Comics, overrun with criminals who prey on the city relentlessly. Policing doesn’t work in Batman’s world, either. Batman’s been at his fictional game for over eighty years and the situation in Gotham hasn’t gotten better.
As a country, the United States holds to this mythological idea that we are all inherently safe and that if we’re not safe it’s someone else’s fault, someone else’s problem, and individuals should never have to be concerned or have to deal directly with such matters. We have put upon police departments an impossible burden, expecting them to keep our world ideal when the world itself is grossly imperfect. There is no plausible scenario in which policing accomplishes what we dream of because the human factors of greed, power, and corruption as just as much present in police departments as they are anywhere else.
The white perspective of public safety is distantly removed from the reality of public safety for the black community. Josie Duffy Rice writing in the September 2020 issue of Vanity Fair brings that difference into sharp relief:
America has never truly had a system of “public safety,” if only because Black “safety” has historically been imagined as being secured by more policing, whereas white “safety” is ensured by altogether different means. America does not flood the dorms of Harvard with cops because they are areas of “known drug activity.” It does not station armed officers in the cubicles of Wells Fargo. The white parents of Westchester do not generally have to subject their teenagers to The Talk. White safety, itself built on a foundation of enslavement and segregation, is ensured through familial wealth, home ownership, well-funded public schools, stable employment, and health care. Black safety is ensured by “zero tolerance policing” and “stop and frisk.” White safety is cancer prevention. Black safety is all-day chemotherapy.
Not only does the current system of policing and incarceration not keep us safe, but we’re also wasting a lot of money that could/would be better spent on more efficient and effective programs. For all the billions of dollars we (the US) spend on policing, we’re getting precious little on our return. Again, this isn’t something that can be fixed through gradual reform. Andre M. Perry, David Harshbarger, Carl Romer, and Kristian Thymianos wrote a statement for the Brookings Institute that highlights some of the financial inefficiencies. They divide the financial concerns into four areas.
Going beyond the financial inefficiencies of policing in its current form, the sad truth is that they’re not all that great at solving crime, either. We have developed this concept from watching too many police procedural dramas on television that once police get a case, they work on it obsessively until it’s solved. Uhm, no, that’s not the way it happens.
According to FBI data, which is overstated due to the voluntary manner in which information is recorded, for violent crimes, just 62.3% of murders, 33.4% of rapes, 30.4% of robberies, and 52.5% of aggravated assaults ended with arrests. For property crimes, just 13.9% of burglaries, 18.9% of thefts, 13.8% of motor vehicle thefts, and 22.4% of arsons ended with arrests. [Michelle Mark, Insider, “US police don’t end up solving most crimes” 18 June 2020.]
Those numbers, at best, only refer to crimes that were reported. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey found that in 2018, the most recent year for which data was available, just 42.6% of people who were the victims of violent crimes reported the incidents to police. For property crimes, just 34.1% of those who were victimized reported the incidents to police. [Mark]
Reasons for not reporting crime varied, of course. Some didn’t think the crime was sufficient to bother the police, others didn’t want to cause any additional harm to either party. What’s most concerning, though, is that a number of people (exact percentages are not given) who don’t trust the police to deal with the crime appropriately. This attitude is especially dominant in BIPOC neighborhoods where the consequences of reporting the crime are often worse than the crime itself.
If we’re going to build a better system of public safety, those numbers, all of them, have to be addressed. Solutions that “come close” are not acceptable. If we’re not dramatically improving upon the status quo, then we’re wasting our time. Raze everything to the ground, the whole of the so-called justice system, and start over with a hard and unforgiving eye toward a system that values everyone equally, responds to situations appropriately, and minimizes (or eliminates) the armed use of force.
All that is easy enough to say. Those are lofty ideals, to be sure. Yet, we know that we can improve because there are places, predominantly in white communities, where it’s already happening. In June of this year, Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote the following:
There is a different world, one in which people need not be arrested for many of these offenses or be otherwise racially targeted and criminalized. We can shrink outsized and misused police power and responsibilities, along with their budgets, and strive to ensure they don’t come into regular, unnecessary contact with community members.
We know this is possible because this different world exists today, for communities that are largely white. The harsh reality is that policing in communities of color looks very different than it does in wealthy, white communities. In those communities, police are often only present when responding to specific serious disruptions to the community, rather than just constantly intruding on people’s everyday lives. To understand the impact of this approach, one only has to look at the approach to policing marijuana — which is used at almost equal rates by Black and white people, though Black people are still arrested at a rate that is almost four times that of white people. Racialized policing is the best way to understand this disparity.
White communities are also more likely to see significant investment in community resources that are purposefully and programmatically used to maintain safety, health, and stability, all without police intervention. The lived reality that white communities already enjoy and take for granted is what we are demanding for communities across the country — an end to over-policing, an end to constant surveillance and harassment, an end to enforcement of non-serious offenses, and an end to the targeting of people of color.
Knowing that we can do better, that there are programs out there that are working already, colors my concept of what a solution must have to operate efficiently and effectively on a large scale. I have poured over what feels like endless concepts and ideas the past few weeks and largely dismissed those based on rhetoric rather than any evidence-based proof system. Addressing the fears that come with phrases like “Defund The Police” must be part of the solution or the whole program is disabled from the beginning. A strong system also needs to take into consideration how persons with disabilities are treated and often locked out completely. If we’re not addressing the root causes of all our issues we’re simply trading one set of problems for another.
So, I get to this point, some 10,000+ words in, and feel pressure (perhaps self-induced) to wrap things up and offer a solution. If all I do is complain I’m not adding anything constructive to the conversation, am I? Aggregating information from several sources, which I’ll try to credit as we go along (follow the links), here, in no particular hierarchy, is what I think we need to do.
There are, of course, different ways to break all this down, some more elaborate and detailed than others. What is important for this conversation right here, right now, is to acknowledge that,
Back in 2017 (my, how time flies), I wrote a book you haven’t read. I know you haven’t read it because I know exactly where all the copies are. Rethinking ‘Merica was my response to obvious fallacies following the 2016 election and, much like this document, proposed several solutions that everyone has ignored because, again, no one read the book. Several things in that tome apply to this situation, but one particular comment stands out:
What is important in this conversation is that we not look at the matter in terms of simply patching the existing structures. We need to replace and update everything from sewer systems to airports, transit systems, dams and levees, schools, and the rail system. For many, the systems are still attempting to operate on equipment from the mid-1900s, making maintenance a nightmare.
To the extent that we continue to ignore these problems and push them off on state and local municipalities, we commit an injustice against every person who utilizes that infrastructure. We need to look to the future, invoking new and emerging technologies and even creating new technologies in anticipation of solving problems before they occur.
Police and prisons are among those parts of our infrastructure that needs to be replaced. We cannot expect to adequately address the underlying issues related to crime, especially violent crime, any other way. We’ve tried reform repeatedly since 1888. None of it has worked. It’s time to put our money and our allegiance behind a better plan.
In a June 2020 opinion piece published in the New York Times, Mariame Kaba writes:
“There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.
So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.”
Every reasonable effort to end corruption within policing has failed. Either we’re all safe or none of us are safe. Either we’re all equal or none of us are equal. As long as black people or my indigenous family or immigrants of any background are mistreated and targeted by law enforcement and a biased justice system, there is no justice for anyone. Black Lives Matter. Indigenous Lives Matter. Until there is equality across the board, without the smallest exception, there is no equality.
Maybe people should listen this time. No police + No prison = No Violence. I’m right. Try it.
And thanks, Syd, for giving me this push.
https://youtu.be/oF6T8wd7nMc
Hi there. I would say, “Thank goodness it’s Friday,” but I’m not sure Friday matters that much anymore. The news keeps churning and we’ll be watching it all through the weekend. I’m up at 4:00 AM every morning making sure the world hasn’t completely blown up while we were asleep. There really should be at least six people doing all this work, but it’s just me. Yes, I’m patting myself on the back, and perhaps that’s the value of Fridays. Find a reason to pat yourself on the back, even if it’s only because you managed to survive the other four days of the work week.
We’re skipping over the war between North Carolina’s governor and it’s state legislature for now. We’re also refusing to enter into the speculation of what cabinet nominees might or might not do. We only work with news we can verify as being accurate and you should be doing the same. So, that being said, let’s take a look at our top five stories for today.
One of the many questions we have this morning is whether the whole Russian hacking scandal has gotten out of control? If you were watching yesterday afternoon, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters, “Only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,1” in reference to reports from three US intelligence agencies that not only was Russia involved in hacking the servers of political parties, but that Putin himself knew and directed the attacks. That the White House would officially support the intelligence reports is a pretty big deal since both the Kremlin and the president-elect has been denying them.
If you’re listening to NPR this morning, you’re hearing President Obama tell Steve Inskeep, “I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections … we need to take action. And we will — at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be.”2
If the statement from the president sounds just a little ambiguous, it is. That might be because, at least from a public information perspective, actual evidence of Russian involvement is a little ambiguous. Yes, the White House likely has access to evidence that the public does not. What we see on this side of the fence, though, is a bunch of anonymous sources, none of which can be confirmed. We need some names, we need some faces, and we need their butts sitting in front of a Congressional hearing to give validity to all these accusations.
Furthermore, there is no precedent for how to react to this situation if the reports are indeed true. There’s nothing in the Constitution that adequately covers direct intrusion into an election by a foreign power. What President Obama might have up his sleeve isn’t clear, either, but we know he doesn’t have long if he’s going to do something before he moves out of the White House.
We talked earlier this week about the Venezuelan government confiscating some four million toys and promising that “every child will get a toy.” News coming out of the beleaguered country yesterday shows us that those toys may be all many Venezuelan children have. Reuters is reporting that three local councils and four national welfare groups are all confirming a rise in parents giving their children away, sometimes to other family members, sometimes to neighbors, because they can no longer afford to feed them and keep them safe3.
If you’re a parent or plan on ever being one, I want you to stop and think a moment about just how desperate one has to be and how devastating it must feel to have little choice but to give up your child. Average wages in Venezuela are less than the equivalent of $50 a month. Normally, in places where wages are so low, we see food prices around the same level. Not here. Food prices are in some cases higher than they are in the US, and that’s when food is available. Food scarcity across the country has caused unrest there for over a year.
Children’s rights groups say that the increase in parents giving away children is exponential, with many of the children already suffering from malnutrition. Plunging oil prices are partly to blame, as well as social policies of president Nicolas Maduro. Yet, more than politics, this is a humanitarian disaster of untold proportion. Some parents are simply abandoning their children, leaving them to die on the streets.
So much for a merry fucking Christmas.
We knew when the jury left the South Carolina courtroom yesterday that they would come back with a guilty verdict. Roof has been convicted of a total of 33 counts involving hate crimes in the shooting of nine people in a Charlotte, South Carolina church4. He never shied away from the fact that he was guilty. In fact, at one point during the trial, he fired his attornies and disastrously tried defending himself. Immediately after the verdict was announced, Roof fired his attornies again.
The jury returns on January 3 to determine exactly what his sentencing will be. There are only two options available: life in prison or death by lethal injection. Roof has already said he doesn’t want to introduce embarrassing evidence that might save his skin. Yet, as we saw last week, lethal injection hasn’t necessarily been going all that well with multiple botched attempts around the country over the past couple of years. There are also plenty of arguments against capital punishment.
One thing for certain is that this horrible massacre has left a lasting impression upon the state of South Carolina. The confederate flag no longer flies at the state capitol. The effects of hate are very visible and efforts to defuse that hate are strong. Dyllan Roof is a good example of why we cannot allow the alt-right white supremacy movement to go unchecked. We don’t need another incident like this to happen anywhere in our country. Ever.
As incredible as it may seem, a school district in Colorado has actually approved a measure allowing some teachers and other school employees to carry guns inside classrooms5. That this decision would come the same day as the third anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary shouldn’t be ignored. The Board of Education for Hanover School District #28 voted 3-2 to approve the resolution on Wednesday night.
Now, before we all go off on some knee-jerk reaction, we should be aware that the Hanover School District is very small and very remote. The board’s president, Mark McPherson, who didn’t vote in favor of the plan, told the press that it was the town’s distance from any kind of assistance that fueled support for the resolution. The school is 30 minutes away from the nearest law enforcement. The resolution lists “national events” and, get this, potential trouble from marijuana grows, as the justification for the action.
Now, for any teacher or staff member to actually carry a gun on campus, they must first volunteer for extra duty as a security officer. Then, they must complete training before receiving their permit to carry. There is no limit as to how many of the school’s 20 teachers can carry weapons. Let’s just hope their finals weeks never get too stressful.
Facebook announced yesterday that they’re going after fake news and enlisting a number of partners, including Snopes, the Associated Press, and ABC News, to help validate stories6. The announcement comes as the world’s most dominant social media company attempts to wrestle with accusations that fake news shared on its site contributed to the outcome of the US presidential election.
Understand, Facebook has yet to say that it would actually remove content that is flagged as being fake. Instead, the content will be marked as “disputed” with a link to the reasons for the decision. In fact, they’re only focusing on what they call “the worst-of-the-worst” of fake news producers, those who create deliberate lies for financial gain.
However, this hasn’t kept publications with a right-leaning tilt from going all boo-hoo over the new policy7. Ben Shapiro, editor-in-chief of the conservative-leaning Daily Wire wrote, “It’s an attempt to restore gatekeepers who have a bias as the ultimate arbiters of truth.”8 Perhaps someone should tell the whining little brats that if they’re not producing fake news then they don’t have anything to worry about. Facebook’s efforts are gentle compared to what they could have done. Hell, you’ll still get in more trouble for posting a picture of women’s nipples on your profile than you will for distributing blatantly false news. Some alleged news sources need to grow the fuck up.
But hey, this whole fake news thing is exactly why we bother bringing you these reports every morning. We always verify our stories and provide links to our sources. We want news we can trust and know that you do as well. Thank you for your time. Here’s hoping your Friday kicks some ass.
Complaining about life not being fair is immoral when you’re already so close to the top.
I could be very frank with you and say that life isn’t fair. Ever. I could end this article here and go back to bed, which sounds so very tempting. But to do that would be missing the entire point this morning. You already know life isn’t fair. You feel how unfair life is everytime the car doesn’t start, or someone else gets the girl, or the baby throws up on you just as you’re about to walk out the door. You don’t need me to tell you that life isn’t fair. What I want you to hear this morning is that nothing to do with fairness, the good, the bad, or the indifferent, is personal. The universe is not picking on you.
From the earliest point in our lives, we look for fairness. If we see a child with a lollipop, we want a lollipop. If one of our classmates has new shoes, we think we deserve new shoes as well. Someone gets paid a given amount for a certain job, we think it’s only fair that everyone be paid the same amount for the same job. This concept of what is fair seems to be universal. Even monkeys understand equal pay for equal work. We want everything in our lives to be fair, or so we say.
The fact is, if you’re living in the United States, Canada, or most of Western Europe, the scales are already tipped in your favor. Those little inconveniences you consider unfair are little more than a minor balancing of the universal measure of right and wrong, and chances are you’re still coming out much better than the vast majority of people. Consider some of the following comparisons:
Why? What’s fair isn’t a personal thing. Shit happens on a universal basis. There’s no cosmic calculator that is keeping tabs on the number of good things you get versus the bad. There’s no mystical figure in the sky or below the earth who is waiting to reward you for being nice, or punish you for being a total bitch. Instead, what we consider to be fairness has more to do with where on the planet you were born, whether your parents were (comparatively) rich, and whether you had the opportunity to go to school. If you had those things, life is likely to be overly fair to you. If you were born with those factors against you, life is more likely to feel like the bottom of a global shithole.
Whether you want to admit it or not, if you were born in the US, regardless of any other factor, life for you is more fair than 85% of the rest of the world. Here’s another list:
Are any of those statistics in any way fair? What is fair about children in one part of the world sleeping soundly at night while those in a different region huddle together in fear as they listen to bombs falling around them? What is fair about women in Africa walking multiple miles each day to collect water when all you do is turn a tap and then complain because you don’t like the way it tastes?
In the past week, I’ve heard people complain that they didn’t think it fair that someone was prettier, someone had bigger boobs, someone had a better spouse, someone had a better job, someone had a bigger house. Each one of those people specifically said they didn’t think their current condition was fair.
I don’t think the real problem is one of fairness at all. Life isn’t treating you mean, the universe doesn’t have a target attached to your forehead. You’re just greedy, and perhaps lacking in perspective. Your desire for more blocks your ability to see just how much you already have.
Life is treating you just fine. So not every little detail goes your way. So someone else gets the promotion at work. So Brad Pitt will still be hotter than me even when he’s 98.
You’re alive. That’s fair.
Morning Update: 08/28/24
The colonoscopy is done. Everything looked fantastic. No polyps needed to be removed. Everything looked good. In fact, apparently, they had a cancellation because I was back in the surgery room well before my scheduled time. We were out of there a little after 10:00 and looking for cheap food. I don’t have to go back for another one for five years. The only potential concern I saw was that my weight had dropped 18 pounds since last month. In theory, that could signal another uptick in my white blood cell count. My weight isn’t too low, though, so I’m not going to worry about it at this point.
Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for our air conditioning. We noticed that it had stopped cooling during the night but assumed that it had just frozen up and would be fine after being turned off for a while. Wrong. So, we called Grandpa Bob. Bob called the people who installed the AC. They said their after-hours technician would be by after he finished the job he was currently on. We waited. And waited. The temperature inside the house went up to 89. The sun went down. We were still waiting. The kids went to bed, G choosing to sleep on the floor where it was cooler. Still waiting. Finally, around 10:00, my phone made noise, but Verizon’s spam filter cut it off before I had a chance to answer. Cue a couple of rounds of phone tag as it turns out the AC company’s numbers are all on Verizon’s spam list. Around 10:30, the technician arrived.
A burned-out capacitor was the problem. Some four-hundred-plus dollars later, the AC kicked back on. There are plans in the work to physically move the location of the AC as its proximity to the house may have contributed to the capacitor’s demise. I went to bed a little after 11:00, significantly later than my normal bedtime of 8:30.
Through it all, my biggest concern was the dogs and our mane coon hybrid, Jack-Jack (the kids are adaptive, though they complained constantly). Jack’s heavy fur makes him susceptible to heat. He stretched out on the tile floor in the living room and seemed to be okay. The dogs were having a more difficult time. They refused to not be in the same room as me. The Recovery Room is carpeted, so there’s a limit to how cool the floor gets. They lay there, stretched out as much as they could, panting heavily, and frequently getting up to drink water. I knew the AC had cooled the house significantly when they both finally jumped back onto the bed. Everyone seems to be fine this morning.
After all that, you’d think I’d be anxious for a rest day. That’s not going to happen. While Bob was here yesterday, he noticed that both of the outside water spigots were constantly dripping. So, he called the plumber and they will be here sometime this morning to replace both spigots. That’s going to mean turning off the water for an undetermined amount of time. That’s also going to mean shutting the dogs in the Recovery Room. A few years ago, we ran off one plumber from the same company because he was afraid the dogs were going to jump the gate between the living room and the kitchen (they can’t, they’re too fat). My biggest fear is that they’ll look at the 80-year-old pipes and declare that the whole mess has to be replaced. We’re crossing our fingers that the solution doesn’t involve thousands of dollars in new plumbing.
At least I get to eat.
With everything going on here at home, I’m not overly worried about the mundane aspects of this morning’s news. A few things are sticking in my craw, though.
Home improvement chain Lowe’s is scaling back its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, joining the ranks of a few other companies who have altered their programs since the end of affirmative action in higher education and amid conservative backlash online. This kowtowing to right-wing nut jobs is infuriating. They’re letting the online trolls win. Mind you, the people who are making the most noise don’t know one end of a hammer from the other. They’re not actually shopping at any of the companies they target. Yet, they’re effectively killing jobs and making the US a more inhospitable and inequitable place to live.
Investigators are looking at whether UN World Food Program staff sought to hide the alleged role of Sudan’s army in obstructing aid. That anyone would block aid to starving people is unconscionable. That the people responsible for delivering that aid would cover up the crime is just as bad. Bad actors have no excuse and should be given no assistance in committing their crimes. People all across Sudan are dying because of the nonsense going on there. That the agencies we depend on and financially support are involved in the lies and deceit is inexcusable.
The US isn’t the only country with a far-right problem. Eastern Germany is finding that far-right factions there are both making hiring difficult for business and causing problems for renewable energy. The far-right is hoping to gain some ground in upcoming elections, so they’re flexing their muscle. Remember what happened the last time the far right came to power in Germany? The entire reason the country was divided between East and West after WWII was so that they couldn’t become a global threat again. The world hailed the reunification of the country as a sign of progress and peace, but now it would seem that the original concerns might have been more accurate than anyone cares to admit.
If you’re a Lego fan, as I know my older boys are, be prepared for a price jump on those building blocks. Lego has announced that they’re replacing the oil-based plastic with a biodegradable version. The problem with that is the price tag is considerably higher. The popular blocks we all played with as children, and many as collectors, have never been cheap, but no one is expecting Lego to eat the increased production costs, despite the fact that the company is outperforming the overall toy market in Europe and the US. No one is sure when that price jump will hit retail stores, but stocking up on those collectible kits might not be a bad idea.
The Mormon Church is going after transgender rights again. They’re now prohibiting anyone even considering transitioning from working with children and prohibiting those who have transitioned from being baptized. The percentage of Mormons who are trans isn’t necessarily high, and anyone who has looked critically at the faith largely considers them to be more cultish than a legitimate religion. Nonetheless, they are far too public an entity for this type of action to not have repercussions throughout the trans community. Feel free to shame them.
If you had any remaining concerns as to whether Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was a complete nut job, I think the case has just been sealed. According to his daughter, Kick Kennedy (seriously, that’s her name), the fool “chain-sawed the head off a dead whale on a beach in Hyannis Port, Mass., bungee-corded it to their vehicle’s roof, and drove it five hours to the family home in Mount Kisco, N.Y.” She first told the story in a 2012 interview in Town and Country magazine, but now the political arm of the Center for Biological Diversity, a progressive environmental organization, is screaming for an investigation.
Another youth football player has died from injuries sustained on the field. This season is getting off to an especially rocky start as the number of injuries overall appears to have increased. Of course, it’s too early for there to be any hard numbers behind that assumption, but there seems to be plenty of cause for concern. Not that I expect every parent to pay attention to those concerns. Why? Travis and Jason Kelce just signed a $100 million podcast deal with Amazon. That along with a litany of stories of NIT wealth at the college level, obsessed parents are pushing harder than ever to make sure their kids are the ones bringing home the bacon. As long as there’s money on the table, greedy parents are going to treat their kids dirty, health and safety be damned.
Speaking of sports, have you ever known a major-league player to play for both teams in a game? It happened Monday as catcher Danny Jantsen played for both the Red Sox and the Bluejays in the resumption of a rain-delayed game from two months ago. The issue is that Jantsen was playing for the Bluejays when the game was originally scheduled. During the interim, he was traded to the Red Sox. So, he appeared on both teams’ rosters. You know that has to make scoring the game a bit difficult.
On the upside, Dolly Parton is at it again, sending books to five-year-olds in 21 states and a growing international participation as well. In many states, her Imagination Library has the ability to reach every child with new books before they even start kindergarten. In a world full of greedy sons of bitches, the 78-year-old singer is a shining example of one using their privilege to help others.
That seems like a good place to stop this morning. We’re expecting heavy rain with a chance of severe weather across the Midwest this afternoon, but that’s not going to do anything to bring down the record-setting temps. That makes me all the more thankful that we have the AC back up and working.
I never have liked iced coffee, but if they hadn’t fixed the AC I’d be considering it.
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