“I have heard this with Boston hockey fans too, being pretty racist towards PK Subban when he played for the Canadiens,” my son Daniel wrote me reflecting on the racist slurs recently shouted at Baltimore Outfielder Adam Jones at Fenway Park. “Dad, is the city really this notoriously racist?”
Read MoreSixty-one years ago last evening Rosa Parks boarded Cleveland Avenue bus 2857 in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, paid her fare, and took a seat in the bus’s colored section. When the whites-only section filled up, the driver ordered Parks to give her seat to a white man and move to the rear. She refused. Although she had worked all day as a department store seamstress, she was, she wrote later, no more physically tired than usual. “No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
Read MoreWhen I last visited Flint, Michigan, in 2012, I wrote in American Apartheid: “Flint belies our image of urban decay. With no high-rise projects, it is a city of tree-lined neighborhoods of single-family houses where 200,000 people once lived, and half that number remains. But on those streets are hundreds of abandoned and burned-out houses, which remind you that Flint is the most violent city in America.” Flint is back in the news, this time because, in April 2014, its state-appointed emergency manager switched the source of the city’s water to the Flint River to save money. The water was cheap because it was filthy, and the complaints began immediately. Soon the city was telling its residents to boil their water before drinking it, and General Motors stopped using it altogether because it corroded engine parts. But the state government ignored the growing health crisis until it became a full-blown political disaster.
Flint is where environmental degradation meets social neglect. For over five decades the city, the birthplace of General Motors, has suffered the all-too-familiar urban pattern of disinvestment, depopulation and decay, unemployment, poverty and crime.
For a long time in this country, the environmental and social justice movements ran on separate tracks, focusing on different wildernesses. But it’s increasingly clear – from climate change to Flint’s water supply – that the first victims are the same: the poorest and most vulnerable, those who can neither move nor get out of the way. When governments deliberately abandon those people, it seems a betrayal of democracy.
The line between refugee and emigrant may be legally simple to draw, but not here on the ground, where the preponderance of those walking have come from Syria, a collapsed state, both ungovernable and unlivable.
Read MoreThey left home 50 days ago, Ali said, and for the last 15 days they walked – mostly in the woods and often in heavy rain – across Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary to the Austrian border. In the forest, Ali’s 16-month-old daughter got a nasty rash, which grows steadily worse. Yet, like other refugees we met, the Jasams, with astonishing resilience, seem never to despair.
Read MoreThe streets around the camp are filled with a chaos that has spawned individual acts of great kindness, frustrated and at times ill-mannered responses, and bewilderment.
Read MoreThe small road out of town, which led ultimately to Vienna, was lined with discarded clothes and plastic water bottles. We followed it until we came to a police roadblock. When we suggested we would like to take the scenic route to Vienna, we got an emphatic one-word reply: “Closed.” Now we knew for sure where the refugees were, but they have very big policemen in Hungary, so we took the highway to the border.
Read MoreThey keep coming and coming, groups of men, mostly young, families with small children – some walking, others being carried – and grandparents. They are heading to the last opening along the border, a rail line that crosses into Hungary, a country racing to erect a high 109-mile razor-wire fence, at the small town of Roske. Half a mile north, a temporary city of tents had been erected on farmland, and dozens of buses lined the one-lane road.
Read MoreAt the Belgrade airport we were told we could drive our Serbian rental car anywhere in eastern Europe – except Kosovo. But Kosovo, I noted, is not on the map. That’s because it is part of Serbia, said the Hertz man, as he sketched its approximate borders with his pen. Then how will we know when we get there, I asked? Oh, you’ll know, he said. They’ll stop you. They don’t like us very much. For DeWitt Sage, a documentary filmmaker, and I, who have come here to try to comprehend the refugee situation threatening to overwhelm Europe, it was a jolting reminder that the Balkans, which is now the pathway for refugees fleeing by the hundreds of thousands from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea and elsewhere, was not long ago itself the scene of brutal ethnic warfare – of sieges, bombardments and genocidal executions that unleashed centuries of hatred in what seemed an endless war. In 1999 NATO air forces bombed Novi Sad, the city on the Danube where I write, so massively that it took four years to restore the river.
It is a reason for hope that peace, however fragile, has returned to the Balkans less than two decades later; and it is a reason for despair that this area is now the passageway to Europe for those fleeing atrocities so horrific they seem unprecedented in their scope and barbarity.
What it is not is a passing phenomenon. According to the UN Refugee Agency, 42,500 people are forced from their homes every day. They will go somewhere.
Mitt Romney’s tweet was unequivocal: “Take down the #ConfederateFlag at the SC Capitol. To many, it is a symbol of racial hatred. Remove it now to honor #Charleston victims.” Meanwhile, over the state capitol the American and South Carolina flags were at half-staff, while the Confederate battle flag flew nearby fully raised, forbidden by state law to be lowered for any reason. Romney isn't running for president, and most of those who are took a spineless pass, insisting that this was an issue for South Carolina to decide. “I’m not a South Carolinian,” said Rick Santorum. We don’t need “people from outside of the state coming in and dictating how they should resolve it,” said Ted Cruz.
Of course. It’s a states rights issue – that same hypocritical lament used to defend the “peculiar institution” of human bondage, to launch the deadliest war in American history, to justify 100 years of brutal apartheid – Ted Cruz eerily echoing Bull Connor.
And the flag, of course, is the symbol that honors those who fought and died defending states rights. So argued the defendants in Walker vs. Sons of Confederate Veterans. But the Supreme Court disagreed last week, upholding the Texas decision to ban the flag from its license plates, with Clarence Thomas abandoning both his customary allies and traditional principles to cast the deciding vote. Thomas hasn’t said why, but perhaps it's because the flag is not for him, as it is for Lindsey Graham, “part of who we are.”
If the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev showed our justice system working as it is meant to, what happens when it doesn’t? One result is that innocent people go to prison, and it is very hard to get them out, even when those who sent them away have become convinced of their innocence. With 2.3 million people in jail, America has the world’s highest rates of incarceration (equaled perhaps by North Korea), and for some, it is much easier to get in than to get out. On Sunday Justice Aid sponsored a benefit for two organizations that are dedicated to freeing the wrongly convicted: Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which focuses on D.C., Maryland and Virginia; and Innocence Project New Orleans, which covers Louisiana and Mississippi, two states that have more prisoners than any other places on earth. (Full disclosure: Justice Aid was founded by my friend and cousin, Stephen Milliken, a retired judge of the D.C. superior court known for his creative approach to sentencing.)
Between them, MAIP and IPNO have to date helped exonerate 45 people who had served a combined 829 years in prison for crimes they did not commit. We read that most people who are arrested are guilty of something, and perhaps that’s so, but our system of justice isn’t supposed to be about the law of averages; it’s based on the rights of individuals. What struck me about the people we saw on Sunday was not their bitterness at being wrongfully jailed but their infectious joy at being finally free.
Europe’s leaders, who have come under heavy criticism for an inadequate response to the thousands of refugees trying to reach their shores, are calling the latest events on the Mediterranean a humanitarian crisis. This seems a small ray of hope in the ongoing disaster – because you can’t have a humanitarian crisis without humans, and it's a step forward to see a human tragedy where others see a border-security breakdown or an immigrant problem. It seems unfair to blame Europe for the desperate people embarking from North Africa on overcrowded boats owned by unscrupulous human traffickers, as a Boston Globe editorial did yesterday, arguing that “the European Union has a moral duty to provide the financial resources and manpower to stem this escalating humanitarian crisis.” Europe didn’t cause the crisis, at least in its present incarnation, and it is not going to be able to stop it – and I can't think of many countries that would make the efforts Italy has made to rescue those at sea.
We need to stop flaying ourselves long enough to recognize that while the West isn’t perfect, there’s a reason why millions of desperate people are trying to get here, and no amount of wishing or wall building is going to make them stop coming. One lesson from Europe is that, whether out of humanitarianism or self-interest, we need to accept the responsibility our success has given us by continuing to engage with the world, which has become a very small place indeed.
You know the world is absurd when Chinese functionaries, who believe in nothing but their own political survival, denounce the Dalai Lama for betraying Buddhism. Why? The 79-year-old Dalai Lama, who has led Tibetan Buddhists for 64 years, has suggested he may not reincarnate himself, thus ending a line stretching back to the 14th century. Instead of cheering the demise of a sharp thorn in its side, the implacably atheistic Chinese government reacted with fury to this “frivolous and disrespectful” act.
"China follows a policy of freedom of religion and belief,” said a Foreign Ministry spokesman with a straight face, “and this naturally includes having to respect and protect the ways of passing on Tibetan Buddhism" (or as The Wire headlined, “China Will Make the Dalai Lama Reincarnate Whether He Likes It or Not”) – except, of course, the way of the Dalai Lama, who writes with delightful understatement that “no recognition or acceptance should be given to a candidate chosen for political ends by anyone, including those in the People’s Republic of China.”
At a time when people are slaughtering each other in the name of their gods, the image of humorless Chinese bureaucrats fuming over the irreverence of a religious leader known for his sense of humor seems welcome relief. Except, of course, it’s deadly serious. As more Tibetans immolate themselves protesting China’s rule, we are reminded that repression comes in many guises and that fanaticism, whether secular or sacred, is toxic to the human soul.
Last night I went to see Selma, which opened with the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church that took the lives of Carole Robertson (14), Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14) and Denise McNair (11), and ended with the Voting Rights Act two years later. One of the film’s main characters is Pettus Bridge, the steel arch that spans the Alabama River and the site of “Bloody Sunday,” where armed troopers beat peaceful protesters without mercy. The bridge is named for Edmund Pettus (1821-1907), Confederate general, U.S. Senator and Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. The film’s power stems not only from its juxtaposition of violence and courage, but from its innocence. Black Americans put their lives on the line for things not much in vogue these days: the right to vote, something only 36.4% of Americans (and 41% of Alabamans) bothered to do in 2014; non-violence, in a country which today owns over 300 million guns; faith and community, where people of unimaginable courage turned to their churches for their strength.
Yet as I sat through the violence, the bloodshed, the humiliations, I suddenly and unexpectedly felt proud to be an American. African-Americans led the Civil Rights movement; the vast preponderance of its victims were black; the oppression they fought is older than the nation itself. But as I watched people hold America accountable for its own ideals, I realized that this was not just Black history. This was my history. And all the people who walked across that bridge were our greatest generation.
“In the broadest sense,” write the feminist pioneers of Our Bodies Ourselves, “violence against women is any assault on a woman’s body, physical integrity, or freedom of movement inflicted by an individual or through societal oppression.” Broad as that definition is, it says little about assaults on a woman’s mind, spirit or workplace equality. But it underlines the significant, if incomplete, advancements in women’s rights since the 1960s, progress based on the belief that a woman’s body should be protected from coercion from both individuals and the state. That’s precisely what Cassandra C. claims in a recent essay in The Hartford Courant: “This is my life and my body,” the 17-year-old wrote, “not the state’s.” Cassandra, however, was writing about Connecticut’s efforts to force her to take chemotherapy for her Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She and her mother call chemotherapy “poison,” but doctors testified that it gives her an 80-85% chance of recovery and without it she will die. The state asserts that Cassandra is a minor, overly influenced by her mother. Cassandra insists it’s her decision. When she turns 18 in nine months, the state cannot intervene, but her chemotherapy will probably be over.
Meanwhile, down at Guantanamo Bay the doctors’ response to widespread hunger strikes is to force-feed prisoners, which many human-rights advocates consider, not a life-giving intercession by the state, but torture.
Belief in the inviolability of a person’s body and mind is the foundation of an individual’s right to be free of state coercion. We continue to probe its limits.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is remembered above all for its soaring rhetoric, delivered in the flowing cadences that black Baptist preachers had transformed into an oratorical art. I heard King speak in February 1963 when he was working out his August speech. I had never heard anything like it. But I was long troubled by two paragraphs, near the beginning of the speech, whose language seems not melodious but mundane. “[W]e’ve come to our nation's capital to cash a check,” King said, “a promissory note [that] guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ [But] America has defaulted on this promissory note.” For people of color, the check bounced.
King labored over his speeches, leaving little to chance, and his language in this, his greatest speech, was no accident. His intent was to locate the civil rights movement firmly in America’s political tradition. Despite all we have endured, he said, “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”
He evokes directly the language of America's two seminal documents, the Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address; but he grounds their philosophical rhetoric in the no-nonsense pragmatism of Poor Richard’s Almanack.
We have folded King safely into American history because we want to forget how revolutionary he was. His message was simple: Words are important, but let’s get real.
He came to redeem more than a check, and he was threatening enough to get himself killed.
* From Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again
It’s one of Jack Nicholson’s great scenes. In A Few Good Men (which was released in 1992 and set, eerily, at Guantanamo) Col. Nathan Jessup (Nicholson) responds to the Navy prosecutor’s (Tom Cruise) demand for “the truth” about the torture and murder of a Marine private. “You can’t handle the truth,” Jessup sneers, raging against those who “sleep under the blanket of the very freedom I provide and then question the manner in which I provide it.” Like we do with the CIA. We do not want to see what some do to protect us from others who would do far worse. We look the other way because we are afraid. But also, I think, because we are ashamed.
The dominant American myth is that we are different, special and by implication better than other nations. That is the basis of American exceptionalism. America is the city on a hill, the first new nation, conceived in liberty, dedicated to equality.
But our myths contain potent contradictions that we prefer not to confront:
America, at first alone, insisted on accountability at Nuremburg after World War II. It's hard to imagine that we would not demand accountability now, were the crimes reported yesterday not our own.
In the wake of Monday’s Supreme Court “non-decision” that paved the way for gay marriage in 30 states and the District of Columbia, the “originalists” – who believe the courts should seek only to discover the original intent of the Constitution – were in high dudgeon. “This is judicial activism at its worst,” railed Senator Ted Cruz. “The Court is making the preposterous assumption that the People of the United States somehow silently redefined marriage in 1868 when they ratified the 14th Amendment.” Cruz echoed Justice Scalia’s dissent when the Court declared the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional in what he called a “jaw-dropping . . . assertion of judicial supremacy.”
And after a stunningly superficial survey of the founding fathers’ writings, I admit I could not find a single one who supported gay marriage. Nor could I find any who opposed it.
And yet, as the country turns rightward, gay marriage moves inexorably from unthinkable to inevitable, and the Supreme Court, despite its conservative instincts, is tagging along.
Maybe that’s because the Court’s duty is not only to analyze sacred texts but to protect those rights (“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”) which the founders believed were "unalienable" and therefore not subject to a plebiscite.
When the Court has gotten that wrong – as in Dred Scott, which declared slaves property, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation, and Korematsu, which allowed the internment of Japanese-Americans – it has disgraced itself.
When it has expanded human rights, it has redeemed both itself and America.
In addition to the horrific manner of their murders, the three men beheaded by ISIS shared the status of non-combatants, a status protected by Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits “violence to life and person,” hostage taking, “outrages upon personal dignity” and arbitrary execution. So much for the Geneva Conventions.
Steven Sotloff and James Foley were freelance journalists covering events in Syria. David Haines was bringing humanitarian aid to a Syrian refugee camp. These are dangerous – and critical – roles in war zones, and those who perform them knowingly put themselves at great risk. But to be singled out for torture and public execution is a sign that the rules of war do not apply. It also raises the question of why we have rules for wars which have always brought disproportionate destruction and death to innocents.
ISIS has made a mockery of those rules, and we have hastened their demise with our justification of torture and failure to close Guantanamo.
And now Foley, Sotloff and Haines are being blamed for their own deaths. They had no business being there, we are told, as if they were seeking only their self-aggrandizement. But the world needs, more than ever, men and women who will risk their lives to bring aid to the suffering and report what is happening to the rest of the world. We cannot build walls and turn our backs.
I do not know what motivated the three men, but I admire their courage and their commitment.
“In this country immigrants are still treated like victims. . . .If you can help them tell their stories, you will have done a lot.” I am reading Swedish novelist Henning Mankell’s The Shadow Girls, recommended by a friend, about the thousands of people – from Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere – who wash up daily on Europe’s southern shores. It is a reminder that America isn’t the only country with an immigrant issue, that all those children at our southern border are not just problems but people, and that most of them are not so much coming for America’s freebies as fleeing for their lives. Don’t misunderstand me, this is a huge problem, but it is a human one and it is global in scope. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees reports that the world’s refugee population now exceeds 50 million for the first time since World War II.
Last Friday, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria ordered every Christian still living in the city of Mosul to leave, convert or be killed. In images chillingly reminiscent of the Holocaust, ISIS appropriated the gold, confiscated the houses and destroyed the icons of the Chaldean Christian community that had lived in Mosul for 1,700 years. Many “expressed a sense of utter abandonment and isolation,” The New York Times reported. They fled with nothing but the clothes they wore, bringing the number of Iraq’s internal refugees to 1.2 million.
Seventeen hundred years of history. Gone forever. “There but for the grace of God go I.”