Otter's Rock

If you have any desire to see either Native Americans' voices amplified, or oil companies' voices minimized, or both, and you are a US citizen, now is a great time to send a message to your US Senators asking them to confirm Rep. Deb Haaland as Secretary of the Interior. The Department of the Interior is the department in charge of things like energy and environmental policy, and it's ALSO the department of which the Bureau of Indian Affairs is part. Having an Indigenous woman in charge of that department would be huge. Here's what the Lakota Law Project has to say about it:


The link leads you to a page with a widget to email your senators. It only takes a few minutes--please take this opportunity to push for things to keep moving in the right direction!

If you listen to podcasts and are interested in in-depth looks at race issues in America, here are two I recommend.

Nice White Parents. A podcast miniseries by the makers of This American Life, which looks at the way White parents in New York schools can and do manipulate the system--and the school--in ways that favor their interests without even realizing what they're doing or how it affects the people of color around them. If you have any interest in exploring what underlying structural racism looks like, this is a really good look at it. Nobody gets demonized, everybody gets a fair chance to lay out their side of the story, but they put everything so clearly that you can see how race is twisting things even if the white parents involved don't see it.

Sounds Like Hate. A podcast from the Southern Poverty Law Center that tells the stories of those grappling with hate in their communities. It's designed to show just what the problems are, while also laying out reasons to hope and how to engage with the problem.

Here's the AP article about it.  It's great news, because for some people you can do your taxes online but for some of us taxes are more complicated and you really, really can't.  My question though is, for those of us who pay taxes quarterly instead of having it deducted from our paycheck, do we just ... continue with the same quarterly payments even if our income has changed?

I learned an AMAAZING new fact today, about the anti-abortion movement in the US.  I already knew that up through the 70s, Catholics were the only religious group in the US to be coherently anti-abortion, and even for them, it was not a huge issue.  I already knew that it was Evangelical and Fundamentalist leaders' desire for power and influence that caused their segment of Christians in America to dive head-first into politics for the first time ever, and why they changed abortion rights for something most US Protestants either supported or didn't care about, to The Most Evil Thing Ever And The Greatest Unforgiveable Sin (and oh, by the way, a great megaphone to whip up their supporters with and a great club to beat their opponents over the head with).

But what I didn't know was why they chose to go for politics as their route to power and fame, instead of the old tried-and-true Evangelical method of hosting lots of revivals and bringing people to Jesus.  I mean, there had been people trying to whip up the more conservative branches of American Christianity into political fervor to make them a voting block, and the response had always been that evangelicals focused on salvation and bringing people to Jesus, not temporal matters like politics.

So what changed?  What brought around the 180 on political engagement?  Oh, friends, it's a doozy.  Thank you to Kindreds Podcast for bringing this to my attention, it's not the main theme of their episode on abortion, but they mentioned it and it led me to investigate the details.  Politico has a great article about it.

Roe V. Wade in 1973 was a great big "meh" in Christian circles.  Catholics didn't like it, but Protestants mostly approved.  Nobody but Catholics believed life began at conception.  Or, rather, most Christians would have said that a fetus is alive, but it's not really a person until it's born and can live separate from its mother.  This is including Evangelicals and fundamentalists, by the way; the head of the Southern Baptist Convention at the time, a fundamentalist named W. A. Criswell, said exactly that on the record and nobody really cared.  And those who did care largely didn't go around making political hay over it.

Then the IRS went after Bob Jones University (Jerry Falwell's darling school) for not admitting black students.  Private schools which explicitly excluded students of color lost their tax-exempt status, and BJU tried to claim that it could discriminate because it was a religious institution.  Religious institutions are allowed to discriminate on religious grounds; so, for example, a Christian church can say they'll only hire Christians to play the organ/be custodian/whatever, and feminist Catholics can't sue the Roman Catholic church for not ordaining female priests.  But the thing is, in order for that discrimination to be legal, it has to be related to longstanding doctrine of the church.  And BJU couldn't prove that racism was a longstanding doctrine of Christianity in general or Evangelicalism in particular.  And they lost their tax exempt status in 1976.

That was a much bigger problem to White Evangelical and fundamentalist leaders in the late 1970s than abortion was.  They couched in terms of "The government is infringing on our religious freedom!" but the problem wasn't religious freedom, it was racism.  All of a sudden, they needed political clout.  And since by that point naked racism was a non-starter in securing the moral high ground (dog-whistling was fine; outright saying it was not), they couldn't use "but we don't want to integrate!" as their call to action.

And so all of a sudden, they started preaching sermons and writing articles on how evil abortion was, and how that had always been the Evangelical position (even though it hadn't been) and it was a sign of America's moral decay that it was allowed now and anybody with any morals at all (certainly any Christian) would agree with them because it was the only moral and faithful position, and how Christians had to involve themselves in politics to overturn Roe v. Wade.  And by 1979, they were firmly supporting Reagan over Carter.

If the issue were truly abortion, supporting Reagan made no sense.  Carter had worked as president to reduce the number of abortions (mostly through social programs that would eliminate some of the need for them); he was wishy-washy on the subject politically, but on a moral level, he didn't like abortion.  (Very much a centrist who thought abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.)  Reagan, on the other hand, signed the most liberal abortion bill in the country in 1967 when he was governor of California.

You know what Reagan had that Carter didn't?  Dog-whistle politics.  On the issue of race, Carter was a mid-century Democrat generally in favor of civil rights.  Reagan took Nixon's idea of dog-whistling (using coded language so you could enact racist policies without actually saying you hated Black people) to a whole new level.  Reagan was the king of finding fig-leaves so that he could enact racist policies but claiming that the negative impact on the Black community was just a side effect (or denying that it existed at all).  And he also had the kind of ethics that would allow him to reverse his position on key issues if that would get him elected.  Carter was a man of principle.  Whether you liked his principles or not, he generally stuck to them.

Reagan was racist enough for them, and would give them both what they actually wanted (ways to keep Black people out without actually saying stuff most of their parishioners would notice as racist) and what they needed as an excuse to have the political power to bargain with (explicit anti-abortion policies).

After months of nothing further happening on the Net Neutrality front in the US, four lawmakers have signed the Congressional Review Act discharge petition in the last two weeks.  This petition would undo the FCC's Net Neutrality repeal and restore the previous (much stronger) net neutrality regulations.  It's already passed the Senate, and there are almost enough votes in the House to pass it.  The reason it hasn't?  Too many politicians have taken large sums from ISPs.  However as the four who recently caved have shown, enough pressure and even politicians who've taken lots of money for their support of net neutrality repeal can be shamed into doing the right thing.

If you would like to pressure the 16 Democrats favoring ISP money over a free and fair and open internet, here is a tool to call them.

Remember, calls to politicians are most effective coming from their own constituents.  So people from Pennsylvania, North Carolina, California, Texas, New Jersey, Arizona, Illinois, Georgia, and Indiana are especially encouraged to call.

Folks, I haven't seen enough people talking about what an amazing thing happened on Tuesday. Sporadic stuff about specific people who won (mostly rejoicing that Danica Roem, a transgender woman, defeated and replaced the Virginia state legislator who authored the bathroom bill), but nothing about the whole shebang.

Folks.  Folks. The Republicans got hosed on Tuesday.  As usual, the Washington Post has a great analysis: Anti-Trump backlash fuels a Democratic sweep in Virginia and elections across the country.

( Election overview: all the places Democrats won )

Now, I know a lot of you are thinking, "wow, that's nice, but these are all local elections and small fry."  But there are three things to remember.

First, a HUGE proportion of the ways government impacts our lives come from local government.  Schools, roads, zoning (i.e. what kinds of homes and businesses and stuff goes where), water and utilities, police and law enforcement, these are all mostly under local control.  Local is where pretty much everything starts.  Obamacare started as a state-level plan that people liked and then adapted for the nation.  If you think your local police are racist and need to be reigned in, the President of the US and your congressperson can't do jack shit.  Your mayor, your governor, your county sheriff if you have one, your attorney general, your state legislature, those are the people who between them control your local law enforcement officials.  Gay marriage started at the state level.  Most things build up momentum at a local and state level, and then they go national.  It therefore should be obvious that local affairs are small-scale but HELLA IMPORTANT, and because they are so small-scale, your vote matters more.  You could be one vote in a few thousand, rather than one vote in a few million.

Second, all these awesome things?  They happened because people showed up and voted Democrat.  Democrats (especially young ones) have this nasty, NASTY habit of not showing up.  We get lazy.  We don't think a particular candidate is ideologically pure enough, so they're no different than the Republican they're running against.  We say, oh, there's no President on the ballot, so it doesn't matter.  We don't show up.  And then we wonder why everything's going to hell in a handbasket and our guys can't get anything done.  Trump and the Republican behemoth can ABSOLUTELY be defeated, we can in the long run ABSOLUTELY change the way things are going, but you know what it's going to take?  VOTING.  VOTING IN EVERY ELECTION.  YES, EVEN THE WEIRD ONES WITH ONLY LOCAL MINUTIAE ON THE BALLOT.  If people keep turning out like they did in Virginia, whole lot of places going to be colored blue on the map and Democratic goals are achievable.  BUT WE, ALL OF US, HAVE TO SHOW UP AND FUCKING VOTE.  EVERY SINGLE TIME.  You don't have to be constantly retweeting and reblogging stuff, you don't have to be The Greatest Activist Ever.  I mean, activism is great.  But it's all meaningless IF WE DON'T SHOW UP WHEN IT COUNTS.  On election day.  And if you don't have the time/money/attention/spoons/health/whatever to pay attention to each new scandal and whatever bill is in congress, that's okay!  It's perfectly fine!  As long as you vote.  Regularly and consistently and every fucking time like you were a little blue-haired redneck Fox-News-watching granny.  (I mean, vote as consistently as she would, not for the same candidates and policies as she would.)

Three, community.  Everybody wants to be The One Great Hero.  We build our societies on stories of The One Great Hero Who Saves The Day.  So it's really tempting to fall into that mindset, where if we can't be The One Great Hero, we're not having an impact.  But you know what?  Most of the time, the day isn't saved by The One Great Hero, the day is saved by a multitude of ordinary people who choose to do their part to make the world a better place.  Probably nobody reading this will ever have an opportunity to be The One Great Hero of anything.  But when a lot of people come together with a common purpose to achieve something, they can achieve far more lasting change than any One Great Hero ever possibly could.  Dr. King was great, but he wouldn't have achieved bupkiss without the SNCC and the NAACP and the SCLC and positive HORDES of voter registration workers and lawyers and lots of other people and groups.  None of us are islands, standing alone.  We all depend on each other.  We have to work together.  We have to support one another.  We have to come together in organized groups if we want to effect large-scale change.  There was no one great voter who single-handedly got any of these people elected.  But communities did, by working together and voting together.  This is both a blessing and a responsibility.  A blessing, because it means that the pressure is not on any one individual.  My senator isn't going to change his vote because of any one phone call I, personally, made; my single solitary vote isn't going to make or break any candidate.  A responsibility, because a number of phone calls by different people to my senator might very well change his vote, and a lot of us voting together might very well make or break a candidate in an election.  And the thing about groups and communities is that they are made up of individuals.  If we all of us, individually, decide not to work together and organize and put in the daily grind, nobody is going to do it.  So each one of us has a responsibility to do what we can.  Not because the whole shebang rests on our shoulders, but because a small piece of it does.  And if enough small pieces are missing, there's no larger picture.

Let's make sure as many small pieces as possible are in the picture.

Lo these many years ago, American History was one of my special interests.  My undergrad degree was in it (well, not technically, but like 90% of my classes--including Historical Methods and stuff like that--focused on US history).  I still love it, but I'm not focused enough on it to call it a special interest any more.

But you guys, there is SO MUCH interesting stuff about early American history that, if it were taught properly, would REALLY change peoples' perspectives on the "brave, gallant, noble" men of the Confederacy.  And I'm not talking just the racism stuff, like 90% of them were whiny pissbabies and THAT is why the Civil War even existed in the first place.  I shit you not.  The modern Conservative Christian persecution complex has NOTHING on the antebellum Southern elite.  Sure, a lot of those guys were personally brave in battle.  But on a political or moral level, they were ... most five-year-olds are more mature.  (I'm simplifying things a lot here and painting with a really broad brush, but it's not inaccurate.)

This meta is going to take as read that slavery=EVIL and that there is no such thing as a "good" slaveowner and that racism is horribly, horribly evil and nothing good can ever come of it and white supremacy twists and mutilates everything good it comes in contact with.  You all know that, or you should, and you can find lots of places talking about that with a quick google search.  Also, Blacks and poor Whites had vibrant cultures during this time period that I'm going to largely ignore because while all that is awesome, I want you to truly understand ALL the reasons why it's stupid and pathetic to glamorize the Southern elite, which means focusing on them.  The South was (and is!) REALLY AWFUL AND SCREWED UP and racism is part of that but not the only part.  But we will start a bit by talking about racism, because it's the root of so much other evil.

I'm sure you've heard that "race is a social construct!"  Let's look at how that construct got constructed, shall we?

( How Black And White People Came To Be )

( Economic Differences And Political Boondoggles, or, How The South Learns That Temper Tantrums Are A Viable Political tool. )

( The South's Persecution Complex vs. the North's Manifest Destiny )

( Taking Their Marbles And Going Home, Then They'll Be Sorry: Civil War Edition )

( More Delusions Of Grandeur: The Whole Lost Cause Romantic Bullshit )

And I look at this and shake my head at the triumph of propaganda over reality, and also at the fact that ANYBODY, even a racist, could POSSIBLY think that those idiotic inbred delusional cretinous whiny pissbabies were cool or worthy of adoration.


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