We've Seen This Before: White Voter Angst

Howard Jarvis led a movement in 1978 to reduce property taxes in California, called Proposition 13, that became a national movement. A hero to many, from my perspective, he was just another jolly (jowly?) white guy who didn't want to pay taxes.

I was going to a California state college in 1978. I had exchanged the bitter cold winters and sweltering summers of Minnesota for the perpetual sunshine of southern California. (It never rains in California, but boy don't they warn you)

In 1978, the census forecast for 1980 was that California would become the first state in the nation where whites would no longer be a majority. California in 1978 had significant Asian, African and Mexican minorities.

California had one of the best public university systems in the nation. The UC universities were designed to be primarily research institutions. UC-Los Angeles and UC-Berkeley being the most well known.

The Cal State universities were designed to be primarily teaching institutions, with the goal of providing low cost education to all Californians that desired it. I was attending Cal State Fullerton. After satisfying the state residency requirement, my tuition was under a thousand dollars a year.

The UC and Cal State systems were primarily funded by property taxes. My heretical theory is that when white voters realized that most of the young people going to college on their dime (their words) would not be white, they complained.

I would point out that most of these white voters did not complain previously, but rather had extolled the benefits of college education being available to everyone. I guess they meant every one who was white.

It may be a coincidence, and I understand there are people who explain the existence of patterns this way, but with census projections declaring that whites will no longer be a majority in the nation, it isn't surprising to see white people complaining again about property taxes (i.e. school funding)

Again, it needs to be pointed out that these angry white voters did not complain with the same vehemence before. It needs to be pointed out that most (what is it 90 percent?) of Tea Party activists are white.

The constitution was crafted by well-to-do white men to protect the interests of, yes, you got it, well-to-do white men. Brown men, black men, yellow men and ALL women were excluded from these protections. Any time any of these exclusive entitlements of these affluent white people are in danger of being reduced (I believe it's called sharing) there is a backlash.

This backlash has gone by different names in different times. The Tea Party is just the latest incarnation.

Let's face it, white folks aren't good at sharing. The White Anglo Saxon Protestant deity they worship has blessed their entitlements and they aren't giving them away to any Mexicans, Africans or Asians. No way, no how. Not without a fight!

Howard Jarvis and his cause are still being invoked in California elections this year. He is still a hero to many white people. I still think of him as a selfish white man who didn't want to share. But then, I'm a heretic. I don't mind sharing.

America is an Empire in Decline

Comedian and Daily Show correspondent John Oliver is British. He knows a thing or two about empires in decline. There was a time when the 'sun never set on the British Empire.'

The Brits began losing ground after WWI, losing a whole generation in the trenches of Flanders. Another British comedian, Rowan Atkinson, captured the futility and stupidity of WWI in his Black Adder TV series.

What was left of the British Empire was largely dismantled after WWII, most notably when India gained independence. The way Oliver put it before an audience in Montclair, New Jersey this month was the last time the British had guns they took over 2/3 of the world.

"We don't have guns now," Oliver deadpanned. "We're on timeout."

Fifty years from now, Oliver predicted, Americans will be on Chinese TV, voicing lizards talking about cheap car insurance.

Lewis Black, an American comedian, points out that many of the people claiming America is the greatest country on earth have never been to another country. America is not even in the Top Ten anymore in areas pertaining to quality of life. As Casey Stengel said, you can look it up.

As we get close to going through the motions of democracy next week, where one group of idiots will be replaced by another group of idiots, let's pause and reflect.

Will the Tea Party activists and newly minted Republican majority make us a better, stronger country?

Or will the same stuff happen that happened in 1994? Bomb thrower Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House and was exposed for being a lousy leader and even worse human being. Conservative crusader Rush Limbaugh was exposed as being a mere mouthpiece for the Republican party and a blowhard. Term limits, a key part of the Contract for America in 1994, where did that end up?

It is convenient that each party can blame the obstructionism of the other party for not doing what they promised the American voters. This will continue, stay tuned. The political system as it currently operates in America does not hold its leaders accountable.

The foot soldiers, the elected officials, the idiots, these will change every four or six years to give us the illusion that change is taking place. The illusions of hope and fear will be used to motivate first one side, then the other.

America is an empire in decline largely because democracy has become a joke. People who make their living telling jokes have been pointing this out to us for years. Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Bill Hicks, and Lewis Black to name a few.

There was once something beautiful about this country. It died in 1968. It died when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. It died when Robert F. Kennedy was killed. It died when the forces of Law and Order clubbed demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

I'm tired of Ivy League liberals telling me I don't know anything. They start out by saying "Look ..." and then proceed to tell us why they're right and we're wrong.

I'm tired of conservatives and their bumper sticker slogans, thinking they are better than other people because they are white, straight or pious.

Regardless of who wins next Tuesday, America will still be involved in quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. The infrastructure of this country will continue to decline. Higher education will continue to be more expensive and secondary education will continue to decline.

The wealth of the working class will continue to decline. Health and retirement benefits will continue to be taken away. More and more people will lose their homes.

American democracy is a joke, and the joke is on us. As George Carlin put it, "It's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it."

What's in Your Wally? Credit Card Plundering and Pillaging

Watching my hometown college football team streaming on my computer this past weekend, I was subjected to a credit card commercial too many times to count.

You may have seen the commercial. It's one in a series of 11th century Norsemen (sometimes called Vikings) attempting to assimilate in modern culture. The commercials are funny. They are entertaining.

Then you ask yourself the question, what do Norsemen have to do with credit cards? The commercials all end with a catch phrase designed to get you to put one of their credit cards in your wallet.

So, I'm supposed to use your credit card because you have entertaining commercials? Is that how it works?

I would have stopped thinking about the commercials except for a seminary professor who told me about a BBC documentary on the melding of Freudian psychological theories with Madison Avenue. Most commercial campaigns after the 1940s have a strong psychological component designed to get us to buy products we don't need with money we don't have.

What are Norseman known for? Pillaging and plundering. They did a lot more, but most of what they did has not entered the cultural psyche. The pillaging and plundering is part of our cultural psyche.

My theory is the commercials are designed to get us to feel good about being pillaged and plundered. They are such friendly, funny Norsemen, aren't they?

Let's look at the math involved in the credit card plundering.

The standard credit card for this company has a 24.9 interest rate and $19 annual fee.

The card for young adults has a 19.8 interest rate and $39 annual fee.

The lowest rate is for the Prestige card, ostensibly not everyone has enough prestige to get this one, with an 11.9 percent rate and no annual fee.

Let's compare this with the amount of money you would receive for depositing money in their bank.

The rates range from 1.1 percent to 1.75 percent. Let's put this in simple terms. When you use a credit card, you are borrowing money. To do this, if you borrow $100 you will pay $120 with 20 percent rate.

If you save at this bank, at 1.5 percent, you will earn $1.50 from $100. The difference, called profit, between $20 and $1.5 is $18.5. In other words, when you give the bank $100 they give you a buck and half and they make eighteen and half dollars when they loan your money to some one else.

That, in other times, was called plundering. Your wallet has been pillaged. Today, we call it funny and entertaining. Banks and credit card companies spend billions of dollars mounting campaigns designed to pillage and plunder the wealth of working people.

Have they succeeded? Who cares, they're such funny commercials.

Tailgating - Good; Following Too Closely - Bad

We drove from New Jersey to Virginia over the weekend to attend a family reunion and take in a football game. We tailgated before the football game. It was fun. The food was good, the company was better.
Driving back to New Jersey through Pennsylvania, I muttered something to my traveling partner about some one tailgating us.
"I don't remember anybody tailgating us in Virginia," she said.
"Or Maryland or West Virginia," I added.
In New Jersey, tailgating is all too common. It's not safe and it's not smart. And it needs to be called something other than tailgating. We need to differentiate between good behavior and bad behavior.
'Following too closely' is the term used by states that have laws against tailgating. Let's use that term, though it doesn't fit on a bumper sticker as nicely.
Maybe those people 'following too closely' are trying to read our bumper stickers. Sure, when they pass us they're all friendly, roll down their windows and yell out "nice bumper sticker!"
Yeah, that's it.
I asked my partner, who is licensed and accredited in drug and alcohol rehabilitation, why people follow too closely.
She replied that they are unable to self-regulate. They drive as fast as they can until they are slowed down by someone in front of them. Then they engage in dangerous behavior until they get what they want, which is to get by you so they can run up against someone else's back side.
In other words, these people are sociopaths.
I have read through several state motor vehicle sites that discuss how to deal with drivers that follow too closely. They all recommend letting the offender get by as quickly as possible. They advise against braking suddenly (to teach the bum a lesson) or tapping your brakes several times (it doesn't do any good and creates a 'crying wolf' situation).
The sites advise against doing anything confrontational as it may be lead to 'road rage' and endanger other people's lives as well.
For me, that sums up our culture fairly well. We reward sociopathic, bullying behavior. We advise against doing anything about it. "Just let them go."
Political discourse, social discourse, and religious discourse in our culture more often than not resembles this kind of bullying, sociopathic behavior. It's not surprising it crops up on the road as well.
Being gentle and kind are seen as signs of weakness today. It shouldn't be. We're better than that. Or, we used to be.

Memories of Hazel, My Grandmother

We are all born of a woman. And the woman who gave birth to us was also born of a woman. My mother's mother name was Hazel, grandma Hazel to me and my siblings. She was matronly and kindly. She baked cookies. She mussed my hair and called me 'Butch.'

Like many women of her generation who raised families during the depression years of the 1930s, she had it rough. As a young woman before she married, she was a telegraph operator. In another time, she could have been a successful career woman.

Like many families in the Great Depression, she and her family were poor and when her husband was laid off, they got poorer.

But they raised their own food, grandma made every one's clothes and she stayed home while her husband looked for work. Like many people, he got a job in the military buildup to the Second World War, working in a factory that made missiles.

When her husband died when I was two years old, grandma was devastated. I remember mom and dad worrying about her. She never remarried. We visited her at least once a month when we were little. Then we moved away.

In the later years of her life, we moved again to be closer to her. I remember visiting her with mom and eating pie at her favorite restaurant. She liked pie.

I remember her telling me how important it was to be kind to people. She said just because people got older didn't mean they got nicer. If they were mean when they were young, they were mean when they were old.

Be kind to people, she would tell me as she mussed my hair. Every time we visited she would tell me how much her husband had loved me and how much she loved me. Then we moved again. She died a few years later and I didn't get to go to the funeral.

When mother died I had a dream and grandma was in it. I was in the hallway of a convention hall. In one of the rooms they were having a banquet. I looked through the windows of the door and saw mother on the stage, she was the guest of honor. I looked to the side and there was grandma, sitting on a bench, smiling.

"You can't go in there, you know," she said.

I nodded and then did something I had never done in a dream. Instead of passively letting the dream flow by me, I forced myself to interact and speak. I wanted to tell grandma something. It was difficult, but I managed to speak.

"I love you, grandma."

"I know, Butch. I love you, too."

I woke up from my dream and felt at peace. At peace with my mother dying, at peace with missing grandma's funeral.

All of us are born of woman. Many of us have lost mothers and grandmothers. Through these losses we can gain wisdom. The wisdom grandma Hazel imparted was simple, "Be kind when you're young and be kind when you're old."

She worked hard her whole life. She lost the love of her life. But nothing she experienced ever stopped her from being kind.

Every once in a while, when all the negative stuff in politics and in our culture gets me down, I think of grandma Hazel. And then I go out and try to be kind to everyone I meet.

An Ethical Response to the Rutgers Suicide

What is an appropriate response to the tragedy of the suicide at Rutgers University? Using the framework of intentional ethics as a guide, to aim for the highest ethical response it is recommended we seek to understand (intention) for others (motivation) a constructive action (result).

One item that needs to be understood is that planting a camera for the purpose of spying on other people is a perverse action. It doesn't matter if you're boring holes in a change room, rest room, shower, or bedroom, it is perverse. This action on the part of the two Rutgers students needs to be understood as an invasion of privacy issue.

Another item that needs to be understood is that an 18-year old's awareness that their actions can have negative consequences for others is not well developed. It is not surprising that all three adults involved were eighteen. It is a dangerous age, as the freedom they experience is not matched by awareness and consideration of others.

This is a development issue. It's not a hate crime. The actions by the two students demonstrate obliviousness to what effect the invasion of privacy would have on a vulnerable person living in a homophobic society. It is doubtful the two Rutgers students were homophobic. But they were clueless.

The motivation of an appropriate ethical response should be what can be done for others? What can we as a society do for other 18 year olds?

As a pragmatist, it matters not to me where ideas come from if they work. The Mormon church has an outstanding program for young adults. They go on a mission for two years. They develop a sense of awareness for people outside of their own culture. After two years of mission, they go to college or pursue their careers with new-found maturity.

A program of national service for two years (no exemptions) would serve a similar purpose. Young people could work in nursing homes, homeless shelters, or drug clinics. There should be military options as well.

How will we pay for it?

A country that throws away billions of dollars that are never accounted for does not need to ask that question. The money is there, the priorities are not. It is a matter of wanting to do what is best for others, and not just the top two per cent.