I LIKE DONNA BRAZILE AGAIN

I’m beginning to like Donna Brazile again. She turned me off with that episode in which she leaked a debate question to candidate Hillary Clinton. Up to that point, she always seemed to be a smooth, informed and powerful Black woman whose background was not unlike my own. She recently wrote a book that upset members of her own Democratic Party, especially the Clinton crowd who felt she should have kept her thoughts to herself rather than risk further dividing the Party. Her response during an interview with George Stephanopoulos was classic. She said: “George, for those who are telling me to shut up, they told Hillary that a couple of months ago. You know what I tell them? Go to hell. I’m going to tell my story…. And I say go to hell because, why am I supposed to be the only person that is unable to tell my story?” I know how Donna Brazile feels. Some readers respond angrily to articles I’ve written simply because I don’t tell my stories the way they want me to. Of course, if I told my stories the way they wanted me to, they wouldn’t be my stories but their stories. My response – though in my own colorful words – has always been very similar to Donna Brazile’s. I admire her now more than ever and forgive her for her minor leak transgression which, as politics go, is quite normal.

SOME PEOPLE BELIEVE ANYTHING

“Our president is a liar, our Congress is a circus, our friends are frightened, our enemies emboldened and our society is pulling itself apart. This, we are told, constitutes making America great again. And some people believe it.” (Miami Herald’s Leonard Pitts, Jr. as reprinted in The Boston Globe, October 27, 2017)

WHAT IS WRONG WITH AMERICA’S REPUBLICANS?

The last poll I saw showed that 86% of Republicans approve of Donald Trump which is more evidence that the Republican Party has become a haven for troglodytes and yahoos. More than 50% of White males support him which means that every other White male I meet is a potential Trumpite. And before my White Massachusetts friends start pointing their finger south, they should know that more than 50% of Massachusetts Republicans support him, which means, of course, that even every other Massachusetts Republican that I meet is a potential Trump supporter. And, Trump is a bigot and a women harasser and one of the most damaging figures to ever set foot on America’s political stage.

REPUBLICAN MORALS

“These days, the GOP is trying to slither toward a moral high ground by condemning Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of pursuing and assaulting teen-age girls.  Senators Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who vacated the seat Moore is seeking, have made a show of saying that they believe Moore’s accusers. But they steadfastly refused to do the same for the women alleging Trump’s misconduct….Nor do they have a problem standing shoulder to shoulder with a man who boasted about kissing and grabbing a women by the genitals without her consent.” (Renee Graham, The Boston Globe, November 22, 2017)

SIGN KAEPERNICK

Writing about his “hatred” of the New England Patriots, Nestor Ramos wrote: “But there’s one thing the Patriots could do that would turn my wild-faced, at least partly irrational hatred into grudging acceptance: Sign Colin Kaepernick.” He elaborated: “And since the Patriots are widely seen as Team Trump, the act of signing Kaepernick would demonstrate to the league and the country that Kaepernick’s protest is not some unforgivable political sin, but an earnest stand against injustice that merits contemplation. Disagreeing with the method of protest – something that America has been wrong-headedly doing at least since the days of bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins – doesn’t have to mean discrediting the person doing the protesting.”  (The Boston Globe, November 1, 2017)

REAL FAKE NEWS

“We know…that over a two-year period, up to 126 million Americans were reached by Russian messages through Facebook alone. I don’t much mind that; what bothers me is that most of those Americans had no idea they were viewing messages from the Kremlin. We need to fix that…. But paid ads are a small part of the problem. Facebook, for instance only sold around $100,000 in ads to Russian buyers. The company estimates that these were seen by about 10 million people. But Russian operatives also posted about 80,000 messages free of charge through personal Facebook accounts and pages set up for the purpose.  These messages were seen by about 29 million people, and many of these people liked and shared them, and so on and so on, until 126 million of us had gotten an eyeful.” (Hiawatha Bray, The Boston Globe, November 1, 2017)  The more unfortunate part of the story is that the only news many Americans follow is Facebook news, which is, at best, mostly gossip and, at worst, simply fake.

IT SHOULD BE CALLED THE “DRUG COMPANY CRISIS”

It looks more and more like America’s current opioid crisis was started by our own for-profit drug industry, a fact that shifting the blame to China, which has piled on with major shipments of fentanyl south of the border where it is smuggled into America by drug lords, should not be allowed to cover up.
MORAL ACCEPTANCE“Books will someday be written on how Trump, this wounded and twisted man, became morally acceptable to tens of millions of Americans.” (David Brooks, New York Times, October 24, 2017)

THE MORAL FABRIC OF SOCIETY

“The moral fabric of society is invisible but essential. Some use their public position to dissolve it so they can have an open space for their selfishness.” (David Brooks on Trump, New York Times, October 24, 2017) “…The Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that if the Trump/Clinton presidential race were held today, it would be a tie. Think on that. Arguably the worst president in modern history might still beat one of the most prominent Democrats in America.” (Michael Gerson, Boston Herald, November 7, 2017)

TWO WAYS TO HANDLE “N” WORD ABUSES

Sometimes it is the message to others that makes the response to a person who calls a Black person “nigger” effective. When a nine-year-old White Ludlow football player called an Amherst nine-year-old Black football player the word loud enough for officials, parents and their coach to hear it, the game was stopped and cancelled on the spot; Ludlow school officials sent a letter of apology to the Amherst program saying it was ashamed of what happened and they kicked the 9-year-old White player off the team. That was one way of handling the racial transgression. Another just as acceptable way would have been for the Black nine-year-old to knock the White player on his rear end. The story reminds me of an event at a day camp we sent our sons to on Stony Hill Road. A fellow White camper called my kids niggers and they decked him. When I came to pick them up at the end of the day, the camp director told me that they could not return because they started a fight. He didn’t tell me why the fight started. I waited until my kids got into the car and we were on the road and asked them what happened. When they told me they beat up a White kid who called them “nigger,” I told them they had done the right thing and taught the poor fellow a hard lesson that he needed to learn as did his fellow White campers. As for the White camp director, he wasted a teachable moment.

DEATH OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT

“For the three decades that followed, I could count on one thing: The conservative right was the religious right. That was its branding, if not always its behavior. It was as if the foot soldiers for the conservative right had read only half the Bible they thumped. They were harsh and vindictive like the God of the Old Testament, not generous and inclusive like the Jesus of the New Testament…. “But now, all the pretense of any “moral” majority and moral authority has vanished into the very impulses that fed it: tribal racial/ethnic anxiety, panic and hostility, patriarchy and sexism, and a perceived threat presented by the full acceptance and inclusion of LGBT identities….Piety is now postscript. The principal motivation now is anger, fear of cultural displacement, and anxiety about the erosion of privilege and the guarantees it once provided, from physical safety to financial security….You can peg any number of moments in recent history when the objective seemed to change for the members of the religious right, where they swallowed all pride and principle to secure power and vent anger, but for me there is none more glaring than the embrace of Donald Trump…. “The anger that gave birth to Trump was a death notice for Republican religious principles. Now, if you ask me what the Republican Party stands for, I’m not sure I can tell you. All I see is regression, wealth worship, nationalism and white supremacy. Maybe that’s it. I no longer see Christ in that equation.”(Charles, Blow, New York Times as reprinted in The Republican, November 19, 2017)  ■