When Rights Collide

The recent spate of controversial decisions made by the U.S. Supreme Court has gotten me thinking about rights and the role of law in our life. 

As I've gotten older, I've become more libertarian in my views. The libertarianism I speak of is not the political movement (spelled with an upper case "L") which concerns itself mainly with laissez-faire capitalism, but rather the more general meaning of the word, stemming from its root, that is to say, liberty. In other words, I believe a society such as ours which claims to be "free", should allow its citizens to be well, free, so long as their freedom doesn't impinge on the rights of others.

Pay close attention to that last part.

I believe people should be free to live their lives as they choose with governmental interference kept to a minimum. 

I believe people should be free to love and to marry whomever they please, and to identify themselves however they see fit.

I believe that people should be free to obtain the health care they and their physician (not their state legislator, or governor) feel is necessary to keep themselves well. 

 

I believe that people should be free to practice whatever religion they chose, or none at all. 

I believe that educators, with the input of parents, should be free from the government deciding what they should teach or what books their students should be allowed to read.

I believe that people should be free to speak their minds, even if what they have to say is unpopular.

That last part, freedom of speech, is so important in our society, that it is guaranteed in the first section of the "Bill of Rights" of our constitution, along with the freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. As a side note, for those who believe that nowhere in the Constitution can the phrase: "separation of church and state" be found, they are correct. Instead, before any of those rights mentioned above, the very first clause of the First Amendment of our Constitution unequivocally declares that: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion", which means exactly the same thing. 

Anyway, two of those rights enumerated in the First Amendment, speech and religion, figure prominently in one of the Court's latest controversial rulings. The case is identified as 303 Creative LLC vs. Elenis and it could prove to be a landmark decision in the realm of public accommodation in the United States. 

The case involves a Colorado website designer who is looking to branch into creating sites revolving around weddings. The designer, Lori Smith, wanted to post a disclaimer on her own website saying that due to her Christian faith, she would not be accepting business from gay couples intending to get married. However, she learned that such a notice violated Colorado law stipulating that public businesses could not discriminate against people based upon their gender identity or sexual orientation, among many other things.

Smith decided to sue, claiming that the Colorado law violated her First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

When the Supreme Court ruled in Smith's favor a couple weeks ago, I have to say that I agreed with the decision to some extent. Let me explain:

First of all, the inevitable and reasonable question arises: do I believe it's OK to discriminate against people because of their gender identity or sexual orientation? To that I would answer no, I believe it is wrong. But I would add that it is imprudent to make laws against everything that we believe is wrong. It is wrong to be rude to people, but it is not against the law, nor should it be. It is wrong to lie, but unless a lie is told under oath, it is not against the law. It turns out many things are ethically wrong, but not illegal. 

Laws are created essentially to solve conflicts in society when people left to their own devises cannot solve them on their own. In a civilized world, (the jury is still out on that one concerning this world I'm afraid), people solve problems and conflicts all the time on their own without having to turn to the law, which I would argue is a good thing most of the time. However sometimes the solution is worse than the problem, which is where laws become necessary.

In Ms. Smith's case, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me to explain up front to potential clients that because of her beliefs, she wasn't comfortable promoting gay weddings, but would gladly provide the clients in good faith, a list of designers who would. I would argue this is indeed serving potential clients as finding someone to perform a service is more than half the battle.

Besides, if I were getting married, something I've already done twice and have no intention of doing again, the last thing I would want is to have someone working on the event who did not approve of my lifestyle or my marriage. 

That thought had been running through my head ever since another case went before the Supreme Court a few years ago. The case, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, involved a baker who refused to provide a wedding cake to a gay couple. Again, I believed that while I didn't agree with the baker's motivations or actions, I felt this case and others like it could have been resolved without involving the courts, especially in our day and age of the internet, where the couple could go online and fight the case in the court of public opinion, often with more effective results than in a court of law. (Please bear in mind that until recently I wasn't aware of the specifics of this case, see below).

However...

Let it be known that's what I believed two weeks ago but having given it a considerable amount of thought since then, have changed my mind and have done a complete 180.

The post you're reading was originally intended to be a half-baked defense of the Court's decision based upon my half-baked libertarianism. Given my previous ambivalence on the matter, I'm not entirely sure what inspired me to write the following two sentences, but I stand by them today and will until my dying day:

There are two essential ingredients for a democracy to work, the first is that the minority must accept the decisions of the majority. The second, at least as important as the first if not more, is that the majority must accept the rights of the minority. 

The problem with libertarianism's objection to legislation in all but the most serious of cases, is that it assumes people will do the right thing because it generally works in their own self-interest. You know the drill, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", "what goes around comes around", "instant karma's gonna get you" and all that. Unfortunately, it doesn't take much living in the real world to realize that it doesn't always work out that way. 

That's why we need laws to protect the rights of minorities, in fact, those laws are the bedrock of our democracy. 

Many of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, especially the first one, indirectly address the rights of the minority. Ironically, The Bill of Rights was written at a time when owning people was still legal. On December 15, 1791 when the Bill of Rights was ratified, eighteen percent of the U.S. population was enslaved, including a little over two percent in the Northern States alone. The Bill of Rights, the cornerstone of safeguarding our liberty as American citizens, did nothing to change that.

It would take a Civil War seventy years later, to eradicate what has come to be known as "America's original sin" once and for all.

One of the most consequential amendments to the constitution, the Fourteenth, was adopted on July 9th, 1868, three years after Lee's surrender at Appomattox to Grant.

Here's the meat and potatoes of the Fourteenth Amendment, Section One:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

As clear as legal writing can be, the Fourteenth Amendment declared who will be granted the full rights of citizenship in this country, that no person, citizen or not, shall be punished without due process of the law, and that everyone residing in the United Sates, legally or not, is granted equal protection of the law.

But there was still a lot of work to do. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, known as the "Reconstruction Amendments", were written during the period around the end of the Civil War. In a nutshell, the thirteenth amendment officially abolished slavery, and the fifteenth prohibited the government from denying the right to vote on the basis of race. (Women would have to wait another 50 years for the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment which granted universal suffrage in the United States.) 

Anyone with a sense of U.S. history knows that the post-Reconstruction was a particularly dreadful time for black people in this country, especially in the South. It is the time that gave birth to the KKK, Jim Crow segregation laws, public (and private) lynchings, and illegal disenfranchisement. With virtually no one willing or able to enforce them down south, it was as if the reconstruction amendments did not exist. 

Despite the non-violent movements that confronted the treatment of blacks in the U.S., led by estimable figures such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois, it would remain that way, virtually unchanged for nearly three quarters of a century. 

I think it's fair to say that the modern American Civil Rights movement began in earnest at the end of the Second World War in 1945 when black members of the armed forces who served this country with distinction in Europe and the Pacific, returned home to their previous lives as second-class citizens. This grave injustice did not go unnoticed, even outside of the black community.

As I've written in this space before, one of the first great, symbolic victories in the modern American Civil Right Movement came on April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson entered the previously segregated baseball Major Leagues and played his first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Quoting myself:

Jackie Robinson (may have only been) a ballplayer and much of his legacy is wrapped around a game. But back in the day, baseball wasn't different from any other institution in the United States in regards to race, it was simply more public, and the integration of the game brought the issue of racial injustice in this country to the forefront. 

Soon to follow were the harrowing, trailblazing events and the people who inspired them that symbolize the American Civil Rights movement and would change this country forever. I won't go into detail here as I believe the mere mention of the following names and events should be sufficient to anyone with a modicum of understanding of American history:

• Emmett Till
• Thurgood Marshall
• Rosa Parks
• Medgar Evers
  
• The Lunch Counter Sit-Ins
• The Freedom Rides
• The Birmingham Campaign
• The March on Washington
• The Selma to Montgomery March
  
• Martin Luther King

to name just a few.

And yet, people were still unmoved by injustice, so it took laws to make real change. Again, I won't go into much detail here, for more information you can look up these groundbreaking SCOTUS decisions, executive orders, acts of Congress and amendments to the Constitution, all made possible by the Fourteenth Amendment:

• Executive Order 8802, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, creed, and national origin in the federal government and defense industries.
• Executive Order 9981 which officially integrated the armed forces.
  
• Brown vs. Board of Education which declared state sanctioned segregation of schools unconstitutional.
  
• Bailey vs. Patterson which prohibited racial segregation of transportation facilities.
• The Twenty-fourth Amendment, which eliminated the poll tax as a requirement for voting.
  
• Loving vs. Virginia which affirmed the right to inter-racial marriage.
• The Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965
• The Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972

Most relevant to the topic of at hand is The Civil Rights Act of 1964 which among other things, prohibited discrimination in public accommodations, facilities, and schools.

From that point on, from a legal standpoint at least, black people no longer would be required to sit at the back of the bus, figuratively and literally.

But it didn't stop there. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 insured that those guaranties of the right to not be discriminated against would be extended to other groups who had a long history of being marginalized in American society. In addition to race, the categories that were deemed protected classes under the anti-discrimination statutes as spelled out in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were age, national origin, religious beliefs, gender, disability, pregnancy and veteran status.

In addition to these categories, states were free to add their own protected classes of individuals, including sexual orientation and gender identity. Colorado did so on May 29, 2008, officially banning discrimination of the LBGTQ+ community in housing, public accommodation and advertising. In 2021 the state expanded these protections to employment.

 

As of this writing, about 20 states include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes.

In the Masterpiece wedding cake case, the couple who were refused a cake for their wedding, filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission against the baker for what was a clear violation of the state's public accommodation anti-discrimination law. The Commission ruled in favor of the couple and required the baker not only to provide cakes for gay weddings but also to:

change its company policies, provide 'comprehensive staff training' regarding public accommodations discrimination, and provide quarterly reports for the next two years regarding steps it has taken to come into compliance and whether it has turned away any prospective customers.

The baker responded by ceasing to bake wedding cakes entirely.* He also sued the CCRC on the grounds that the law violated his first amendment right to freely exercise his religion. That case made it to the Supreme Court. The case which seemingly pitted two fundamental rights against each other, stymied moderate members of the Court such as now retired Justice William Kennedy who while on the bench, was the court's staunchest defender of the First Amendment AND gay rights. 

So the Court punted. 

Their decision in that case was inconsequential, it rested on a technicality, namely that the CCRC erred in its ruling by using disparaging words about religion, which led Kennedy to write in his majority opinion: "religious hostility on the part of the State itself" violated the "State's obligation of religious neutrality." The court ruled 7-2 in favor of the baker, the dissenting votes coming from the Justices Sonia Sotomayor and the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

With Ginsburg and Kennedy gone, both replaced by far more ideologically conservative judges, the table was set for a different outcome with the 303 case. The plaintiff argued what separated her case from the one preceding it, is that in the role she hoped to play in her new business, she would be writing copy to accompany pictures posted on the wedding websites. As she objected to gay marriage, she claimed she would be forced to write something she didn't believe in, thereby violating her First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

Six justices made up exclusively by the ideologically conservative branch of the Court agreed with her. The remaining three dissented.

This ruling is consequential because in it, the Court is saying that it is indeed OK to discriminate in some cases. Defenders of the decision say the ruling is very narrow in that it only concerns cases where a business is required to provide language, a protected right, rather than say, just a cake. But wait a minute, can't a baker claim his or her cake is a work of art, therefore a form of personal expression which could also be considered protected by the First Amendment?. What about a wedding photographer or a musician?

We don't have to stop there, what about business owners who are morally opposed to mixed marriages? Or folks whose religion teaches them that blacks Jews and Catholics are devil worshipers? Believe me, those people are out there, not just a product of my imagination.

Which begs the question, what if the plaintiff in the 303 case had instead sued to refuse service to Catholic couples, how would the six conservative justices, five of whom are practicing Catholics, have voted?

I can't say for certain, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the outcome of this case would have been different, assuming the Court would have even bothered to hear the case at all.

Regardless, as a result of this ruling, messages like "Gays not served" and "Blacks, Jews and Catholics not welcome" are now AOK according to this court's ruling, at least in some cases. 

What's next?

We'll have to see as we can now expect a whole new slew of lawsuits coming before the court, claiming the plaintiff's First Amendment right to discriminate.

Yes I know, my argument here predicting all sorts of terrible things that might result from this decision, could fall into the category of a slippery slope logical fallacy. But here's the thing, if you want to change something big in the courts, you have to start small. I'm not questioning the motivations of the two plaintiffs in these cases. I have little doubt the baker and the web designer are sincere in looking after their own interests, protecting their faith and respective businesses. Challenging the law is their First Amendment right after all.

But sustaining a lawsuit all the way through to the Supreme Court takes tremendous resources which few individuals have. Typically, there is an interested third party, usually an organization with deep pockets and an agenda or axe to grind who takes up causes such as this to provide the funding and the legal expertise to make cases like these possible.

Sure enough, both plaintiffs were represented by a group called the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian advocacy group who in their mission statement declares itself to be:

the world’s largest legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, marriage and family, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.

From their website:

ADF is working to secure Generational Wins in the five key areas.

Those five key areas are:

• "Guaranteeing the right to life from conception to natural death."
• "Restoring religious freedom as a fundamental right."
• Securing free speech for all."
• "Guaranteeing the fundamental rights of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children."
• "Ensuring the law respects God’s created order for marriage, the family, and human sexuality."

From my experience, whenever a Christian organization claims it is working to "protect religious freedom", what they are really working for is the right to impose their religion on others.  

Rest assured that for the ADF, the First Amendment in these two cases is only a means to an end, they have much bigger fish to fry.

Here from their website is a detailed description of the group's efforts to help successfully overturn Roe v. Wade. Pay close attention to the small steps they took before the big leap.

Now that item number one of their "Generational Wins" to-do list is checked off, the two victories regarding denying public accommodations for LGBTQ+ people could be the first steps necessary for them to check off item number five, "respecting God’s created order for marriage".

In other words, getting the Supreme Court to overrule Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 decision, ruling that the right to marry is guaranteed to same sex couples by the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who not surprisingly voted in the minority in Obergefell, has publicly invited like-minded parties to bring cases to the Court that challenge rulings he does not like involving not only the right to gay marriage, but sexual acts between consenting adults (Lawrence v. Texas) and contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut). In his concurring opinion to the case that overturned Roe, Thomas wrote:

In future cases, we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.

This Court has a track record of taking away rights Americans have enjoyed by for decades by overruling precedent, and it is clear that Thomas intends to keep on doing it.

It would be interesting to hear Justice Thomas's views on yet another due process precedent, Loving v. Virginia, the overruling of which would invalidate his own marriage. 

There are more fundamental issues with this case than the dreadful consequences that may likely result from this decision. I understand how some people might resent the comparison of someone like Rosa Parks, who was arrested for not sitting in her proper place on a bus, to a couple who were denied a wedding cake. But grave injustices and not quite as grave injustices are both injustices. If we are going to have laws that prohibit businesses from discriminating against particular groups of people, something I believe the majority of Americans support, we can't cherry pick the offenses we feel are "worthy" from others we feel are not. If it is illegal to ban black people from being served at your place of business, it is illegal (in the states where they are a protected group), to ban LBGTQ people. Equal protection under the law means just that. It shouldn't be that hard to figure out.

In a perfect world, we wouldn't need laws, we'd all be able to figure out how to do the right thing on our own. As we saw above, the laws that protect against discrimination written over the last eighty years or so, have helped set us on the course of being a more free, equitable and just society, something we should all be on board with. We still have a lot of work to do to get to that place and it doesn't help that this Court is hellbent on setting us backward a half century or more. 

Funny, in the process of writing this post, I went from being OK with this decision to believing it is an unmitigated disaster.

Guess I should turn in my libertarian card. 

CODA

*Getting out of the wedding cake business entirely is a very reasonable solution to the problem for the baker who didn't want to bake cakes for gay weddings. Come to think of it, it's a good rebuttal to the argument that someone's First Amendment rights are violated when their work requires them to do or say something they do not agree with. They are free to pursue other work opportunities that do not conflict with their beliefs. 

A good example is a friend of mine who worked for a firm that considered doing business with a company that manufactured assault weapons. As he has a moral objection to these weapons, my friend was prepared to quit his job rather than contribute to something he felt was immoral. Sometimes there are difficult decisions to be made in life, especially if you have strong beliefs. Nowhere in the Constitution does it guarantee the right to a job that will never require you to do something you may not believe in. Personally, I see no First Amendment issue in these two cases at all. 

Some Thoughts on the Fourth of July

I've written before about summer's bookend holidays, Memorial Day and Labor Day. Both are days that call for reflection on what they commemorate. Whether we actually think about those who gave their lives in service to this country, be they veterans or activists in the cause of making this a better place for the working man and woman, is another story.

We have a new national summer holiday, Juneteenth, which commemorates the emancipation of slaves in the United States, certainly a day worthy of reflection and indeed, celebration. It has been referred to as Black Independence Day and rightfully so. Juneteenth deserves a post all its own which I promise is forthcoming.

But this post is about the other Independence Day, popularly known as the Fourth of July, or simply, The Fourth.

I would like to say that every year on fourth day of July, I dutifully read the Declaration of Independence before risking life and limb, not to mention the mental health of animals, by blowing things up. What could be more American than that?

The truth is I seldom do either of those things, but there are exceptions, see below. I did read in its entirety the Declaration of Independence the other day, whose signing in the year 1776 is what Independence Day commemorates, in case you forgot.

The Declaration is for the most part, a list of grievances against the colonial powers of the British Crown, but when we think of the document written by Thomas Jefferson, one sentence immediately comes to mind:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

With those words, I think it's safe to say that as our Constitution is the heart of this nation, the Declaration of Independence is its soul. 

That rings true despite the bitter irony that not only did its author own slaves, but also ignored half of the nation in his grand statement. 

Despite the irony, it has been the words themselves serving as an ideal, that have led us more or less, in the right direction for nearly 250 years. We may not be there yet, there have been many roadblocks, there will continue to be obstacles, but I believe we will get to that promised land one day, when inspired by those words, all of us, men, women, black, white and brown, rich, poor, gay, straight, trans and cis, will have equal rights. This won't happen in my lifetime, and probably not in my children's either, but it will one day. 

You see, despite everything, I am an eternal optimist. 

And that's why I'm happy to celebrate the Fourth of July in whatever way I can, usually being content to let others blow stuff up while I watch.

Growing up, my family did not have any particular Fourth of July tradition, we just winged it, culminating with the obligatory witnessing of a sanctioned fireworks display. In a big city, that inevitably means a tremendous hassle, fighting the multitudes in getting to a place reasonably close to see the display. Been there, done that on several occasions, with mixed results.  I distinctly remember in the mid-sixties, being stuck in gridlock on southbound Lake Shore Drive, trying to get to Soldier Field to see their fireworks show. If my memory serves, we never got there. 

Because of that, more often than not, my most satisfying Fourths were spent out of town, usually in small towns in Wisconsin and Michigan.

The following is a list in no particular order, of some of my most memorable Fourth of Julys:

The most memorable, 1968: Not much to do with the holiday itself but something every Chicagoan of a certain age will understand, I went to a taping of "Bozo's Circus". The hardest ticket in town in those days, on-the-ball parents sent in their requests to WGN TV at the time of the birth of their first child, knowing the tickets would show up in the mail about eight years later, just in time before the kid would be too old for such nonsense. Hopefully there would be younger siblings to follow. No, my parents were not on the ball when I was born, it was my friend Edgars's parents who didn't have enough young kids of their own to use up all their tickets, so they invited me. I think that evening we did make it to Soldier Field for the fireworks, which paled in comparison to meeting Bozo.  

The least memorable, that I actually remember, 1976: The Bicentennial of the United States was anticipated for years before the event. Consequently, when the actual day rolled around, it could not possibly live up to the hype. I vaguely recall being with my parents, standing in line for about a couple hours to see something, I can't remember what or where. I want to say it was Navy Pier to see a moon rock on display. But I don't think that makes sense because seven years after the original moon landing, the thrill would have long been gone. When the day came to an end, I do recall the song that went through my head, the refrain of a Peggy Lee tune that was popular at the time: "Is that all there is?"

The sweetest, 2002: That year, our first child was a little over one year old and we threw all caution to the wind by taking him to his first fireworks display on the Kenosha lakefront. We had a wonderful time picnicking with his grandparents and his aunt and his uncle, happily anticipating the big event with the first child in the family for at least three hours. Then it got dark, the booms began, and we discovered our little boy was totally freaked out by the noise. After two or three minutes of hysterical crying, he fell fast asleep, allowing us to enjoy the fireworks in relative peace, paradoxical as that may sound. 

The most satisfying, 1997 and 1998: Before marriage and children, my wife and I liked to head up to Wisconsin where she grew up. One Fourth of July we stayed in a B&B in the city of East Troy, situated in the beautiful Kettle Moraine region of the state. Another year we headed up the coast of Lake Michigan. On the way we found a deserted beach where for the one and only time, went skinny dipping in the lake. We ended up at Port Washington, a small lakefront city where we sat on the rocks by the shore with a few thousand others, as opposed to several hundred thousand if we had stayed at home, to watch the fireworks. Perhaps my favorite Fourth of July or at the very least, tied for that title with the following. 

The red, white and bluest, 1987: We did have a tradition of sorts during the eighties, when my ex-wife and I would often spend the Fourth, as well as other festive holidays, with our friend Scott, who moved to Michigan where he bought a one room schoolhouse near South Haven. One year, Scott took us to the small town of Allegan, MI, situated on the Kalamazoo River. In the shadow of the historic and truly lovely Second Street Bridge, sits a park with a gazebo, where the town band put on a concert of patriotic tunes (what else?). I have to say that corny as it sounds, there is no better place to spend the Fourth than in a small town, especially a picturesque one like Allegan. Imagine a Norman Rockwell painting of the Fourth of July and you have an idea of what it was like. It hardly mattered that the band evoked memories of the Mayberry Marching Band. If anything, their sincere if slightly less-than-virtuosic performance, made the experience all the more wonderful. 

The scariest, 1988: Also with Scott, this time on the beach in South Haven. Waiting for the town's official fireworks show to begin, as is common at these events, there were several unofficial, amateur fireworks shows going on. A couple hundred yards in front of us, a tremendous blast went off, the flash occurring smack dab in the middle of a group of spectators. Then came the emergency vehicles. After about 15 minutes they cleared the scene, and I recall the show went off without a hitch, but the mood of the crowd darkened considerably. The following day in the newspaper we learned what had happened. Someone tossed a lit M-80 (a firecracker on steroids) into the crowd. It landed underneath the back of a man who was lying on the sand while propped up on his elbows. The man was seriously injured both with second and third degrees burns to his back from the blast as well as severe lacerations from the sand kicked up by the explosion. 

The most historic, 1986: We happened to be in New York City visiting my friend Frank during the festivities surrounding the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. As one can see from the Wikipedia article on the event, there were four days' worth of activities celebrating the milestone including speeches by the presidents of the United States, (Ronald Reagan), and France, (François Mitterand), a flotilla including U.S. Navy warships and beautiful tall ships sailing by Lady Liberty, a concert featuring Frank Sinatra, Neil Diamond and other big stars, and the proverbial much, much more. Being big city dwellers weary of the hassle of attending such events, amplified a hundredfold by being in NYC, we avoided all of that. Instead, we chose to limit our participation to viewing the July 4th fireworks in New York Harbor from the roof of Frank's sister's apartment building in Brooklyn, about five miles away. Nevertheless, we can say were there.

The most hands on: c.1975: As I said, I typically prefer to let other people blow stuff up for me on the Fourth, but not that year. My Uncle Bob lived with his family in suburban Oak Lawn and we would spend Christmas and other holidays with them at their home. For some reason, only once did we spend the Fourth of July there, and their tradition was to shoot off fireworks in front of their home, along with everybody else on their block. Despite being somewhat timid at the outset, I even shied away from cap guns as a child, I quickly got into the swing of things and had a blast, pun intended. Nevertheless, I was still respectful of the explosives and would toss the things the instant the fuse was lit. Not so my macho father who insisted on holding on to the explosive device until the very last second before it would explode. One time he waited a little too long and the cherry bomb he was lighting, went off not exactly in his hand, but just inches from it. While everyone gasped in horror, he stoically laughed off the incident with not so much as an ouch, although I'm certain he was hurt. Clearly, I didn't inherit my old man's penchant for risk taking machismo.

The biggest wash out. 1999: Another thing I didn't inherit, was my late friend Janet's patience. She was the kind of person who would obtain a ridiculously hard-to-find parking space on her block by putting the blinkers on and wait for someone to show up to move their car. I on the other hand had no patience for that, preferring to drive around for blocks looking for an available spot, sometimes parking a mile or two away. In the end of course, her way would be far more efficient, both in terms of distance, and time. So, it makes perfect sense that Janet and her partner Dave, also a dear friend who was equally patient, would have no problem staking out a spot to watch the official Chicago fireworks show, ten, perhaps twelve hours before the event. That year we joined them around 3pm on the holiday, picnicking on a berm above the Grant Park parking garage on Monroe Street. I believe Dave set up camp around 10am and was there the entire time. We had a wonderful time until we noticed the sky was becoming darker and darker. If we had smartphones back then with up-to-the-minute weather forecasts, we might have taken cover. Instead, we hoped for the best and boy did we pay the price. Nevertheless, it was one of the last and best times we had with this wonderful couple, so it was all worth it, not a washout at all. 

Janet on the right, with my wife and me waiting for the fireworks that would never come.
Photo by Dave. 

The farthest away, 1996 and 1997: Those two consecutive years I happened to be out of the country for the Fourth of July, 1996 in Barcelona and 1997, in Yamagata, Japan. Both times my hosts wished me a very happy Independence Day, reminding me of something I had completely overlooked. How people in other countries view Americans is what originally inspired this post, but I've gotten side-tracked, and that post will have wait for another day.

The most Zenlike, c. 2018: For the last several years, my son and I have been invited to a party at the home of our friends who are fellow baseball parents. Today we unfortunately won't be able to make it because of other commitments. At these parties, adult beverages are served and as the festivities usually begin in the early afternoon, by the time it gets dark well, you get the picture. Anyway, one year our host Ricky, brought out a Chinese lantern, effectively a miniature hot air balloon, consisting of a paper structure, open at the bottom, suspended over a candle. The lit candle heats up the air inside the paper "balloon" and once the air is hot enough, the whole assemblage, candle and all lifts off, much like a balloon filled with helium. Unlike a helium balloon, the candle illuminates the paper lantern so its voyage to wherever the air current takes it can be viewed for several minutes, much like a rocket blasting off at night. I had never seen one of these before and between the chaos of the fireworks going off in the surrounding neighborhood and the room zooms caused by the alcohol running through my bloodstream, I stood there transfixed, watching this little toy, the most satisfying (and quiet) firework of them all, make its one and only journey to God knows where. It's an image that will remain with me the rest of my life. 

Then there was last year, 2022: Fourth of Julys have been less momentous for my wife and me since our parade and firecracker hating kids came along, Last year was set to be no different. But around 10:30 am, I walked into the kitchen and heard a report on the radio of yet another mass shooting in the United States. This report was different as the voices of the reporters on the scene were familiar, they were local reporters. 

It was at an annual Fourth of July Parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park where a young man with a high-powered assault style rifle, perched himself on the roof of a commercial building along the parade route, and began shooting indiscriminately at spectators and participants. In the end, he killed seven people and wounded 48. Not long after hearing the initial report, my thoughts immediately turned to a friend, my friend Frank's godson, who lives in the suburb with his wife their two small children. Certainly, I thought, they had to have been at the parade. Turns out they were, but as I found out hours later, to my relief, they were not on the same block as the shooter. 

Later that day, reports came out about a doctor on the scene as a spectator, who attended to several victims, most likely saving at least a few of their lives. His name is Dr. David Baum, the obstetrician who delivered our first child in 2001. In this article from CNN, you can read Dr. Baum's graphic descriptions of the injuries he saw that day.

The next day I saw a Facebook post from a friend and fellow parent at my kids' former elementary school. He reported the devastating news of the death of his father, one of the victims of the shooting. Here is an article with the stories of the seven people who died that tragic day one year ago.  My friend's father was Steven Strauss.

For the victims and their loved ones, those present at the scene, the people of Highland Park, and to a slightly lesser extent everyone in the Chicago Metropolitan area, the Fourth of July will never be the same. To many of us, myself included, it will forever be a day of grief, mourning and loss as much as a day of celebration. 

It's a little hard to put into perspective what that all means. All I can say is this: it's hardly surprising that on the most American of holidays, the most American of tragedies would take place. 

I love my country, but I'm troubled. 

I'm reminded of this recent video published by my favorite YouTube language teacher, Juan Fernandez. A Spanish ex-pat living in London, in the video Fernandez returns to Spain and lists many of the things he loves and misses about his country. Then after each item on the list he adds, "pero eso no es lo que me gusta mas de España" (but that isn't what I like most about Spain.). After about a dozen times repeating that phrase, he wraps up the video (spoiler alert) with this thought: "Lo mejor de España es la gente." The best thing about Spain is the people. Then the screen goes dark.

Not long ago, I would have said the same thing about my country.

I used to think that despite our differences of opinion, at heart, we Americans all shared a devotion to the core values of this nation as spelled out by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, especially the part about self-evident truths and all of us being created equal. 

But now I'm not so sure. It seems too many of us think men and women are created equal, have the unalienable rights Jefferson mentions, and I might add the right to vote, so long as they look, act and think like us.

I used to think we all shared a passion and respect for democracy, and a profound disgust for totalitarianism in all its forms. 

But it seems that a lot of us show a true admiration for dictators, both real ones abroad, and wannabie ones over here.

I used to think that we all understood the difference between facts and opinions.

But scores of us don't recognize that while everyone is entitled to their own opinions, no one is entailed to their own facts. 

And I used to think we all paid heed to the words of Abraham Lincoln who quoting the Bible, said this: 

A house divided against itself cannot stand. 

But there are bad actors, mostly politicians and their enablers who, rather than seeking compromise and consensus, as is required of a working democracy, use the oldest rick in the book of tyrants. They gain power by purposefully dividing the public against itself by exploiting fear, anger and hatred, then saying things like: "only I can solve our nation's problems" and "they're not coming after me, they're coming after YOU." Worst of all, there are far too many of us who gladly follow these people. 

Just as my feelings about this country are complicated, so too are my feelings about today, the Fourth of July. 

Perhaps last year's tragedy puts it all into perspective. Today we celebrate the lofty ideals of our nation as we mourn the tragedies and lost opportunities. We celebrate our potential, our liberty, and our diversity spelled out in the nation's motto: e pluribus unum (out of many, one). But we long for what could have been, had we only paid heed to those ideals, had our selfishness, fear and hatred of our fellow human beings not gotten in the way.

Ours is a great country to be sure but it could be so much better.

With that in mind, have a happy, thoughtful and meaningful Fourth of July.

I'll close with my friend Leon's parting words to me every time I see him:

Be careful out there.

Pride

 

For my part, I'm proud to live in a city and a state that recognizes that in a free society, people have the right to be who they are.

It doesn't get any more basic than that.

Happy Pride month.

Not Enough Clichés for This

Strap yourselves in folks, it's going to be a bumpy ride. 

That's just another cliché making the rounds these days as we head into uncharted waters, so to speak.

For the purpose of this post, last Tuesday evening I held my nose and sat through a speech the exPOTUS gave at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, a few hours after he was indicted for a second time.

Predictable in so many ways, that speech featured wall to wall hyperbole, logical fallacies, misleading statements, outright lies, a few pronouncements taken directly from the How to be a Dictator for Dummies Handbook, and other stuff that could best be described as nothing more than unadulterated bullshit. I'll detail just a few of those in a minute.

The one thing that separated this speech from his typical whiney rants of the past was that it featured an unusual amount of self-pity, even for him, not a good look for someone who likes to pretend he's a tough guy. In reality a diva if there ever was one, 45 made it clear to his adoring public that the great tragic operatic heroines, Aida, Madama Butterfly and Lucia di Lammermoor combined, have nothing on him as far as suffering and being victims of indignity, maltreatment, and injustice. Paraphrasing the old Negro spiritual, to the MAGA cult who sees their guy as a latter-day Jesus Christ, nobody knows the trouble he's seen. 

To the rest of the world, he's exactly where he belongs, as a criminal defendant.

As they say, what goes around, comes around.

So on to the speech, shall we?

One year ago, I wrote this piece on logical fallacies, that is to say, arguments that do not reasonably follow from their premises. In my post I listed about a dozen categories of logical fallacies (there are many more) and can honestly say the exPRES used virtually all of them Tuesday evening.

Here I'll mention only three, the ones with fancy Latin names, just because they make me sound smart:

Logical fallacy number one: The post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy with not a little hyperbole thrown in. On Tuesday evening, the exPOTUS opened his speech with this:

The ridiculous and baseless indictment of me by the Biden administration’s weaponized Department of Injustice (sic) will go down as among the most horrific abuses of power in the history of our country.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, in English "after this therefore because of this", concerns the misconception that subsequent events are necessarily connected to preceding ones. In this case, the exPOTUS's legal prosecution follows the presidency of Joe Biden, therefore according to him, the Biden administration, and specifically Biden himself, are directly responsible for the prosecution of the exPOTUS. 

The following is the core argument of the exPOTUS: 

A corrupt administration, Biden's, is actively prosecuting a political rival who is likely to face him in the 2024 presidential election. 

This is a very serious charge, one that should never be taken lightly, especially in a democracy.

We'll never know if Joe Biden is directly or indirectly responsible for the prosecution of 45, but logic and everything I've seen up to this point leads me to believe that both are extremely unlikely. For starters, the current president has bent over backwards to distance himself from his predecessor. He has made it abundantly clear that in his administration, the Justice Department works independently of the Office of the President, as it is designed to do. To further that point, an independent counsel, Jack Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, to investigate and if necessary, prosecute this case, further distancing Biden and the Justice Department from the travails of the exPOTUS. 

OK but what if Biden is lying and really is working behind the scenes to ensure that the case against the exPRES moves forward? That's where logic comes in.

Joe Biden is not a dumb man. He understands that 45 needs attention, even negative attention, like a fire needs oxygen in order to survive. I believe that if the current president truly is working behind the scenes to remove the exPOTUS from the race, he would do everything in his power to avoid giving 45 more oxygen in the form of public attention. The media circus that has developed around 45's two indictments, and surely more to come, is the last thing Biden needs if he is truly afraid of the exPOTUS and wants to keep him out of the headlines.

Biden also knows that 45 (who is hoping to become 47) is a proven loser. While he may be the odds-on favorite to win his party's nomination, he is the least likely of four or five of his Republican opponents to defeat Biden in the general election in 2024. A conviction of the exPOTUS would almost certainly energize more than just the MAGA base to come out to vote for the Republican candidate, whomever that may be. There's no telling where that road might lead but a conviction probably would not be helpful for the Democrats' cause in 2024.

Furthermore, should 45 be convicted, you can bank on any future Republican administration, with or without the exPOTUS in charge, much like the Mob, seeking retribution and coming after Biden and his family in Congress and the courts with all their might. 

Which leads us to the following cliche, currently the mantra of the Republican Party:

The exPOTUS said as much Tuesday promising that if elected president in 2024, he:

...will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.

In other words, he would do exactly what he is accusing Biden of wrongly doing right now, weaponize his Justice Department against his political enemies. 

Unlikely as it may be, it is not inconceivable that 45 could become 47 in '24 and I certainly wouldn't put it past him to do just that, or at least try. After all, he has a proven track record as president of using his attorney general as his personal attorney. 

Simply put, no matter how much Joe Biden would like to see justice done, prosecuting 45 does not work in the current president's self-interest. It seems ridiculous to me that he would actively work toward that end, rather than letting the chips fall where they may, which I have no doubt is exactly what he's doing.

Logical fallacy number two: The tu quoque fallacy.

Translated into English, "you too", the tu quoque fallacy occurs when rather than explaining one's own position, someone turns an argument back on the opponent, citing inconsistencies or hypocrisy in their position. A more current and familiar term is "whatboutism". In the speech after his latest indictment, 45 spent a considerable amount of time listing other prominent figures who did what he is charged for, wrongfully maintaining records of government information, some of it highly classified, in their possession after leaving office. The exPOTUS was indicted for his actions while the others were not. This is correct. What he conveniently left out is that all the others he mentioned, the Clintons, Joe Biden and Mike Pence, all cooperated with authorities to return the material in their possession back to the government. 

In stark contrast, 45 did not cooperate, in fact according to the indictment, he went to extreme, illegal measures to prevent the government from getting their hands on the documents, many of them containing very sensitive information regarding national security.

As a friend commented on Facebook: comparing 45's acts to those of the other politicians "is not like comparing apples to oranges, it's comparing apples to hand grenades."

Logical fallacy number three: The ad hominem attack.

Attacking the opponent, rather than addressing the argument, is what defines the ad hominem (to the person) fallacy. It also happens to be the favorite rhetorical device of the exPOTUS. It's almost inconceivable to think of a 45 speech without hearing stock put downs like "these are very bad people" or "this is a low IQ individual" or "so and so is a nasty person" if the target happens to be a woman. Like a schoolyard bully, the bigger the threat to 45, the harsher the put down. The really privileged get a personal nickname. Who could ever forget "Crooked Hillary" Clinton or "Rocket Man" Kim Jung Un?

Perhaps the biggest threat the exPRES has ever experienced up to this point in his career is the Special Counsel in this case. True to form, he is the beneficiary of the harshest nickname of them all, "Deranged" Jack Smith. I imagine the nickname doesn't come from Smith's highly regarded professional reputation, but from his headshot that made the rounds, where he's sporting a full beard and an intense gaze, making him look shall we say, a little sinister. But as we all know, you can't judge a book by its cover, Smith's work on this case has shown nothing but intelligence, thoroughness and competence, very unfortunate indeed for the exPRES. No wonder he hates him so.

Then there's his name. 45 displayed some of his tribal instincts when he said:" I wonder what his real name is. Jack Smith, sounds so innocent, doesn't it?" I guess to him, a white guy with a very common Anglo-Saxon name is someone he would automatically trust, as opposed to someone with a name like Barack Hussein Obama for an example.

What these logical fallacies have in common is they deflect from the issue at hand, in this case the crimes the exPOTUS is accused of committing. In fact, all the defenses I've heard from apologists for the exPOTUS, both the true believers and those who are simply afraid of crossing him and maybe getting a nickname of their own, have not once addressed what is actually in the indictment. "I guess..." suggested one commentator, "you can't defend the indefensible." Instead, they just throw a bunch of nonsense against the wall to see what sticks. (I do love that cliché).

On Tuesday evening however, the exPOTUS did bring up the charges.

Logical fallacies alone do not invalidate a premise. Claiming that an issue cannot be true because its defender uses faulty logic is known as the fallacy fallacy, I kid you not.

Making stuff up is another story.

The secondary argument of the exPOTUS is this:

I did have the documents in my possession, but I had every right to do so. 

During his Tuesday speech, the exPOTUS kept bringing up the "Presidential Records Act" which he claimed gives presidents leeway to take their time in order to make the decision as to which records could be kept and which should be relinquished.

I must say 45 made a good case for himself citing an act of Congress from 1978 that I'm assuming few average Americans, myself included, knew much if anything about. Given my ignorance on the subject, I did what most reasonable people would do, I looked it up, not hard to do these days. 

Lo and behold, The Presidential Records Act states exactly the opposite of what the exPOTUS claimed.

According to the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the president is required to relinquish ALL documents relating to affairs of the government, classified or not, as soon as he or she leaves office. 

This is neither my opinion nor conjecture, it is an unequivocal fact. Here is section 2022 of the Act which deals with the ownership of presidential records:

The United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records; and such records shall be administered in accordance with the provisions of this chapter.

And from Section 2203, dealing with the management and custody of presidential records:  

Upon the conclusion of a President's term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President. The Archivist shall have an affirmative duty to make such records available to the public as rapidly and completely as possible consistent with the provisions of this chapter.

If you don't believe me or think I'm taking this out of context, you can read for yourself the Presidential Records Act here.  

Of course, 45 is only preaching to the choir. He has so little faith in the curiosity and the intelligence of his followers, that he doesn't think twice about telling them easily debunked falsehoods, assuming they wouldn't dare question him. For many I'm afraid, that's true. 45 could tell them up is down and down is up and before you know it, they'd be walking on their hands. 

Unquestioning people like these can be easily manipulated, so when a former president whom they adore tells them as he did last Tuesday:

They're not coming after me, they're coming after you.

They believe him. A lot of them do.

And as Republican former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake so eloquently pointed out, many of them have guns. 

So, this week when friends and family members asked me what I thought about the indictment, I responded with the most pertinent cliché of all:

We have to be careful what we wish for. 

Our New Normal

On this day, May 29, 2023 we Americans observe Memorial Day, the day we honor the men and women of our armed services who gave their lives in the service of our country. It is right and just that we do this. We must never forget them and their sacrifice. 

During my childhood, my family had a tradition of visiting the graves of our deceased family members on Memorial Day, whether they were veterans or not. It was right and just that we did that too.

Last Memorial Day came directly on the heels of the beginning of Russia's war in Ukraine, inspiring me to dedicate my last Memorial Day post to "the people who through no fault of their own, get caught up in war." I then went on to liken Ukrainians and civilians in war zones all over the world, killed while going about their everyday lives, to people in this country going about their daily lives who are killed in gun violence. 

It is also right and just to do this.

Because perhaps every Memorial Day from now on, we will be reminded of two specific days of infamy in our own country, the anniversaries of two American massacres that occurred just before the holiday last year, to be exact: May 14, 2022, at a Tops Grocery Store in Buffalo, New York, and May 24, 2022 at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. 

Yet another truly horrifying and repulsive thing is this: in our day there are more mass shootings in the United States in one year than there are days in a year, so one can mark the anniversary of a mass shooting practically every day of the year. Worse still, the number of mass shooting victims is a small fraction of the total number of victims of gun violence in this country.

In 2022, according to the web site The Trace, 20,138 gun deaths, (not including suicides), occurred in the United States. That number was a slight decrease from the previous record-setting year.

Now consider this: inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, there are 58,318 names of all the U.S. service men and women who either died or were MIA during that conflict which for us lasted between 1955 and 1975. 

You do the math.

This is our new normal. There are so many gun tragedies in our country that unless they are particularly horrific in terms of the number or age of the victims, or the reasons why they were killed, we hardly notice anymore.

It's tempting to find a single culprit for these horrible statistics, but there are many. According to this Wikipedia chart which is quite out of date, for every 100 people in the United States, there were 120 guns.  That number is significantly higher today. Number two on the list is Serbia with a paltry 37.2 guns for every 100 people followed by Canada, with 34.7 guns for every 100 people, and Finland with 32.4.  If you remove the U.S. from that equation, it is obvious that the number of guns per person in a country, does not necessarily correlate with a high gun-murder rate.

The countries with the highest gun-murder rates in the world are concentrated in one geographical area, Central America and parts of South America, with Venezuela and El Salvador far and away leading the pack with 36.75 and 36.34 gun related deaths per 100,000 people respectively, according to a recent web site from World Popluation Review. According to that site, those numbers are attributable to "the prevalence of criminal gangs and a vibrant drug trafficking industry." In El Salvador, at least according to the older Wikipedia list, there were only 5.8 guns per 100 people in 2015. By contrast, Serbia, Finland and Canada all with about seven times the number of guns-per-capita, had 4.8, 2.9 and 2.3 gun-=murders per 100K people respectively.

From the World Population Review list, the United States experienced 10.89 firearm related deaths per 100K in the past year, a rate comparable to those of Uruguay, Paraguay and Panama.

If one only looks at these numbers, gun rights advocates have a point when they say limiting the number of guns available to the general public is not going to eliminate gun violence.

But what do we make of the off-the-charts number of guns in this country? Remember, there are almost four times as many guns-per-capita in the States than in Serbia, the country second place in that category the world.

My take is that with all those guns available, it is stupid easy to get your hands on one in this country, be you a responsible gun owner, a run-of-the-mill criminal, or a sociopath. And with few meaningful restrictions on the sale, manufacture, possession and the carrying of firearms in many U.S. states, and even more lax restrictions on the way, it's only going to become more stupidly easy in the future. 

True, the U.S. is not in the top twenty in the world in terms of gun-murder rate, it's number 22, according to the WPR list. That's hardly a bragging right.

But as far as public mass shootings go, along with per-capita gun ownership, we are in a class all by ourselves. 

The connection may be purely anecdotal, but I don't think so. Gun rights activists claim other culprits for the preponderance of mass shootings in this country, mental health being number one. 

I don't buy it. As far as I know, there are people with mental health issues everywhere in the world, not just in the States. I'm not even convinced that all perpetrators of mass shootings are indeed mentally ill. There are certainly millions of people in this country and elsewhere with mental health issues who would not harm anyone, let alone commit mass murder. I'm all in on making mental health a priority in this nation. But the emphasis on mental illness being a major cause of violence is no more than a smokescreen from the issue of gun legislation and an excuse to stigmatize and marginalize yet another group of people. 

Regardless, the one thing we have that nobody else does here in the good ol' U.S.A., along with a mass shooting or two every day, is unfettered access to guns. 

What IS sick are politicians looking for gun lobby money and a few extra votes, people who could make a difference to save at least some lives, wearing lapel pins in the likeness of AR-15 assault rifles, the preferred weapon of mass shooters. 

What a slap in the face to the people who lost loved ones to those weapons of mass destruction. 

They may as well piss on the graves of our fallen soldiers, seamen, airmen and women. I have no doubt that in exchange for money and a vote or two, they would do just that.

Angry White People

Much of the political divide in this nation right now is focused between two distinct groups, angry white people, and everybody else. This subject has gotten a lot of attention lately after the recent departure of Tucker Carlson from FOX "News". In his role over there, Carlson as you probably know, cast himself in the role of chief defender, spokesperson and provocateur for tens of millions of angry white Americans.

On his show he typically addressed his devoted viewers as "YOU." That "you" was a means to distinguish his followers, or as Carlson put it, "Legacy Americans", from THEY, everyone who is not an angry white person.

Typical Tuckerisms include: 

• THEY'RE coming after YOU,
  
• THEY'RE taking your rights away from YOU, and most sinister of all: 
• THEY hate YOU.

Unfortunately Carlson is not alone in riling up white people,. The machines that drive both sides of the ideological divide in this country from politicians, members of the press, pundits and other public figures, to lowly bloggers such as myself, in our words and deeds, only exacerbate that anger, further dividing the country. 

So why are so many white people so angry? Google that question and you'll find all sorts of explanations, some logical, some let's just say, far reaching.

Here in Chicago and in several comparable American cities, there is a complicated historical force at work that contributes to white rage.

I've been thinking about it since I wrote this piece twelve years ago about a South Side Chicago Roman Catholic parish that closed its doors largely because of so called "white flight" from the neighborhood as black people moved in. That piece continues to be one of the most viewed posts on this blog. It struck a nerve as it has received by far the greatest number of negative comments of anything I have ever written.

I tried to be balanced in my assessment of why white people have historically moved out of neighborhoods in Chicago as soon as black people moved in. In the piece I cited institutional policies and greedy individuals who took advantage of people's fear, all of which contributed to white flight. Then I said: 

It would be easy to make a blanket condemnation of white people picking up stakes and leaving their neighborhood based on the threat of change...

Yet, next to our children, the biggest investment most of us have is our home. As much as we all would like to be community minded, the bottom line is that most of us need to look out for ourselves and our families first. "Get out before it's too late and you lose your investment..." may not be the most altruistic or public-spirited advice, but one certainly cannot say that it is not prudent.

I went into more detail in my recent post on West Garfield Park about housing covenants, redlining, contract selling, and other

...pernicious discriminatory practices that all but guaranteed segregation in the city and second-class status to people of color.

Despite taking the blame of white flight largely off the shoulders of most (but not all) average white homeowners, some folks reading the piece still took issue when I wrote that in addition to all those things I just mentioned, racism was also part of the mix.

I stand by that statement.

But here's the thing, there's racism, then there's racism. One type of racism leads people to dress up in white sheets, give Nazi salutes, and march with tiki torches while chanting "we will not be replaced." The other is nuanced and from my experience, to some extent lives in all of us. If someone tells you he "doesn't have a racist bone in his body", rest assured he either lacks the self-awareness to recognize it or is flat out lying to you.

For good reason, "Racist" in our society is one of the most devastating accusations that can be leveled against a person, as people by nature associate the word with the former, the unequivocal, un-nuanced, heil-Hitler form of racism.

But today, the word is thrown about with such reckless abandon, especially by the Left, that it has virtually lost its meaning, but not its offense. 

Another term that needs to be judiciously reconsidered is "white privilege."

There's privilege, then there's privilege. The former comes through access to money, higher education and personal connections, among other things.  The latter privilege is something that should be enjoyed by everyone who lives in a free society. Unfortunately, far too many of us, especially people of color, are often denied many of those privileges. Therefore, "white privilege" which for the record I believe is a real thing, is not something bestowed upon white people, but rather, something that is taken away from others.  

Yet like racism, the word privilege evokes a very specific image to most people.

Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, heir to the TV Dinner fortune, is undisputedly a man of great privilege in every sense of the word. The vast majority of his audience which is mostly white, does not enjoy the kind of privilege Carlson and the proverbial one percent of Americans have, and never will. 

Since Carlson is nothing if not two-faced, it's difficult to know exactly who he is or what he really believes. Judging from his public words, and now his publicly distributed private words, Carlson is likely also a racist in every sense of the word.  I'll go out on a limb here and state that the same is probably not true of much of his audience, although I haven't a clue how much. 

I read two books in preparation for my recent post about the Chicago neighborhood of West Garfield Park. The first was: Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago, by Linda Gartz. Gartz writes about growing up in the West Side neighborhood where both she and her father spent their formative years. Linda's formative years coincided with the drastic population shift of the community which went from virtually 100 percent white in 1950, to virtually 100 percent black in 1970.

In 1968, the neighborhood was hit particularly hard during the riots that took place after the assassination of Martin Luther King. In the subsequent decades, between 1970 and 2020, West Garfield Park lost nearly two thirds of its population. Unlike the vast majority of their fellow white West Garfield Parkers, Gartz's family remained, at least as landlords, (they moved out in 1965). As the buildings around theirs crumbled due to vandalism and neglect, Gartz's parents dedicated themselves to the upkeep of their three properties and faithful service to their tenants for the rest of their lives. (They died in the nineties).

Linda Gartz pulls no punches when describing some of the shortcomings of her family, including her mother's initial response to a black family moving to her block. But she also describes her mom's change of heart as she got to know some of her new neighbors.

Simply put, the message of the book is that both black and white families in West Garfield Park and other similar communities around the city, were the victims of bad actors, both government and businesses who profited off anger and fear of the white people, and the limited options for black people. The other message is that if we only could get to know one another on a personal basis, maybe we could begin to learn to live together.

That last point is also one of the messages of Vanishing Eden: White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Racially Changing City. The book was written by Michael T. Maly and Heather M. Dalmage, two professors of sociology at Roosevelt University. The book is based upon Dalmage and Maly's interviews of white folks whose families moved away from the neighborhoods in which they grew up when they began to change racially, and the two sociologists' take on them.

In all the interviews, the subjects spoke with reverence for the neighborhoods their parents felt compelled to leave. These places are described, as the book's title implies, as virtual paradises, places where everyone knew, cared for and looked out for one another, where the only limitation placed upon kids was to be home as soon as the streetlights came on. 

This all hit home for me as I have similar idyllic memories of my life growing up in Humboldt Park, a couple miles from West Garfield Park. We left the community in 1968 when I was nine, not long after the West Side riots, for the suburb of Oak Park. 

Many of the negative comments to the post mentioned above, implied that as an outsider, I had no idea what I was talking about and had no right to criticize others who experienced something I had not. I pointed out that I did indeed have "skin in the game", bringing up my Humboldt Park experience. 

At one point in reading Vanishing Eden however, it dawned on me that I was being disingenuous. In describing the factors leading people to change neighborhoods, the authors distinguished between being pulled away or pushed away.  

A few weeks ago, I asked my mother what was the factor that made her and my father decide to leave the neighborhood in which she had lived for nearly thirty years. She told me about an incident that took place while she was walking to the corner store, (a classic example of the bygone days). On her way, someone spit on her from a second-floor window. "That was it.." she said, "we were out of there." OK my mother doesn't talk like that, but you get the picture. 

Thinking about it however, that incident, unpleasant as it was, was not the reason we left Humboldt Park. We left because we were living in a small rental apartment in a residential hotel building in which my grandmother was the manager. Both my parents had good jobs, both had cars, and money to afford to buy a house in the suburbs. In other words, they were acting out the "American Dream" just like the vast majority of their peers at the time. Long story short, we would have moved regardless, the spitting incident only hastened the act. 

In contrast, the families of the people interviewed in Vanishing Eden for the most part had already realized the "American Dream" of owning a home. Many were working class folks who had to save and sacrifice for years to achieve that goal and once there, had no intention of giving it up. Had external forces not intervened pushing them out of their beloved homes, they or their descendants might still be there.

Naturally there was great bitterness once their neighborhood changed. As I pointed out in the West Garfield Park piece, most of these folks knew nothing about the bad actors Linda Gartz speaks of in her book. What they knew was what they saw with their own eyes: time and again, once a neighborhood in Chicago went from white to black, it deteriorated rapidly. Given that, it's not too hard to figure who they came to blame.

In her book, Linda Gartz mentions that growing up, she and her family knew no black people personally. While I didn't have a great deal of close contact with black people as a small child either, one of the most memorable persons from my life in Humboldt Park was the contracted painter in our building, a black man by the name of Rogers. As my grandma ran the hotel, I got to know all the people who had a stake in the building from the owners to the janitor. Honestly I liked them all, but Rogers was especially kind to me, and I'd say he and I were as close to being genuine friends as a grown man of thirty-something and an eight-year-old child possibly could be.

Further background in my development, I have no childhood memory of my parents ever making a disparaging remark about black people. In fact, as I pointed out in this space at least a couple times, after I reported to them some nasty racial comments made by the parents of my best friend at the time, my parents told me in no uncertain terms that my friend's parents were wrong. As my father would always say: "people are people." I will forever be grateful for that.

It wasn't until we moved to Oak Park that I experienced virulent racism.  It was tough entering a new school in fifth grade where virtually all the kids had known each other since kindergarten. I met a kid in my class who seemed nice enough. He was smart and would actually talk to me without condescension. It turns out that he too was a new kid at the school, also having recently moved from the West Side. One day in the playground much to my surprise, he told me he and his family were moving again. When I asked why he said "because nig--rs moved onto our block and there's no way in hell we're going to live with them." Even at my young age I understood that while they came out of this ten year old boy's mouth, those weren't his words. 

Perhaps he was one of the people interviewed by Professors Maly and Dalmage for their book. Some of the interviewees while not being that candid about their feelings, were quite brazen by today's standards about expressing their bitterness and distrust of black people. One particularly disgusting excerpt is a couple recounting something that took place after moving to a new, all-white neighborhood. They were having a garage sale and a couple of black teenagers from another neighborhood bought a bicycle from them. As they walked through the alley with their new bike, a couple of neighbors who were cops chased after the kids and jumped them, assuming they had stolen the bike. The most disturbing part is that in recounting the story years later, the couple telling it were laughing, finding the whole incident amusing. 

Vanishing Eden is a revealing book, not only in the attitudes of its subjects, but also the attitudes of the authors, whose own bias comes through clearly.

The first clue comes from the book's cover illustration which features a faded photograph appearing to have been made in the fifties of a smiling white boy, three or four years old, sitting in a Radio Flyer wagon in the midst of what appears to be a tidy neighborhood of modest post-war homes. With the exception of the social class depicted, this picture evokes "Leave it to Beaver" and other period pieces that represent to many, a time of lost innocence in this country, all made possible in their minds by white hegemony.

The subtitle of the book: "White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Radically Changing City" drives home the point that the book's creators don't hold that opinion, and the photograph gracing the cover is there for irony.

In the book they make the point that their subjects view their old neighborhoods through rose colored glasses. To them, before the change everything was perfect and after, everything went to hell. 

Had they interviewed me about my own childhood experience of Humboldt Park, I would have told them pretty much the same thing, except the going to hell part.

The truth is I spent my formative years in Oak Park. I made some of my most cherished friendships there including my oldest and dearest friend, also an emigre from the West Side. I have no such connection to Humboldt Park. In Oak Park I had a back yard and a basement where I had nearly full reign, in addition to my bedroom. Three doors away there was a lovely park where I learned to play tennis. In the winter I went skating and sledding. For all intents and purposes, the "quality" of my life improved exponentially after we moved there. I am who I am today, for better or worse, by virtue of my life in Oak Park. 

Yet moving away from Humboldt Park was traumatic for me as things I dearly loved, my friends and the only home I knew, were taken away. Today I have no bad memories of my life in Humboldt Park, even though bad things certainly happened there. For years I mourned losing it and went back every chance I could. Despite there being no rational explanation for it, to this day I still feel in some ways more connected to Humboldt Park than Oak Park. 

Memory is a funny thing.

It's not surprising to me that folks who left their childhood homes around the same time I did, would have similar memories. It's even less surprising that they would express bitterness had they felt pushed out of their old neighborhood, especially if that idea was constantly enforced by the people closest to them.

Not many of the subjects in Vanishing Eden come off looking as horrible as the ones I mentioned above. Most of them, forty and more years after the fact (the book was published in 2016), understand the dynamics of race in this country and realize that black people themselves aren't to blame for what happened to their communities. But the authors in no way let these folks off the hook as they all in one way or other, express understanding for their fellow white folks, usually family members, who feel more bitter than they do, thereby "excusing their racism" as the authors put it.  

Thumbing through the book it's difficult to find a page where either the word racism or the term white privilege is not found. The authors are correct in pointing out that many white people who experienced white flight to this day have no intention of living on the same block as a black person Somehow, they weren't able to come up with any white flight veterans who had no problem living with black people. 

I wonder why.

They could have asked Linda Gartz. Perhaps the most revealing part of her book is where she mentions how during the civil rights movement of the sixties, her parents sympathized with the plight of black people in American South. That feeling didn't extend to the blacks who were moving into their neighborhood. This NIMBY (not in my backyard) attitude is not unusual, it's one of the less flattering parts of human nature.

On the same token, it's completely understandable why white people who experienced making the difficult decision of moving out of a changing neighborhood, would feel put off being judged by other white people who had no such experience. I imagine it would be doubly irritating for working class folks to have people with more money, education and influence, people who could afford to live anywhere they pleased, including affluent predominantly white suburbs, accuse them of racism and exercising their "white privilege", just for wanting their families to be able to live in peace and safety.

I don't know the personal backgrounds of Professors Dalmage and Maly. From their profile photographs, they appear to both be white. I can't say if either had the experience of living in a racially changing neighborhood. Dalmage was born in the mid-sixties and Maly in the eighties making them both too young, especially Maly, to have experienced the height of the era of white flight.  

It's clear they have an agenda, not a misguided one, reminding us that we'd all be better off if we learned how to get to know one another. Where they err in my opinion, is they make the same mistake they accuse their subjects of, they lack a sense of empathy. 

In my piece on the baseball player Ty Cobb, I embedded a powerful interview with the great Negro League ballplayer, coach, manager, and historian John "Buck" O'Neil. In that interview, O'Neil refuses to condemn people for being racists. Everybody has their own mountain to climb he suggests. "Babies aren't born prejudiced", O'Neil said, someone had to teach them to be that way.

Had Rogers and other good people like him not entered my life, had I spent my first years in West Garfield Park rather than Humboldt Park, had we not moved to Oak Park allowing me to meet the amazing people who would become my lifelong friends... 

Had a slew of other things that happened by chance in my life making me who I am today not happened, and most of all, had I not had parents who set me straight and taught me that the most important lesson in life is that "people are people", my outlook on the world may have been very different.

Had things been different, I too may have ended up being an angry white guy, falling prey to bad actors like the neighborhood busters, Tucker Carlson and the rest, teaching me to fear and distrust anyone who is different from me.

"There but by the grace of God go I" they say.

I think everyone of good will needs to keep that in mind.

They Dropped the Puck This Time...

 ... and not to start the game.

2010 was a good year for me. It started when my wife and I had the opportunity to visit London for the first time. Then halfway through the year, the unthinkable happened. My favorite sports team in the world, the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup. It was not the first time in my life they won the Cup, they won it when I was two years old, a little before I started caring about hockey and just about anything else. As far as hockey is concerned, it was indeed just a little bit before I started caring about the game as you can read here.

The Cup itself is one of the most emblematic and recognized trophies in all of sports. For starters, unlike other trophies such as soccer's World Cup, and whatever they call the thing they hand out to the winner of the MLB World Series, there is only one Stanley Cup; a new version of it is not recast and handed out for each championship team to keep.  

As such, the Stanley Cup gets around. The tradition is that every member of the Cup winning team gets to spend a day with the trophy, doing with it whatever he pleases, within reason. There are a couple of guys whose job it is to accompany the Cup wherever it goes to I assume, enforce the within reason part. 

Most players take the opportunity to share the cup with people who are special to them, often in their hometown which given the international nature of the game, means the Cup logs hundreds of thousands of airline miles every year. 

If the Cup could talk as they say, boy the stories it would tell.

Patrick Kane and Lord Stanley's Cup, Chicago, 2010

Another great tradition, in the days immediately following winning the NHL championship, the team shares the Cup with its community.

For example in 2015, after the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup for the third time in six seasons, the team's captain both then and at this writing, Jonathan Toews*, shared it with the patients at Miserecordia Heart of Mercy, a facility in my neighborhood that serves people with developmental disabilities.

On June 26, 2010, 15 days after the Blackhawks won their first championship in 49 years, a bit of history was made when the Stanley Cup found itself in a place it had never been, and as far as I can tell, hasn't been since, as the centerpiece of an LGBTQ+ pride parade. 

It was Hawks defenseman Brent Sopel who, with the approval of the team, accepted an invitation from the Chicago Gay Hockey Association to carry the Cup while riding aboard their float in the 41st annual Chicago Pride Parade. His inspiration to participate in the parade was to honor a young hockey player, Brendan Burke who was killed in an automobile accident earlier that year. Two months before his death, Burke had come out, and while Sopel claimed his participation in the parade wasn't to advocate for anything, he added:

...if coming here helps break down walls in the meantime, so be it. 

That act did indeed break down at least a few walls. In the words of Bill Gubrud, the founder of the National Gay & Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame, spoken in 2015:

The Blackhawks organization has been very supportive of the gay community for years, starting with the Stanley Cup being in the gay pride parade in 2010 and their numerous contributions to LGBT youth organizations and programs.

Those walls Sopel spoke of were not insignificant. While much of American society by 2010 had at least tacitly come to terms with accepting people being free to be themselves, the world of men's sports, never known for its progressive leanings was an exception, especially when it came to accepting diverse sexual and gender identities and lifestyles.

Given that, Sopel's decision to participate in the Pride Parade with the Stanley Cup was a gutsy one, which paved the way for the team's and ultimately the National Hockey League's participation in several efforts in the direction of inclusion, by accepting, supporting, and to the cynical among us, selling tickets to members of the LGBTQ+ community.

By far the most visible of these outreach efforts are the Pride nights that take place annually in every NHL rink. One of many such events teams devote every season to a particular theme or cause, Pride nights feature many different activities related to the theme. In the NHL, the most noticeable of these is players on the home team donning special jerseys celebrating the theme during their 15-minute pre-game warmup. After the warmup, each jersey is signed by the player who wore it, then offered up for auction to the fans, with the proceeds going to charity. 

In the case of Pride Night, artists representing the local LGBTQ+ community are commissioned to design jerseys which incorporate the design of the team's regular jerseys with the rainbow theme, emblematic of the community.

It's with great pride that I can say the team I've been a fan of for nearly all my life, the Chicago Blackhawks, were trailblazers in this effort when Brent Sopel representing them, proudly carried the Stanley Cup on that float in the Chicago Pride Parade thirteen years ago. 

In a perfect world, this post would end here. 

Unfortunately...

NHL Pride nights had gone off pretty much without a hitch for several years until a couple months ago. The trouble began when Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Ivan Provarov opted out of wearing the extra-colorful Flyer warmup jersey. Instead, he skipped the warmup, but did play in the game in January against the Anaheim Ducks. Afterwords, Provarov sited his Russian Orthodox religion as the reason for not wearing the jersey. In a brief post-game statement addressing the issue, Provarov said this: 

I respect everybody’s choices. My choice is to stay true to myself and my religion. That’s all I’m going to say.

Shortly thereafter, also sighting religious objections, six other NHL players chose to go the same route and sit out their teams' pre-game warmups rather than wear the rainbow-colored warmup jersey.

This was followed by four teams announcing that while they would go ahead with their own Pride Night celebrations this year, their players would not be wearing the themed jerseys during their warmup. Those teams were the Minnesota Wild, the New York Rangers, the Toronto Maple Leafs and, wait for it... the Chicago Blackhawks. 

The first three teams offered no enlightening comment on their decision. The Blackhawks however came up with a doozy, citing an unlikely scapegoat, Vladimir Putin.

Putin you see, has decreed that it is now illegal for Russian citizens to promote anything LBGTQ+. On their current roster, the Blackhawks have three players either from Russia, or of Russian heritage, and out of concerns for their safety the team says, there will be no skating with the special jerseys this year.

This is a little puzzling to me for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that an American sports franchise is caving in to the demands of a hostile, sociopathic, foreign dictator. While I understand the concern for the players and perhaps most directly their families currently living in Russia, it seems to me there would have been a simple solution that didn't involve throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Simply scratch those players from that particular game (you can do that in the NHL), and replace them with three members of the Hawks' farm team ninety minutes up the road in Rockford. I'm sure those minor league players would be more than happy to warmup in a rainbow-colored jersey in exchange for a chance to skate for one night in the big show. 

 

So why can the event? As one of the worst teams in the NHL this year, the Hawks certainly can't be all that worried about losing yet another game. My guess is that there may have been a few more players on the team who said they wouldn't participate either, and rather than upsetting the apple cart, the Blackhawks played the Putin card. 

 

Not surprisingly, since Provarov's action, this issue has become red meat for the ultra-right cultural warriors among us who are using it as an example of the intolerant-woke-fascist-predator mob "co-opting" the sport of hockey and our lives in general, with their "divisive" political message of love, inclusion and acceptance. 

For them, push back to Hockey Pride Night is a great victory for freedom of speech, religion and self-expression, something gravely missing they say in our current pinko, libtard, snowflake, ANTIFA-BLM loving, multicultural mess of a society. To the ultra-right, Ivan Provarov is a valiant hero to the cause by saying nyet to the groomers.

I beg to differ. 

For starters, I believe that publicly supporting a group of people who for centuries have been marginalized, abused, persecuted and in some cases murdered just for being who they are, is NOT a political act. It is an act of human decency. If being a decent human being is "woke", then count me in.

 

When asked after the game in Philly if he had any intention of benching Provarov for missing the warmup, Flyers head coach, John Tortorella, said no, adding that Provarov had every right to "be true to himself" by refusing to wear the jersey and skipping the warmup. 

 

That's very kumbaya of Tortorella who is known for his old school, "there is no 'I' in the word 'team'" approach to his craft. It's also surprising as the same Tortorella a couple years ago emphatically declared he would bench any player who refused to stand for the anthem as a means of protesting injustice in this country.   

 

I guess somebody "being true to himself" counts only to some folks when they agree with what the person is being "true" about.

Retired hockey star PK Subban was featured in a FOX interview where he is quoted as saying that athletes should not be forced into to being "activists".

I agree. 

I would also argue that in this case, no one is asking that of the players. Nobody expects hockey players to march in the streets, write op-ed pieces in the New York Times, or warmup in drag, the last of which is kind of a pity as I would pay good money to see that. 

As for the players refusing to wear pride jerseys on religious grounds, I would ask them to probe deeply into their hearts as well as their heads, as they listen to these words of San Jose Sharks goalie James Reimer, one of the refuseniks, edited here for brevity and clarity: 

...everyone has value and worth. I wish people knew that wasn’t just a line... I have a heart for people. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done in the past, (or) what you do..., I have my beliefs and things that I can’t personally endorse. But man, you love the person, you try and do whatever you can to get to know them...

Reading this, if Reimer is being honest, which I believe he is, he obviously has his heart in the right place. Which makes me think he hasn't thought the whole thing through. He mentions not being able to endorse things he doesn't believe in. That is not only his right but his obligation.

However, as with Brent Sopel in 2010, NHL players wearing the rainbow jersey is not in itself an endorsement of alternative lifestyles, but rather an expression of love and acceptance of our fellow human beings, which is EXACTLY what James Reimer says he believes in. Wearing these jerseys in public with your teammates is powerful symbol that the team and the organization flat-out reject bigotry, abuse and hatred. What kind of religion could have a problem with that? 

OK, plenty, but none I would ever associate with.

As such, wearing a pride jersey in the pre-game skate is no more an automatic endorsement of queerness than wearing a green jersey on St. Patrick's Day (which NHL teams routinely do), is an automatic endorsement of the Irish Republican Army.

Thirteen years after the Stanley Cup made its one and only appearance at a pride parade, some things have changed, but not much. At this writing, there is still only one current male North American professional ice hockey player who has come out, and zero in the NHL, which reflects the numbers in other men's sports.

There's no reason to believe that the proportion of gay people in sports would be much different from that of the general population, meaning there are probably at least a couple dozen closeted pro hockey players. Given that, I don't think it's farfetched to claim that male sports culture is still toxic when it comes to gay and trans people. If you don't believe me, check out the article: "Nashville Predators hold Pride Night after mass killing carried out by transgender shooter", its ludicrous premise, and the hate-filled comments it inspired, brought to us by the fine folks at FOX Sports. 

I bring that up because unlike many other fields, when the sports community takes a stand reaching out to the LBGTQ community, they are clearly NOT preaching to the choir. This means their efforts actually can change attitudes, especially among young people. 

Despite the detractors, lost in all this is the fact that there has been overwhelming support of NHL Pride nights among the players. Sadly because of the detractors, there is speculation that NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman is considering mothballing Hockey Pride Night after this season. That would be a real shame.

In my view, if they are able to reach a handful of kids who by seeing their heroes wearing the rainbow colors, might think twice about their own negative views of people who are different from themselves, if they reach a handful of LGBTQ athletes to let them know they are welcome members of the community, and most important, if their efforts help make lives just a little better for a handful of gay and trans kids who are suffering with depression and suicidal thoughts, then the effort will have been worth it, in spades. 

Let's face it, haters are going to hate, that's been the story of human existence since time immemorial. It's high time we stop letting them have the final say.

*  On Thursday, April 13, Jonathan Toews most likely played his last game as a Chicago Blackhawk, capping off his brilliant 15-year career with the team.