Looking Back and Looking Ahead

In 1952, Ferrar, Straus, and Young published a book by novelist-reporter-historian William L. Shirer called Midcentury Journey. (For a while I had misremembered the title as Europe at Midcentury, as it focuses on England and the countries of the European continent, following World War II as well as up to and during that war.) True to my francophilic nature, rather than beginning at the beginning, I immediately turned to the third chapter, “The Waning Star of France,” curious to see what I would find. 

French government up to the Second World War was known as the Third Republic, which began in 1870 (after the collapse of Napoleon's Second Empire) and lasted until 1940. It was relatively stable, and the economy as late as the mid-1920s was also in decent shape, Shirer reports. Intellectual life, the arts, and literature, freedom—all were flourishing. “Men were wonderfully free, and they were free from fear,” as Shirer saw them in Paris:

If ever a great nation seemed destined to continue on its glorious and civilized course for centuries to come, France was it.

And yet, even then there were signs of approaching catastrophe that one can only appreciate today—with the benefit of hindsight.

- William L. Shirer, Midcentury Journey 

How to explain the weakness of France in the face of German aggression, and why did so many French people, not just a radical racist fringe but even conservative middle-class Frenchmen, actually see Hitler as a savior?

Part of Shirer’s answer is that there were, in fact, two Frances, a democratic, republican Left (heirs of the 1789 Revolution) and an authoritarian Right, "which looked backward with nostalgia to the ancient régime….” While democratic, republican France was supported by industrial and farm workers and people in the trades and small business, those on the authoritarian side, yearning for a return to monarchy, had support from the church and army, big business and finance. Evenly matched numerically in the population, the two sides had little common ground, and thus power tended to shift back and forth, back and forth, until fear of “Reds” in their own country (“the enemy within”) led the (formerly, I would say) “conservatives” in France to see Hitler as the lesser evil.

Naturally, there were other contributing factors. Loss of male population in World War I and the subsequent falling birthrate, decay of the bourgeoisie, a corrupt press (“venal,” Shirer calls it), widespread tax evasion at all levels of society, and failure to industrialize sufficiently all played a part in the country’s problems. What struck me most forcibly, however, was the deep division Shirer identifies in the French people, a chasm with no bridge across, because had the country been united, couldn’t they have devised solutions for the other problems? 

The troubles of France, it became evident, went back to the French Revolution of 1789, which had given birth to the nation we [Americans] came to know. There the deep fissure developed which has divided France to this day. It was an unfinished revolution in that the old order was never really liquidated or even converted, and therefore survived to combat the republican idea right up to Hitler’s entry into Paris, which it welcomed and which brought the Third Republic to an end.

These two Frances, Shirer argues, “never really fused.” 

Whether or not France is a united country today is not my concern today (although I do see divisions continuing), and it is probably obvious why Shirer’s idea of a divided country strikes me with such force: It is the divisions in the United States of America, my own country, that most deeply concern me. In one of my January posts, I wrote about avoiding difficult subjects. For me, such avoidance means ignoring crisis to pretend that life is normal, although these are not normal times. The great question of our time is, once again, whether our nation, “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” can endure into the future. And yet, and yet—.

Yet conversation across the chasm is all but impossible, because Americans, like those divided French Shirer describes, have so little common ground on which to meet that we live in different realities. 

The fissure was already deep in 1776, when a nation "conceived in liberty for all” allowed some humans to own others. A scant 85 years later came the Civil War, the war Lincoln saw as deciding the nation’s fate. That war came to an end without stitching the country seamlessly back together. The legacy of defeat is still bitter to many who never lived through it but inherited bitterness from those who could not accept the war's outcome, in much the same way that the defeated candidate for the presidency in 2020 has never been able to recognize and accept his defeat that year—and now, despite having successfully avoided military service himself and despite being elected to another term in the White House, has taken up political arms against Americans by withholding Congressionally approved funds, has sent armed forces into American cities and states that contributed to his defeat, and is now bombing foreign countries and killing civilians in the name of America. That is, these things are being done in your name and mine.

***

I wrote the foregoing back in March. Since then--just the other day, in fact--the world has seen an event that fills me with hope. Despite loud support from top officials in the current American government, autocrat Viktor Orbán was defeated for re-election as prime minister by opposition leader Péter Magyar, who ran on a strong anti-corruption platform. Read about the campaign what Magyar to build support, and how he brought down a 16-year regime that had ruled through, in addition to outright corruption, stacking key institutions with loyalists and taking over news outlets. Now the rest of Europe is eagerly welcoming Hungary back into the fold--and meanwhile, Canada is contemplating joining the European Union, no longer able to trust completely in a North American alliance. The Magyar story, though, is inspiring. It can be done! We do not have to slog through another world war and commit mass genocide before returning to sanity!

It isn’t all Ayn Rand’s fault. (Only part of it is.)

As always, this is how I see it. If you see it differently, let me know.

 

Rand’s view

 

The part that brands taxation for government social programs as thievery or sees worker protections as outrageous interference with ownership or views union bargaining as blackmail—all that you can pin on Ayn Rand. Her fictional villains were those who would be called liberals in today’s culture: What liberals see as progressive taxation she saw as stealing from productive members of society for the benefit of the lazy and undeserving.

 

 

What she didn’t see

 

Look a little closer, though. Her heroes are gifted, rebellious, independent capitalists who ask no favors or anyone! The cronyism and pay-to-play bootlicking demanded by the current administration in Washington is the behavior of her villains, not her heroes! 

 

She thought free market capitalists would be different. She was wrong.

 

 

Her background

 

Born Alissa Rosenbaum, the woman who reinvented herself as Ayn Rand was 12 years old when the Russian revolution exploded in St. Petersburg. Her family fled to the Crimea. Her father lost his business. She saw firsthand the sins of communism, and from those early impressions she extrapolated the evils to anything that smacked to her of what she called collectivism. Under Bolshevik collectivism, she saw cheating and corruption and a class of political elites lining their pockets while grinding down poor, hard-working citizens.

 

Again, She thought capitalists would be different. She was wrong.

 

 

Russia’s background

 

Russia, become the U.S.S.R., now Russia again – it’s a big, sprawling country, and top-heavy bureaucracy was not invented by Bolsheviks. Autocratic czars relied on a far-reaching network of bureaucrats to carry out their will. People’s representatives in government? Forget it! 

 

 

The American story has been different

 

Americans set up a different kind of government, based from the beginning on representation. The “people,” of course, were originally only white, property-owning males, but other groups gradually gained suffrage. But Americans also have a long history of being taken in by and being fearful of extremes. That is, we as a people tend to see the world in either/or terms, and politically this comes down to the (false) dilemma of completely unregulated free market capitalism vs. toiling for the state under a red flag. 

 

Two things have saved us over the years from the absurdity of either of the dismal extremes: 

 

First, we have had, historically, a strong two-party system.

 

Second, the two parties have, until very recently, worked together to reach legislative compromises and actually get things done. 

 

Because Americans are stuck in either/or thinking and because we have had two strong parties, government power has alternated between the two parties, and because of back-and-forth swings in power and because, generally speaking, civility reigned in Congress, bipartisanship worked.

 

 

Where we are now

 

The current president, however, said when on the campaign trail that if people voted for him, “You’ll never have to vote again.” Those in his party in Congress have acquiesced to his Cabinet nominations, however inappropriate or unqualified the nominees (until the most recent and most outrageously inappropriate, a man even Republicans could not stomach), and they have done everything to exclude and block Democrats, including withholding funds already appropriated to various agencies and programs.

  

Now there is the government shutdown, the longest in U.S. history. Senator Chuck Schumer, minority leader, on Friday, November 7, said the Democrats would vote to end the shutdown if Republicans would agree to a one-year extension of expiring ACA tax credits, without which many middle-class working Americans could see their monthly health insurance costs rise to unaffordable levels. Republicans say no, we open the government back up first, and then we negotiate. So, believe Mike Johnson? Why? Is he credible? Truthful? 

 

Republicans do not want to work with Democrats. They do not want bipartisanship. They want everything their way (which is the Project 2025 way), with no input from the other side of the aisle. Although Republicans are in pro forma session right now, and although they have earlier this year sworn in two other people while in pro forma session, they still refuse to swear in the Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva from Arizona. And as the president urges Republicans in Congress to get rid of the filibuster, he tells them there is no need to worry about future Democratic control because by getting rid of the filibuster, Republicans could pass legislation that would guarantee they would “never lose the midterms and we will never lose a general election” again.

 

What Republicans want is one-party rule. 

 

 

Drawing the wrong conclusion

 

Ayn Rand can be forgiven for believing at age 12 that free market capitalists would be all for freedom in general and not for cheating and greed and corruption, and young people in general can be forgiven for falling temporarily under the spell of her "romantic realism, with heroes larger than life and her villains considerably smaller and smarmier. Most young people want to believe in heroes, whether they are Superman, Spiderman, or John Galt. 

 

But for those willing to look dispassionately at American history, “experience has shown” (to quote from the Declaration of Independence) that completely unregulated, unrestrained capitalism is as destructive of life as collectivism, and a corporate “Big Brother” is every bit as much of an overpowering steamroller as a governmental “Big Brother.” Who wants to be enslaved by either one? 

 

What threatens us at this juncture in our history is an unholy alliance of the two--unbridled capitalism enabled and rewarded by a would-be autocrat at the head of the federal government, a head backed by “representatives” doing the bidding not of the people who elected them but that of corporate interests willing to offer big rewards for the legislation and contracts they want. 

 

All along, it wasn’t collectivism that was the problem. It was unchecked, one-party rule. If you vote Republican, is this really what you want? Think hard!

The Worst Thing You Can Call Someone

Since the end of World War II, even though the world since then has seen massacres by Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Idi Amin, and others, there is still no worse judgment to be made than comparing a leader anywhere to Hitler and his party to Nazis. Name-calling in general has been on the rise in the past decade in the United States, and Hitler name-calling is increasing at an alarming rate, notes Edna Friedberg of the William Levine Family Institute for Holocaust Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who finds the trend “disturbing.” She writes,

 

This oversimplified approach to complex history is dangerous. When conducted with integrity and rigor, the study of history raises more questions than answers. And as the most extensively documented crime the world has ever seen, the Holocaust offers an unmatched case study in how societies fall apart, in the immutability of human nature, in the dangers of unchecked state power. It is more than European or Jewish history. It is human history. Almost 40 years ago, the United States Congress chartered a Holocaust memorial on the National Mall for precisely this reason: The questions raised by the Holocaust transcend all divides.

 

Neither the political right nor left has a monopoly on exploiting the six million Jews murdered in a state-sponsored, systematic campaign of genocide to demonize or intimidate their political opponents.

 

Both right and left, she points out, have made use of these dangerous analogies.

 

Recently someone I know slightly posted on Facebook about Nazis in relation to American politics. He listed a few oddly chosen political sins of the Nazis (leaving out depriving people of basic citizenship rights, plus the whole Holocaust death machine!!!) as follows: They “tore down statues; banned free speech; blamed economic hardships on one group of people; instituted gun control; put the state before God; nationalized health care; and placed strict government regulations on industry.” He then posed the question (though it looks as if he copied the whole post from someone else; I don't really know), “Does this sound like the policies of a current political party in the U.S.?”

 

Well, let’s see. Let’s look at those “sins” one at a time. Here's what he says the Nazis did, which he thinks sounds like one of the American political parties:

 

Removed statues. Statues of Confederate leaders have been removed in more than one American city and state—are we talking about any statues other than those of Confederates? —and we can probably thank the primarily Democrats for that. Please note that the statues removed were leaders of an armed insurrection against the U.S. government, leaders of an opposing army in a war that cost over 600,000 American deaths, a war that took place over a century and a half ago; that most of those statues went up much later, during the 1890s, the Jim Crow era, i.e., when Reconstruction ended and Southern states began enforcing strict segregation laws; and that the current Republican president, in sympathy with the old Confederacy, has ordered a couple of those statues put back up. (He has never wanted to be the president of “all Americans” and has made that clear time and time again.) 

 

On the other hand, it has been the present Republican administration that removed online memorials to Black and Native Americans, and the Republican president himself had portraits of President Obama and both presidents Bush moved out of a highly visible area of the White House to a place where they are hidden from public view. 

 

Banned free speech. Sounds like the current Republican administration to me, where any criticism of the president is seen as treason, radio stations are threatened with loss of their licenses, newspapers are sued for printing true stories that show the administration in a bad light, etc. I suspect, however, given his general sympathies, that the questioner has in mind bans against “hate speech,” particularly on college and university campuses, so here’s the way the United Nations explains that idea. Did you follow the link for the definition? If “free speech” is an absolute, then “hate speech” must be permitted, and if this is where you come down on it, both parties are guilty restricting speech. The line between acceptable and unacceptable speech under the line has always shifted with shifts in political climate, in every country of the world, under all manner of political power. One absolutist on the matter wrote that he would not even ban yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. Can you go that far? I can’t, although I tend in general to lean towards freedom. 

 

Blamed economic hardships on one group of people. Yes, Nazis blamed economic hardships on one group, the Jews, though they also scapegoated gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people, dark-skinned people, etc., etc. Republicans blame economic hardships on immigrants and Democrats, two different groups. They also love to call Democrats "socialists," because that's a hot button that short-circuits thought for many of their listeners. Democrats blame Republicans for their policies that favor the wealthiest Americans at the expense of everyone else. Not sure how to score this one.

 

Gun control. I don’t know what the specific German laws about gun ownership were under the Nazis, but neither major party in the U.S. has ever advocated making gun ownership unlawful. Democrats do, however, favor the kind of laws that most Americans also find reasonable, 

while Republicans kow-tow to the gun lobby and see any law about ownership of any weapons as an infringement of individual rights. It's strange that while they oppose even the “morning-after pill” as “murder of a child,” they are willing to sacrifice the lives of actual living schoolchildren so that anyone who wants to own a military-style assault weapon can get his hands on one. So yes, if “gun control” is a sin, Democrats are guilty. 

 

Put the state before God. That, like the foregoing, would be in the eye of the beholder. The separation of church and state does not elevate the state above the church and certainly does not elevate it above God. It’s a huge topic, what any individual might mean by this claim. 

 

Nationalized health care. There is only one country in the world, as far as I know, that has national health care, and that is the United Kingdom. Other countries have national health insurance, and the U.S. made a move in that direction with the Affordable Care Act, stopping short of having the government as a single payer. So American health insurance is still the business of for-profit corporations. Hospitals and clinics, too, which used to be owned and operated by cities and religious groups when I was young, are now for-profit businesses. Bottom line: We do not have nationalized health care. Neither major party has pushed for it. There is no country in the world that puts a greater burden on its people to pay exorbitant fees to private companies for health insurance and health care. 

 

Put strict government regulations on industry. This is certainly a sin of the Democratic party. Republicans would prefer that business be completely unregulated, with no safeguards for workers or for public health and no concern for the national resources of the country, on which all of us depend, including the industries.

 

Here's how I see these points, one by one, in summary: 

 

Every country chooses its heroes, and most adults recognize that we must choose our heroes carefully. 

 

Free speech would be less controversial if public, commonly accepted standards of civility and decency were still in place and respected and adhered to by our country’s leaders. 

 

Purposeful attributions of blame are unfortunately common in politics, but anyone following the news can see that it is much more common coming from Republicans, starting with the current president, the Blamer-in-Chief. 

 

I don’t know that this country will ever have sensible, reasonable discussion of gun ownership and gun control. 

 

Putting one religion above all others (often in a very perverted, materialistic form), rather than “putting the state before God,” is what I see Republicans doing these days, whereas Democrats would be content to maintain the traditional separation of church and state as laid out by the Founders. 

 

Nationalized health care is a straw man: We don’t have it, and neither party advocates for it. 

Government regulations on industry are nothing but common sense; the absence of regulations would be nothing but the raping and pillaging our own land and our own people for the short-term gain of the wealthiest segment of the population. I should say, for the short-term gain of the segment of that segment who recognize only one value: money and the power it gives.

 

A more important question relating to the list, however, is—what, if anything, does this list say about either major American political party? Would anyone want to say that a country with gun regulations or regulations on industry is, because of those regulations, led by Nazi-like politicians? The idea is ludicrous. 

As for my own view (which would not be the view of the person who posted the list), I believe that analogies between the present Republican administration and its leader to Nazis and Hitler are unnecessary and beside the point. We don't need analogies. All we need to do is listen to what is said by the Blamer-in-Chief and his diehard supporters and watch what they are doing and ordering done. It's all plenty bad enough without comparing it to other people and times and places. So let's not undermine our testimony with a reductio ad Hitlerum.

 

But I will let Edna Friedberg have the last word today: 

 

Careless Holocaust analogies may demonize, demean, and intimidate their targets. But there is a cost for all of us because they distract from the real issues challenging our society, because they shut down productive, thoughtful discourse. At a time when our country needs dialogue more than ever, it is especially dangerous to exploit the memory of the Holocaust as a rhetorical cudgel. We owe the survivors more than that. And we owe ourselves more than that. 

What Is ‘Woke,’ and What Is So Terrible About It?

At its simplest, ‘woke’ means being awake to the facts of history and biology and life in the United States from colonial days to the present. 

 

‘Woke’ means learning not only that Africans were brought to our shores in chains but that they were considered property here for two centuries, often treated worse than livestock. It means learning that each black human body was counted as 2/3 of a person—not given the vote, you understand, but just counted so as to give Southern states greater representation in Congress. Woke is realizing that the Emancipation Proclamation was just that, a proclamation, and that enslaved people were not freed until long afterward—and then, after an all-too-brief period when their rights were protected by U.S. troops, once more treated as subhuman by white men in power. 

 

‘Woke’ means knowing the history of the indigenous peoples of North America, the litany of broken treaties, slaughter of Native women and children by the United States military, slaughter also of the buffalo so that the people would starve, leaving their land open for railroads and homesteaders. It means learning about boarding schools where Native languages were prohibited, abuse was rampant, and where many children died and were buried in unmarked graves. Native American adults were not allowed to vote in U.S. elections until 1924, but the Snyder Act passed that year left it up to states to decide eligibility, so Native peoples were still frequently barred from participation in American democracy, and even today people on reservations without street addresses have difficulty registering to vote.

 

‘Woke’ means learning that until 1870 in the United States, only white men were allowed to vote. In 1870, black adult males were supposedly eligible to vote, but poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, etc. kept the ballot from most men. Women were not “given” the vote until 1920, with passage of the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution. Native Americans had to wait until 1924 and, as noted above, still have trouble registering today in many places, though in 1964 poll taxes were outlawed by the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act officially secured the vote for all adult Americans.

 

But ‘woke’ also means awareness that there is more to equality than voting rights. It means recognition of ways that discrimination persisted in laws and social customs, such as insurance and real estate practices, etc., that intergenerational trauma has been passed down through families and communities, affecting health and longevity, and ways in which privilege enjoyed by white Americans by virtue of their skin color is unearned and exceptional. 

 

About one percent (1%, or 1 in 100) of human beings are born gender-nonbinary, or intersex (having both male and female sex organs), with a mismatch between visible sex organs and sex hormones that activate at puberty, or with some other variation from a clear male or female identity. ‘Woke’ means recognition of this minority and respecting each individual’s way of dealing with the binary world.

 

‘Woke’ means, basically, being politically and socially aware, having an awareness that rests on thorough knowledge of history, along with recognition of privilege and its absence. The antonym is ignorance. 

 

A number of Republicans use ‘woke’ as a pejorative term and proudly declare themselves ‘anti-woke.’ In this context, the term ‘woke’ is carelessly thrown around to inhibit open inquiry and discussion. 

Ron DeSantis, for instance, calls it the belief that there exist systemic injustices in American society that need to be addressed. Does he think this is a false belief? Does he not see examples of injustice? Does he see them but want them left unaddressed? What he would have, rather than asking God to mend our country’s flaws, is that we insist that our country is flawless. Book bans and exclusion of “sensitive” topics in history are the result of anti-woke campaigns. 

 

As to the matter of gender terms, the current administration in Washington has declared, with unintentional humor, that the government will now recognize only two sexes, those fixed at conception. This is humorous because sex organs of embryos are not yet developed as male or female. And who is there at conception to conduct a sex test? 

 

As a white female American, I have known unearned privilege. I certainly did not earn the parents to whom I was born. And yet, as an adult in certain situations in company with a white male adult, I have been ignored while the man was recognized. In situations with an African woman friend, however, I was the one recognized while she was ignored, and when shopping with an elderly white woman, again I was the one recognized while the older woman was ignored. Women, people of color, people with foreign accents, old people, the disabled, the mentally ill—all experience discrimination. It’s a fact, and pretending it doesn’t exist, being indifferent to it, is downright callous.

 

Years ago members of my undergraduate department had not participated in graduation and wanted to make up for my disappointment (it took me 20 years to earn a B.A.) by taking me to lunch. One of the late arrivals at lunch was the university president, who sat across the narrow table from me and never once made eye contact or acknowledged my existence. Later I compared notes with another employee in the college where I worked. She, a black woman with a Ph.D., had had a similar experience with the president and thought it was because of her race, while I’d thought it was because I was a new and very lowly B.A. We concluded, perhaps too easily, that the president’s problem was with women. It took years for me to consider that his antipathy towards women did not rule out a racist attitude. He could easily have been biased on both counts. Perhaps also fixed on academic status, I think now.

 

Much earlier in life, I was called to babysit for a couple with two young boys and a new baby. Before they left for the evening, I was given instructions about what to do “if ‘it’ [the baby] wakes up.” It? They did not use a name for the baby, which I found very strange. Later, when the baby cried and needed a diaper change, I was shocked and confused about what I was seeing, and it took years for me to sort it out. Whatever happened to that baby? How did the parents raise their nonbinary child? I was not called to babysit at that house again (had only gone once when their regular sitter was unavailable) and never talked about the baby with anyone, my parents or my friends. My parents were never comfortable talking to my sisters and me about anything to do with sex, so we were not comfortable asking them questions. I’m glad to say they did better with questions of race and religion and taught us to respect people of different backgrounds and faiths. 

 

The questions remains, why are people so afraid to wake up? Why do they fear history? Why do they fear nonconforming genders? Realizing where our country falls short is the only way we will ever make it better, so teaching history honestly is our only chance. As for gender issues, the fear no doubt arises from confusion and shock, but that can be overcome. Human beings come in many variations, a very wide range of skin colors and in a wider gender range than is generally acknowledged. 

What’s strange can be frightening. But it doesn’t have to be. We don’t have to stay stuck in fear and let it turn to hate.

Are you brave enough to explore learning? The Revolutionary Love Project is not about hating yourself if you have had privilege: You can't love anyone else if you hate yourself. Check it out. Be brave. 

Resilience

Beautiful Great Lakes water
 

‘Resilience’ is a word we have heard perhaps much too often since the year 2020, and its omnipresence may have begun four years earlier. Who knows? As a widow, I have had personal encounters with the word and the idea, as well as meeting with it in casual news and important news stories day after day, and sometimes I get tired of the word. But then I think, what other word could possibly take its place? 

 

The movie “Bad River” that premiered in various U.S. cities on March 15 (mostly cities much larger than Traverse City, so we were particularly fortunate to have it there) is set in a small place beset with large issues that are pertinent to everyone on earth. The federally recognized Ojibwe tribe at Bad River, Wisconsin, numbered 6,945 members in 2010. In 2020, 1,545 members lived on the 193.11 square mile reservation, most of it managed as “undeveloped” forest and wetland. In this tribe’s culture, wild rice is as elemental as land and water, but all are threatened by a Canadian-owned oil pipeline over 70 years old and in imminent danger of failure at key points, as the film makes clear. 

 

Challenge and threat are nothing new to the people of Bad River. Removal of their children to boarding schools (where their language was prohibited, physical and mental abuse rampant, and where many children died), removal and relocation of whole families to cities far from their homes, broken treaties, pressures from the dominant culture that shrunk the tribe’s lands time after time, an allotment plan that divided the land (all the better for lumber companies to buy their land and gain control), along with all the ills that follow poverty and disculturation. 

 

“Bad River” the film is a story about much more than the dangers of an oil pipeline that could spill into Lake Superior and from there contaminate the Great Lakes, because the Bad River people have been fighting to maintain their land and way of life and identity for much longer than the pipeline has been in place, but in a 1980s court case the judge ruled in favor of the tribe, saying that the Treaty of 1854 does indeed guarantee their rights to hunt and fish and gather food. Sport fishermen were incensed, but the fact is that the tribe manages its own fisheries, more than replacing the fish they take each year. See details of that history here. 

 

Now the tribe comprising roughly 7,000 Native Americans has been defending, at their own expense, not only their own lands and waters and resources, but the entire Great Lakes system, freshwater on which the entire world depends. The Canadian corporation, Enbridge, has been ruled a trespasser on tribal land since the tribe chose not to renew the corporation’s lease, which expired in 2013 – and yet a judge ruled that the trespass could continue until 2026 -- and the corporation has no intention of shutting down the pipeline and removing it then. 

 

Line 5 originates in Canada, passes through Wisconsin, Michigan, tribal lands, and the Great Lakes, only to end back in Canada. Apparently it was easier and cheaper for the foreign company to build the line below their national border. What would the energy cost be without Line 5? The company’s own experts estimate that gas prices might increase by half a cent per gallon. 

 

As is much too often the case with cost/benefit analyses, profits do not go to populations bearing the risks. Almost always, the few and the poorer bear the risks in order that the already wealthy can become wealthier. In this particular case, however, the risks are born by all Americans and Canadians within the Great Lakes system, now and into the future. “We’re not there yet,” said someone in the trial that found the corporation guilty of trespass. I.e., we have not yet had a disastrous break in the line. That, of course, is just the point: to prevent a disaster that could not possibly be contained.

 

The Bad River people have had to be resilient for generations in order to survive. Nature, we often note, is also resilient. The span of time needed for nature’s resilience, however, is not always limited to the span of a human life. What do we want to bequeath to our children and grandchildren, let alone to the seventh generation in the future?

 

SHUT DOWN LINE 5 NOW!

 

“It Isn’t Fair!” Why Can’t We Say So?

When I was young, that was every kid’s natural objection, almost an automatic response, when given an unpleasant task or punishment. Clearing the ground of rotten apples that had fallen from the trees was a particularly loathsome seasonal chore in our household. Why should the kids have to perform that disgusting job? Not fair! As for punishment, rarely were we “grounded” (though our friends were, often), because our father and mother, knowing what a pack of little readers they were raising (those apples didn’t fall far from the trees, either!) knew that the loss of library privileges would be a far greater punishment than having to stay home (with books to read!). Forbid us the library? So unfair!

 

As we got older, we learned to distinguish the difference between being unhappy and being treated unfairly. More than that, we learned to recognize when other people were being treated unfairly. That was a huge step.

 

I’ve been looking into the question of values teaching in public education, apparently a battleground in the present-day United States. Those opposed to the teaching of values usually point to “liberal” values and call such teaching “indoctrination.” One site I looked at, under the heading “Public Schools Shouldn’t Be Teaching ‘Values,’” objected to students being taught “tolerance, egalitarianism, diversity, and globalism.” The author of the piece thinks this teaching has no place in American public school classrooms. 

 

I understand keeping values specific to a particular religion out of the classroom. There are Catholic schools, Jewish schools, Amish schools, etc. for parents who want their children taught only within the strictures of the family’s religion. As for “moral values” in general, though? I admit I am confused. 

 

What does even mean to teach “globalism”? I have no idea. As for tolerance, egalitarianism, and diversity, those look to me like bedrock American values – honored more in the breach than in practice, perhaps, but certainly part of our country’s ideals. At least, so I was taught by my conservative, Republican, Lutheran parents.

 

Another site I looked at, “Education on moral values a must for school children,” cites the following as values needing to be taught in school: “truthfulness, honesty, charity, hospitality, tolerance, love, kindness and sympathy.” Kindergartners learn to share. They are taught to take turns. They are told that it is wrong and against the rules to hit each other. These are moral values, and a classroom without such values would be absolute chaos. It is impossible to teach if students have tacit permission to cheat, lie, bully, steal, etc. “Neutrality” on these questions has no place in a classroom.

 

(Some people say schools only have to teach values because parents have not done so. That’s bullshit. Parents and schools have an obligation to children to teach them right from wrong. It is the job of adults to be responsible for children in their care, and that means teaching right from wrong. Some parents will fall down on the job, as will some teachers. All the more reason for building redundancy into education.)

 

Now in more than one state there are moves to require, by law,“neutrality” when teaching historical subjects such as slavery in America and the WWII holocaust of Jews in Europe. Neutrality???Opposing views??? We are supposed to tell students that bullying is wrong but then cannot tell them that human trafficking and genocide are wrong? Refrain from judgment??? Neutrality on the buying and selling and robbing and killing of other human beings, treating them worse than we treat livestock??? 

 

That one state governor calling himself “conservative” can deny college credit for an AP class carefully put together and implemented across the nation is appalling. 

If this is what American “conservatism” has come to, it deserves to wither away.

 

In a Holding Pattern

I’ve been searching for a way to describe my feelings, and all I can come up with is that I feel I’m in a holding pattern. Not waiting for any big event, just for clearance to land — finally! — and get on with ordinary life. Waiting for a return to normality, that is — which has enough problems and complexities and challenges of its own, God knows. I don’t kid myself about that. Normal life has enough craziness for anyone. But living in a country at war with itself, as we do now, goes beyond normal craziness (and I don’t mean that to be taken as an oxymoron) and into outright daily insanity. It either exhausts the heart or drives it underground, into hiding, but meanwhile we cannot afford to check out or let ourselves fall asleep. We still have to keep our lighted, fully equipped, and heavily freighted ships — our lives! — aloft, all parts running and in decent working order, and we have to remain alert and engaged and keep sending and receiving signals —. . 

So for now it’s the holding pattern and the quiet, sometimes desperate hope (one must maintain hope) that fuel reserves will hold out and that we will, one day, walk out on solid ground again. 

Does One Really Intend All Consequences?

Imagine that you are lost in the woods with friends. Not a little city or county park, but a wilderness of thousands of acres. It’s a dark, stormy day, so you can get no fix on direction from the position of the sun, and one of your party has a life-threatening illness, making your situation all that much more frightening.

Stumbling around, you come to a river, and by some apparent miracle, there is a boat tied up onshore, large enough to hold all of you. One of your party assures the rest that heading downstream is your best possible chance for survival. Eventually the river will come to some kind of civilization, where help will be available. Food, warmth. Rescue. Survival! 

It makes sense, you all agree. You get in the boat, push off from shore, and begin to drift with the current.

The storm continues. As rain lashes your crowded little storm-tossed craft, the sense of urgency increases, and drifting with the current seems too slow a pace. Everyone now puts hands in the water and paddles furiously to speed the boat to safety downstream.

Meanwhile, the roaring wind in the trees along the river seems to increase along with your speed. The noise becomes deafening – just as your boat tumbles over a waterfall, crashing on rocks below. Some of the party are dashed on the rocks, others drowned. Perhaps one or two survive to tell the tale.

You did not intend death and destruction. You intended survival for all. If you’d had a map of the river, you could have foreseen the waterfall.

Unfortunately, there is no map to the future. The best we can do is to learn from the past. Or repeat its most hellish episodes.

The Trouble With Too Many Facts

Imagine the following:

Imagine someone describing conditions of a town under siege and looking to allay the fears of those within the town. Let’s call him the Prophet, because the example will be easier if we have a name for him. The Prophet loves facts and has enough numbers and lists of numbers and statistics to fill thousands of written pages. “The situation is challenging, without a doubt,” he says to the people, “ but we are educated and intelligent and have all history and technology on our side to help us overcome our enemy.”

Tons of grain in warehouses, fresh water in wells and cisterns, herds of livestock and flocks of poultry, stores of preserved fruits and vegetables and spices and sugar – all this and more has been meticulously catalogued by the Prophet’s clerks, along with records of past sieges and their outcomes. Additionally, the Prophet cites what he calls the “Home Ground Advantage.” Those outside the walls, he reminds his fellow townsfolk, are sleeping on hard ground, far from their families, not in comfortable beds at home.  They will not want to continue forever in thankless discomfort.

But the Prophet’s chief message lies in his facts and numbers. Whenever a dubious voice is raised, the Prophet rains down a flood of facts upon the questioner’s head. He does not simply say, “Look at all we have!” but enumerates tirelessly until the questioner is overwhelmed by the sheer force of the wall of facts. The questioner feels stupid and falls silent.

What’s wrong with this picture? Are facts not important? Should we want not to be “confused with facts”? Should we instead make up our minds about what to believe and what to do without reference to reality?

I do not intend my example as opposition to facts or reality. What I see too often, however, is a blizzard or tsunami of facts thrown up as a smokescreen -- because when facts come in a blizzard or in a tsunami, they can be overwhelming and leave a crowd speechless with amazement. Historians are often guilty of this technique, but so are writers on economics, politics, and just about any other topic under the sun. Any “expert” with infinite facts at his fingertips can silence an audience – and, worse, can paralyze thought, which is my main concern.

“I'm only saying it because it’s true.” Have you ever heard anyone say that? What did it mean to you? Did it shut you up?

Here's something else that's true: The number of true sentences that any of us can utter at any given moment is infinite. We do not, therefore, make any statement simply because it’s true: we make it for some purpose. To make a statement is to begin to stake out a position, and to make thousands of statements is to stake out a huge area of ground.

As listeners, as readers, what do we need in addition to statements of fact?

If someone lays out a book-length position, complete with chapters and footnotes, bristling with dozens of facts on every page, I want to know: What is the basic line of argument? What am I being asked to conclude, and where, in the jungle of facts, are the lines of the argument? Sometimes the author has not constructed an explicit argument, and I as a reader have to infer it from hints. Other times an argument is explicit but rests on unstated or unexamined premises. Is there a hidden premise that, if brought forward, because false, defeats the conclusion?

Facts are important, but so are arguments. So too are values that lurk behind arguments.

Imagine another situation: One hundred people survive the siege, and the barbarians at the gate have all gone home. One survivor has a net worth of $1 million. The 99 others have nothing. The per capita wealth of the survivors is $10,000. This group of people is in pretty good shape, wouldn’t you say?

I hear someone saying yes, they’re in good shape, because the millionaire will need the labor of the ninety-nine and will have to pay them for their labor if their civilization is to enjoy a renaissance. Ah, but does survival necessarily entail a renaissance? And what if the millionaire can get work done – planting, harvesting, sewing his new clothes – simply by providing enough food to keep the workers’ bodies and souls together?

The number of survivors is a fact. The per capita income is a fact. Interpreting facts, predicting outcomes and making decisions based on available facts – that is something else again. That will depend on what you are trying to prove and what you want to see happen.

It is not enough to question facts. One must question the beliefs and purposes and values of people presenting facts. If no argument is given, an important question to ask might be, “What’s your point?”

Stop the tsunami in its tracks, freeze the blizzard in midair. Why are you giving me all these facts? You are trying to convince me of something. What is it?

[Just realized this is my 100th post on "Without a Clear Focus."]

Back to the Ghost Town

Return to the West, VI: Back to the Ghost Town

How often this past winter I have returned in memory and imagination to last winter in Dos Cabezas! It would not be everyone’s dream getaway, as it was, quite literally, a ghost town: we had to drive fourteen miles (to a real town) to find so much as a cup of coffee, let alone library, post office, and stores; we only met four neighbors during our entire three months’ residence; we had no cell phone signal; and traffic on the two-lane highway past the cabin was limited to other inhabitants of ghost town and neighboring ranches; travelers between Willcox and the Chiricahua National Monument; U.S. Border Patrol vehicles; and cows.

“Cows,” the generic Western label for adult cattle, regardless of sex, and whether natural or “fixed.” Cows and calves. Beyond the area of scattered houses and adobe ruins the land was fenced to keep cattle in, but Dos Cabezas itself, paradoxically, was open range, with cattle guards across the highway at both ends of town. Anyone who wanted to keep cows out of their yards or gardens had to put up their own fences.

The cabin we rented sat high off the highway. It looked down on the highway in front and off through the wash to the mountains in back. In front were two big metal livestock gates, painted green, but no fence surrounding the property. Cows could, and therefore did, come right up to the door. Cow patties could, and did, appear anywhere the cows went.

Javelinas, locally known as “pigs,” were a different matter. Classified as a game animal, javelinas could not be killed except by hunters with a proper license, and permitted numbers were limited, which was a problem because the pigs were notorious garden raiders and despoilers. Coyotes, on the other hand, not classified as game, could be killed without a license in unlimited numbers by various means. No doubt there was a logic to the distinction, but it escaped me.

Our neighbors had gardens and so were pestered by javelinas. We never saw evidence of them around the cabin. Coyotes we heard in the distance regularly, but we were used to that from northern Michigan. Birds, lizards, once a rock squirrel – those were the wildlife we saw. Since we were there in winter, we were not troubled by rattlesnakes or scorpions.

The ghost town, at any rate, was open range to animals wild and domestic.

Once laid out in a grid, with streets and house plats, the ghost town had once had its own school and post office and stores. In its early days, it was on the stage line; later a railroad served the area. Mining was responsible for the boom years, but no great amounts of gold or silver or copper were ever taken, and at last hopeful prospectors went elsewhere, leaving the town to wither and die. Old railroad ties used as fenceposts were one sign of the past, coils of barbed wire another, but the most obvious and picturesque were the ruins of adobe houses and stores. Crumbling adobe walls we looked to as a landmark stood at the bottom of our driveway. Elsewhere nearby, rotted wooden sills marked places where buildings had stood, craters (some fenced to keep cattle from falling in, others unfenced) all that was left of old dug wells. Antique automobile carcasses begged to be photographed, so as not to be forgotten.

Across the road from our cabin was a B&B, but that house, like our cabin, was set far back from the road, and we never saw anyone we could identify positively as B&B guests. Next door to the B&B, also a long way off the highway, was the home of a young couple; the husband was a mechanic, but his shop was in the town of Willcox. As it happened, our 2000 Toyota needed work more than once, and that mechanic was a lifesaver. Once I walked across the highway and up the drive to their house, hoping to meet the mechanic’s wife, but no one came to the gate when I called. Oddly, their dog, lying silently in the shade of the house, did not bark once at my presence. I call that odd because that dog barked every morning about 5 a.m. and at other irregular intervals through the day and night. He barked long before the rooster crowed the sun up. But when a stranger came to the gate? Silence.

Not far past the B&B and the mechanic’s house was the home of the French-Canadian handyman and his wife. Monsieur Jean, as we called him, was another of our Arizona lifesavers. It was Monsieur Jean who replaced the nonworking refrigerator in the cabin for us and loaned us a television and hooked up the antenna to bring in, without cable or dish, as many as twenty stations, including PBS. We owed much of our knowledge of the neighborhood to Monsieur Jean and his wife, a very cordial couple.

Another neighbor, who had inherited from his father property that met, at the corners, the property where our rented cabin sat, was Señor Dan. Some days I would be outdoors talking with Dan while David was deep in conversation indoors with Jean, and later we would compare notes and share what we had learned. It was all “Dan says” and “Jean says,” and I tried to make notes so as not to forget it all.

Those were the neighbors we knew to greet by name, neighbors with whom we conversed: Jean and Cheryl, Dan, and Jared. Others we knew only through stories those four shared with us.

Dan told me people in Dos Cabezas pretty much left each other alone except for the annual cemetery cleanup, an event that included a potluck meal. The cemetery and annual cleanup and potluck seemed to be the community life, from what we gathered, but maybe the ranchers had their own social life. We heard there were some arts and crafts people, and perhaps they got together now and then. But there was no gathering place in the ghost town – no church, no community center, no fire hall.

Still, it was a place, with an identity distinct from Willcox and the rest of Cochise County. People with history in the ghost town felt the ties keenly, particularly those with relatives buried in the old cemetery.

It was a mile from our cabin to the cemetery. One day I suggested to a friend visiting from Michigan that we walk that mile and back. The wind was strong and piercing, and by the time we got back to the cabin the air was filled with horizontal snow, the only snow we saw in Arizona except for what remained high on mountain peaks.

From either direction, approaching either from the north-northwest, from Willcox, or from the Chiricahuas to the south-southwest, entry into Dos Cabezas was clearly delineated by a cattle guard across the highway, a sign announcing Dos Cabezas, and another sign saying “Go Slow – Save a Cow.” From Willcox, the road climbed, and from Chiricahua one wound down into lower elevations, but either way, the cattle guard and signs clearly marked the edge of the ghost town. Whether ascending or descending, from wherever else we had spent the day, when we reached the signs and the cattle guard I felt, happily, that we were home again, but the feeling was most intense when we came from the Chiricahuas, late in the evening, and the scattered lights of houses and ranches sparkled quietly on the darkling desert below us while the stars twinkled in the blackness above. Dear little ghost town!

That feeling lasted three months, until the morning came for us to say good-by to the high desert and make our way across the Great Plains and the Midwest and around the Great Lakes to our home in northern Michigan, there to take up, once again, our well-established life, rich in friends and meaningful work. For months, the ghost town felt almost unreal. And then our Michigan winter came upon us, and my heart began to look back West.