Teamwork

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I want to raise an important issue that’s been crowded out by the headlines.

Many people are upset about the whole idea of affirmative action or otherwise taking specific note of the needs of Black folk. For many, that seems completely new, like we never did that for anybody before. When I was a kid, the two parties in New York carefully balanced their tickets with Protestants, Catholics and Jews for statewide offices. To many, that seemed OK because everybody involved was “White” and only Blacks noticed their absence.  Few remember now that people had been referring to Jews, Italians and Irish as races, and Southern Europeans and semitic peoples were not the least shamed by their swarthy skin. The world changes – now everybody but Blacks are white and the Blacks are the new kids on the block.

Norman Rockwell did the famous Four Freedoms posters for American war bonds in World War II, and the iconic covers for the Saturday Evening Post, a national magazine, including the sweet picture of the doctor putting his stethoscope on a little girl’s doll. Rockwell also painted Moving Day, depicting the arrival of a moving truck with Black children and their baseball equipment opposite a group of similarly equipped white children, the two groups standing there not knowing what to say. “Play Ball” was the obvious answer.

Sports used to be about learning teamwork. We learned to cooperate, help each other for the sake of the team, and we did it together with kids of all backgrounds. I’ll never forget taking a cab with some friends to a demonstration in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City against the war in Vietnam. The cab driver was pretty obviously unhappy with us – he realized the four of us were carrying candles to light at a well-publicized demonstration. I remember turning the conversation to the Mets. The Mets had never made it out of last place, but this year, 1969, they were fighting for the championship. Mayor John Lindsay, was literally campaigning for re-election from the Met dugout. It seemed like the whole world was for the Mets – at least in New York City. The change on our taxi driver’s face was obvious – how could such nice Mets fans be against the war!

Some of you may remember Pee Wee Reese, the long time Brooklyn Dodger shortstop and captain. In 1947, when the Dodgers brought Jackie Robinson up as the first Black major league ballplayer of the twentieth Century, some Dodgers groused about having to play with a Black man. Reese got up at a team meeting and told his teammates they weren’t going to win in spite of Jackie – they were going to win because of Jackie. In fact, the Dodgers became the dominant team in the National League for the rest of Jackie’s career. As Jackie aged and skills declined, a Dodger manager benched him, but the team played poorly. It fell to Reese to tell their manager his teammates wanted Jackie on the field. Jackie was restored to the lineup and the Dodgers won the pennant again.

Sports matters and teamwork matters, and it matters to America. We cannot make a greater America by fighting and killing each other, by wasting our energies kicking each other off the team of America the way that white supremacists want us to do. We can only destroy the country we love.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on April 19, 2022.

Tired of Texas

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First, they separated from Mexico because Mexico banned slavery. Then they tried to leave the U.S. when Lincoln was elected president because he hated slavery. Then they committed treason in 1861, seceding and making war on the U.S. Now there’s a Texas Nationalist Movement that wants to secede again, denying the treason in secession. Treason or not, I say get out. Texas has never been an honorable member of the United States. Their first principle has always been that white Texas men are entitled to injure others with everything from guns to slavery, segregation, the subjugation of women and labor policies that turn workers into peons. Let’s retroactively accept Texas’ secession. The Union will be better without them.

Texas leads the movement to prevent women from controlling their own bodies. In Texas it’s OK to force women to bear children so they become dependent on and can’t leave their oppressors. The rotten court that calls itself Supreme won’t help. Women will have to be airlifted out of Texas to states which care about protecting women instead of subjugating them and their bodies to the will and whims of Texas men.

And Texas is trying to corrupt elections for the whole country. As far as Texas is concerned, if you’re poor, Black or a person of color, don’t bother to vote – they’ll do everything they can to stop you. That can change the complexion of the House, Senate and White House. They’re trying to assert the right not only to control people in their own state but to control all of us from Texas. Kick them out before they destroy the country more than they already have.

There’s no justice in Texas. Sandra Bland is dead in a Texas prison because “It was not a model traffic stop.” To protest that an armed policeman is denying you your rights as a human being and an American citizen is “not a model traffic stop.” Worse, it justifies imprisonment and a staged “suicide.”

Texas denied American citizens their rights by withholding their birth certificates until 2015 when a lawsuit forced it to provide birth certificates to children born in Texas.

Then there are their governors and candidates for president. Perry. Bush. Abbott. Need I say more? I’m getting tired of Texas. Let’s reconsider their secession. They’re obviously not patriotic Americans. Let them go.

Even better: the President and the Senate have the treaty power under Art. II, sec. 2 of the U.S. Constitution. A treaty with Mexico could give Texas back. Think that could only be to settle a war? Fine. We could make a sham war with Mexico equivalent to Texas’ sham prison suicide of Sandra Bland, and settle it by transferring the state back. That would be good for Mexico, and good for America.

There’s another option – one they’re really afraid of. We could have federal registrars register  their undocumented citizens to vote and take over Texas. Then when the rebels fly their true Confederate colors over the weapons of their racist army, we could send the Grand Army of the Republic back to Texas, where it served until prematurely withdrawn in 1876, and drive those rebels into the Gulf. That’s a dream devoutly to be wished.

I’m just tired of Texas. Let’s get rid of it. OK, there’s no way, and I’ll never get a spot on Comedy Central. But I do deny the patriotism and human decency of Texas’ bigots. I’m truly tired of Texas.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on September 28, 2021.

The Stress of Race

There’s a moment when we first experience race. As a kid, I remember reading something about my team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, that described a player, not a star, but a good ballplayer, in a hotel room, trying to rub the black off his skin. That image was deeply disturbing. Even as a kid I understood or maybe what I read explained the deep hurt that racism inflicts.

I tried to find the story for this commentary and found a story about Charles Thomas, a Black teammate and lifelong friend of Branch Rickey when they both played for Notre Dame. It seemed different from what I remembered. My old memory may have merged with the Charles Thomas-Branch Rickey story but I suspect it was a common experience, one that made some of the first African-American fortunes in cosmetics and hair straighteners.

Risks in dealing with cops and white people are a constant fact of Black life. The Warren Court, that’s right, the Warren Court decided cops could stop and frisk people without what the constitution requires for a seizure or arrest. That meant all hell could and did break loose. Almost anything an African-American did or does can look suspicious to a cop – putting keys in one’s door, a kid running when an officer appears (actually quite a reasonable response), driving a nice car, or reaching for something in the car (even in response to a request from a cop), jogging in a white community, looking “furtive” (whatever that means) or standing together on a street corner – ambiguous actions that wouldn’t look troubling when whites do it, but combined with common prejudices become lethal suspicions. Blacks are left trying to prove discrimination, that authorities wouldn’t do that to whites. Good luck. Even when African-Americans prove discrimination, the Supreme Court says so what!

The Civil Rights Movement and the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King scared whites. Blacks were lynched for over a century, whole Black communities were burned to the ground and the people in them killed as in the notorious Tulsa massacre. Not to mention the Klan’s reign of terror on Blacks and their supporters before and during the Civil Rights Movement. But once whites were scared, everything else disappeared.

We don’t know from our own experience that African-Americans are regularly pulled over without reason. Most assume that cops have good reason to pull someone over. As a lawyer who worked in and for the Black community, I knew that was nonsense. But if you’re not there when it happens, how would you know? When a cop shoots a Black, how would a white know what happened unless someone takes a video from beginning to end? Are you going to believe a cop or an African-American? Judges will tell you that cops do not have a good reputation for honesty. And cops have told many of us in the law straight out that they violate the law and lie about it. It’s obvious when they repeatedly use stories that already passed judicial muster. They study the decisions and learn what to say. As one judge told me, we don’t know when they’re lying.

So just being Black on the street in America can be very stressful. No wonder, and how sad, that those young men were trying to rub the color off their skin, and that it became important to say that black is, in fact, beautiful.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on June 8, 2021.

To prevent a coup – strengthen the military spine

Two weeks ago, I commented about Jefferson’s fear of a presidential coup. Last week I spoke about using nonviolent methods to prevent a takeover by the incumbent president, who told Chris Wallace on Fox that he might not leave the White House if he loses the coming election. Afterward, I expressed my concerns and showed a copy to Ian Shapiro, a friend and polymath who’s done brilliant work on both foreign and domestic policy. He sent me back a portion of his new book on economic insecurity, The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It. I quickly realized we were approaching the same problem from different angles. Insecurity makes people want to believe that Trump is leading them to better days. And getting Ian’s message across will help protect us against a presidential takeover.

The Army is a crucial player in any takeover. American military tradition is stanchly against political activity and devoted to defending the Constitution. There would be great resistance at all levels to using the military politically, especially to end politics by takeover. And because the military contains a large cross-section of America, we all influence it. Military diversity makes it harder to unite on unauthorized, unpopular activities in conflict with American military tradition, especially if they depend on secret planning.

But presidential takeovers in other countries force us to the sobering realization that a perverted commander-in-chief can pervert the military, given enough time. That makes all the work we’re doing to prepare for this election crucial to prevent White House treason – even though he’s talked about it openly. Concerted opposition to Trump and to takeovers, expressed in a vigorous campaign, make it less likely that the military will participate in a coup.

But outside the military, Trump has been constructing other forces which respond to him – using or threatening to use the National Guard, border guards and other armed federal agents in Portland[1] and elsewhere to stir up trouble where peace had reigned. Even more serious are the private militias that conduct their own training with their own arsenals. The great bulk of domestic terrorism has come from those groups. Instead of fidelity to the Constitution, they aim at violently defeating American government in order to achieve undemocratic aims in conflict with the Constitution and the law. Some American elections have been overturned by force of arms.

Unreconstructed admirers of Civil War secessionists would gladly reverse the results of the Civil War. Guns and racism have become closely entwined. Gun shows and private militias confront us with a plethora of racist and conspiracy theories making the point.[2] Their treasonous impulses fuel my strongest objections to gun rights today – guns are not being used for self-defense but for calculated murder, intimidation and political takeover.[3]

Trump’s outrageous racism and complements to racist killers are obvious efforts to get those armed but irresponsible groups behind him, ready to function as a palace guard to keep him in office regardless of the election. Private militias, like gangs and criminal cartels are dangerous because they oppose democracy, are divorced from national values, and expect to gain from violence. Instead of respecting peaceful demonstrations, they’ve spawned provocateurs in places like Portland, to give Trump an excuse for shutting democracy down. They and their standard-bearer in the White House must be stopped. And we have to keep up the fight for government of, by, and for the people.

[1] Washington Post Blogs, A violent send-off on feds’ final night at Portland courthouse, July 31, 2020 Friday 12:07 AM EST

[2] John A. Wood, THE PANTHERS AND THE MILITIAS (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002); Kenneth S. Stern, A FORCE UPON THE PLAIN: THE AMERICAN MILITIA MOVEMENT AND THE POLITICS OF HATE (Norman: U. Okla. Press, 1997); Southern Poverty Law Center, “Terror From the Right: Plots, Conspiracies and Racist Rampages Since Oklahoma City,” http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/publications/terror-from-the-right (visited Jan. 23, 2014).

[3] Stephen E. Gottlieb, Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and the Breakdown of American Politics 173-77 (NYU Press, 2016).

Our Umpteenth Effort to End Racial Murder and Abuse

I wanted to deliver this last week but Trump’s use of the military against domestic protestors had me fear for the future of our republic and I put this off.

But I want to talk about these horrible scenes of murder of African-Americans by police. People killed who posed no threat, where the police had everything well under control, and it wasn’t even clear if the victim had done anything meriting police attention, let alone murder. Breonna Taylor, an EMT, was killed in her bed in Louisville.

This reminds me of the Civil Rights Movement I grew up with. People in prayer outside boards of election that wouldn’t let them register. 14-year- old Emmet Til killed on a visit to Mississippi relatives, accused of whistling at a white woman. Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights worker shot in her car. Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, an integrated trio of civil rights workers, released by police in front of thugs who followed, murdered and buried them where they were not expected to be found.

The murders and lynchings stayed in front of our eyes until we hurt, just as we are hurting for George Floyd, choked to death in Minneapolis; Walter Scott, over a brake light in Charleston, SC; Ahmaud Aubrey, killed for jogging while Black in Georgia; Tamir Rice, a twelve-year old, in Cleveland; Stephon Clark, killed for holding a cell phone in his grandmother’s Sacramento backyard;  Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.; Eric Garner, in Staten Island; Tony McDade in Tallahassee; and Trayvon Martin, a teenager, killed by a neighborhood vigilante who thought he didn’t belong, compounded by the jury’s acquittal. Their stories, and so many more, are unacceptable. The police are supposed to protect us. But they kill too. African-Americans have learned not to call the police in order to protect their own families. I can’t forget the acquittal of four officers here in Albany for killing Amadou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant, in a barrage of forty-one shots for trying to put a key in his door.

The U.S. Supreme Court enabled a century of lynching in 1876 by holding that a U.S. Attorney had no authority to prosecute the perpetrators of the Colfax Massacre.[i] After that, police and the Klan, which also infiltrated the FBI, acted with impunity in much of the country. The Court now does its best to restore the worst abuses of that century of intimidation and impunity.[ii] I recently worked on a brief in support of the family of a Mexican boy, in a cross-border shooting by American officers for playing too near the border. The Supreme Court protected his killer. As Pete Seeger asked, “When will it ever end”?

And yet we can’t get tired, we can’t stop, we can’t let all the abuses this country has tried to stop elsewhere define life for a third of our citizens at home. No one is free when anyone is in chains. I don’t want to have the deaths of thousands of decent people on my conscience. I don’t want my darker skinned friends, colleagues, clients, neighbors, essential workers, athletes, entertainers or any other good people and their families having to worry day and night about eluding people who want to kill them or think they aren’t worth living?

When Yugoslavia started to come apart, we had an exchange student living with us who was from Belgrade. She cried about what was happening to her country – the whole country, Yugoslavia. There was intermarriage, friendship, strong neighborhoods, business partnerships, and none of that protected people. When things start to fall apart, there is no safety. We need to stand up for decent people of all backgrounds. And remember that none of us and none of those dear to us are safe when shooters are empowered, with or without a badge.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on the WAMC Northeast Report, on June 30, 2020.

[i] LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (Oxford Univ. Press 2008); Charles Lane, The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction (Henry Holt & Company 2008); and United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876), the case that turned a massacre into a century of intimidation and impunity.

[ii] Stephen Gottlieb, Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and the Breakdown of American Politics 189-208 (2016).

To Reinvent the Cops, Disarm Them

The Governor wants us all to reinvent policing in our own communities. Let’s pull that apart. He wants each separate community to have a conversation about policing and reset everything. Sounds good. Community is a lovely warm word. But I think the reality is a lot different than it sounds.

Lots of folk assume what academics say is just theory. But the difference is addition. Academics add up all the examples. They take what Google calls the satellite view. They don’t necessarily interview people like cops and lawyers. They want the big picture – what’s happening. And when you do all the examples and add it up, what you discover are vast numbers of communities engaged in keeping everybody else out – using everything from acreage requirements to zoning. So, Governor, are you telling us all to rebuild segregation by having each of our communities use policing to keep everyone else out? “Looks like he doesn’t belong here; get rid of him.” Some communities will try to protect everyone, but they’ll be surrounded by rules and cops that say keep out.

So I don’t expect anything constructive to come out of the Governor’s mandatory conversations. Breaking us down into our little private sanctuaries, the game is already stacked.

Forgive me for repeated something I’ve said before, but guns should need an excuse and a warrant before they’re pulled out in public, because guns make bullies of us all. My cure for police misbehavior? Firearms aren’t always used, but to change the culture, to motivate people to use their heads, I’d put an unarmed force between the police and the public and call for arms only when necessary. Guns and ammunition can do a lot of harm – even if only by intoxicating the officers with a sense of power.

An unarmed force would need to use their heads, to de-escalate conflict instead of aggravating it with belligerent language and a show of force.

I was asked to speak to a group of high school students alongside a policeman about relations with the cops. He told them to show respect and everything would be OK. What about the adult? The police also have an obligation to show respect for people, old and young, upset or calm. Those guns make bullies of us all – cops included.

I have no objection if the cops think wireless video connections should be provided so the department could rush help if there really is any danger. But a video stream would be more effective than a gun in convincing people to cool it. I’d put officers on the street without their guns.

I helped do a memorial for a friend a few years ago – we were both on the NYCLU Board when Jerry died. Forty years before that he was in charge of a group of attorneys in Mississippi during Freedom Summer 1964. A historian, Thomas M. Hilbink, had done a study of that group of lawyers and, reading his paper while preparing for the memorial, I discovered that Jerry had been in numerous life or death situations. Down there, by the way, the police were closely allied with the Klan. But Jerry came back healthy and strong – one of the best litigators the Civil Liberties Union had. He used his head. He de-escalated. And he protected everyone working with him.

OK, Jerry was extraordinary. So was Mississippi that summer. Jerry was truly brave, not just filled with the bravery of firearms. And he wasn’t so foolish as to pack or pull heat.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on June 16, 2020.

Cops, Blacks, Presidents and Stereotypes

After practicing law, it’s hard to stick to stereotypes about people, whether the police, the looters, whites, presidents or anyone else. Lawyers see the best and the worst, Mother Teresa and Jack the Ripper. The good and bad aren’t predictable.

We have lots of stereotypes about African-Americans. I’ve worked in and for the Black community but I’ve never met the stereotype. Instead I’ve gotten to know a lot of wonderful people at all levels of American society.

Police? Actually I think the police are like rest of us in all other walks of life, comprised of everyone from the best to the worst. We stereotype the police. Since they’re brave, we stereotype them all as good people. Americans don’t like to call people they despise brave, but if risking death is brave, the cops share that honor with lots of the people they pursue – gangsters, gang members and terrorists. So it’s pretty obvious that I don’t see the connection between bravery and decency. There are police who heroically track down dangerous people and rescue the innocent. But there are other police convicted of everything from fraud to the murder of women and children as well as unarmed and peaceful African-Americans.

Presidents? It had to happen that we would have one who’d try to preserve his power against the wishes of the American people. He fans the flames and encourages chaos so that he can gather the military and pretend to put out fires that he fanned, using the military against domestic dissent. He stripped many of the finest military men from command to quote “work” in his White House, and when they discovered they could not behave intelligently and patriotically they resigned. Monkeying with military leadership is dangerous. And Trump is using his die-hard armed supporters with their “Second Amendment rights” as Storm Troopers in disguise. It couldn’t be clearer that he wants to become dictator. That’s the route they take – encourage violence, create chaos and then pose as the savior.

The men who created our country knew that power corrupts. They made no assumptions but tried to create checks and balances to counter against the certainty that it would happen. They didn’t figure out how to control the Senate before it made a mockery of the impeachment process. Yes, he’s guilty of lying and a cover-up, but no matter, that’s not serious enough. Is abandoning world leadership to the Russians and Chinese disloyal enough? Is a daily string of lying to the American people and making up fake quote “facts” serious enough? Is threatening insurrection with what he refers to as “Second Amendment rights” serious enough? Is there a Second Amendment right to storm state houses and threaten governors with their weapons? Is that serious enough? Is trying to poison Americans with fake so-called “cures” serious enough? Is the slaughter of a hundred thousand Americans because he dithered in dealing with disease serious enough?

Yes, along with decent and heroic officers, there are some who are intoxicated by the power of their weapons, corrupted by their stereotypes of African-Americans, and protected by a culture of silence and solidarity. But their faults are encouraged by a pretender in the White House for whom nothing is too much to keep him in power.

No Time for Moderates

We’re suffering a worldwide attack on tolerance, the brotherhood and sisterhood of all peoples, and the principles of democracy and equality that make it possible to share the country and much of the globe in peace. The results, from Brexit to White Nationalism, the resurgence of Nazism in Europe, intolerance in India and China and ethnic warfare over the scraps of economic failure endanger us all. America, founded on tolerance, equality and democracy, should be leading the world out of this dangerous morass instead of smoothing the path to hell.

Commentators have long seen and feared the separation of national politics from the needs of the great mass of working people. Both national parties partook of that separation. Republicans revere Reagan but he crippled the unions, the organizations of working men and women. And claiming that government is the problem, not the solution, Reagan crippled efforts to address their problems. Democrats followed national economic trends without paying enough attention to the dislocations among working people. That combination made white working people feel left out, instead of uniting us in pursuit of a better world for everybody.

That’s recent history. Much further back, Alexis de Tocqueville, famous French nobleman, toured the U.S. in the 1830s and had the genius to see far into this country’s future. Tocqueville told us that democracy required widespread economic well-being.  The very first paragraph of the U.S. Constitution talks about the “general welfare” but many poo-poo it as merely precatory language, not authorizing government to take care of the people. Those who poo-poo that language think the Constitution is merely about freedom from government rather than the creation of a government capable of providing for the people. Their misreading of history is perverse and dangerous.

Seymour Martin Lipset, one of the twentieth century’s great political scientists, pointed to the world-wide connection between democracy and economic welfare. Germany, which had been a great economic power, lost its illustrious and democratic Weimar Constitution after going through economic hell between the world wars.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told America that he was saving capitalism by protecting the great mass of Americans from the ways capitalism went awry. The big shots of industry couldn’t understand that their behavior wasn’t sacrosanct. They couldn’t understand that capitalism too has to operate by standards of ethics and principles of sharing. Roosevelt was the architect of American economic success for the next half century precisely because he put in place the rules by which it could operate for the benefit of the entire country, not merely the captains of industry and finance. We have forgotten and dishonored Roosevelt’s legacy of making government serve the people. He rescued this country from the Great Depression, “promote[d] the general Welfare,” as the Constitution provided, and set the country on a sound economic keel, a legacy that would honor any leader.  Fools now sneeze at his accomplishment so they can promote something new – poverty for all.

There’ve been plenty of warnings. Now we have a chance. It’s not enough to beat Trump. We need a victory for the principle that everyone counts and everyone needs to be protected. It doesn’t matter whether it’s called “socialism” or something else. The idea that it’s a bad idea to take care of each other has got to go – permanently – and all the conservative nonsense about the damage of helping each other. Either we care for each other or we will suffer a war of all against all regardless of what you call it – fascism, communism, totalitarianism – the results won’t be good for anyone except the oligarchs.

Forget “moderate” Democrats. If “radical” describes the philosophy of taking care of each other, we need it NOW. Bless all the people with the decency and humanity to care about their neighbors, fellow citizens and fellow human beings. The blessed are those who care.

– This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, May 28, 2019.

Guns make bullies of us all

We often use the tool at hand for whatever we’re trying to do. Got aspirin or alcohol? Drink it down ‘cause everything feels like a pain. Got a wrench? Everything looks like a pipe. Got a hammer and everything looks like a nail. Pete Seeger sang If I Had a Hammer he’d have used it to hammer out justice. It’s a wonderful song but it seems like the wrong tool.

Some of you may remember the late Congressman Steve Solarz. We went to high school together and I always remember a conversation we had about brotherhood – in student government I headed the brotherhood commission. Steve understood my passion and commented we can’t hammer brotherhood into people. Indeed, we can’t. Instead I had the privilege of inviting Jesse Owens to our school and introducing him to the assembly. Owens, an African-American, had won four medals at the 1936 Olympics in front of the Nazis in Berlin, Germany. We gave him our brotherhood award and then had the privilege of hearing him deliver an impressive and very powerful talk about brotherhood – a great alternative to using a hammer.

In the afternoon before I drafted this commentary, I read about a recent incident of abusive policing in Albany. In the evening, my email was filled with a discussion among law professors about an example in Louisville. Look at Washington and see international sabre-rattling. I looked over some draft commentary and read one about Israel’s reliance on force. And I realized there is a theme. Everybody has the same hammer with a barrel and a trigger. Much too often, from Albany to Louisville to Israel, the Philippines and many other places, the people with the guns don’t bother using their heads or their manners. They don’t have to. Them guns ‘ll make people shut up.

I don’t want to be simplistic about it. Policy changes often lead to overreaction. Focusing on domestic law enforcement, the public somehow has to support the police while also controlling it.

Nevertheless, mappingpoliceviolence.org/ tells us “There are proven solutions. Police Departments that have adopted these use of force policies kill significantly fewer people. But few departments have adopted them.”

Of course, if we could hang them up or put them away except when necessary, we could eliminate a lot of mistaken killing of innocent and unarmed people. There’s lots that police do that don’t call for guns.

Guns also don’t belong in cities. It’s one thing to use a gun for hunting but it’s another for people like George Zimmerman to think they are protecting the community by carrying a gun and killing an unarmed 17-year-old African-American who was heading away from, not toward, Zimmerman.

Guns do not belong in the hands of people who are convicted of domestic violence or any other kind of violence – only the manufacturers could truly like selling guns to people likely to use them on their families. Guns enable people to act out their worst instincts.

I support the Second Amendment right to carry a muzzle-loading-single-shot-18^th-century device deep in the woods. That’s the strict construction that conservative judges have been trying to teach us to use. Claims about the breadth of the Second Amendment come from people’s prejudices, not the Constitution. Guns should need an excuse and a warrant before they are pulled out in public because guns make bullies of us all.

— Addendum – four excellent podcasts and web sites:

Shots Fired Part 1: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/shots-fired-part-1

Shots Fired Part 2: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/shots-fired-part-2

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

http://useofforceproject.org/#project

— This commentary is scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, April 9, 2019.

Democracy Needs Generosity

What’s wrong with our politics is its too common don’t-tread-on-me selfishness.

“What’s-in-it-for-me” politics in the early republic held up roads, canals and other internal improvements for decades until we learned to share. Democracy needs some generosity.

After 9/11, Congress passed appropriations for local safety and security. I spoke with a former congressman from this area about New York City’s share. He responded about his district’s various rural areas. I pointed out that the people in his district had important ties to New York City – family or friends there for jobs or schools. Others with close business ties. He responded that he hadn’t thought of that. Frankly that’s what’s wrong with our politics. We need to think about what binds us together instead of what splits us apart. And yes, even the subways New York City depends on. If we starve the subways because it’s there, not here, we starve ourselves; and vice versa.

The same connections are true of our ethnic, racial, religious and gender groups. Some hate paying for anyone else’s schooling. Yet it’s even costlier to clean up after or imprison people who’ve never been given the tools to pull their weight in society.

Should God forbid equalizers like Social Security or Obamacare, though they’re cheaper than the costs imposed by inequality?

The alt-atrocious white supremacists would give us a war of all against all, which makes only corpses and refugees, leaving no one safe – not supremacists, minorities, family, men, women or children.

Since Revolutionary America, colleges kept inviting broader, more diverse groups of students in order to sustain themselves. Industry learned production required people working together regardless of language or faith. Commercial firms learned that lesson to sell their products. The military learned that successful missions required soldiers to support each other regardless of color, origin, language, faith or sexual orientation. Whenever diversity looked problematic, it ended by strengthening American institutions.

America IS great, not in spite of diversity but because of it. Our ideals have led Americans to work well together. The lesson of brotherhood has been our great strength.

Meeting and introducing my classmates to an African-American Olympic champion who won four medals in front of a fuming Hitler did me no harm. Befriending fellow law students from every faith and continent hurt none of us! Just the contrary as we became comfortable with and learned from each other. Perhaps the biggest lesson we all learned is that both lovely and nasty people come in all colors, cultures and tongues.

Climate change, terrorism, threats of war, and economic collapse truly threaten to embitter our lives. Pulling together will be essential to combatting them. Prejudice is a distraction and an obstacle. No children should be left behind. We all have to take care of each other. From federal workers to the homeless, we all have to take care of each other.

Remember President Kennedy’s call: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Some of what we do has to benefit others. Without sharing the gains, there may be no gains to share.

The second President Bush turned Kennedy on his head. He wanted us to counter terrorism by shopping. Bush’s vision was victory without blood, sweat, tears, money or sacrifice. After all we’re number 1. But that’s a fantasy. People unwilling to take pains for the benefit of America and its democratic inheritance cannot enjoy its gains.

It’s broader than that. We must care about the welfare of the European Union, Mexicans, Hondurans and each other, or reap the whirlwind.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, January 22, 2019.