Incarnation Pianity

This is an editorial piece written for our local paper in Murray, KY.

Well, here we go again!

Republicans are currently creating great fear by hysterically attacking “critical race theory” (CRT). This term is an academic way of saying that racial discrimination has been around for centuries in the United States and has become embedded our social and political institutions and policies.

However, many Republicans and rightists want you to believe that the notion of racial inequality and systemic discrimination by whites against blacks and other people of color, is really not much of a problem, but a Marxist inspired plot to turn whites against blacks and create turmoil.

We all really get along pretty well with each other, these critics of CRT say, despite a few unwarranted killings and traffic stops by a few “bad cops” here and there.  We have laws on the books against discrimination in banking, housing, education, and other areas of public life. There really isn’t any bias built into our social, political, or financial structures, they say, and all this talk about “systemic racism” just divides us.

As evidence that I am not being too sarcastic, I present as evidence of this new right-wing fear-spreading tactic a proposal by three Kentucky legislators to “ban teaching critical race theory in Kentucky,” according to a headline on the front page of the June 8 edition of the Ledger & Times.

Representative Joe Fischer (R-Fort Thomas), and fellow Republican Representatives Matt Lockett of Nicholasville, and Jennifer Decker of Waddy will introduce legislation in the 2022 General Assembly of Kentucky to prevent the teaching of critical race theory (by which they mean the history of racism) in all public schools and universities.

Lockett’s comment was intriguing: “Those who subscribe to critical race theory are more interested in labeling people, dividing them into categories, and pitting them against each other than they are [in] actually addressing important issues like racism.” 

He then adds that he wants to ban teaching that: “one race, sex, or religion is inherently superior to another race, sex or religion” and that “an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race, sex, or religion.”

These statements are irony, defined by my dictionary as “a state of affairs [or words, in this case] that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is [thus] often amusing as a result.”

Lockett also is engaging in what I have heard psychologists call “projection”—accusing others of what you yourself believe or do.  Haven’t many white Americans for centuries regarded black Americans as “inherently inferior”?  Wasn’t this one of the justifications of slavery?  Even after slavery officially ended, didn’t white leaders, especially in the American south, pit poor whites against blacks in order to prevent any collaboration between the two groups during the Progressive Movement of the late 19^th and early 20^thcenturies?

Lockett and his colleagues should choke on their words as they claim that people who support teaching about racism believe that “an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race, sex, or religion.”  Discrimination by whites against blacks has been blatant throughout American history, both before and after slavery.  Lockett’s colleague Decker’s comment is even more unbelievable: “Frankly, teaching that one race or sex is superior to another is insulting and dangerous.”   

It certainly is! But to have the effrontery to try to shift your behavior and beliefs onto your political enemies is even more “insulting and dangerous.”

During the Obama administration, right-wing leaders worked insistently to convince us that Obama was really a Muslim born in another country; later Donald Trump worked hard to convince his followers that the 2020 election was stolen.

Many Democrats were initially bemused by these tactics, certain that sensible, thinking voters would see though such outrageous statements.

They were wrong. These statements were not silly distractions. These lies convinced millions.

And Democrats will be wrong again if they do not strongly and repeatedly condemn these lies about racism in America. 

These tactics by the Republican right-wing are distortions of both history and the truth; they could pave the way for authoritarian rule—beware!

            Spending the final years of my education during the Vietnam War, I recall many references to “the light at the end of the tunnel” that promised a successful conclusion (for us anyway) to that war.  

            We tried to find hope in that phrase, but it was difficult. The war was finally concluded  with serious human cost to all participants, in 1975.

            Now we face another crisis in our history. The new tunnel we are trying to exit is “the climate crisis.” 

This tunnel results from natural processes and human excesses; among the latter is the population explosion of the twentieth-century sending global population from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in the year 2000.  Animal, vegetable, and human life cannot continue as we know it with this unsustainable human growth rate, as I suggested in my recent column on our interest in Mars.

However, we now see light at the end of this particular tunnel, found in a piece from the New York Times weekend edition of May 22-24, entitled Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications.

The authors got my attention with this statement: “Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy, Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can’t find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties [330,000 housing units since 2002] have been razed, the land turned into parks.”

This dramatic and rapid decline in population will reduce pressure on natural resources.  China, these authors tell us, could shrink from its current 1.41 billion to a mere 730 million by 2100. Decline, like growth “spirals exponentially” as fewer people have fewer children, causing a drop that “starts to look like a rock thrown off a cliff.”

This suggests that the “light” of a reduced planetary population that could allow us to better adapt to a warming global climate might only come at the end of a tunnel of massive social, political, and economic unrest.  We cannot welcome the coming light without being clear about what we must endure to enjoy the light at the end.

 Our economies, especially in capitalist industrialized countries, are predicated on growth—in products, purchases, and people. Fewer people mean fewer jobs, smaller markets, diminished revenue for governments at all levels. One town in southern Italy, Times authors report, closed its maternity ward, built to accommodate 500 births annually, a decade ago because “this year, six babies were born.”

When schools, factories, businesses and hospitals close (with nursing homes the last to go), society as we know it will face those “sweeping ramifications”—a polite term for collapse—promised in this article’s headline.

There are ways, however, of dealing with our need for the “light” of a reduced population to help restore our planet to sustainability without suffering the full “tunnel” of a turmoil caused by a too rapid population drop.

The authors of the “Long Slide” article explain that people still want to have children but often “face too many obstacles.”   They cite the story of Anna Parolini, who left her small town in Northern Italy to find a better job in Milan. Her salary of under 2,000 euros a month is not enough to raise a child without parents nearby. She is 37, and says that “thinking of having a child now would make me gasp.”

            Anna, and many like her in other “advanced” countries like the USA, could benefit from free day care (or a higher salary) which would allow her to have children and more security and hope, perhaps even a better job. Then she might be able to pay taxes, some of which could help us better adapt within our current tunnel of climate change.

            Some of my Republican friends call such a “gift” socialism. So far employers in places like the United States, Australia, and Canada have been able to make up for the population decline (especially among white people) with immigrant labor from other countries.

            Yet those who confuse socialism with democratic social welfare programs that promote a stronger, healthier country economy are also the ones who want to reduce immigration. Go figure?

            We can address climate change by promoting equity and hopefulness among citizens that might slow the inevitable population drop just enough to allow our economy and society to adjust as we move through our tunnel?  

            Maybe that is what President Joe Biden has in mind.

Since we have now passed the one-year anniversary of our encounter with COVID-19, this might be a good time to review what we have learned.

            Following the Old Testament example, I have come up with a list of ten things I have noticed.  Some are based upon my own experience, and others are observations based on watching too much television while living in Coronaville with my wife and a series of rescue dogs.

• Working from home digitally reduced both traffic congestion and carbon pollution;

• We are now all aware (as some of us teachers were twenty years ago) that on-line education has a long way to go before it can result in effective learning;

• We all have a renewed appreciation of family and friends—most of the time;

• We now know that even a serious pandemic threat to humanity will not significantly reduce our distrust of people who think, look, or act differently than we do;

• Whether we are alone or crowded together with others, we need pets with us when we are quarantined;

• We have learned that we can be kind and compassionate to each other for a short period (March to May, 2020) but do not have the patience to do so for the long term (June,2020 to May, 2021);

• We have learned that going out to lunch or dinner really is a big deal, not “small potatoes”;

• We really do have time to hone a hobby, rediscover reading, or finally learn to cook;

• We have learned that it can be fun drinking beer in someone’s back yard, socially-distanced, with a mask, weather permitting;

• We have learned, to our credit, that even a pandemic of unusual size cannot keep us from voting or going to the streets to seek justice and “redress of grievances.”

Yes, we have learned many things about ourselves, some that are encouraging 

and others discouraging.  As Pogo said in the old cartoon: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” 

            But we have also seen light at the end of the spiked Covid tunnel. Things we have lived through, among them the stresses induced by living in Coronaville, the death of George Floyd and its aftermath, and the alarmist TV news programs, have made us more aware of systemic racism in our country’s culture and institutions. 

            We are also more alert than ever before to the possibility of drastic, rapid changes in our earth’s climate that could destroy both our civilization as well as many living species (even us) on this planet.

            It is hard for some of us to sort out what we have learned, as is evident by the mixed nature of my “Ten Learnings.”  In 1849 the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote “the more things change, the more they remain the same.”

            This might be a useful truth to remember while we listen to all the hype about how COVID will change things. Americans are born with a pretty strong “change gene.”  We are taught to expect change, which we sometimes confuse with improvement. We naively expect the future to automatically be better than the past: we are Americans, after all, and favored by God and History.

            Sarcasm aside, what COVID-19 should have taught us is that we can change things—for better or worse—depending upon our intentions and actions. Our experience with COVID can result in a better world for all of us, but not if we just want to return to “old normal” as quickly as possible.  

            To really learn from this experience we need to do more than just get vaccinated and listen to science more carefully than in the past.  We also need to end our national love affair with greed and selfishness, stop worshiping our unhealthy version of unrestrained capitalism, one that values money and power more than human lives.

Beyond that isn’t it is actually time to begin treating others as we would like to be treated, whatever their color, religion, sexual orientation, or where they were born?  That may be what COVID was trying to tell us.

            It also might not hurt to take a hard look at that original list of ten dos and don’ts that Moses brought down the mountain some time ago.

[I present here a thoughtful essay by my long time friend and fellow liberal. It makes some thoughtful distinctions between the individual and the community based in part on what we both learned in Catholic schools in Iowa 1957-1965]

Greg Cusack                                   March 27, 2021

            Many years ago now, when mostly conservative religious voices began calling for the need for us to return to values, I actually resonated with that call, even though I recognized that the values they were calling for were primarily those that applied to personal behavior, sexuality issues specifically.  If I recall correctly, this was during the 1970s when the US was reeling from the aftermath of the divisive Vietnam war and wrestling with many of the cultural issues raised during the 1960s.

            I thought that their observation that the United States had become an overwhelmingly secular society that needed to rethink its direction was right on.

            I promise that I am not going to be writing a moralistic lecture.  Rather, I want to focus on what I believe has been lost in our conversations for some time – the revitalization of communitarian ethics.  And, no, these are not the same thing as socialist rhetoric under a disguise!

            Rather, a communitarian understanding stands in sharp contrast to an individualistic one, and it is this latter that pretty much represents our country’s mindset these days, as it has for some time.

During the first wave of our COVID-19 “shutdown” last year, talking heads on TV spoke with excitement about the “new normal” that would follow our conquest of the new virus. Things would be different, they predicted.  We would take less for granted, appreciate each other more, become more environmentally conscious as we drove less, worked from home, enjoyed our families and lived at a more relaxed pace.

Now that the light at the end of the tunnel of conquest seems to be moving further and further into the future, I am beginning to hear less talk of the “new normal.” 

It is as if the dream of living in a new, healthier way post-COVID-19 has worn off.  Are we just tired of being trapped inside our home, wearing uncomfortable masks when going out, and not being able to see our parents, children, or friends “until we are vaccinated?”

And who know when that will happen?  And then there are those “variants” of the virus that will continue to spread, especially among the “anti-vaxxers”?

 It seems we may have become like the two characters in Samuel Beckett’s famous play “Waiting for Godot” first performed in 1953.  Two men meet under a tree and discover that they are both there to meet a man named Godot.  They wait hours, and even come back the next day, but Godot never appears.

“Waiting for Godot” has become a way of saying that we are waiting for something that  never happens.  Is our “new normal” coming or are we waiting for Godot?

Many of us have heard the phrase “the only constant is change.”  As a historian, I can vouch for its truth, despite the widespread misconception that “History repeats itself.”  Although the History Channel and human nature do repeat, human history does not! It only often appears that way.

Of course, we do truly crave predictability.  We want a world where not everything is “unprecedented,” as we hear so often on the news. We just want it all to stop—and go back to normal, the way things were—or do we, really?

Here are some of the things that were normal before we entered Coronaville: 

1. a vast economic and cultural gap in America between the very rich whose power seemed endless and the very large number of poor who couldn’t make ends meet;
2. two major political parties, both of which often put greed for money and power ahead of governance, and division into hostile camps ahead of “democracy for the people”;
3. many people in positions of power at all levels who thought that “the greatest good for the greatest number,” the “common good,” referred to Socialism—even though three states in the USA, including Kentucky, are titled “Commonwealths;”
4. millions of stressed-out people educated and uneducated, who felt so ignored by their leaders, so eager for change, and so tired of watching ‘rich people TV commercials’ for things they couldn’t afford that they turned to conspiracy theories to explain their plight;
5. a planet experiencing intense rains, huge fires, more violent hurricanes,, warming and rising oceans—all due to  climate changes not taken seriously by many of us;
6. and of course, a systematic racism or sense of white privilege built into our institutions and our subconscious minds, despite our easy talk about the importance of racial justice;

These are some of the reasons we might not want to return to being normal—new or old.

            It is time for some serious rethinking of what we really value It is time to be “abnormally” attentive to each other needs and to those of our planet?  Are we really happy with the kind of capitalism and rampant individualism that allows, even encourages, the rich to get richer and the poor poorer? Is money the measure of our worth?

            Finally, are we still content to blame “the other guy” (or other political party) for all our problems instead of thinking about and demanding change?  We may have taken a small step forward by our votes in the 2020 election?

            We can we change our fate or we can just continue waiting for Godot?