What this country needs

What this country needs are more radical moderates. Alt-independents. Conservative liberals. Liberal conservatives. People who think with their whole brains, and love with their whole hearts.

And you can quote me on that.

You may not want to hear this, but it's your fault

This weekend was not a happy weekend for the Zymog. Two of my close friends, and a friend of a third close friend, suffered what can only be called racial harassment. The nature of the harassment, and the things that were said to them, make it clear that this only happened because of Donald Trump being elected.

I got a lot of my friends mad at me when I reposted on Facebook a blog article that says, more or less, "if you voted for Donald Trump, then it's partly your fault, and you need to fix it."

A lot of people don't want to hear that. Bear with me here, okay? Don't close your mind and get all upset yet.

Let's start with a scene from Disney's Aladdin: 

Jafar used his third wish from the lamp: "I wish to be an ALL-POWERFUL GENIE!"

So the genie said, "Way to go, Al" and granted Jafar's wish. Jafar became this huge, red genie. 

"Yessss. YESSSSSSS! The power! THE ABSOLUTE POWER! The universe is mine, to command, to control!" 

He was reveling in his power, when suddenly Aladdin said, "Not so fast, Jafar! You wanted to be a genie? Well, you got it. AND EVERYTHING THAT GOES WITH IT. Phenomenal cosmic power —"

Suddenly two two bracelets of slavery were clamped onto his wrists, and against his cries of "No! NOOOOOO!" he got sucked into his own tiny lamp.

"— itty bitty living space!"

Hang onto that story. It will become immediately relevant. (You gotta admit, I did a pretty good job reciting the scene from memory, didn't I? I'm sure that my grandchildren can do better than I did.)

Now, follow this logic:

Many voters in this country fell for the Supreme Court scam: they voted for Trump or for Clinton because they wanted to preserve the conservative or liberal majority, respectively, on the Supreme Court. I have heard from a lot of people who voted for both candidates, who told me that that was the only reason they voted for them. Well, that and all the other stuff they didn't like about the other candidate. They were both awful.

But, the Trump supporters told me, they didn't like Donald Trump because of his racist, misogynist, reactionary, petulant, et cetera, ways. They ignored, or pretended that they didn't see, all of the radical right-wingers who were chanting at Trump's rallies and posting hateful garbage on the Internet. Or they hoped it would all go away after he got elected.

(If, at this time, you want to tell me "Yeah, but Clinton supporters were the ones who actually committed violent acts at the rallies," I'm going to ask you to stay with me here. Don't distract yourself. I'm not talking about Clinton.)

Way back in June 2016, Mitt Romney warned that Donald Trump's hateful rhetoric, if he were to win the election, would change the face of America. He warned that the extreme racists would consider themselves legitimized by Trump's victory, and somehow authorized to practice their nasty racism. "Emboldened" is the current term for it. (See this CNN article, entitled "Mitt Romney says Trump will change America with 'trickle-down racism'.") 

So Donald Trump got elected. (And the extreme liberals - I mean progressives - Clinton supporters, anyway - rioted. That's also a post for another time. I don't want to dwell on it here. It's a distraction. Let's keep focused on Trump and his supporters, okay?)

In the three days following his election, these three things happened to friends of mine. This isn't something I'm reposting from a remote newspaper or blog, okay? Two of these are first-hand, and the third one is second-hand, but it still counts because I know these people and I know when it happened to them.

These things really happened.

1. This first one is from one of my former math students. Her parents immigrated to the U.S. legally, before she was born. She and her two sisters graduated from college. This woman is working as a teacher in a downtown Denver elementary school (which Donald Trump disparagingly referred to as "inner city," because he didn't want to say "black" or "Hispanic" or "low-income" or "crime-ridden") while she is pursuing a graduate degree. Someone left this comment on her FB page, the day after the election: 

Try to convince me that this was not a direct result of Trump being elected. Go ahead. I'll be glad to call you an ostrich.

2. This second one is from one of my parishioners. This woman is from Saipan, an island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. Saipan, and the other islands in the CNMI, have been part of the United States since 1944, and its inhabitants are natural-born U.S. Citizens. Got that? Not immigrants. Citizens, just as much as native Hawaiians and Alaskans are citizens.

She works at a large nationwide retail store here in Colorado, whose owners were yuge donors to the Trump campaign. This happened to her on Friday, three days after the election:

Again, try to tell me that this wasn't a direct result of Trump getting elected. Try to tell me (or her) that it would have happened if Clinton had been elected instead - or that it would have happened if this weren't an election year.

3. This third one is a friend-of-a-friend. One of my friends works with a Muslim man, whose brother lives and works in Seattle. This extended Muslim family immigrated legally to the United States years ago, fleeing an oppressive regime in the Middle East, and looking for freedom. They bought into all the ideals which constitute the American Dream, and have been working hard at becoming Americans. On Wednesday morning, the guy in Seattle found this piece of paper under his windshield:

I'm sure you will agree with me that this is despicable. You will even tell me that you would never do this yourself, or condone anyone else doing it. You might even point out the cowardice of the perpetrator, since he didn't leave his name or contact information on the paper.

But you cannot convince me that this is not a direct result of Trump being elected. When the message starts with "We won! Now ...", it's pretty clear and undeniable.

Now, here's the part that you don't want to hear. And you may get offended by this. If you voted for Trump, and if Trump won your state, then these racist incidents are partly your fault.

Follow my logic here. And remember that scene from Aladdin.

1. If you voted for Donald Trump, and so did a majority of voters in your state, then you were part of that majority. That's an important distinction.

2. If the majority of voters in your state voted for Trump, then all of the electoral votes in your state went for Trump.

3. Donald Trump won in 31 states, giving him over 300 electoral votes and winning him the election.

Okay so far? You can take part of the credit for electing Donald Trump. You can loudly proclaim, "My candidate won!"

4. As a result of Donald Trump's election victory, many racists and extremists, lowlifes who had been hiding in the shadows for years, muttering to themselves on their racist blogs, suddenly felt empowered. They moved out into the light and began openly harassing and threatening minorities and immigrants. 

I have given you three examples in support of this fact. Do you want more? Are three witnesses not enough for you?

Now, I know you weren't voting to embolden the low-level racists and hatemongers. You were voting to preserve the Supreme Court majority, or to keep the Clintons from looting the White House for a second time. You had no intention, with your vote, of causing pain to my former student, my Saipan friend, or that Muslim immigrant in Seattle.

And yet, just like Jafar, you got Donald Trump - and everything that goes with him. You don't get to pick and choose which consequences of Trump's ascension you voted for. You voted for all of it.

You can't say "I just wanted the Supremes, not all the rest of it." You knew, going in, that you were going to get all of it. But you squeezed your eyes shut, held your nose, and voted for him anyway.

And, just like Romney said it would, the "trickle-down racism" happened. And, whether you want to admit it or not, even if it wasn't your intention, it's partly your fault.

On Sunday, November 13, five days after the election, Donald Trump was interviewed on 60 Minutes.  Leslie Stahl asked him about the harassment that had been taking place, and in typical Trumpian reality-distortion mode, he said:

Donald Trump: I don’t hear it—I saw, I saw one or two instances…
Lesley Stahl: On social media?
Donald Trump: But I think it’s a very small amount. Again, I think it’s--

One or two instances? I have told you of three real instances, and I'm just one person - a white male person, no less.

So then, to his credit, Trump said:

Lesley Stahl: Do you want to say anything to those people?
Donald Trump: I would say don’t do it, that’s terrible, ‘cause I’m gonna bring this country together.
 Lesley Stahl: They’re harassing Latinos, Muslims--
Donald Trump: I am so saddened to hear that. And I say, “Stop it.” If it-- if it helps. I will say this, and I will say right to the cameras: Stop it.

So Donald Trump told everyone to knock it off with the racist stuff that's been going on. Do you think it will work? The horses have left the barn, Mr. Trump. There's no use locking the door now.

Now, if you are a white person who voted for Donald Trump, what are you going to do about it? You voted for him, what are you going to to do fix it?

John Pavolovitz, a white Christian blogger, pointed the finger at all of the white Christians who voted for Trump, and told them what they need to do to fix the situation. Basically, he told them that this mess was their fault. He gave them two tasks:
1. Reach out to the victimized minorities, tell them you're sorry, and try to make amends.
2. Stand up to the perpetrators. Protect the victims. Do your part to bring an end to the harassment.
And he suggested that this should be done, live and in person, person to person.

For some reason, a lot of white Christian voters reacted poorly to his article. He was very blunt, he did point the finger of blame, and it made a lot of people uncomfortable. In reaction, there was a lot of "It's not my fault" and "I don't have to fix anything." (Remember Jafar.) And, even in the face of what he said in his blog, many people insisted that it was up to the victims to reach out, to establish a dialogue, and to be forgiving.

The Latinos and the Muslims aren't the ones who need to have a change of heart. And it's time that everyone who helped to put Donald Trump in the White House take their share of the blame and do their part to make amends.

Some of the white Christians didn't take kindly to be singled out. They say that's not fair. Some of them, not really understanding what "racist" means, have told me that it's "racist" to single them out like that. Then I challenge them to explain away this article from Religion News Service, entitled "White evangelicals, Catholics and Mormons carried Trump", or this one from World Religion News, entitled "Why the majority of Christians voted for Donald Trump".

This is where I'm supposed to put down two or three pithy statements and a final zinger, to make a powerful concluding paragraph. I don't have any. I'm too tired.

Manufacturing Outrage

Someone on Facebook pointed me to a political blog called IVN, written by a published author and retired professor named Michael Austin. His blog entries are balanced and well-written. If you perceive a bias in any of his articles, bear in mind that it's an opinion, and a logical and well-supported one at that. You may or may not agree with his opinion, but that is precisely why you need to read this article.

The July 11 article, "Manufacturing Outrage," points out how the continuum between agreement and disagreement no longer exists. If you don't like someone's viewpoint or behavior, you slip past all the socially-accepted degrees of disagreement and go straight to outrage. This causes serious problems, as he explains.

I wish everyone who goes into spasms of outrage at the slightest provocation would read this article. Because blogs occasionally disappear or become unavailable, I am reposting it here in its entirety, with Mr. Austin's permission.

Manufacturing Outrage

Here’s an interesting little fact: to the best of my ability to recall, I have never seen one of my conservative friends post anything on their Facebook feed by Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or Pat Robertson.

But my liberal friends post something outrageous by one of these commentators every day. When Ann Coulter wrote a column denouncing soccer as a symbol of America’s moral decline, I probably saw a hundred links to it. I forwarded it on myself.

But every single person who forwarded it did so with the intention of mocking it. A million people probably read Ann Coulter’s column that day just so they could laugh at what a Neanderthal she was. To my knowledge, nobody read it and agreed with her.

So Ann Coulter gets a million readers and makes a big pile of money so that liberals can smile smugly at their superiority, even as they drive another million readers to her site by forwarding her posts. Outrage, as it turns out, is kind of fun.

It’s fun for everyone, liberal and conservative alike. Though none of my conservative friends forward things by Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, quite a few of them forward nearly everything that President Obama says or does or is rumored to have done—normally with a statement like “there he goes again.”

I read, dozens of times a day, descriptions of Obama as a “tyrant,” a “dictator,” a “communist,” a “traitor,” and, of course, “the worst president we have ever had.” I don’t think I have ever heard anyone say that he is merely a bad president, or even one in the bottom quartile. Come to think of it, I have never even heard him described as the “second worst president we have ever had.” Millard Fillmore and James Buchannan get a pass—outrage only works with superlatives.

And this pretty much sums up our political environment today: we are outraged. Everything is outrageous. Obama is outrageous. Benghazi is outrageous. The Tea Party is outrageous. Ann Coulter is outrageous. Immigration, health care, contraception, the Supreme Court, Russia, Israel, Egypt, and the World Cup—it’s all outrageous, and it all proves that things are worse than they have ever been.

I suspect that this narrative prevails on both sides of the aisle because we really do enjoy being outraged. It makes us feel smart and special, like we are actually doing something noble by reducing everything to the most vile proposition we can imagine and then getting outraged about it. If we feel especially noble, we will go out on the internet and call people stupid. That’ll show ‘em.

And, at the same time, the political parties know that outrage works. It gets people to the polls, and, more importantly, it convinces them to donate to politicians and their causes. Not many people will donate to defeat a “mediocre manager with left of center positions.” But make them believe that they are donating to defeat “the most liberal, tyrannical dictator in our nation’s history,” and they will take out a second mortgage to support you.

Actual political argument is hard, while recreational outrage is easy. As long as we can fool ourselves into thinking that we are participating meaningfully in the political process–when all we are really doing is stoking our own outrage and that of people who think exactly like we do–then we will be at the mercy of people who know how to use our outrage to their advantage and our intellectual sloth as a way to make sure that nothing significant ever changes.

Why are college kids so intolerant? Part Two

I have noticed that stuff on the Internet doesn't really last forever. It lasts until the publisher, copyright holder, or server administrator decides it's time to get rid of it. The Wayback Machine helps, but I doubt it can capture everything. Therefore, I decided to copy Matt Bai's excellent column and paste it right here.

I don't know if I can claim "fair use" for such a blatant copy. But I will include a link to the original: http://news.yahoo.com/don-t-blame-college-kids-for-intolerance--blame-us-085916423.html . And I will rewrite this posting to reduce Mr. Bai's essay to a bunch of acceptable excerpts, if he or the Yahoo lawyers ask me to.

Here, then, are Mr. Bai's words on the subject.

Don't blame college kids for intolerance. Blame us.
By Matt Bai
May 22, 2014 4:59 AM
Yahoo News

America's college kids are back and resting at home this week, which is a good thing, because during the long months away they seem to have gone completely out of their minds.

Last weekend, The New York Times' Jennifer Medina reported on the latest bizarre demand on campus: "trigger warnings" to let students know if the text they're about to study will expose them to some version of misogyny or homophobia, so they aren't unexpectedly traumatized by visions of things that can never be unseen – like, say, every novel written by a white man before 1960. That followed the public floggings of several commencement speakers whose invitations had to be rescinded, including such evildoers as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the International Monetary Fund's Christine Lagarde and Robert Birgeneau, the former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley.

All of this has provoked a torrent of eloquent condemnation from pundits and academics, who worry that our elite universities, in the words of an editorial published in Monday’s Washington Post, are being "impoverished by intolerance." Which is a reasonable concern, except that it misses the point. It's not the students' fault that they expect to laze around in a world of ideological comfort. It's totally ours.

There's nothing new about the basic tension between speech and sensitivity on campus. When I was at Tufts in the late '80s, at the height of what we called political correctness, we argued fiercely about whether the military belonged on campus or whether certain faculty members were denied tenure because of their politics. But, by and large, we were primed to have the debate, not chill it.

We'd grown up with TV news that tried to get at complicated issues (Ted Koppel's "Nightline" was the single most influential news program of the era) and op-ed pages that crackled with competing arguments. I remember meeting William Colby, the former CIA director, at a symposium. A lot of us were disgusted by the role he had played in Vietnam, but it never occurred to us that he shouldn't speak or that his beliefs weren't at least defensible.

It was reasonable to hope, with the sudden explosion of what we called cyberspace a decade or so later, that this kind of exchange would become more commonplace and more enlightening, rather than less so. Only that's not what happened. Almost from the moment the first iteration of political blogs appeared, not long after the 2000 presidential election that exposed a deep cultural rift in America, like-minded activists began to wall themselves off from any version of reality they didn't like. They set about building ideological silos in the space where virtual town squares might have thrived.

Our political leaders and our media might have recognized the danger here and done their traditional duty, which was to ignore all the noise, and focus instead on explaining the complex realities of a country in social and technological transition. With some notable exceptions, that didn't happen, either. Instead, politics in the past 10 years has become a perennial contest of the already converted, a constant pursuit on either side of "base strategies" and data sets that tell you exactly which voters you need to turn out in order to get and hold power.

Those of us who cover and analyze the news – whose central purpose it is to challenge our own preconceptions about the world, and yours – haven't really performed much better, and I'm not just talking about the partisan rehashing on Fox News and MSNBC. Many of our most respected columnists and academics, too, occupy the predictable extremes, where they can always rely on the clicks of a comforted audience. They use a smokescreen of empiricism to prove to you, over and over again and without fail, that everything you already believe is borne out by some selective poll or study.

What's happened is that we've effectively left behind the Age of Persuasion and ushered in the Age of Confirmation. It sometimes seems the whole world exists to re-affirm our conceptions of it; you can get through days, even weeks, without being at all discomfited, if you know which sites to visit and which channels to watch.

This isn't confined to politics. We target self-help books and superhero movies at consumers whose habits we know, rather than do the hard work of trying to convince anyone to broaden their minds. (Did you like Sheryl Sandberg's book? Then you'll love Arianna Huffington's version, which is pretty much the same thing, right down to the catchphrase title and cover photo.) Log on to Amazon.com, the supermall of the confirmation culture, and you will instantly be introduced to all of the books, movies and songs that are exactly like all the others you've purchased recently.

We have more options and access to information than any society in human history, and less inclination to avail ourselves of it. Maybe we're just overwhelmed.

So tell me this: What exactly did we think the effect of all this was going to be on the generation after ours? Today's college senior was born around 1992 and developed a political awareness just as blogs and social media were bursting into the American consciousness. Did we really expect these kids to emerge from the moment with a sense of intellectual adventurism? Were they supposed to just know that the entire point of literature is to discomfort you with no warning at all?

Did we think the characteristic that F. Scott Fitzgerald cited as the hallmark of first-rate intelligence – "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and retain the ability to function" – didn't have to be taught by example?

Here's the good news. First, while the loudest students have been grabbing the attention lately, anyone who spends any time on campus these days (or who reads some of the better polling of the so-called millennial generation) can tell you that a lot of younger Americans appreciate that something is wrong with the way we talk to each other, or don't. They're distrustful of old political and media institutions and eager to build a more tolerant, less fragmented society than their parents have to this point. That's to their credit.

Second, it's worth remembering that for all the missed opportunity around us, we're still in the infancy of the Internet culture, a moment roughly analogous to where television was in 1960. Our instinct has been to retreat into safe communities online that reinforce our convictions and banish all doubt. But media evolves, and political dialogue with it, and I'm betting we will figure out how to hear alternate (and even odious) worldviews without need for a trigger warning.

To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., the arc of technology is long, and it bends toward enlightenment.

Why are college students so intolerant? Why so closedminded?

It used to be that universities and colleges were intellectual greenhouses, where all sorts of ideas could be explored, and could grow and develop together - even opposing ideas. Now they seem instead to be intellectual concrete mills.

Normally, I don't find anything on Yahoo to be deep, well-written, or insightful. Also, normally, I find navel-gazing to be tedious and unproductive. Here's an opinion piece from Yahoo that is deep, well-written and insightful - also interesting and worthwhile.

It's a good read. It slaps down the narrowminded, shallow-thinking, intolerant individuals on both the extreme left and the extreme right. It frames the discussion by taking a look at the intolerance (what?!) manifested on college campuses today. It makes the intolerant students look like little kids with their fingers in their ears, chanting "Na na na na, I'm not listening, I'm not listening."

The scary part of the article is the thought that the closedminded individuals will grow up and run the country, and that they will marry and have children of their own. Let's hope that their children are more openminded than they are.

I'm not going to give Yahoo credit for this excellent piece of writing. Not yet. This is just one data point, and probably an aberration. I will, however, applaud the author, Matt Bai. I don't agree with everything he writes, but he's consistently thoughtful and well-written. Matt Bai is good; Yahoo is just lucky.

UPDATE: I was afraid of the article disappearing from Yahoo, so I reprinted it right here.