Friday’s Questions

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I woke up yesterday morning excited to read the Pope’s encyclical on environmental justice, but the headline I read crushed my spirit. • Why is it that young white men who commit massacres with guns are deranged loners, but young black gunmen are products of a culture of thuggery and the breakdown of civil society?

• Come to think of it, how many mass murders have African Americans committed?

• Why have we long noted the power of social media to recruit young, disaffected jihadists but are only waking up to its power on young disaffected white supremacists?

• How many of the 170 bikers arrested for the murderous shoot-out in the Twin Peaks parking lot were raised in homes with no fathers? Did anybody ask?

• Why did California Governor Ronald Reagan enthusiastically sign the Mulford Act, a Republican-sponsored gun-control bill, in May 1967 (saying “there is no reason why  . . . a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons”)?

• Could it have been related to the fact that armed Black Panthers had just marched on the state capitol demanding their second-amendment rights?

• In fact, why did the National Rifle Association reverse 100 years of support for gun control (its president testified in 1938, “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns”) around the time of Reagan’s election in 1980?

• Why did Clarence Thomas break with his conservative allies to support the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles' ban of the confederate flag on state license plates?

• Should we be concentrating on nation building here at home?

No answers this week. Only questions.

Free Enterprise and the Commons

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Once upon a time, before corporations had become persons, they were legal entities that offered ordinary people the chance to own shares in the nation’s economy, an opportunity until-then reserved primarily to industrial titans and robber barons. It hasn’t turned out that way: far more families own cats than shares of stock, and 10% of Americans own 81% of all stocks. This has exacerbated the wealth gap, centralized corporate decision-making, and provided lots of money to influence politics – a 21st-century version of the “military-industrial complex” Eisenhower warned against. With congressional approval ratings remaining abysmally low, many Americans feel shut out of the economy and unrepresented by their elected officials. In a democracy, this is not a good thing. The current system has privatized the commons, polluted it, extracted its public goods at a fraction of their value – and created a class of politicians beholden to special interests.

Yet I believe that the free-enterprise system itself provides fertile ground for change, and I see many people planting seeds of hope: shareholder initiatives demanding changes in corporate environmental and social policies; signs of recognition that the best long-term returns will come from companies that operate sustainably and mindfully; social networks and crowdfunding that are democratizing investment opportunities and financing young entrepreneurs. Their collective effort is to create a free-enterprise system that is open to ordinary people, that exists not just for private gain but for public good and that seeks not to destroy the commons but to revive it.

The Jury

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There was little joy in Boston last Friday afternoon when 12 jurors unanimously sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death. Only 15% of the city’s residents supported the death penalty for the 21-year-old marathon bomber; across the country, four times that many wanted him executed. The reaction to the verdict was muted in Boston, even among the victims. Some quietly expressed gratitude that justice had been served. Others, notably Bill and Denise Richard whose 8-year-old son Martin was the youngest to die and whose 7-year-old daughter Jane lost her left leg, opposed the execution. There was no sympathy for Tsarnaev, but there was also no outcry for vengeance, no demand for public retribution – only a kind of sad and weary spirit, and a determination to move on. I was one of those who had hoped the jury would decide for life, although life in the supermax prison seems a living death. But I have only admiration for the 12 people, whose identities I will never know, who came to a different conclusion. I don’t know why they did so, but I think that, amid the horrific sadness of the testimony, they looked daily at Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and saw . . . nothing – no sign of the empathy that connects us to each other. And so all the arguments of his defense team – which were efforts to humanize him – came to nothing.

We have seen so many instances of our justice system breaking down. Here, whether you agree with the outcome or not, it worked.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

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As I walked along Market Street in San Francisco, past payday loan storefronts and pawnshops and “We Buy Gold” signs, the Dickensian stench of poverty rising from the sidewalk, unkempt people with paper cups and cardboard signs dared me to make eye contact. Whatever sympathy I might have had for one person down on his luck turned quickly to irritation at the legion of mendicants, their ranks swollen by addicts, drunks and scam artists, making me run an urban gauntlet of guilt. We like the objects of our generosity to be grateful, passive and scarce.

But that isn’t how they come these days in a world of massive displacement, where we read daily of thousands of desperate people washing up on a resort beach in Malaysia; of trying to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa crammed onto rickety boats in a diaspora in which more 2,000 people drown every year; of swimming across the Rio Grande at night and then driven across America by “coyotes” in what has become a multi-billion-dollar business dominated by organized crime. For them, our southern border is just one more obstacle to survival.

The United Nations Refugee Agency estimates that the number of displaced people worldwide now exceeds 50 million, a misery index that will overwhelm both national borders and traditional notions of charity. There are many reasons this is so, but the driving factor is war: “Peace is today dangerously in deficit. Humanitarians can help as a palliative, but political solutions are vitally needed.”

American Uber

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To those who haven’t experienced the phenomenon known as Uber: it’s not just a taxi company with a Teutonic name, whose valuation has gone from $60 million to $50 billion since 2011; it’s also an improbable reminder that America’s melting pot still bubbles. I have yet to meet an American-born Uber driver, and perhaps as a result I’ve heard some poignant stories. I wrote in March of a young Eritrean man who fled to Sudan, was kidnapped for his body parts and ultimately ransomed by his father. More recently, I had a young Palestinian driver who had grown up an Israeli citizen in Jerusalem, come to America where he married a refugee from Guatemala who had been adopted by a woman from one of Baltimore’s first families. The couple, now settled in Boston, were awaiting their first child. Although he had fled from the Middle East, he carried none of the baggage of hate we associate with that place, blaming the violent passions on political opportunism, not ethnic animosity.

Yesterday, my driver had fled from Yemen because his family had been on the wrong side of the civil war. “When I was 13,” he told me, "they put me in jail. It was because of my last name." He will never return, he said, the tribal conflicts will never end. But he wasn’t looking back. “I want my son to understand what we have here.”

I am inspired by these stories of gritty immigrants for whom America still represents a beacon of hope.

Conditional Love

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If you don’t wear an American flag on your lapel, proclaim America the most exceptional nation in the history of the world, and say “thank your for your service” to every person you see in a uniform (“You’re welcome, but I’m in the Salvation Army”), then to many you aren’t a loyal American. I’m unclear how this squares with a self-proclaimed democracy in which (1) trust in our elected representatives barely breaks single digits, (2) fewer than half the people support the president, and (3) politicians of both parties are routinely indicted – e.g., New York’s Assembly Speaker (Democrat) and Senate Majority Leader (Republican). Maybe it’s just government we distrust. So let’s turn to the private sector, where banks commit crimes, get fined billions and no one in management gets fired; under-performing hedge fund managers average $465 million in yearly compensation; the Koch brothers recognize the reality of climate change but still fund its debunkers; the wealth gap has reached oligarchic proportions; and corporate lobbyists annually spend $2.6 billion writing laws and purchasing politicians. It’s disgraceful.

And yet, America was founded on a set of ideals, which, however short we fall, we continue to reaffirm:

This seems an “American exceptionalism” worth holding on to and living up to.

Patriots' Day

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If I were Iran, I’d want a nuclear bomb too. I hope it never gets one because I think moving toward denuking the world – and particularly the Middle East – seems a better avenue to stability than arming it to the teeth, as the U.S. seems intent doing. According to Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper in yesterday’s New York Times, American companies, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, can’t fill their order lists fast enough for planes, drones and heavy weapons for delivery to almost any Middle Eastern country except Syria and Iran.

We hear a lot about how we shouldn’t trust Iran, which seems a good idea, but is it any wonder that Iran doesn’t trust us? In the world’s most dangerous region, America’s free-enterprise arms dealerships are selling billions of dollars of weapons to the avowed enemies of Iran, which is, let’s not forget, an avowed enemy of ISIS.

The current U.S.-Iranian negotiations present an opportunity to break out of 35 years of mutual mistrust, and I believe Congressional oversight is an important part of the process – as long as it isn’t just one more partisan club with which to bludgeon any initiative suggested by President Obama.

Today is Patriot’s Day in Boston. Security is extremely tight, but the determination of people here to transcend the 2013 Marathon bombing is remarkable. It’s a spirit in which the whole diverse community has come together to affirm its optimism, its resilience and its unity. That was once called the American spirit.

Friday’s Question

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Here’s today’s question: What's an expat? No, not Vince Wolfork, who signed yesterday with the Houston Texans after being cut by New England. He’s an ex-Patriot. The other kind, the expatriates who live abroad.

I ask because I read two columns this week that raised the question – one in the edgily leftist SiliconAfrica.com and reprinted in The Guardian; the other in the somewhat stodgier Wall Street Journal. Both came to the same conclusion: “Expat is a term reserved exclusively for western white people going to work abroad,” writes Mawuna Remarque Koutonin in SiliconAfrica, echoing Christopher DeWolf in the WSJ, “Anyone with roots in a Western country is considered an expat.”

I suspect I’m not alone in admitting I’d never thought of this distinction before. The Oxford Dictionary defines an expat as, simply, “a person who lives in a foreign country;” Wikipedia as “a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country other than that of their citizenship.” Yet, for all the words we use in America – “immigrant,” “migrant,” "refugee," “illegal alien” (the old term for southeastern Pennsylvania’s mushroom workers) – I’ve never heard “expat.” It’s hard to imagine the 4 million Irish who disembarked on our shores in the 19th century or the Africans who arrived in the holds of ships or today's Latinos being called expats.

Yet, the Journal has a section called “Expat”, a “hub for expatriates and global nomads – spanning the globe in expat hotspots like London, Paris, Hong Kong, Beijing, Sydney and many more."

Annie Moore

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Yesterday I heard a song called "Isle of Hope, Isle of Tears" on my car radio, a song about Annie Moore, the teenage girl from Ireland who, on Jan. 1, 1892, became the first immigrant to pass through Ellis Island. She was given a $10 gold piece, the equivalent of $200 today. Annie was one of 4 million people who left Ireland for America in the 19th century, and like immigrants everywhere, she carried hopes for a new beginning, even as she left forever her home in a land that had become unlivable. Over a million people died in Ireland's Great Famine, and between 1845 and 1895 death and starvation cut the country's population in half. The Irish came in disruptive, unwelcome droves, overrunning the cities and overwhelming the culture. Catholics in a Protestant country, most spoke no English and almost all were desperately poor. A rural people from a hardscrabble land, they brought few marketable skills, found no welcome mats rolled out, and crammed themselves into ethnic slums.

Annie married Joseph Augustus Schayer, the son of German immigrants, with whom she had “at least eleven children,” and so for her the process of assimilation – the “melting pot” – began almost immediately.

Yesterday, the descendants of those millions of immigrants celebrated their history as both Irish and American, and on Boston’s 114th St. Patrick’s Day Parade, its organizers, the South Boston Allied War Veterans, at last lifted their ban and invited gay and lesbian groups to march.

The melting part enlarged, I think of Annie smiling.

Hard Time and Hope

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“The misconception of totalitarianism is that freedom can be imprisoned. This is not the case. When you constrain freedom, freedom will take flight and land on a windowsill.” So wrote the Chinese artist and activist, Ai Weiwei, whose multimedia exhibit now at Alcatraz invites us to think about freedom and imprisonment, crime and conscience, art and dissent. Indeed, @Large is dedicated to all those everywhere who have been deprived of their freedom for speaking out. We don’t think of Alcatraz, which housed America’s most brutal criminals, as a place for prisoners of conscience – although Hopi men were sent there in the late 19th century for refusing to send their children to government boarding schools. But Ai, who was arrested in China and held secretly for 81 days (the charge was tax evasion, the same charge that landed Al Capone on the Rock), shows us the power of freedom in a world filled with prisons.

Yesterday I met a young man from Eritrea, whose brother, a journalist, was arrested 14 years ago for criticizing the government – and who himself was imprisoned, when still in high school, for talking openly about his brother. After his release he walked for two weeks until he reached the Sudan border, where he was kidnapped and held for the ransom of his body parts. His father, who had escaped to Boston many years ago, paid the ransom, and the young man is now here and hopeful. He does not expect to see his brother again.

Age of Apocalypse

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I came of age in the Age of Aquarius when “peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars." I seem to be exiting stage left in the Age of Apocalypse when true believers shout that the end of the world is at hand. Every crisis is a global crisis, every event a sign the last days are coming. We are not just pessimistic about the future, we are afraid of it. It makes it kind of hard to have fun. The brutality of ISIS portends a violent clash of civilizations – and as Graeme Wood’s chilling piece in The Atlantic asserts, ISIS believes itself “a key agent of the coming apocalypse.” Environmentalists worry we will die in our own emissions, fighting over our vanishing resources. Benjamin Netanyahu paints for Congress a Middle East “crisscrossed by nuclear tripwires.” “Obamacare = a death panel for the U.S. economy.”

When I was a kid, we played “Cowboys and Indians,” which transported us, six-shooters and all, into a mythical past. We were actors whose cap guns gave us some power in our small, politically incorrect drama. When I watch movie trailers now, I see a grotesque future filled with robots and monsters bent on destroying, as far as I can tell, the entire universe.

It's tempting to retreat from a world so out of our control. Or we could accept it, make what small contribution we can, and live fully engaged the few years we get on this earth.

Another America

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I fear the growth of two Americas, so removed from each other that we are losing our ability to communicate. Not Republicans and Democrats, but two countries in which words mean different things, no common mythology holds us together, and we listen only to our own. In this second installment of her response on terrorism, my friend describes her America. Our America – yet a country many of us has never seen. Perhaps we have not looked. “[French Prime Minister Manuel] Valls proposes that there is a fundamental difference between democracy and terrorism. From my life experiences and observations, living in this skin, there is no difference between “democracy” and “terrorism – not when “democracy” all but wiped out First Nations, promoted slavery, sustained Jim Crow and institutional racism (still alive and well); has maintained a prison-industrial complex with a majority of men of color and a post-incarceration system that does not facilitate re-entry into the society to be productive and contributory. This is terrorism to me. To only have access to inferior education, sub-standard housing, removal of boots and their laces so that there is nothing with which to pull one’s self up – that’s our democratic process, which Congress fights to maintain. That is terrorism to me. Living in fear that every time my nephews (young black men) go out or drive up from Florida or across from Indiana, we may never see them again. Democracy? That feels like terrorism to me. Barriers to voting, intimidation of voters. Democracy? That is terrorism to me.”

Seeking Common Ground

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“Obama Defends Islam, Slams Christianity at Prayer Breakfast.” The religio-political firestorm unleashed by the president’s reference to the Crusades and slavery in his remarks on ISIS last week is the latest example of how we intentionally misunderstand each other and lash out without listening. I’d like this blog to be a commons, however small, in which we listen to other voices – not judging them, not dismissing them, simply trying to understand them. In my next two posts, I print a response to last week’s blog on French Prime Minister Manuel Valls’ speech on terrorism. It came from a friend, a nurse practitioner who has spent her life working on women’s health issues in Africa. As she grapples with the violence, both in the Middle East and America, she offers a different perspective. May we take her words seriously, and may they challenge us. I just went to see “Timbuktu” by Abderrahmane Sissako yesterday evening; it has been nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film. I can’t say that I “liked” it – it is a hard film to watch, but it made me think about the portrayal of the jihadists, which I trust Sissako (Mauritanian) to have represented accurately. Their behavior and interpretation of “Islamic law” (substitute any adjective) was to me the same as the behavior of colonizers and missionaries, e.g., dismissal of existing cultures and cultural norms, unwillingness to learn the local language, a sense of superiority through their interpretation of a particular ideology, and the use of intimidation. It seems ironic that your piece touched on a similar vein.

I agree that words inform thought and that linking “radical and jihadist” with Islam taints Islam, for what we are seeing is NOT Islam – these are extremists. And yes, the war for some may be against terrorism not religion, but the media do not bear that out. Islam is demonized by our careless use of language.

Continued Wednesday.

The Real Cost of Oil

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Oil Cash Waning, Venezuelan Shelves Lie Bare read this morning’s headline describing the hardships ordinary Venezuelans are enduring as plunging oil prices deepen an already-deep recession. President Nicolás Maduro reflexively blames right-wing enemies, both internal and external, and especially the United States. But most economists blame policies, launched by the late and unlamented Hugo Chávez, which stifled private economic initiative and squandered one of the world’s largest gold reserves. The real culprit is oil. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves, and oil constitutes 95% of its exports. Twenty-five years ago, when Venezuela was a very rich country, Ivan Maldonaldo predicted its future.

He was then an old man, one of the most interesting I’ve ever known. Convicted at 16 of plotting to overthrow the dictator, he was sentenced to a chain gang and later exiled. He ultimately got a veterinary degree in Czechoslovakia and returned home, on his father’s death, to take over his ranch in a remote corner of the country. He was a visionary who protected all wildlife as he built Venezuela’s largest cattle operation and went on to become one of its richest men. His politics shifted rightward, but he never lost either his curiosity or his empathy.

Ivan watched his country become addicted to oil – become an importer of food and other goods it once exported, a nation whose diverse and vibrant economy died while it giddily drowned in petrodollars – and he watched the return of the dictatorship he had sought to overthrow 60 years before.

The Progressive’s Dilemma

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The plunging price of oil has already had a number of consequences, including:

Perhaps above all, $45-a-barrel oil threatens to aggravate the historic liberal divide between those focused on social justice and those dedicated to environmental protection. At least as far back as John Muir’s battle to stop the Hetch Hetchy dam, economic and environmental progressives have had a wary, often antagonistic, relationship. The latter’s emphasis on wilderness and endangered species protection has often seemed in conflict with the social and economic needs of the poor and unemployed. The environmental justice movement arose to bridge that divide, arguing that the poor suffer disproportionately from environmental degradation and insisting that the fate of the earth and the welfare of its people is not about choosing one or the other.

But cheap gas has a way of making people ignore the real costs of energy consumption; and so today we do have a choice: we can burn these momentarily cheap fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow or we can use this fortunate interlude to build a better one.

We could start with a gas tax.

Charlie Redux

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Today Charlie Hebdo published its first issue since the massacre. As I look at my own and others’ struggles to make sense of what happened, our reactions seem surprisingly varied for an act so easy to condemn. Opinions diverge as we debate the inviolability of free speech and the demise of civil discourse; the “delicate balance” between legal tolerance and social restraint; the difference between skewering the powerful and bullying the downtrodden; the dangerous delusion of pitting civilization against barbarism; the political role of art. I find myself agreeing with people who disagree with each other. I have argued for more civil discourse in our own politics, and yet nobody ever accused Charlie Hebdo – whose tagline is “journal irresponsible” – of civil discourse. I believe that ridiculing each other ultimately debases us all, and yet I know no more effective way than satire to prick the (al)mighty. The problem is not simply external: we can’t reconcile our own beliefs.

Today’s cover features a cartoon of Muhammad, a tear falling from his eye. He holds a sign that says “Je Suis Charlie.” Above his head are the words, “All is Forgiven.” It’s not clear, at least to me, who is the forgiver and who the forgiven. So I infer that the journey toward reconciliation must begin with forgiveness, not of murder, but of each other. It is Charlie Hebdo’s most courageous cover, standing firm and reaching out. It will inevitably, even intentionally, be misunderstood. In fact, it is already under attack.

The Public Employee

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On New Year’s Day, as I arrived with my car packed with evidence of our “family activities,” he emerged from the building, putting on his gloves. A quiet man of medium height, with shoulder-length hair, a stubbly beard, and an earring, he oversees the town’s recycling efforts. Recycling here is a community habit. Only ten states still have “bottle bills”. Half of those are in the far northeast, where you pay a nickel deposit for soda, beer and wine bottles. Because stores long ago stopped accepting returns, local governments established recycling stations with separate dumpsters for cardboard, plastics, glass, paper and metal. The Boy Scouts set up bins for redeemable bottles and cans, which is both a source of revenue for them and, I imagine, a peephole into grown-up life.

I initially resented this recycling czar, as he instructed me what went where – “this is plastic; paper bags go with the cardboard” – thereby dragging out what had seemed to me a pretty uncomplicated operation. So I’d try to go when I thought he wouldn’t be there. Like New Year’s Day.

“You’re working today?” I heartsinkingly asked.

“I work almost everyday,” he said. “I took Christmas off.” He added as an aside, “I don’t get paid for the holidays.”

But wait. Where is the stereotype we are endlessly fed – the arrogant, apathetic public employee, mindlessly punching a clock until he can collect his budget-busting pension? He takes his work seriously. He believes it’s important.

"Thank you," I said.

Spring of Hope, Winter of Despair

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On the last day of the year, the cusp between past and future, I turn to Charles Dickens to make sense of a world that seems filled with hope and progress even as it seems to be falling apart. By many indices, the world is a far better place than ever before. Millions have escaped poverty; life expectancy has increased markedly; war, discrimination and violent crime are at historic lows. On the other hand, climate change, resource depletion, widening wealth gaps, exploding populations, insecure nuclear arsenals, seething inner cities, global terror all portend disaster.

So which is it? It is both, as it has always been. The conflicting scenarios aren't just matters of opinion. They are matters of fact: the world and its human inhabitants are all these things at once. It isn’t easy to hold onto such contradictory realities, and in our efforts to make sense of the world and our lives, we reject views that differ from our own. This is how we build communities of people we trust. Yet, as we separate ourselves into groups of like minds and familiar lives, we give up something important: the ability, even the desire, to truly understand those who are different. Our ideas are the best ideas, our facts the real facts, our religion the only path to salvation.

The spring of hope blooms only when we listen to each other. For how can I convince you of the value of my ideas, if I will not listen to yours?

Immoral, Illegal and Ineffective

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Excerpts from two responses to Friday’s post:

  • I never encountered any U.S.-trained military interrogator who claimed torture was moral, effective or constitutional.
  • If torture had revealed information that might have thwarted 9/11, would you support it?

If the first is true, the second becomes moot. But let’s accept its possibility because it is the fundamental issue in the debate.

My answer is no, and here’s why:

The question seems to ask, would we torture one evil person to save 3,000 innocent lives? That seems a no-brainer – except that the chances the first guy you torture gives you what you need are about zero. But once you have tortured him, you can’t just say, ‘gee, that didn’t work.’ You have to keep torturing to justify what you have done. So, how many people, some of them innocent, are you willing to torture to get information? 10? 100? 2,000? 3,001? The question seems absurd, but it's where the numbers game inevitably leads.

There are only three questions to consider with regard to “enhanced interrogation:" Is it moral? Is it legal? Is it effective?

The Geneva Conventions sought to legally codify morality in war (which may not be a good idea in this Hobbesian world). They say nothing about effectiveness. But after 9/11, our government perverted our legal system to justify immoral acts, claiming they were effective. Effectiveness  became the only question that mattered. Legal had become legalistic. We were in the numbers game.

Yet that same government had enough information before 9/11 to prevent the attacks without torturing anybody.