NSA Spying Must Stop

So for anyone who is ok with the revelations about the government's universal spying program...let me talk to you for a moment, then ask a question.

I've heard some of the arguments in favor of allowing the NSA to monitor as they please without complaint. They are approximated as follows:

"They're only doing it to keep us safe from terrorists. They're on our side."

"I am not a terrorist, so I don't have anything to hide."

"They only look at metadata, not actual content. We can trust our own government."

"Every government out there is doing this, we have to keep up."

Is that about it?

Quick response: BULLSHIT. I don't care if the intention of these programs is to keep us safe, they are removing the things that are supposed to make America special in the first place. You know, liberty and freedom? The right to privacy in some vestigial sense. All too often it is a focus on an external threat that allows the real danger to grow within like a cancer. Ever heard of COINTELPRO? Hoover was big on surveillance too, and he wasn't on "our" side. If you think it's okay for what's going on to continue, you aren't on my side either. So you're not a terrorist, huh? Well, friend, in a police state, a terrorist is whoever the authorities decide is a terrorist. Maybe they don't like the books you're checking out from the library, maybe they don't think you need to study what you study. What's the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? Depends who you are asking.

As far as metadata vs content, how are we to trust anything we are told? The government didn't trust us enough to tell us ANYTHING, but they expect trust in return? Sounds like a pimp & ho kind of relationship. Not to mention, it is demonstrably false that they can keep this data secure. That goes without saying at this point. Any and everything can and will be eventually hacked. Period.

Every government is doing it? Not to this scale, they don't have the capacity. Besides, didn't we use to oppose regimes that persecuted citizens for knowledge and thought crimes? Weren't they the bad guys?

I don't know about you, but the fact that we are in a totally Orwellian 1984-style Big Brother state does not make me feel safe. At all. That is not my idea of America and, again, if it is yours WE ARE NOT ON THE SAME SIDE.

Lastly, a question: Imagine a technology that allowed a government, or corporate, worker sitting in some room to scan people's thoughts. The actual thoughts inside their heads. Sounds far-fetched, right? So did the Internet 50 years ago. So did space travel a hundred. Would you be ok with governments and corporations rummaging around in people's heads, looking for dirt?

You're still not a terrorist, right? Still have nothing to hide...so would you be ok with that? How is that substantively different from the things we are allowing now? And the things that are surely as the rising sun coming down the pipeline unless we stop it now.

Please think about it.

#todayisareddawn, #weareenemiesofthestate

Black Racists

Here's a quoted reply to a post about Oprah's "old racists just have to die" comment on the Grio

"There are no more racist people than Black people."

...Right. Remember when we exterminated the Indians and forced kidnapped Europeans into centuries of chattel slavery, then ostensibly freed them only to create an apartheid state, then fought their fight for civil rights for decades through legislation and domestic policy strategy, maintaining a wide economic and educational gap that persists to this day?

Do you remember when Blacks did that? Huh?

Then when the oppressed groups participated in a coalition to elect a man who identifies as White to the office of the Presidency (finally!) remember how we obstructed and disrespected him in unprecedented ways? Remember how we called him a Mormon terrorist from Eastern Europe? All the memes on the Internet identifying him as a Gypsy? The knee-jerk reactionary backlash against his judicial nominations and signature legislation?

Do you remember when that happened?

You don't? Because it didn't go down like that? Then what, exactly, makes Blacks the greatest racists in America?

Oh, because we use the word nigger and don't allow Whites to use it? That might, and I don't really believe this but I could at least understand the argument, make us hypocrites. But not racist.

What else? Because we have called Whites pejorative names like "cracker" and "devil"? Not nice terms, to be sure, derogatory and possibly hurtful. But the difference is those terms have never possessed the leverage of law and culture giving them weight; meaning that when Blacks are treated as living icons of epithets, the full power of society acts to ensure that we live down to our reputations, that the hatred behind the words is made known in our lives and on our flesh. Prejudice and racism are not the same, although they may sometimes look alike.

What else you got? Affirmative Action? That's helped more White woman than Black men; and they needed the help. Still do, if you look at corporate America and dollars earned versus men. And it is not as if we have a preponderance of Blacks earning PhDs on the public dime. In fact, considering the number of Blacks incarcerated by the criminal prison-industrial complex, it can be argued that Blacks, and to a lesser degree Latinos, still form the unpaid labor core of an industry designed and maintained by whites for financial gain and social control, operating under the guise of law and order.

It is not the fault of Black America that the white-middle class has crumbled apart like a rotten tooth; we have been gumming our food for years. If the blue-collar Whites don't stop the manipulation that the power elite exerts over them like a vampire's glamor and start seeing the lessons of history and the realities of politics and economics, we will continue to see natural allies played against one another and that same power elite diminish in number and increase in obscene wealth and disproportionate influence over our republic.

Now, call me a reverse racist. Whatever in blue blazes that is means.

Gun Culture

The "American" experience of gun culture is not monolithic. Rural and sub-rural hunting culture, militia culture, self-defense culture and crime culture all represent distinct cultural interactions with firearms.

People often don't understand when I start a conversation by saying that I grew up around guns and a gun culture, then respond to their question "Oh, you hunt?" with - "No, I'm from New York City".

"Oh, " they reply uncomfortably.

The difference between gun racks on the back of a pickup and metal detectors in public high schools is a wide one. Experience shapes thought, thought shapes reality.

I am torn on the gun debate in this sense; I know firsthand the devastation caused by the presence of firearms in the Black communities of America. I also comprehend, intellectually and instinctively, that guns change the course of history, and a world where only state security agents possess the rights, and means, to utilize firearms is not a world I want to live in.

So I guess I'll continue as a gun owner who criticizes gun culture and live with the dichotomy. Or the hypocrisy. Whichever.

What needs to be done

 History certainly is a blueprint of change, but it is also documentation of how some things have not changed as much as we would like to think. In the post-Reconstruction period, during the establishment of the First Jim Crow period, it was deemed a social necessity by Whites to use violence and socioeconomic pressure to "teach niggers their place", and during the height of the nascent revolution that was the Civil Rights Movement, television allowed us to document the violence used by police and others against us and our allies. We find ourselves at yet another moment in history, so I humbly suggest we learn from the path behind us, so as to walk a different path forward. We need to educate OURSELVES, as the American Educational system falls further from relevance. We need to work together and EMPLOY EACH OTHER, as the larger economy demonstrates it only exists as a tool for capital accumulation for a few, not a "rising tide" lifting all ships. We need to ACTIVATE POLITICAL POWER. as politics is a game of power, and there is no way to win begging for mercy from those who don't value compassion. This will also force the national discourse BACK TO THE CENTER LEFT, and away from the right-wing edge of xenophobic, misogynistic, tribalized oligarchy and neoconservatism. Lastly, we need to arm ourselves, both literally and metaphorically, with the tools necessary to engage in a long, vicious fight with a remorseless enemy. WE NEED TO BE A COMMUNITY AGAIN. If we can do that, there are those who will flock to our cause as naturally as birds migrating towards warmer, more hospitable climes. The lines are being drawn, the drums of war are beating in the streets of America again...

For the record: Modern progressives do not want to take what "rightfully belongs" to the haves and give it to the have-nots. That is what plantation owners did during the several hundred years of American chattel slavery. That is what payday and title loan sharks do to financially unstable people today. That is what funds and banks who gamble their constituents funds in markets and inscrutable financial instruments do. That is what purveyors of cheap "non-insurance" insurance plans do.

Progressives want structural changes in a system designed to keep the rich filthy and the rest of the pyramid clean as vulture-picked bone. Progressives want to create an environment of opportunity and egalitarianism under tax policy and enforcement of the law.

Nobody (read reasonable and intelligent person) believes government can solve ALL problems, just as nobody believes government cannot solve ANY problems.

I worry about spending (we spend too much, let's invade less), government overreach (thank you for your service to the private citizenry of the world, Edward Snowden, damn these so-called-liberal-media shills who take every opportunity to defend Big Brother aka the NSA), and inefficient bureaucracy as much as the next guy. Probably more, actually.

However, I am a fan of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. I am a fan of the Civil Rights Act, and of federal intervention into states that had every intention of making Jim Crow into a new slave code for the nation. It took Federal power to make things happen on that level.

So please, stop using "progressive" and "liberal" as if they are inherently pejorative terms. In return, I will stop praying to your Big Kahuna (read The God of Abraham, Yahweh, J. Hova - whatever he calls himself on his next album) to remove you from this earth before you complete the damage your political and social forerunners began.

Validation is requisite for normative psychic functioning. Too many people internalize their marginalization and the stigma attached to them by society, making them unable to view themselves as fully operative human beings. They come to believe that the things they cherish don't matter, that the people and things they love have no value.

Do the economic injustices inflicted by the world make you angry? You don't have the right to be angry, especially if you are Black in America. Others have that right, but not you.

Do you smoke pot? Sorry, this is not California or Colorado, and that is not an acceptable alternative. Have a Newport and a shot of Ciroc. Then piss in this cup, let's see if you get this cubicle job.

Do you perceive misogyny, homophobia, racism and class discrimination. You should not be seeing those things, because they don't really exist in America anymore. And if you talk about the privileges associated with being a financially secure, educated, heterosexual White male of Christian faith, you are a reverse racist and your perceptions are not relevant.

Why do you think people join street gangs, fraternities and legislative bodies? To be a part of something, to belong to something, to have their thoughts, feelings and perceptions validated.

Why do you think unstable individuals pick up firearms and open fire on strangers? They are disconnected, internally stigmatized and feel invalidated by the societies that created them.

Namaste means "I bow to your form", it is a traditional greeting derived from Sanskrit widely used throughout India and certain spiritual communities. It is similar to the Navi (yes, from Avatar) "I see you"; it is a recognition of the valid existence of the person you are talking to.

Ralph Ellison wrote of the opposite phenomenon, the utter lack of recognition and validation experienced by an ethnic minority surrounded by casually accepted structural racism and prejudice, in his classic "Invisible Man".

If we want to solve the problems facing us as individuals, as families, as congregations of faith, as citizens of this country and denizens of this planet...we must learn to see each other.

The alternative is simple disintegration of human progress.

Namaste. I see you, my friends. And to those who disagree with everything I say and count me among their enemies...

I see you too.

Election Day

As I read about the armed robbery of a fast food spot in Portsmouth last night, a crime that resulted in a female employee being shot, I wanted to make a relevant comment. You know, something insightful about the relationship between prolonged economic depression, the perennial lack of opportunity perceived by so many in the hood, and the psychological reality experienced by street youth in general - and how all of this ties into occurrences of violence and crime.

Instead, I find myself thinking of my youth in New York City, and especially of my mother, a Black woman herself widowed by street crime, who slogged through all kinds of weather and personal ailments to make it to the post office job she held my entire life. The streets were still reeling from the nuclear-level impact of crack cocaine and the fast money it injected into the hood, not to mention the rapid militarization of the police force and attendant targeting of black and brown boys. Her desire to get my grandparents out of the daily pressures of that life is what eventually led her to move them to Virginia Beach during the 1990's.

I think about how street crime is an ever-present reality in poor neighborhoods, like a damned Uroboros, the snake eating itself which symbolizes eternity, in this case symbolic of a community devouring itself. The perpetrators and victims of street crime are usually from the same community, creating a sort of predatory microcosm in which certain citizens are forced to form the buffer between street-level criminality and the rest of the society.

These are the same neighborhoods populated with check cashing spots, payday loan storefronts, greasy-spoon Chinese food joints and neighborhood stores that exist mostly to sell blunts, beer and lottery tickets. Rarely is there a real supermarket in walking distance, and eating anything other than garbage requires a deliberate effort.

It is not easy being poor in America. It is not easy being a single mother. It is not fun being Black, and it is no joy to live in a concrete jungle filled with all manner of hungry creatures. Put all this together and then add atop it a bureaucratic system seemingly designed to extort money from the poorest among us by any means possible. Add a vicious political current that attacks the poor for the crime of poverty and seeks to gut the social safety net whose tenuous strands keep so many from falling completely through the growing cracks in our social foundation. Do the math when you add a society that sees the victims and criminals as part and parcel of the same problem, and treats the entire community accordingly (stop and frisk, driving while black, sentencing disparities, et al and ad infinitum), and a popular culture so bleached of soul that it becomes a delivery vehicle for nihilism and self-degradation.

Then I think about the other side of criminality - the fat cat hedge fund managers, the bank execs with their multi-million dollar golden parachutes, the predator capitalists who would sell gasoline undies to their auntie in Hell if it would help their margins, the corrupt and for-sale professional politicians who exist to serve the oligarchs and assist in sucking the lifeblood from the poor.

I think of all these things, and then remember that today is election day, albeit an off-year contest, which ostensibly idealizes the bloodless change of power in this country...and I wonder...how would we be different, as a nation, if there was no buffer...if more people were forced to live the life of a second-class citizen, if the illusion was more fully ripped away.

As above,
so below.

I see the agenda being pushed by political elites in this country, the future being engineered, the dog-tiredness of the lower classes and gadget-induced apathy of the diminishing middle. There is a vastness to our capacity for violence as a nation, a military, a police force, and individuals.
And I cannot help but think...

Soon we will find out.