The only flag I need on the nation's birthday

Knowing that the USofA has not always been good -- in fact has been a horror show of genocide, slavery, exploitation and murder for many -- let us recommit to that "new birth of freedom" which shimmers as a tantalizing alternative possibility to be pursued with all our lives and strength.

I.C.E. in San Francisco got a visit Monday

A human wall of resistance activists stretched around the downtown stone block that houses Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as Department of Justice immigration courts.

We're sick of this shit, but not half so sick as those locked away by the federal child-snatchers.

Kids get it.

To steal a slogan, more and more of us in the resistance are learning this is about "changing the human race into the human family."

Northern California is not a religious place. In fact, it's the most secular region of the country. But there is something about the horror of how the U.S. government is treating desperate migrants that calls forth ancient moral injunctions that still underlie the culture. Not for everyone, but for more than we might have expected. When push comes to shove ... keep on.

Long suffering Russians

There's something deeply broken in Russian society. That simple minded statement is what I've taken away from reading a series of books about Russia recently: Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoir of survival and devastation during Stalin's Terror in the 1930s; Peter Pomerantsev's vertigo-inducing Surreal Heart of the New Russia; and Svetlana Alexievich's Nobel Literature prize-winning collection of mini-interviews with post-Soviet citizens.

Russian/American journalist Masha Gessen's National Book Award winning The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia is another contribution on the same theme. She chronicles Russian political and social experience through stories of the lives of seven individuals between the 1980s when the Soviet regime was dissolving amid its own contradictions and failures through the 2010s when Putin was seizing increasingly unchallengeable power. For U.S. readers who have struggled with Russian naming conventions in those hard-to-follow Russian novels we were supposed to read in school, she provides a wonderfully helpful introductory explanation of how she uses these forms; you don't have to get lost in the names here.

Gessen ties the trajectories of her individuals together through describing the ongoing research of pioneering post-Soviet pollster and sociologist Lev Gudkov, a student of communist Russia's father of indigenous sociology, Yuri Levada. (Putin eventually drove Levada out of the institute he founded where Gudkov also worked.) Levada had propounded the notion that the Soviet system had indeed made possible the emergence of a New Man: Homo Sovieticus.

The system had bred him over the course of decades by rewarding obedience, conformity and subservience. ... The Soviet state was the ultimate parent: it fed, clothed, housed and educated its citizens; it gave him a job and gave his life meaning. It rewarded him for doing good and punished him for doing wrong, no matter how small the transgression.

It also taught its citizens to live inside "double-think" -- at once permanently victimized by encircling capitalist enemies and also a conquering heroic empire which had defeated Germany in the 1940s and was standing up against an aggressive America. In the late 1980s, Levada expected Homo Sovieticus to die off after the Soviet state failed.

But in the 1990s, Gudkov's polling showed that Homo Sovieticus was making a comeback. A complete economic crash, oligarchic privatization that amounted to theft of the USSR's industry and farms, the peeling off of non-Russian minorities into their own states -- all of this led Russians to yearn for renewed stability and order.

Now Russians were distinctly tired of thinking of themselves, and their country, as inferior. So what did they see as the innate positive qualities of Russians? This open question elicited, on the basis of 2,957 surveys, three leading qualities: "open," "simple," and "patient." The ideal Russian, it seemed was a person without qualities. It was clear to Gudkov that this was the blank mirror of the hostile and violent regimes under which Russians had long lived. ...

... Homo Sovieticus was not going anywhere: there was no clear evidence that this sociological type was less prevalent among young people than in their parent's generation. Homo Sovieticus's central trait -- double-think -- was in full display across age groups. ... A majority of respondents agreed with the following statement: "Over the seventy-five years of the Soviet regime our people have become different from the people of the West, and it is too late to change that." A slightly larger majority agreed with the statement "Sooner or later Russia will follow the path that is common for all civilized countries." Most people agreed with both statements at the same time, and that that they did seemed to affirm the former, and made the latter seem vanishingly unlikely.

Living with these unresolved contradictions made Russians ready to give Vladimir Putin 80 percent approval ratings when another economic crash in 1998 was short lived and the new strongman promised decisive action against Chechen terrorists. By 1999, 58 percent of Russians wanted to go back to how things were before Gorbachov loosened the regime's controls in 1985; 26 percent believed Stalin's rule had been good for the country. Nostalgia ruled.

By the early 2000s, Gudkov believed he was seeing in Putin's rule something he called "pseudo-totalitarianism." The same bureaucrats ruled; mass media were state controlled; the secret police had changed its name but not its powers. Neither reliable rule of law nor an independent judiciary had emerged. Education was militarized and the state determined the distribution of goods.

One thing was certain: this regime was not going to develop into a functioning democracy. In fact, it did not seem capable of developing at all. It probably could not re-create the old systems of terror and complete mobilization. Its sole purpose ... was to stay afloat, to maintain just enough inertia. In this its main resource was the Russian citizen weaned on generations of doublethink ...: the Homo Sovieticus.

As the Putin regime moved closer to being a recognizable totalitarian state in the 2010s, Gudkov developed a theory that Russia's periodic popular eruptions, whether in 1990 or in subsequent repeated mass protests against elections devoid of choices, were a feature serving to revitalze an unchanging system.

This was Gudkov's depressing, and he had to admit, radical idea: the last century could be viewed as a continuity, with periodic bumps of "aborted modernization" and the society he had been studying his entire adult life had stayed essentially the same. What made this idea radical was that no one wanted to hear it.

Perhaps it is proof that merely compiling the truth doesn't set people free since all this sociological theory and data exists without discernible impact on the country's development. Dictators don't have to hide their scat anymore, it seems.

The heart of Gessen's book is not these sociological observations I summarized crudely here, but the stories of particular individuals. Her subjects are city people, educated, relatively privileged, middle and upper middle class in our terms. They are not Russia's bottom dwellers. (Alexievich goes deep in that stratum.) I found them by turns interesting, repellent, and attractive and you probably would as well. None of these lives are easy; but then, even the most idealistic didn't expect life to be easy.

One of Gessen's people, Lyosha, is a young gay man trying to make a life as a professor of gender studies at a provincial university. It's a tough road, but he makes something of a go of it until Putin's regime realizes it can create an aggressive xenophobic Russian patriotism by inciting mass hatred of queers. U.S.-based homophobes from an outfit called the World Congress of Families (listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) assist Russia's homegrown anti-gay zealots. Lyosha becomes first an object of suspicion during a national pedophilia panic, then a prospective target of bashers and murderers. He emigrates.

Some reviewers, including Francis Fukuyama in the Times, imply that Gessen -- a lesbian who decamped to New York to protect her children -- is making too much of the role of gay bashing in Putin's consolidating his regime. Actually, I am grateful that Gessen shows so vividly that violence and bigotry derived from fear of gender fluidity can be a very potent instrument in a dictator's arsenal. Not every society would be so subject to this particular intra-community wedge as contemporary Russia, but violent gender terrors are potent inflammatory agents. This is not some piddling minor issue; we should not look away.

Marina Arutyunyan, a Russian psychoanalyst, came to believe that nearly all her clients should be understood as suffering ongoing trauma. Gessen lets her sum up.

Most of her clients craved "stability," whatever that meant. It had all been too much for them for years. ... When the first constraints began snapping back into place, to the beat of the "stability" drum, they had felt calmer.... [A client with a small business] had a strong sense -- she got signals -- that she should be cultivating connections and giving bribes, but she did not know how and, more to the point, she felt strongly that she should not. The signals she was getting about what was right came into conflict with her own inner sense of what was right. If only the law was clear and permanent and applied to all equality ... It was the oldest trick in the book -- a constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense they could control anything themselves. This was not the sort of anxiety that moved people to action and accomplishment. This was the sort of anxiety that exceeded human capacity.

... The whole country felt helpless. ... What options did this frightening country offer its intolerably anxious citizens? They could curl up into total passivity, or they could join a whole that was greater than they were. ... they could rejoice alongside other citizens that Crimea was "theirs." ... Paranoia offered a measure of comfort: at least it placed the source of overwhelming anxiety securely outside the person and even the country. It was a great relief to belong, and to entrust authority to someone stronger. ... One could belong, but one could never feel in control.

As I say so often, the remedy for helplessness is action. Do something to build power and community. Resist and protect much.

Reminders from a higher authority

Seen outside the West County Detention Center in Richmond, CA where several hundred migrants in ICE custody are imprisoned on any given day. Fifteen hundred or so demonstrators rallied yesterday as part of the national Families Belong Together protests.

Religious groups have been expressing their solidarity at the jail for months. "We usually get about 100 people," one regular explained. Yesterday there were a heartening number more ...

It was a hot day; the Trump/GOPer family separation atrocity made us hotter.

In the Trump era, resistance is a family affair.

In this crowd, the question is not just whether people will remember to vote, but which campaign they'll be working on. If we do it right, the people are still the higher authority.

"Our City, Our Home"

The other day the San Francisco Chronicle and a boatload of other local media focused their output on our region's substantial unhoused population and the ongoing failure of public policy to much reduce their numbers. I read a lot of the entries linked here and it was discouraging.

In particular, a laudatory profile of the work of San Francisco homelessness chief Jeff Kositsky left me with the feeling that newspaper had buried the lede of its story. About 20 paragraphs in was this:

One reason for the slow pace [of reducing homelessness] is this shocking factoid: Every week, Kositsky’s team gets 50 homeless people off the streets, and every week, 150 more take their place.

On average, that’s 100 people who become homeless in San Francisco and 50 homeless people who arrive here from somewhere else. Some of them are just passing through, and some of them will figure out housing on their own. But many of them won’t.

One hundred residents, our neighbors who live alongside those of us with relatively secure housing, lose their place to live every week. One hundred living, breathing people!

Experienced Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan assembled some of the numbers in an interesting graphic presentation. One point that stuck out was that when city authorities claim they've gotten some people off the streets, some good sized portion of that reduction has been achieved by giving people one-way bus tickets to somewhere else. Does that help anyone except flacks who have to explain city policy? Maybe, but I'm skeptical

Fagan dares attempt to explain why, at this moment in time, San Franciscans perceive an intolerable crisis.

Weariness: The decades-old problem lends itself to a perception that it has no end in sight, and the exploding opioid epidemic, which has thrust more addicts onto the streets shooting up in public, only adds to the sense of futility.

Tents: The proliferation of tents all over the city, in places where before there were mostly just blankets and tarp lean-tos, has been perhaps the biggest driver. The Occupy protest movement that flared in 2011 and died out in 2012 infused hundreds of tents onto the streets, and kindhearted residents followed by raising donations to buy even more.

Unknown artist. This surprisingly bucolic picture of out tent encampments had been turning up on lamp posts.

Gentrification: As the city’s tech-driven economy exploded, traditional homeless hangouts in places like central SoMa or around the Transbay Terminal were revitalized. Unable to blend in so easily, the homeless migrated elsewhere, causing fresh alarm to those unused to seeing camps.

Panhandlers: As many as 50 percent of them, by some estimates, are formerly homeless people who now live inside but are so dysfunctional they revert to the one moneymaking technique they’ve always known. They look homeless, but they’re not.

After decades of hand-wringing and ineffectual policy initiatives, pretty much everyone agrees that the only true solution for people without housing is to provide housing. This is not a problem caused by the idiosyncrasies or disabilities of homeless individuals. It's not surprising that living on the streets drives some people crazy or encourages self-medication with alcohol and drugs. But if we don't like living alongside tent encampments, we have to move people inside.

The Chron reports that street people and allies have a substantive proposal:

... a proposed November ballot measure called “Our City, Our Home.” It would raise taxes on businesses making more than $50 million a year to bring in $300 million annually to build more housing, boost mental health and substance-abuse programs and create more shelter beds. [Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness] and other supporters are gathering signatures to qualify it for the ballot.

“It’s going to completely turn around this crisis,” she said. “Big time!"

When city authorities cry poverty at budget time, they need to remember this is a rich city. There's money here; it's time to put more of it to community use. Homeless people and their friends never have a chance to forget they live adjacent to riches.

Quick points on Kennedy retirement from Supreme Court

There's a lot of fluff and a lot of fear out there on this blow to our already unstable democracy. At core, Kennedy's retirement and whatever subsequent reordering of the court follows will deepen an ongoing crisis of legitimacy of government.

Two Republican popular vote losers [Bush II and Trump] end up packing a Supreme Court that votes 5-4 in favor of a lot of things that the majority of Americans dislike. Very, very, very bad.

Marty, Emptywheel

Much of the distress will be about the near certainty that forced-pregnancy Republicans will, finally, get their dream of overturning Roe v Wade which ostensibly makes abortion legal everywhere. In practice, right wing Republicans have already made the procedure close to unavailable for less-privileged women in some states. That wise Democratic observer of politics Ed Kilgore makes a point worth remembering:

... the era of women being able to count on legal, if not convenient or affordable, abortions in every part of the country will be over in a post-Roe environment, and with it the argument that abortion policy is an annoying “social issue” that should be put aside so that politicians and policy-makers can focus on “real” issues like the economy. With one SCOTUS appointment and one decision, that could all change, and we could enter a period of abortion-policy activism unlike anything America has seen in decades.

My emphasis.

The Trump policy of baby-snatching and jailing at the border seemed to have softened evangelicals embrace of the President momentarily; the focus shifting back to a chance to end legal abortion will lock the fundamentalists and any wavering Catholics back in lock step.

It's worth noting that Anthony Kennedy was not a great jurist, merely a highly influential one, because of sitting for more than a decade as the swing vote between moderate liberals and hard line rightists. Sharp lawyers from both left and right criticize his opinions as poorly argued. Unfortunately, his rulings in favor of gay civil rights and affirming same sex marriage are among his more airy-fairy offerings. This legal weakness (all the other justices, even Thomas, have been more cogent) may make it easier for a court that is hostile to LGBT and women's rights to pick away at what equality we've won under law. They probably can't outright take away our full citizenship, but they can allow discrimination and undermine equality.

And, whoever Trump and the GOPers install on the court will almost certainly sit in judgment on whatever cases arising out of the Mueller investigation work their way to the Supremes. Trump gets to pick a judge who will judge him. That's certainly representative of a low and dangerous moment.

Resistance activists have to recognize that Democrats are very unlikely to be able to prevent any of this. Pols will almost certainly yell and scream and blunder about tactically through the process. But since the power -- the votes -- aren't there, much of this will be an involuntary charade.

Activists have to play it out, but if ever we had to resist forming a circular fire-squad over Democratic missteps, this is it. Skip it. Win in November; don't let Trumpists and bots get us mired in denouncing our enfeebled "leaders."

When legal remedies are blocked, other shit happens

The Supreme Court's union busting Janus decision reminded me of one my favorite books from the Reagan era: Sabotage in the American Workplace: Anecdotes of Dissatisfaction, Mischief and Revenge. This is a delightful, and sometimes slightly scary, compilation of anecdotes from workers about what they did to get back at a system which used them as miserable cogs in a profit machine. The technological environment of current workplaces is different, but I have no doubt that frustrated workers find ways to screw with the bosses.

Here's a bit from one I enjoyed. "Santa" was a kind of stock clerk; today his workplace might be an Amazon warehouse.

I snuck out the back door of the store during lunch hour, pushing five shopping carts into the woods behind the store, every day, for close to a month. Then I would pull out some rope, which I stole from from the hardware department every morning at seven, and tie those five carts onto the rope and hoist them up various trees.

Finally, twenty-seven working days and 135 shopping carts later, a store manager walked into this "forest of sabotage" ... It took three hours to pull these carts out of the trees.

I committed these acts partly out of boredom and partly out of revenge. ...

The employer never figured out who did it.

Today there would be surveillance cameras, but contemporary workers are no less creative than their parents 30 years ago ... When people are blocked from expressing their dignity in communal, organized ways, they don't stop seeking alternatives.

The book is still available -- really cheap.

Our 16th President knew something lost on too many today

The Koch Brothers got the union busting Supreme Court decision they've been craving; but labor comes first and creates wealth. And labor finds ways to get its own back. To be continued ...

A good one comes to the fore

This tweet is from last Sunday. Yesterday Ben Jealous won his primary by an unanticipated margin and became the Democratic nominee for Governor of Maryland.

Grateful to spend time this Sunday before Election Day at the St. James Episcopal Church in Baltimore.

My family has attended this church for generations. I was baptized here and my parents renewed their wedding vows here decades after interracial marriages became legal. pic.twitter.com/OiCTMCRNQu

— Ben Jealous for Governor (MD) (@BenJealous) June 24, 2018

In 2012, while leading the national NAACP, Jealous lent his energies to the campaign to end the death penalty in California, preaching for justice at three churches in one day in the Bay Area that fall. He's one to watch.

Who are men?

As a rule, I don't put much energy into thinking about men and manhood. One of the great benefits of age, economic stability, and lesbian-identification is that I don't have to. Don't get me wrong; there are plenty of men around me who I like and even admire. I just enjoy the privilege of thinking of them as people, not as men.

So I probably would never have listened to the podcast from Death, Sex and Money called Manhood, Now if they hadn't partnered with FiveThirtyEight which dropped it in my feed.

Their polling findings from over 1600 respondents are fascinating. Here's what men worry about:

If I hadn't told you this was what men worry about, would you have known these were the concerns of guys? I'm not sure I would have; women worry about the same stuff, though perhaps not so much about the appearance of our genitalia.

But the interviews in the podcast were absolutely fascinating to me.

"Don’t be weak. Don’t be small. Don’t be poor. Don’t be emotional. Don’t be feminine. Don’t be aggressive. Don’t be unapproachable. Don’t be sexist. Don’t be patronizing. Don’t be entitled. Don’t be unemotional. Don’t be big. Don’t be loud.

You might notice a lot of contradictions here."

These interviewers did a great job of mixing conversations with men of many ages, races, sexual orientations, and gender identities in 43 minutes. If interested in contemporary masculinity, highly recommended.

Who are we licensed to hate now?

The Supreme Court, in today's approval of President Trump's Muslim Ban, and in decisions over the last few weeks, is giving us prompts about who we are permitted, even urged and required, to hate.

During the campaign, Trump trumpeted the lie that "Islam hates us" and promised "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States." The Supremes say sure: hatred toward 1.8 million Muslims worldwide is a fine, civil sentiment, however much obscuring bilge government lawyers may have spread over Trump's "animus."

Meanwhile, those same judges refused to apply elementary public accommodations standards -- the rule that if you run a public business you have to serve the public without discrimination -- to a Colorado baker with a religious objection to same sex marriages. You see, some Colorado human rights bureaucrat said something insensitive about right-wing Christian intolerance and that is impermissible "animus."

It's just fine to hate Muslims, but don't criticize bigoted forms of Christianity. Those are the rules for this Supreme Court. With a conservative majority of justices, things are likely to get worse, not better.***The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) writes in a very American way about how bigotry is embedded in our history -- and how such bigotry ends in shame.

The Supreme Court has permitted the slavery of African Americans, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, and today it permitted the banning of Muslims.

We know what America's history is. Together, we aspire toward something better.

The fight does not end today. We will continue even despite the Trump administration's bigotry and the Court's permission of it.

When the courts fail, they must hear from citizens in the streets and at the ballot box.

I love our library!

Library Journal calls the San Francisco Public Library "a model and inspiration for public libraries worldwide," naming this sprawling institution its Library of the Year. They sure got this right! Anyone who reads this site benefits from this wonderful institution; I borrow nearly every book I write about for some period, if only to extract quotes and check my notes.

But an ambitious and brave library can give so much more to its community. The SFPL understands itself as a necessary part of advancing resistance values that create a warmer, courageous, and more inclusive city. From the LJ:

... “The day after the 2016 election we had our Future of the Library Forum meeting. [Then-director] Luis Herrera recognized that people in the room were hurting. We discarded the agenda we had prepared and had a dialog with the staff. ‘What are we going to do in the library to address equity in our community? How can we be more inclusive?’ were the questions discussed,” says Acting City Librarian Michael Lambert.

From that dialog, SFPL formed its Immigrant Services Task Force, which in turn quickly developed a slate of programs. The SFPL All Are Welcome initiative was born, providing information on how to settle in the United States, how to learn or improve English proficiency, how to become a citizen, and other critical resources, delivered in six languages and via YouTube video. The initiative’s “Know Your Rights” program has been a smash hit, and SFPL has joined with the city’s Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs, which calls the library “a critical partner,” plus an immigration law firm, to give one-on-one advice on citizenship applications. The library also offers workshops on how to become an ally to immigrants. A Respect and Love toolkit and resource guide addresses issues of bias and discrimination.

SFPL is taking steps to address racial injustice internally and externally alike. According to Lambert, the two are intertwined. “We want to do a better job of serving impacted communities in San Francisco, and we want all SFPL staff to go through [anti]bias training. These efforts will improve our recruiting from communities of color and make the SFPL workforce even more reflective of the city,” he says.

... For its version of the One City, One Book program, in 2017 SFPL chose Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr.’s Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Univ. of California). More than 700 people participated in over 20 author talks, bike tours, film screenings, panel discussions, and other activities. More than 1,200 patrons checked out the book.

... SFPL frontline staff asked management to have SFPL stock Narcan and give them training on its use to save lives. More than 120 employees have completed the voluntary training. In February, SFPL staff administered Narcan and saved the lives of two patrons. “Having to face tough urban issues like homelessness and the opioid epidemic has redefined the collaborative and expansive role that libraries play in spearheading social policy,” says Lambert.

Much of the SFPL's success goes back to successful local political campaigns. The volunteer organization Friends of the SFPL led the fight in 1994 to pass a ballot proposition creating a fifteen year set aside from property tax revenues to create a Library Preservation Fund. This fund was renewed in 2007 with 74% of the vote. It will come up again in 2022; the library is working overtime to prove its value to the people of San Francisco.

Nicaragua is rising

As I often explain to visiting friends, here in the San Francisco Mission district, Nicaragua and all of Central America feel very close by. "Nicaragua is rising" says the poster that recently appeared in a store window on Mission Street. It refers to the popular struggle which has rocked that country since April and has cost some 200 lives in what was recently the most peaceful nation in its neighborhood.

Nicaragua is close, not only because so many local residents migrated from there, but also because so many San Franciscans participated in the struggle of the 1980s against our own government's determination to crush Nicaraguans' attempt to replace a dictator with democracy and justice. That dream lives on in the hearts of many experienced activists now bent on resistance to the Trump/GOP regime's cruelty and greed.

In her latest article for Tom Dispatch, Nicaragua at the Barricades ... And a Crossroads, Erudite Partner describes both, some of the story of Nicaragua's liberation struggle, as well as some of the history of how North American supporters learned from Nicaraguans. She asks, why should we care that Nicaragua is suffering renewed violence amidst our manifold troubles at home?

...there was a time when Nicaragua’s imaginative, idiosyncratic revolution offered the world an example of how a people might shuck off the bonds of U.S. dominance and try to build a democratic country devoted to human well-being.

This was "heady stuff" in the repressive, GOP/Reagan-afflicted 1980s. North American allies could not always internalize the most important lesson Nicaraguans tried to teach us: that the success of their revolution ultimately would depend on whether we too could remake our country into a place of democracy and justice. E.P. shares that story and more in this new article.

From here, we can have at best little idea where Nicaraguans' contemporary struggles will take them; we can have confidence that our domestic struggles for human decency, for democracy and justice, increase the space for theirs.

Speaking out: for kidnapped children and against our national demons

In anticipation of civil disobedience, Erudite Partner was asked to explain why she was protesting at Otay Mesa immigrant detention jail to a reporter from Bay Area station KQED.

Protesters in San Ysidro are preparing for arrest this afternoon at the border. Rebecca from San Francisco came to this protest and explains what this orange bracelet means for some protesters. pic.twitter.com/aCxzIqFBQa

— 🐝john sepulvado🐝 (@JohnLGC) June 23, 2018

As usual, she was animated and articulate.

Reporter John Sepulvado's report from Otay Mesa is an observant, accurate account of the weekend's actions.

Up close to a toxic system ...

With leadership from PICO California, some 600 or so folks from all over the state descended on Saturday on the Otay Mesa detention center that the US government is renting from a private contractor to hold migrants. We rather thought we'd improved the signage.

While security was distracted by the redecoration project, about 50 of us moved up the fence around the facility.

They then linked arms and chanted some more after tying kids' shoes to the fence. pic.twitter.com/PQNp93H0KK

— Andrew Bowen (@acbowen) June 24, 2018

From there we blocked the main gate during shift change and received the smiles of visiting family members exiting after visiting prisoners.

The best moment was when women locked within responded with cheers to the chants of the massed crowd on the perimeter road. On this day, what we had to offer was encouragement to sister human beings. The long work remains to reform an asylum and migration system that has become poisonous to us all.

This post lacks my usual photos because, for this day, I was on hand to take whatever risks of detention my participation might involve -- so no photographs. Didn't happen today. The condition of our country will likely demand unfamiliar risks from most all of us in this toxic moment.

The people assemble ...

One thousand folks are expected to march and witness tomorrow outside the immigration detention center in San Ysidro. This afternoon belonged to the mechanics of organizing -- buses, sign in sheets, and water bottles.

In early evening, massed clerical persons from many traditions led an interfaith prayer service.

A child participant was fascinated by her candle.

More tomorrow ... or as soon as I am able to post.

A profound moral crisis

Erudite Partner and I are on our way to the border to pray and protest against the Trump/GOPer regime's cruel treatment of migrants. You are more likely to see photos than text here for the next couple of days.

But I thought some might appreciate some thoughtful reflection on this country's history of child snatching from Adam Serwer of The Atlantic.

... part of what horrifies Americans is not the novelty of Trump’s policy, but its familiarity. Americans are fighting a part of themselves that they naively thought they had vanquished. From chattel slavery to American Indian schools to convict leasing, child-snatching has been a tradition in America since before there was an America. If one is convinced that the parents are not truly human, then the children cannot truly be children, and what should be unthinkable becomes inevitable.

Few of the Trump administration’s policies better exemplify the Trump campaign’s commitment to restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race, religion, and gender, than family separation. That commitment—and Republicans’ muted opposition to or vigorous support of the administration’s actions —has plunged the United States into a profound moral crisis that will define the nation’s character for decades to come. To harden oneself against the cries of children is no simple task. It requires a coldness to suffering that will not be easily thawed. The scars it inflicts on American civic culture will not heal quickly, and they will never completely fade.

People who would do this to children would do anything to anyone. Before this is over, they will be called to do worse.

Serwer points out that the abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin which gets some credit for spreading the anti-slavery gospel in the north in the 1850's revolves around child theft. Once again, when they revel in their villainy, we cannot be silent or passive.

Friday cat blogging

There's nothing to suggest that this animal wanted the human with the camera to come closer.

But although wary, she didn't pull away when I came close. I love how cats can negate your existence when they wish to.

Encountered while Walking San Francisco.

When evil curdles your gut, you can do something

Children caught up in the Trump/Sessions/Nielsen border dragnet are turning up around the country. Media are investigating the scope and horror of the program. Ordinary citizens are looking for ways to denounce and impede this cruelty.

• A flight attendant explains in the Houston Chronicle: "I will not be complicit." She's not alone. Airline workers protest being made part of this atrocity.

• The Detroit Free Press reports "8-month-old baby lands in Michigan." Another of the children shipped in with that group was 11 months old.

• The New York Daily News has looked into which entities and individuals in New York are making a good business out of child detentions.

  Housing the migrant children who arrive in America unaccompanied and those who have been separated from their parents at the border is a big business -- one that now costs taxpayers more than $1 billion a year.
  
  ...The charities and church groups whose duties include running the Unaccompanied Alien Child Program in New York State have seen their revenue double, from $73.9 million in fiscal 2015 to $154.2 million this year.
  
  Some of the executives at these charities take home hefty six-figure salaries, a review of tax records shows.
  
  For instance, Jeremy Cohomban, CEO of Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, Westchester County, received $568,999 in salary and other compensation, according the group’s 2016 tax forms. The group’s contracts under the Unaccompanied Alien Child Program rose from $16.6 million in fiscal 2015 to $19.4 million this fiscal year. ...

• Meanwhile, 600 alumni of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's Tampa prep school have organized to express their outrage about the policies she has made herself responsible for. Better yet, like thousands of citizens across the country, they are raising money for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES).

Most of us can find something to do to demonstrate where we stand on ripping children from parents already so desperate they sought asylum in this unwelcoming country. Your blogger along with E.P. is off to the border this weekend with our friends from Faith in Action.

You can find protests planned around the country for June 30 at this link.

Our improbable "internal political resource"

As the Trump regime builds out its baby jails for children under five, and we, the resisting majority, scream our protests, some repeat over and over "This is not who we are. We aren't like this!"

And those of us who have never been confident that the USofA was very good through much of our history sigh -- and contemplate the terrible job of gentle (and not so gentle) instruction we owe to our fellow citizens. What a horror show this country has been for so many: there was the attempted extermination of the native people of the continent; the use of African human captives as trafficable, disposal machines for cotton profits; the wars of empire in which torture and murder have been justified by religious and race hatred. And it goes on and on.

But there have also been also those other themes of our history: "inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; "government of, by, and for the people." The gradual expansion of "the people" to encompass more and more of us ...

Mark Kleiman at Reality-Based Community took up how we live among these uncomfortable contradictions a few days ago. We need to learn a more complicated, more truthful, history, of course. But also --

Aspirational history and political rhetoric
... “critical” history isn’t the only kind. National myths are, themselves, potent realities. A country where the belief that horrible actions Aren’t Like Us is widespread has an internal political resource that helps political actors within that country oppose such horrible actions.  A country where that belief isn’t widespread – where criminality is an accepted part of the political culture – lacks that resource, which of course is a benefit to criminal political actors within that country. The accuracy of the underlying belief is an independent question.

This post was a rare exception to the rule on the internet; comments expanded the discussion. Here's one from someone who calls himself "johnarkansaslawyer".

As a leftist, I'm in broad agreement ... that the United States has no particular claim to virtue. Also as a leftist, I'm also able to tell the difference between bad and worse. What we have right now is worse cubed. ...

Hating your own country is the internationalism of fools. That much I do know.

Becoming revolted by your own culture's flaws is a useful phase in development of a broader worldview, assuming you get past it. Getting stuck in that revulsion leaves you just as foolish, just in the opposite direction.

As we resist cruel barbarism, we can't pretend this country is flawless. But neither can we succumb to nihilism. That's throwing away any chance to fight another day.