I've been MIA for a while

Americans are at war. With each other.

Yeah, I know. I’ve been maintaining radio silence for quite a while. I haven’t posted since early March. There’s a reason though. A bunch of reasons actually. Before he went down in a plane crash in 1985, singer Ricky Nelson had a hit song, “I’m a rambling man”. That’s been me for a while. In March I rambled out to Joshua Tree to guide five “The Intersection of Race and Life in the United States” conversations. Four at the national park, and one at the Rotary Club. As I write this I’m on my second week on a wildland fire in northern NM. Not the big scary 280,000 acre Hermit Peak Complex you’ve been reading about, but the much smaller 45,000 acre Cerro Pelado (Bare Hill) fire that’s slowly bearing down on the Los Alamos National Lab - birthplace of the atomic bomb. I go out as the guy who is in charge of the medical component, but on this fire I’m only in charge of medical at a remote camp, so it’s given me a bit of time to write. I used to go out a lot, but then Joe Neuhof and I gave birth to The Civil Conversations Project. So now I go out only once or twice a season in order to replenish the old bank account. The rest of the time is dedicated to The Civil Conversations Project.

But those aren’t the reasons I’ve been so silent. When Joe approached me in the parking lot of the Kopeka Coffee shop in Grand Junction in the wake of George Floyd’s murder he was kinda amped up, as was much of the country. “You need to start a nonprofit so you have a platform for your writing. I’ll help you.” Thus was born The Civil Conversations Project. Splat…right there on the asphalt. A platform for my writing and eventually the writing of others.

It wasn’t long before I was asked to come and speak with a couple of law enforcement organizations, and another unexpected birth happened -  “The Intersection of Race and Life in the United States”. Those events were followed by podcasts, a few keynote speaker engagements, and collaborations with prominent companies and institutions that had the potential to blossom into true partnerships. In almost no time I was…not exactly overwhelmed, but scattered. So I kinda took off my writing hat and put on my nonprofit executive hat. Since I know squat about running and growing a nonprofit, or fundraising, the hat didn’t fit well and it hurt my head. A lot. And once again in my life I found myself in a job that I wasn’t enjoying.

Joe kept approaching me and encouraging me to get back to our foundation of writing, and maybe talking. We want to change the way this race thing turns out. We want to end it. There is no need why it actually has to take this many generations. So I’ve taken some time, rambled, and drank my fair share of Dark and Stormies. And Joe’s right. Writing is The Civil Conversations Project’s foundation and talking has become the rebar that gives it strength. Hopefully there will be another documentary here and there. That was fun. And we’ll continue to collaborate with the organizations that have seen us through our first of many learning curves. Organizations and people who had faith in us ‘just because’.  

I took time to think about why I write. What’s the message? I get emails on a frequent basis telling me about this or that interesting Black history story. But the business of The Civil Conversations Project is not to tell interesting stories about Black history that should be taught in school, but aren’t. I write to move the needle. I’ve heard people express more times than I can count, and every poll confirms this, that white Americans tend to think that racism is behind us. Or largely behind us. Or just not that big a deal. Polls have confirmed this going back to the days of slavery. No…I’m not joking. People think racism’s not a thing. Or at the very least, not a thing that has to be confronted and worked on. Racism is so abhorrent to Americans that they just want to will it away. If only.

That being the case, my writing is focused on helping Americans understand where we are on this journey, how we got here, how the past informs the present, how much concerted opposition there is to fixing this problem, and even how much money and effort is devoted to keeping Americans at each other’s throats. And finally how much better off Americans of all stripes would be if we could fix this…which we can.

We’re trying to find somebody to hire to guide us, and do the many, many things that I can’t, or just won’t. She’ll cost money. If you can help us out, great. If you can’t, it’s still great. Because we’ll still get’er done. We’ll still move that damned dial. No doubt the words of Calvin Coolidge are etched into your memory…or maybe not: Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Nobody would refer to me as either talented or a genius. With a whole crap load of poor grades, I somehow managed to graduate from high school, but not from college. And more than once I’ve been referred to as a derelict. But sure as hell I’m persistent.

Since I’ve been absent, I’ve taken a stab at writing a couple of things. I dove into the reparations controversy, egged on by a reparations bill working it’s through California’s state legislature. White America has an unpaid debt to Black Americans. That’s hard to argue with although many people do. But simply handing out cash is not the right approach, not the least of which is because racism is so imbedded in our institutions. Not some of them. All of them. Racism needs to be dismantled. Way down there where the concrete foundation meets the dirt.  A check ain’t gonna to do that.  But I quit working on that when it was pointed out to me by a friend who read my first quick draft that it’s probably way too complex to tackle in any format that is available to me.

I took a stab at writing about Sarah Palin popping up again. Sarah’s claim to fame was igniting the crazies and following in the footsteps of former Vice President Spiro Agnew and pitting Americans against each other. But I dropped that because, well…I’m not sure why.

So now I’m working on helping Americans understand the tie between Cliven Bundy with the current direction and philosophy of the Supreme Court and racism. You remember Cliven. He’s the rancher in Nevada who has refused to pay the government his grazing fees for decades and is the father of the fellow who led the takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in OR in order to bring attention to….well…that part was never clear.

In the meanwhile I’ve edited and resurrected a piece I published about two years ago that sadly is as relevant now as it was in fall of 2020.

And as I wrote this…literally as I wrote this yesterday…another mass shooting took place. Ten people died. Eleven of the 13 who were shot were Black. Evidently there is evidence that the killer had bought into the ‘Great Replacement’ theory being pushed by Tucker Carlson and others that posits that Black and brown immigrants are intentionally being imported to dilute the white majority vote. Yesterday that theory killed 10 Americans.  The FBI is calling it, “Racially motivated”. A friend asked me if I’m as angry as she is. Sadly, I’m not. I’ve become numb. So there you go.

At War With Ourselves

Published September 2020

America has always been an experiment — a country that is constantly zigzagging towards that elusive “more perfect union.” But at times we’ve had national leaders more interested in obtaining power than in what’s perfect for the union. And nothing brings more votes, more power, than provoking fear and hate. Divide…conquer…reap the rewards….rinse…repeat. In America, nothing divides us more than race.

In the late ’60s, presidential consultant Lee Atwater was coaching his nominee and eventual winner about the most efficient way to divide us. Atwater explained his approach: “You start out by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ So you say stuff like, uh…’states rights’ (which is) a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’ ” And just like that politicians continued the use of coded language.

After disgraced vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned from office in 1973 after pleading “No Contest” to tax evasion, reporters accused him of deliberately dividing the American people. His response was, “Dividing the American people has been my main contribution to national politics. I not only plead guilty to this charge, but I am flattered by it.” Agnew first came to national attention when, as governor of Maryland, and in the wake of Doctor Martin Luther King’s murder, he used race-baiting to create fear, hate, mistrust, and division among the residents of Baltimore. And then he bragged about it.

Reflecting years later on the so-called war on drugs,  presidential advisor, John Ehrlichman, admitted: “We (he and the president of the United States of America) knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be… (Black), but by getting the public to associate…Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing (it) heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

When another candidate ran for the presidency in 1980, he campaigned from Philadelphia, Mississippi. Why go to such a small town for such a big announcement? Good acoustics? Probably not. Philadelphia MS was the site where three civil rights activists had been murdered by a sheriff’s deputy and his cronies and buried in a dam 16 years earlier. Coincidence? Nope. The candidate knew exactly what he was doing -  subtly stoking racial fears and resentment. Dividing and conquering. He won the contest.

In 2005,  Ken Mehlman, chairman of one of our political party’s National Conventions, went before the NAACP and apologized for his party’s decades-long Southern Strategy, which deliberately exploited white fears and resentment. "Some (in my party) were looking … to benefit politically from racial polarization … we were wrong." That might have been fine, or at least less horrible, if the strategy had actually ended there. But you hear echoes of that same political strategy today in “Send them back!”,  “Shit-hole countries”, “They’re rapists and murderers”, and “George Floyd got what he deserved.”

In July, 2019, the governor of Tennessee declared June 8 a day of remembrance for favored and famous son Nathan Bedford Forrest — a Confederate general, slave owner, slave trader, first Grand Wizard of the KKK, and an unindicted war criminal who slaughtered Black union troops who were trying to surrender at the Battle of Fort Pillow. That can’t possibly be a day that the full, diverse citizenry of Tennessee wants to honor!  After a public outcry, the designation has since been rescinded. The citizens of Tennessee knew what to do. Their political leader did not.

A few years ago during the Nike ‘Betsy Ross flag’ controversy, the Senate Majority Leader angrily declared that he’d place the first order for a pair of shoes if Nike would just put the so-called ‘Betsy Ross flag’ back on them. The 13-star Betsy Ross flag has been co-opted by white supremacist as their own. Was he truly upset that Nike had ceased production of his favorite flag? Or was that just another race-based dog whistle to divide us? And conquer us? And get him re-elected once again?

I’ve long wondered: If politicians stopped pitting us against each other, mightn’t we solve our long-simmering issues with race? And wouldn’t that make us a better country?

Creating racial parity would benefit everyone. In their book The Spirit Level, researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett show that residents of equitable communities enjoy better health care, longer life expectancies, less violence, less incarceration, less obesity, fewer teen pregnancies, better mental health, and better opportunities for financial gain. Isn’t that precisely what everyone wants?

A 2009 study conducted by the Altarum Institute found that if racial equality — whatever that means — were somehow achieved, the country would enjoy an annual influx of well over a trillion and a half dollars, accompanied by lower taxes and increased corporate profits, owing to the greater spending power and increased productivity that equality would bring. Other brainiacs have estimated an economic uptick of up to two and a half trillion.

But here’s the real thing. If we could actually resolve our ‘race thing’…whatever you want to call it, we’d actually be the country that we like to brag that we are. Or as the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King said, “All we ask is that the country live up to what it wrote down.” Simple enough.

We’re all Americans! We want the same things. But we seem to be at war with ourselves. Lincoln was right when he said that a house divided against itself cannot stand. We can do better. We used to be proud of our ideals and brag about being a melting pot. What happened? I don’t claim to know how to achieve racial harmony, but I suspect that if our “leaders” quit dividing us, we’d have a much better chance of figuring it out.