[This post will be edited for additional information soon.]
If you live long enough, you find yourself bombarded with how inadequate your moral compass has been. Your ethics were all wrong. Sooner or later, someone is going to point out all the errors in all the rules of behavior you had internalized. It's not that you don't know anymore which way is up, but ... that phrase does come close.
With all the protests taking place today, it seems very difficult to know whom to call out. I would have thought that destroying private property is always wrong. But in the wake of the shooting of Mr. Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wi, there were numerous cars that were set on fire. The protestors were angry. But these days, it seems that anger is called forward to excuse all sorts of destruction of property, since we can all agree that those who are angry are rightly so.
To look at another kind of problem: people are not quite comfortable with accepting that women, throughout the world, are in fact subservient to men. It is worse in some societies, but even in the USA, a woman makes only three-quarters what a man makes for the same job. (Of course, some companies are so delighted when a competent woman applies for an upper-level job, that they offer her an enormous salary. But that woman is a mere token, though she may not thank you for pointing it out.) A black woman, according to some estimates, makes only 68 cents for every dollar a man makes. That comparison may not be quite fair, because they compare a black woman to all men, rather than to black men, because I believe that black men make less than white men.
Many of my readers have been brought up to assume that US men and women of all shades are more deserving than foreigners. We deserve more pay, more leisure time, better health care, better education, lower taxes, than people in any other country. This explains why items made in other countries are less expensive, even after the cost of transportation has been taken into account.
The majority of US citizens are Christians of one flavor or another. We have been brought up to believe that the Bible, and the Preacher, are the guides who will point us in the right direction. The Bible says, wives: be obedient to your husbands; children: obey your parents; keep the sabbath; do not murder; do not covet.
But often Christians are called to fight in wars. In a war, many of these precepts must be suspended, because often the one in your gunsight could be a father, or a brother.
Every moral rule of thumb that I had ever made for myself, based on the teachings I received from my religion or my school or my parents seems to have been called into question. But the one rule that seems to keep popping up into my mind is not even a Christian teaching. It is to take the side of the underdog. Might is not right.
In the topsy-turvy world that Donald Trump, and his political allies have created, it is very hard to discern who exactly the underdog is. Normally, I would assume that it is the side of those who live from paycheck to paycheck; those who do not have healthcare; those who have to choose between sending their kids to school in a dangerous environment, or going in to work themselves. People who are forced to live in sub-standard housing, in crowded neighborhoods, in neighborhoods close to polluting plants and landfills, on streets constantly exploding with gun violence: I would consider these people the underdogs.
As you're probably aware, Trump supporters consider themselves the underdogs, the weak and the oppressed. They huddle together in the safety of their Megachurches, afraid of what that hell-hound Biden might do; afraid that Kamala Harris might suddenly visit their homes, and snatch away their guns, and assault weapons, and bazookas. Somehow, many of them are convinced that healthcare for all will eventually destroy America as we know it. It is just the first step (they think) in a government takeover of everything.
Wherever I was going with that, it is quite possible that, in a year or two, there might be runaway inflation. The millions that the so-called One Percent have in their banks could soon be worth very little. At that time, those of us of more modest means can, without embarrassment, establish a barter economy, just as they did in the 1930's and 1940's. And Biden and Kamala Harris will have to supervise our response to this economic collapse, which Trump and his followers will be quick to blame on them. (As is their wont.) After a year or two of this, it could easily happen that the poor--and even the rich--will beg and plead for more government supervision of distribution of resources.
However things work out, we must be prepared for widespread protests and riots. The weak and the ignorant are always willing to lose their temper, and sometimes to pretend to lose their temper. If alcohol is available, people will drink first, and then pretend to have lost their temper. People on the losing side of an argument, particularly, will lose their temper.
It is going to be a very interesting time indeed.
[More, added later]
Soon after I had written (and published) this post, I read the following story.
Omar Wasow (of Princeton, if you needed to know) published a paper that nonviolent protests increased the Democrat vote, and riots decreased it. Against that background, David Shor, a progressive analyst, Tweeted this fact, and got fired by New York Magazine.
What is going on?
Protests against Police Brutality take the form of peaceful protest, or rioting, or both.
Peaceful protests help the Democrats politically.
Rioting expresses the anger of the community, and draws attention to the problem of Police Brutality. Politically, it has been seen to help the Republicans.
It appears that some people do not care about the political advantage of peaceful protest. Only rioting will express their outrage at the Police. (In this instance, I understand perfectly: there is no excuse for shooting a man in the back multiple times. The police are the professionals; even if they suspect that the man has some weapon of mass destruction in the car, they have to wait until he deploys it.)
Well, as for me, the political advantage of peaceful protest trumps everything.
OK, let's set that aside for the moment. Here's something that people have not talked about yet, but will surely come up in conversation in a few months.
If the Republicans win the election, and the party is dominated by hawkish Law and Order types--perhaps backed by White Supremacists, who like to believe that blacks and other minorities are out to get them--and Trump wins a second term, I expect the situation to get more violent. It is repression that causes violence.
Let's keep calm; things do not have to go that route. But it is as well to have an inkling of the large long-term consequences of small actions we take. This post is not aimed at either the peaceful protesters or the rioters; we are not coaching either group to be violent. But the tactics of the Trump GOP strikes me as being shortsighted in the extreme, and extraordinarily naïve.
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