Civility in an Age of Uncivil Society

It has become an almost nightly fixture on the news these days.  Some news channels reporting of an unruly passenger on an airline assaulting either the flight crews or other passengers.  It appears most of these events involve the millennial generation.  Passengers ranging from their twenties to early forties.  If true, it suggests to me just one more manifestation of a generation created with a sense of entitlement and self-importance that leads to outrage anytime they are forced to comply with some social norm.

These are the people who now control social media and who seem to believe being an “influencer” is actually a profit-making occupation.  I’ve been criticized by progressives for believing there is such a thing as a “slippery slope” where bad behavior, once tolerated, will lead to increasingly bad behavior. 

But I see in the Millennials a generation that has little respect for the history and culture of the nation and has been told their behavior will be tolerated.  We have legal and legislative systems around the country now committed to releasing violent individuals in the name of social justice.  We have judges who place their political beliefs before their role in the law.  In the eyes of Beryl Howell[1], an appointee by the Obama Administration, she is outraged the DOJ is allowing the January 6^th rioters plea deals that tie her hands in handing down serious prison time.  I don’t recall those same complaints with rioters in Minneapolis or New York as they protested the George Floyd death.  It seems in the eyes of liberal judges not all riots are created equally.  Those that pass their social muster are okay, those that don’t are a serious threat to democracy.

It will be interesting to see how the airlines and the government now deal with the increasing violence in the skies.  Whatever the course of action airlines will need to rethink their advertisements and perhaps even the "woke" political choices they support?  Since the "woke" tend to eat their own and if you get even a little out of step you will be condemned anyway.  

Can we really say “Fly the friendly skies” anymore?  Perhaps, “Fly with us, we are only mildly passive-aggressive” would be more accurate.  Remember, we are all in this together, unless your entitlements are more than my entitlements.

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[1] https://news.yahoo.com/federal-judge-criticizes-dojs-plea-204112591.html

Life in the Age of Trump.

Way back in 2015 the 2016 election season kicked off.  The Republican field grew to 16 or so candidates, including a billionaire who brought to the game a demeaning and vilifying style the professional politicians had no defense against.  He spent far less than what the experts said he must, but one by one the professional politicians fell by the wayside.

On the Democratic side, there was supposed to be no contest, it was, after all, the time for a woman to be crowned.  Everyone, but a single communist/socialist was onboard with the plan.  He became a fly in the ointment, but the establishment made short work of him and as it was supposed to be she was anointed at the party’s convention. 

Unfortunately, for the DNC their future president carried so much baggage she reminded the average person of Humpty Dumpty.  She was ensconced on her perch going through the motions until her coronation.  Then came that fateful election night.

Hillary Clinton sat on a wall,

Hillary Clinton had a great fall.

All the pundits and all the stars

Couldn’t put Hillary together again.

What we saw in the aftermath was a political class shocked and bewildered over how such a vile thing as the election of Donald Trump could occur.  The media and the political opposition have chosen to make it their life’s work to destroy this presidency.  We see in the reporting and the analysis that no decision made by the administration can be accepted as reasonable or good for the nation.  We have chosen to operate on a purely vindictive and emotional basis where each side tries to outdo the other in its vilification of opposing ideas.

Of course, the personal needs of the President to be the center of attention only magnifies the drama.  I will say in his defense this personal need is not so unlike many of his predecessors.  The only real difference is we now have an openly hostile press that can use its pulpit to enlarge the narcissistic nature of such politicians. 

As we now approach the same point we were at in 2015 it seems just a bit humorous to note Donald Trump will probably secure the party nomination without more than a whimper of opposition (usually the case for an incumbent), and the Democratic Party is looking for someone to unseat him, but their pool of candidates collectively seems little different than the professional politicians he defeated to arrive at his current position.

The one inescapable (and unfortunate) truth I see is the level of vile mudslinging and its negative effects on social discourse can only increase.

Yea us!

The Politics of Outrage.

To paraphrase a popular quote: Life is hard; It’s Even Harder When You’re Partisan. 

It seems this age we are in has made life almost unbearable for the partisan left and the partisan right.  There are so many things to be outraged about, yet our politicians find more value in feeding the outrage than they do in working towards viable solutions.  How does one cope on daily basis?

There is a line from the Cary Grant – Tony Curtis movie “Operation Petticoat” Tony Curtis, playing Lt. Holden, is put in charge of finding parts needed to fix the submarine commanded by Cary Grant, as Lt Cmdr Matt Sherman.  In one scene Lt. Holden leaves the sub while the navy base is under attack.  When he is asked where he is going he offers this memorable truth, “In confusion there is profit.”  That seems to be the strategy in play in today’s political division.

We have problems with immigration, who should come and how should they be qualified for entry?  Today, it is better to be outraged at the separation of children from adults at the border than it is to find a solution that prevents that from being a necessity.  This shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but it clearly is.  During the eight years of the previous administration, we saw a hodge-podge of enforcement and non-enforcement of immigration laws.  The DOJ was accused of gun-running that resulted in at least one death of a border agent, some people were welcomed and others denied, and yet children and adults were still separated when detained and very little effort was made to ensure they were reunited after the mind-numbingly slow decision process.  The press and the partisan supporters of the DNC said little or nothing about the moral injustice.  Put a hated Republican in charge and all the sudden it is the end of the world, and people will die.

On the opposing side, there at least is not a rock-solid set of approved talking points as there is on the left. We have everything from President Trump’s promise of a wall to grants for limited immunity from deportation.  It would seem to anyone who considers this spectrum there is room to negotiate a new law, but when one side says there can only be one answer, that room quickly shrinks to the hardline rhetoric we have today.  We were supposed to have fixed this in the 1990s, under President Clinton when we granted immunity to millions with the intent we would have laws we could agree to. What has changed?  Who has altered the requirements for immigration?  Are we to be a nation that believes in the rule of law or not?  To me, that is the real question before us on immigration.  It appears one side says no.

Then we have the Russians and their impact on preventing the favored DNC candidate from achieving her rightful place in American history.  What makes matters so much worse is she lost to someone who the media and the party had vilified to such an extent that he was viewed as almost certainly someone who would be little more than a footnote in history, much like William Henry Harrison.  At the time of the election, the DNC had predicted the economy would never recover, the markets would crash, healthcare for the nation (especially women) would end and people would die.  On election night some small percentage of the 60 million or so voters who voted for HRC decided their outrage was just too great to contain.  They bought knit hats and took to the streets to show the world their disdain for the nation’s choice for the next president.  Calls for investigations on how this outrage could have occurred began immediately and here we are two years later still waiting for the Special Counsel to shed some light on how the Russians persuaded some 60 million voters to choose someone other than HRC. 

Of course, over the past couple of decades, we’ve developed an intolerance for ideas and thoughts that might invoke discomfort and force debate on an issue.  The definition of “hate speech,” although fluid, is now part of our language.  It sure appears the demands for politically correct speech is less about offending and more about controlling the debate.  When only one side gets to call the other racist it is no longer a debate, is it?  I give you, as an example HRC’s latest snappy comeback.  When an interviewer attributed a quote to Cory Booker, HRC corrected her and said that was actually from Eric Holder.  When the interviewer apologized Ms. Clinton forgave her saying “they all look alike.”  The audience laughed because after all this was Hillary Clinton and she’s a Democrat and by current definition can’t be racist.

We are bombarded by the idea that white racist organizations are going to undo all the civil rights minorities have fought so hard to gain and expand, yet how many white racists are really in power now that Robert Byrd (D-WV) is gone?   The Southern Poverty Law Center shows a marked decline in the number of groups since 2011 when estimates put the number of hardcore and sympathizers at about 300,000.  For the record that is .09% of the nation.  So, 1/10^th of one percent of the nation is classified as racist yet how many times have we heard someone who disagreed with the President called a racist?  Of course, with critical race theory that is the desired option, since only white people can be racist the best way to control the conversation is to shut it down.

Once again, the issue of putting on makeup has hit the news.  NBC has suspended and will quite possibly can Megyn Kelly for her comments about how as a child putting on “blackface” was okay and opining about why it isn’t today.  Having never had a desire to wear blackface, but watching the likes of Al Jolson play exaggerated characters in movies about the Minstrel shows I can certainly understand why many would find the idea of a whole bunch of white kids mocking their color as offensive, but the outrage that comes from these events today does not appear to be based on a compelling desire for cultural sensitivities nearly as much as it comes from a desire to control the conversation.  Just as in the #metoo movement there is evidence that when some liberal personalities chose to use blackface for the sake of their comedic benefit there was little mention of how offensive this was to black culture.

Finally, we have become a nation that selectively condones or condemns actual hate speech as represented by vile acts of terror against political or religious targets.  It sure seems the focus of these condemnations is more about affixing blame than actually ending any political speech that may incite the actual individuals involved.  One side lays the blame on President Trump, and of course, President Trump’s supporters have an equally large number of examples that will lay the blame on his opposition.  Is affixing blame for mean and ugly speech really ever going to solve a problem where individuals feel empowered to kill or attempt to kill others?  I doubt it.

At the end of the day, isn’t that what all this outrage is about?  The need to control the debate so your side wins?  The question we will see answered in the next week or so is can the idea of outrage be overplayed to the detriment of the victim party?  Will the voters reject the vilification of good people by the outraged left or will they reward them for their victim status?

An Opinion on 29 October 2018

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The Government is Neither Moral or Immoral

“Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.”  Mahatma Gandhi

We gather today in outrage over the massacre of eleven people, killed because of their religion.  On a global scale this senseless violence is small and perhaps insignificant, but within our culture it marks yet another step in the polarization of the politics of incivility.

Today’s society demands we assign blame for these immoral acts to specific people whose life, political views, or access to power we disdain, rather than the individual who commits the offense.  The need to score political points, display political outrage and demand the government improve its moral approach outweighs any sense of grief, real or imagined.

In a very real sense, it is this society, not the government, which has created the conditions which foster the public violence we see.  The government is an entity, it has no morality, it has no sense of justice, it is an infrastructure and a vehicle through which our society functions.  I think this article from the Foundation for Economic Freedom written in 2011 captures my sentiments as they have evolved over the past decade or so.  As George Washington is credited with saying, “Government is not reason.  It is not eloquence, Government is force; like a fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

The young have willingly bought into the identity politics and rhetoric of those who are unhappy with the current reality of government and are seeking, through whatever means possible to overturn the choices made in the last general election.  Many have been led to believe President Trump through his social media and personal approach to celebrity has created the “toxic” environment we see today.  At the same time, they discount the personal attacks, vilification, outright falsehoods, and slander used by his political opponents as having any contributory impact at all.

It should be noted the idea of personality politics is nothing new for this nation.  We can trace the role of personality all the way back to our first president.  The difference, at least it seems to me, is we’ve found it more reasonable to attack the person who challenges the status quo than accept policies that fail.    As an example, let’s look at the success or failure of major metropolitan cities where unemployment, crime, and social disparity are the worst.  Most, if not all, have had an unbroken chain of Democratic Party Mayors and City Councils, all making promises they failed to keep while driving their cities into deepening debt.  Where their choices moral or immoral?  No, they acted in what they perceived to be their self-interest.  Unfortunately for many within the cities, their self-interest was really THEIR personal self-interest as in personal and family enrichment.

Perhaps sometime in the near future, we will ask our individual selves, "what can I do to alter the course of society and advance a course that reflects the desired moral standards we had believed to be the foundation of this country?"  Will our political outrage actually have a positive effect if we continue to apply it unevenly to the political parties and allow the social media to control the debate through limiting speech?

We are a nation of some 328 million and if we want society to improve it will take all 328 million to develop an intolerance to those who advocate for a one solution fits all society.

You Know, I Thought We Were Better Than That.

“I thought we were better than that,” has become one just another tired cliché.  I’ve pointed this out here, but this week while I was traveling another instance of our base ugliness made the news.  I am saddened that so many who view themselves as superior to so many others actually find ways to prove they are not.

On April 17^th Barbara Bush, wife of George H.W. Bush, passed quietly away after an illness.  By all measures, she was a fine woman, wife, mother, and First Lady.  She represented the strength and dignity of those who’ve become known as America’s Greatest Generation.  Before it became fashionable to recognize HIV/AIDS she used her position to bring a humanity to the plight of those infected.  As First Lady, she pushed hard to encourage America to read and be literate.  She was originally from Rye NY and will be buried today in College Station Texas.

Almost immediately after her death was announced, Professor Randa Jarrar, California State University, Fresno, felt compelled to take to Twitter to call Mrs. Bush and the Bush family all racists who deserved to die. She upped the ante when she pointed out she was a tenured professor who couldn’t be fired.  Completing the trifecta of petty, ugly, behavior she gave out the phone number of a suicide hotline for Arizona State University and told people upset with her to feel free to call her and debate the claim, thus closing the line to people who might actually seek counseling before attempting to kill themselves.

She was not the only person who felt compelled to show their ass but is the one I am most aware of.

Hopefully, her university and she will come to find there are consequences to their actions, but I am not holding my breath since so many believe being ugly to one another is somehow protected by the First Amendment and her supporters will claim any critic of her action must be a racist or (xxxxxx)phobe of some kind.