Tag Archives: #TheResistance

Boiling Frogs

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Barbed Wire. Photo by Javardh on Unsplash

Some 20 years ago, I came upon an online article by an elderly German man, responding to a question those of his generation were often asked – “How could you let the Holocaust happen?”

He said it came about over time, in incremental steps – like the old story of boiling a frog by turning the heat up slowly. “There was never a single incident so different from the ones that proceeded it that large numbers of people had a reason to take to the streets…By the time rumors of a ‘final solution’ reached us, we were too dispirited and fully compromised.”

Ten months ago, Ben Ferencz, age 99, the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials, called the Trump administration’s family separation policy, a “crime against humanity.”

“It’s a crime against humanity. We list crimes against humanity in the Statute of the International Criminal Court. We have ‘other inhumane acts designed to cause great suffering.’ What could cause more great suffering than what they did in the name of immigration law?” Common Dreams, August 8, 2018

The administration’s chaos style of governance effectively pushed the issue out of mind through its regular deluge of outrageous acts. Fortunately, one clueless administration lawyer may have turned the heat up too high by claiming that it is “safe and sanitary” to deny soap and toothbrushes to immigrant children, and have them sleep on concrete floors under bright lights (1). This appears to have set off a firestorm of outrage – hopefully enough to to spur some action.

Here are some links to various takes on the situation, beginning with some concrete suggestions on what concerned people can do to #CloseTheCamps:

What You Can Do to Close the Camps.

AOC’s Generation Doesn’t Presume America’s Innocence.  Argues that the right fears naming the concentration camps for what they are because only “bad countries” have concentration camps.

An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That’s Exactly What the US is Running at the Border. “Many of the people housed in these facilities are not “illegal” immigrants. If you present yourself at the border seeking asylum, you have a legal right to a hearing under domestic and international law.”

America Was Never Great. Behind the Flag is a Harrowing History. The shadow cannot be ignored if an individual, an organization, or a nation is to grow.

A Firsthand Report of Inhumane Conditions at a Migrant Children’s Detention Facility

Detained Migrant Children Denied Adequate Food, Water, and Sanitation in Texas.

If Your Church is Silent Right Now, You Should Leave it.

Signs of difficult times

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March for Science, Sacramento, CA, April 22, 2017

It’s clear that a war for the soul of the nation is underway. The March for Science on Saturday reminded us that the stakes are even higher than that. I snapped this photo because I liked the right-hand sign, “Science – Because you can’t just make shit up.” Only later did I notice the sign to the left – “All Life on the Planet is Counting on US.”

That evening, I noticed a Denver Post article: junior Trump is off to Montana to help a GOP special election candidate by joining him in a prairie dog hunt. Greg Gianforte, the congressional candidate said, “What can be more fun than to spend an afternoon shooting the little rodents?” Apparently, real men think it’s fun to kill the animals during the season when the females nurse their young.

Prairie dogs are considered “agricultural pests,” and ranchers kill them because they damage crops. They are, however, listed as “a species of concern” by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks because their numbers are in decline.

The Humane Society of the United States has condemned the hunt, noting that prairies dogs are a key species in the ecology of the great plains, and “more than 100 other animals depend on the prairie dog as food or move into the burrows they dig.”

In response to HSUS concerns, congressional-hopeful, Gianforte says, “Clearly they’ve never shot a prairie dog. They don’t know how much fun it is.”

Think about that. Think about Gandhi’s words, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

Gianforte’s opponent in the May 25 special election is Rob Quist, a popular musician. Who would you rather have in congress – who is more likely to move our country to greatness – a creative artist or someone who thinks killing small creatures is fun?

There are likely to be opportunities for online contributions to Quist’s campaign as the election approaches. I plan to give as much as I can.

The current president and all of his minions and congressional lapdogs represent the greatest threat to the physical, spiritual, and ecological health of this nation of my lifetime. Nothing is more important than resisting their agenda as vigorously as possible and removing them from office as soon as we can.

Notes from 2017 – A Funeral in India

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Friends, family, and Indian government ministers at funeral rites for Srinivas Kuchibhotla in Hyderabad, India

Friends, family, and Indian government ministers at funeral rites for Srinivas Kuchibhotla in Hyderabad, India

Yesterday, hundreds of mourners held funeral rites for Srinivas Kuchibhotla, a 32 year old Indian software engineer who had called the United States home for ten years. A week ago, a man with with a history of alchohol problems yelled, “Get out of my country,” then shot Kuchibhotla as he watched a basketball game in a crowded bar in Kansas City. The shooter then wounded Kuchibhotla’s friend and a bystander who tried to disarm him. He reportedly told the bartender, “I killed two Arabs.”

In our recent presidential election, we didn’t just vote for candidates, we voted for their stories – both the stories they told and the stories told about them. The winning story played on our fears: the world is a dangerous place. Murderers, rapists, and terrorists are coming to get us. Other countries are “stealing our jobs.” We must close our borders, expel foreigners, hunker down, look after number one, and trust “a strong man.”

Stories can kill. People kill each other and go to war over stories. The narrative of hate that infected this country during last years election continues to grow and appears to have been a factor the Kansas City shooting.

The shooter didn’t just rob a family of their son. He didn’t just arouse the wrath of one of our key allies against us. He helped sink our nation’s prospects in the new century. He hammered a big nail into America’s rapidly fading greatness, both humanitarian and economic.

More than thirty years ago, in the right place at the right time, I joined Intel just before the tech boom really took off. The company, and its peers were oceans of diversity. The “best and brightest” from all over the world came to study at our universities and then go to work for the companies that sparked the revolution that changed our world. Indian engineers were probably the largest contingent at Intel and the other tech companies.

No longer. Srinivas’ brother also lives in American, but his mother said, “I will not allow him to go back. I don’t want to lose another son,” His father told the nation not to let their children come to this country. I wouldn’t if I was an Indian parent – would you? The president’s smooth sentence, read from a teleprompter last night, after a week of silence, will not convince a nation in morning that all is well in America. Indian politicians at the funeral held signs reading “Down with Trump,” and “Down with Racism.” The real message has been received.

Creativity is fueled by divergent viewpoints – it’s a heterogeneous soup from which marvelous things appear when the circumstances are right. The right circumstances are rapidly disappearing from an America that disavows science and cowers in fear of strangers.

The next big thing – clean energy, bio-technology, revolutions in food production, cures for epidemic diseases won’t happen here behind our walls, both visible and invisible. History tells us the fall of empires isn’t pretty, and they do not rise again.

Notes from 2017 – The dreams of our ancestors

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"The Sower" by Jean-Francois Millet, 1866-67, Public Domain

“The Sower” by Jean-Francois Millet, 1866-67, Public Domain

My paternal great great grandfather Gustav, a farmer, was born in the Alsace-Lorraine, a region on the French/German border that had been fought over since the time of Louis XIV. As a young man, grandfather Gustav, his two brothers, and their families emigrated to America in 1870 to avoid conscription into the armies of Napolean III during the Franco-Prussian war.

As one historian noted, the ancestors of most Americans of European descent came here as paupers, petty criminals, war refugees, draft dodgers, or religious fanatics. I certainly come from such stock. I’m alive today, in part because 150 years ago, the US was not afraid to admit refugees from conflict zones. As Bill Murray put it in Stripes, “We’re Americans! That means we’re mutts – the most lovable kind of dog there is!” Mixed breeds are often the healthiest too.

A century later, our open borders policy helped spark the technology-driven economic boom of the late 20th century. Andy Grove, one of the founders of Intel, was a Hungarian Jewish refugee who survived the Nazis and then the Russian takeover before before coming to America in 1960. Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian refugee. If you’re reading this post on a laptop or smart phone, you can thank these two pioneers, as well as the space race in the 60’s, which thrived upon a universal respect for science and affordable education which drew the world’s best and brightest to our shores. Microelectronics and the connected world were among the results.
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Notes from 2017 – #TheResistance, one week in

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Today I set a photo of Lady Liberty as header for this blog, which is entirely consistent with its six year old title, “The First Gate.” She guards the gate through which many of our ancestors of non-native descent came to this country. Her light has been a beacon of hope for the world for several centuries. Never perfect – no institution is – this light is under attack in a war for the soul of the nation. Vicious forces, now in power, seek the transformation of our democracy into a tyrannical plutocracy.

Lady Liberty will remain at the top of this blog until the current administration is removed from power, or until writing a blog like this becomes illegal, whichever comes first…

This is not so much an article, as much as a collection of notes and images, like the jottings, sticky notes, and bookmarked URL’s that percolate into the articles I write. There hasn’t been time this week for percolation, so here are some tidbits, both distressing and encouraging…

1. Definition:  Plutocracy – A government controlled exclusively by the wealthy either directly or indirectly. A plutocracy allows, either openly or by circumstance, only the wealthy to rule. This can then result in policies exclusively designed to assist the wealthy, which is reflected in its name (comes from the Greek words “ploutos” or wealthy, and “kratos” – power, ruling).

To those who voted for the current administration – is this what you wanted? Because it is what you elected.

2. The Pledge of Allegiance:  Do they still make kids recite this in schools? If so, all school districts of integrity should immediately stop the practice. To force children to say, “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” is to make them repeat a lie, and indoctrinate them with the kind of hypocrisy which infects our overlords.

3. Donald Over the Edge? – The Washington Post reports that Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chair of the House Oversight Committee, is “weighing legislation to require presidents to undergo an independent medical examination, including for mental health. Chaffetz cautioned that he wasn’t ‘talking about some of the rhetoric that’s flying around’ about Trump. Still, he said, ‘If you’re going to have your hands on the nuclear codes, you should probably know what kind of mental state you’re in.’” The 25th Amendment to the Constitution outlines the means by which the Vice President and members of Congress may remove a president for office when he is unable to adequately serve. 

4. Join #TheResistance: This was a hashtag I first saw on Twitter back in December (I think), and thanks to three million women and their allies last week, has made it into the mainstream.  From the cover of Time to the millions following the rogue twitter accounts of the government agencies Trump tried to shut down, to those protesting at JFK this afternoon, to Jerry Brown, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, to everyone who values the ideal upon which this nation was founded, now and every day until he is out of office is the time resist the lies, fear, and unconstitutional tyranny now propagated by Donald Trump and his cohorts. Push back against the bullshit storm!

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And finally, from a tweet by Senator Chris Murphy (D Conn), a reminder of the absence of core American and human values in the Trump administration:

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Notes from 2017 – What is your innermost truth?

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truth-2

I  started this post several days ago – in what now seems like a galaxy far away – with something different in mind. My title is paraphrases a question asked by Zen priest, Edward Espe Brown, at a retreat in 2011: “What is your innermost request?”

In the context of the retreat, I took his question to mean, “What is the deepest desire at the deepest core of your being?”  The word, “request,” implies not just desire, need, want, but something akin to prayer. What do we want our lives to be about? What would it take , when our time comes to leave this world, to exit with a sense of peace, victory, satisfaction?

I mean the same kind of thing with, “innermost truth.”  Not just beliefs, ideas, concepts, deductions, or any of the contents of consciousness, for they inevitably change. How many beliefs, ideas, concepts, and so on do you hold from this time a year ago, let alone 10 years ago, 20, or from childhood? What do you know more deeply than emotion and reason both?  Jack Kornfield, in A Path With Heart described this as something you know so deeply that if Buddha and Jesus both said, “You’re wrong,” you would answer, “I am not!”

It’s not an easy question, and there is no simple answer, but it has never been more essential to look to our truths, try to clarify and hold them close over time.

Knowing what we truly believe is an anchor, a center, a “know thyself” tactic at a time when the new president and his minions are trying to normalize lies as “alternate facts.”

The day will come when telling “a Spicer” is a synonym for “telling a whopper,” but until that happens, we need to guard our sense of right and wrong, true and false, as the greatest safeguards we have against the fascist administration that now occupies the White House.

voltaire