Quote for the End of a Difficult Year

Massive financial crashes always produce some inherent unfairness. For some reason, though, we were willing to overlook that unfairness when it was Wall Street that came begging, but became obsessed with it when all the rest of us came begging.

This is how 2008 radicalized me. It's one thing to know that the rich and powerful basically control things. That's the nature of being rich and powerful, after all. But in 2008 and the years since, they've really rubbed our noses in it. It's frankly hard to think of America as much of a true democracy these days.

--Kevin Drum, posted under "How 2008 Should have Radicalized Us All," Monday, 28 November 2011.

Police State?

Yes, I begin this post with a question mark, but a number of news stories over the past few months have made me wonder if I should follow such a phrase with an exclamation mark. The Occupy Wall Street movement has certainly brought the police force out in numbers in cities around our country. Yes, in Oakland, CA, a few fringe folks in a recent peaceful demonstration turned more violent, but the OWS movement is committed to peace. So why did the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security personnel infiltrate the Nashville, Tennessee OWS? 

Nashville's The Tenneseean obtained e-mails that reveal that State Highway Patrol troopers were taken off their highway duty to infiltrate Nashville's OWS. And one policeman revealed his own attitude in one of those e-mails: “If they start camping, I’m confident that a public health issue will soon develop...Then the Health Dept. can shut it down and we all look like the good guys.”

One Occupy Nashville protester wonders:  "My question in response would be : ‘Why are they messing with such a peaceful protest in such a warlike manner. Why declare war on peace?'"

This is what I think is the answer to that question: Too often it seems that the police have a pre-existing bias against groups that assemble to protest peacefully, especially if those groups are full of young people or minorities. And that attitude has been aided and abetted by Homeland Security. Ever since 9/11, police departments around the country have been highly weaponized, and I think this encourages a certain mindset--a tendency to use excess force in dealing with ordinary situations, of seeing the public as "them," even when the "them" is not much of a threat.

Just recently, a sheriff's office in Conroe, Texas, obtained an unmanned Shadowhawk helicopter that could carry a weapons payload. Yes, that's right--an unmanned drone with the potential to carry weapons. Why does Conroe, Texas, need an unmanned, weaponized drone? Nearby Cut-and-Shoot isn't that much of a threat, is it?

The drone can also look into people's backyards and has infrared capabilities to see into homes.

Police might have the best intentions, but even the best intentions can deteriorate into untenable consequences that challenge our civil rights--or worse.

Updates

• "But many law enforcement experts said Thursday that the officers' tactics appeared to be a severe overreaction." (Berkeley)-- "UC cops' use of batons on Occupy camp questioned," Will Kane, Demian Bulwa,  SF Gate, San Francisco Chronicle, 11 November 2011.

• "Portland Pepper Spray Incident Generates Iconic Occupy Photo," Las Angeles Times, 18 November 2011.

• "Pepper-Spray Brutality at UC Davis," posted on James Fallows' blog at The Atlantic,  19 November 2011.

• "#OccupyMissoula--Police Dropping Off Drunken, Hostile People," posted on Plutocracy Files 19 November 2011.  (h/t David Crisp)

• "How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police," Arthur Rizer and Joseph Hartman, The Atlantic 7 November 2011. (h/t James Fallows)

• "Turning Patrolmen into Soldiers: How did we let this happen?," posted on James Fallows' blog at The Atlantic, 21 November 2011.

Alone but not Lonely

This morning while struggling with the beginning of a scarf I'm crocheting for hire, I heard a hawk call, very close. I keep my binoculars in a basket near the sofa in our sunroom, along with Peterson's Eastern Birds, so I grabbed the binocs and headed out into the chill that a cold front had brought to south Louisiana. There was the hawk, circling in the sky, then plunging downward to perch upon the broken limb of a dead tree. Early this summer, a pair of hawks nested in the same area and watched over their juvenile's soaring and diving in this little patch of woods near a creek, just minutes from the paved parking lots of big box stores of the nearest town of any size.

I live in an old cottage in a small town, on a road that ends near a creek. My husband and I have bought two lots on this road, and we would buy a third if the price weren't so high and we weren't worried about what the economy will be like under the next president. These days, I want space between me and the next person; perhaps I'm becoming a misanthrope. Someone who saw photos of our house told me our house and property looked like a "retreat," and it is. It's a retreat for me--a retreat from a life where I had spent my working hours (not just in the office and in the classroom)  trying to help other people write better, think better, and understand the world better through reading, writing, and thinking; a retreat from a world where we are considered "consumers" rather than "citizens"; a retreat from those paved parking lots and all the stuff we're encouraged to buy to "keep our economy growing."

I like it here, especially in the fall and winter, when the air is cooler and drier, and especially here at my retreat, where I am alone most days, but not lonely.

I know that I should get a job; I'm only fifty-four (nearly), but I have yet to decide what I want to be in my old age. I know that I don't want to teach. I don't have the patience for it anymore. At one of the last universities where I taught, a student wrote on her evaluation of my teaching that she hated that I made her read about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 or about the ongoing genocide in Darfur, Sudan. As part of a research project, my students read an essay by Philip Gourevitch about the genocide, the public documents of a government review at the 10th anniversary of the horror, and contemporary news articles about the genocide in Darfur. This was at a Baptist University, where one would think the student population would have a deep concern about injustice in the world, but my student did not want to know and said so. Just a couple of years before, when I was teaching at a university in Georgia, my students viewed a collection of online photographs taken of people north and south of the Mexican/US border and then wrote about what they saw. One student told me that one difference between the people south of the border and north of the border was skin color. "Americans are white," she said.

No, I had more patience then, though it was wearing thin.

Here I watch the hawks, pet my cats, weed my gardens, and hope...hope that the economy doesn't tank any worse than it has already, that the person who gains the White House in 2012 won't lay off thousands of federal employees or dismantle the EPA or  de-fund education (I really don't want to be surrounded by more people such as the two students I've described above) or take away support from PBS (one of the few sources of real--and entertaining-- information these days, and much of it online) or abolish Net Neutrality. I guess that means I hope that a Republican doesn't win.

And I work at figuring out what comes next, in the afternoon of my life.  Lots to think about. No time to be lonely.

The Stupid, Stupid Scapegoating of Public Employees

So...evidently Mitt Romney has in this evening's debate of Republican presidential candidates claimed that he would "link pay of public employees to that of private-sector workers." However, as the writers at Think Progress point out, such a claim would actually require RAISING the pay of public employees. According to an article in the Washington Post, Saturday, November 5:

The federal government reported Friday that on average, its employees are underpaid by 26.3 percent compared with similar non-federal jobs, a 'pay gap' that increased by about 2 percentage points over last year while federal salary rates were frozen.

Got that, Mitt Romney, and all the other Republican talkingpoint-bots who like to scapegoat public employees? 

It's all just a diversion tactic--to get people to focus on what's NOT important and to forget what IS: the increasing income gap in this country, the over-weaning power of corporations, and unemployment.

Sick of Politics

In mid-September, my husband and I left for a two-week vacation, with Nova Scotia as our end destination. It was a great trip, in which we saw fossils of ancient trees in the cliffs near Joggins and the Bay of Fundy, watched humpback whales and porpoises up close, drove foggy roads along the Bay of Fundy, hiked in the rain, and viewed the land that my original Acadian ancestor farmed. What would my life be like now, I wondered, if the British hadn't ethnically cleansed the Annapolis Valley and the shores of the Bay of Fundy of French Acadians? What if Abraham Dugas' grandsons had remained instead of finding refuge in the swamps of Louisiana and then, later, the marshes of Anahuac and the Old and Lost Rivers of southeast Texas (where "Dugas" became "Dugat")? What would it be like to be Canadian now instead of American?

During our trip, I tried to stay away from the internet and the nastiness of our political discourse, but then one morning, a Canadian asked us at breakfast a question about our politics, and soon other people at the bed and breakfast were voicing their opinions, especially an ex-patriate from West Texas who had married a Canadian. Our hosts, however, were visibly silent; they were trying to sell their bed and breakfast so that they could spend their winters in Florida and their summers in Nova Scotia, untroubled by testy customers who wanted better views.

I was sick of politics. I just wanted a better view, not from my window but from my heart, a better view of humanity. History was not the place to find it, however. Abraham Dugas had never been compensated for the land confiscated to build a fort at what was then known as Annapolis Royal; his grandchildren were deprived of their cattle, the farmland they had improved, and their homes were burned; his descendants were transported to British colonies where many had to beg and where their daughters were taken away to work in the big houses of Protestants, where their language and their Catholicism were scorned.

Just the politics of kings: the strong taking from the weak. But how is that different from today?

It was the greediness of Wall Street--of banks and CEOs of corporations and financiers and politicians-- that brought our economy and the economy of the world to the brink of disaster, yet corporations continue to profit while laying off workers, politicians continue to cut deals, the banks are bigger, the CEOs who led those bloated financial institutions are not in jail but making more money than ever. So that's not the smoke of burning homes in the distance or of people loaded into ships with only the belongings they can carry, but, really, how different is it?

Mitt Romney can run for the highest office in the land of a democratic republic and tell voters that foreclosures should just be allowed to run their course. So what that people lost their jobs because Wall Street sold toxic derivatives and over-leveraged. So what that those people now can't keep up with their mortgages while looking for other jobs. Let those with money buy up those homes at rock-bottom prices and rent them out.  In other words, let the rich make more money off the losses and grief of the working and middle class. That's Romney's message to the people.

Or how about making federal employees scape goats for the economy? Mitt Romney, whom it is estimated to be worth up to $250 million, shows up at a steel fabrication plant, dressed in jeans and a plaid work shirt,  and tells the workers that government employees are "making a lot more money than we are." I'm married to a government employee, and, with a Ph.d., he still makes less as a government employee than he did working for a private non-profit and less (counting inflation) than he did working for a corporation over ten years ago. I bet you he makes less than some of those working in the steel fabrication plant.

Who does Mitt Romney think he's fooling? This is a man who made his fortune buying sinking corporations, laying off the workers, and re-selling what remained. And he's likely to be the Republican nominee for President of the United States.

What a joke. On us. The middle-class, the working class.

 Our houses are burning, our wealth confiscated, our voices silenced in a sea of political bullshit.