Least of Us

For Uncle Geoff

Life and love are almost certainly the two most precious resources on earth, though as a living and loving being I might have a bias.  Too often when talk gets political we forget this and instead focus on material wealth, resource management, etc.  While having an adequate pool of money to draw from certainly contributes to being able to live, wealth is not necessarily an end in and of itself.  Our Declaration of Independence highlights Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness as three birthrights of humanity, and while economics can provide means toward these ends, they are not perfectly interchangeable.  When we get right down to it, things we point out as politically important, e.g. a growing economy or fighting unemployment, are just the surface of what our goal as a society is.

We work to make the world a better place to ensure that every person we can possibly affect has the necessary tools to live happy, healthy, and loving lives.  This is why we know that any society is judged not by how well off the best of us are, but by how well we can make the lot of the least among us: the people who are born without advantage, the people who get ignored by the history books, the people who may be our friends, our family, our neighbors, or perhaps more likely the people we’ve never even met.  It can be so easy to pretend that if we are doing alright for ourselves that the job is done, but as compassionate human beings far more is required of us if we wish to be able to look ourselves in the eyes.

America is by no means the worst place in the world to be poor.  The advantages of being born within the United States are clear if you ever experience the world outside of our borders.  But even having made that concession, we can do so much better.  The Right constantly reminds us that America is the most powerful country in the history of the world, the most prosperous nation imaginable, yet there are millions of homeless people within our borders, over 10% of our citizens still lack healthcare, and countless people who require mental health assistance in this country slip through the cracks.  And while these may seem like daunting challenges, we have the whole world to look over and find examples of how best we can help to ensure that every American actually has a shot at Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The first, and most obvious, step in addressing these problems is to recognize the humanity of every human being.  I would have hoped that this would be so eminently obvious that it wouldn’t require mentioning, but then you listen to how we talk about the poor, the homeless, the immigrants, and the minorities of this country.  We refuse to look homelessness in the eye, both literally and figuratively, as if by ignoring the problem it might go away on its own.  We call the poor lazy and stupid, irrespective of how many jobs a poor person may be working to make ends meet, regardless of their efforts to get an education that at least offers the possibility of advancement.  We put such a social stigma on mental health problems that we make it all the harder for people to even accept that they need help, and because so few people seek help we’ve accepted that we don’t need to spend any resources to maintain facilities to actually help people.  In recent years, illegal immigrants have been getting company from legal immigrants as the targets for scorn from people who only see lost jobs and not created wealth.  Even after the historic decision by the Supreme Court the slurs against the LGBT community are not rare and since the attack on Emmanuel AME there have been at least a further three black churches attacked in the US.  These are not just issues or problems, these are real people and any solution is going to have to bear that fact.

For too long we’ve allowed ourselves excuses to ignore the humanity of our fellow Americans.  The cult of Ayn Rand has so effectively evangelized the Republican Party specifically that we’ve had to seriously consider whether people aren’t selfish enough as it is.  The obnoxious proponents of the idea that the masters of capital should reign over us like gilded kings with bad haircuts, i.e. Donald Trump, are given venues to say their piece while the scores of devoted people who actually work to make the world a better place, e.g. volunteers, nurses, and social workers, are never heard.  Perhaps even worse, the families that struggle to get by are almost entirely ignored while we heap all the attention possible on the Duggars.

America is a great country, yes, but when it comes to so many measures that should matter, we have a lot of work to do.  Some of the happiest countries in the world are places like Sweden and Norway.  While a fjord might be a breathtaking sight now and then, the long, cold winters they face tell me that it’s not a geographic convenience that this is the case.  The happiest countries tend to be the healthiest countries, with the greatest opportunities for social mobility, and the greatest number of resources dedicated to making sure that families are supported.  We would do well to take some notes from these incredibly atheist nations, because they actually have the kind of morals that our ostensibly Christian nation claims.

“If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,’ and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that?” James 2: 15-16.  We’ve become far too comfortable with avoiding the problems or at best recognizing problems while doing nothing constructive to address them.  This is why so many of us see tragedies like the shooting at Emmanuel AME as painful reminders that we will simply let bad things happen to us without putting up a fight.  In response to that tragedy it seems like we will be rid of some Confederate regalia, which would be a fine and symbolic first step, if there were some indication that we would also address the systemic racism in housing,voting, the use of force by police, etc and the cultures within America that allow bigotry and ignorance to go unchallenged.

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” Matthew 25: 35-36.  As living, breathing, loving human beings we are called to do more than simply make our own way in the world.  It just so happens that by caring for others you also have a better chance of getting help in your own affairs as well.  We are a richer society both materially and morally when we come together in hard times.  President Hoover was the tail end of a line of presidents that thought the government should do its best to keep out of the business of tending to the poor.  What followed was a tide of public works that gave America the sense of dignity needed to win WWII and eventually to drive out the Depression.  It’s true that the New Deal may not have been the silver bullet that undid all the worst parts of the crash that preceded its implementation, but it was the line in the sand that said in hard times we will rise to the occasion and make sure people are fed and cared for, which is how you grow a decent society.

I am an atheist, though my Christian upbringing has given me a great appreciation for the good words that are in the Bible.  What has always stuck out to me is the mingled sense of hope and devotion.  For the least off in society there is always a reason to be optimistic, but only  if society works diligently to make that better world.  And in times when things seem bleak, when it can be hard to imagine that things can ever get better, it is comforting to hear, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Matthew 5:4.
Life can be unfair and miserable, and for the people we love it will always be too short. But life is also full of joy and it is made more prosperous every day, and it is the very fact that we have so little time that we are challenged to do the important things.  A person who has lived a life of love, a life of devotion to their family and friends, a life dedicated to making a functioning world in whatever way they can find, has done their part to fight for the least among us.  As a society, we need more people like these, because once we do, the remaining tasks of fixing the world’s iniquities are made all the easier.  The tragedy for those of us who remain, is to see such a great person pass.  But I can’t think of a better measure of how decent, how loving, how simply good a person is, than by how heavy our hearts feel after their passing.  Our task in the wake of these events is to hold onto what made that person great and make it a part of us as we continue the work to make the world worthy of those whom we mourn.

Common Ground

In so many speeches, not least of all President Obama’s first presidential victory speech, we are told that there is no black America and no white America, no red America and no blue America, that there is only the United States of America.  Whether intentionally or not, and given the man I would presume not, Bobby Jindal has chosen to echo this refrain almost verbatim in his announcement that he has become the 13th major Republican candidate for president this year, lucky him.  While this may be a commendable sentiment of unity in the face of all our other problems, we need to remember that one of the greatest advantages to a pluralistic democracy is our diversity.  It seems almost tautological to point out the irony that the one thing we all share in common is that we are all different, but it is an important point to bring up because between the two ideals of unity and diversity we encounter the necessity to draw boundaries that can allow us to work on common ground toward a more prosperous economy, a more equitable society, a more harmonious union, and a more just world.

I would certainly consider myself on the Left side of the political spectrum, at least in America.  Having had the opportunity to experience other parts of the world, it’s been made eminently clear to me that in most other countries my positions would be Centrist, sometimes even edging on Center-Right.  Perhaps it is because I’ve been able to interact with so many people that I remain open as ever to be convinced that the Right is right, though at this point there would have to be a good mountain of compelling evidence to balance out what I’ve already learned.  I make it an effort to seek out opinions that differ from my own for many reasons.  There is the purely practical matter that my work often puts me in a situation where I’m bombarded with extremely conservative rhetoric, but there’s more to it considering that I consume conservative media on my free time as well.  It can be cathartic to yell at a screen, to point out every flaw and falsehood in a conservative talking point, but even that’s not really why I keep myself open.  I do it because I know that I don’t know everything, and among the things I do know is that I’ve encountered some truly kind and intelligent people who profoundly disagree with me politically.

It’s tough to judge a teacher by any fair metric, because there’s always going to be bias depending on how you feel about the subject if nothing else.  Having said that, one of the best teachers I have ever had was an extremely conservative man.  In middle school, one of my history teachers had a deep impact on me, even though I am fairly certain he didn’t particularly take notice of me.  He commanded attention and didn’t waste time in class, he was able to illustrate effectively some rather difficult concepts for middle schoolers to understand, and he forced his students to really grasp US history in a way that you can understand the modern world.  However, being the person I was, it was impossible to notice all the biographies of Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, and both Presidents Bush.  I would like to think that in the time since I was in his class and now that he’s seen the state of the modern Republican Party and at least become an independent, but whether he has or not, I would still hold him in personal esteem as a very good, but stern teacher.  What Monty Python might describe as “a cruel man but fair.”

It’s not saying much to cede that there are any number of things that he doubtless knows better than me when it comes to politics and history, and if we were to have a conversation, I would hope that I’d be able to absorb that information to better flesh out my own perspective.  This is how you build unity through diversity and it’s been the heart of society since Plato’s example of the shoemaker in The Republic.  We are better suited when people are able to specialize and think different things, because society as a whole becomes that much better as a monolithic unit.  None of us can know it all, but through the amalgamation of every individual experience it’s not unfathomable that the community might come close.  However, this can only happen when the constituent parts of society are playing in good faith, which is sadly not the case for a loud handful of people.

Now, it would be trivial to point out that there are examples to be found of people on either side of the political spectrum that are unwilling to actually stick to reality and to be honest with themselves and with the whole of society; however, it would be downright dishonest to pretend like the extremes on both sides of the political spectrum are equally to blame for this unproductive behavior.  The Far Right of American politics has made it into a type of sport to twist words into the exact opposite of their actual meaning.  The quintessential example of this is the words tolerance and intolerance.  The Left has been using the concept of tolerance for decades to make the tent of America broadly, and the Democratic Party more specifically, as wide as possible.  This is why, since the break off with the Dixiecrats at least, the Democrats have courted the black community, gays, women, immigrants of all nationalities, etc.  But the extreme conservatives of this country have the utter gall to proclaim that it’s actually liberals who are intolerant because they are unwilling to put up with intolerance.

There was a rather appalling story last year of a boy who came out to his family, who met him with less than open arms.  He recorded the interaction between him and several members of his family that occurred a few months after he came out to them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1df_i26wh-w Just by happenstance I was reminded of this the other day, perhaps because it’s pride month and there is still so much we need to do, but when I looked up the story I was presented with a counterpoint by a conservative site. http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/08/liberalisms_newest_fake_gay_victim.html As you can see this person was much more appalled by the fact that a teenager was acting a little immature and petulant, though one can’t help feeling that in comparison to the adults in this situation he comes off as sage.  But the thrust of this article comes down to the belief that Daniel Pierce needed to learn to coexist with his family’s beliefs.

If one side of the argument is, “I’m a gay human being and I have the right to exist,” while the other side is “No you’re not, and you’re either going to convincingly pretend that you are straight or you aren’t going to be a part of this family,” then there can be no compromise because one side of the argument is both flatly wrong and unwilling to even act as if the opposing side exists.  And I’m not saying that every person has to be pro-gay, though the world would likely be a better place, but if you can’t accept that your flesh and blood has the right to exist, then you’re setting yourself outside of the bounds of society.  I’m not a particularly big fan of people who proudly display regalia from the CSA, but it’s their prerogative if they want to do so, just so long as they aren’t going out in white sheets to lynch someone and disparage people who happen to have more melanin in their skin.  People have the right to believe and even say truly, horrendously offensive things, but if you want to be a part of society then you have to act within certain bounds, and the clearest of those is that every human being deserves to be treated like a human being.

The people who usurp a decent word like tolerance to make it mean intolerance are either the worst kinds of manipulative creatures or else irredeemably stupid.  I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt, because you think to yourself that no one can be this stupid. But then someone goes and proves you wrong by saying that women don’t deserve the right to vote, gays need to be rounded up and put behind fences, Mexicans need to pay for their own Great Wall to be kept out of America, and that anyone who dares point out how horrible these things are, are part of a Nazi conspiracy to shut down dissent.  These opinions can be thought and they can even be spoken aloud in a free society, but the moment you start acting on asinine claims like these you demonstrate that there can never be common ground between any halfway decent society and you.

Ignorance, in matters like these, needs to be combated and not celebrated, yet it seems in the cavalcade of ignorance that is the GOP field right now the celebration is only getting more raucous.  If we do want to come together as a nation, a nation that values diversity, then we need to be able to stand up to those who would rather crush and ignore whole swathes of society.  We can always hold onto hope that by being open ourselves that they might see the light, but we can’t be foolish.  Common ground only exists for people who want to go to it, and not for people who can only demand we all pretend that where they stand is the common ground.

On Their Graves

There has been a lot of talk in response to the tragic shooting in Charleston, and very little of it sounds any different.  In fact, we’ve gotten so used to the cliches in response to tragedies like these that even a response complaining about the cliched response has, itself, become a cliche.  The exasperation in the response of President Obama is perhaps the epitome of the hopelessness many of us feel, with the refrain “at some point” we will have to do something.  For so many of us, it is a simple reality that we will hear the same talking points for the next few days until the whole matter fades into obscurity for whatever interim precedes the next such tragedy.  While it may not be the most important problem we face, a significant force precluding change is the holier than thou refrain from those who seem content to do nothing.  The claim that those of us who wish to do something, anything, in response to this tragedy are inappropriately standing on the graves of the victims.

Very often, if they even feel the need to offer an alternative course of action, the stalwart defenders of the status quo tell us to pray for the beleaguered and simply come together in solidarity.  What is left unsaid is that this solidarity is momentary and simply acts as a placebo to keep enough people convinced that they’re actually helping, while obstructing the proposal and implementation of solutions that might prevent situations like these from happening, or at least from happening in such frequency.  In a form of rhetorical jiu jitsu, these self-seeming righteous people are able to use the tragedy as a shield from conversation, debate, and productive change.  They seem to say, “No, now is not the time to address these problems, and to even suggest changing anything for the better would let the perpetrator of this violence win.”

I, for one, believe that it is worth while to consider if there is anything we can do to make the world better, in the great tradition of people who saw the value of ceasing to touch fire after discovering that fire is indeed hot.  We sit in a precarious position when we are told to simply believe, as fact, that there is nothing we can do to make things better, that any attempt at addressing historical wrongs and contemporary issues is the height of naivety at best and selfish ambition at worst.  My how times have changed, because I can’t imagine this refrain of accusations would be hurled at Dr King in his response to the bombing of a church in Selma.  I suppose the justification for the holier than thou crowd would be that then he had legitimate grievances when racist people were killing the targets of their racism, whereas now the people doing that same work are merely race-baiters and profiteers of pretend racism.

Here are some of the basic facts of our current situation.  Among the long list of incidents and tragedies we’ve seen in just the passed year, nine people are dead.  The fact that these people were black was not incidental to their killer and was, along with the symbolic importance of the church they attended, specifically the reason why they are now dead.  In response to this tragedy we have a choice, both as individuals and as a larger community, we can do something or we can do nothing.  While prayer and reflection are undoubtedly an important part of the grieving process, particularly for the community around this church, the use of prayer in lieu of any changes is not only unproductive but actively counter productive to saving lives in future.  And let’s be clear that for the religious of this country, it has never been an “either or” situation between prayer and action, but a “both and.”  Dr King was a pastor and prayed frequently, but he never viewed prayer as altogether sufficient in the cause for Civil Rights.

Here are the obvious caveats to respond to the predictable reactions against those of us who wish to see different results and are, therefore, prepared to try different actions.  No, we cannot eliminate racism.  Racism, or whatever similar discrimination might be a more adequate descriptor of a specific situation, is going to be a part of humanity so long as people think differently, look differently, act differently, etc.  However, we can make racism less relevant and indeed virtually irrelevant.  Most people think that the color of your skin does not determine your humanity today, that was not always the case.  Most people think laws that actively discriminate against entire groups of people for no other reason than their existence are wrong, this too was not always the case.  The reason why some of us still try to change things for the better is because we’ve seen that we can succeed and that we’re better for having done it.  The view that things are better than they were, therefore nothing more need be done is about as old as causes for progress, and is still bound to the fallacy that there is a reason to stop striving for more.

Next, a single action is not going to fix the problem on its own, and these problems are indeed too big to be reconciled over night by any number of actions.  Rome was not built in a day and neither was the Roman Empire destroyed in a day.  These things take time, more time than we may think possible to contend with, but we see that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  It does not bend that way in spite of human action, but because people are willing to work day after day to make the world better than it was.  Getting rid of a battle flag is not going to end racism, but it is a part of saying that we do not revel in the darkest parts of our past and celebrate the side that sets states’ rights above human rights.  Setting up an infrastructure to ensure people with mental health problems can safely seek help without public scorn will not eliminate the possibility of school shootings, but it will make it possible for the most desperate people in our society to vent their problems in positive ways.  Calling out institutional racism and refusing to accept our powerlessness is not an end, but it is an important step toward the end of a fairer and safer society.  Implementing gun control legislation will not make it impossible for people to kill others with guns, but we see already that the states with the most lax gun control just happen to be the ones with the highest instances of violence.

When it comes to the fight to make the world just that tiniest bit better, every step of the way there are going to be the people asking, “What more do you want? Things aren’t so bad, why do you have to keep pretending like things now aren’t better than they were?”  The response has to similarly remain the same until, or more probably if, we actually get to a just world.  We want people to have a reasonable sense that they don’t need to fear persecution to the point of death for the color of their skin, their family’s heritage, their religion, their sexual orientation, their ethnicity, etc.  We don’t need to pretend that things haven’t gotten better, they undoubtedly have, but that’s not an excuse to settle for an imperfect and unjust world.  In the 60s, the black population of America were quite aware that they were not chattel as they had been just a few generations prior, but that was not a sufficient reason to keep from striving toward a fairer and more civil society.

There is every indication that this too will be an example of national outrage for a news cycle followed by indifference until we reach the media da capo.  It is in no small part helped by the constant echoing calls of those who would rather do nothing, decrying those who say “enough” as taking advantage of the broken hearts in this country, accusing us of standing on the graves of the deceased.  I don’t think I’m standing on anyone’s grave by calling for action in response, I’m doing the only rational and compassionate thing I can think to do.  That is, work to make flowers bloom on their grave instead of allowing more graves to bloom.

It is no small act of strategy that many who oppose progress make it sound like they are so reverent and pious.  Our sense of decency is their greatest shield in protecting the comfortable and deadly status quo.  Our sense of devotion is the the greatest weapon in the fight to help people live and to live in a world less haunted by our historic demons.  I have no doubt that there are any number of good-hearted people who genuinely believe in the rhetoric that says to calm down and simply pray, but when all is said and done that position does nothing more than allow these tragedies to persist unchallenged.  We are not helpless and we are not hopeless, but we are in great need of a backbone if we cannot stand up in the face of feigned disgust and unearned superiority.

Are You Better Off?

For better or worse, President Reagan has had a lasting impact on American politics.  Candidate Reagan also had an important turn of phrase on how the electorate should make their decisions.  “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”  To be fair, that 1980 presidential debate wasn’t the first time this basic theme has ever been brought up, but the direct simplicity of it has made the phrase a fairly lasting part of campaign rhetoric.  Even when the fight isn’t between an incumbent and a challenger, the fact that we have a two party system usually makes the question relevant.  Strictly speaking, though, this is not the right question.  To use an economic term this question focuses on sunk costs.  It focuses on what cannot be changed, the past, but when you’re deciding on a new leader what matters is the future.  The question should be, “Who do you think will make this country and your life better four years from now?”

Obviously, when you make decisions about which path you’re going to take, you use your knowledge of the past.  You don’t go into the voting booth ignoring everything that has happened in the past and choose solely on the basis of what seems to make sense on paper, but our ability to judge the past, especially the very recent past, can be incredibly flawed.  Recently, polling numbers of George W Bush have been going up at the same time that polls have been showing diminishing favorability for Barack Obama.  While it is entirely normal for people to have a bias against the current administration and even more normal that distance from events can give you a less visceral reaction to them, I don’t think any objective metric of these two presidents would ever put President 43 over President 44.

George W Bush inherited a budget surplus from President Clinton.  Despite losing the popular vote, and arguably the electoral college, he took his technical victory as a mandate to almost immediately start slashing taxes for the richest Americans, which brought on deficits.  After starting two wars, he then felt the need not only to continue those tax cuts but to make new ones.  He also created education reform that stripped money from schools, reformed Medicare in a way that took away seniors’ abilities to get affordable medication, and did away with ostensibly burdensome regulation on Wall Street.  All of this, not to mention the historic Great Recession that was gifted to the next president.

Barack Obama, therefore, inherited budget deficits when he won his election outright.  Due to the recession the unemployment rate got as high as 10.1%, but the policies of President Obama have brought it down to about 5.5%.  Incidentally, this beats even the most optimistic prediction that Romney proposed (6%) in less time to boot (by the end of his hypothetical first term).  Taxes on the richest Americans have gone up only slightly, while most Americans haven’t seen a dime of tax increases.  Our troops are being taken out of combat in most cases, though events in Iraq and Syria have obviously thrown a wrench in his effort to truly end American wars.  The Obama administration has increased funding for education and reformed healthcare to make it available and affordable to more people, though clearly much more work is required. Necessary regulations were brought back to try and prevent a repeat of the Great Recession, though Republicans have been working their darnedest to eviscerate those regulations again. Deficits keep going down, the stock market is seeing record highs, incomes are starting to increase again, marriage equality has had victory after victory, and the average American is certainly better off today than they were six years ago.  But again, this isn’t really the question we need to be asking.

Every person who runs for elected office makes promises of what they will do once they’re in office.  We implicitly understand that these promises are essentially impossible to keep because they assume that the president, in this case, can do whatsoever he or she wishes.  Even with a super majority in Congress at the time of his election, President Obama was not able to get the healthcare plan he campaigned on, to pick just one notable example.  The years of obstruction from the GOP led House during most of his tenure have made it impossible for President Obama to keep all of his campaign promises, and we know the same will be the case for whomever wins the next election.  However, it is still critical to listen to the kinds of promises and the positions that candidates take now, because it will give you as close of a guess as you can get the kind of future they want to work toward.

The million and one candidates in the GOP race are nearly all different flavors of the exact same positions.  Tax cuts, as ever, are seen as an end in and of themselves on the Far Right. How many taxes can we expect to see cut?  Well, over here we have one calling for a massive tax cut on the rich, and over there we have a call for a flat tax, which just so happens to bring down rates for the rich.  What do these candidates intend to do with their reduced revenue?  We’re going to start spending even more on the military as we start full scale wars in Iraq, Syria, Iran, and heck if they’re really bold maybe even against Russia.  If Governor Perry can be sober enough to get out the whole answer we might expect to see the Departments of Energy, Commerce, and Education not simply scaled back but eliminated altogether.  If Carly Fiorina wins we can expect to see the EPA eviscerated.  If Ted Cruz wins we can expect to see healthcare for millions revoked and the rights of patients to be thrown out of the window with the repeal of the ACA.  If Donald Trump wins… well let’s be honest the name alone is a punchline.

In any of these cases, can a rational person expect to be better off four years from inauguration day if these policies are enacted?  People might like the sound of tax cuts, but the sound of crumbling bridges and roads due to a lack of maintenance funding is pretty eerie.  It might feel good to use the EPA or the FDA as a boogeyman, but the regulations they maintain keep us healthier and keep us alive.  In any other country in the world the very idea of closing the Department of Education would be so laughable that we wouldn’t even be able to hear the door slam behind the idiot who proposed the idea.  In every other country in the world the goal is to get quality healthcare coverage to more people not to fewer for the sake of lining still fewer pockets.  Even the richest Americans, if they thought about reality for just three seconds, would have to understand that they would be worse off if these people were able to keep their promises.

On the Democratic side of the race we have, essentially, two viable choices at the moment.  On the one hand there is Hillary Clinton, whose campaign rhetoric on some issues is refreshingly farther to the Left than most people, myself included, expected; however, on the whole these policies are reflective of a continuation of many, if not most, of President Obama’s policies.  As I discussed, this is not only not bad, but actually pretty good.  She is a true moderate and her policies would likely stay the course on what has been an effective, if sluggish, recovery.  But that’s just it, the Obama years have been good, but they haven’t been good enough.  Income inequality has reached historic levels after decades of trickle down rhetoric, we still lack universal healthcare, higher education costs are astronomical, primary and secondary education are failing too many people, and our research spending has been cut, to highlight just a few issues.  The continuation of the status quo for the next four years would be simply insufficient.  While there may technically be four candidates running in the Democratic primary right now, we all know that the real competition is coming from one guy.

I don’t like hero worship, because one person on their own is never going to be able to solve all of our problems, but at this point there’s only one person who’s actually putting forward a vision of how we can get to a place we’d like to be four years from inauguration day.  We can’t make the same mistake of assuming that simply electing the right person will get everything done as was the case with Obama’s election, but Bernie Sanders is the only candidate I see actually saying what needs to be said and making promises, which if kept, offer a real chance at getting our country on the right track.  So, are you better off now than you were before January 20, 2009?  Almost definitely, but unless you think that only the slightest changes are needed for this country to be perfect, the only candidate I see who you can honestly say will make this country better off after four years is the independent senator from Vermont who’s running in the Democratic primary.

What Facts?

The speed of things on the internet is truly a wonder to behold.  Within a matter of three days, the world learned about a shocking scene in McKinney, Texas and the officer at the center of that scene has resigned.  Now that more than ten million people have scene the original footage, not to mention the countless reposts and reports all over the web, people are still arguing about what it is we even saw.  The rapidity of the internet is such that before a consensus can even be drawn about what happened, the situation has changed dramatically.  What surprises me the most is how willingly people will accept certain storylines regardless of the images and sounds that encounter their eyes and ears.  Because while we may all be entitled to our own opinions, surely we should at least try to agree on the facts.

To set the background with as little bias as possible, here’s my best assessment of what went on before the video begins.  There was a pool party at the Craig Ranch Community Pool.  This pool has restrictions about how many guests can come in with residents, but at some point a flyer about the party was made public, though it didn’t mention these restrictions.  This is presumably because no one expected people outside of that community to see or care about the flyer.  Eventually more people showed up, some without any connections to residents.  The security began to stop people to make sure they were allowed to be there, at which point a small number of people who would otherwise not have been let in, jumped the fence anyway.  Where things get murky is when the police were called, because there are at least two reasons described that preempted the arrival of the police.  Either residents made a call because the people who surreptitiously made it into the party started causing a scene, or as a result of a fight broke out between a white woman and a black woman due to racial comments used against black people.  This community has both white and black residents, but there is video that documents that this scuffle did take place, though it is difficult to hear what was being said before, during, and after the event.  Whether that was the last straw that led someone to call the police or whether it was any number of intervening events, the police were contacted and showed up.

When the video begins, we see one police officer chasing after suspects.  The videographer and his friend pick up a flashlight that the officer dropped and give it to a different officer who was calmly talking to onlookers.  When that first officer comes back, things start to get considerably more active.  And it’s at this point that I want to comment on something that I saw that few people seem to be commenting on.  There were at least three police officers at this scene, and only one of them was shouting, only one of them was pulling on hair, only one of them pulled his gun, etc.  This being my way of saying that the incident here was indicative of one bad cop, whereas the others seemed to be calmly and effectively doing their job well without escalating the situation.

The now resigned officer continues to yell at teenagers that he views as suspects, handcuffing at least two.  He proceeds to scold some of the teenagers he’s apprehended.  He then addresses a group of, mostly female, onlookers, telling them to go home.  They seem reluctant at first, but do start to leave the scene.  One of the young women in that group was, apparently, one of his suspects.  He proceeds to grab her by the hand and bring her down to the grass, she starts to get up and he grabs her by the hair and throws her down toward the pavement.  While this is going on, many onlookers come rushing back to try and help her by at least yelling at the officer to let her go, some get too close for the officer’s comfort and he pushes them back.  Amid these onlookers there are also two young men who come close to the officer in a way that could be perceived as threatening, even though it could easily have been accidental.  The officer looks at them and they back off, but he continues to pull out his gun, which sends them running.  Two other officers arrive, one of whom seems to stop the first officer from proceeding any further, leading him to holster his gun and the other two to chase the two young men.

The young woman that he brought to the ground is still sitting there, but he orders her onto her face.  When she does not immediately comply he grabs her by the back of the head, shoves her onto the grass, puts one of her arms into a hold, and kneels on her back.  For the rest of the film, only that one officer yells at the other people who have been giving him his space but are pleading for him to get off the young woman.  Even when the other two officers bring back one of the young men that fled, in handcuffs, he is the only police officer who yells or in any way keeps the scene from settling down.

I did my best to describe what I saw as honestly as I could, even though I felt it was important to emphasize the actions of the one officer.  Now, let’s discuss what is not the story here.  On Rightwing blogs, I see constantly that they think people are complaining about the gun being drawn.  While there may be a few people who make this complaint, that is not the key issue.  The officer had a reasonable fear that the crowd of people coming at him, might have intended him harm.  While a reasonable person might have hoped he could have pulled out a taser or pepper spray instead of a firearm, considering he had the restraint not to pull the trigger, I think this is the least of the issue for a person in the heat of the moment.  Just as his response to the crowd was understandable, the arrival of the crowd in then first place was quite predictable.  His apprehension of the young woman was quite violent, and they were concerned about her, as you would when you hear a person screaming in fear.  There is certainly an argument to be made that she wasn’t obeying the officer’s orders quickly, but he had the opportunity to handle the situation as calmly as his partners and decided instead to use force.

Without a doubt, part of this story concerns one bad cop who used way more force than was justified.  As evidence, I would again offer his partners who seemed much better at getting suspects and onlookers alike to do what they wanted by being calm, rational, and non-confrontational.  From the very start of the video, this one cop seemed dead set on making this into an action packed event and even when he had moments to calm down and assess the situation he immediately went back to yelling and grabbing and pulling the moment someone didn’t respond his way immediately.  This should be seen as a teachable moment to police forces of what good and bad police officers look like, because we need more of the other two to start earning the trust of communities across this country.  I should also note that after the other officers brought back one of the young men that fled, you can also see on the video that they checked to make sure he was ok after they saw him looking a little injured.

Where things get hazy is what role race played in all of this.  It seems clear that there were incidents of racism leading up to this event, but it’s harder to say what role racism may have had on the scene involving the police.  The first thing people noticed was that all of the police officers were white and all of the people being handled were people of color.  There are statistics that show, in any number of fields, implicit racism when people seem to think that black people can simply endure more pain.  This is true in the medical field where black people are less likely to be given pain meds in ERs and in ICUs, regardless of age.  The many examples of police interactions over the years seem to bear out that white people are treated more gently than black people, regardless of whether a suspect is actually armed or not.

We should all take some small solace in the knowledge that no lives were ended in this incident, though that should seem like the lowest bar for a response to a rowdy pool party.  What I think should be the main story is that we are now entering a time when reality is being filtered by ideologies to an extent where people can see the exact same video and disagree on some of the most basic details.  The problem is exacerbated by the speed with which stories are handled and blown up online.  In an ideal world, journalists would be able to get all the facts and put them into a tempered summation of what actually happened, but there are significant barriers to this being possible anymore.  Again the speed with which these things spin out of control makes it nearly impossible for the full story to be adequately told before everyone feels they have enough information to come to their own decisions about it and close themselves off to the truth.  Even if they could, news networks seem much more interested in keeping the sensationalism going to attract viewers, while ideological media seeks only to spin the events.

We need to be able to take a step back, because we are setting ourselves up for even bigger problems down the road.  It may feel like you’re more informed by having all this raw footage and news as it happens, but this doesn’t seem to be the case, because it’s hard to get any context from a seven minute long clip.  The world is safer and more prosperous than it has ever been, which is not to say we don’t have serious problems, but to put them in perspective.  The reason why people seem sure that the world is flying apart is because they have exceptional video like this available to them all the time, while the majority of boring old reality gets ignored.  Cameras and camera phones only start rolling after the action begins, which means that if you aren’t looking deeper into reports about what happened before and around the events you see, then you aren’t any more informed from seeing the footage.  There are bad cops, but even in this video, they are the minority.  There are incidents of racism in this country that need to seriously be addressed, but we need to be able to view human action as potentially separate from racial problems, if and when the facts lead in a different direction.  There is a wealth of information to be found on the internet, but we need to be able to responsibly sift through it if it’s going to be any use.

Taxes and Choices

I miss the Colbert Report.  I honestly can’t think of a piece of satire that matched his consummate representation of the Far Right’s lunacy.  Day after day, he showed just how true Poe’s Law really is by making claims that would seem so over the top that no one could possibly agree with them, only to show clip after clip of Rightwing talking points doing just that.  He hit the tone so spot on that many people, arguably including a president, didn’t realize it was an act.  It will be fascinating to see what he does in his next role, but for those of us that have to listen to the constant stream of ridiculousness that just won’t go away, well let’s just say there’s a Colbert sized hole in all of our hearts.  Unfortunately there are conservative memes that just won’t go away, seemingly in the wake of his absence.

One of the most frequent pieces of repeated wisdom that has been echoing on the Right for a while now is the idea that taxation is theft.  The argument goes that the government takes your money at the barrel of a gun in the form of taxes and this is immoral.  I can understand why someone might seem convincing to the right kind of person.  You work your butt off to earn your paycheck and at the top of the summary you see the money you could have taken home with some subtraction signs next to it.  You have to empathize with the feeling that you didn’t elect to have that money taken away, and given the mismanagement in Washington, nor would you ever make that choice.  Except you most definitely did choose just that.

This conservative/libertarian meme betrays the reality of Rightwing politics, which is to say that personal responsibility is a virtue for everyone else but you.  See, we all choose to pay taxes because we all choose to live in a country and in societies that are sustained by our collective efforts.  I find it impossible to adequately put into words the irony that the same people who say “if you don’t like this country then you can get out,” are invariably the same people who love to complain about everything that makes this country possible.  So to paraphrase, if you don’t like paying American taxes, you don’t have to live here, you don’t have to hold onto American citizenship, and you are totally free to look for a society that doesn’t see the value of actually paying for government services.

I’ll admit it is something of a Hobson’s choice, but no one is saying that you have to pay your taxes, but you do have to deal with the consequences of electing to shirk your responsibilities.  America is a free country and no one is compelled to stay here, unless you’ve broken a law and have since become incarcerated.  If you want to pay lower taxes you can go out into the world and find a new home, but you’ll soon find out that America is already close to the bottom in that regard.  There are a handful of countries with no income tax, e.g. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, etc, but most countries have come to the realization that they are not oiligarchies and need to find a way to pay for the roads, the military, the schools, the police forces, the water pipes, etc.  Taxation is the cost of living in these countries, but with the a few notable exceptions, you are free to not pay those taxes, just know that you are then choosing not to participate in that society.

Rousseau might have been pulling stories of the original man out of his cul, but he was spot on with his description of the social contract we all enter into as citizens.  See, we each are born into a society that we didn’t choose, but we are nonetheless born into societies that operate under a certain set of rules.  We have the choice to reject that agreement but only at the cost of all the benefits that came from those rules.  On the whole Locke/Hobbes scale, I have to put myself closer to Locke because I believe we get more out of this social contract than merely avoiding anarchy.  Particularly in a democratic republic we gain much greater liberties from having come together than what we lose, which to me sounds an awful lot like a transaction and not theft.

When I go to the supermarket and buy a gallon of milk I don’t pretend like the shop has robbed me out of $3.30 because I get something out of that transaction that is worth more to me than that cash.  What do we get from paying our taxes?  Quite a lot.  Speaking of that milk, we get the FDA and USDA monitoring the food industry.  I hear the occasional complaint about the overregulation that comes from bureaucracies like these, but the complaints tend to die down after we get news of new food-borne illnesses that get stopped before the entire country is enjoying the latest craze of running to your toilet repeatedly.  Not for nothing, but you’d think people might like to read some classics like “The Jungle.”

I hate to be the one to constantly defend taxes all the time, because let’s be honest it’s not fun.  It’s not fun that things cost money, it’s not fun that you have to get immunizations, it’s not fun that we have to maintain a military, but it’s not about fun all the time.  I don’t take some great joy in seeing money that I worked hard for mismanaged and wasted by idiots in Congress, but I do know that as a part of this society I agree to pay the price of admission.  But it isn’t all doom and gloom either, I mentioned liberties before and we do get true liberty from this transaction beyond the basic services that we often talk about.

We are made freer by coming together as a society than we could ever be by living in an anarchic state.  I am free and secure in making a property purchase in this country because I know that I have recourse if someone damages my property or in any way infringes on my property rights.  Without the full force and authority of a government, I would have very little freedom to assert any sense of property so long as there is anyone more powerful than me, who might also want that property.  Things like eminent domain show that the system not always as simple as that, but it is nonetheless true that the average person is freer to prosper because they join in the social contract.

And as much as people who hate the idea of government recoil at the notion, to deal with the consequences of people living together you need to have something that very much resembles a government.  Comedians have been enjoying the material given to them by ostensible candidate for President, Ted Cruz, for his promise to shut down the IRS.  They rightfully pointed out that the collection of income taxes, even at a flat rate, would require some government service to monitor the revenue that occurs internally of this country.  Anything less invites a Greece scenario where people simply don’t pay their taxes, because there’s really no one to enforce it… at the barrel of a gun.

Here’s the thing about that phrase, I’ve never seen an IRS agent locked and loaded.  There’s symbolism and hyperbole and then there’s just making things up to gin up fear.  Perhaps back in the feudal era there were tax collectors roaming around the countryside with armed guards to steal from the poor, but you may have noticed that Sherwood Forest was a long time ago in a land pretty far away.  We live in a civil society where citizens are expected to contribute to maintain the services we all use.  The roads we drive on are just the tip of the iceberg of all the things that we profit from through the social contract.  This transaction can be cancelled at any time, but no rational person really wants that.

In the mean time, we’re still going to be stuck with the spoiled brats on the Far Right who expect that everything be done for them at no cost, all the while claiming to be independent.  Well here’s the big news flash, none of us are independent.  I didn’t build the computer I’m writing this on, I didn’t operate the power plant that provides the electricity to keep it functioning, I didn’t grow the food I ate, and I didn’t pave the roads to get to the store to buy these things.  I paid for all these goods and services in different ways to private companies and public agencies alike.  I am a mind independent of other minds, but I am as connected as everyone else in society to everyone else in society.  When you recognize that, maybe then you recognize the inanity of conservative talking points that claim that guns are being pointed by anyone other than their bizarre fringe.

The Good Fight

At last count there are four candidates in the Democratic Primary, not counting the fringe candidates that are technically running but who no one will ever hear of.  Everyone knows that Hillary Clinton is running and that she is the expected nominee, even though there are still 225 days left until the first caucus.  Setting aside the reality that she was in the same spot at the same time in the 2008 election cycle that she did not win, I want to talk about the sense of gloom regarding her opponents.  I have heard a lot of people saying that they like other candidates: Martin O’Malley, Lincoln Chafee, and especially Bernie Sanders: but it always comes with the cynicism of assuming that  they don’t ultimately have a chance in the primary.  I’ll admit, I have said more than a few times that I like Bernie Sanders but I question his chances.  And I’ve come to the realization that my cynicism has blinded me, I was wrong, and I want to explain why.

It’s easy to look at the zoo forming in the GOP primary, between the options of Far Right and Farther Right.  In any sane nation, the majority of these candidates would occupy the equivalent of UKIP or Front National and would therefore be seen as a public source of shame at best, yet the GOP has welcomed the likes of Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, etc.  When faced with the prospect of one of these people potentially running the entire country, it’s more than natural to look for any ship you think can most readily face the storm, because anything to the Left of Margaret Thatcher would seem comparably tolerable.  Actually, even that’s not fair, because even Thatcher never attacked the NHS, “socialized healthcare.”  So what’s the point of dreaming about a candidate whose opinions actually match your own on most issues, if it seems like it might be a long shot?

You don’t win the war if you aren’t ever willing to fight the battles.  It’s true that there’s a chance that a candidate like Bernie Sanders could lose both in the primary and the general.  The same could be said of any candidate, Hillary Clinton included.  But if we aren’t willing to actually stand for something, then what ultimately is the point of pretending that we care about ensuring every American can go to a hospital in their time of need without fearing bankruptcy or worse?  What’s the point of feigning like we actually want to ensure that all Americans have the infrastructure to succeed, if we’re not going to fight for it?  What’s the point of showing up to the polls if we don’t at least try to win something?  This has long been the problem with the Democratic Party, its spinelessness, and it needs to stop.

From the 1930s through the 1970s, there was an effective Left in American politics, so much so that even the Republicans fought to desegregate the country, fight against pollution, and build up the country for everyone.  At the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, the conservatives worked hard to push an agenda and a platform that could inspire Americans, and to their credit the election of Ronald Reagan certainly shifted the sands of the American political spectrum.  There may even have been a decent point to be made at that time that government had gotten out of control, but they have since bled this nation so much that we now have one of the least equal societies, one of the least educated workforces, one of the least healthy nations of the Western world.  It was, perhaps, understandable why the American Left felt the need to cower in the face of this movement, but we need to stand up again.

The common knowledge says that “the government, which governs least, governs best.”  This is demonstrably false.  The government of Kansas is routinely getting smaller and smaller, and the people are feeling the consequences in their schools specifically, but in simple daily life more broadly.  When you’re employed, but still rely on government assistance to make the ends meet, you aren’t flourishing if those benefits are being cut further.  The state of Nevada has long tried to keep taxes as low as humanly possible, but even the Republican majority has finally seen the consequences and set a new budget that will increase revenue by billions to fund its failing schools.  I’ve already harped on about how nearly every conservative government’s stupidity in rejecting ACA funding costs their citizens health and longevity.  But while the simplistic rejection of this might be to simply give government more power in all areas, this too is wrong.  The fact is that the government, which governs best, governs best.  This little tautology simply means that there are times when we need to scale back government, sure, but there are times when we need to work together as a society through government to address some basic needs.  We need candidates that are actually going to stand up for this kind of rationality again.

Now, I’m not saying that Hillary Clinton is a bad candidate, and I have pointed out what I like about her, but if you want things to move closer to a rational center, which is to say Left, then you need to feel confident enough in your own convictions to vote that way… at least in the primaries.  Look, if Bernie Sanders loses, so what?  He will have done what no other candidate has done for a long time in the Democratic Party, and that’s try to actually do something.  And if as many people as there are who agree with him but cynically dismiss him actually followed through with their votes then, in all likelihood, he could win.  It can only be a win-win to have real progressive candidates fighting to be heard in this election cycle, because it forces everyone to remember what could be if only we worked for something.

Correlation is not causation by any means, but I find it unlikely that Hillary would be taking the stances she’s been taking on voting rights, education, and trade deals if it weren’t for the presence of Bernie cutting into her spotlight.  Maybe I’m completely wrong and she always wanted to run to the Left for the primaries, but the mere existence of candidates on the Left being heard can only be for the greater good here.
And we need to stop pretending like Bernie is some fringe candidate.  Crazy hair aside, his platform is virtually identical to many Center-Left parties across the globe.  The policies of universal healthcare and education have proven to cut costs and improve quality in France, Germany, Australia, and yes Canada to name just a few.  The idea that we need to actually pay for the government we want instead of just running up debts and deficits would seem to actually be a conservative position.  When even oil companies are admitting that climate change is a real and imminent threat, a candidate who advocates sound environmental policy would seem to be a starting point and not a fringe candidate.

For too long, we on the American Left, which again is like saying everyone shorter than seven feet, have sat around waiting and dodging fights, but it’s time to stand up and be heard.  We may lose this time, we may lose the next time, but we have to put ourselves out there.  Nearly everyone recognizes that something’s not right, but if they we never hear from people who actually put forth new choices and workable solutions then we get conditioned to believe that this is the best that we can hope for.  I can say with all honesty that if the primary were held today, Bernie Sanders would have my vote.  This is not to say that in the vast amount of time between today and the primaries that I couldn’t be persuaded to change my mind, but right now he’s the best candidate running, near as I can tell.

If we’ve learned anything from the Obama Administration it should be that you don’t approach the bargaining table having already giving in on every demand.  What happened when the Democrats proposed a healthcare solution that was drawn up by Republicans?  They opposed it out of principle, which is why we still don’t have a public option, let alone universal coverage.  What happens when you assume that the Far Right is going to be rational in budget discussions?  You get government shut downs and dropped credit ratings, because they will never meet us in the middle if we start with the compromise.  We need candidates who offer strong ideas, who actually believe the principles they espouse, and will fight to be heard.

I understand a little bit better why some of my friends were passionate about Ron Paul back in ’08 and ’12.  I even understand the impetus behind movements like the Tea Party a bit better, because for the first time in a long time I’ve seen a candidate that actually stands up for a lot of the issues that I am passionate about.  Unlike the former, I think that a candidate who espouses progressive policies, actually cares about making government work; and unlike the former, I think that the movement toward the Left is a reflection of the real needs and wants of the American people, and not the vested interests of a very entitled few.  But at the end of the day, it really matters very little who I think is the best candidate.  What matters is that if you see a candidate in the primaries that speaks to your beliefs, you need to fight to have that voice heard and leave the pragmatism for the general election.

Vigilante

Oh the internet is a silly place, full of very silly people.  More than anything it can be an infuriating place if you look at venues where people are encouraged to voice their opinion in 140 characters or fewer.  It’s pretty clear that we need to encourage people to flesh out their thoughts and to allow room for nuance in our discussions, but then there are those days when you just have to shake your head at the things people genuinely believe.  The most basic rights and freedoms are not necessarily as popular as you may think, particularly if you have the gall to stand in between the internet denizen and their righteous indignation.  Obviously, I have to recognize the irony of using an blog to voice my own righteous indignation, but the point still stands.

There is a story still making some small ripples on the web about a dog that was abused.  Her owner taped her mouth shut, clamping down on her tongue.  Understandably people felt tremendous sympathy for the dog and wanted her owner brought to justice, but that’s not how the discussions went.  People talked repeatedly about how the owner should be punished in the most cruel and unusual ways.  People seemed to take great pleasure in imagining that this owner might be raped during his or her imprisonment.  People, needless to say, were getting a bit out of hand.

There was the occasional comment alluding to Eighth Amendment protections or else defending the right of accused parties to be afforded the benefit of the doubt until proven guilty, whenever a suspect was apprehended.  These comments were, perhaps predictably, not as well received as those jumping on the bandwagon of insulting suspects and taking comfort in the fantasy of punishment.  A casual observer might think at this point, “what the heck is wrong here?”  Everyone seems to believe in all the good and pleasant aspects of justice until they get riled up, at which point all they want is vengeance and not justice.  It’s, therefore, not surprising to consider what the trend in pop culture has been for the passed few years.

Comic book superheroes have always had a sense of wish fulfillment to them, from the basic power trip that is Superman to the gritty righters-of-wrong like Batman.  There are comics that tackle some really profound questions in life, including the very concept of superheroes, like “The Watchmen,” but for the popcorn-crunching masses who ingest comics in the form of TV shows and movies, there is much less emphasis on depth.  We want our heroes to be the good guy who bypasses all that pesky infrastructure that allows the bad guys to prosper, to assert the kind of justice we feel is lacking in the world.  And don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of injustice in the world.  The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, as they say, but there’s a reason why we have a system.

In the aptly named “A Man for All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More has a discussion about what lengths we must go to, in defending the rule of law, even when it means letting the bad guy get away. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk We could use a bit more of that today, but instead we have Batman, an insanely rich man who takes the law into his own hand, crosses international borders to kidnap bad guys, sets up a secret monitoring program to find bad guys, beats bad guys within an inch of their lives, and does so with our tacit approval that his assessment of what makes a person sufficiently bad justifies ignoring the law.  The whole idea of superheroes has become entangled with the idea that there are any number of powerful individuals who have the ability and therefore the right to circumvent law in pursuit of a cleaned up city.  This makes me uncomfortable.

Part of the problem here is anonymity, people feel secure in saying whatever they want without a moment’s thought because it costs them nothing and there’s likely little to no consequences.  I mean, outside of the slightest embarrassment of being called out on a stupid remark, what consequence is there for denying the right to a fair trial or the right to a humane sentence in an online forum?  It’s become almost a cliche in its own right that the anonymity of the internet has given rise to some of the worst vitriol because people still don’t see the internet as a part of reality, regardless of how integrated our lives become.  But I think the anonymity is a bit more insidious than all that.

People feel isolated online, they feel detached from people around them.  The great irony of the internet is that it offered with one hand openness to the whole world, but with the other it gave us the means to defend ourselves from outside opinions, dissenting voices, and simple human interaction.  The isolation that the internet instills makes us feel both infinitely powerful and infinitely powerless.  Online you have complete control over your own webpages and what content you see, but as a single person using a computer you’re nearly impotent in changing the real world.  There are exceptions; the effort to defend net neutrality comes to mind, but in most cases people tend to share news articles or like movements, which may give a momentary sense of accomplishment, but ultimately leave you feeling powerless when you realize that no politician has yet been convinced that ten thousand likes equates to a political mandate.

So we seek our own little fantasies in our media, both the active and passive.  We actively make our comments about how the whole world is awful and bemoan the fact that there isn’t someone to just clean things, damn the consequences.  We passively enjoy entertainment that reinforces that naive belief.  All the while we’re convinced that the only solution is to stop them, whoever they are, by any means necessary.  Which brings us back nicely to the sad matter of the abused dog.

It is heartening to see so many people immediately and unreservedly show empathy when something horrible has happened.  It would be nice if some of that empathy could translate into real world action, but we’ll come back to that.  Where we get into trouble is assuming that by making the bad guy hurt as much as he hurt others that we can set things right.  This is the definition of vengeance, not justice, and when people seek to actually pursue this in the real world, that’s where we get vigilantism.  We have a system for dealing with the bad guys, it’s called the rule of law, and while it may have some flaws, it’s the best game in town.

There are going to be times in our lives that a bad thing happens in a way that directly affects us.  Sometimes the bad guy looks like us, or maybe has a similar background.  At that time, wouldn’t you like to know that you aren’t going to be immediately blamed and punished for that person’s wrong doing?  For some out there, maybe you will do something wrong, maybe something that you actually don’t see as wrong yourself, e.g. consume an illicit drug.  At that time, wouldn’t you like to know that there is a system that seeks to dole out appropriate punishments with limits to how extreme things can get?  These are aspects of a legal system that has evolved over hundreds of years to treat people as people, and to seek justice over vengeance.  The fact that there are still holes in the system is testament to the work we have yet to do and not an excuse to throw the lot of it away.

This is a time for hard work and tough, nuanced answers.  The problems we are confronted with life are not always going to be solidly black and white.  There are times when we need to recognize that our ability to function as individuals comes as a direct result of our common pursuits to build an infrastructure that protects people, even arguably bad people.  We seek to right wrongs in this world, but in doing that we need to do our best not to create further wrongs of our own.  These are the ideas that seem to be too complex for Hollywood productions and these are the conversations too long for 140 character comments on the virtues of vigilantism.