Police in America

In all honesty, I would be afraid to write this in a public forum, but no one reads my blog so it is OK.

Police have been in the news a great deal for the last year or more. There is little doubt that part of the phenomenon is a media issue. Once the media begins to focus on something, they bring forward everything they possibly can find. That is good, in one respect. Certain things need mainline focus. But it also has it’s dark side. It gives the impression that something is increasing in frequency when it is actually just the reporting that is increasing in frequency.

For all of that, there is clearly a problem with police conduct. It is by no means all police officers or even the majority of them. But it is also clearly, at the very least, a small number of police officers who are violent and lethal in the way they handle situations. That would probably not be a problem if these officers were dealt with fairly within the normal confines of our justice system. But that does not happen. In all the instances of officer-involved-shootings this last year, no one has been prosecuted. Frankly, the “justice system” is aligned with the police authority and will not prosecute, no matter what. And, worse yet, the police community simply draws together into what appears to be a massive gang and defends the offending officer. The word ‘gang’ is shocking, I suppose, but that is what police authority looks like. It is a very tight community that is ready to protect anyone of their won, no matter what; and members of that community seem to feel that they can do anything and any amount of violence against those (of the other gangs) they label as “bad guys”. 

“The officer felt threatened” — really? a tazered man writhing on the ground and on his face, shot in the back twice by a policeman?

There is nothing that ordinary citizens can do about this situation since the justice system is unwilling to do anything. I presume that 90% or more of police officers are not at fault here, in the sense that they would not engage in this behavior, but they are at fault in the sense that they do nothing about the gang mentality of police authority itself. Only the 90% of good officers can really do anything to stop this.

Conservatives and the Money Issue

Most Conservatives seem angry at the Federal Reserve System and, especially, at paper money printed by the Federal Reserve. In fact, everything would be better, they seem to think, if we went back to hard cash — that is, coinage. Actually, I think the situation is worse than that; they would really like us to go back to plain old metal. After all, coinage can have devious mixtures of metals.

The whole idea is ridiculous so far as I can see. Anything that qualifies as “currency” for payment of bills or purchase of commodities qualifies as such because people agree that it is worth something. This can be paper, coinage, or precious metals — or even a person’s word of honor. All the weight of this issue rests on the word ‘agree’ and depends on social relationships and trust. Precious metals are no more trustworthy for these purposes than printed paper. Our basic needs are food, clothing, and shelter (and iPhones) and you can no more make any of those from precious metals than you can from printed paper.

Back to the Old-Time West

“The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” So chants the NRA and their supporters. There is little evidence for the truth of this claim, but it does have the “virtue” of taking us back in time to the Old West. The history of that experiment indicates pretty strongly that towns eventually became safe havens by asking everyone to surrender their guns on the way into town.

Another classic NRA yarn is, “people kill people, not guns.” That is entirely true, of course, but it is also irrelevant. It is a classically weak argument because it completely fails to acknowledge the total causal chain. When we look at the causal chain, we see that a gun was in between the person who killed and the person who was killed. Granting that some people use their bare hands, some use knives, and some use cars, there are a huge number of homicides in which a gun was in the middle of things. But the argument is used to convince us not to look at guns but rather to look at people. That’s fine, of course; we should look at people, especially violent and mentally unstable people. However, we don’t look at guns with the idea of disciplining guns; we look at the ways in which guns get into the hands of violent and unstable people. That is what legislation is about, and the NRA “argument” does nothing to address that issue except trying to distract us from seeing the point.

Yet another NRA tactic is to convince people that the government (if not Obama himself) is almost at their front doors hot on taking away all their guns. The fact that people (some people, that is) seem to believe this is completely amazing. But they do believe it with religious fervor and are stock piling ammunition and weaponry and keeping it close to the front door. There are no facts to support this claim so why do people believe it. It’s effectiveness relies on widely held hatred of government, especially among so-called conservative people. (Why they are called “conservative” when their mission is complete destruction of the Constitution is beyond me.)

High schools and colleges should teach critical thinking, but that is the reason (partly) why Conservatives do not want to support education.

Gun Violence in America

Yesterday there was yet another shooting on a school campus. We do not know anything about the shooter, at this point, except for his name. But it is likely that he had severe mental issues that brought him to the place of doing this kind of violence. What we do know is that religion seems to have had a confusing dimension to his furry. The event has, of course, brought out all the familiar arguments — e.g., “if more people were armed with guns, shooters would be neutralized before too many people are injured,” “people kill people, not guns,” etc. And, of course, there is a wild-and-crazy segment of our population that believes (really believes) that the Federal government is actually out there preparing to take away their sacred guns and will do anything to prevent that. 

After we mourn the loss of yet another bunch of people, perhaps Americans could spend a few moments simply contemplating the facts (just dry old simple facts). There have been about 45 campus shootings this year. At maybe ten fatal injuries per incident (which is actually high) that makes about 450 school fatalities this year. However, there have already been almost 40,000 gun-related incidents and 10,000 deaths in this country this year. Campus shootings get a lot of press time, but no one looks seriously at the actual carnage that goes on. More than 40 people will be killed with guns TODAY. 

These are not really dry statistics; it is a national disgrace. No other modern or “developed” country in the world has anything like this kind of record!

So, about the argument that we should arm school cops. Just yesterday 30 other people were probably shot dead beyond the poor young people in Oregon. What would an armed school cop have done about that? How do you know which 30 people were about to die so you could arm their nearest neighbors. The answer is that you don’t. Arming everyone just puts a whole lot more guns in people’s hands and increases the likelihood that some one with real mental problems can get armed. 

The saddest thing of all is that our government is completely unable to do anything about this because the National Rifle Association literally owns the legislative wing of government and rules over it with an iron hand. And poor slobs continue to fund the NRA with their annual dues because the NRA keeps telling them the government is coming to take away their precious guns and keeps telling them that having their guns is their absolute Second-Amendment right. We love to fixate on that right — with all it’s weird 18th Century language about militias and dreadful fears about the English disarming them — but I honestly think that the intelligent authors of our Constitution and Bill of Rights would be horrified, today, to see what has happened.

Civil Disobedience

In some people’s eyes, Kim Davis is simply following a great American tradition of civil disobedience. After all, Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax on the grounds that the government supported slavery and was engaged in an unjust war with Mexico. He was arrested and jailed, in late July of 1846. He memorialized the incident in his essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" in 1849. But his Aunt Mary paid the tax, against his will, causing him to be released after a single night. Still, the essay is an American classic.

Davis objects to the Supreme Court ruling that gay and lesbian marriages must be recognized and refuses to execute marriage licenses to gays in her Kentucky county. According to Thoreau, we have a duty to opposed government actions when we have grounds to believe they are illegal, inappropriate, or otherwise unconscionable. But part of that duty is to accept the consequences of disobedience — namely, arrest, prosecution, and perhaps fines or jail time. The object of civil disobedience is precisely to carry the issue into the courts through one’s own case with the hope that the courts may intervene and correct a government action. Thoreau hoped his case would force the people of Massachusetts to examine slavery and the Mexican War, though it never went that far. Davis has been freed to a crowd of vocal supporters but she may go back to jail if she continues to prevent marriages license to go to gays and lesbians.

The question is whether Davis’s “civil disobedience” is appropriate. In this case, the highest court of the land has already decided the issue so there is no path through the court system for Davis to pursue her case. But it also seems inappropriate in another sense. Most civil disobedience in this country has been motivated by the desire to grant rights and freedoms to underdogs, citizens on whom government has turned its back. The historic movement of civil disobedience in the South in the ’60s was an attempt to bring the nation’s consciousness to see how Blacks were treated under segregation and to secure their civil rights as Americans. But Davis’s issue with the government is morally reversed; she wishes to deny rights to a certain class of people. As someone has observed, Davis is more nearly kin to George Wallace than to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here we go again on the First Amendment

Kim Davis, a county clerk in Kentucky who prides herself as a Christian, insists that she can refuse to issue marriage licenses to gay or lesbian couples on the basis of her own religious beliefs. Yes, the First Amendment does provide that every citizen can freely pursue his or her own religious beliefs and practices. However, when a person becomes a public official and acts for the public, he or she must act in the public spirit and is no longer free to act in the mode of a private citizen. I presume that Kim Davis took some kind of oath of office in which she actually promised to do that. The First Amendment also prohibits the formation of a state religion, which means that the public spirit is secular. As a public servant, Davis has no right to impose her private religious beliefs on those that she serves. 

Actually, the relationship between these two aspects of the First Amendment is intimate and essential. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." If Congress had the right to establish a state religion, then individuals would not have the right to freely exercise the religion of their own choice. In other words, the public spirit is secular precisely so that individuals like Kim Davis can hold their own private beliefs. If public servants like Davis are free to exercise their private religious beliefs in office then citizens are interfered with in the free exercise of their private beliefs.

We would all be outraged if we elected a president who was Catholic and who then proceeded to consult the Pope on all matters of state policy. What’s the difference? Or what about a Muslim county clerk who refuses to issues driving licenses to women?

What is amazing to me is the pile up of Republican presidential candidates who are now eager to defend Davis and who, in the process, are showing their complete ignorance of the Constitution as well as demonstrating their complete lack of respect for the Supreme Court. 

The South

I watched a very interesting documentary about Hubert Humphrey last night. One of the events they covered was a speech that Humphrey gave at the Democratic Convention in 1948. Humphrey was then the mayor of Minneapolis and he spoke in support of a platform plank on civil rights. It is easy to forget (I certainly had) that the Democratic Party, at that time, was dominated by the so-called Dixiecrats. At any rate, Humphrey's speech was passionate and convincing; the majority of the Party voted to keep the civil rights plank. As a result, the Dixiecrats walked out of the convention and formed a third party they called the States' Rights Democratic Party and ran Strom Thurmond for president against Dewey and Truman. In spite of the split, Truman won the election by a narrow margin.

The documentary went on to explore the fight for civil rights legislation in the '60s --- in particular, the major fight in spring and summer 1964. By that time, Humphrey was one of the senators from Minnesota and Lyndon Johnson, a former ally in the senate, was president. The fight was violent, especially since the Dixiecrats, who had dominated Southern senatorial positions for decades, mounted a sustained filibuster in order to prevent the bill from coming to a vote. In the end, Johnson and Humphrey were able to mount enough support to end the filibuster and the vote was successfully taken.

What fascinated me about the documentary is that the same people were trying to block civil rights in 1964 that walked out in 1948 and were saying the same crazy things about "Southern life styles and culture" to protect their "Jim Crow Laws" and their total segregation of blacks and whites in the South. But it wasn't just the similarities between 1948 and 1964 that amazed me, it was the fact that similar Republicans and Democrats in the South today are saying the same things and acting in the same ways. The argument has not changed in 150-160 years. All the Civil War achieved was the death and maiming of countless men, women, and children. Southerners still want their own way, separate from the Federal government's interference --- no matter that they suck off of the Federal government to a larger extent than other states.