Hatred

The voice that left the message was course and vile. "Ain't none of your business how I'm registered . . . I'd never vote for a Democrat, they're all crooked and stupid . . . Don't ever send anything to me again."  

Really?  This in response to a friendly, straightforward Get-out-the-Vote letter that my daughter and I sent to fellow Durham Democrats in our neighborhood.

So it's okay that people make calls like this? to a neighbor no less?  Especially when you're a registered Democrat who would logically receive such a letter?  I don't know why she's chosen to register as she has, perhaps to vote more effectively in local primary elections, but she shouldn't be surprised to get mailings from the Democratic Party.  What bothered me the most, though, was the hate in her voice.  Why not a simple, polite call that asks me to remove her from my mailing list?

I was watching the funeral service for Congressman John Lewis when the call came in and fortunately didn't answer.  The anger I felt simply listening to the message was hard enough to contain.  I felt like calling her back with an equally hateful response or sending her a demeaning letter.  But I thought instead about John Lewis:  his humiliations, his arrests, and his beatings.  The hatred he endured over a lifetime of 80 years dwarfed my bad encounter with a neighbor.  Like him, I wouldn't let this experience poison me.

Still, it's hard to know what to do with hate.  Martin Luther King, Jr., would counsel love.  Others, forgiveness.  For me, it's enough to say that I might understand my neighbor if I had lived her life.  And while I won't exactly turn the other cheek, I'll refrain from meeting hate with hate.  It's the best I can do right now.

Suburbanista

Someone needs to tell Donald Trump that he's got his suburbs on backwards.  Sure, they're not one size fits all, but their style has changed.  Suburbs no longer wear uniforms; they're colorful and varied, even subversive at times.  I know, because I live in one.

Determined to eliminate a fair housing law established under Barack Obama, President Trump is warning that Joe Biden's zoning policies will "abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs."  He thinks he's scaring us by saying that crime rates will rise and property values decline.  It's all code, of course, easily deciphered, for Black and Brown people moving in.  "Suburbia will be no longer," he says.

The trouble for Trump is that suburbia isn't so White anymore.  Nor is it Republican.  In fact, Democratic households outnumber Republican ones in my north Durham neighborhood, where people of different colors, ages, and genders have lived together for years.  Many of us detest Trump's endless race baiting, and we denounce his response to protests in support of Black Lives Matter.

Interestingly enough, protesters in Portland have employed one of suburbia's trademark symbols--the leaf blower--to counter tear gas attacks from federal agents.  It's as if urban and suburban citizens have joined together to demand civil rights.  Whereas Trump wishes to pit the two against each other, we've teamed up to stand him down.

So on this Sunday in July when the body of John Lewis crosses one last time over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, soon to be renamed in his honor, let's remember what he said: "I believe in freedom of speech, but I also believe that we have an obligation to condemn speech that is racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic, or hateful."

Racist appeals to suburban voters meet the Congressman's definition and must be condemned at every opportunity.

The Emerald Ash Borer

A brief thought on this hot July night. . .

Having noticed many dying trees in our neighborhood this summer, I asked an arborist what was wrong.  He said that the Emerald Ash Borer is killing ash trees in north Durham, and for some reason I thought of Donald Trump. 

Like this metallic green beetle, President Trump destroys rather than renews: he's dismantled our Constitution the way the ash borer disrupts nutrient pathways, and he's managed to do this in 3 years--the time it can take for an ash borer to kill a tree.  He's small (minded) and shiny like this nasty bug, and evidence of his subversion can be found both directly and indirectly.  He's on the move wherever ash trees can be found (and beyond).

Where the analogy doesn't hold up?  The ash borer is a non-native species.  Donald Trump, unfortunately, is as native to this country as you and I.  He sprang from our values and thrived in our culture, understanding how to wreck the very systems that helped to create him.

I hope that we're more successful in defeating him this November than we've been in defeating his Coleoptera counterpart, for it will take more than insecticides and hardwood quarantines.  It will take votes and votes and more votes.

Education 101

Saturday's editorial in The New York Times, "Reopening Schools Will Be a Huge Undertaking. It Must Be Done," elicited almost 2,000 largely oppositional comments.  In it, the editorial staff argued that public schools should open this fall with unprecedented federal funding and with imaginative use of outdoor space.  As one reader noted, the word "teachers" appeared only once, in the second-to-last paragraph.

This says it all to me and, at the same time, doesn't surprise me.  "What do our teachers think about re-opening?" seems like an obvious question.  Yet for too long our society has discounted the role and expertise of its teachers.  We don't pay them enough, we don't support them enough, and we don't consult them enough. . . but we ask them to solve society's problems that society fails to solve.

Consider for starters poverty, hunger, racial disparities, and economic inequality.  We expect our teachers to overcome these challenges and ensure that all of their students achieve at a defined level-- despite low salaries, marginal benefits, and often poor working conditions.   At a most basic level, the schools that my kids attended lacked soap in the bathroom dispensers, doors on stalls, sufficient cleaning supplies, working windows, and mold- and asbestos-free classrooms.  Even when there's no coronavirus circulating, many Durham schools are neither safe nor clean.

Just as the pandemic has exposed the failure of public health and elder care in the United States, so it exposes public education.  How did we get to the point where teachers buy their own paper?  Need subsidized housing?  Work second jobs?  Crowdfund surgeries and new equipment?  Why do we tolerate dilapidated buildings and aging school buses?  Why do we short-change our children and their teachers?

It's past time to ask these questions.  Covid-19 will eventually resolve, but the ills that plague our schools will not unless we demand something different.  As fellow citizens protest policing and racism, let's add public education to the conversation.  It's related, after all, and it serves our future and our national treasure: our children.

Random Thoughts, 4th of July Weekend

I've always wanted to see Mount Rushmore, in part because I like Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest.  But not anymore.  The land belongs to the Lakota, the sculptor was a white supremacist, and the carved faces (a quartet that's never made sense to me) insult the lives and history of native Americans.

If Donald Trump wants to call his opposition an angry mob whose behavior defines the word "totalitarianism," then he can very well learn how to pronounce it.

The Washington Redskins should have changed their name decades ago.  Given the recent outcry of protest across the country, FedEx and Nike have pulled their support, and it looks like the name will finally change.  Two of the team's main corporate sponsors, their money made the difference.  I guess we should celebrate this?

Mandy Cohen, North Carolina's Secretary of Health and Human Services, lamented our state's lack of chemical reagents to run more coronavirus tests, but we need help from the federal government to do so.  "We can't solve that problem from the state level," she said.  In the midst of this pandemic, do Trump's idolatrous crowds in Tulsa and the Black Hills have any idea how morally and criminally negligent his administration has been?

My mother and I watched two episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show on Friday night in memory of Carl Reiner, who produced the show and occasionally appeared in it.  Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore are two of my favorite comedians, and we laughed and laughed.  It felt good.

Baby Steps

So now that the mass protests have largely ended, where are we in our evolution of civil rights?  Here are some good signs:

Confederate statues and other offensive public works are coming down.

Black Lives Matter signs are popping up; I've seen several in my neighborhood, where few people broadcast their political views.

The U S. House of Representatives passed the D. C. statehood bill for the first time ever.

Mississippi's House voted to remove the Confederate flag from the state flag.  Republican Governor Tate Reeves said that he would sign such a bill if it comes his way.

Players in the National Women's Soccer League knelt during the national anthem on Saturday.  In a joint statement, they said they were protesting "racial injustice, police brutality and systemic racism against Black people and people of color" in the United States.

Baby steps, perhaps--and way too long in coming.  Much harder work awaits.  Yet baby steps need not be dismissed.

They're often the first signs of a movement on the rise.

Rebuilding

When I restarted this blog four months ago, I was excited to think that I'd be writing about the coming presidential election, starting with the Democratic primaries and moving into the general election.  I love national politics; I'm fascinated by the two parties, the candidates who emerge, the winnowing that takes place, the roll of pollsters and pundits, and the final call on a Tuesday night in November.

But this time it's different.  The Democratic primary yielded no single candidate who ever captured my whole-hearted enthusiasm, and the Republican party has tied itself to a president whose values upend the country I love.  Donald Trump's rally last night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was so offensive and destructive that it's hard to see how we'll recover.

Still, Donald Trump didn't come out of nowhere.  He tapped into a hatred that has long haunted us, one that surrounds us every day but one that we choose not to see.  George Floyd's murder made it impossible for us to look away, finally, but the hard work ahead feels equally impossible.  I don't know where to begin.  I feel weary, not up to the challenge.

I know that it's time for younger voices, for younger leadership.  Kids and young adults are wiser than the rest of us, certainly when it comes to sensitivity surrounding race, gender, and culture.  Many in my generation grew up with Dick and Jane readers and Father Knows Best television shows.  Our worlds were white through and through and often still are.  How do we change?

All kinds of ways. . . books we must read, voices we must hear, organizations we must support, ideas we must consider. . . and votes we must take.  Here's what must happen as elections move forward:

Joe Biden hires and hears consultants much younger than he.

Donald Trump's supporters face their hatred; if and when they don't, the rest of us call them out.

Elections officials do everything they can to ensure a fair vote.

Candidates at every level make clear where they stand on institutional redesign--from police departments to prisons to public schools to health care to immigration to climate change to banking--and we elect those who will follow through.

We, the people, start to rebuild our country.