Does My Vote Really Matter?

For those who didn’t think their vote counted. Here’s a newsflash: it does. Every time, it does.  But for it to count, you gotta show up. 

The next time you’re tempted to stay home as yourself these questions………….

1. What might happen to my environment if I don't vote?

Answer: much, much more of this. Remember "Drill baby drill!"?

Meanwhile, out in the real world this is what is actually going on.

The 'Drill baby drill" crew swears up and down that drilling is now safer than ever, but that red river ain't looking like a particularly good example of safety in action. Unless water's supposed to be red?

2. What could happen to my (or my friends') Civil Rights if I don't vote?

Answer: an erosion of the comfortable, easy, diverse universe you've known your whole life.

It is not accidental that it took this nation until the late 19th century to begin to acknowledge the Civil Rights of some of its members. Neither is it a surprise that those rights have been challenged and undermined at every opportunity since.  That's kinda the way we do. Resistance to the principles and practice of equality remains a central theme of American social, political, and economic life.  

If people who are uncomfortable with growing diversity are going to vote, then those of us who embrace it must vote in larger numbers. That's the math.

3. What could happen to my healthcare if I don't vote?

Answer: the candidate you fail to vote against might wipe out any chance you have of owning some.

If you're really lucky, the eventual election winner might think health savings accounts (HSAs) make sense. But in a world where income barely meets current expenses HSAs are not going to help you much.  

Or, alternatively, the winning candidate might gut healthcare access entirely, as they seem intent on doing in Minnesota. Check out this list of procedures and care options that AREN'T covered. Numbers 1, 5 and 23 are especially interesting. But don't worry about them because there's no war on women.

As I written before, democracy is nothing without us in it. We may have forgotten recently that democracy won't continue without our express participation but I think we know different now. We have the proof that it will not. We gotta show up. Every time. 

We must get back in the game. And we must do so in numbers too large to ignore. 

Joe Medicine Crow - shining just beyond the common man's sight

I read the story of the death of Joe Medicine Crow with tears in my eyes. I cannot tell you why......or maybe I can. Medicine Crow represents something. Or he should. 

Here are five thoughts that floated through my mind as I read his story.

1. Joe Medicine Crow represents the last of a particular stripe of man. He was the last man in his tribe to successfully complete the requirements to become a war chief of his tribe. There are specific requirements to become the chief and Joe, without intending to do so in some instances, completed them all. From the article, 

"During World War II, when he was a scout for the 103rd Infantry in Europe, he strode into battle wearing war paint beneath his uniform and a yellow eagle feather inside his helmet. So armed, he led a mission through German lines to procure ammunition. He helped capture a German village and disarmed — but didn’t kill — an enemy soldier. And, in the minutes before a planned attack, he set off a stampede of 50 horses from a Nazi stable, singing a traditional Crow honor song as he rode away."

Maybe he meant to complete the requirements, or maybe, those requirements were so deeply ingrained; were so much a part of who he was, that completing them was inevitable? How many more like him are there? How many of us have who we are so deeply engraved into our DNA? How much has our approach to Native culture robbed us of access to that strength and those character traits?

Medicine Crow was the last of a certain kind of man and he was our last bridge to a particular tradition. He was a war chief, a writer and an activist and while there are others who are each of these, even some who are two of these, there are no more who are all of these in his tribe, and quite possibly, in any tribe.

2. Joe Medicine Crow represents the distance we have yet to travel between the Trail of Tears and equality. Bear in mind that it was only 7 years ago that he was recognized with a Medal of Honor for his lifetime's worth of activism, storytelling, and serving as griot for his tradition and his people. His death serves as a stark reminder of how far we have yet to go to arrive at a place of true equality and just treatment because.....

3. In the year that Joe Medicine Crow died, we had the images and events of the Oceti Sakowin Camp and the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

In the year that Joe Medicine Crow died, we saw dogs and hoses turned on peaceful Native protesters (water protectors) in the dead of winter.

Water protectors drenched by water cannons @ Standing Rock
Stephanie Keith / Reuters

4. In the year that Joe Medicine Crow died, we have seen flagrant desecration of sacred land and the trampling of treaty rights in the quest for profit.

5. In the year that Joe Medicine Crow died the past served once again, as prologue.

Look closely at yourself America. Do you like what you see?

Five hundred+ years removed from Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of America, one might hope that Native Americans - Joe Medicine Crow's people - would finally be seen and respected as fully American. And yet, we are still not there yet.

Medicine Crow's death signals the end of an era as such deaths always do. His death also signifies that the new era has yet to begin...or perhaps it has, just beyond our view? Perhaps men like Gyasi Ross and David Archambault II are made in the same tradition and are doing similar work? Perhaps there are plenty of others whose names we (I) do not yet know?

What we do know is that US history is yet to turn the corner....a corner that Medicine Crow and men and women like him tried to bring us to. US history is yet to come to terms with its claim that "All men are created equal" or "with liberty and justice for all". 'All' not some, not some are more equal than others, but all. Equal. No provisos. 

The 102 years that Crow lived may have been enough to build railroads, an interstate system, the institutions of 'democracy', an internet, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter and myriad multinational businesses and industries and the largest economy on the planet, and yet it was not quite enough time for America to live out its creed; for Native people to realize all the rights of citizenship. Some things take longer than others I guess. How how long exactly is equality gonna take? 102 years and counting. 500 years and counting. 

The life of Joe Medicine Crow, is a love song no, a life song of and to his nation, to all nations and especially to this one that still has not quite got it. 

In spite of every dishonorable thing done to him personally or to his people generally, he fought for this country….the country of dogs and water cannons in mid-winter 2016. More than a hundred years after his birth, this is still the nation of dogs and the water cannons. 

In 2016, we said fare-thee-well to an inordinate number of 'stars'. But what is stardom? With all due respect to the famous, Medicine Crow's death is a clear reminder that some of our brightest stars have shone and burned out just beyond the common man's sight. 

May his spirit travel safely on.

Survival of the Fittest: the Trump Years

When next you hear someone claiming that "We will survive" or "I will survive" the Trump years because others have survived worse in the past consider this: 'we' certainly will survive but 'we' won't all make it to the other side. 

Here's how I know......

1. Thirty years ago, there was the piss poor HIV/AIDS response, and still we survived
HIV positive people survived Ronald Reagan's cavalier attitude to the early appearance of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Reagan himself is said to have laughed off the growing crisis and Mrs. Reagan turned her back on longtime friend Rock Hudson when he was diagnosed.

St. Ronnie and his administration laughed off the crisis, kinda like the President-elect laughs off climate change. The world was slow to recognize the gravity of the situation (then as now) or to begin working on treatment and prevention protocols. The greater 'we' certainly survived, but we haven't all made to the other side have we? The AIDS quilt is proof of that fact.

2. Thirty years later, there's Flint & Standing Rock, and we will yet survive
In Flint, as in Standing Rock, calls for a potable water supply have been shrugged off. In Flint, early alarms raised by pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna-Atisha were shrugged off as "data" (which apparently is a bad thing). It was more than twelve months before anything like an admission was forthcoming from the powers that be. That probably explains why there are now public officers facing felony charges.

Ultimately, the greater 'we' will survive the Flint crisis, but the children of Flint will not survive unharmed. Lead poisoning has lifetime consequences and we can be assured that they won't get the financial, emotional and/or educational support they will need. 

Thirty years from now, Flint's children will be struggling to find their way, Governor Snyder will be long gone, and we will all have conveniently forgotten what malfeasance and classist + racist Republican politics visited upon them.

So yes....
The greater 'we' will survive, but some of us won't make it to the other side: lives will be shortened, prospects will be dimmed or lost, families will be destroyed. 

We are entering an era of conservatism. Remember where the last one left us? 'Compassionate conservatism' my ass. There's an ox and a moron (oxymoron) if ever I heard one!

Did Black folk survive Jim Crow and slavery? Yes they did, but ask the good people at EJI (Equal Justice Initiative) how many people were murdered by mobs. How many lynching sites are they now trying to recognize? How many victims are they trying to remember and recognize? How many Neil deGrasse Tysons did we lose? How many Hadiyah-Nicole Greens?

Did Jews survive the Holocaust? Yes, they did, but ask any Jewish friend how many of their relatives didn't make it. How many Elie Wiesels did we lose? How many Anne Franks?

Did Native Americans survive the Trail of Tears? Yes indeed, but talk to an elder about the stories of loss. How many Joe Medicine Crows did we lose? How many Elouise Cobbells?

When we say "We will survive" we're also saying that a survival of the fittest approach is acceptable. It isn't; we're saying that entirely preventable human losses are acceptable. They aren't. 

Preventable losses are a criminal waste of human potential. We're in a compassionately conservative time. Brace yourself. This version of 'compassion' will leave some of us dead. We will not all make it. Sorry to be the harbinger of those sad tidings. 

Democracy is work

What is this thing called democracy? How easy is it to create, to sustain? What are the factors that undermine it, strengthen it? These are the things I've been forced to think about since election night turned out way differently than I'd expected. 

Here are a few thoughts I've had about the fragility of democracy since that night. 

1. Every democracy is an experiment. Sometimes experiments fail, abysmally

We don't talk about this enough, nor do we respect this notion enough, but every democracy is a series of experiments. Every time we go to the voting booth, we are saying (and actively doing) something about democracy. We're taking control of it and staking our claim to it. When we fail to participate, we're doing precisely the opposite. When we shrug and walk away, we leave the door open to those whose version of democracy is anything but democratic. Those people are motivated. They show up every time. Those who have opposing views must be equally so.

It's tough to overstate how easy it is for this experiment in democracy to fail completely. With every tweet, every Thank You rally utterance, we are given further reason to question PEOTUS's suitability for high office, but we stumble on. We must. 

The American election process gives us an escape hatch in the form of so-called faithless electors of the Electoral College, but I'm pretty sure we won't use it (and, unsurprisingly, we didn't) but even if we had, then what? We would then have been in completely uncharted waters if the required 37 electors had said “Nay” to the Donald. 

And so we're a-stumblin' on because the people have spoken, though to whom and what exactly they said is an open question. 

The experiment continues. 

Whether the experiment will ultimately prove successful remains to be seen. 

2. Functional democracy? We have one of those?

This US democracy[i] may have been around for 240 years but it's not perfect; it never was, attestations to the contrary notwithstanding. After two centuries one might think that most of the kinks would have been worked out by now. Not so, mon cher! Equal rights? We're just not there yet. Equal justice remains a (largely elusive) dream; Civil Rights for people of color are barely 50 years old and are being undermined every year; equal marriage recognition is barely two years old - and could easily go away with the 'right' appointment to the SCOTUS; and the rights of LGBTQI people are still not completely protected under the law and such protections as do exist can be easily undermined; and prisoners are still technically enslaved and that's upheld by the Constitution. And that's after 240 years. 

Real democracy isn't like evolution, moving from one stage to the next, pushed on by necessity. No, democracy is art and with an unskilled painter, the outcome is no Mona Lisa. 

A relatively functional democracy is what the majority of Americans have always known. Because of that, none of us has any idea what it takes to establish this thing we call democracy from scratch; what it takes to create something from nothing. 

We've never had to consider that process before since we discovered our democracy in relatively good working order (hence the italicization of the word democracy) and generation after generation has mostly left it in slightly better order. Our job, generally, has been to 'perfect' the union not create it; mind the store not build a startup. Four years from now, things might be  a little different.

We look at places like Grenada, Syria, Iraq, Libya  and much of Latin America (places, coincidentally, where our government has had a hand in destabilizing or removing governments) and cast aspersions on the character and will of the people and their leaders to establish a lasting peace, a shared prosperity and a participatory democracy. We've had the temerity to judge others' efforts at establishing democracy when we haven't the first clue what it takes to create political and social order out of chaos. We have no idea what it takes to rebuild a failed democracy, especially one broken by an authoritarian, but we may be about to find out. 

Let's hope that our years of sneering at others don't come back to bite us in the arse.

3. When it comes to democracies, 'functional' ain't the default setting

We've been lulled into a false sense of security thinking that after 240 years, 'functional' was the default setting on our democracy and that all we had to do was (i) show up from time to time (even if halfheartedly); (ii) depend on the news media for factual information and all would be well. Those days are over. 'Functional' isn't the default. There is no default. If we want functional democracy, we're going to have to work for it. Hard. Every day.

We've presumed that what obtained yesterday - politically-speaking - would necessarily obtain tomorrow, because We Are America! We've assumed that what we were experiencing was the baseline; the low water mark. We've assumed that gains, once made, were permanent. Yeah, NO. 

My great takeaway from this election is this: democracy is not sustained by the disinterested. You have to show up. For every one just barely interested citizen, there are at least two or three passionately engaged folk whose aims are direct opposition to your barely interested aims, so the onus is on both sides to show up, and may the bigger side win. 

Those who object to growing freedoms are eternally vigilant, concerned as they are about the erosion of their standards of decency. They stand ever ready for a fight. Those who complain about big government and social programs - but never about the ginormity of the defense budget somehow - are registered to vote and show up at the polls without being asked or coaxed. Those who object to rights for LGBTQI persons; protections for criminals/suspects in police custody; recognition of rights for undocumented persons and all manner of other things, have no trouble getting involved. Democracy is a fight between ideas. If one side fails to show up, its ideas won't see the light of day. It's really that simple. Worse still, if one side fails to show up, there are no longer any guarantees of good faith actions on the part of the other side. cf North Carolina's legislature this past week.

Tomorrow, as people of faith are fond of saying, is not promised, yeah well, neither is democracy. Tomorrow's democracy is the work of today's participants in the democratic process.  If you want democracy tomorrow, you'd better show up today.

The election of 2016 has proven to me that we have casually and cavalierly presumed that democracy would continue without our express efforts to ensure same. We now have proof that it will not. 

---

[i] The word democracy is italicized because so much that has occurred here in the last 240 years really is the antithesis of democratic. 

The Bending Arc of History

It is said that the arc of history, though long, bends surely towards justice. (Theodore Parker)

This line is often attributed to MLK Jr. but it was Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister and prominent American Transcendentalist born in 1810, who used the above phrase in an 1853 collection of “Ten Sermons of Religion”. The third sermon titled “Of Justice and the Conscience” included figurative language about the arc of the moral universe: 1

In the sermon he says, 

"Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right [thing]*. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble." **

* Parker used the word ‘right’ to denote the right thing not the right wing, just to be clear. 

**All emphases mine.

As insightful as the arc of history metaphor is, there are some ideas in there that are open to misinterpretation.

First, Parker's language suggests that history's arc bends naturally. The phrasing seems to center the bending of the arc away from human actors. The sentence gives the – dangerously erroneous - impression that the arc bends, not that we who wish to see it bent, must act to make that happen. That's really misleading. Passivity bends nothing. Staying away from the polls wins no elections. Apathy achieves nothing. Disengagement wins no war.

The bending of history's arc does not occur without significant effort. We ought to know this by now. Shoulders - many, many, many of them - must be applied to the work, and there must be blood, sweat and tears shed along the way. The bending of history necessarily involves both victories and defeats, and at times it may even feel like more of the latter than the former. Yet overall, the arc may indeed bend, but only if we have the will and do the work to bend it. For history bends toward justice only if we fight tooth and nail against the will of those who would have it not bend at all.  And then when there are victories, we must fight harder still to hold the newly gained territory, because change is a threat to those comforted by the status quo, and they will fight with everything they have in them to reassert what they believe to be the natural order.

Parker also offers the idea that "[things] refuse to be mismanaged long". This idea has very little bearing on the truth. Perhaps where he stood in history this was the case, but it ain't the case today. I could write you a list, as long as my arm, of things that have happily been mismanaged for quite long, but I'll offer just one: racial justice in America. We've mismanaged that to hell and back. We still don't have it managed, and if the election campaign of 2016 is anything to go by, we probably shouldn't hold our breath that it's going to be managed any better, any time soon.

Not least of all, I must disagree vehemently with Parker's suggestion that "all America did tremble." When did this happen?  Parker, speaking in 1853, suggests that America had some collective epiphany that clearly has not occurred.  It had not occurred when Parker spoke, just two years after Chief Justice Taney asserted that "the Negro has no rights which the White man is bound to honor" with respect to the Dred Scott legal matter. It certainly had not occurred when the Confederate States seceded to preserve African enslavement and defended that course of action with a Civil War.  Surely it had not occurred when in the wake of Reconstruction White supremacists implemented Jim Crow laws and rained Domestic Terror (lynching) on African people.  It was evident that it had not occurred when millions of Americans expressed their hatred of the slogan and the notion that Black Lives Matter.  And it most certainly has not occurred, as evidenced by this year's awful incidents around the election.

So on this election day + a few, while the arc of history may seem (to liberals and progressives) to have returned to its original place, and while we seem to be careening back to an earlier, uglier time for people like me, I am working to remain optimistic about the overall direction of history's arc. I am choosing (or trying to) to believe that we can bend history. At the same time, I am also staying coldly realistic about what that bending will take. I accept that sometimes, even as the arc is bending, it will bend through dark and dangerous places and times (such as these may now be) and we won't all come through to the other side. MLK Jr, himself said as much and was then killed for his efforts to bend the arc. 

This last point is critical: we will not all see justice. Not every family survived the Trail of Tears; not everyone survived the Middle Passage; not every unarmed man, woman or child survives their supposedly  uncomplicated encounter with the police. We do not all come out the other side of these horrors, which is why these "My grandpappy survived Jim Crow, I can survive Trump" memes are ridiculous as hell. Your grandpappy survived so that you wouldn't have to! But let me not go down that rabbit hole. Some of us won't make it out of these next four years. Some with chronic or life-threatening conditions will lose their health care and it will shorten their life spans. Some will be diagnosed and unable to get care. Some will be harassed or brutalized by an increasingly out of control police force and there will be no justice. Some will lose homes, jobs, everything and will succumb to grief and despair, and give up. 

Whether the election of Donald J. Trump is whitelash or not I'm not sure, but here's the truth: the arc of history will bend if we set to bending. There will be setbacks and there will be victories but we must never stop applying the pressure that is required to bend history's steely arc. Right about now though, I'm taking a little break. I'll get right back to doing my part just as soon as I get up off the floor cuz this election done laid me flat.