Gladly Learn and Gladly Teach

I am a devoted Sudoku player. I play for relaxation.  I use my tablet and the game that I have on it allows me two errors, after which, for each additional error, I must watch an ad, a sort of penalty. Lately, you will not be surprised to learn, most of these ads, (I make a lot of mistakes) have been political, in particular, the Georgia run-off election. This blog was inspired by one of those adds.  It was a Walker add attacking Warnock for his “racist agriculture bill.” It suggested that Warnock and the Democrats had introduced a racist bill on behalf of black farmers. It ended by encouraging the viewer to vote “no” on Warnock. Not vote for Walker. Rather odd way to put it, I thought.

What struck me was the blatantly racist character of this ad attacking Warnock for his supposed racism. I screamed “white people, rise up against Warnock and vote against the one who discriminates against white people”, not “vote for Walker”, another black man! Maybe that is why it did not mention his name.

It did pick my curiosity though.  Did Warnock sponsor a racist bill, even if it were against whites rather than blacks, which is the usual way bills have been written in this country? So, I did a little research.

February 2021, Senators Booker, Warren, Gillibrand, Warnock, and Leahy introduced a bill to address the historic discrimination against black farmers in the Federal Agriculture Department. It would have provided 4 billion in loan forgiveness to farmers of color for USDA farm loan debt and related taxes. I say would have because, while the bill passed in Congress as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, before it could be put into action, the law was challenged in court by the Nebraska Freedom Coalition, a conservative think tank looking after farmer’s interests, white ones at least. This group is supported by conservative foundations, such as the Koch family, and Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, to name the best known. The news stories which suggested that it was white farmers who brought the action are not exactly correct. It is not that there was no money for white farmers in this bill. It simply tried to right an old wrong by setting aside a small amount for a group that has suffered discrimination in the past.

The upshot of it all was no money for black farmers, at least not to date.  The Democrats backed down and rewrote the bill to say money for people who have suffered discrimination.  It passed in August of 2022, on that basis, but to date no money has been dispensed, and the jury is still out whether these foundations will bring suits against even this bill. I would not be surprised if they do.

The irony of it all is that black farmers organizations are now angry with the  Democrats who caved at the first moment of being challenged. It is, after all, easy for black farmers to look to the ways they have been treated in the past and see this as more of the same. Warnock has said he expects the money to be forthcoming, as the new law does not use the word race and should get by any court challenge. I suspect that the approaching mid-term had a lot to do with the backpedaling, or perhaps the stark reality of the 6-3 conservative activist majority on the present court.  

Stay turned. Perhaps this nation will address the long history of Federal discrimination against black farmers. But, if Republicans have their way, we will not. Goodness knows a Senator Walker would happily bury such a program, as per his handlers instructions.  

But my point in this blog is to express my shock and outrage that the Republican campaign against Warnock would manage to find a way to be overtly racist even when both candidates are black.  I guess I should not be surprised. Recently, a former governor of South Carolina and U.N. Ambassador, and Republican hopeful for President in 2024, Nikki Haley, in a campaign speech on behalf of Walker in Hiram, Ga., suggested that Warnock should be deported. There seem to be no low to which Trump-inspired politicians will not sink to frighten people into voting against their own best interests. And, I do live in the district represented by MTG!

Recently, I read an article, which reported that amongst senior citizens, (my demographic, as I recently joined the ranks of the octogenarians), Walker was preferred over Warnock by a significant margin. What was surprising about the report was the reasons it gave and did not give for this preference.

It did not mention abortion.  If you are a senior for whom this is the only issue that matters, Walker is certainly your man. I suspect his personal behavior on the issue; indeed, his sheer hypocrisy, will not matter. But if other issues are you main or of equal concern, the three the article mentioned are worth exploring, because they mostly make no sense. Indeed, based on two of these three, our demographic’s best interests would be served by supporting Warnock. One, for example, was “fear for the survival of our democracy”.  If that is a concern of yours, as it is of mine, the Trump wing of the Republican Party is what we have to fear, and Walker has aligned himself with that wing. They not only supported, to one degree or another, the coup attempt that Trump clearly was behind, they also do not support our resisting Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and suggest they will use the next session of Congress to try to undermine it.

This is very dangerous for the survival of the nation and the world. China is watching and is very anxious to recover Taiwan. If Xi, China’s version of Putin, acts on that desire, it could easily lead us into a major war, with possible atomic consequences. We do not need to give tyrants the idea that we will turn a blind eye to aggression. Our parents set the right example here, in both World War II and Korea, and they mostly voted Democratic.

The second reason the article gave is protecting Social Security.  Since the Great Depression, starting with Social Security, which they called “socialistic”, the Republican Party has generally been opposed to programs that help the middle and lower classes and closely identified with those that make the rich richer. (All in the name of smaller government, to be sure.) Walker is no exception here. As Republicans are promising to use their new-found power in the House to undermine Social Security and particularly Medicare, by holding the government hostage over the debt ceiling, it is not in our best interest to support anyone who agrees with such policies, and you may safely assume that Walker will do exactly as his handlers instruct him to, if the opportunity presents itself.

The third reason the article listed is inflation.  I can understand that one, inflation is a special headache for seniors, especially those living on fixed incomes.  And I understand that Republicans would have harped on the issue and tried to blame it on Biden, leading up to the recent election. Truth is Biden’s policies are not the primary cause for our inflation.  In the first place, it is a worldwide problem, largely brought on by Covid and intensified by Putin’s war in Ukraine, and it is beginning to ease.  Beyond that Republicans do not have any plans for what to do about it, except cut taxes for the rich, which necessitates cutting social programs for the rest of us. (Precisely what the current Conservative government in Great Britain is proposing to do because of their much higher inflation rate.)

When we were young, Georgians were mostly “Yellow Dog” Democrats. After 1963 and the Civil Rights Act, they became Yellow Dog Republicans. But in the last election that seemed to crack a bit.  Many Republicans who voted for Kemp also voted for Warnock. If all those Republicans who voted for Kemp had also voted for Walker instead, there would be no run-off, and Walker would have won as handily as Kemp did. The same was true nationally for other “weak” (as McConnell described them) candidates the Trump wing of the party put forward, most of whom lost in an election where Republicans garnered more votes for House members than did Democrats. (The “redwave” that did not materialize.)

If you are a senior citizen, I encourage you to consider voting for Warnock. Walker is a weak choice; his ignorance is his greatest virtue, and he will not represent our state effectively and certainly not look after the interests of senior citizens.

In earlier blogs I have discussed some of the reasons why I think we are finding it so hard to get along with people who have different outlooks than we. So far, I have not ventured outside the United States, but I think the problems we face are human ones and not limited to our nation. To understand why it is not just an American problem is important to finding a solution, but for now I am going to stay with us.  I will expand the scope of my analysis in future blogs.

Up to this point, I have identified racism as a major factor in causing our difficulties. We are becoming a nation with no majority group, and many whites are very worried about this inevitability and what it will mean for the nation and for them. I have suggested that Trump’s popularity has a lot to do with those fears. But there is more to the problem than racism, and in this blog, I want to explore another cause of societal alienation.

In past blogs, I have pointed out that many of the values and ideas I grew up with have been cast aside by contemporary Americans (not to mention Western Europeans.) As a result, alcohol is available every day, everywhere, recreational drugs are coming to legalized in more and more states, sexuality is more openly expressed in its many forms, and marriage, to many, seems to be a dying institution. Our population is stagnant, even declining, in part because sex is now possible without consequences (birth control and abortion), and many women are choosing careers over motherhood. This is also true, where it is possible, over much of the globe. These changes are celebrated by some, (I will call them liberals) and deplored by others (conservatives), but all recognize the validity of what I am pointing out. Either way, this reality is a major source of our deep divisions.

Climate change is another area that divides us.  In this case, we are divided over the reality of what is happening, or at least over its cause. The same group that celebrates the changes I mentioned above are most concerned about global warming and its consequences. They also accept what most scientists offer as the cause: too much use of fossil fuels. They also support major governmental action to curb such use. On the other hand, those who deplore the social changes I mentioned above, tend either to downplay global warming, or to suggest that it is a judgment from God for all the social changes they deplore. Either way, for them draconian reforms that might harm the economy are not worth the cost, especially if what we really need to do is to “get right with God”, as most of them see it.

Obviously, included in this point is an overall disagreement about the role of government. Unfortunately, both sides have lately resorted to describing the other in pseudo-historical terms like “Fascism” for those who are conservative, and “Communism” for those who liberal. In truth, neither group has ever been very strong in America, nor are they today. Indeed, I would suggest that it is unhelpful to use either term to describe the behaviors one disapproves of.  MTG, whom I deplore, as I have made plain on a number of occasions, does not fit the description of a Fascist and neither does Trump. And even professed socialist Democrats, like Sanders, are not even close to being communists. The people who specialize in crazy conspiracy theories like QAnon are not identifiable with any past ideology, and as crazy as their ideas are, they are a contemporary phenomenon made possible by the internet and social media.  It is not illuminating of their behavior to call them Fascists.

It is fair to say that, on the conservative side of this divide, there has been a loss of faith in democracy. But to be honest, it was never as strong among those individuals as it was among those to their left. From the earliest days of our republic, there has been those who feared the masses, and as the masses became more non-white, that fear has only increased.  So, it is not surprising that the Republican Party in Georgia and around the country spent last year trying to make voting more difficult, and the Democrats to make it more inclusive.  But neither group is Fascist or Communist for doing so.

I expect I could mention more sources of our social and intellectual divide today, but I think we have enough to work with for what I do want to discuss. Behind our deep divide in America, and much of the world, is a fundamentally different attitude toward the modern world, which has produced all the social changes I have described. Those who approve of allowing gays to marry, or people to have abortions, or mixed racial marriages, tend to be comfortable with the world the way it has been evolving since the seventeenth century. They also tend not to be religiously conservative, if they are religious at all, as are those who oppose the things I mentioned.

Let me give you some examples of what I am talking about. In 2004, on Christmas Day, there was a tsunami off the coast of Indonesia that took the lives of about 250,000 people. Six months later, I found an article in a Canadian journal that listed the various reasons people have given for this tragedy. Scientists pointed out that an earthquake was the cause and suggested better early warning systems would have saved lives. The folks I am calling liberals were happy with this explanation. But many among the conservatives were not. They preferred a divine explanation. The Christians among this group blamed Islam and said God was punishing Muslims for their beliefs and, no doubt, for the sins committed by Radical Islamists as well.  Muslims blamed fellow Muslims for not being faithful about their daily prayers, or other sins. A Jewish Rabbi in Jerusalem suggested that God was generally unhappy with human behavior, and a Hindu in India suggested it was because of the arrest of a Hindu leader for murder.

To be sure, most religious people of all faiths agreed with the scientists.  But there is a group of people who belong to all sorts of religions who are profoundly unhappy with our tendency to rely upon scientific explanations for what happens in our world. They recognize that the role for God has been vastly diminished in the last 300 years. Before the modern world, everything that happened was in some way a result of divine action. Now, everything has to be explained by some scientific law or social scientific principle. Time was when mental illness was explained by demons; now demons are relegated to entertainment. I suspect that this is the reason many of these conservatives are so hostile to Harry Potter. Witches are evil and not supposed to be the stuff of heroes.

More to the point for my conservatives, to suggest that humans are causing global warming is to suggest that God is not in charge, but we are. From their perspective, if God wanted the climate problems to cease, they would cease, and until He chooses to do it, global climate problems will continue and even get worse. Obviously, those of us who follow science on this matter, would agree that until something changes, things will get worse, much worse. But we think the problem is of our own making, not God’s. And the solution lies in our actions, not in repentance or prayer. (Unless it is prayer to change the hearts of those who don’t recognize the nature of the problem.) Clearly, two different world views are operating here, and that makes working together very difficult.

One other illustration must suffice for making my point. Once when I was at the Tellus Museum planetarium I overheard a father of two young boys, coming out of the presentation, say “Remember boys, it’s only a theory.” I don’t know what he was concerned about, but I suspect that his universe has only about 6000 years to play with, and what they heard about in the presentation would have required billions to accomplish. This is another area of difficulty between the two distinctive world views that I have been describing.

Christian conservatives also reject evolution because it contradicts the Bible; indeed, any scientific idea that contradicts a literal understanding of scripture, as they understand scripture, must be similarly rejected. It simply cannot be true or the Bible itself is false and their faith is a lie.

In the late Middle Ages, some thinkers came up with a way to reconcile scripture and what they observed in nature called the “doctrine of the two truths”. Basically, it suggested there was one truth for the ordinary person, which was based on scripture and the authority of the church.  The other truth was for the scientists who obeyed the truths of their observations. To be sure, the authorities did not see it that way; but since the modern world came to dominate Western European and American thinking, after the Enlightenment, the doctrine of the two truths is about all that conservative religious groups can hope for. Scientific truth has become the norm, and religious deviation has very little influence in the matter.  And conservative religious thinkers are very much aware of their situation.

I have often suggested that people today can be divided into four groups. One group I call the ultra-modernists insist the only scientific questions are real questions, and only scientific answers can be true. So, the question of God’s existence, for instance, is a non-question, certainly one that cannot be proven (agnosticism); therefore, it must be dismissed.  This is sometimes called “scientism.”

On the other extreme is my second group whom I call “neo-traditionalists.” They maintain that only questions compatible with their religious views are legitimate, and only answers compatible with their religious views can be true. As I mentioned, for some Evangelical Christians, evolution cannot be true because it violates scripture, as they understand it. Some also reject relativity for the same reason.

Most people don’t belong to either of these groups. Instead, I suggest, most people belong to my third group. I don’t have a good name for them so I will use “bothworlders”. Not very pretty, but perhaps clarifying. This group lives in both worlds. They accept the basic scientific view of reality. But they also know that many important questions, like the existence of God, cannot be answered through science, and they look to their philosophies or religions to deal with such questions. This is a more complex approach to life because absolute certainty is hard to come by, and there are many places where the two worlds this group inhabits collide.

Oh, the fourth group? I call them “the Rhett Butler Contingent.”  “Frankly my dear,” he said to Scarlet, “I don’t give a damn.” This group does not have a lot of influence, but I mention them in the interest of completeness.

“What does all this amount to,” I can hear you saying. “How does it relate to the problem of our divided world?” In the middle of the twentieth century, Thomas S. Kuhn published a book entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolution, which suggested, among other things, that once a scientific model, he called it a “paradigm”-comes to be accepted, every practitioner of science discards the old ideas and embraces this new one. Old scientists die off and the younger ones, trained in the new understanding, didn’t know anything about the older view anyway. This happens, he suggested, because these two scientific models are “incommensurable.”  I am not sure he was right about old paradigms totally dying out, but I think incommensurability is very helpful if we allow for more than one social “paradigm” in America today. It helps to explain why our divide is so great. We simply cannot understand what one another is talking about.

I have attended several Evolution-Creationism conferences in my time and inevitably, the two sides talk past one another. There is simply no ground of commonality. I find that to be true in our society as well.  It seems rather obvious to me that Trump lost the last election. But to many Republicans, the only thing obvious about that election is that it was stolen. I am certain of the soundness of my reality, but so are they.

What this means is that there will be no easy resolution to our dilemma. The best we can hope for is to promote acceptance of our differences. Here I think the folks in groups one and three (with whom I tend to side) could help promote a little more comity if they were more tolerant of the folks in group two, whom I realize tend not to be very tolerant of us. But our point of view is in the majority and controls most of the media and almost all the academic teaching and publishing world. The conservatives are threatened, and I can understand why.  Modernism has been attacking and eroding traditional ways of life since it arose.

It is particularly unhelpful to insist that because ones scientific approach leaves him/her no place for any divine actor, acceptance of scientific ideas that have borne the test of time like relativity and evolution require that everyone reach the same philosophical/theological conclusion thy have. This was the gist of Richard Dawkin’s the Blind Watchmaker.  In the first place, they don’t, but more to the point, it is asking too much of people to expect them to embrace a scientific idea if it means losing their eternal salvation. They will always find a way to reject the science. The cost is too high.

Instead, I recommend Stephen Gould’s approach.  He waged war with creationism throughout his career, but he also wrote a thoughtful book, Rocks of Ages, in which he sought to find common ground with them.  As he put it, both groups are guided by what he termed “non-overlapping magisteria” and the two can get along amiably if they agree to recognize our differences. I know, it is a rather post-modern conclusion for someone like me who does not care for post-modernism to come to. But that is where I am now.  If you have any other ideas, please comment.

In my last few blogs, I have explored what I see to be the changes in society that are causing many white, mostly rural and even elderly Americans to be anxious about the nation’s future and incline them to doubt our system and to look to a ‘strong man” like Trump for answers. Many of those same people are conservative Christians of whatever stripe.

              In this blog, I want to explore the anxieties of those on the other side of the political divide. Their anxieties are very different in character. They are likely to welcome the changes I described earlier. Their concerns arise out of their realization that our political system is configured in such a way as to give preference to the concerns of those who fear change, despite the fact that they are clearly in the minority.  I think they are right to be concerned. If Trump is reelected in 2024 and does the things he is talking about doing, our government will become unrecognizable, and those who support him will not have to worry so much about most of the changes I have outlined in earlier blogs: they will have to worry about America sinking into national senility as we get hotter and hotter and more and more divided.

              To be sure, Conservatives have long pointed out that we are not a democracy, but a republic. Where the Founding Fathers are concerned, they are correct.  But what they are incorrect about is that over the last two hundred years, we have been inching ourselves closer and closer to a democracy. I won’t bore you with a long history lesson, but I must tick off a few examples of what I am talking about. When the nation began, only white-male-property owners could vote. Now all citizens over eighteen can vote, regardless of ethnicity, literate or non-literate, property owners or paupers, males or females, and those whose gender is non-binary.

              When this country began, what we voted for was our Representative to Congress.  We did not vote for Senators, and we still don’t vote for the President: we vote for electors, but a number of people clearly do not like it when the new President does not win the popular majority. No matter what Conservatives say, the American people want to be in control of their lives, and they resent it when government seems to be working to the advantage of a rich and privileged minority.

              The resentment from the liberal side of the aisle is that while the majority of Americans say they approve of the measures liberals support, the way our government works, the minority party- the Republicans at present, is able to manipulate the system to enable them to thwart those changes and protect the wealthy in doing so. Let me explain how that works.

              First, the Constitution was set up to make sure that popular influences were not able to express themselves. The Founding Fathers were clearly afraid of the “mob” and created a Constitution that protected our society against it. One way to do that was the have a two house legislature , one popularly elected, based on population, and the other appointed, with two members from each state. To be sure, we now elect our Senators (although some Republicans would like to change that and go back to what the Fathers had originally intended).  Even so, this body is a boon to conservatism.  Here I have to remind you of the map of voting by geographic distribution I mentioned in an earlier blog.  Recall that rural states are more numerous than urban ones and these states tend to vote more conservatively than the ones that have large urban populations. In other words, some people’s votes have more power in them than others where the Senate in concerned, and both Senate and House must approve legislation for it to become law.  This stumbling block to change was intentional where the Founding Fathers were concerned.

              Second, the popular house is itself not really popular. In times past, when Republicans controlled the House as they may well do again after November- the total number of House votes cast for Republicans in the country was always less than for Democrats, even though Republicans gained more seats.  Why? Because of the districting process.  Governors  draw district lines in such a way to guarantee their party’s control even without a popular majority, gerrymandering. Lately Republican governors have been utilizing these techniques very effectively and the current Supreme Court has ruled that such practices are constituional.

              There is another problem with the House.  The term only lasts for two years, and most of the time, all House members are running for office.  They certainly cannot be expected to work on legislation that involves reaching across the aisle for a compromise. The recent near paralysis we have seen in government in the last decade or so is the result.

              We need to make some revisions in our system of government, revisions that would get us back on the road to becoming a true democracy.  First, we need to adopt a system of directly electing the President.  The Electoral College should be done away with.

              Second, we should adopt a system of voting whereby people may vote for candidates in rank order, much like they use in Alaska now. Using this system, we would no longer need runoffs; and the person most people most prefer would be selected for office.  It would also diminish the influence of political parties, and come closer to what the Founding Fathers were thinking in the bargain.

              Third, we should amend the Constitution to require mandatory retirement of Supreme Court Judges once they have served for ten or, at most, fifteen years. As we see in the court now, the majority of the justices reflect the most conservative thinking in the country.  Their recent decisions are not in keeping with the sentiments of most people in the country.  Often in our history, the court has been  manned by people of advanced years who were out of touch with the thinking of people in the country. If you placed a limit on how many years a justice can serve, as we do with every other office in the country, it would help to keep the court more in sync with the rest of society.

I invite your thoughts.

In my last blog I discussed four major changes that have occurred in my lifetime, changes that divide the nation along urban-rural lines.  In this one, I will finish my list. In the previous one, I named race, alcohol, sex , and homosexuality. I did not finish sex- really gender- so I am picking that up in this blog.

Traditionally, women were supposed to obey their husbands, stay home and look after the children, keep the house, and cook the meals. I suppose the country song Stand by Your Man puts it best.  But a few years ago, there was a new country hit, Goodbye Earl[1].  That better describes what has been happening where the place of women is concerned. When I was young, a slightly older women I knew had to quit her job to escape the sexual harassment of her boss. A few years ago, this kind of behavior became big news, and the “Me Too” movement made us aware how many women and men have had this experience, which we are at last beginning to address. Men are now going to prison for such behavior.   In part, it is because women are a vital part of the American labor force, and they know it. They also are no longer prepared to accept such abuses.

Some men have responded to the emergence of the powerful woman by claiming that men are under attack and masculinity is in danger.  Studies of men’s attitudes towards women suggest that there is a stronger preference for patriarchy among Evangelical men than is found among other groups. They justify it on Biblical grounds, to be sure.  Once again, the familiar urban/rural divide is evident, although some men in all ethnic groups are anxious about the changes they are witnessing in gender relations. It sheds further light on why we are such a divided nation.  

Gender consciousness also helps us understand why the recent Supreme Court decision overthrowing Roe v Wade is so important. Many of those who did not agree with the court’s decision see it as an attack on women. Since African American and other ethnic minority women are the ones most likely to suffer from the decision, they see it as a racially motivated: To them it is a matter of women’s rights.

The real problem for the court is that most Americans today did not want Roe to be overturned. The Pew Research Center reports that the numbers here are much higher than the support for same-sex marriage.  Abortion opponents are overjoyed that the court has ruled in their favor, but in doing it, they did not win the hearts and minds of people on this issue, any more than they did on alcohol or sexual behavior. They exploited problems in our political system I will discuss in a later blog.  But now that a few pills can replace the need for a visit to a clinic, the ability to police this change will be even more difficult than it was before Roe.

The pro-life proponents see themselves as protecting unborn children. From their perspective, the fetus has as much right to exist as does its mother. They are looking out for the interests of a group that has not been looked after since Roe. But the decision was made without making provisions for problems that can arise and are arising rapidly where pregnancy is concerned.  Shortly after Dobbs v Jackson was announced, for example, a raped and pregnant 10-year-old left her home in Ohio, a state that has now outlawed abortion, and went to another (Illinois) to have the procedure. Some opponents of abortion in her home state said this ten-year old should have carried the baby to term. Others opined that subjecting her to an abortion was as horrible an assault to her as the rape had been. Circumstances in which woman facing a miscarriage are not receiving timely medical care because it may violate the new and often vaguely worded anti-abortion laws in many Red states are also beginning to surface. Doubtless in the future, some women will die as a result. Finally, while a few Red states are aware that they need to help women who decide to carry a baby to term rather than abort it, most are among the most regressive where such assistance is concerned. It goes along with their anti-government positions. I fear it will be poor women who suffer from the decision as rich ones can simply travel to another state for the procedure.

Worse still, many of these children will grow up in poverty and face a life of hardships. A few years ago, Freakenomics reported that after Roe had been in effect for a decade or so, crime rates began to fall in many American cities.  They connected the fall to the decline in babies born into poverty, because it is desperately poor women who resort to abortion in the first place. Will this trend be reversed? I can’t know, but I suspect that it will. The only way it would not would  be is if Red states began to change their attitudes toward their poorer classes and tackle the problem of growing up in poverty in America. That is not likely.

To be sure, the opponents of abortion want to make it a national statue to outlaw the procedure. Likewise, some want to pass laws to prevent people from obtaining abortion pills through the mail. Some are prepared to curb peoples’ ability to travel in order to prevent women traveling from one state to another to obtain the treatment. And of course, there are unscrupulous and unsafe abortion providers who will attempt to profit from the changes that we have made.  With fifty different abortion laws, enforcement will likely begin to look like it did in the days of prohibition. Already, we are seeing some urban officials in Red states suggesting they will not be in any hurry to enforce their state’s strict anti-abortion laws.   Those who are happy with Dobbs will have to defend it and fight to prevent a new national law being passed. If, as I expect, they ultimately fail, they will be very unhappy and likely begin again.

So, here is another thorny issue about which we are sorely divided and about which a compromise solution seems almost impossible to reach.

A further controversial Supreme Court decision this term had to do with the EPA’s ability to enforce anti-pollution laws.  The environment is another area in which red and blue, rural and urban America are at odds. This one is especially interesting because until recently, it was not a partisan issue. Both parties were concerned about climate change and anxious to do something to protect against it, but now it is a partisan issue.  I will deal with that aspect next time.  My point here is that climate control has become a culture-wars issue, also.  Religiously conservative groups are inclined to dismiss pollution as an issue, or to say it is a judgment from God for one of our many sins, especially the ones I have discussed above- take your pick or choose them all.  Above all, they are inclined to say that we cannot do anything about the problem because it is God who is in charge.  As in my other cases, this sort of argument makes more sense in rural areas than urban ones, as that is where the preponderant number of Conservative Christians reside. The authority of science is not the same in Red and Blue America.

We experienced a similar divide over Covid.  At first there was some Black resistance to wearing masks, but  it soon faded, and true to form, it was the white/rural population that most strongly resisted Federal and state governments’ efforts to control the infection by mandating wearing masks or controlling our comings and goings. That, too, became political; I will return to it in the next piece.

I expect there are some changes I have omitted. You can tell me about them. In my next blog, I want to explore how our political system is not meeting our needs and how that plays into the cultural divide we are living with at present. I expect you can see how what I have been writing naturally calls out for a political discussion. My point has been that we have come to a place in our national story where rural/conservatives see that the moment of decision has arrived. For them, we must either change and return to the ways of the past, or their hope of a future for America is gone. My wife knew a couple after the defeat of Barry Goldwater who so despaired of the future of America that they sold everything and were going to immigrate to Australia. There are a number of Americans who share that sentiment today after Trump’s defeat, but they cannot think about moving and they now live in an America where media and politicians offer them hope that they can change the system one way or another. They thought Trump would be their savior. He was not. He may try again. To be sure, they have not given up.

I share their fear that we are at a crossroads in American history. I do not share their specific fears because of the changes I have enumerated, but I am afraid that, in the future, their fears may well result in a nation crippled by them.  I could give you a number of historical examples of nations that faced similar challenges and chose to respond by refusing to change. The future for those nations was not good. Returning to a lost, idealized past is seldom a successful path for a nation to follow.  We are no less susceptible to this principle than any other people in history have been. How we deal with the problems we now face in the next decade or maybe two will determine whether you grow old in a free, vibrant America, or in a retiring, constricted shell of what we used to be.  Time will tell.  You will decide.

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[1] If you missed it, the women in the song/video deal with an abusive husband by murdering him, stuffing body into a car, and burying it.

In this blog and the next, I will present my case for what is behind the urban-rural divide that I see as the basis of most of our current political divisions.  

To make my case, I am going to remind you, or inform you (if you are young enough not to remember) of some of the things that have changed in Georgia, just in my lifetime (almost 80 years). Many that were “sacred” when I was a boy are gone or are disappearing fast; some that were unheard of or rarely mentioned then are an established part of our national life today. I will finish my list in the next blog.  Taken together, they are the sources of the fears and anxieties of so many white/rural/Conservative Christian Americans today. Until we have fully defined them, we will not have a chance of figuring out how to deal with our dilemma, how to resolve our political divisions that are based on them. That is what I hope to do, and if I leave anything out, I hope you will tell me. 

First is the matter of race. As much as many Republicans here in Georgia don’t want us to talk about it, at least in our schools, it is probably the most important source of the anxieties and fears of those whom I have collectively called ‘rural’ and ‘small town’ Americans, including those who attacked our nation’s Capital on Trump’s behalf January 6, 2021. Race has been the major source of distress since the founding of our nation, and it was the primary cause that led the South to secede in 1860.  So, I will begin with it.

The first African American I ever met was named “Agnes.” She had a surname, but I never knew it. I called White adults by their last names and said ‘m’am’ and ‘sir’ to them- still do- but I  did not to Agnes. My family was not wealthy, but we did have a maid to come clean the house one day a week. Lots of not too-well-off-white people did in those days.

When I first came to Rome, Black people waited out-of-line at the back of the bank for all the white customers to be helped before they approached the teller.  Blacks rode in the back of the bus and drank from separate water fountains. They even swore on separate Bibles in court.  The idea of an interracial couple, like Justice Thomas and his wife, was totally unthinkable, but so was a Black justice. 

My wife recalls going to the public library in Rome when she was young. The only Blacks who came in were bringing books back for their white employers.  They could not check them out.

This is a major part of our dilemma, not just because of the KKK, White Nationalists, and other white reactionary groups who played such a big part in Trump’s January 6 rebellion. No, the real problem is ordinary white people who didn’t go to Washington and would not attack the Capitol. They are people who are afraid because the White majority-status they have always enjoyed is rapidly disappearing, not only because of Blacks, but also because of Hispanics, Asians, and other groups who have higher birth rates than Whites. We Whites will soon be another minority in the land of e pluribus unum, only some of us are not so sure about the “one” anymore. While Whites have always feared the peril of the non-White ‘other,’ the descent into minority status for many is hard and the prospect frightens many White people. You need look no further to understand the success of Donald Trump than to acknowledge this fear. 

I could go on, but I expect you get the point. As much as White Nationalists, like the ones who came to Rome a few years ago, want to reverse our history to “save the White race from extinction”, they are not going to succeed. Too much has changed. They will continue trying, and some politicians will continue trying to use their votes to stay in power. Race continues to be a major problem that divides us.

Second, when I was a boy in Smyrna, Ga, my father used to ‘go down to the river’ because he was thirsty, and Cobb County was dry.  It was not the water of course, it was booze, his nemesis. In the seventies, if my wife and I wanted a bottle of wine for supper, we had to make a journey either over to Centre, Alabama, or down to Cobb County “to the river”, or up to Chattanooga and then bootleg it back into Rome. Wine and liquor could not be purchased here, or anywhere around here. Fast forward to the present and you can buy anything, anywhere, just about all the time, including Sunday (afternoon).  Evangelical Christians have thrown in the towel on this one.  It is a big change in our way of life, one that many object to and are still concerned about.

Third, I recall a story told by one of my wife’s elderly male relatives, who watched a certain soap opera every day because one commercial break featured a woman in her bath, judiciously covered with soap bubbles. He said he never gave up hope that one day one of those bubbles would pop, and he planned to be there when it did. They never did.  Now there are no longer any bubbles! Sex and adultery are as regular a part of our entertainment as G-rated family sitcoms used to be.

Equally important is the change in attitude toward marriage and divorce.  Indeed, marriage is no longer chosen by many couples, even those who do choose to have children.  And the fact that they can choose to have children, (legalized contraception) is itself a major part of the change. Sexual relations in our country have been undergoing significant transformations most of my life, not without distress for all involved.  It is another source of great concern, especially to the more traditional and mostly rural people I am focusing on. Justice Thomas, in his remarks following the Dobbs v Jackson Health case that overturned Roe v Wade, suggested that now the court should revisit the decision that made contraception legal. He is not alone in that belief.

Fourth, closely related to my last point, is the end of sodomy laws and the legalization of gay marriage. The first time I ever heard of homosexuality was during my teens when my father had a rather unpleasant encounter with a man who solicited him at his work. I was at that stage when I did not trust what my father said, so I did not believe him. I could not imagine it.  My next encounter was with a college friend who was gay. When I was at Emory, a professor whom I really admired left mid-term because he had been arrested in a gay-sting operation in downtown Atlanta. He was married with children. I was very confused. But most important for me personally, my son was gay, and I came to realize it when he was a teenager. Being gay did not make it any easier for him to grow up. 

Obviously, this falls under the topic of “things never before discussed but now a part of life”. Gays are free to marry just like straights. My church has instituted a marriage service for them that will become the standard service, I was told by my priest.  One of my grandchildren recently graduated from a high school in a metropolitan area that included a gay-support club amongst its student organizations.

The latest Pew Research Center survey suggests that more than half the American population accepts gay marriage as a right. What particularly struck me was a Pew survey a few years ago of various religious groups. Catholics and Evangelicals were the most staunchly opposed to gay marriage and relations. No news there.   But what caught my eye was the report that within these groups, the precent of young Evangelicals concerned about that issue was dropping, and their degree of concern was lessening. The change in attitudes nationally on this issue is one of the most striking I have observed in my life.

Justice Thomas, also in his remarks on the abortion decision,  suggested that since Dobbs v Jackson, the court should reexamine their earlier sodomy and same-sex marriage decisions, as well. There is a significant minority of Americans who agree.  This issue will continue to divide us in the future. In my next blog, I will finish my list.

Introduction

The Republic is in Danger!

              I expect you have heard that a lot lately.  “January 6” was a shock. That so many ordinary people would have participated in an attempt to overturn an election is beyond disturbing. Worse still, there has been no wholesale denunciation of the man who was responsible for the attack on our Capitol. Over one- hundred Republican candidates in this election cycle are running on Trump’s ‘big lie,’ and winning. The next time, we hear, we may not be so lucky.  Why has this happened to us? In this blog I will explore what I see to be the general causes, and in subsequent ones, I will explore them in more detail. I am listening to my wise wife/editor who reminded me that people do not sign on to a blog to have to read a weighty tome. Therefore, I will present my case in several consecutive posts that will appear rather quickly, one followed by the next.

               The most common explanation is that we are a divided nation. I can’t fault that observation, but the question is:  Why are we so divided at this time? That is what I want to explore in this series of blogs.  I do not think we will get out of this situation quickly. We may not even survive as a free society.  If you are a young person, you may grow old in a very different America, one in which meaningful political life is a thing of the past. Your personal options may well be more limited than they are now.  Democracies have been destroyed in the past, and many of the things happening today are similar to what happened in other failed democratic states.

              I recently participated in a VBS at my church. It was for adults as well as children; the adults discussed Joseph Campbell’s idea of the “hero’s journey” as related to the Christian-life journey. I led the adult discussion, and some very interesting ideas were floated. One was the realization that Campbell is not just talking about the great and mighty.  He was really saying that life for everyone is a hero’s journey, if we will let it be- many such journeys, actually.

That led me to wonder: Do nations also go on the heroes’ journeys? Are we on a hero’s journey at present? Might we come out of this a better nation?

I thought about our nation’s history. For example, was the Civil War such a journey from which we emerged a better nation? Perhaps, but I am not sure. You see, in the first place, Southerners did not see themselves as the evil oppressors who were violating Christian principles by enslaving their labor force, all of whom were of African descent. On the contrary, they saw the North as the place of evil and factory labor as a more heartless institution than slavery itself. Factory work, what Marxists called “wage slavery,” was rather inhumane in the nineteenth century. When that war ended, we were a long way from workers receiving a decent wage and being able to retire in dignity with a pension and social security, such as many laborers enjoy today. We would have to wait, at least until the New Deal, for that struggle to begin to make headway, and we are not there yet. If anything, we have been regressing lately, as all the studies on the decline of the middle class suggest.

  It also occurred to me that when the Civil War was over and slavery was defeated and outlawed, white Southerners did not realize the error of their ways, repent of their sin of racism, and welcome their former slaves as equal citizens of the republic.  Instead, they created the “myth of the lost cause” and adorned our public squares with thousands of statues honoring those who had labored in it. Until 1952, Nathan Bedford Forrest was ensconced on Broad Street. To this day, most Southern states still honor Confederates in the National Statuary Hall.  We insist on having traitors to the nation represent our states over a century-and-a-half after this insurrection was defeated. Our representative in Washington, MTG, has even taken to suggesting that maybe we should end our experiment and become two nations, much as the South tried to do in the mid-19^th century.  Yet, recently, a prominent Southern Baptist leader called upon his co-religionists to repent of the sin of racism and ask God for forgiveness. I am not sure how many heeded his call, but I do know that the church doors are no longer shut to non-white people as they were when I was a teen growing up at Smyrna First Baptist.  It is also worth pointing out that both of our candidates for the U.S. Senate at this time are African Americans. So, things are not what they were when I was a boy, and yet we are not a society where race no longer matters, either.

As much as I deplore MTG, she has put her finger on something significant in terms of the crisis of our nation when she talked about breaking up the union.  We are a sorely divided nation. She is wrong in one aspect, though; it is not regional as she claimed. Everyone in the South or West would not line up to leave the Union if she could give the people in these areas that opportunity.  A lot of rural people in both regions would, but people in urban areas mostly would not. And the same generalization is true for New Yorkers.  Rural Upstate New York is not like “the Big Apple”.  That is the core of our problem: We are a nation divided between urban and rural areas, both having very different values and both wanting to lead very different ways of life. Urban centers are more comfortable with change and creativity, while rural areas are more traditional and reluctant to change. Additionally, rural and small town America is more white, and anxious about non-white incursions. Their people are also more traditionally religious and prone to lead traditional moral lives than those who live in the “wicked cities”.

You may be thinking, hasn’t this always been true? Jefferson and Hamilton were at odds in great part because Jefferson represented the rural world and Hamilton had a vision of an America that would be urban-centered.  Early in the twentieth century we had more lynching than ever, especially in the twenties when American was fast shifting over to an urban-dominated society.  This was the time when Madison Grant published his encomium to white racism, The Passing of the Great Race, and we passed the most restrictive immigration laws of our history.  Even prohibition itself has been recognized by social scientists to have been as much motivated by fear of immigrants as it was about fear of alcohol. So why, a century and a half after we survived the Civil War, are we in such a state of conflict with one another that the survival of the nation is in question?

 I want to suggest that it is because those people who, just as in the past, follow traditional ways of life, who mostly live in rural America and are mostly white and conservative Christians, today see their way of life under threat from those in urban areas (mostly non- white), but in ways that have never been true before and ways that are unlikely to go away in the future. As they see it, our nation is changing and becoming something alien to them, and they think that if they do not act now, their world will be lost forever. Their chance to change, to reverse the situation, will be lost. They thought Trump was the one to save them and their America. When he was defeated, they easily fell for his lies, and some were prepared to use violence to express their anger and fears. As they saw it, to do their patriotic and, indeed, Christian duty.

In truth, they are partly right. Their world is rapidly disappearing, but in the end, they will not be able to stop it. They could, however, transform America into a place they are more comfortable in or even tear it apart altogether. It is these fears that have convinced many of them of the need to throw our democracy overboard.

They may not see it that way. They are likely to say they are protecting the nation from aliens who should not be here anyway.  But the end result, if Turmpians like MTG and many who are attracted to her, have their way in the next decade or so, could well be the destruction of the nation as we know it.

They are aware that they are significantly outnumbered, and every decade those numbers turn against them even more. If you look at the ‘red states’ v ‘blue states’ on a map, most of the acreage of the U.S. is very ‘red.’ But if you look at the places where people are concentrated, they are mostly ‘blue.’  The more we move toward a true democracy where everyone who wants to votes, the more red-state people see their ideas and values threatened because they are outnumbered. They know this and so did Trump.  As do Republicans. To make this case, I am planning a series of blogs.

In the next two, I want to demonstrate all the ways in which our nation has changed in my lifetime of almost eighty years. I will demonstrate that all these changes go against the grain of traditional people in America today.

In the fourth or perhaps fourth and fifth, I want to examine how the defects in our political system are also contributing to our dilemma. Many of the structures in our government, designed by the Founders to protect against the mob, now work to guarantee that a minority of rural-white Americans exercise more power than their numbers entitle them to. Our current party structure is also part of the problem.  In the last, I will try to tie it all together.

The next decade will determine how much of the rest of the twenty-first century will play out for Americans. Those of you who will be living in that America will decide and live with the consequences of your decisions. Choose wisely.  Paraphrasing Ben Franklin, you have a republic and a free society, if you can keep it.

I have been wondering what I could do after the recent spate of mass shootings. Perhaps you have been, too. I have been writing about politics in this blog and wanted to continue that line of discussion, but I feel the issue of gun violence is more urgent. I will come back to voting and my ideas about how to change the way we do that later.

Janet, my wife /editor, found this in the Rome News: “Turn Your Back on Hate — a local nonprofit activist organization — is holding a Rise Up Against Gun Violence rally on Saturday, June 4, at 1:30 p.m. in front of the Rome-Floyd Law Enforcement Center at 5 Government Plaza”.

I joined this group some years ago when a Neo-Nazi group came to Rome, so I decided to don my “Turn Your Back on Hate” shirt and join them again to see what we could contribute to the cause of reducing gun violence in America.

The crowd was not large. Maybe thirty. We did not demonstrate or stop traffic or do anything disruptive. A few passers-by stopped to look at us out of curiosity, but they did not join us. We listened to speeches, most of which said all the things we are used to hearing, things that I am afraid were like “preaching to the choir.” We were encouraged to write to our elected officials, and I was able to send an urgent message to MTG, full of fire and venom- to no avail, I am sure.

The most impressive speech of the occasion was given by a nineteen-year-old whose name I did not catch.  She catalogued the incidences of mass shootings of school children that have punctuated all of the nineteen years of her life, and concluded by saying that her generation has been marked by gun violence against children.

On the way home, I remembered a piece by Margaret Mead, the noted anthropologist, who suggested that my generation had been marked by growing up under the shadow of the atomic bomb. The young lady’s remarks became more poignant for me. I had never thought of this current recurring nightmare in quite the way she put it.

I confess I have been unable to write about guns and mass shootings because I could not think of anything to say that had not been said. I am horrified, as I expect you are. But the truth is that people on both sides of this matter are horrified. Most of those who oppose gun control are not heartless people who don’t care about massacred children. They truly believe that gun control, the obvious answer to the problem for those at the rally, is no answer at all.  Saturday’s rally inspired me to say something that I think will be of value. Let me know what you think.

First, the best approach should not be to demonize those who disagree with us, but to try to take advantage of the common ground that does exist between us that might lead to the removal of weapons-that-kill from our reality. That common ground is our shared reaction of horror to what is happening and will doubtless continue to happen until we do something.

Second, we do not have to convince Democrats of the pressing need for action. They have offered a number of gun control measures for decades now.  We have to persuade Republicans and some Independents. It is they who have stood in in the way of meaningful solutions for decades. The truth is, they have blocked what Democrats want to try but offered no solutions of their own, other than condolences and prayers. (It is much like they way they approached health care, if you remember.)  My point is, we should put the onus for this situation on their backs. We should try to persuade them that this nightmare will continue until they join us in fixing the situation.  If they do not like the solutions Democrats are offering, they must pressure their representatives to offer something else instead.  We should all be demanding solutions, and that “we” includes our Republican friends who are also sickened by the slaughter. Indeed, nothing will change without their support. Democrats alone cannot solve this problem.

Recently I read of a Republican who was running for reelection and backed out of the race because he could no longer support the IRA-dominated policies of his party. Of course, that means the Republican who takes his place will. But it is encouraging that a young Republican member of Congress with impeccable conservative credentials would take this morally strong stance against his own party’s position on gun control, even though it is costing him his seat in Congress.

In the Monday, June 5 edition of the NYT, Will Hurd, the Congressional Representative for Uvalde, Texas, argued for a multifaceted approach to the gun problem that included mental health initiatives and gun control measures, including the current House Democratic sponsored measure. He is a loyal NRA member and enjoys their support, but feels that something must be done to make us safe.  Are these small signs of a crack in the solid Republican phalanx against gun law reform? I certainly hope so. In any event, they should be encouraged.

One thing loyal Republicans could do is to encourage such voices in their party and not simply kowtow to the leadership that seems to be under the thumb of the NRA. It would also help if NRA members themselves wrote to that organization, demanding a change in their position, even threatening to withdraw support from them if they do not.

In our district the majority of people support the NRA and its positions.  Many think gun control is both absurd and even anti-religious. The Neo- Nazis did not choose to come to Rome for no reason.  MTG moved to our district because she knew she could get elected.  So, our problem locally is to change the thinking of our fellow citizens, those who would not have applauded the speakers at the rally but who are horrified by the massacres.

I am hoping that our nineteen-year-old speaker may provide a clue  to how to proceed.  If she and others her age, especially young Republicans, are similarly affected by seeing the young slaughtered in defense of gun rights, perhaps as young voters and when they become parents and have children of their own to worry about, they will demand that their Republican representatives change their policies.  Young Republicans could play a significant role in effecting this policy shift.

I will offer my Republican friends a counter argument to the oft repeated claim that it is not guns, but people, who cause this problem. Mental illness is the problem and so gun laws are no help, they argue. Let’s admit that mass murderers are suffering from some mental problem.  It makes sense that anyone in this “right mind” would not shoot small children, or worshipers in a church, or shoppers in a mall, etc. But my question to you is, “If you agree with me, why then do you support a policy that makes it easy for disturbed people to obtain weapons that enable them to kill on a massive scale? That is what your Republican policies are doing. “

More to the point, if it is mental illness, why does your party not support massive improvements in support for treatment of mental illness? In the state of Texas, Republicans cut spending for mental illness significantly under the present Republican administration.  In other words, why are Republicans doing nothing except offering condolences and prayers? I would say, as some of the speakers did yesterday, the time for prayers and condolences is over! It would help if Republicans who really are disturbed by mass shootings would say the same thing very loudly to their candidates.

One argument of those who oppose gun control is that it simply does not work. But the evidence is dead against them.  In the U.S., mass shootings went down when we outlawed military-style weapons, and since that law expired, the number of such shootings has risen steadily every year. In other countries, like Australia and New Zealand, following a mass shooting, gun laws were enacted, and they have not had such horrors since.

We can find a way to legislate gun control that does not violate the Second Amendment. Afterall the Second Amendment does not allow people to buy bazookas, nor flame throwers, nor tanks.

Why should we allow military style weapons or multiple round firing magazines to be sold to civilians in the first place? These are only useful to criminals or the insane, outside of the military and law enforcement officers. Why defend their right to kill or rob innocent people under the guise of the Second Amendment?

One of the most absurd legal realities in Georgia is that a young man of eighteen may not buy alcohol and cigarettes, but he can buy an AR-15 and take it away, without a background check! Republican legislatures are totally responsible for this situation. It will take pressure from Republicans to change the situation.

In other words, Republicans, if you do not like the ideas proposed by Democrats, and you agree that mass killings in America are unacceptable, what measures will you support that would make mass shooting become a distant memory? It should be of utmost importance to you to protect our children, your children or grandchildren for that matter, as much as it is for you work to protect a citizen’s rights to gun ownership because of the Second Amendment? And nothing less than a successful solution is acceptable. The clock is ticking.  Every week there is a new horror for which your party and by extension you are responsible. What are you going to do and how quickly will you do it? We Democrats are on board with making changes to make us safe again. Won’t you join with us to make it happen.

I invite your observations.

p.s Please send my observations to any of your Republican friends. It is a conversation we need to be having. They are the key to the solution.

Well, I did it; I voted in the Republican Primary.

It felt a bit strange, but it helped that I did not have to say the word “Republican” out loud.  I checked the ballot I desired from a computer screen, and the poll worker did not even see what I chose. (Last time, I voted absentee, so these machines were new to me.) Now that it is done, though, I am asking myself, “Was it worth it?” MTG won by a sizeable majority. According to the Rome News Tribune, she won by so many votes that if every Democrat in the district had done what I did, she would still have won.

Kemp also won and that was good, in terms of embarrassing Trump, although if Kemp had been forced into a run-off with Purdue that would have been better, in terms of the general election. Should I have voted for Purdue? Would not have mattered much anyway, the margins were too great.

I will start getting Republican mail, perhaps even a questionnaire. That could be fun. I could answer all the questions like a Democrat! What if all the Democrats who voted in the Republican Primary and subsequently receive Republican questionnaires fill them out like Democrats?  Just a thought.

Before the election, I was planning to launch a movement I was going to name “G-dogs”, which would stand for “Georgia Democrats Opposed to Gerrymandering.” The idea was to invite all such folks to use this acronym to try influencing Republican political behavior by threatening them with the vote in future primaries. Now I am not so sure. We don’t have a lot of clout in this district. I can’t imagine the Republicans will be scared. They have been working on this for decades. Voting in the other party’s primary may make you feel good, but it won’t change the situation. Only a change in state government can do that.

The general election is the most important issue.  For me, Walker’s victory is the most disturbing. Will the Democratic vote among African Americans be diluted because a young, handsome, wealthy, and famous athlete who is Black is running for Senator? I hope not.

Walker himself will be running against Biden, not Warnock. That has often been a formula that works. Also, that way he is less likely to make mistakes or reveal what he stands for, if he stands for anything. It will be up to Warnock, in their debates, to force him to say something and make mistakes.

One other disturbing figure I noted.  There were a lot more Republican votes cast than Democratic ones in the all the major races.  Some of them were Democrats like me but not enough to overcome the vote differential. Did lots of Democrats simply not turn out to vote in the mid-term because there was not much riding on the outcome? Or are the Republican voter suppression tactics working? Perhaps African Americans are disillusioned with the party and just tuning all this out? I don’t know, but if the numbers from this election are a sign of what to expect in the general election, the prospects for Democrats in Georgia are not good.

The Democratic electorate in our district did do well without out my help. Flowers does not have much of a chance, but of the others, he is perhaps the most likely to energize our African American base. He is worth supporting and working for.

We certainly have our work cut out for us.

Voting in the other party’s Primary

Tuesday I am going to do something I never thought I would do. I am going to vote in the Republican Party Primary. Janet, my wife (editor), has done it before.  I have always scorned such behavior, but I have come over to her way of thinking and perhaps moved beyond it. Her motive, as before is to try to do something meaningful about a menace, in this instance our current representative, MTJ, and all the other Trump clones on the ballot. I could not agree with her more.  We also agree that the only chance Democrats in the Fourteenth District have is if enough Trump-clones are defeated in the Primary to cause the Trumpites in the district to stay home on election day. It is a pretty slim chance, but it is the only chance.  It also might help with state-wide races for the same reason.  After all, if Kemp and Raffensperger are on the ballot and not Purdue and Hice, will not the losers and their supporters claim election fraud? And maybe, just maybe, that will persuade lots of people to skip this “rigged” election like they skipped the last one.

You may think that we have no business voting in the other guy’s primary.  It’s an invasion of privacy or crashing a party to which you were not invited. That would be true were it not for the fact that our party’s primary is virtually meaningless because the district has been rigged to guarantee that only Republicans win. So why shouldn’t we have a voice in how the representation for our district is decided. They will not be Democrats in any case. When the party in power resorts to gerrymandering in order to stay in power it leaves members of the opposing parties with no reasonable choice but to vote in the Primary of the majority party of their district.  In Georgia that happens to be the Republican Party for now.  In the past, incidentally, Republicans were known to vote in the Democratic Primary for the same reason.

I said perhaps I moved on beyond Janet’s position and I might add the position of a number of Democrats across the state who have and will be voting in the Republican Primary this time. By that I mean that I am thinking about this as an issue of gerrymandering, broader than simply this election. Defeating MJT and her crowd is important, but it is a bigger problem than just this election. Indeed, I am thinking that so long as the state is gerrymandered, Democrats and Independents alike should vote in the Republican Primary as a matter of course.  Their candidates would come to realize that they cannot win the primary by appealing to the “base” alone. There would be too many Democrat and Independent voters to be ignored and that would change their campaigns and even their political behavior. But that is a matter for another blog.

Don’t forget election day Tuesday, and if you are a Democrat in the Fourteenth District, I hope you will seriously consider voting in the Republican Primary and voting against everyone whom Trump supports! It could really make a difference.