The upshot is that a reform-minded president supported by labor unions and social organizations is now pitted against a mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political elite that is accustomed to controlling the Supreme Court, as well as congress and the presidency. It is a story often repeated elsewhere in Latin America, with the United States almost always weighing in on the side of the established, entrenched interests.

The Honduran elites were outraged that a member of their class would carry out even modest reforms. They began to portray Zelaya as a demagogue, and demonized Hugo Chavez as trying to take over the country. When Zelaya announced that he would hold a plebiscite on June 28 to see if the country wanted to have the option in the upcoming November presidential elections to vote for the convening of a constituent assembly that would draft a new constitution, the political establishment would have none of it. They incorrectly claimed that Zelaya was trying to stand for re-election. In fact the possibility that a president might serve a second term could only emerge in a new constitution that would not be drafted until well after Zelaya left office in January, 2010. The elites did however have reason to fear a new magna carta, since this is the path that Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador have used to draft new constitutions to begin transforming their countries political, social and economic structures.

Also recommended is the book “Against the Tide,” by Debbie Hagan,to those who want to understand the social role of lawyers. It is the story of Lawrence Velvel, Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law, who dreamed of running a law school in the public interest but met resistance at every step from the legal establishment.

Also recommended is a book I’m in the middle of reading, Unequal Justice, which explores the political interests behind the origins of many of the legal institutions we are familiar with, such as law schools, the big law firm, the bar exam, the American Bar Association, and the National Lawyers Guild. It’s dated (from the mid-1970s), but still very interesting and useful.

The comments section here might be a good place to compile recommended resources on this subject.

This suggests that “union boss” is a term of abuse and/or propaganda, not of analysis. My question here: are there circumstances in which the term is legitimately used?

A boss is someone who can fire or demote you, subject of course to legal and practical constraints. Bosses tell you what to do – if you don’t listen, you get fired. They hold power over you. You don’t elect them, though you may have the ability to walk away from them if the abuse gets to be too much, possibly at a substantial cost.

Union leaders are in most cases elected. If a union is functioning properly, the leaders don’t tell members what to do – members tell them what to do. They can’t get rid of you, but you can get rid of them. In short, they are elected officials, and therefore the servants of members, not their bosses. They are no more the bosses of unions than the President of the United States is the boss of the country.

Now, all of this is how it is supposed to work in the abstract. In reality, there are all kinds of constraints on bosses that may prevent them from firing you. For instance, you may belong to a union that has a just cause contract with the employer, requiring your boss to have a legitimate reason for firing you. Or you may be in a non-union workplace, but you’re such a productive and useful employee that while your boss can fire you in principle, she is constrained by the fact that she would lose money by doing so.

The reality is also that unions are not perfect democracies, just like our political system is not perfectly democratic. There are plenty of union leaders who are incompetent and corrupt, just like there are politicians who are incompetent and corrupt. Union leaders can subvert democratic processes, just like politicians can. Union leaders can try to act as though they are the bosses of the union, just like President Bush acts like he’s the boss of the country. But a key difference between a union leader and the President is that there are many more mechanisms of accountability in place to keep union leaders honest than there are to keep the President honest.

One is that people are free to opt out of their union, while one may not opt out of the legal regime of the country. In many states, individual workers cannot opt out of paying for the benefits that they receive from the union, in terms of better wages and working conditions. This is for the same reason that you can’t opt out of paying taxes, namely, that you’re “free riding” by taking the benefits of collective action without contributing to the costs. Workers who are *really* bothered by the union’s leaders can quit their job, just like if you *really* don’t like the president, you are free to leave the country.

If a majority of workers decide they don’t like the union’s leadership, they can petition to decertify the union. There is no analogous decertification process for Presidents, although there are automatic elections every four years.

Unions are typically guided by elected executive or steering committees, who are above the union president in the decision-making hierarchy. Typically, the highest decision-making body is the membership, which is asked to decide important questions, with the executive in charge of implementing the decision. The U.S. President, on the other hand, is the supreme executive authority. In theory, the Congress sets the agenda and the President implements it; in reality, the President wields a tremendous amount of independent power.

Perhaps most importantly, unions are subject to overall democratic and judicial oversight and regulation. In the U.S., unlike in most of the world, the fundamental rights of workers to unionize and bargain collectively are not recognized. Instead, they are subject to legislation. This provides another mechanism of accountability that is lacking in an institution like the Presidency. If unions become too corrupt, the public can step in and impose anti-corruption measures, as it did in the Landrum-Griffin Act.

So overall, characterizing union leaders as “bosses” is grossly inaccurate. There are, however, one circumstances in which it fits, and one in which it maybe, kinda, sorta fits.

With respect to the union’s staff under the direct control of the leadership, they are in a boss-worker relationship with the leaders. They can be fired or demoted by the leadership. This does not make the union leaders the bosses of the union, however, any more than the President is the boss of the nation because he can hire and fire White House staff.

The other situation, the one which kinda, sorta fits, is when a national union imposes a trustee on a local union. Trusteeships are permitted by the Landrum-Griffin Act in order to remedy corruption, mismanagement, or failure on the part of local leadership to run the union democratically. Trustees are imposed by the elected national leadership, not elected by the local, and they can themselves be highly undemocratic. When I was a union steward in UAW Local 2322, I participated in an effort to oppose imposition of a trusteeship on the local by the international. These days, they are highly controversial within the SEIU, with locals of the United Healthcare Workers West accusing the national SEIU of imposing trusteeships against the will of the members in order to control the locals.

That’s why when I hear someone say “union bosses,” I first check to see whether they’re talking about the relationship between union staff and the elected leadership, or about an imposed trusteeship. If they are not (and inevitably, they are not), I pretty much tune them out.

Postscript

I had been relatively disengaged from this blog for the last few weeks. This is not due to post-election having-nothing-to-talk-about, but rather due to me having to write several exams and one major paper. The paper is a linguistic analysis of a dispute between Justice Stevens and Justice Scalia in the District of Columbia v. Heller gun control case about the significance of the word “to”. I will post a link to it once I refine it a little bit and put it on the web, just in case someone is interested in seeing what such an analysis might look like.

I am proud to live in Obama’s America too. Long time coming. Let’s work together now to bring us back into the international fold.

- Steve, November 4, 2008

There are many lessons to be learned from the recent U.S. Presidential election – but many more lessons commentators claim we have learned.  It’s been a month since the election, and it’s time to look back with some perspective.

• It was a historic election – this should not be understated.  A Black man was elected to the highest office in a country where 2nd-class citizenship and economic inequality was written into our laws just 55 years ago.  A woman was a serious competitor for the candidacy of one of two major parties in a country where gender inequality is still rampant and largely unaddressed.  This represents progress along racial and gender lines.
• It was a historic election – but this should not be overstated.  Despite the competitive candidacies of a person of color and a woman, racial and gender disparities are real and ongoing.  They are not merely anecdotal, but devastatingly economic.  The average white household made $48k last year; the average Black household made $30k.  The fact of Obama as president is not going to close that gap.
• Symbolism is real, and has very real effects. Cornel West on CNN:

In a sense it ["post-racialism"] doesn’t exist – it just means that white fellow citizens are more likely to vote for a black candidate who has qualifications rather than be preoccupied with his pigmentation.  “Post-racial” means less racism on behalf of white voters – and that’s progress, but “post racial” ought not to mean “black” people disappearing, as if there’s no such thing as “black” people anymore.

… As we see the glass ceiling actually pierced at the highest level, and the symbolic impact – My god, the impact on children … it makes a *big* difference.  That means the sky is the limit for them.  And of course the impact on white children as well, they understand that the sky is the limit for children across the board.

The challenge now is from moving from symbol to substance.  What kind of policies?  Will you accent working people?  Will you accent poor people?  Who will be your advisors?  What will your cabinet look like?  Symbols matter – but then we move to substance.

• “Progress” is only superficially defined by “more black faces in higher places” – yes, folks of color in positions of power is a part of moving forward, but that’s just the surface of progress.  In fact, having people of color in positions of power should be one of the last achievements in a democratic society in breaking down racism and building up a more equitable society.  The real achievement is when persistent and brutal conditions for everyday folks are addressed and resolved.  We are a long, long way from that, and it is entirely unclear whether Obama has the will or desire to “cash the check” he was given, as put by Bruce Dixon from the Black Agenda Report:

The day Obama takes office, there will be an incredible 1.1 million African Americans behind bars, a proportion eight times that of whites. Before the mortgage market meltdown the wealth of black families was about one eleventh that of whites. Since then, it’s fallen off a cliff. Whether we look at education, at wages, at morbidity, mortality, unemployment or mass incarceration the gaps between whites and blacks in the US are wide and still growing. With the nation’s First Black President installed, many whites will solemnly assure us that the US is not now, if it ever was, a racist society. The First Black President-elect seems to agree with them, having told us all a year before electing him that we were “90% of the way” to a non-racist society.

Will the First Black President be of any use cashing the check for real racial justice, not just for black faces in high places? The clock is already ticking, and every day is an opportunity to lead lost.

The day the First Black President is sworn in the US economy will still be, in the words of economist Michael Hudson a polite fiction, based on phantom assets, phony profits, inflated valuations, and outright fraud, a house of marked cards where even the bankers know not to trust each other. Millions of families will still face foreclosure, eviction and bankruptcy. Tens of millions more are in debt up to their necks, afflicted with ever-rising interest rates thanks to the tireless efforts of Obama’s running mate Joe Biden, sometimes known as the Senator from MasterCard.

In his first true test of presidential leadership, while still a candidate the First Black President lobbied reluctant Democrats and urged them to pass the Bush-Cheney trillion dollar no-strings-attached parting gift to Wall Street, money that could have been used to fund education, jobs, infrastructure, human needs, and debt relief for ordinary families.

• This was not a landslide victory. It was clearly an electoral landslide, with a projected 365 to 173 vote difference.  But the popular vote was 53% to 46% – a difference of 7%.  McCain was dealt a hand of 8 years of Bush, embarrassing responses to 9/11, the largest Wall Street disaster in a lifetime, the ruins of Katrina, Republican corruption after corruption, an incompetent campaign with incompetent vice president, without a real message of substance to people who work for a living, and a sitting president who might be the worst president in the history of history, whose very name he could not freely speak aloud.  Ignoring everything about the Democrat’s candidate – MIckey Mouse should have handily beat the Republican party by 20 points.  That this was settled by a difference of 9 out of 129 million voters says quite a bit about the Obama victory.  That the Obama campaign spent 3/4 of $1 billion dollars to get such a margin of victory indicates something very wrong with our political system.
• As for that $750,000,000 spent by the Obama campaign, Noam Chomsky points out:

The Center for Responsive Politics reports that once again elections were bought: “The best-funded candidates won nine out of 10 contests, and all but a few members of Congress will be returning to Washington.” Before the conventions, the viable candidates with most funding from financial institutions were Obama and McCain, with 36% each. Preliminary results indicate that by the end, Obama’s campaign contributions, by industry, were concentrated among Law Firms (including lobbyists) and financial institutions. The investment theory of politics suggests some conclusions about the guiding policies of the new administration.

• The victory of Obama over McCain means that we have a little more time than we otherwise would have. A McCain victory would have meant continued economic disaster, a greater pace towards environmental ruin, slightly more lethal occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and a tremendous blow to a great deal of (if not misplaced) hope for those millions of people, particularly youth and folks of color, which would make re-mobilization difficult and done from a less positive place.

I’m thinking today of the mythical Amazons. I say “mythical” not to make any statement about their actuality, but because I’m thinking specifically of the mythology. That is, what does this mythic idea mean?

The idea is of a woman warrior, but she’s more than that. She is a person who occupies the space between sexes. She cuts off one breast, the better to shoot arrows, but leaves the other: a combatant who can nurse children. All her life is dimorphic. Women are her friends and comrades, men her enemies; her daughters are treasured children, her sons left out to die.

I am being somewhat ahistorical here. I’m interpreting this idea from my vantage point as a 21st century dyke, wondering what the symbol means today — I find its simple endurance as an idea noteworthy — and, to a lesser (and less informed) extent, what it might have meant once, what purpose this idea serves.

So. The Amazon is, I think, the visceral reaction to the gendering of violence. We code violence as male and tenderness as female and, therefore, men as dangerous and women as nurturing. Trapped in such a system, people respond in many ways — most frequently by performing these roles and behaving as if they are natural and inevitable. But I don’t think of any of us is truly comfortable with this incredibly reductive picture of human nature. The life of the Amazon is a life of both protest against this system and capitulation to it: a rejection of the system on the system’s own terms. The Amazon is following an older, crueler Golden Rule — treat others as they treat you. In a world where men, and only men, are brutal, and women, and only women, are kind,* the Amazon, in an imperfect stand against cruelty, becomes callous to men and considerate to women.

This is a profound assent to the premises of the gender system — she accepts that women are one way and men another. But it also, inevitably, gets her kicked out of that same institution. As soon as she practices both violence and tenderness, even in her sexist way, she is no longer qualified for membership in the group “woman.” This contradiction embodies the essence of life under this regime: we are trapped and re-trapped in the system even as we are constantly kicked out of it, constantly deemed unworthy of our assigned class. And that’s the real cruelty of it.

Even in exile there is no escape.

* This is not the real world. It is the world the gender system tells us we live in, though.

Cross-posted at Our Descent Into Madness.

This past week was Palestine Awareness Week, when members of Students for Justice in Palestine worked to present facts and viewpoints that run counter to the traditional negative portrayals of Palestinians. As part of the effort, the organization created posters presenting facts about the Israel-Palestine conflict that would surprise most Americans, like facts illustrating the enormous disparities in military strength between the Israeli army and the Palestinian people, and between the magnitude of the crimes committed by Israel against the Palestinians and those committed by the Palestinians against Israelis.

Unfortunately, some individual or group, presumably unhappy with this factual presentation, has seen fit to sabotage these signs. Although I have never heard of a pro-Palestinian group sabotaging signs put up by Zionist groups, I have more than once encountered vandalism against pro-Palestinian groups, presumably by Zionist individuals. I suggest that this reflects on the fact that Zionists are insecure in their own political position.

Zionism, born during the heyday of colonialism as a colonial movement, has not successfully adjusted to this postcolonial world. The self-serving nationalist myths that used to pass as truths have been systematically debunked, in most cases by Israeli historians, and are no longer taken seriously in respectable circles. The old racialist caricatures of Israelis and Arabs are too embarrassing, too evocative of the historical racism in this country, for educated Americans to entertain. And though Zionists have spent enormous sums of money on advertising and image management, they have not identified a successful message. Just a couple of years ago, Israel was rated the world’s worst brand by the National Brands Index.

If you read the Zionist press, as I often do, you’ll find that discussions about communication are dominated by concern that the Zionist message is not succeeding among young people, and proposals for how better to “sell” Zionism and Israel to the targeted audiences. This is in stark contrast to discussions in the human rights community, which is concerned about how to break through the media and cultural barriers that prevent the Palestinian side of the story from reaching a mass audience. No wonder, then, that when Palestinian groups take steps to communicate its message, Zionists feel like they have to undermine it through acts of destruction.

This letter got me a request to meet with the director of Hillel, which I shall do on Tuesday.

Originally conceived as an opinion piece, it would have noted, as Edward Said noted in “The Question of Palestine”, that in many respects Zionism is a great success – it’s created a state with a strong economy, powerful military, solid educational sector and arts scene, and at least for Jewish citizens a democracy.

And then there are the reasons it’s a failure, even on its own terms. As Eqbal Ahmad has argued, Israel has created a situation where its survival is premised on the perpetual military and political weakness of the Arab states. As a result, Zionists have failed in their goal of creating a secure safe haven for the Jewish people. It’s also a failure in that its desperate clinging to the program of colonization and conquest is causing serious moral deterioration among Israelis, and very bad publicity outside Israel. In the final calculation, Israel may be a net debit for the Jewish people.

It seems to me that the foundational assumptions of traditional school are: that children, left to their own devices, cannot and will not learn; that children are basically helpless and stupid and deficient in curiosity; that children must therefore be taught, by a competent authority, or they will fail to grasp concepts and gain skills.

I think anyone who has ever spent any time with a child can attest that all of these ideas are patently false. Anyone who was ever spent time around a child who is learning to talk can attest as much with even greater confidence — tiny babies, unable even to feed themselves, crack the code of language with a speed and an enthusiasm most adults could envy. The reality, as far as I can tell, could not be farther from those assumptions.

And I do believe those are the underlying ideas. We would have to believe that children must be forced to learn in order to ask ourselves, “Is our children learning?”

That is an insane question. I know it’s also a much-mocked one, but no one would have laughed at it if our Ivy Leagued-educated* soon-to-be-former President had managed to formulate it correctly. And that’s absurd. There is no such thing as a child who isn’t learning. The only questions is, “Are our children learning things in the arbitrary order and at the arbitrary pace the school system requires?” If that’s more important to us than whether children are happy, healthy, curious, and engaged — and it certainly seems to be — we have our priorities precisely backward.

Instead of creating a safe, engaging environment where young children can explore, we create sterilized institutions where children are policed, herded like cattle. Instead of recognizing children as humans, with interests and desires, we treat them like identical robots, worrying whether they’ve learned to perform the right tricks instead of worrying whether they’ve learned to make friends, have conversations, critically evaluate ideas, express themselves through writing and art.

I know this has been said before. It’s been said so often it was already cliche when I was born in 1989. These things had been said, written, published in many places when, in 1998, I threw up in the bathroom after my first timed math test. Yes, these were well known ideas in 2005, when my incredibly intelligent twelve-year-old brother was identified as a “problem” by his teachers for such offenses as having unkempt hair, a messy backpack, and unsharpened pencils. I’m quite sure these ideas were familiar to the “head learner” (principal) of my high school when he sat me down and, having seen my SAT scores, proceeded to lecture me at length about the importance of attending a prestigious school, in total indifference to my thoughts, feelings, existence. He repeatedly interrupted me as a I tried to explain myself — to explain that I had more than a few misgivings about running off to spend a fortune for the privilege of joining the system currently destroying the world. His unwavering, self-interested concern for his own ability to use my accomplishments in future fund-raising was shockingly transparent. And this was at a small, artsy, alternative charter school. I do not want to imagine the lives of my cohorts in crueler institutions.

These ideas are well known, but the system continues. I have a lot of ideas about what would make a better school system, but very few about how to get out of the mess we’re in. The machine seems unbreakable, and I am terrified that with each passing year my memories will fade, I will care a little less, and eventually put my children through the same thing, safe in the socially acceptable conviction that it’s good for them. That the best training ground for this cruel world, this cruel capitalist economy, is the schoolyard with its bullies, its asphalt, its sand kicked by wind into little eyes, little mouths.

I’m sorry. I don’t have any suggestions. The point of public education is a very laudable and necessary one: we must have an educated populous in order to have a functioning democracy. But while we have a schooled populous, we don’t have an educated one. And while things are looking up for this country in recent months, the state of our republic is still dubious.

And I’m not just talking about public schools here, though that’s where I received most of my primary and secondary education. It’s the strange project of school itself, the centralization of childhood. It’s the strange truth that we live in a society in which young people, like old people, are useless — are unable to contribute anything we consider to be of value — and so must be occupied by pointless, deadening tasks.

I’m still in school now. In many ways college in depressingly similar to high school — the kids are the same as ever — but in others, it is a great improvement. The single greatest thing about college, the single thing that differentiates it from high school, is the fact that my professors respect me. My professors acknowledge me as a human being, with both the ability and the right to make choices for myself. No one is trying to go over my head. No one is trying to deny me my most basic authority over my own time, my own body. No one treats me a like a robot or an animal. No one treats me like a child.

Further reading.

In the comments to this post, I was offered two invaluable links that helped to catalyze my thinking on this subject. My aunt Stephanie recommended this amazing speech by John Taylor Gatto — it’s his acceptance speech for the New York City Teacher of the Year Award, which he won in 1990. Please read it.

Next, ballgame me suggested Compulsory Miseducation by Paul Goodman — that’s a PDF of the 1964 book. It’s a fast, engaging read; much of the language is dated, but the ideas are still timely and revolutionary.

* You know, enough said, really. That’s my whole point right there.

At the risk of appearing cynical, the election of any U.S. President (or any election) has never ensured a prosperous future.  On the contrary, politicians (and people in general) tend to do what they’re paid to do – and Obama’s $640,000,000 bankroll from the campaign means that there’s some rich folks who are expecting him to do things that will help them out.  Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, JP Morgan, Citigroup, and Time Warner were not in the Top 10 of  Obama’s contributors because they believed that he would redistribute their wealth or give alms to the poor.  This is not a surprising expectation.  After all, sister Goldman once remarked, “Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.”

Even if Obama were an anti-war socialist with an agenda of ending world hunger (he’s not, and he doesn’t), he still faces a rather conservative Democrat majority and a reactionary Republican minority.  The machinations of the U.S. government are not easily pushed in the direction of change – even the tepid and abstract changes to which Obama has alluded.  The status quo tends to remain the status quo – and that does not bode well for most of the folks in the country (and the world).  For instance, even after populist uproar over the Wall-Street bailout/giveaway, AIG is getting another bailout of an additional $40 billion ($40,000,000,000) and this has evoked little response from Washington.

The fundamental question is whether we believe that we are sheep to be herded by a shepherd, or whether we are all shepherds of our own future.  Is what “democracy” means that once in a few years we choose one of two narrowly-chosen candidates and expect him to lead us to redemption?  Is being a citizen a spectator sport, in other words?  Or are we to understand that if we wish to control our own destiny, that we will have to get up and do just that?

What the Obama victory means, among other things, is that unlike a McCain/Palin administration, the new president might be responsive to popular organizations and movements calling for reform.  Real change (i.e. revolution) is not likely an option.  The problems that face us are unparalleled in human history: climate change, ongoing war and occupation, nuclear proliferation – the list goes on.  Despite the accolades on Obama, the belief that he’s “going to cure everything, make everything perfect“, it is going to take a great gathering of the people of good will and intention of this country to sway him.  He’s not (and maybe cannot) do it by himself.

When I was in 10th grade, Emily and I started going to the bookstore during our free periods. We’d get coffee, and then just wander, reading title after title, picking up anything that interested us. We often read whole books in a single sitting, crouched on the carpet at the back of one aisle or another, sometimes reading silently to ourselves and sometimes out loud to one another. We read novels, collections of poetry, nonfiction volumes about science and history and feminism. This was fun — it was great, unadulterated fun, and the things we learned are immeasurable. I would learn more in ninety minutes, exploring an interesting topic with my best friend, than I did in an entire semester in any of my classes. Overall I’m sure I’ve learned significantly more reading with Emily — in bookstores, bedrooms and the blogosphere — than I did in my three* years of high school combined.

Being forced back into class every day after this was incredibly demoralizing. I’ve always been an A student and liked school more than most, but this exposed the great hypocrisy of what I was being forced to do. I was learning, passionately — and it felt nothing like sitting in those classrooms. That framework of school was actively hostile to my education, actively preventing me from learning, by forcing me to sit in my plastic chair as an often pathetic teacher tried and failed to gain control of the classroom, and as the other kids joked and flirted in their stupidly transparent ways.

(Emily simply sat silently reading through every single class, managing to get some value of that wasted time.)

To add insult to injury, those school officials would regularly force me into discussions and activities about “learning how to learn.” Learning how to learn! As if they new the first thing about it! As if learning is some trick children must be trained, like dogs, to perform!

Needless to say, there is something profoundly wrong with the school system when it inhibits learning. There is something profoundly wrong with the school system when the bookish, academic kids hate it.

So what are we doing here?

We’re treating children and teenagers like they aren’t people. People — human beings — are sensitive, curious, self-aware, self-motivating, cooperative creatures. We treat children like they’re numb, stupid, belligerent, apathetic animals, and then we complain when they act that way.

And what happened to Emily and me?

We figured out that we were people. We discovered we were smart, caring, inquisitive and enthusiastic. We discovered we were human beings.

Once the kid knows she’s a person, you can’t expect her to sit back down and shut back up again.

(Thanks to Dave at How to Save The World for reminding me of this a few weeks ago.)

In the next installment, more about the fundamental assumptions of school, plus a suggestion for further reading. Finally, in Part III if it fits or IV if it doesn’t, some ideas about what school should do and be.

* At the end of junior year I started attending college under an arrangement in which both schools agreed to let me count college credits toward my high school graduation.

I’ll leave readers to suggest the other 7, but I think deserving to be in at least three spots are the following:

(1 of 10)
The Nightwatchman (Tom Morello), “Road I Must Travel”:

(2 of 10)
Against Me!, “Baby, I’m an Anarchist”:

(3 of 10)
Immortal Technique, “Point of No Return”:

Others? State Radio’s “Gang of Thieves”? Dead Prez’s “Hip Hop”? If you’ve got a suggestion, leave it in the comments.

I’m at my high school, sitting in the gathering space — the hall where we had our weekly, school-wide assemblies. All my friends are there, and all my teachers. Guest speakers have come in. They are talking and talking, lecturing us about some subject, passing a microphone back and forth. They are saying something that infuriates me — some lie, some bigoted untruth that the teachers and administrators are nodding along to. I’m exchanging glances with my friends, my classmates, uneasy sideways glances as we slowly realize how wrong these lecturers are. They talk on and on and it gets only worse, I get angrier and angrier. I raise my hand to speak but they ignore it. My hand is up for what feels like hours, until my arm is shaking and exhausted and my face contorted. I start to yell, begging to be allowed to speak. I need to speak. I know that no one will correct these liars if I don’t and I can’t let them talk like that to my friends, to all these kids. I love these kids and I can’t let them do this. But they ignore me. I start screaming, and I’m crying, choking around my sentences, my pathetic little points that I need to make so badly. I need only to say them, to be heard. How can they make us sit here like this? Forced to gag on their sentences and not allowed to feel anything, not allowed to respond.

This is when my teachers decide they have had enough of it. They grab my arms, my hair, my shoulders. They put duct tape over my mouth.

It’s more than a year already that I’ve been out of high school, but I have these dreams about once a week. That’s a more mild one. A few month ago I dreamt that the school administration was keeping us locked in rotting facilities on an isolated island a la Lost, and they performed surgeries on us when we were sleeping, putting machines into our bodies. My parents, both in their forties, still have high school nightmares, too.

These nightmares are evidence of trauma. I wake up crying, my hands stuck in tight fists. If my parents are any indication, I may have these nightmares all my life.

What the hell is going on here? What are we doing? What is this system, this methodology, that we refuse to break away from? It’s incredible to me — truly incredible — that virtually everyone has a horrible, permanently scarring experience in school, only to force their own children through the same thing.

In the next segment, I will explore the nature of formal education — what it is we’re actually doing here.

The title, by the way, comes from here.

Write to Marry Day!

Arguments in favor of California’s Proposition 8 are a fascinating study in hate apologetics.  Just as with the “life begins at conception” anti-choice movement or the pro-creationism lobby, from the start there is an intense pressure to hide the religious foundations beneath the nearest available logic-like substitute.  It comes down to an often hilarious yet very sobering look into the kind of people who think discrimination belongs in the California state constitution.

The favored defenses of institutionalized bigotry are:

• Cultural Definition/Clarity
• Protecting the Institution of Marriage, Social Role of Traditional Families, Etc
• Claiming Same Sex Relationship are Unnatural
• OMG They Will Make Our Children Gay
• Majority Rule vs Courts
• Protecting Religious Freedom

The first argument goes something like this (DocDodson’s first comment):

Marriage law in this culture represents one thing.
A man and a woman. For clarity another word must be used to represent any other type of union. Specifications reject confusion. Now, Let’s do talk about religion. If you attend a church, would it be a church of God in Christ, or a church of Satan? What if you walked into a building that just said church, and became trapped? You thought it was one thing, but you got trapped in another. Deciet is a horrible thing. Misrepresentation of values, a crime.

I can see why DocDodson is afraid, who would want to become trapped forever in a building that “just said church”?  Its painfully easy to dismiss the idea that straight people might become so confused by marriage in a post prop-8 world they might accidentally marry someone of the same sex.  The cultural definition provides more to go on.  This argument is remarkably similar to the Southern Way of Life arguments against racial equality:

The Southern way of life divided the world into white and black – sacred and profane.  In this sacred way of life, all who were white were viewed as fully human and all who were black as less than human.

The anti-gay movement and the support for proposition 8 shares a lot in common with the racist campaign against equality during the civil rights era, as this brilliant video hack shows (via Amanda at Pandagon):

By taking the Morman Church’s campaign against equality regardless of sexual orientation and substituting in “interracial” for “same-sex”, they’ve effectively shown the true colors of those who claim to champion family values.

Which leads us to the next three arguments, which often go together.  The basic idea is that Same sex marriages somehow:

• Effect opposite sex marriages
• Go against the purpose of marriage, which is to further society (ie make more people)
• Provide an Immoral/Unnatural/Icky Environment for Children

The first point is the easiest to tackle.  One can simply look to Massachusetts, which has a complete lack of “Well, gay marriage is now legal” statements in divorce proceedings.  The opportunity to point out the utter nonsense of this argument is not one to squander.  At its heart is the idea that the actions of some can affect the morality of unrelated persons.  The reasoning is remarkably close to the heart of many pro religion-state marriage partisans:  Its about removing temptation so the weak do not succumb to what they view as sinful.  We need look no further than the tendency of Republican officials – paragons of morality – to seek out prostitutes and other sexual activities they rail against in public.  It is religious conservatives of all stripes who seek to institute a nanny state.

The second point is often lightly dealt with by referring to childless marriages, and offering to institute a deadline for producing offspring for marriage licenses to remain valid.  Anyone foolish enough to walk into this arguing that would be fine by them can be shamed by bringing up the example of infertile couples.

Against the third point there is some encouragement to find in popular culture (Apple Trailer: Breakfast With Scot). This boils down to two implied arguments:  That homosexuality is learned behavior (which feeds into the paranoia about children even being taught same sex couples exist), and that homosexuality is ok “for adults who already are gay, but not for children!”.  The clear implication being that despite all the assurances to the contrary, people who use this argument are really wearing their homophobia on their sleave.  The best thing to do is to bring the discussion back to the biological basis of sexual preference, and to argue so as to bring out their homophobia into the light, where you can then counter that they have no place forcing their fear and hate on the general public.

To quote Comparative Religious Ethics again:

The Southern way of life divided the world into white and black – sacred and profane.  In this sacred way of life, all who were white were viewed as fully human and all who were black  as less than human.  Therefore Southern white morality did not require whites to treat blacks with the same dignitiy that they treated each other.  For a black person to enter the sacred space of white society, except under strictly controlled conditions, was to pollute that space.

The fear and hate of homophobia, combined with the disapproval of religious authority, has had a similarly violent impact on homosexuals.  When people are viewed as hateful, less than human, or a sinful influence, they become objects of aggression.  Opposition to same sex marriage is innately eliminationist in its expression.

We now arrive at the last two arguments for proposition 8, wherein the anti-gay movement tries to have it both ways at once (preservingmarriage.com):

One the one hand, the anti-gay contingent is intent on insisting their religious freedom to believe homosexuals are sinners are at risk, and need to be protected.  They are however quite comfortable with ensuring their beliefs restrict all same-sex couples from enjoying the same rights as straight couples.  With regard to their perceived vulnerability to a flood of lawsuits demanding churches marry homosexuals, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence to back up this kind of fear (mormonapologetics.org, emphasis mine):

But will it happen? Will churches be forced to perform gay marriages, even when it contradicts their religious convictions?

No one can see the future, but we can look to the past for similar situations. The closest comparison I can think of is the legalization of interracial marriage. I’ve searched and searched, but I can’t find a single case where a church was forced to perform an interracial marriage. From a broader perspective, the same argument could be applied to civil rights as a whole. The civil rights era created anti-discrimination legislation which was applied to public and private institutions, but churches were (and still are) exempt from such laws. The LDS church was free to deny priesthood status to blacks until it decided on its own to end the practice. The government never attempted to force the LDS church to change its policies regarding blacks, even though those policies were racist and discriminatory. The church was never threatened with the loss of tax exempt status for those policies.

History shows that churches will be free to practice their religion, even when such practices are discriminatory. There is, therefore, no reason to believe the hysterical arguments now being put forth with respect to same sex marriage.

Further down in the same thread, there is a link to a California law professor debunking the legal threat:

Kaimi Wenger, a law professor addressed this question in a discussion of the legal issues in California, and his conclusion was that it is unlikely that the Church would be required to perform same sex marriages.

http://ldshomosexuality.com/?p=168

Given that churches have in the recent past successfully barred interracial marriage, I doubt they’ll have much trouble being just as bigoted when it comes to same sex marriage.

This leaves the desire of the anti-gay mob to force their religious beliefs on all Californians.  And they are increasingly acting not just like a mob, but like the mob (SFGate via August):

Leaders of the campaign to outlaw same-sex marriage in California are warning businesses that have given money to the state’s largest gay rights group they will be publicly identified as opponents of traditional unions unless they contribute to the gay marriage ban, too.

ProtectMarriage.com, the umbrella group behind a ballot initiative that would overturn the California Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage, sent a certified letter this week asking companies to withdraw their support of Equality California, a nonprofit organization that is helping lead the campaign against Proposition 8.

“Make a donation of a like amount to ProtectMarriage.com which will help us correct this error,” reads the letter. “Were you to elect not to donate comparably, it would be a clear indication that you are in opposition to traditional marriage. … The names of any companies and organizations that choose not to donate in like manner to ProtectMarriage.com but have given to Equality California will be published.”

No word on whether or not in addition to being “outed”, supporters of gay rights would wake up next to a disembodied horse’s head:

Equality California executive director Geoffrey Kors said Thursday he has heard from two other business owners besides Abbott.

“It’s truly an outrageous attempt to extort people,” Kors said.

A church is acting like the mafia to protect institutionalized inequality and hate.  Their excuse for doing so is mind boggling:

She called the tactic “a frustrated response” to the intimidation felt by Proposition 8 supporters, who have had their lawn signs stolen and property vandalized in the closing days of the heated campaign.

Individuals act out inappropriately and the response is to extort business owners?  WTF?

Its an incredibly stupid move, and one we can help backfire simply by bringing more attention to it.

I’ll close with this video (through Feminist Law Professors via Samhita at Feministing):

I’d like to draw your attention to a particular scene at the end where one of the “No on 8″ counter protestors attempts to debate with the “Yes on 8″ supporters.  Unable to defend their desire to impose their views on others, they break into a chant, drowning out the lone “No on 8″ activist, literally turning their backs on him.

There is literally no room for nuance on an issue like this.  Supporters of Propostion 8 are on shaky ground with only veiled appeals to theocratic tendencies to lean on.  In contrast the opponents of Prop 8 have their shit remarkably together, and are willing to engage in smart and reasoned discourse.

Equality California has an Action Center and a helpful Ways to Get Involved page.  It also isn’t too late to donate.

* National Rifle Association
* Republicans for Environmental Protection
* Reform Party of the United States of America
* Al-Qaeda

Al-Qaeda is in some sketchy company here…

First of all, Lisa Harney of Questioning Transphobia is a vital voice in the blogosphere. If you’re not reading her work, you should be. She’s in a very tight spot right now, so if you have a few dollars to spare, I urge you to consider donating via the Paypal button on her site. (You can read more about her situation here.)

I want to jump now away from Lisa to the broader phenomenon of folks rallying around a fellow blogger to offer assistance in a time of need, something I’ve seen happen quite a few times. It is, in my observation, starting to become standard practice for bloggers to receive some support from the blogosphere when the going gets tough, which I find pretty fascinating.

In my last post, I talked about our need, as humans, for love and support from more than one person — in essence, our need for community. Community performs a lot of different functions; in the last post, I focused mainly on our social and emotional needs, which are of course very important. At an even more basic level, though, community meets our daily physical needs for food and shelter. What does it say about the state of community today that the blogosphere, of all things, steps in to support people?

(Once again, I’m talking about big-picture phenomena here, not the specifics of the life of any person but myself.)

To me it says that, for a lot of people, the blogosphere, and other non-geographic communities, are the new neighborhood. Instead of having a neighbor to bring over a casserole during a hard month, many of us have, instead, a wide circle allies and readers to click on a Paypal button. (Or, if we’re lucky, maybe we have both.)

It’s great that people have that support. That kind of network is critically necessary; I’m very glad to see the blogosphere step up to meet that need where necessary. What’s interesting to me is that it is necessary — that, for many people, the networks that are presumably more immediate than blogland are either nonexistent or, more likely, just inadequate.

This does make some good sense. Neighborhoods (and, before, villages and even towns) used to be collections of people who shared a culture, complete with shared values, worldview, lifestyle and experiences. Today, many neighborhoods* and other Earth-bound populations in industrialized countries are basically random assortments of people who have nothing more in common than the fact that they live on the same street. (This is not always true — there are still some thriving, supportive neighborhoods around. I’ve never set foot in one, though, and I don’t think my experience is particularly unusual for a middle class US-American.) These neighbors are often, but not always, in roughly the same economic strata. But the real glue of communities is usually totally absent: shared principles, priorities and worldview, shared identity and experience, shared culture and history. It makes perfect sense that my neighbors are basically strangers to me — we have very little in common.

Contrast this to a grouping like any given subset of the blogosphere — the queer blogosphere, for example, or the circle of progressive Jewish blog(er)s, or the online community of women of color feminists. Here we have, instead, a group of individuals who have self-selected for very similar interests, goals, opinions and values. Amongst the group there are typically many people who share an identity and/or similar experiences, not to mention language. The glue of community is there.

As we would expect, these communities function better than many neighborhood communities, and, for that reason, step up to the plate when community support is necessary (as it often is). It’s wonderful that people are crafting solutions to meet unmet needs, even if it is lamentable that the needs are going unmet in the first place.

More lamentable than the erosion of the neighborhood, though, is the related phenomenon of the loss of culture. My girlfriend and watched Fiddler On The Rough this week, so I’ve been thinking even more than usual about this, about the worlds and ways of life that we have lost: that I personally have lost, and that have been lost to countless peoples around the world, in the many tides of war, change, revolution, genocide. Some of these forces are horrible — genocide — and others — change, for example in the form of freedom movements — are very good.

But it’s a strange and complicated sort of problem. How do we move towards justice without eroding culture? Is it possible? How do we change for the better without irrevocably damaging our traditions? My life is better than those of my ancestors — I’m not poor, I’m comparatively free of restrictive gender roles, I can love (and, I hope, marry) the person of my choice regardless of her gender or ethnicity…

But these freedoms come at a price. have an unshakable sense of who I am, culturally — and yet much of that culture is missing from my knowledge. I ache for music and traditions and a language that are lost to me, for a country that shares my culture. (That country doesn’t exist, mostly because my cultural identity is a strange mishmash of many things.)

My grandmother mourns that she didn’t get to grow up in her parents culture: the tight-knit Sephardi community in Sofia, where she was born. Instead she was raised around western Europe (Spain, France), largely ignorant of her own culture. There was a permanent, irrevocable gulf between my grandmother and her parents — in some ways, they could never really know each other, never really talk to each other.

My mother was then raised primarily in the United States. Another culture, another unbridgeable gap. In some much smaller sense the same thing happened to me, because my mother and father raised me in a different part of the country from where they grew up. (New Mexico is very different from New England.)

No one understands this pain better than my grandmother, and yet she does not understand.

“Let’s go back to Europe.”

Where it would only happen all over again, to my children and to me. That world is already gone.

* I am, of course, excluding intentional communities here — they’re the response to this very situation.

If Things Were Switched …

What if Obama hadn’t supported immunity for the Bush administration?

What if Nader’s top contributors had been Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Microsoft, JP Morgan, General Electric, and others?

What if Obama supported equal rights, instead of opposing gay marriage?

What if Nader proposed escalating U.S. war and occupation in Afghanistan?

What if Obama was demonized and criticized for demanding that the country could do better than George Bush and Al Gore?

What if Nader claimed to be a liberal while at the same time embracing the death penalty – even for those not guilty of murder?

What if Obama was a crusader against nuclear power and the corporate welfare nuclear energy industry?

What if Nader supported environmental degradation, such as the fallacious “Clean Coal” campaign?

What if Obama were white and had declared in a Black church, “Too many fathers also are missing… they have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men… You and I know how true this is in the African-American community.”

What if Nader had called for increasing George Bush’s federal faith-based funding, in violation of the separation of Church and State?

What if Obama wasn’t as eloquent, as good-looking, as athletic?

What if Nader had been allowed on the debate stage, alone – no wife, no children – a picture of professionalism and dedication to his life’s work that precluded having a family?

What if Obama had spent his life challenging, instead of joining, the political establishment in the U.S.?

What if Nader had used his office to support Joe Lieberman over anti-war Ned Lamont in 2006?

What if Obama was responsible for establishing standards for consumer protection, environmentalism, and civic life for the last 40+ years?

What if Nader’s political career was bolstered by folks like Tony Rezko and Richard Daley?

What if Obama had started the Citizen Advocacy Center, Citizens Utility Boards, Congress Accountability Project, Corporate Accountability Research Project, Disability Rights Center, Equal Justice Foundation, Foundation for Taxpayers and Consumer Rights, Center for Women’s Policy Studies, Clean Water Action Project, and many more?

What if Nader had broken a promise to reject private donors and campaign on public funding based on campaign finance reform?

What if Obama had taken on corporate interests in Washington,  and acknowledged the “one-sided class war” in this country, instead of being funded by huge corporate powers?

You could easily add to this list.  If this were a real democracy, do you really believe that the only two valid candidates would be members of the Democrat and Republican parties?

Racism is very real and degrades the fabric of our society.  But if racism was the only barrier to democratic leadership, surely Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney would be a much preferable candidate for progressive voters.  When our only real choice on election day is a candidate who embraces the escalation of foreign war and occupation, who has been bought and sold by corporations his entire career, who supports widespread use of the death penalty, who refuses to impeach or hold the Bush administration accountable; then maybe racism isn’t the biggest problem we face in this country today.

Educational Background:

Barack Obama:
Columbia University – B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in International Relations.
Harvard Law School- Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude

vs.

Ralph Nader:
Princeton University – Magna Cum Laude in Public and International Affairs
Harvard Law School – Juris Doctor (J.D.)
University of Hartford - Professor of History and Government
American University Washington College of Law – Faculty Member
(Served in the U.S. Army)

Education isn’t everything, but this is about the two highest offices in the land as well as our standing in the world.

There has to be a reason that, in spite of the above, we are where we are today.  Racism is one of the keys.  Another is the fact that our politicians are bought and sold by corporate power, and money is everything.  Our government is up for grabs by the best spokesman who can convince us they offer change while maintaining the status quo at the same time.  Of course, there is a generous dosage of country-wide stupidity too.