Shards from the Embattled Republic

An occasional list of links to provoking commentary. Some annotated by me. Lots of guns, GOPer malfeasance, and too little good cheer, but here goes ...

Ryan Grim: The horrifying massacre at Uvalde, then, is a graphic illustration of two of America’s worst problems: our epidemic of gun violence, and our plague of lawless, incompetent police departments. There really is a murder problem in many American cities, yet the police in most of them let the culprits get away with it half or more of the time. We’ve got far too many guns that are too easy to get, and we’ve got a sick police culture that needs to be torn out by the roots. San Francisco cops make an arrest in only 8.1 percent of reported crimes -- and naturally residents are not rushing to report. Why bother?

Sportscolumnist John Feinstein: If the NCAA had any moral standards, it would move the Men’s and Women’s Final Fours — one scheduled for Houston, one slated for Dallas — out of Texas next year. It would move all of its other championships from the state, too. And it would vow not to return until Texas reforms its gun laws. That might have an impact.

Food writer Soleil Ho: As a people, the amount of grief we’ve been asked to carry for the comfort of the gun lobby has rapidly exceeded our capacity to process it, and we need to acknowledge that. We can’t continue being their comfort food.

Senior journalist and media commentator James Fallows: Reporters like politics. Most readers care about governance—for which they wouldn’t use that term, but would instead think about schools, taxes, health care, jobs. Most reporters are interested in conflict and drama. Most readers and citizens would rather know that things are undramatically getting done. Reporters do thrive on the stories of who is up and who is down -- politics as sport. But too often, stories of governance only break through when the narrative exposes failures. It's hard to get heard about what's working.

Philip Bump: ... Defending the media is not easy. It’s uncomfortable, in part because it’s vexing to think that objectivity needs a defense.

Historian Serhii Plokhy: Poisoned legacy: why the future of power can’t be nuclear ... Can anything be done to make reactors safer? A new generation of smaller modular reactors, designed from scratch to produce energy, not to facilitate warfare, has been proposed by Bill Gates, and embraced, among others, by Macron. The reactors promised by Gates’s TerraPower company are still at the computer-simulation stage and years away from construction. But his claim that in such reactors “accidents would literally be prevented by the laws of physics” must be taken with a pinch of salt, as there are no laws of war protecting either old or new reactors from attack. There is also serious concern that the rapid expansion in the number of plants, advocated as a way of dealing with climate change, will increase the probability of accidents. While new technology will help to avoid some of the old pitfalls, it will also bring new risks associated with untried reactors and systems. Responsibility for dealing with such risks is currently being passed on to future generations. This is the second great risk from nuclear power: even if a reactor runs for its lifetime without incident, you still have a lot of dangerous material left at the end of it. Russia's scorched earth attack on Ukraine should end debate over "safe" nuclear power. Invading troops crashed on into Chernobyl, one of the best understood and marked off nuclear hazards on the planet. As a species, we are not capable of handling nuke waste safely in perpetuity, so it is grossly irresponsible to generate it.

Speaking of messes we've made, this one might be somewhat remediable. Sociologist Tressie McMillam Cottom: The time for debating student debt’s political messaging is over. Anything less than across-the-board forgiveness extends the life of the mess we made. Student loan debt is an albatross around the Democrats’ neck. Kicking the can down the road is throwing good political capital after bad.

Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa describe what they felt while reporting on the life of George Floyd: Before reporting this book, I considered systemic racism to be an unmoving, dark cloud that hung over us. As I watched life unfurl for these families, I understood that the residue of America’s original sin was something more terrifying. Racism is a pervasive, insidious force threatening to corrupt the spirit of every American if it is not acknowledged and confronted. I realized why so many of the families felt they had little choice but to fight racial injustice. You could not simply run away. George Floyd's murder taught both white and Black people what it can mean to be Black.

Karen Attiah: ... when it comes to white supremacy, White liberals have long held on to dangerously naive replacement theories of their own — that increasing populations of nonwhites will automatically dent anti-Blackness, for instance, and that younger generations are automatically less racist than their forebears. If President Biden’s reactions are anything to go by, the temptation is to believe that the salve for America’s racist spasms is a good ol’ dose of national unity. This liberal complacency puts us all at risk. The article describes the attractions for U.S. Black people of moving to Ghana.

Brennan Center Fellow Theodore R. Johnson: ... in 2016, I conducted a study to examine how the black vote might become less lopsided in presidential elections. ... The results were mostly unsurprising: For black Americans, as with the general population, the political party cues were so strong that they far outweighed every other consideration. There was, however, one rather unexpected insight. The political issue that most influenced black voters’ choice was abortion. Supporting a pro-choice presidential candidate was more important to black voters than the unemployment rate, obtaining new civil rights legislation, a candidate’s race, and every other presented factor except party. ... For black America, the revocation of a woman’s constitutionally protected right to choose to have an abortion raises questions about what other rights might be suddenly found revocable. Johnson's Black respondents didn't necessarily approve of abortion. But when the Man comes for rights ... who is next?

Speaking of rights, Stanford law professor Elizabeth A. Reese, Yunpoví (Willow Flower): The reemergence of tribal governments in the United States over the last fifty years has been nothing short of a renaissance of resilience. 

Organizer Scot Nakagawa: This morning I was the subject of an interview on KBOO, Portland’s listener-supported community radio station. ... During the interview, a caller made a comment about the left arming up, citing it as necessary in the face of an armed rightwing insurgency. ... If we break with strategic non-violence, we may find ourselves not too unlike the person who fights back against second-hand smoke by lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke right back. They may, in fact, damage the health of those pesky smokers with second-hand smoke, but only while doing much more damage to themselves while the tobacco companies make out like bandits. Those folks in the Pacific Northwest have experience with right wing militias that many others can learn from.

Paul Krugman: Republicans are following an old playbook, one that would have been completely familiar to, say, czarist-era instigators of pogroms. When the people are suffering, you don’t try to solve their problems; instead, you distract them by giving them someone to hate. ... And history tells us that this tactic often works.  

In The Atlantic, David A Graham: Come November, the wackadoodles shall inherit the Republican Party. It's satisfying to mock them, but vicious know-nothings with power are no laughing matter.

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr.: The Republican Party isn’t fit to lead, and most voters know it — that’s why Joe Biden won the presidency. But all those 2020 Biden voters shouldn’t be expected to turn out for two more years of Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) blocking most legislation in the Senate ... The Democrats must stop trying to duck the so-called culture wars and instead fight hard to win them. There is no middle ground between White male Christian hegemony and multiracial, multicultural social democracy — and the Democrats shouldn’t be shy about using their power to impose the latter, since it’s what a clear majority of Americans want. 

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson: Oddly for a secular age, our country might be waiting on a theologian equal to the moment. Previous generations of generally liberal politicians, like Barack Obama, looked to Reinhold Niebuhr. This is a more passionate moment that aches for compassion and empathy. Perhaps Nadia Bolz-Weber might suit us better?

Economist and provocateur Noah Smith: We were not born into this world to fight over scraps until we die. We were born into this world to remake it so that we don't have to fight over scraps.

Friday cat blogging

Janeway knew exactly what the sign supporting District Attorney Chesa Boudin was for. We did too. We took away her toy and hung it in a window.

San Franciscans: remember to vote No on H on or before Tuesday!

Why the British monarchy has been able to survive its expiration date

When the chips were down and Hitler threatened, the incumbent Queen (and her royal parents) demonstrated how to perform symbolic leadership at a moment when the British people needed them. Without this history, it's impossible to believe the house of Windsor would still occupy a throne. It seems unlikely any successor can extend their run -- Brits will decide.

Queen Elizabeth's coronation in 1953 was the first event I remember seeing on television in shaky black and white.

Democracy on the line

In the London Review of Books, discussing a study of contemporary civil conflicts, James Meek asks "What are you willing to do?" Yes, he is referring to the ongoing Republican insurrection against inclusive democracy.

One of the strange things about the reaction to the invasion of the Capitol was how few of those dismayed by it speculated that they might one day long for just such an assault to succeed. Might a different mob storm into Congress to save democracy, rather than attack it? If an autocrat who has stolen an election is about to have his trashing of American democracy hallowed by Congress, all other recourse having failed, shouldn’t Democrats – or democrats, at least – take direct action? Liberal opinion in North America and Western Europe has tended to be gung-ho about pro-democracy protesters storming ruling institutions in other countries, notably Ukraine in 2014. ... 

But it’s one thing to imagine, as [author Barbara] Walter encourages her readers to do, the gradual spread of white supremacist, anti-government terrorism across America against a democratic framework, until one day the progressive left, and the people of colour she suggests are likely to be targets of violence, arm and organise for self-protection. It’s another to wake up one morning and find that without any bloodshed or violence, without any seeming change in the smooth running of traffic signals and ATMs and supermarkets, without, even, an immediate wave of arrests or a clampdown on free speech, your country is run by somebody who took power illegally. Something must be done! But what, apart from venting on social media? And by whom? Me? ... Who, I wondered, would do for the truth what these [Capitol attackers] were ready to do for a lie?

Unfortunately a pertinent question. Because Joe Biden so clearly did win the presidency in 2020, in that year we didn't have to find out. But it would be a mistake to assume a seizure of power by Republican fascists sheltered by corrupted institutions might not be in our future. So who and what might stand in the way?

The grassroots progressive coalition consists of three pillars -- three semi-organized groups of people who work together in significant numbers who might act if need be. The strength and capacity of the various elements waxes and wanes, but I find thinking about this triad useful. I'm not alluding to elite media and academic writers and talkers here -- I'm assessing who might do something in an unfolding crisis. The elite elements will come along if we make space for them.

I envision the triad of democratic actors like this:

1) Organized labor. Yes, unions continue to dwindle, successfully neutered by aggressive bosses. But the desire for organization to humanize workplaces surges wherever and whenever it finds an opening. And most unionized workers are a progressive force, despite ugly exceptions like the cops.

And sometimes (cribbing from myself here) even national union leadership mobilizes its considerable remaining resources in defense of majority rule. In 2020, in the run-up to November 3, mass Zoom meetings of union staff and activists prepared for an attempt by Trump to steal the election. Union leaders aimed to create a disciplined cohort of leaders and members who could understand what was happening and be roused to turn out to defend the process. They never had to put the full plan into practice, but leaders of the hospitality union, UniteHERE, effectively protected the vote in contested Philadelphia by assembling a dance party in the streets around the count. They were ready to take to the streets in disciplined action.

2) Nonprofits. Yes, the non-governmental organization sector (the NGOs) is a morass of competing, overlapping, ideologically incoherent groups which sometimes amount to nothing more than tax shelters for the rich. Within this stew, however, people do experience community and develop bonds which are essential to engaged citizenship. The NGOs are the vessel for much progressive social capital; though the nonprofits, we channel our hope for better communities. Both Left and Right act through NGOs.

In 2020, various coalitions of progressive NGO forces sought to prepare for the worst. Alexander Burns described their preparations:

... Worried that Mr. Trump might use any unruly demonstrations as pretext for a federal crackdown of the kind seen last summer in Portland, Ore., progressives organized mass gatherings only sparingly and in highly choreographed ways after Nov. 3. In a year of surging political energy across the left and of record-breaking voter turnout, one side has stifled itself to an extraordinary degree during the precarious postelection period...

Stifling would not be the right course in James Meek's dystopian vision. Can the more functional NGOs get themselves together to lead disruptive, though tactically nonviolent, actions? The 2020 experience make this seem more possible than it might once have; for a season, the nonprofit activist sector resolved not to hang separately.

3) Democratic Party. Now there's a mess, too often a short-sighted aggregation of the mediocre and the power hungry -- except when it is something better. People who identify as Democrats really are a representative slice of the country's whole people, unlike Republicans who are becoming more and more just disgruntled, usually old, white people. In fortunate spaces and moments, the Democratic Party can be a vehicle for mass, principled activism: anyone remember Obama's 2008 campaign or notice the current Wisconsin Democratic Party trying to organize itself out of gerrymandered oblivion? Democrats can act as a mass progressive force when gifted with good leadership. And if we believe in democracy, the Democratic Party is what stands between us and white nationalist authoritarianism so we need to make the best of it. It is us, after all.

Enhancing any of these forces is doing the work of democracy in this embattled republic these days. And all of them have to be prepared to act if needed.

Blog hookie

We took advantage of this perfect summer day to walk the Tennessee Valley road.

There's big ocean out there.

 

Once upon a time, these quiet rocks were forced sideways and upright. They seem so solid. Yet where this land meets the sea, underlying faults are some of the most active in the world.

 

I'll return to regular commentary on "the condition our condition is in" tomorrow.

"Our honored dead" at the Golden Gate

The National Cemetery in San Francisco's Presidio is a quiet, peaceful place. The expanse of graves can can support a reflective silence.

Not so much so today. Memorial Day means a band concert and speakers.

In the older sections, there are rows on rows of headstone markers.

But no more are being added.

Following World War II, [the cemetery] was largely at capacity; new burials stopped in 1973, with the exception of family members who have an existing plot.

I guess the dead of our more recent wars go elsewhere.

The Office of San Francisco's Chief Medical Examiner called it "homicide"

William Jenkins from Mission Local summarized the account given by the San Francisco Police Department in a public meeting about how officers came to kill two apparently unhoused men. According to the cops, a woman called in to say one guy was beating on another. Twelve minutes later, some nine to eleven officers arrived at the scene.

To make the story short, both guys were on the ground; the reported scene: "Michael MacFiohnghain, age 57, is laying on his side holding a knife over 49-year-old Rafael Mendoza." 

Somehow all these heavily armed cops, hanging about for some nine minutes, bristling with "less lethal" armament and guns galore, were unable to end the altercation without shooting. Here's Jenkins" report of what the police department had to offer:

Footage from 11 different body cameras show officers aiming less-lethal weapons at the men, while one of the officers negotiated with MacFiohnghain, trying to convince him that all would be settled if he drops the knife.  

“I need you to drop the knife so we can sort this out okay? We’re not gonna shoot you.” 

Another officer responded with, “Drop the knife or we will shoot.” 

More than nine officers surround both men with weapons drawn, shields posted and pepper spray equipped. Officers repeatedly told MacFiohnghain to drop the knife, following up with a shot from a foam baton weapon.  

MacFiohnghain and Mendoza continued laying on the ground in the same position, while another officer sprayed MacFiohnghain with pepper spray.

 Also in the footage, an officer recognized Mendoza and mentioned he doesn’t speak English.

“We just booked him two weeks ago. He’s Cuban.” 

Officers initially believed Mendoza had a knife, but later they said MacFiohnghain had two knives. “Left side has two of them, hit him again,” said one of the officers. Three knives were found at the scene.  

“This is why we show all the videos because it shows perspectives of different officers,” said [Police Chief Bill] Scott. He also said that the California Department of Justice is still investigating which knives were used and how. [Were knives "used" at all? Not clear.]

Minutes before officers opened fire, one officer yelled “drop the knife” yet again while another said to the officers surrounding the men “there are too many guns, there’s too many.” He asked the officers to step back. 

The officers, however, stayed put with their weapons drawn, watching both men struggle on the ground. 

At approximately 8:10 p.m. after a roughly nine-minute struggle, MacFiohnghain suddenly climbed over the top of Mendoza and brought “the knife point downward towards Mr. Mendoza’s upper body,” Yep said. 

Shouts from the officers overlapped and began to mix as officers fired two more less-lethal rounds. “Within seconds, MacFiohnghain again brought the knife point up and then downward towards Mr. Mendoza in a stabbing motion at least two times while officers continued to give commands to drop the knife.” 

As MacFiohnghain apparently appeared ready to act, four officers opened fire. Three officers discharged their department issued handguns. A fourth fired a rifle.  

Yep said that the investigations team found 11 pistol casings and one rifle casing at the scene. 

While the smoke was still clearing, one officer mumbled “this is bullshit” while another calmed one of the officers who fired shots. 

... MacFhionghain died at the scene. Mendoza was taken to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where he later died. 

A report from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner sent to Mission Local on Wednesday reported that both men died from gunshot wounds and the report characterized both deaths as homicides.

How on earth could that many cops be fail to disarm two middle-aged men with knives without using bullets? I am tempted to conclude the problem was something like the Uvalde police contingent: they feared they might get hurt. 

If you are a better person than I, you can watch the complete video of the meeting from which this official police story of the killings derives, including edited and blurred body camera video. I admit, I skimmed. But given the long record of the SFPD of defending the indefensible, I won't be surprised if yet more incriminating details emerge with further investigation.

 

UPDATE: The Chron interviewed police practices experts who had viewed the body camera footage:

David Klinger, a former police officer and a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said there are important distinctions between the legal standard and successful policing.

“When something like this happens, it’s a failure,” he said. “It’s something that shouldn’t have happened, so we need to understand why.”

Neither Klinger nor other experts think the shooting cops will face legal charges in these two deaths.

A great divorce

Outside the NRA convention in Houston:

David Lauter explains in the Los Angeles Times:

Go back roughly 15 years: In 2005, California had almost the same rate of deaths from guns as Florida or Texas. California had 9.5 firearms deaths per 100,000 people that year, Florida had 10 and Texas 11, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Since then, California repeatedly has tightened its gun laws, while Florida and Texas have moved in the opposite direction.

California’s rate of gun deaths has declined by 10% since 2005, even as the national rate has climbed in recent years. And Texas and Florida? Their rates of gun deaths have climbed 28% and 37% respectively. California now has one of the 10 lowest rates of gun deaths in the nation. Texas and Florida are headed in the wrong direction.

David French has imagined how the gulf between the states might lead to a fictional CalExit via Joe Matthews:

It was gun violence that finally drove California to secede from the United States.

A series of mass shootings culminated in a savage, Columbine-style attack on a Sacramento-area school that killed 35 kids and two cops. The shooters used semi-automatic rifles and pistols with large-capacity magazines—weaponry that had been illegal in California until the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the state’s gun control laws. Californians raged that the justices—and the federal government—had effectively murdered their children.

That anger soon spiraled into a cold civil war, with California’s elected leaders openly defying federal officials and laws by outlawing most guns, and imposing a mandatory buyback. An authoritarian Republican president retaliated with an economic blockade of the state. After right-wing militias invaded the state and used Facebook Live to broadcast their massacre of California Highway Patrol officers enforcing state gun laws, California’s governor declared her intention to depart the Union, subject to the result of a referendum by voters. ...

Doesn't seem so farfetched after Uvalde,  does it?

Friday cat blogging

Janeway is taking her beauty sleep. I had better give up on getting up any time soon. It's her lap.

It's not those demanding workers who are driving inflation

This came along, shared by economic historian Adam Tooze:

The profit surge in the first phase of the COVID recovery only confirms the stark imbalance of our social conditions. The current debate about inflation and wage-price spirals is - more or less openly - a debate about whether that class balance might be about to shift. And if so, will that shift be merely temporary - an effect of labour market tightness for instances - or will the energy of a new generation of union organizers, impelled in part by rising prices, produce a more lasting rebalancing?

As the logic of capitalism dictates, entities with the power to do it are taking all they can get from an exhausted, restive populace. Might this situation stimulate more worker organizing? Workers deserve some too. And labor assertiveness seems the order of the day.

Time for some different Senators

In case you missed this, don't. Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr reacts to the Texas school massacre.

"Any basketball questions don't matter. ... there's 50 Senators who refuse to vote on a [gun purchase] background check measure ... and the reason they won't vote on it is to hold onto power."

Maybe not healing, but movement toward a different equilibrium

It's so obvious that the experience of the pandemic has left just about everyone spooked and perhaps a little nutty. Pauline Boss's little volume -- The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change -- speaks directly to a facet of what made the last two years so hard: so often the people who would have formed a support circle for sick people and for surviving loved ones couldn't be present with those who needed them. The horrible paradigmatic case is of couples and families who were kept from even saying goodbye to their dying members at the height of COVID infection fears. But all of us in our own ways lived with losses that couldn't be faced in the social ways we would have once thought only normal.

Boss' career and expertise is in helping people who've experienced the awful trauma which she named "ambiguous loss." In particular, she worked with people who lost family members in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center -- no bodies, no mementoes, just agonizing uncertainty that finally morphed into certainty. Loss of this kind has particular markers.

Ambiguous loss is neither a disorder nor a syndrome, simply a framework to help us understand the complexity and nuances of loss and how to live with it. My focus is on building resilience to live with and thrive despite a loss that can't be clarified. Here, resilience means increasing your tolerance for ambiguity. As a result of the great uncertainty that surrounded the COVID-19 pandemic, the ambiguous loss skyrocketed and left some lasting effects for us to deal with for years to come, as individuals and as a collective. ... 

... Wherever they are, I write for the millions who are still unmoored by their pandemic losses and want to make sense of them. With so many sickened and dead worldwide, we are just now emerging from this great shadow of death. Life will go on, but it will be different. It already is. We won't go back to the way we were because change is both needed and taking place. ... What helps? Letting go of the idea of closure and instead, finding meaning in our losses, thinking both/and about the positive and negative, and finally, risking change by doing something different. ..

In addition to our pandemic losses, Boss insists that in the last few years, many of us have also been trying to absorb heightened awareness of murderous white supremacy and of advancing climate collapse. No wonder as COVID recedes (we hope), many of us nonetheless feel unmoored, a little at sea. And we need to understand, according to this author, that "closure" is a myth.

In the popular vernacular, closure is unfortunately used to describe the ending of the grief that comes after loss. The assumption is that you'll be "over it," done with your sorrow once you have closure. Not true. ... What I have learned is that even with the most extreme cases of loss, having no closure doesn't have to be devastating. ... I saw repeatedly that keeping loved ones present in one's heart and mind, even after they have disappeared or died, helps on to hold the loss and its grief without seeking an absolute ending.  

... the cost of seeking closure is that it's impossible and thus saps our energy and distracts us from seeing other coping options that could lead to more emotional growth and resilience. The benefits of not seeking closure are many. ... without needing closure, we can feel more rooted in this world because we now see more than ourselves in it. We are genetically part of those who have gone before -- and thus part of the human species. With continuity instead of closure, we are not alone.

As most readers of this blog know, I'm not much for psychologizing. But I found Boss' little volume humane, compassionate, and wise. Like most of us, I've felt surrounded by losses in the last couple of disorienting years -- especially by too many deaths (though none from the coronavirus) -- most not marked as we would have in the before times. We need to be gentle with each other. Boss knows that.

Some smart advice to politicians

Don Moynihan is a scholar of how government actually works -- and doesn't. At Can We Still Govern?, he argues that Democratic politicians have lost track of how worthy programs they may set up fail in practice. And he suggests how to do better when it comes to cancelling student debt ...

At the broadest level the Obamacare and student loan examples underline that policymakers need to update their basic theories of how political acts generate political returns. In the most simple terms, the standard working theory seems to be: 

    •    Public benefits = recipient gratitude and goodwill 

If policymakers were to think more carefully about implementation, they would revise their working theory to be a bit more complicated: 

    •    Public benefits that are easy to get = recipient gratitude and good will
    •    Public benefits that are hard to get = much less gratitude and goodwill
    •    Promised public benefits that are impossible to get = backlash 

Biden is already going to face some backlash from those opposed to the idea of any type of student loan forgiveness. He should do all he can to avoid it from the people the program is intended to help.

If the Biden administration does cancel some student debt as promised in the 2020 election campaign, can they please demonstrate that they can do it without placing crazy burdens on the people who most need help?

Since the Clinton administration, Democrats have allowed themselves to be bullied by Republicans into creating endless procedural fences around the work of government support for the people. In consequence, too often government is appropriately despised by many recipients. But hardly anyone hates Social Security, or Medicare, or stimulus checks during the early COVID era. Government assistance can be made easy. And easy is the politic course of action.

Buffalo's racist massacre

The news cycle whirls on. But I'm not willing to let Black Buffalo's trauma be pushed out of mind by new horrors.

Fortunately, some news organizations are providing those of us at a distance a means to learn something from the Buffalo community torn apart by a white supremacist, a sick evil man with a big gun.

Most local TV news is a cesspool of over-hyped police procedural pseudo-drama. But this local reporter stumbled into evoking honest answers from a small gathering of auto workers near the massacre sight.

 

The clip is longer than I usually post here, but raw and necessary. These men have something to say. Bear with the dumb questions. The outrage in Buffalo is so strong, he gets answers.

This clip is shorter, more polished: community leaders make their pitch for what the Biden administration can do for the traumatized people. 

I can't testify that these are good organizations, but they seem to have at least some amount of ground level reality. Buffalonians will have to struggle to define what happens after this crime.

• Black Love Exists in the Rust: getting food and support into the community in partnership with Colored Girls Bike Too.

• Open Buffalo

• Voice Buffalo 

She's a fighter

Congresswoman Lucy McBath is not going to give in to a system that's been trying to kill her. In 2012, her son Jordan was murdered by a white man who didn't like his music. She has dedicated her life to ensuring that no parent has to feel the pain that she felt that day – and that she feels to this day. 

In this clip, she describes, in a Congressional speech, how anti-abortion laws and prejudices nearly killed her when she very much wanted her pregnancy.

McBath's anti-gun activism led her to run for Congress in an Atlanta suburban seat in 2018 -- and flip that seat without support from establishment Democrats.

After her two terms in Congress, Republicans are trying to get rid of this proud spokeswoman for the true life experiences of women. A Georgia gerrymander put her in a district with another Democrat (also a worthy Congresswoman). The primary is on Tuesday, May 24.

UPDATE: She won her primary this week.

Terrorism begets terror

It really is that simple. Washington Post reporter Clyde McGrady has shared an intimate story of what it feels like to have some random young white weirdo come gunning for your community.  People in the Buffalo Black community are reeling under the trauma of the massacre.

Some struggle to understand the motivations of the killer. Some feel their insides burn with rage. Others pray — for the victims, for the killer, that those contemplating retaliation will turn away from anger.

Tricia Grannum needed to pick up a prescription.

“I’ve never felt like this, going into a store,” she told her mother when she got home. “I’ve never felt scared to get out of a car.”

This is what terrorism does to people who have reason to fear they are not going to find any lasting support. That seems to be Buffalo.

Go read it all.

Also worth reading is Washington Post media correspondent Margaret Sullivan's account of what's so wrong in Buffalo. She knows much. She edited the local paper before becoming a national voice for journalistic integrity.

Friday cat blogging

Sometimes Janeway radiates a sense that we don't quite live up to her standards. What they are, I don't know. We're reliable providers of food, water, ear scratching, and laps for sleeping ... we don't play enough for her kitten persona, but this look is her adult persona.

Deadly stasis

“Buffalo is a powder keg,” said Franchelle Parker, executive director of Open Buffalo. “We can’t talk about what happened on Saturday as one isolated event. Buffalo has been a breeding ground for this type of situation to occur.”

Has so little changed since the 1960s? Apparently not. The massacre in Buffalo took place two miles from my childhood home. Not that, as a young person, I hardly ever ventured over there -- into east of Main Street, into darkest Buffalo where Black Buffalonians were corralled. 

Since the 1930s, Black neighborhoods have been ranked as financially unstable to dissuade lenders from approving Black homeowners for loans. This meant Black homeowners were subject to different procedures when purchasing a home, which restricted the flow of capital into Black neighborhoods and prohibited Black homeowners from buying in white neighborhoods—reinforcing segregation. 

The lack of access to loans also made it more difficult for Black people to open businesses and build wealth, sparking a downward spiral of disinvestment. Today, the impacts of segregation are clearly visible in the resources available in the city of Buffalo. Of the five major employment centers in Erie County, only one is located within the city of Buffalo, and there are 51 census block groups that have limited access to supermarkets. Every single one is located east of Main Street.

Even in my insulated white high school, I knew something should be done to break the pattern; I demonstrated with a fair housing outfit. It seems to still be operating, still a necessary cog in Buffalo's nonprofit industrial complex.

In those days there was hope of a sort. There was the civil rights movement in the South. There were somewhat organized community demands. There was the communal outpouring of frustration/rebellion in 1967.

By then I'd escaped to California. White Buffalo wasn't any place for a lefty lesbian feminist then -- or probably now.

The people east of Main Street have not escaped, nor can they, nor perhaps do they wish to. I've even known people who moved there for refuge -- where else in the 1990s could you find a house, however dilapidated, for under $10K? Maybe in some burned out section of Detroit -- there's a pattern here.

I just pray that the folks east of Main Street can leverage some of the attention the murderous white man with an AR-15 has brought to their community for some improvement, some hope.

COVID is becoming a killer of the young

I didn't know this. Apparently over the last year, COVID has been the leading medical cause of death in the United States among people under 55. Not chronic diseases, not suicide, or other gun episodes -- but COVID.

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According to Inside Medicine:

Many believe that Covid-19 is merely a cold for all young people and a death sentence for a handful of older folks who probably would have died around the same time anyway. 

That is wrong. 

We know there has been extraordinary “excess mortality”—that is more deaths than usual during the pandemic. It’s not just that people dying of cancer happened to have caught Covid in the last weeks of their lives. Rather, people are dying way early—sometimes months, but more often years and decades earlier than they otherwise would have. 

... What surprises many is just how many young and middle-aged adults have died. Nearly 250,000 people under the age of 65 have died of Covid-19 in the United States so far. Around 61,000 of these deaths were in people under the age of 50. 

Those of us 65 and older are 90% fully vaccinated in the United States. Covid can kill vaccinated people, but in the most part, serious outcomes -- deaths -- happen to unvaccinated people, who are largely younger.

• • •

We're very COVID conscious around here at the moment as a household member has tested positive. So far, so good here.

Hiding beneath the robes of a tame court?

California's Catholic bishops have run whining to the U.S. Supreme Court; the demonstrated deference the current justices show toward religious claims justifies my adjective in the headline. For these judges, the rights of religious institutions seem to override all other rights.

Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, CA

CalMatters explains the legal claim: 

Nine California Catholic dioceses and archdioceses have asked the nation’s highest court to review their case against a 2019 law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, which created a three-year window for survivors of childhood sexual abuse to file legal claims against alleged perpetrators at school, church or elsewhere, regardless of when the alleged abuse occurred. The law also allowed defendants to be sued for a new offense: “cover up” activity. 

In the April 15 petition, which was first reported last week by the Catholic News Agency, lawyers for the Catholic bishops assert the law is unconstitutional because California already gave victims a chance to sue in 2002 — when it opened a one-year portal for sex abuse survivors to file claims with no time limit attached — and because it retroactively adds new liabilities.

The Survivors Network (SNAP) is having none of it:

We are not surprised that Catholic officials in California are fearful of the lawsuits that allow those who have been time-barred from justice access to the courts.  These suits represent transparency and honesty and would make it far more difficult to pretend that their abuse scandal is a thing of the past. Window legislation is allowing thousands of victims of abuse by Catholic clergy, nuns, religious brothers, and laity to come forward and expose these crimes. 

It is our firm belief that many, many more survivors who have been abused in the 1990s or early 2000 have yet to realize the damage done to them and remain silent in their pain. We know that window legislation exposes both predators and the institutions that covered up these horrific crimes. 

We urge the Court to throw out this meritless challenge.... 

BishopAccountability.org collects documentation on the sexual abuse crisis. They currently report 29 U.S. Catholic dioceses and religious orders have filed for bankruptcy protection because of the claims of survivors. The one recent(ish) such filing from California was of the Diocese of Stockton in 2014.

Will the Supremes ensure this is the last such accountability event from California?