Tag: current events

A Far Future Reflection On The Plague

“Wow, that early 21st Century plague was wild. I guess they didn’t know what we know now.”

“They didn’t have some of the tools we have, but they knew most of what we knew.”

“So why did they let so many people suffer?”

“A few reasons. They were very concerned about money.”

“Money? Like the made up barter proxy stuff?”

“Yeah. Some of them would hoard massive amounts of it, like more than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes, while other people didn’t have enough to eat.”

“That’s sad! Why did. . . “

“It wasn’t just about money. They were worried that people staying home would mess up how much money the hoarders could make, so they were willing to sacrifice some vulnerable people to prevent that from happening. But they also were concerned about freedom.”

“Huh? How are you free when you could just get sick at any time? I mean, you’d go into temporary residence at a medical facility, so not a big deal. . . “

“Well. . . “

“What?”

“They didn’t cover everyone’s health care back then, so you would go into their medical facilities, their ‘hospitals’, and then you’d pay a lot of money. Some people lost all their money from going into them.”

“That’s awful. All that risk, no vaccines. . . “

“No, they had vaccines. But some people thought that the money hoarders were trying to control their minds using the vaccines. Others thought it was a sterilization project. In fairness, people had done those kinds of things not too long ago, but still, there was no evidence. Still others thought getting vaccinated made you _more_ contagious, or getting sick made you stronger, even though the disease mutated like a cold, and we now know acquired immunity is idiosyncratic and doesn’t guarantee comprehensive immunity.”



”I know they’d had vaccines for a couple hundred years by then. That’s nuts. So, no vaccines, no medical facilities helping, what else could they have done?”



”Wearing air filtering masks became popular, and was at least somewhat effective, as not all the masks were the same. But some of the freedom cults got really angry about the masks and protested, and made their governments stop requiring masks.”



”Like the masks we had to wear during the Bad Summers when the pollution got crazy? So people had masks that could stop them from getting sick, and they didn’t wear them. No vaccines, no medical facilities, no masks. They were out of luck, huh?”



“No, there was one other thing. Ventilation. They could have opened windows, run filters, made sure more fresh air circulated in buildings and did more things outdoors.”

“What? You’re telling me that all someone had to do was open a window, and they wouldn’t even do that? No disrespect, but it just sounds. . . primitive.”



“Try not to judge them too harshly; people will look at us one day and think the same. This is something we have seen happen a lot when humans are on the verge of a point of enlightenment. It’s scary to come into the light, and it hurts your eyes. So some people prefer to just stay in the dark where it’s dangerous but familiar.”

even when we win

It is better for children to raise fists in square-capped joy,
to breathe salt air and ponder the unending horizon,
to dance like big folks, then double over with laughter.

It is better for love to accrete in beating hearts,
an aspiring star. It is better
for parents’ eyes to mist with salt tears
as they ponder the unending horizon from a wooden pew.

It is better for small hands to lift triumphantly,
safe in their parents’ grip. It is better for uncles
to dispense secrets of life in between sips,
for aunts to chart courses through narrow straits
in sacred circles of wisdom.

It is better to sit slowly, with creaking bones,
to watch children play. To gather them around your feet,
and tell them harrowing tales of near-disaster,
how you thought you’d never get away,
how there was mercy,
how you might not be here today.

It is better for long, dirty toenails
to be clipped and cleaned as soon as you get home.
To sit on the front porch while shadows lengthen,
to let the soil return to the soil,
to give something else a chance to grow.

-C. G. Brown
25 November 2021

Voter Security or Suppression? A Closer Look at the New Laws in Georgia and Elsewhere

There is much consternation about the recent voter laws passed in Georgia and being evaluated in other states. Why are people so upset about a simple ID law? Doesn’t it make sense to verify that the person in the booth is authorized to cast the vote? And how is requiring identification racist?

In order to understand the discontent around voting laws, like many acts of policy or protest in America, the policy must be placed in the appropriate context. Before we get into that history, we must first define election fraud. The term as currently being discussed typically refers to people illegally voting multiple times or voting when they are ineligible, something we should more accurately refer to as “voter fraud”. This is contrasted with after-ballot tampering, miscounting, or tactics that prevent people from being able to vote in the first place, which is all conducted by agents of the state and reflected in most of our voting history in America. When we dispute the charges of election fraud currently being leveled by the Republicans who are pushing nationwide for stricter voting laws, we are specifically disputing the question of whether voters are acting illegally and not the states that count the votes. 

The story for Black voting in the United States starts at the end of the Civil War with the 14th and 15th Amendments. Having abolished slavery except for prisoners with the 13th, the United States Congress went on to ratify the 14th Amendment, which gave Black people citizenship, and the 15th Amendment, which made preventing voting based on race, color, or former slave status illegal. (It was still illegal for women to vote.) In the South, Black people made up nearly half the population in several states, and so a number of states sent Black legislators to the state houses and to DC.

In Georgia, 33 Black legislators were duly elected in 1868. They were subsequently expelled by white supremacists, with some of them being attacked or killed. The newly formed KKK backed the move with a terror campaign where a number of Black Georgians were killed. This subversion of the legal electoral process led to Georgia being kicked back out of the Union, and it was not readmitted for nearly two years. The Confederate remnant in the Democratic Party managed to re-secure control and engaged in an orchestrated terror campaign similar to what happened in other states in the South to eventually disenfranchise Black voters by the 1890s. The politically dominant Democratic Party even went so far as to have White-only primaries. 

Jim Crow kept most Black people out of the voting booth until the 1960s. Poll taxes were in place from 1877 to 1945. All-white primaries were banned in 1946. However, literacy tests and “tests of personal character” were also common, with the passing determined by the voting registrar in the county, nearly guaranteed to be white. Regardless of federal and state laws, local registrars did what they wished, and the state would generally look upon malfeasance with a wink and a nod. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was crafted to target the aggressive voter suppression in the Deep South and affected specific states, and finally allowed Black people to safely vote, at least in urban areas where terror or intimidation tactics could not be as easily applied. 

Thanks in part to the Voting Rights Act, the ideological home of Southern conservatism switched over the next 30 years from the Democratic to the Republican Party. In 2005, after Republicans took control of the legislature and the governor’s seat from Democrats, they passed a law reducing the number of valid forms of ID one could vote with and making provisions for no-excuse absentee ballots, with the knowledge that the absentee ballots would skew rural, white, and Republican. Democrats at the time made some of the same arguments Republicans are making now, indicating fear of fraud, though not alleging that fraud had occurred. Republicans continued to win statewide elections for the next 15 years, and there were no suggestions to change the law. While there did not appear to be malfeasance in the counting of the absentee ballots, catering to the demographic they hoped to obtain seemed to work. Along the way, Georgia also chose electronic systems that came under fire for glitches and possible tampering that favored Republicans.

Stacey Abrams, through her efforts with the organization she founded, the New Georgia Project, registered nearly a million voters over 6 years — 200,000 before the 2018 governor’s race, and 800,000 more after. Those voters were disproportionately historically disenfranchised and disengaged Black voters. Despite this, in 2018 she lost the governor’s race to Brian Kemp, who in his capacity as secretary of state presided over the election as well as being a candidate. The election itself was plagued by allegations of miscounts and problems with the equipment. In the end, the voter registration efforts paid off for Democrats as newly engaged voters who skewed Democrat voted in the election, giving Georgia 2 new senators and giving the Democratic presidential candidate the state’s electoral votes. 

In the wake of the closely contested 2020 election and runoffs, Republicans asserted foul play and again moved to change the laws. The same absentee ballots that were valid 15 years prior were now allegedly sources of substantial fraud. Despite lack of substantial proof, anecdotal allegations and unfounded claims won much of the day in the public discourse. A Republican-dominated state legislature adjusted the voting laws and made several changes. The most notable changes were:

-The state can now intervene and take over county election boards

-The secretary of state can no longer preside over the state electoral board, replaced instead with a person chosen by the legislature

These changes determine who gets to count votes in the large urban counties in Atlanta where there is a significant enough Black population to sway the statewide result. They also ensure that even if a secretary of state is elected from a different party than the legislature, they will not have sufficient influence to determine how the state sets election policies and rules within the laws drawn. A number of other provisions were put in place, including the infamous food and water provision, requiring copies of ID, and restricting absentee ballot drop-off to poll hours.

Restrictions like limiting drop-off to poll hours are intended to make it harder to vote. Georgia gained notoriety as well for uneven distribution of polling equipment, producing hours-long lines in many predominantly Black districts while other districts breezed voters through. The laws are specifically designed to create more hurdles to voting under the guise of solving a problem with voter fraud that has repeatedly been proven not to exist. (The Heritage Foundation alleges over 1300 instances of voter fraud but they appear to be looking at over 2 decades of data nationwide and do not seem to distinguish between malicious intent and people who made honest mistakes.) But why?

Just as the Voting Rights Act was able to target the South without saying “the South” by looking at the percentage of registered voters due to successful suppression during Jim Crow, these new measures are targeting Black voters without saying “Black voters”. There are a number of ways to validate that a person is authorized to cast a vote. We could make state IDs free, and in this digital age, even make them easy to get via manned mobile stations. We could allow voting on Sunday (the new Georgia law makes that optional for counties to disallow, targeting Black churches’ “Souls to the Polls” efforts). We could mandate that any county polling place with the equipment make complimentary photocopies of ID. None of that is being done. 

The economic damage of centuries of enslavement followed by nearly a century of racial terror and disenfranchisement means we see Black people disproportionately represented in jobs that make less money and have less flexibility. Our “essential workers” may not be able to get out of their jobs during election hours. Federal law mandates 2 hours of time off (not necessarily paid) to vote, but in an at will state where you can be fired for any non-protected reason, do you take the chance? Even if you get the time, if you are reliant on public transit, it may be too inconvenient to get to your polling place.

Yes, these hurdles are surmountable. Yes, a sufficiently motivated person can still vote in person, albeit with an hours-long wait time in some areas. However, we should ask ourselves why we are putting up hurdles in the first place if they have been proven to not protect us from anything. When we again lay the list of actions and expected outcomes against a nation that has a long history of racialized policy decisions, the results become problematic, and we’re faced with the choice to either mitigate the racialization or avoid it in the first place by choosing policies that are just and maximize access without compromising security.

Our nation deserves secure elections. And we deserve sufficient access to the tools required to secure them, and sufficient resources to run elections in such a way as to avoid hours-long waits to exercise the fundamental right of a democracy. 

——————————

Additional Reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_33

https://www.todayingeorgiahistory.org/content/poll-tax-abolished

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/gallery/2020/nov/01/georgia-voter-suppression-in-pictures

https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote/vote-suppression/myth-voter-fraud

https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud

Schedule Change

in the style of Dr. Seuss

We all remember Dr. Seuss,
as famous now as Mother Goose,
with rhyming stories full of facts
about the Grinch, Who, and Lorax.
The famous stripey-hatted Cat
And Sam I Am’s big breakfast spat.
Most of the books were full of rhymes.
A few had art from older times,
when we thought foolish things about
what humans are, inside and out.
We held them closely anyhow,
those books from then brought into now.

But Seuss himself was known to say,
“Those books weren’t written the right way.
I thought I’d have a bit of fun,
but realized I had hurt someone.”
So now dear Dr. Seuss is gone,
his children left to carry on.
Not a matter of compromise,
but them deciding what was wise.
To pull the books that did the harm,
and push the others’ special charm.
Private decisions shouldn’t irk,
we have to let them do their work.

No public bans would we abide,
but it’s their call. They did decide.

-C. G. Brown

An American Conversation on Guns and Violence

Ed. Note: All quotes are from actual shooter manifestos. I did not paraphrase or make up anything said by “Shooters”.

Republicans and Moderates: I don’t know what we’re going to do about these shootings. It’s a shame about these boys’ mental health.

Democrats: But you won’t pay for their health care and your Saint Reagan closed the mental hospitals and. . .

Moderates: *holds finger up* Ah-ah-ah. Remember we weren’t supposed to talk politics today. Too divisive. Both sides are to blame for where we are.

Shooters: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” (1)

Republicans and Moderates: I just feel sorry for these troubled, obviously mentally ill boys.

Shooters: “I am just a regular White man, from a regular family. Who decided to take a stand to ensure a future for my people.” (2)

Republicans: If we prayed more as a people, this wouldn’t happen.

Shooters: “There has been little done when it comes to defending the European race. As an individual I can only kill so many Jews. . . Although the Jew who is inspired by demons and Satan will attempt to corrupt your soul with the sin and perversion he spews – remember that you are secure in Christ.” (3)

Republicans: Well, I mean, the things he’s saying are clearly not right, but he is talking about Christ, so. Shame about that boy’s mental health.

Republicans & Moderates: But it’s not really about the guns when you think about it, is it? Why do they do this?

Shooters: “To create conflict between the two ideologies within the United States on the ownership of firearms in order to further the social, cultural, political and racial divide within the United states.This conflict over the 2nd amendment and the attempted removal of firearms rights will ultimately result in a civil war that will eventually balkanize the US along political, cultural and, most importantly, racial lines.” (2)

Republicans: There’s nothing to be done I suppose. Guns are essential to our life and identity, and besides, who will protect us from the government without our guns?

Democrats: But you ARE the government! All we’re saying is a little more gun con-

Moderates: Stop playing politics. Both sides are the government, and both sides are to blame for this.

Republicans: You’re being too fair, Moderates. The black identity extremists calling everyone racist, and these women who can’t take a compliment and turn everything into a MeToo lawsuit are the problem. We need to go back to a better time when people weren’t so politically correct. That’s what’s creating this climate of violence.

Shooters: “My orchestration of the Day of Retribution is my attempt to do everything, in my power, to destroy everything I cannot have. All of those beautiful girls I’ve desired so much in my life, but can never have because they despise and loathe me, I will destroy.” (4)

Moderates: I guess we’ll never really know. And I guess things won’t get better until we stop playing politics, stop talking about things that divide us, and move forward.

Republicans: Yes, we have to stop playing politics, give every real American a gun, and back the blue. God bless our troops, our police, and our guns. God bless the real America.

Democrats: *presses face into hands and weeps*

____________________________________

1 – El Paso shooter’s manifesto, 2019

2 – Christchurch shooter’s manifesto, 2019

3 – San Diego Synagogue shooter’s manifesto, 2019

4 – Isla Vista shooter’s manifesto (the “incel”), 2014

On Reconciling Christian Principles with Government Programs

President Trump recently proposed a budget which makes a number of cuts to discretionary spending across government agencies. Liberal-leaning folks are predictably up in arms. Conservatives range from mild concern to relief that Trump is finally realizing Grover Norquist’s dream of “reduc[ing] [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” People on the left are wagging their fingers about the hypocrisy of professed Christians being so concerned about performance of programs designed simply to feed the poor and hungry. Conservatives answer with their standard retort that being Christian doesn’t mean you advocate that the government do everything. To them, it’s the job of churches and private citizens to step in and take care of the poor and needy. Who’s right?

As usual, the answer requires a bit of nuanced thinking. Conservatives have a point about their Christian obligations not extending to an explicit call to fund government programs. Other than giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s, Jesus himself says little about how we respond to government authority, though he says a lot about how we should individually behave. Paul says more, generally telling us that we should generally abide by the government’s rules and authority, even if we are encouraged to live in a socially countercultural way and not allow human law to subvert God’s law. Generally, the commands on how to live and treat people speak to individuals, not governments. So it is technically fair to say that there’s no call in the Bible to engage in aid through taxation or government programs.

That said, it requires a narrow interpretation of the Bible to assume then that government programs that execute Jesus’s mandates are inherently bad, or even just inherently worse than a church or individual doing the same. While I cannot presume to know the mind of God, why would God not be pleased about a government that distributes some of the taxes it collects for programs to help the poor or needy? Corruption is certainly found in government, but what is forgotten by many who prefer limited government is that government is ultimately just comprised of people, just like any institution. Churches and individual hearts are no less susceptible. In fact, churches have to be on special guard because of their perceived proximity to God’s desire for humanity.

Another challenge with the standard conservative Christian position on the role of government is that churches have both an inward-facing and outward-facing obligation. The churches may have mission that they engage in locally or far away, but a primary objective is the cultivation of spiritual life and community among their attendees. While it would be better if people gave more in general so that church coffers were overflowing and churches were able to step into the breach for the needy across the nation, that’s simply not the case for most churches. The churches that do have lots of money often struggle with the challenges Jesus warned us that money brings.

Also, the outward-facing missional work of a Christian church is usually tied to evangelism, the spreading of the Gospel. Conservative Protestant denominations tend to interpret this fairly literally, with telling the message being as important or more important than showing and patiently modeling in one’s life. So, then, what if a person refuses the Gospel? What if they don’t wish to come because they know that that’s what will be served with their soup and bread, or with the clothes they are given? I’m not encouraging anyone to shut their mouth about the Gospel. I’m just asking if the church expects that it can be effective at meeting all types of needs.

On top of all this, the Christian church is no longer hegemonic in America. By this I mean that it’s not the default, dominant framing for most citizens. As church membership declines and more people turn away from faith as it’s historically been understood, the weight on the shoulders of each remaining member increases. It simply isn’t reasonable to assume that the church can serve the needs of everyone.

Even if other people start chipping in out of pocket, we’ve already seen what that looks like. Go to GoFundMe and see which medical requests get funded and which don’t. Popular, well-connected, attractive people get more money than the unpopular, the undesirable, the forgotten. We give to people we care about or think we care about, dropping $25 here, $100 there, while we leave the masses of the invisible at the margins and mercy of government programs that we want to cut so that “real charity” can begin. Why do we think a post-tax world would look any different than GoFundMe writ large, with individuals and small shelters and nonprofits spending more time putting on a good face for well-heeled donors than servicing the needy?

This is the part where some would point out that the liberals or non-religious people out there should put their money where their mouth is and give a lot more to charity. The response: they do give, in the form of taxes. The government is able to achieve some economies of scale with the support programs it funds. Taxes are also a great way to get everyone to participate in programs that improve the state of the society as a whole rather than relying on the goodness of individual hearts. The concern often raised following this assertion is that too much government money is going to the undeserving. I always find the notion of being deserving of grace to be a funny thing to be promulgated by people whose entire faith is predicated on receiving a gift that they did not deserve.

Moreover, when we unpack the notion of an unworthy recipient of government largesse, we often find ourselves envisioning someone very different than ourselves, someone with a different style of dress, different way of speaking, different way of acting, possibly different complexion. Our biases have a way of working themselves into our decisions about who should get what, whether it’s our tax dollars our just our attention.

I consider myself fairly generous, but I hold too tightly to my money, forgetting that I’m only a steward. I don’t manage as well as I should. Why would I assume my neighbors would on average fare any better? I’m always in favor of examining places where we can cut spending waste, where private organizations can serve people more efficiently than government organizations, or where government organizations can be restructured to be made more nimble. What I am not in favor of is the replacement of tax dollars that are helping millions with a reliance on the kindness of each of our individual hearts and our willingness to cheerfully give. I fear that switching to that model will find us coming up painfully short, with a net increase in suffering, all so that we can be satisfied that someone isn’t getting what they don’t deserve.

 

 

United Healthcare Pulls Out of Georgia – Thoughts on Health Care

United Healthcare is pulling out of the federal exchange in Georgia for 2017. You’ll see headlines about how this means Obamacare is on its last legs, or showing how overbearing progressive policies are bad for consumers. Healthinsurance.org has an article about the Georgia exchanges that has a bit more perspective. I would like to point out a few things about what this actually means in my opinion.

First, Georgia doesn’t have an exchange of its own. It opted to use the federal exchange provided for the states that refused to accept them. What’s more, Georgia actively created laws to prevent the creation of state-run marketplaces and make it harder for navigators to help people get coverage. In Georgia, a navigator must pass the same exam as insurance agents in order to be able to give advice to potential subscribers.

Second, according to this article, United Healthcare had less than 1K individual subscribers in Georgia, with most of their subscribers being in group plans. As such, it strikes me as disingenuous of United to paint their problem as being a gross profitability issue caused by ACA policy when in fact it probably was simply inconvenient for them to operate on such a small scale in the state. It is worth noting that their subsidiary Harken Health has signed up over 30,000 members in Atlanta and Chicago and will continue to remain on the exchanges. (Disclosure: I am subscribed to Harken and so far have been moderately satisfied with the insurance part and ecstatic about the primary and preventative care part).

Georgia has also opted out of Medicaid expansion, passing on billions in federal funding that would have created lucrative medical jobs and leaving nearly 300,000 Georgians earning too much to qualify for federal Medicaid, but too little to afford unsubsidized premiums. The principled stand is supposed to be that the program will ultimately cost Georgia too much money, but the data so far has not pointed to that. Instead, Georgia has opted to send federal tax dollars from their residents to provide health care to people in other states that did accept Medicaid expansion.

I find it interesting that the same politicians that favor deregulation and competition turn a blind eye to the mergers of the largest health care companies and pass red tape legislation to make it harder for an existing federal program to be successful. I have also not yet seen a credible alternative to ACA presented that would address the pre-ACA issues insurance companies had with refusing to pay for care and rapidly escalating premiums. What, then, is really motivating such staunch resistance to the simple question of how to get more people health insurance?

There’s an increasingly libertarian bent to arguments I hear from my conservative friends about the way things should be. The government is always bad at everything, and wants to take away your freedom at the point of a gun. Private companies have your best interests at heart because they’ll be motivated by a desire for profit and good reputation, and efficient markets will sweep away those that cannot provide the quality of service required for both. It is the responsibility of individuals to make optimal choices and protect themselves at all times, and the market can hold companies responsible for business done in bad faith.

This vision of how the world should work is attractive, especially if you believe that you are extraordinary. As much as I find libertarian ideals attractive, I find that when they hit the ground, there are some issues. Markets are great at what they do, but markets require open information. The American health care system is profoundly lacking in that, with dozens of prices for every item and procedure used, depending on who is ordering it and how it will be paid for. Try asking a provider how much anything costs. They couldn’t tell you if they wanted to, but most will answer, “I have no idea”.

Beyond the fact that the health care market is currently opaque, the myth of halcyon days of quality care before ACA took effect is false. Insurers were free to deny coverage to people due to diagnoses, culling the expensive cases and keeping the cheap ones, and there was no provider of last resort in most places. I was personally affected by this and had loved ones go without coverage for years until ACA took effect. I also paid for my own insurance out of pocket as an individual from 2003 to today, and I watched prices climb even faster than people complain about today. When the first ACA provisions took effect, my premium was cut by more than 50%.

At a deeper level, non-aggression and altruism are not natural human states, though it can be cultivated and encouraged in culture. I don’t think that removal of regulations automatically leads to Mad Max. However, given how companies try to take advantage of individuals as much as they can now even in the face of regulation and protection, I don’t see how removing regulations and protections would lead to less fraud. I also don’t believe that I’m so good at discernment and so popular or good at marketing that I could determine fraud, stop patronizing a business, and get enough others to do the same to shut a bad business down. Even if I dodge the bullet, someone else gets hit.

A more libertarian framework could work if people got serious about introducing competition enhancing measures along with the measures to unfetter corporations from regulations and limitations. We could use modern technology and new data aggregation and processing techniques to distribute more information in real time, keep everything visible and above board, keep private businesses a bit more honest. Frankly though, I’m busy enough trying to manage everything else in my life, and I don’t want to have to become an expert in health care administration and analysis just to go have my cough seen about.

Conservative politicians talk a libertarian game but are only interested in freeing corporations’ hands, assuming that in their benevolent interest in profit, they’ll do what’s best for consumers, and let the benefits trickle or rain down from the top. Until we can couple that with digestible, accessible information, and a media more interested in corruption than sensation, the net effect of deregulation will be continued massive profits for an oligopoly of companies and worse outcomes for consumers.

Injustice for All?

The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “Save us!”… and I’ll whisper “no.”

-Rorschach, “Watchmen”

One of the most insidious legacies of racism in our country is unequally applied justice. Poor black and Latino neighborhoods are overpoliced. “Respectable” black people with no criminal record have a fear of police, and most have stories about themselves or a friend getting unduly pulled over and/or poorly treated, or worse. Many white people find these stories hard to believe because they are so out of line with their own experience. In the places they’ve been, police have often been helpful protectors, occasionally even looking the other way for minor infractions.

I have lately been watching the reaction to Otto Warmbier‘s case. As a tourist in North Korea (pause to let that sink in), he attempted to steal a banner to bring home as a souvenir for which he would be rewarded. The North Korean government caught him, arrested him, and sentenced him to 15 years in their prisons. There is now an outcry to seek clemency and bring him home.

I have also seen the coverage of a recently discovered heroin epidemic here in Atlanta. The episodes of reporting are given sympathetic titles like “We All Make Mistakes” and “Please Understand”. (Seriously, go look. I’m not making this up.) The photos of victims of the epidemic are shown to humanize them, show what good kids they were before something unknown drove them into the path of addiction.

Many of my black friends have greeted these stories with snorts of derision. As black Americans, we know all too well what a mandatory minimum sentence can do, turning a youthful error into a lifetime’s failure. We have seen drugs destroy our communities in the 70s and 80s while the rest of America looks on and wags their finger, whispering under their breath, “I knew it.” or “Just say no. How hard is that?” Even now, as traffic stops turn into homicides, we see characters defamed and radicalized. Where were the cries for mercy then? Where was the humanization? Can you even imagine West Baltimore, Chicago, or South Central Los Angeles getting that kind of careful, loving analysis?

I have no objection to telling the truth. Whether Warmbier’s case warrants mercy is irrelevant to the point that he took the world to be his playground and thought that the privileges he enjoys in this country were transferrable to what is possibly the most dangerous country for Americans in the entire world. The circumstances that led the kids in affluent suburbs to use heroin neither fall neatly in the bucket of personal responsibility nor in that of externalities. That said, I grow concerned on two fronts.

I don’t want my heart to grow hard. If a white person, or any other human, is hard done by by the police, or has a hard experience that tears them apart, I want to feel compassion for them where they are. I see case after case of black injustice though, and I find the same thoughts entering my mind as those I see from my peers. “Well, I guess they’ll see now.” “Welcome to reality.”

At a more philosophical level, I am concerned that our desire to see the shoe on the other foot will lead to a tolerance for injustice. As we fight for people we know and love personally, who look like us and face the same struggles, we must never forget that our goal is to intersectionally end injustice wherever it lives. I shouldn’t want for them what I know people that look like me get. We shouldn’t want that for anyone.

I won’t deny, there is a grim satisfaction to see someone find out a truth the hard way when you know they wouldn’t believe you if you told them in advance. However, those of us who are coming from any non-dominant axes of privilege have to find an extra measure of grace to see us through, and to always see what the privileged and comfortable let themselves be blinded to. What’s worse for us, we have to see it and dispense said grace to everyone.

This is an area where I find Christian theology, properly applied, very helpful. The notion of the Imago Dei, that each human being is an image bearer of God, helps us apply this lens of grace to everyone, even those who by their actions or by our judgment may seem to be the least deserving. This is a bewildering concept to those who do not believe; how could [insert evil person from history here] be an image bearer of God? One answer: the same way a dirty and cracked mirror is still a mirror.

I also find the teachings of Jesus to be useful to help remind me. Jesus was clear about overturning systems of injustice or rules that sought to preserve comfort and ease of a few at the expense of many. Jesus went to those who, by conventional wisdom, were the least deserving, and pulled them closest to him. Then he called us to do the same.

I don’t want to take Rorschach’s stance. More accurately, I don’t want to want it. I see the wave of detritus frothing like a disaster movie, the unclean and unclaimed legacy of discriminations and denials. I see it in this election cycle threatening to choke us, set us back decades. As the authoritarian cavalcade reaches into the lives of those it was designed to protect, I want to reply to their “Save us!” with an icy “No.” But as a person who believes what Jesus said, I’m called to try to find the balance between calling out the unevenly applied care and caring for the wronged, even when they might have wronged me given the chance.

I am still figuring that one out.

Awakening to Gender Privilege

A few things have been happening lately, from Hillary being called out for her shouting while Bernie screams continuously, to people scheduling a multi-city rape advocacy parade in freaking 2016, to an ongoing cavalcade of foolishness regarding women and every damn thing that they do. I watch all this go on, and I just start to feel like:
8tllwmw
Race has been an issue for about 400-500 years. Gender has been an issue for at least a few thousand in most parts of the world. It’s so much more deeply rooted that it feels natural in a way race never quite does. To be honest, there is a biological component. Men and women are built differently, and process the world differently. Men and women also need each other in a way that two random people from different parts of the Earth don’t. I’m not an advocate for an equality that doesn’t recognize our differences, any more than I am an advocate for a racial equality that doesn’t recognize and allow for cultural diversity. But I am not an advocate for a system that has women as lesser either, or doesn’t allow for individual women to break a pattern that doesn’t make sense for them.
Historically, I would have described myself as pro-women, and that was mostly true. I didn’t believe in restricting women’s freedoms. I thought their underrepresentation in positions of power was wrong. I also would say I was aware that being a male conferred me certain advantages in our society. I wasn’t blind to the notion of privilege; on the contrary, I used it to better help me understand what it might be like to be on the upside of racial privilege.
But was I anti-sexism? When I saw weirdly sexy ads for hamburgers, did I roll my eyes or give a Beavis and Butthead chuckle? When an attractive woman walked by at work, did I remind myself that she was a colleague, client, or hell, supervisor, or did I just check her out? And in the latter case, how did that affect how I dealt with her in business?
I think about this more now that I’m older and differentially wiser. If I’m mentoring or leading a woman that I’m attracted to, even though I’m happily married and have no intentions of making anything of it, how can I do my job effectively? I have to take extra precautions to ensure fairness. I have to watch my mouth around my peers, and call my peers out in a way that feels unnatural and weak. And how far do I have to go, exactly, to ensure I’m creating a climate that neither feeds nor tolerates sexist behavior? The end result can be a kind of secular asceticism which is both frustrating and difficult to maintain.
It’s not about my desires and challenges, ultimately. As a man, the entire framework is built to accommodate my desires. Nothing is more difficult than speaking truth to power and demanding fair treatment with no protection from those same systems of power. That said, it’s time for me to engage in the second most difficult kind of work: dismantling the platform of advantage I am standing on.

My Social Media Filter Guidelines

I spend far too much time on Facebook, like at least 100 million other people I don’t know. Processing that much information is a challenge. Fortunately, Facebook puts the site name in all caps in gray below any post. I’d like to share some of the techniques I use to determine what is newsworthy:

economist.com, nytimes.com – Unbiased or biases will be obvious. Read it.

theguardian.com – This is really important and will never, ever be reported in the US. Read it.

cracked.com – It will be funny and ridiculously stated but true. Read it.

foxnews.com – It’s Obama’s fault. Skip it.

tiny.iavian.net, theblaze.net – It’s liberals’ fault. Skip it. (I guess you could skim The Blaze if you’re conservative or want some balance)

breitbart.net – Obama is the Manchurian Candidate. He’ll invite Yemeni religious zealots in to impose Sharia and steal your daughters. Skip it.

salon.com – It’s the conservatives’ fault. Skip it unless you are a liberal that is feeling super partisan and want to co-sign that day.

thinkprogress.org, dailykos.com – It’s the conservatives’ fault, but here’s why. . . Skim it.

forbes.com – Rich liberals argue with rich conservatives. Read it to see how rich people think.

mostlocalorregionalpapers.com – If you live there or the event you’re reading about happened there, read it. Otherwise, it’s probably a bad opinion piece. Skip it.

theonion.com – It’ll be funny, but the headline is usually the joke. Read the headline, read the article if you’re trying to burn some time.

openyourmind.net, countercurrentnews.com, anythingthatsoundslikethat.com – It sounds awesome, but there’s absolutely no science behind it. Skip it, or at least check Snopes.

huffingtonpost.com – Could be celebrity dish, could be politics, could be defining issues of our time. Who knows? Probably skip it.

I hope this helps!