Please help liberate those whites who remain imprisoned in their minds, shackled by the terrifying fear of white race-extinction that undergirds 1800s theories of white supremacy and Social Darwinism, theories that led to WWI and WWII and Hitler’s Holodomor plan to exterminate Slavic peoples. Please remind them of the oppression their ancestors may have faced in Europe where being poor was considered a crime punishable by workhouse sentences and exile to North America and Australia. Please remind them that the British military whipped white sailors and soldiers with 500 and 1000 lashes of the whip. Remind them of social class oppressions against the poor whites across Europe. Help them to be brave enough to resolve their intra-ethnic/race trauma so that they can stop misdirecting it out of cowardice against people of color. Herein is the under-engaged conversation about race in the United States. Help. Talk. Bring peace.
Help employees talk about racism and police
Need a way to start talking about white police officers killing black men? Try British military history and ask if such white anger is directed at the wrong target. The British Army used such “barbarous punishment…at a time of evangelical revival, the spread of humanitarian ideas, and efforts to reform slavery.” Many white sailors and soldiers had more scars than black slaves did. Displaced, multi-generational resentment?
In the British military, white British male soldiers were punished for being late, sleeping on post, being drunk, or insolence toward an officer with punishments like:
- 500-1000 lashes
- riding a wooden horse (astride a sawhorse, weights tied to legs to increase pain.)
- strappado (intended to dislocate both shoulders)
- mutilations
- “bloody backs” civilian nickname to soldiers after floggings
Arthur Gilbert, “The Regimental Courts Martial in the Eighteenth Century British Army,” Albion Journal, 1976 link
Roger Norman Buckley, The British Army in the West Indies (1998) p 206.
The Global Bottom Line: “We”+”And”>”or” in Dallas, Baton Rouge and Minnesota
I am also sorry that we have allowed zero-sum game political theory to replace e pluribus unum. Perhaps the business model has been applied too long in the field of education, so long that we no longer have time to teach the core principles of the social contracts that create opportunities for the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Perhaps we need to restore funding to the humanities so that we can all strive more ardently to be humane even in our business dealings.
We have worked for centuries to make a more perfect union in this country, a nation where “and” is more powerful than the “or” of zero-sum game theory. “We” is the first word of our social contract. This includes police officers who are civilians first and always, as are their employers – every single citizen of the United States. The document that begins with “We” is the one that put the United States into position to be a global player in international trade. Prior to the document that begins with “We” our merchants were vulnerable to pirates. That document is so effective that in 1945 “We” became the first word of the United Nations Charter. “We” is the word that protects the people of the planet, your customers. “We” is the global consensus. I hope that you are comforted by the word “We” and that you, too, are part of the team working to bring those who prefer the fear instilled by zero-sum game thinking into the warmth of the national and global family of “We.”
“We the People, in order to form a more perfect union” -The United States Constitution
“I think, therefore I am” or “I fear, therefore I hate”? Humankind chooses “We are, therefore we will.”
The Constitution of the United States was crafted in a vibrant milieu that is succinctly described by Descartes’s phrase, “I think, therefore I am.” This phrase has traditionally been taught as one that empowers individuals to reclaim self-worth and political power against another era of government described by Louis XIV’s “I am the State,” an era in which too many people were disposable and starved by the policies of their own government.
This year, we seem to be on the precipice of a return to tyranny that I believe is describe thusly: “I fear, therefore I hate.” World-systems historians and economists are not surprised to see a resurgence of hate-speech roughly 75 years since the fascist era in which Europeans nearly self-annihilated through genocide. We can chalk this up to Kondratieff cycles in objective, quantitative analyses. Philosophers and political scientists can do the same using Hegelian dialectic. The danger is that, while we write, the ink in our pens and printers may turn from black to the macabre iron oxide red of spilled human blood.
One of the tragedies of the 2016 presidential election discourse is the inward focused, navel-gazing that blinds too many from the positive achievements of the United Nations Millennium Development campaign. There is a beautiful movement in the world in which those who ascribe to “I think, therefore I am” are working collectively to use laboratory and indigenous scientific knowledge to find and implement sustainable solutions to climate change. http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sdgoverview/
“We are, therefore we will” is the zeitgeist of the planet now. The human family has decided that we will live and we have a collective will to do so with dignity. Many of us will still be poor in terms of material goods but we will not live in poverty. We will not be poor in spirit.
Ironically, it is the spirit of the U.S. Constitution, that document that secured and stabilized the first nation to throw off the chains of colonialism, that catalyzes the global evolution from “I think, therefore I am” toward “We are, therefore we will.”
Please, as you encounter those who suffer from and succumb to “I fear, therefore I hate,” inoculate them with love and kindness and knowledge that humankind, people of all colors, religions, genders and creeds, has decided to work to help them transcend the poverty of body or soul that ails them. They have no need to hate anyone or anything but fear, itself.
No birthright citizenship=>No US Constitution; =>Attack on 1851 Ohio Constitution
If “birthright” citizenship is overturned, then no one is a citizen of the United States.
This week, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and other presidential candidates seem to be using xenophobia to seek votes by promising to overturn the 14th Amendment.
This “birthright” issue and attacks on the 14th Amendment are marketed as a defense of our border with Mexico, but they also invalidate citizenship for every person born in the United States, meaning that there will be no U.S. Constition, no US social contract, and nothing to protect you, your family and neighbors.
E pluribus unum is being trampled. What affects migrants from Latin America also affects migrants from Europe, Asia and Africa. If that does not include you, it includes your ancestors, even the ones who walked across the Bering Strait.
We live in an age when legalized slavery is returning. It is a feature in the Islamic State and it is a feature in Boko Haram.
To return legalized slavery to the United States, a crucial step is to overturn the 14th Amendment. Ending the 14th Amendment accomplishes opens many opportunities:
- People with African ancestry, something determinable with DNA where skin color is insufficient evidence, can be denied citizenship.
- States will have the power to confiscate property of individuals or classes of people. Many benefitted from the Japanese internment during World War II. Germans were also suspect people. This time, we will be able to confiscate the property of people from Eastern Europe on suspicion of supporting Putin, from West Asia and the northern half of Africa on suspicion of supporting Islamic State, from East Asia on suspicion of supporting China or North Korea, from South America on suspicion of supporting Venezuela, from England on suspicion of supporting a royalist faction to bring Prince Harry to the throne of the United States and Canada, etc.
- Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, a section addressing “the validity of the public debt of the United States,” may have some influence on the borrowing power of the United States. This may affect our international trade. It may also affect Social Security and the pensions of federal workers. It may affect the salary, health care and retirement plans for our soldiers and their families.
- Section 3 of the Fourth Amendment addresses the required loyalty of members of Congress and “insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”
The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution compels us “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Reversing the 14th Amendment is a violation of this primary Constitutional directive.
When I was sworn in as Governor of the Buckeye Girls State, an American Legion Auxiliary civic education program, I took an oath of office in front of Ohio Governor James Rhodes and more than a thousand of my peers who voted for me that “I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of Ohio.” There is no expiration on that promise.
So, the 1851 Ohio Constitution is a social contract binding “we the people of the State of Ohio” and our “Government is instituted for their equal protection and benefit.”
In my opinion, this week’s challenges to the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution are a threat to the State of Ohio and that approaches a threshold in Article III, Section III, of the United States Constitution in which treason is defined.
World War II veterans taught me in high school that citizens must diligently guard and defend the Constitution of the United States. I wonder if the 14th Amendment is being taught in this way to our students in the regulated curricula rolling across our nation.
The U.S. Constitution obligates me to speak out when I see actions that threaten one of the United States.
Today, I fulfill this obligation.
Sharing a dry cup of water with some Dine families: “The Navajo Water Lady” on CBS Sunday Morning
Historian Claire C. Robertson taught many of us the importance of Sharing the Same Bowl in 1984 when she published the results of her study of women and the history of socioeconomic structures in Accra, Ghana. I learned the significance of eating from a shared plate during a too brief homestay with a very kind family in Dakar, Senegal. Those daily meals changed my sense of what it means to be in a community and how a social contract is incomplete until all in the community are liberated from anarchy.
In this presidential campaign season, the anarchists are speaking loudly about states’ rights and about gun rights and about small-government as if we are all living on the frontier with Pecos Bill. This anarchy may lead to fascism and many of us know this.
What too many are forgetting is the fascism of Mussolini with its patria potestas and anti-union sentiments. While fantasies of a neo-Pecos Bill Mussolini ride across the range of the blogosphere, I hope the anarchists take time to read Robert. C. Davis’ Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800. There is a direct correlation between the increase in the size of the US government and the increase in white Americans’ safety in the Ottoman Empire where they, like James Leander Cathcart, were often captured and sold into slavery. Anarchy and small US government were dangerous for white Americans.
This same kind of small-government anarchy results in too little money being spent on water infrastructure in the United States.
CBS This Morning showed the world that inside the United States there are people who benefit less from U.S. water technology than the millions of people who have been helped by U.S. government assistance overseas. CBS also included a story about the heatwave in several states near the Dine/Navajo nation. For many of the Dine people, their water cups are dry for about half of the month. California Governor Jerry Brown’s directives about water conservation and Mother Nature’s wildfires are warning us that millions of Americans are at risk of sharing a dry cup of water with the Dine.
Rather than take my word for it, you can read more at the Community Water Center.
I’m not sure what kind of callousness allows us tolerate dry cups of water for the Dine. Small-government anarchists in California and other states may change their minds as their water sources go dry.
Unless we apologize, empathize and finance massive water infrastructure development soon, we may learn that we can’t follow Pecos Bill Mussolini to another frontier in an undiscovered verdant valley. Rather, we should direct our national and state governments to invest on our behalf in a long drink of water at the Empathy Saloon inside the space of the American social contract.
John Adams’ warning about mixing money, politics and national security
The United States of America is the elder sibling of formerly colonized nations and our national security depends upon us remembering the responsibility that comes with this historic position.
With every election cycle, we affirm our social contract by infusing our elected government with new representatives as a means of avoiding oppressive disconnections between those who govern and the governed.
In this presidential election cycle, we celebrate the opportunity that we have to achieve success. Definitions of that success vary. For some it is measured by service to civil society. For others it is measured by the ability to employ many others. Some are able to do both as they live out the concept in our Preamble to the Declaration of Independence that we have the inalienable right to the “pursuit of Happiness.” We are also painfully aware, and under international scrutiny, that this right is not yet universal.
In this presidential election cycle, we are also challenged to diligently pursue the inalienable right to Liberty. Liberty is more humane than the anarchy that arises when people take it upon themselves to step outside of the bonds of our social contract and disrespect the rights of others. Daily vigilance promotes Liberty.
This daily vigilance includes monitoring a source of corruption that Founding Father John Adams identified. “When the legislature is corrupted, the people are undone.” One cause of that corruption, future President Adams warned, occurs when the power of the ordinary person is diminished by money power. “The rich, the well-born, and the able, acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense in a house of representatives. The most illustrious of them must, therefore, be separated from the mass, and placed by themselves in a senate; this is, to all honest and useful intents, an ostracism.” Adams was wary of the power of monied interests usurping the sovereignty of the people. He recognized a role in the polity for those who are now identified as the One Percent. “When he has obtained the object of his wishes, you may still hope for the benefits of his exertions, without dreading his passions.” John Adams warned us that some members of the social class commonly referred to as the One Percent may use their power in philanthropic and virtuous ways to enhance “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” for all while a few others, acting for an infinitesimal constituency, may betray our Preamble.
In this presidential election cycle, we, the collective elder sibling of formerly colonized nations, have an obligation to secure Liberty for ourselves and to model for other nations the benefits of living within the values enumerated in our Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. It is a matter of national security.
Preamble to the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
John Adams was quoted from The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1851) IV: 290-291.
Smart and Wise. What is a liberal arts education?
There is a contest over using the business model to run institutions of higher education. In that contest, one question may be the polka-dotted elephant. What is the product? It is a logical question for a business.
Years ago, when I was the graduate student representative on a Presidential Search Committee at the Ohio State University, I had an opportunity to peruse a volume about the history of the Ohio State University. It seems that there was a concern in the middle of the nineteenth century that the proposed university would produce graduates educated in the mechanical arts such as science, engineering, etc. There was also much debate in the newspapers that the university should produce polished mechanics who know about the classics. Why?
At the time that I served on the committee, I was a non-traditional mother, divorced and raising three children. I added what I learned from that volume to what many of my mentors taught me. I produced a mantra for my children. I am sure that I am not the first to use a this phrase or a version of it.
“Smart is knowing how. Wise is knowing when.”
Yes, the grammar may not be perfect. It is easy to remember.
In this age of increasingly digitized education, it is easy to focus on mastery of the content of texts as measured by multiple choice questions. What is the right answer? Which is the right sentence to copy from the book into your homework? What is the missing word in the following sentence?
I want my doctors and engineers to know the answers to these questions.
When should this knowledge be deployed? What is the proper application of our knowledge to questions not yet asked as of the publication of the textbook? How can we advance science and the economy and political power while remaining human? Are humans only animals? Are we humane? Why does that silent E have so much power over our social engineering and civic decisions?
Humans are smart enough to produce clean solar and nuclear energy and biofuel. Humans are smart enough to house and feed all on the planet. Do we have the will to be humane enough to do so?
Liberal arts courses are the space where we polish our “mechanics.” Our products are what Durkheim called sacred and profane social facts. We produce humane homo sapiens, people who are wise enough to know when to apply their trade in a way that benefits all. We learned something from Ashoka’s enlightenment and from Plato’s concept of “souls of gold” who are pure enough in intent to not make decisions based solely on the bottom line of the quarterly statements.
Without the humanities, universities will produce rational, genocidal bipedal animals with lots of tools.
So, to those who are leaning toward a rational business model STEM education without ample humanities courses, I recommend advice I learned from some nineteenth century people in a state that was full of cornfields and forests. While you focus on making people smart about the What of STEM, be certain that your outputs are Wise enough to know When.
Will we talk about Israel once peace is achieved?
There is something reassuring in Mr. Netanyahu’s annual speeches to AIPAC each spring. It has become a litany and a dependable tradition.
This year I ask a different question.
Will Israel be in the news anymore once peace is reached?
What will it be like to be an Israeli who doesn’t worry about air raid drills anymore?
If we talk about Israel in the news once peace is achieved, what will Israelis want us to say?
Today, I am beginning to imagine new headlines about Israel and Palestine, the new binary stars of Middle East peace and prosperity.
I wish Mr. Netanyahu would imagine these new headlines, too, because he could be a life-giver just as Mr. Gorbachev was once he had the courage to stop fighting our grandparents’ wars long after they died.
Imagine new headlines about the twin nations of Israel and Palestine.
Peace now.
Mr. Putin’s Next Step: the Easter Invasion?
As long as Mr. Putin is making things easy for writers of world history books, then it is most likely that he will rescue more Russians in Ukraine and other areas between Palm Sunday and Good Friday. This will make Easter more of a celebration because they can include a restoration of Russian influence.
One reason for retaking Crimea (and some additional Ukrainian coastline) is to set the stage for exclusive control of the Azov-Kuban petroleum reserves.
It would be quite convenient for Russia to monopolize this field.However, would it not also be wise to share the wealth from this field with Ukraine in order to increase Ukraine’s purchasing power for Russian exports?
Yes and no.
If Ukraine has rights to this field, it can sell the energy to NATO nations, depriving Russia of those revenues from NATO nations. Mr. Putin can prevent this loss of energy revenues.
It leave me wondering if he would like to be remembered as the ruler who kept energy revenues. Is this a correction to the last USSR leaders who may have let Turmenistan oil and gas reserves flow through their hands, reserves “discovered” in 2000, less than a decade after the dissolution of the USSR? If those fields were known in 1990, then the USSR could have continued to fight the Cold War.
What about his statement that Russia had no interest in invading Ukraine? I don’t know Russian but I wonder if he used an archaic conditional verb tense.
Did anyone ask him what he thought the borders of Ukraine are? Which year’s map did he have in mind so that he could claim to tell the truth?Historically,this is merely irridentism, the kind that causes protracted wars with high casualty rates.
Well, Mr Putin may create a monopoly and nickname it the Easter Energy Fields if he rolls his tanks into Eastern Ukraine next week.
profmrobinson 