Friday, March 18, 2011

AH, HAH! MOMENTS

Recently, I have been hearing folks having epiphanic experiences when it comes to institutionalized racism in the United States. I am surprised and quickly become suspicious when these instances are reported, because I reflexively disbelieve anyone living in this country can be so impervious to what has been systematically going on for centuries with regard to African Americans (as well as other peoples of color), that they claim ignorance even as they continue to swim, if you will, in reservoirs of privilege as they have all of their lives! There are countless matrices and social stimuli that daily replay the racial divide within everybody’s purview. We do not need a surfeit of data to observe the injustices and to resolve to collaborate unendingly to fight against this blight upon all of our humanity—although Michelle Alexander has done precisely that in her book entitled, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Colorblindness, of course, is a popular descriptor of what many wish for and claim today it exists, on the one hand, and an expression of the shallow and uncritical perception many have who simply do not wish to deal with the sickness of racism, on the other hand. Colorblindness can be used as a foil ostensibly to hide our greed, selfishness, individualism, and indifference to the plight of people of darker hue. Prejudice raises its ugly head not only in the thoughts of lower-class whites who have the privilege of sighing that they ain’t like no nigger, but also in the charitable contributions of the well-off who never consider sacrificing current material comforts in order to help to begin to dismantle a system designed to lock people in the poorhouse. Yet because we insist that our society has reached an age of colorblindness, we can exculpate ourselves from any responsibility for a system of oppression and exploitation that scandalizes human dignity and worth. Consequently, a structure of exclusion fundamentally based on racial categories can be blatantly perpetuated by lofting from our lips the sordid and flagrantly cynical subterfuge that we have finally arrived!

Every black person in the United States should develop a hermeneutic of suspicion when dealing with others alleging enlightenment and also live in this environment steeped in racism. It is very, very difficult to transcend it unscathed. Knowing the history of well-minded liberals and some progressives in this country, blacks cannot drop their guards because some of the most vicious forms of racism have been engendered and propagated by such people! Race matters in this country because we let it by supposedly having the luxury to ignore and be indifferent to it—while those categorized, prejudged, and victimized by it recognize its validity and its entrenchment in all facets of our regular milieu.

Until we discern the continuum of racial discrimination—from individual prejudice to institutional genocide—we will forever plead some exonerative ignorance or contemplative epiphany ad infinitum that renders us in effect inactive perpetrators of the status quo, which promises that the day of freedom, dignity, and equality for all persons shall remain a pipe dream!

Friday, March 11, 2011

MILITARY ACTION IN LIBYA?

There is pressure upon Nobel Peace Prize laureate, President Barack Obama, to proceed to a military solution to the crisis in Libya. Unfortunately, Col. Muammar Qaddafi has elected to trounce the rebels through air attacks, ground forces, and other military technologies rather than face up to the civil strife he helped to cause prior to his offensive defense tactics in the face of the uprising. The United States has tolerated Qaddafi’s human rights abuses since he became less vituperative against us some years back.

Qaddafi has been in office much longer than Hosni Mubarak. With such a long tenure at the helm of the ship of state, a political leader must be dictatorial and violent against the people. There is no way for opposition to be on the losing end for decades without massive suppression occurring. Needless to say, Qaddafi’s rule has not been exceptional.

It is ironic that one of the main responses of the Obama administration has been to defer to the United Nations as far as military intervention is concerned. We have repeatedly defied the U.N. since its inception, when we have used the device of “national security” to do whatsoever we wanted to preserve or advance our interests. Meanwhile, we watch from afar innocent Libyan civilians being massacred and virtually defenseless demonstrators struck down, because we are more concerned about Afghanistan and Iraq—two places where a hefty portion of our military arsenal is still engaged, both actively and poised for future sorties.

There are many in Obama’s coterie who believe that Qaddafi is definitely on the way out and, therefore, sitting on our duffs is not a bad option for now. This attitude is appalling, for it makes light of the awful devastation the Libyan dictator is wreaking on his own people today. How can we be so cavalier about people’s lives?
Many of our European allies depend upon this authoritarian regime’s oil. They will begin to feel more desperate about what’s happening in that country and may themselves opt to engage their own military might. Perhaps, we will be more favorable to that action, or more willing to support them rather than the democratic rebels of darker hue in Libya itself.

Ultimately, I do not favor a military solution to the crisis in Libya. There are ways to force Qaddafi out without using a weapon of mass destruction. The question is whether our intelligence and diplomacy are fit for the challenge. At this point, I fear the answer to that question and the many lives that are at stake!

UNION BUSTING IN WISCONSIN

The public sector needs protection from those who favor the well-to-do at the expense of the average worker. Many who have this inclination seem impervious to the fact that their support works against their own interest. What kind of democracy is it that fervently seeks after tax cuts for the richest in the nation, yet removes the primarily thing that has historically kept workers shielded from callously greedy business owners, namely, collective bargaining? Many people had struggled and died to make the work environment tolerable. If it were not for unions, children would be allowed to work, wages would not keep up with inflation, the work week would be tediously longer than it is now, there would be no such thing as overtime, maternity leave, medical benefits, pensions, retirement pay, improved working conditions, etc.

What makes what happened in Wisconsin that much more egregious is the manner in which they railroaded the bill through because of the absence of fourteen Democratic lawmakers who were disgusted in the puerile discussions made by Republicans. These Republican legislators claimed they were acting on a conservative mandate from the people—people who were clearly unable to ascertain that they themselves were being blamed for the fiscal crisis in their state. The average public sector worker is not the type of individual that brought the economy to its knees in 2008. It is so much easier to attack the masses of people who have very little recourse for defense except for protesting in the public square.

If a repressive regime can be forced to abdicate and abscond by citizen protests, then why is not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people able to be squashed, impeached, or radically reformed? Union busting is repressive; the denial of the breadth of collective bargaining removes the major form of safeguards for the average laborer. Such action flies in the face of what it means to be a human being worthy of dignity and respect. Certainly, corporate Wisconsin could have taken much of the slack, rather than lobbying to save themselves and ignore consumers upon whom they depend.

Voting is a right in this country, and it ought to be. But that does not mean that voters are aware of their rights or can discern what is in their best interests and in the best interest of the whole. It is incumbent upon the informed electorate to educate the rest of the population that is perpetuating their own self-affliction. Labor unions are still needed to protect the contemporary worker. They are by no means antiquated, and all workers have benefitted from their long history of struggle and activism on behalf of laborers.

The other states that are considering Wisconsin-like measures, including my own state of Iowa, need to be assailed by an Egyptian-type rebellion in order to salvage the last vestiges of real democracy in our weakening republic. Union busting has to become and remain a relic of the Reagan administration!