Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Misguided NFL Speech is Free, but Costly


Aren't you weary of this rancor?

Such divisiveness cannot be good for any country, let alone one that purportedly stands for freedom of expression.  Because while we all - from the president on down to the lowliest among us, even me - have the right to speak our mind, we often forget that with that freedom can come grave responsibilities.

For a president to curse those who make a public demonstration against something like the perception of police brutality, his followers should be alarmed.  For highly-paid celebrities to pervert revered symbols of their country's honorable identity, their followers should be ashamed.

Yet the correct responses by opposing groups are not being made, and that itself is frustrating and disturbing.  It used to be only fringe radicals who would do something as intentionally inflammatory as burning our flag, which is akin to what professional American football players have been doing lately with their demonstrations against our national anthem.  But now, since these are football players, a group of extraordinarily-paid young men whose net worth is based on the adulation their fans bestow upon them, suddenly we have a crisis sweeping America between those who want them fired for their petulance, and those who defend them through a thin sanctimony of righting an injustice.

As if, in either scenario, two wrongs can somehow make a right.

Because yes, while we have the right to insult the national anthem, or burn the flag, our doing so tends to say more negative things about ourselves than what we claim to be protesting.  Our spurning of national totems bespeaks an ignorance regarding how our freedom to spurn those totems has actually been secured for us.  What's particularly curious in this particular instance is how the national anthem somehow, apparently, enshrines the perception that law enforcement is getting away with the heinous murder of so many black men.  Why does belittling the national anthem directly correlate with one's concern over perceptions of police brutality, unless the person doing the belittling doesn't understand that that national anthem has been secured not by law enforcement, but by our military - a military that is comprised of and is led by people of many different skin colors and ethnicities?

We do not live in a police state.  Because if we did, most likely the demonstrations we're seeing before NFL games would have already been met with distinctly brutal official tactics of suppression.  But what are we seeing?  We're seeing a national debate over whether professional athletes should be doing what they're doing.  And a national debate is a far cry from suppression, even though no less than our president himself has called for suppression through the firing of players he sees as being disrespectful to our national honor.

For the topic of police brutality to be fairly debated and addressed in our country, especially in the eyes of those who claim it doesn't exist, mustn't our narrative stay on-point?  Dragging our military and the millions who've fought for our political freedoms into the argument only serves to further divide our country, not bring disparate parties to the table of peace.  There is such a thing as respectfully expressing discontent until a particular wrong is righted, but broad insults are as unproductive as broad dismissals that something like police brutality exists.

What really makes the NFL demonstrators look a bit absurd is the fact that they're among the wealthiest one-percenters in Amercia, a feat made even more remarkable since they're merely entertainers, not corporate titans, or inventors of products that save lives.  Basically all they do is run around with a ball and beat each other up, to the great delight of spectators who, for some reason, willingly spend a lot of their own hard-earned money to perpetuate this ritual.

To the extent that NFL athletes actually comprehend the power they hold over their fans, it's understandable for them to want to advocate for causes in which they believe, with a view towards making their fans aware of these causes, and thus forcing institutional changes across society.  This is the right that NFL players have, and in a sense, it's a good exercise of the responsibility they recognize that their popularity gives them.

Unfortunately for all of us, however, the way many NFL celebrities have chosen to highlight their grievances over the number of blacks being shot by police officers has nothing to do with the number of blacks being shot by police officers.  Instead, all it's doing is making a lot of people very angry.  Which is taking away valuable public attention from the cause these NFL players claim to be focused on:  the question of police brutality.

It's misguided speech.

So should it be banned?  No, not if you value what the national anthem represents.  Should people who participate in this misguided speech be fired?  No, because employers should value a measure of self-expression among their employees, at least to the extent that it does not conflict with the viability of the organization.  Should our president be advocating for their free speech to be curtailed?  No, because by doing so, he himself betrays an ignorance regarding what free speech really is, and he undermines his responsibility as being the primary public defender of that freedom.

It's a brush fire that our president has fanned into an inferno.  The whole thing is such a sad waste of time when our country should be focused on far more beneficent things - such as our problems with racial strife, which supposedly was at the root of all this to begin with.

Come to think of it, what exactly are the direct ways NFL players - who claim to be so concerned about young black men and their interactions with the police - are getting involved in solutions?  How many black NFL players, for example, have recently been arrested for assaulting women?  How many are producing multiple children with multiple women, creating unstable family unit(s)?  Where is this role model advocacy on behalf of other young black men who may be more susceptible to glamorizing the type of get-rich-quick lifestyle that selling drugs seems to afford (and that an NFL contract affords)?  How many NFL athletes are using their personal resources to pay for top-quality legal representation for black offenders who may have been victimized by police?  How many are holding substantive public forums to discuss this issue?  How many are meeting with their local and national political representatives to advocate for change?

Maybe many of them are, and we just don't know, because they're conducting further advocacy in private.  What seems more obvious, however, is that a bended knee or an absence from the field during the playing of our national anthem is an easier way to merely grab attention and stoke conflict.

What's even sadder about all this is that now, it doesn't have a good chance of being resolved constructively.  As has become habit for our nation, this mess will likely disappear from the headlines when something even more provocative and disturbing takes place.  And our national narrative will careen to yet another point of deep contention.

Meanwhile, many of us have become just a bit more jaded regarding our responsibility for preserving our freedoms of expression in everyday life.  Which can't be a sustainable pattern of productive civic engagement for as proudly independent a country as the United States of America.

And the republic, for which our flag... stands.


Tuesday, September 19, 2017

My Family's Illegal Immigrant


I have an illegal immigrant in my family.

Well, at least one, anyway... that we know about.

He isn't Latino, or Asian.  He didn't smuggle his way here.  Nor did he pay some human traffickers thousands of dollars to get here.

In fact, we're not completely sure of how he got to America.  But according to family lore, at least as far as my aunt Helena is concerned, what we think we know tends to make sense, and the dates seem to work.  But we don't know definitively, because our family's illegal immigrant died in the 1950's.  As an alcoholic.  And because he was an alcoholic, he was not fondly remembered by his children when they'd recount their childhood stories to us.

My aunt, who died last year, and my Dad, who died the year before that, were his children.  So the illegal immigrant was my paternal grandfather.  My grandfather died before my own parents ever met.  And for years, Mom didn't know much about him either, because Dad, my aunt, and their mother never talked about him, since his life with them had been so miserable.  Eventually, Dad told us about the time he got home from work, as a college student back in Brooklyn, and opened the door to the apartment he shared with his family.  And there was his mother, and Helena, standing on the other side of a short, portly figure on the floor of their apartment's foyer.

It was my grandfather.  Dead.  My grandmother had arrived home first, and then shortly thereafter, my aunt.  And then Dad.  Dad closed the door, and the three of them stood silently, looking down at the man whose drunken stupors had become legendary in their Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park.  Dad recalled to us that his sister and mother and he were numbed by a mixture of relief and grief - but not grief that he was gone.  It was grief about how much the family had suffered, living with such a hardened alcoholic all those years.

Finally, if only to break the heavy silence, Dad asked out loud, "Well, who do we call to take the body away?  Will Halversen's do it?"

Halversen's is the name of a long-time Norwegian funeral home on Sunset Park's 8th Avenue.  But I'm not even sure there was a funeral.  Nobody ever talked about there being one.

My grandfather was born in Finland, in a sliver of the Nordic country that ended up being invaded by Russia in the Winter War of 1939, about two decades after my grandfather ended up in America.  My Mom has two silver spoons with which my grandfather's sister was able to escape as their family's home in Viipuri faced imminent danger from the Russian invasion.  The town of Viipuri, still in Russian hands, is today called Vyborg.

As a young man, my grandfather set off from Viipuri as a sailor, or seaman, or deckhand, working on trans-Atlantic steamships and freighters.  We have records of him attending the venerable Seamen's Church Institute on South Street in Lower Manhattan, along the docks that used to spike outwards from the Financial District.  At the Seamen's Church, worship services were geared to maritime workers from around the world, working odd shifts, and lonely from months-long stints at sea.

On one of the voyages my grandfather worked, a freshly-loaded freighter from the Caribbean headed towards Europe, the deckhands were strictly instructed to stay away from a locked portion of the ship's hold, below deck.  Which, of course, was like telling a bunch of teenaged boys not to do something.  Before too long, my grandfather and some of his shipmates had broken into that forbidden part of the ship.  And what they saw deeply distressed my grandfather.

There, in the locked part of the hold, were men.  

Black men, in shackles.

We believe this was sometime around 1916*, which used to make me dubious.  Slavery was still a thing, that long after America's Civil War?

Apparently, an illicit fragment of it was, since it was a topic of grave concern for the League of Nations during the 1920's.  Somehow, the ship's owners had arranged for these men to be smuggled aboard without the crew knowing of it, and somehow, ostensibly in Europe, they were going to be off-loaded, probably to be shipped to yet another destination.

We don't know many details about that discovery, but back then, my grandfather knew exactly what was going on.  And he wanted to be no part of it.  Absolutely not.

The ship's next port of call was New York City, with which we believe my grandfather was already familiar from previous visits.  He likely knew there was a vibrant Finnish community in Brooklyn, and that he could become culturally absorbed there without attracting much attention.  So when they docked in New York, my grandfather jumped ship - literally - forfeiting his pay in the process.  And he walked away from those caged human beings, off of the pier, out onto the streets of New York, never to work on ships again.

My father took this photo of his father - the older man at left, and again in the reflection top right -
in their Sunset Park apartment in the mid-1950's.  It's one of the few photos of my grandfather,
and we believe it was his last.  Nobody can remember who the other two men are.

Eventually, after he'd married and become a father, my grandfather obtained his United States citizenship.

My grandmother, who arrived in the United States years later, spent a night on Ellis Island because her American sponsor didn't show up to claim her.  That was one of the legal ways people got into the country back then - by having a sponsor in America vouch for you.  Officials on Ellis Island herded those migrants whose sponsors hadn't claimed them into a large cage with iron bars for the night.  My grandmother could hardly sleep, what with the utter lack of privacy, and worrying about what would happen to her.  Turned out, she made sure she was at the front of the cage the next morning - this big cage, probably similar to what my grandfather saw those slaves inside of - her face pressed against the bars.  Eventually, a sternly-dressed woman strode into the immigration hall at Ellis Island, having just gotten off of the boat from Manhattan.  She walked right up to my grandmother, and asked her in perfect Finnish if she wanted to get off that island.

"Of course I do," my grandmother eagerly replied.

"Well then, just follow my lead," the anonymous woman ordered.  She turned to an immigration clerk, and said she'd come to claim my grandmother, and had a job immediately for her in Manhattan.

"Is this true?" the dubious clerk half-motioned, half asked in broken Finnish to my grandmother.

"Of course it is!" my grandmother retorted, completely unaware of what that job was.

My grandmother Laitinen's first US employer
lived in this townhouse, 60 W. 11th Street
in Greenwich Village. I took this photo in 1986.
Historians call it "the 1843* Samuel Cooke
House
", built by Andrew Lockwood and first
occupied by a ship captain named Samuel Bourne.
Lockwood was one of the developers of 11th Street,
which at the time was at the city's northern reaches.
The property's first auspicious owner had been
Cooke, who was rector at New York's famed
St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church.
Other owners would later rent it out
to various occupants, so we don't know who my
grandmother's celebrity employer was.
Among the home's worst tenants was a secret
abortion clinic, years before it was legalized.
More recent owners have included the son
of the late publisher Malcomb Forbes.
(*The historical plaque affixed to the
home's façade says it was built in 1842
)
The two woman left the hall and got on the next boat to Manhattan as soon as possible.  And that night, my grandmother found herself working as a maid at a party at a townhouse in Greenwich Village that was rented at the time by a well-known silent movie producer.

As they say, "only in New York," right?

At some point, obviously, my grandparents met in Brooklyn, got married, and had children.  My grandfather never seems to have held down a steady job, and eventually came to be known mostly for his prodigious drinking, and for writing a regular column for the local Finnish newspaper, New Yorkin Uutiset.  He wrote pieces about current events, philosophy, and life on the sea under the pen name "X Seaman," since that's what he was.  Years later, my aunt learned that the prestigious New York Public Library had some of his articles on file as part of their cultural heritage department. 

Family friends who knew my grandfather in Brooklyn's old Finntown have told us that he wasn't as entirely horrible as his family remembered him as being.  And it's been suggested that one of the reasons for his drinking - despite the fact that Finns are notorious for their alcohol consumption - might have stemmed from his disturbing experience on that trans-Atlantic ship.  As a Finn, back in the days when Finland was virtually 100% Caucasian, my grandfather would have barely known about slavery, and to him it likely would have been something that horrible people had done back in another time and place.  Not on board a ship he was working!

So for all the agony my grandfather gave his family through his drinking, I've come to value his distress over having the concept of human slavery break into his reality.  I sometimes wonder if, today, we whites would do well to let ourselves be a bit more agitated over something we figure only happened to somebody else back in another time and place.

Because while it may not be our reality now, it remains part of family lore for many African Americans.


* Thanks to research my Mother has been doing in 2021, with help from Finnish cousins on both my paternal and maternal sides, we've learned that Walter had established mailing addresses for himself in Brooklyn as early as 1913.  So it's logical to assume 1913 is a more accurate date for his ship-jumping.


Monday, September 18, 2017

School Name Audit Steps on Toes in Right Direction


Last week we pondered the city's removal of a Robert E.Lee statue from a park in a predominantly white neighborhood in Dallas, Texas.

Now comes word that the board for the Dallas public school system has drafted a list of schools named after historic notables connected in some way with the Confederacy specifically, or slavery in general.  The schools on this list may soon get new names, if the district can agree on how to process the logistics for doing so.

Four elementary schools will be renamed as soon as possible, since they're currently named for Confederacy generals Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, and William L. Cabell.

An additional twenty schools are on another list being audited for future name changes by the school board, but curiously, no major local media outlets have published that list.  It took a Facebook post by a white board member, Dustin Marshall, to get that listing circulating within the public.  And those schools are these:

1. Roger Q. Mills Elementary School
2. W. H. Gaston Middle School
3. Wilmer-Hutchins High School
4. James Bowie Elementary School
5. James S. Hogg Elementary School
6. John F. Peeler Elementary School
7. John H. Reagan Elementary School
8. Wilmer-Hutchins Elementary School
9. James Madison High School
10. Benjamin Franklin Middle School
11. Thomas Jefferson High School
12. David G. Burnet Elementary School
13. Stephen C. Foster Elementary School
14. Nancy J. Cochran Elementary School
15. Sam Houston Elementary School
16. Sidney Lanier Elementary School
17. John Ireland Elementary School
18. Kleberg Elementary School
19. William B. Travis Elementary/Middle School
20. William Brown Miller Elementary School

Of course, some of these people are relatively obscure by today's historical standards.  Have you ever heard of Roger Mills, for example?  Turns out, Mills was a Kentucky-born lawyer who served as an officer in the Confederate army during the Civil War, and then, later, as a Texas senator to Washington, after apparently deciding that serving the Union was a worthwhile endeavor after all.

Some of these notables are more familiar to Texans than they are folks in other parts of the United States.  James Bowie, for instance, was a legendary revolutionary for the Republic of Texas, along with William B. Travis, both of whom later died at the Alamo.  Bowie is famous as the inventor of the Bowie knife, and was briefly a citizen of Mexico, but for a while, he also worked as a slave trader.

Nancy J. Cochran is reputed to have been a proud mother of Confederate soldiers.  Sam Houston defeated Mexico to secure independence for the republic of Texas, and later served as a senator after Texas became a state.  He was pro-slavery but also pro-Union, and refused to serve in the Confederacy.

We could go on and on about who these people were as individuals, but what makes them all the same in the eyes of many Dallas school board members is their affiliation in some form or fashion with slavery or the Confederacy.  That's why Benjamin Franklin is on this list.  For most of his life, Franklin owned slaves and believed blacks were inferior to whites.  However, later in his life, Franklin became an abolitionist.  In 1790, he petitioned Congress to legally end slavery and "promote mercy and justice toward this distressed Race."

So, if anything, Franklin represents the hope that people can change for the better.  And perhaps this significant turn in Franklin's personal perspective will eventually cause the Dallas school board to keep his name attached to one of their schools.

Indeed, it is the often-complex backstory behind many of these historical figures that contributes to the controversy around such calls for culling the national historic roster of American notables.  Which, basically, is what Dallas' school leaders - along with similar governing bodies across the country - are doing with these re-naming exercises.  For centuries, leaders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have been venerated for the overwhelming balance of their contributions to America's founding, even at the expense of their support (to various degrees) of slavery.  Yet now, political correctness has limited the only publicly respectable scope for viewing these personages as being the lens through which their acceptance of slavery is evaluated.

On the one hand, it seems frustrating to some white Americans - even ludicrous to other whites - that the sum total of America's history and the leaders we venerate should be reduced to their perspective(s) on slavery.  Isn't there more by which we should value a person, many ask?  If we're all to be judged by our sins alone, who among us would have any credibility?

And those are fair questions, regardless of our skin color, aren't they?  Especially considering that in America, slavery existed on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, and that racism and bigotry have existed even without the presence of institutionalized slavery.  So, utilizing slavery as a metric for determining heroic validity immediately culls the herd quite a bit.

Which, for many politically-correct folks, would be the price we pay for finally admitting once and for all that the ownership of human beings was and remains patently wrong.  Period.

It's a jarring rationale for many whites.  For centuries, Americans have taught its schoolchildren that, sure, slavery may have been kinda bad, but that even though some "good" people didn't get the slavery issue entirely right, their contributions to our country's history mitigate that slavery thing.  After all, it was so long ago.  It was a different time and a different place.  Yadda, yadda, yadda...

Can't you see how, with a predominantly white-centric view towards exonerating national heroes, with an "ends justify the means" mentality, we also risk minimizing something that our black brothers and sisters still find eminently reprehensible?

And that whites should as well?

After all, were there white slaves in the United States?  (And no, the myths about "Irish slaves" don't count, since even though some Irish immigrants were considered chattel, they were not re-sold, they were eligible for freedom after their repayment of any debts, and whatever indentured servitude they endured was not conferred to their spouses or children.)

Couldn't a white willingness to ignore or dismiss the ownership, by other long-dead whites, of black human beings be kind of offensive to many modern blacks?  After all, how many blacks can ignore however much history of slavery exists in their personal families?  Remember, even though slavery affects both whites and blacks, there was only one race that clearly benefited from slavery.  It's convenient for whites to minimize that, and to see little problem with letting bygones by bygones, burying the hatchet, and moving on in harmony.

After all, it was those old, long-ago, dead people who owned slaves.  I don't own slaves, and I think slavery was and is wrong.

So what's wrong with proving our resolve against slavery by taking a harder line against honoring figures in our history who didn't take as hard line against it as we like to think we do today?

Not that we can erase history by changing the names of some schools, or removing some monuments.  And frankly, not every school name should be changed, or every monument removed, since each of these names in question represents a human being whose views towards slavery, during the course of their life, could have evolved from one end of the spectrum to the other, such as with Benjamin Franklin.

Some whites protest that there are too many names to change, and these names are too prominent.  Which, actually, serves to illustrate the argument for why these names may need to change.  Slavery was so widespread, and so integral a part of the American reality, that our lip service today can ring hollow when it comes to disavowing slavery.

Hey, let's face it:  Whites tend to enjoy going through life with slavery being an issue that impacts somebody else from another time.  We tend to forget that blacks generally don't go through life with the same perspective, at least as far as history is concerned.  And for those blacks who don't let America's history with slavery define their own individuality, we witness an enormous generosity of spirit on their part.

So why not return the favor?


Thursday, September 14, 2017

Lee Statue Removal Happens in Dallas


By the time you read this, Dallas will have one less statue of Civil War general Robert E. Lee on public display.

Currently, the city owns two Lee statues; one towers over a small park downtown near city hall and the convention center, and another commands - or, commanded - a prominent knoll overlooking a swanky boulevard known as Turtle Creek, near some of the priciest neighborhoods in the entire state of Texas.

Even Lee's detractors can't deny that the statue in his honor along Turtle Creek, in a public park named after the general, is a fine piece of art.  At least, in terms of its workmanship and aesthetics.  But with America's current fixation on commemorations of Civil War leaders - at least, leaders from the losing side - Dallas city councilmembers have voted to remove the two Lee statues from city property.  And the first one they chose to have removed from public viewing wasn't the one downtown, within blocks of the city's historically black-majority neighborhoods.

It was the one along Turtle Creek, named after a real creek that winds its way through some of the whitest districts in Dallas' northern neighborhoods.

This particular piece of artwork is actually composed of two elements; an over-sized depiction of a caped General Lee on his horse, and then another horse of a slightly smaller stature with a young, anonymous man (ostensibly one of Lee's soldiers) riding it.  Some folks defending this statue say the young man supposedly represents an African-American teenager, but its anglicized facial features in no way convey such an interpretation, at least in the obvious sense.

One person has already died in Dallas's push to remove Turtle Creek's Lee statue.  Last Wednesday was the council's vote to remove it, and work began immediately, which surprised many Dallasites, used to a far less efficient city hall.  A small crowd hurriedly gathered in Lee Park to either protest or celebrate the historic occasion.  But then the city's more commonplace tendency for lousing things up kicked back into gear.  The first crane hired for the job proved unable to handle the 6-ton bronze piece, which is - sorry, "was" - affixed to a handsome granite base.  The second crane brought to town for the job was hit by a red-light-running tractor-trailer truck this past weekend, and the 18-wheeler's driver was killed.  Even as late as last night, city leaders were guessing - at least to the media - as to when the statue could be removed.  A non-profit group sympathetic to keeping the statue intact had booked a protest at Lee Park for this coming Saturday, and it looked inevitable that the general would indeed be present during the protest to serve as a backdrop to the group's rallying cry.

Initially, Dallas budgeted over $400,000 for removing the Lee Park statue, and currently, it's unknown how much extra these delays have added to that budget.

Then, this afternoon, Dallasites were again caught by surprise at the sight of a new crane heading for Lee Park under a police escort.  And all during the statue's removal, police officers in body armor, with rifles in hand, stood guard around the perimeter of the work site.  The six-lane Turtle Creek Boulevard was closed to vehicular traffic, allowing bystanders a relatively unobstructed view of the proceedings.  And sure enough, by seven o'clock, the statue was down, without incident.

Of course, to some folks, the entire removal of Lee's statue is more than an incident - it's a travesty of justice and a refutation of history.  By now, we're all familiar with the arguments against removing statues such as this one in Lee Park  - a park that will likely soon revert to its original name, Oak Lawn Park, which it held before the Lee statue was erected in 1936.  Incidentally, it was then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a liberal Democrat, who dedicated the statue, which kinda flies in the face of a more modern narrative that only right-wing conservatives value the historicity of figures like General Lee.

In fact, history can be a complicated thing, as our bickering over America's Civil War proves.  Even Abraham Lincoln, long heralded as a hero for African Americans, did not consider blacks equal with whites.  It is now known that although Lincoln lead the Union in its quest to abolish the institution of slavery, at the same time, he was quietly negotiating to expel freed blacks from the continental United States after the war, to islands in the Caribbean.*  That inconvenient reality hardly fits seamlessly into the historical narrative most people want to believe about our national heroes, so it is not widely taught, or discussed.  I also knew a black woman whose family - in Mississippi, if I remember correctly - actually owned slaves as well, although it was a factoid of which she wasn't proud.  Still, she told me it was part of the reality of Southern economics at the time - if you owned a lot of farmland, it was cheaper to purchase workers to help with the crops rather than employ them, whether the landowner was black or white.

So is there really much of the Old South that's worth venerating, as many Southerners nostalgically claim there is?  Southern gentility is a concept that may have a romantic component, both now in the imaginations of people who never actually lived it, and back then, if you were wealthy enough to benefit from it.  But since it was largely based on an economic system sustained by slave labor, the gentility factor is corrupt in its practice, if not in its theory.  The plantation system was mostly a hold-over of the baronial British aristocratic system, which kept poorly-paid workers in perpetual servitude, subject to the whims of feudal honor, which itself is mostly derided in modern Britain today.

Then there's the question of modern America honoring a traitor to the republic such as Lee was, if you want to consider the literal definition of the term and its application to military justice.  Granted, none of the Confederacy's generals were ever tried for treason, mostly because Union lawmakers were afraid about how the public, deeply wounded and raw after such a bloody war, would react to a verdict one way or the other.  The overarching sentiment at the time was a desire to move forward as best as possible for the cause of national healing, but even that noble goal was eventually thwarted by unresolved issues over how freed blacks should be treated on either side of the Mason-Dixon line.

You see, racism was never defeated.  The Civil War didn't so much end because right had might; it ended because the South ran out of soldiers first.

That was back in 1865, but as we all know, the Civil War ain't over.  When my family moved to Texas in 1978, we were called "Yankees" by many native Texans, and kids in our neighborhood played "North against the South" - something my brother and I had never heard of up in rural Cleveland, New York.  Cops and Robbers?  Yes.  Cowboys and Indians?  Yes.  But I didn't even know what the Mason-Dixon line was until we moved to Texas.

Even today, the rebel flag - the "Stars and Bars" - is deeply revered by many as a symbol of not just the Confederacy, but the whole idealized notion of whatever the antebellum South was supposed to be.  "The South's gonna rise again" is a phrase that isn't entirely obsolete in the Southern lexicon.  And opposition to the removal of statues honoring Confederacy heroes such as Lee and Stonewall Jackson, just to name two, is potent here.

With all this in mind, if Dallas leaders wanted to make a statement against the Confederacy and its connotation with racism, why remove the Lee statue in Turtle Creek first?  Remember that other memorial here in Dallas?  It doesn't have only General Lee in it.  Lee is just one of four Confederacy heroes celebrated by this far more imposing structure, which consists of a main 60-foot pillar surrounded by four shorter ones, made of granite and marble.  It's called the Confederate War Memorial, it was dedicated in 1896, and it's considered the oldest public artwork in the city.

And the inscriptions on it? 
  • “The brazen lips of Southern cannon thundered an unanswered anthem to the God of Battle.” 
  • “It was given the genius and valor of Confederate seamen to revolutionize naval warfare over the earth.” 
  • "This stone shall crumble into dust ere the deathless devotion of Southern women be forgotten.” 
  • “The Confederate sabreur kissed his blade homeward riding on into the mouth of hell.” 
  • “Confederate infantry drove bayonets through columns that never before reeled to the shock of battle.”

I guess such romanticized notions as these are part of that Southern gentility thing.  But don't their contrived notions of valor - at the unmentioned expense of slavery - make the Confederacy memorial downtown worthy of more attention than what Dallas' city council paid to the Lee statue?

Meanwhile, this is what President Roosevelt had to say when he dedicated Lee's newer statue along Turtle Creek:

"I am very happy to take part in this unveiling of the statue of General Robert E. Lee.  All over the United States we recognize him as a great leader of men, as a great general.  But, also, all over the United States I believe that we recognize him as something much more important than that.  We recognize Robert E. Lee as one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen."

Hmm.

At the end of the day, much of our perception of the past depends on the rhetoric that tends to fit our worldview, doesn't it?  In other words, if you really want to believe Lee was as hateful a Southerner as his detractors claim him to have been, you will support the narrative that memorials to him must be obliterated from our country.  On the other hand, however, if you really want to cling to the notion that being a "great American gentleman" (whatever that means) should lead us to venerate people like Lee, you probably will be angry that Dallas removed a statue of him today.

So what do I think?  Personally, I neither believe Lee was personally as hateful towards blacks as he's been portrayed as being.  I suspect he was a flawed product of his time who couldn't see past the Southern economic model of slavery.  Does that make him a racist?  Yes, but then again, many folks today are racists; they're just not defined as one the way Lee has been.

Nobody can argue that we don't still have a problem with race relations in our country.  And it's past time for us to admit that we need to work harder at overcoming the prejudices that have sabotaged racial harmony since before were were a nation.  So to that end, I think the magnanimous thing to do would be to remove from public land icons to the Confederacy that likely are misinterpreted and misrepresented today by people with various motives.  If there are historical organizations that want to house these icons on private land, then they should be allowed to do so, but the best memorials will be those that portray a broader and more wholistic representation of the Civil War, the Confederacy, and the Union, warts and all.

I can understand why taxpayers who aren't white don't want their tax dollars used to maintain statues that could be used to celebrate a way of life that mistreated people.  But more than that, since Lee is - to put the best possible spin on it - associated with a culture that sought to perpetuate the ownership of human beings, is that really something for us to so conspicuously celebrate?  After all, do we celebrate the owners of brothels?  Do we celebrate Aaron Burr, who was the third person to be vice-president of our fledgling United States, but was put on trial for treason?

What's the harm in removing statues to Lee and other Confederate legends?  Who's going to forget about those men?  Certainly not all of the Southerners who insist that "the South shall rise again"!  And the Civil War isn't going to fade away from our national consciousness anytime soon.  So what's the big deal?

Part of me wonders if the agitation so many people feel at the removal of Confederacy statuary reflects not simply frustration at the changing political and social landscape of America, but also a shadow of some latent racial issues that folks don't want to admit exists inside of them.

If I touched a nerve with that, then maybe I've got a point?

And if you agree with me, don't gloat.  No matter how you look at it, this should be a somber time for America, since we all have things to learn from it.
_____

* What preserves Lincoln's reputation is the fact that he was assassinated before ever being able to implement any part of any plan to deport newly-freed slaves.  Educators and historians like to assume that by the war's gruesome end, Lincoln's mindset had changed enough so that he would not have pursued the re-colonization idea. 
_____
Update - June 7, 2019:  A Dallas lawyer purchased the Lee statue at auction for $1.43 million.  A condition of the sale is that the statue can no longer be displayed within view of any public property.




Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Protecting Evacuees, or Their Rights?


After a significant natural disaster, it's become standard operating procedure.  Law enforcement agencies refuse to allow property owners back to their homes and businesses until the affected area has been deemed safe for re-entry.

Many people don't even think about it anymore.  It's just something else cops do to keep us safe, right?

This situation repeated itself Monday in the wake of Hurricane Irma, as Floridians who'd dutifully evacuated the Keys in advance of the storm were initially prohibited from returning by police officers who claimed the low-lying islands hadn't yet been deemed safe enough for re-population.

Other Florida neighborhoods were similarly restricted by law enforcement officials, at least for a day or so, but with many residents of the Keys being particularly independent and obstinate - which apparently is a requisite personality trait for those who call that fabled island habitat home - the tempers were particularly apparent there.

Having police officers telling them they couldn't go home was an emotional trigger compounded by anxiety from having just lived through a hurricane.  Since "home is where the heart is," it's only natural for folks to want to return to it and see how well it survived.

Is keeping homeowners from their homes something cops should be doing?  Homeowners are the ones paying taxes on that property (whether owning or renting) and having people whose salaries are drawn from those taxes telling you to stay away from your home can sound unAmerican.

Indeed, if you think about it, this irony is juxtaposed in the face of what most Americans claim to be the basic duty of government.  Ask just about anybody, and they'll tell you that the main purpose of government is protection.  Protect me personally - and all of us corporately - from adversaries, terrorists, whatever.  It's why many conservatives believe in a bloated military budget.  It's why many liberals believe we need more gun control laws.  Protection, safety, defense.  It's the people's Trinity.

Meanwhile, I've said all along that the main role of government is a different type of safeguarding.  Safeguarding not the "homeland," or our physical well-being, but the safeguarding of civil rights.  After all, if we don't have civil rights, how much more is worth protecting?  If we don't have the freedom of speech, or religion, or the right to be safe from unwarranted searches and seizures, what difference does it make if we have the strongest borders and the most merciless police forces patrolling our neighborhoods?

Now, obviously, there is a difference between having a robust military defense, and having cops perhaps being a bit over-zealous in keeping homeowners away from their property after a natural disaster.  But the theory is the same:  Governments get away with letting law enforcement agencies rule with an iron hand when the old "protection" justification gets trotted out in support of police officers winning out over angry, displaced folks from the Florida Keys.

After all, it's not entirely fair to those evacuees, is it?  The Keys weren't deserted; other residents had stayed behind to ride out Irma, whether that was a smart thing to do or not.  The folks now trying to get home had obeyed the government, yet they were being delayed in rejoining their neighbors who hadn't evacuated, and were still home.  And if personal protection is the main goal here, shouldn't the government "reward" evacuees by not making a habit of restricting re-entry after a predicted natural disaster?

Some folks have grumbled that when the next Irma approaches, they'll be less likely to heed government warnings because they don't like how the government treated them after Irma was over.

Not that the cops were entirely unjustified, of course.  And that's the wrinkle in these arguments, isn't it?  Electrical lines and other utilities had been compromised, with some perhaps exposing residents to some dangerous conditions.  Perhaps flooding had undermined more roads than first responders had realized.  Maybe there were massive casualties in some obscure neighborhoods, with fetid corpses laying bare in the Florida sun creating significant health risks to returning evacuees.  Nobody really knew all of the dangerous scenarios that existed after Irma, and if we're talking solely about safety, it doesn't make a lot of sense for hundreds - even thousands - of anxious residents to flood back onto the Keys.

Besides, returning evacuees would make what roadways were passable more congested for first responders and utility crews trying to complete their important work.  Spotty cell phone service could compromise communication in the area, especially as more and more people tried to make calls and overload frequencies.  And then what happens if it's still too dangerous for some folks to return to their particular neighborhood?  Where, along the broad scale of "danger," which we all tend to define differently, is the mark that says the danger isn't worth the risk of returning right now?  And how would you know it, if you weren't there to make that decision yourself?

Yet, on the other hand, how much personal responsibility should property owners be expected to assume for themselves?  In other words, is it more valuable to our society to let people be stupid in their eagerness to return home after a natural disaster, or is it more valuable to our society for people to not be restrained by a police state?  If three feet of seawater still covered the entire 100-mile stretch of the Keys, I don't imagine anybody would argue with the cops about not being able to return home.  And venturing into an area that has been hit by a natural disaster should at least be done without children or the elderly, who may not be able to navigate the various obstacles and dangers that may now exist.  There has to be some common sense here, with evacuees being willing to act responsibly and not take unnecessary risks.

During Irma's lashing of Florida, we all saw the photos and videos of unwise people venturing out in the storm to take selfies in the wind, ride bikes in the rising surf, or drive around like it was just another rainy day.  Remember, there is a difference between being adventurous and being reckless (even though many people today pervert the word "reckless" into being something that should be admired, instead of avoided).

It's hard to enforce laws against stupidity, even though we have many of them.  They've been dubbed "Nanny State laws," such as governmental prohibitions against texting while driving, which should be an obviously dangerous activity to anyone, but in reality is practiced by just about everybody.

And the more we let our government dictate our actions, the deeper our dependence on government becomes.  And that's not good for us individually, or as a society.  After a while, the government gets to set the standards pretty much unilaterally, with the populace further and further removed from decisions that impact us on a daily basis.  We live with the fact that our government can assume a position of control when we abdicate our own responsibilities in a situation - such as texting while driving - but isn't it another thing for us to, for example, let the government keep us from our homes after a natural disaster has passed?  Aren't there ways to accommodate the rights of property owners while at the same time making sure whatever first responders still need to accomplish isn't compromised?

It's kinda like here in north Texas, where law enforcement officials close two or three extra lanes of traffic after an accident just to provide an extra-wide buffer between two cars in a fender-bender, and the vehicles trying to get around the mishap.  What police officers who do this seem to forget is that the more traffic backs up behind an accident, due to needlessly closed lanes, the chances for further accidents in the back-up grows greater.

But I digress.  Of course, the easy answer after a natural disaster would be to simply outlaw permanent homeownership in areas prone to natural disasters, such as the Florida Keys.  Actually, any low-lying land close to the sea.  And maybe forests, considering all of the wildfires raging across the western half of our continent right now...  In fact, if the role of government was to really really protect people, where would be the limit in terms of preventing people from living in harm's way?

This brings us back to my main point about civil rights.  The more we molly-coddle people and compromise their ability to exercise basic human rights in a sensible manner, the more control we cede to an authority structure that has more power to pervert justice on a broader scale than we citizens do on an individual level.  If we don't take upon ourselves the logic, caution, and respect that being participatory members of a well-functioning society demands of us, then government control inevitably follows.

Well, either that, or anarchy.

Unfortunately, some folks think they'd prefer anarchy to a well-functioning society, but they do so without recognizing that no control can actually be more restrictive to civil rights than a well-meaning (yet self-feeding) government.

So maybe waiting for the cops to let you back into your neighborhood after a natural disaster is a small price to pay for an even worse alternative to such control.

Especially after these residents begin to file for government aid to rebuild what Irma damaged, so they can got through all this again after the next big storm.

But doesn't the logic of living in a well-functioning society involve learning our lessons the first time, and making constructive changes to avoid repeating them in the future?


Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Mabel, My Belle

My 'hood in Arlington, Texas



I'm got a thing going on with a girl named Mabel.

She's beautiful, black, and very well-groomed.  Most days, she's sporting a stylish kerchief around her neck.  We live on the same street, and meet in the evenings, as the sun is setting and the temperatures are cooling.  I go out for a walk and stroll by her place; she sees me and comes out... so we can share some private time together before she quietly goes back inside her home.

Mabel is a beautiful black lab who lives around the corner from me, in what we long-timers in our neighborhood call the "Taco Bell House."  In actuality, the Taco Bell House looks nothing like a Taco Bell restaurant, but it does have a red roof made of those undulating tiles, and it has stucco walls, in contrast to all of our brick homes.  The Taco Bell House features a courtyard with a vine-covered archway opening to a fenced-in dog run that parallels our street.  And that is Mabel's domain.

Mabel's courtyard is mostly walled by sliding-glass doors, so from several rooms inside her home, Mabel can see who's passing by outside.  Her owners have built a little doggy-door into one of the glass doors, so she's free to go in and out whenever she feels like it.  At various times, as I've been talking to her owners, lounging in their courtyard, I've witnessed Mabel making loop after loop through an open human-sized door, and her doggy door.  Around and around.  It's as if she's afraid she might miss something interesting inside while she's outside, and vice-versa.

This summer, I guess Mabel has learned that I usually take a walk in the evenings, and she's started to watch for me from inside her Taco Bell House.  Last night, as has become our custom, I walked by the fence along her dog run, next to the courtyard with the arched entryway, and a familiar pattern played itself out yet again.

I'll hear the quiet flapping noise of Mabel's doggy door after I've passed, and as I continue walking along, with my back to the Taco Bell House, I'll hear a muffled bark and a moan from Mabel.  I turn around, and there she is - standing up against the fence, looking at me, with her soft, black eyes and floppy, fuzzy ears, waiting for me to turn around and return to her.

For all I know, she may do that with anybody who walks by, and we have a lot of people who walk for exercise in our leafy neighborhood.  Yet I've seen other neighbors walk by Mabel's home, and she never comes out to greet them.  So I like to think I've got a little something special happening with her.

And she knows I can't resist her.  Yes, I turn back around and stroll over to Mabel, whose seems to be begging for some attention, since she wants me to think her owners don't give her any...  which I know is a lie on Mabel's part...  but I let her think I haven't caught on to her little ploy.  Some people say a dab of deception is good for a relationship.  I don't know about that, but I know that it gets Mabel what she wants.  I reach through the wrought-iron fence and scratch behind her ears, rub her head, stroke her neck, and pat her on her back.  I talk to her and tell her how beautiful she is.  It's all an ego trip for her, of course - we both know that - and she drinks it up.  And then, after a short while, she backs away.  Her ego has been well and truly restored.  Without a sound, she turns around to head back inside.

I realize that these secret meetings of ours probably aren't the best basis for a long-term relationship.  But we seem to have had little problems with the racial thing; her being black, and me being white.  Even the species thing hasn't been much of a problem.  And there's little commitment involved, which works well for both of us.

Although... I've begun to worry a little bit about what will happen to our relationship this fall, when our human clocks get set back an hour, and the sun sets so early.  My walks will be in the dark, so will Mabel be able to see me?  Will she be looking for me before the sun sets, which will then be a couple of hours before my walk?  I hope she won't be devastated if she doesn't see me.  Or... will she forget all about me?

At least I can find some solace in the fact that the two of us will have had the Summer of '17.

_____

Update - March 5, 2019:  Yes, during the two dark winters that have passed since Mabel and I began our little thing, there were times when I'd walk by in the darkness, and Mabel happened to see me, and she'd come out of her little doggie door so we could steal some quality time together. 

Or, so, that's how it seemed to me. 
 

The other day, however, I was talking with Mabel's human mommy, and my bubble was burst.  It seems that Mabel goes out to greet EVERYBODY who walks by, whether she knows them or not.  And we have a lot of folks in our neighborhood who walk, and they carry doggie treats with them for furry friends like Mabel.  They've asked Mabel's parents for permission to give her the treats, and they feed them to Mabel through their wrought-iron fence. 

When I learned that, I realized Mabel comes out to greet me, not because she has a special affection for me, but because I'm just another humanoid passing by who probably has a treat for her... that's why she eagerly sticks her nose through the fence.  And when I never provide one, after about a minute, Mabel cuts her losses and goes back inside. 

And here I thought we had a thing going on!


Actually, while learning the truth is hard, frankly, it fits more with the way my life's experiences with romance have gone.  Perhaps I guess I expected a different result from "man's best friend."  

Oh well - at least Mabel keeps giving me a chance, right?