Juneteenth Appropriated?

President Trump will hold a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma next Friday, June 19th.  The choice of date and location has drawn harsh criticism of a president whose words have done so much to validate the endemic racism that has afflicted this nation for over four centuries.

The date is the one on which the long-delayed implementation of the Emancipation of enslaved Africans was initiated in Texas in 1865, commemorated by celebrations of "Juneteenth."

The location - Tulsa - was the site of a massacre of Black residents of the city's Greenwood district.  Hundreds of Black Americans were killed, and the district - home to a thriving business community - was largely destroyed, beginning over Memorial Day weekend in 1921.

While racial killings - including massacres - have been many in US history, the destruction of Greenwood and the number of murders committed there hold an especially ignominious place.

It is impossible to know whether Mr. Trump had any idea, when this rally was planned, that either the date or the location was of any special significance.  After all, this is the same fellow who said, during Black History Month in 2017, that "Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more" - as though Douglass is alive today and doing important things in the service of his country.  [One can imagine that Trump was really talking about the legacy of Douglass, but it is difficult to credit that notion.]

A solution to this quandary immediately leaps to mind.

President Trump could select the occasion of this campaign rally to tell the American people he is working on a comprehensive plan of reparations to African Americans for more than four centuries of slavery and brutal oppression, details to be made public over the next several months.  He could mention a dollar figure: there is quite a range possible, as estimates of the total amount required in the cause of racial justice range from $1.4 trillion to $17 trillion.  Anything remotely approaching the latter number would have to be spread out over a decade.

The president could thereby transform his public image - from that of a leader of a cult of personality, lacking any admirers outside of his loyal following, and devoid of any but the dimmest perceptions of our nation's annals - to a transformative and heroic torchbearer of freedom, establishing a legacy in US history to be esteemed for many generations to come.

Yes, I know.  Given Trump's denial, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, that there is systemic racism in America, emphasized this week by his sending messengers from his Administration - including Attorney General William Barr and Director of the National Economic Council Lawrence Kudlow - to reinforce that claim, it seems most improbable.

But to quote one of my heroes:

Defund the Police: What's in a Word?

Many Americans who are not decidedly left of center politically are criticizing the choice of "defund" to capture what should be done about police departments that have strayed so far from "To Protect and to Serve."

Of course it is an obvious case of the turning of tables.

It has long been a favorite tactic of conservatives, combining their social conservatism with their professed fiscal conservatism (that never applies to their pets, such as defense contractors and the military budget) to withhold or withdraw funding from anything they don't like.  So they want to defund Planned Parenthood, public broadcasting (PBS and NPR), the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, public health research on gun violence, and "failing" public schools.

Indeed, this is the way they approach government agencies they dislike.  They want to defund the Department of Education to the point of abolishing it.  Likewise for the EPA.

This is their overall approach to government.  Steadfastly denying the role of government as a proper agent of the people, doing our bidding for the benefit of American society (recall the phrase "promote the general Welfare" from the preamble to the Constitution), they want to shrink it.

How?  "Starve the beast."

Nothing, perhaps, captures the sentiment underlying "defund the police" better than "starve the beast" - because so many of us are currently seeing that American policing is a great beast, or at the very least employs far too many officers whose behavior is beastly, working in departments that do little or nothing to prevent or restrain such behavior.

Defund the police.  Starve the beast.

Don't like the word?  Does it conjure up a lawless America?  How can we be a nation of laws if there is no one to enforce those laws?

Do you prefer "reform?"  Fine.  Maybe that is correct in concept, but what about in execution?  Reformers - in this nation so much given to holding tightly to the status quo - are consistently frustrated in their efforts, forced to settle for the most modest incremental changes.

This simple fact leads to "defund" and even "abolish."

So let us return to the question: how can we be a nation of laws if there is no one to enforce them?

But before we ponder the answer to that question, we must examine the premise.  Should this be a nation of laws?  Or must this be a nation of justice?

We must focus on becoming a nation of justice.  And then we can decide what laws promote justice, and how the enforcement of laws must be conducted so that it, too promotes justice.

We are so very far away from that.  Incremental reforms of policing in America are not the answer.  When you are wrestling with a beast, you cannot settle for trimming its whiskers to make it look less threatening and think you have accomplished something.

Petrochemicals and the Pandemic

An article published by Reuters yesterday on the effects of the pandemic on petrochemicals took me back half a century.

From the 1967 film "The Graduate" --

Mr. Maguire: I want to say one word to you, Benjamin. Just one word.

Benjamin Braddock: Yes, sir.

Mr. Maguire: Are you listening?

Benjamin Braddock: Yes, I am.

Mr. Maguire: Plastics.

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The processing of petroleum into plastics via polymer technology has fascinated me for decades, since I first learned of it as a college student in organic chemistry.

The environmental impact of our use of plastics - especially when they are disposable and not recycled or recyclable - was unknown to me then.

I was, however, keenly aware of the environmental consequences of petroleum combustion for energy.  And so, far more times than I can count, I expressed the opinion that future generations would take a very dim view of our burning up all the petroleum as fuel instead of saving it to make synthetic polymers.

Occasionally the subject came up in the context of my stitching up a patient.  "Is that catgut?" the patient might ask.  "It's nylon," would be my reply.  And then, if I thought the patient would like being distracted from what I was doing by some conversation, I would offer a brief overview of the origins of nylon in the pioneering polymer technology research done at DuPont, beginning in 1927, sometimes mentioning other familiar substances produced in the early years, including rayon and neoprene.

These days my thinking has been transformed by an awareness that we are dumping single-use plastics into our oceans and landfills far more than we are recycling them.

As our reliance on petroleum for energy declines, while the supply of oil and natural gas remains relatively abundant, the cost of producing virgin plastics will continue to compare favorably to that of recycled plastic.  Only a substantial increase in the monetary cost of extracting petroleum via offshore drilling and fracking will change this calculus.  We have shown that we care far too little about the effects of drilling and fracking on our oceans, the air quality near refineries, power plants, and petrochemical installations, or contamination of ground water.

This unfortunate tendency to focus on monetary rather than environmental cost will slow the replacement of plastics with biodegradable polymers, such as those made from hemp.

If you live in a region like mine, where fracking and the petrochemical industry are major economic players, discussion of these issues is viewed by policymakers and elected officials as unwelcome at best.  Expect to be branded a job-killing environmental extremist.

This kind of thinking is an unending source of frustration for me.  In recent years I have had some unsuccessful forays into politics, and in the occasional candidate forum I was asked my views on fracking.  Sometimes the question was extremely pointed: would I support a moratorium on fracking pending additional regulations requiring more transparency from the industry - related to their extraction processes, the danger to groundwater, and monitoring of the air and water quality near drilling sites and petrochemical plants?  Would I support more taxes on all this activity?  Would I support a permanent ban on fracking?

In southwestern Pennsylvania such questions are as challenging to a political candidate as any related to gun control or abortion.  Any answer risks alienating a sizable segment of the electorate.  A response that is non-committal or evasive, on the other hand, instantly labels one as a "typical politician" who won't reply to a direct question with a straight answer.

I do not expect to be seeking public office again, but my answers to these questions now are unchanged from what they were on the campaign trail: I support many proposals to reduce the environmental impact of our use of petroleum, including strict regulation of fracking and petrochemical plants, and I would not stop short of bans if the data tell us the environmental impact cannot be reduced to the point of no longer representing a significant threat to the planet and the living creatures inhabiting it.

To accompany such statements, I have also explained that we are often presented with a false choice between jobs and the environment, explaining how many ways there are to pursue economic growth and environmental protection simultaneously.

Today I would be dismissed by the right as a "green new-dealer."

It is exactly this kind of dismissive attitude that stands in the way of moving the nation and the planet in the right direction to protect the environment.

Oh, and one more thing: climate change is not a hoax. 

Thinking of John Quincy Adams and Abolition

Recently I wrote a post for a Facebook group of doctors in my specialty relating some of my thoughts on racism as a public health problem in the US, and more broadly on the subject of racial justice.

The reaction by - well, the reactionaries in the group - was predictable. My post was denounced as political. It was declared that half of emergency physicians hold views diametrically opposed to mine. I was taken to task for crafting an argument in terms that made it seem morally wrong to disagree with me. (I'm still trying to figure out how that is a legitimate point of criticism, when it is actually evidence of rhetorical cogency.) I was advised that I am much in need of psychiatric help. And, of course, I was spewing "liberal bullshit."

One participant in the thread suggested it is the thinking of people like me that is the real reason for the sorry state of race relations in this country.

This last point brought to mind John Quincy Adams (our sixth president, 1825-1829). The younger Adams served in the United States House of Representatives for many years after his presidency: from 1831 until his death in 1848 at the age of 80. In that phase of his political career he was one of the leaders of the Northern abolitionists.

Abolition of slavery would require amending the Constitution, and a Civil War en route to that. Congress by itself did not have the power to put an end to America's "original sin." But Congress did have jurisdiction over the District of Columbia, for which it served as governing authority. Resolutions to end slavery in the District were introduced in the House of Representatives, repeatedly, by Adams and others.

The First Amendment - that familiar repository of guarantees against infringement by Congress of the rights of free expression, free exercise of religion, and peaceable assembly - also guarantees the right "to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

During the few decades preceding the Civil War, petitions, from the people, demanding an end to slavery were brought before Congress by Adams and other northerners.

Such petitions provoked the ire of southerners in Congress, as did the resolutions to end slavery in the District of Columbia. Every resolution and every petition resulted in the parliamentary maneuver to table, meaning there would be no debate.

Southerners denounced these resolutions and petitions as divisive and declared that it was these, and not the institution of slavery, that constituted the real threat to the Union.

So, when I read the comments denouncing my post - and especially the one saying people who think the way I do are the real cause of America's troubles with racism - I could not help thinking of Congressman Adams.

[For those who love to read history, I recommend the scholarly and beautifully written biography of John Quincy Adams by Samuel Flagg Bemis.]

Racism as a Public Health Issue

Coronavirus-induced anxiety, fear, and frustration; unemployment rising to levels not seen since the Great Depression; and the boiling over of outrage at police officers who are brutal thugs with badges and blue uniforms have given us quite the incendiary concoction.

Mayors and governors must act swiftly, decisively, and meaningfully if we are to keep our cities from erupting in wildfires again and again in the coming weeks and months.

There will be no leadership from the top. We have a president whose delusions have risen to heights that are stunning, even for him: telling a reporter yesterday, on camera, that MAGA loves African Americans. While uttering this astounding lie, Trump simultaneously pours gasoline on every fire in sight, tweeting: "When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

No, Mr. President, the shooting has been going on for quite some time. A decade ago Amnesty International reported that police in the US were killing people in numbers approaching one thousand per year. The British newspaper The Guardian is tracking the numbers and reported 1,136 in 2015. The statistics-monitoring website Statista reported that 1,004 people were shot to death by police in the US last year: 37% white, 23% black, 16% Hispanic, 24% other or unknown. The sheer numbers of us being shot and killed by police each year are horrifying. The disproportionate killing of people of color is unmistakable.

There are millions of people in the US who think they are not racists, who say they don't discriminate, that they are "color blind," but whose lack of depth of understanding of the history of the problem makes them comfortable sitting on the sidelines and shaking their heads at the overt racists but never doing anything to be part of the solution.  They think we have anti-discrimination laws, and that's all we need.  They think those laws are enough to allow blacks to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and solve their own socioeconomic problems.  They think the obstacles to that have been removed, and nothing more needs to be done - and both of those notions are false.  They also think the police officers who have been involved in the murders of men like George Floyd are just a few bad apples.  They have no idea how many white police officers have deeply ingrained racism when they join the force, how many have pathologically authoritarian personalities, or how pervasive is the practice of "over-policing" of communities of color.

We are told that "blue lives matter." Of course they do. Yet we cannot ignore the grim statistics. The lives of Americans killed by police matter, too. We must pay attention to these - and ask how many of these killings were genuinely justified, truly unavoidable.

I have long thought this nation could erupt in bloody revolution over economic inequality. I still think that is so, and I am starting to believe that our stubborn refusal to seek racial justice earnestly, with determination and seriousness of purpose, could be the match that sets America aflame.

What do Vladimir Putin, Kim Jon-un, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Xi Jinping have in common?

All are admired by Trump - for their authoritarian style.  He describes this as being "a strong leader.”

Trump's idea of being a strong leader is becoming clearer lately.  He encourages law enforcement to treat subjects roughly.  He is inclined toward having the Secret Service use "vicious dogs" and "ominous weapons" in dealing with protestors.  He calls governors weak who search for ways to replace violence and looting with conciliation.  And he appears eager to use the US military to quell civil unrest, using the Insurrection Act of 1807 - which has most recently been invoked in response to the Los Angeles riots after the acquittal of police officers who had participated in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, and before that during rioting that occurred in 1968 following the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Unlike the governors he scorns, Trump has no interest in conciliation, or in addressing the institutionalized racism of American society, or in making the fundamental changes we need in the way police interact with communities of color.

This is not the presidential leadership America needs.  No, instead Donald Trump offers a response to a nation gripped by racial violence - that predictably erupts when an oppressed minority is brutalized yet again as it has been in this country for four centuries - that is authoritarian in character and fascist in ideology.

We need mayors, county officials, and governors throughout the USA to reject Trump's dark vision and find positive ways to meet the demands being made in these protests.  The refrain we hear echoing throughout the land is "No justice, no peace."  We must not allow the president to respond to that cri de cœur with yet more brutal force.

We must press the cause of justice so that genuine peace is attainable.

Thomas Jefferson's "fire bell in the night" is ringing.

Black Lives Matter: A White Man's Interpretation

Last year we marked the fourth centennial of the arrival of the first Africans brought to Virginia in the transatlantic slave trade.

The history of humans enslaving other humans goes back thousands of years.  The basis for this has varied: some have been enslaved after being captured in wars; others in a form of permanent indentured servitude because of debt; and still others in extreme versions of class or caste systems in which some people spent their lives in a condition of servitude to others because the relation of one group (we might call them peasants or serfs) to another (nobility or aristocracy) was one of being treated as property: that some humans owned other humans was a feature of a society or culture.

Enslaved Africans brought to the New World were not, however, simply humans owned by other humans.  They were regarded as less than human, more a distinct species than a race.  They were mostly employed as beasts of burden and were bought and sold like livestock.

In the British colonies of North America there developed exceptions to this treatment of enslaved Africans as less than human.  A slave might serve as a household servant, a nanny, or a wet nurse.  On a plantation a slave might be a foreman or overseer of other slaves, responsible for managing their labor and maximizing their output, a sort of surrogate master who might employ such tools of enforcement as the whip.  Having such a relatively elevated status could mean a lower likelihood of being sold as chattel.  A slaveholder might come to regard such a slave almost as a member of the family and decide to render the servitude impermanent by providing for the slave to be freed after many years, sometimes upon the death of the owner.

But these were exceptions to the rule of having a sub-human status.  In general slaves continued to be bought and sold as beasts of burden.  When they reproduced, offspring were viewed as the products of breeding farm animals.  Little or no thought was given to the notion that an adult male, an adult female, and the children produced by their sexual intercourse constituted a family, and such thinking did not enter into decisions about selling them when doing so would permanently separate them.

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In the 1970s I attended an academically selective public high school that drew students from all over the city.  There were black classmates I held in high esteem because they were intellectually gifted, or talented musicians, or accomplished athletes who led my school's teams to championships.  A few I had the good fortune to get to know well, forming deep friendships.

When I was in college and spent a summer driving a taxi - my first blue collar job - I was exposed to - in fact immersed in - the society of white working class fellow employees.

In general the city in which I was born and raised was extremely segregated.  Nearly all of Philadelphia's neighborhoods were overwhelmingly white or black, typically virtually 100% one way or the other.  My cab-driving coworkers came primarily from a working class neighborhood that was 100% white.

While I was by no means unfamiliar with racism, the content of some conversations astonished me, because it was not until that summer that I understood how some Whites regarded Blacks as less than human, a distinct species, referring to them as "animals" or even "things," statements about them often dripping with contempt.

At the age of 18 I had no idea how to respond to this - and so I didn't, except internally, where my response was to be shocked, appalled, horrified.  Perhaps I sensed that nothing I might say could influence such thinking.  And I was certainly too timid to try.  Although I didn't know it at the time, I was an enabler.

The city's political milieu was hardly encouraging.  The mayor was Frank Rizzo, police commissioner turned law-and-order politician, an unabashed racist whose treatment of the residents of black neighborhoods was disgraceful.  Few black officers were added to the force when he was commissioner, and his tenure as mayor was marked by incidents of racist brutality and oppression.

The Black Lives Matter movement was formed nearly seven years ago.  Only gradually did I come to realize that the movement was truly needed.  My initial reaction was, "Of course black lives matter."  It was not clear to me what, exactly, was the point of this statement.

Gradually I realized that there was good reason for making the statement, through the name of the movement and its myriad actions.  News reports of incidents told the same story again and again: city police departments, both leaders and rank-and-file officers, conducted themselves as though black lives do not matter.  City government officials' responses to such incidents ranged from indifferent to ineffectual.

When Black Americans are subjected to police brutality, the consequences span a gamut of effects, from injury, both emotional and physical, to death.  It is all unmistakably dehumanizing.  Yet rather than taking away the humanity of its victims, it flatly denies their humanity's very existence.

Black lives matter.  They do not matter more than the lives of other members of our society.  Black lives do not matter more than "blue lives."  Black lives do not matter to the exclusion of the importance of others' lives.  This insistence that black lives matter matter is necessary because they are in constant danger in the USA in a way that others are not, the result of a long history of seeing Blacks as less than human.  Indeed, "structural racism" and "institutional racism" are mere euphemisms for the attitude that Blacks are less than human.

The statement made by the name of the movement conveys one simple and important truth: Black Lives Matter, and all of what we countenance in American society that denies that statement's verity must stop.