Goosebumps

It gives me goosebumps, all this attention being given to what’s happening in Russia.

Yes, I am concerned about the people who are and who have been affected by violence or the threat of violence. It has always struck me as odd that people who believe in God are so eager to get into war with others, killing innocent people.

But what gives me goosebumps is that America, which has so many examples of treating people fairly or just, is so indignant at the possibility that another country might be doing the same.

America’s violence against its citizens isn’t as dramatic as what we have seen in Egypt and Syria and others, meaning, there are no tanks rolling through cities, running over and gunning down innocent people.

But metaphorically, America has “run over” and “gunned down” innocent people throughout her history. Beginning with how America decimated Native Americans in this, THEIR country, moving on to black people, the interring the Japanese …Americans have violated the human rights of large numbers of her own citizens.

I recently heard a report on National Public Radio (NPR) of a car load of Muslim-Americans who were detained and harassed by American border guards. Apparently that goes on quite a lot.

There is the reality of people being incarcerated for 20 years for non-violent, primarily drug offenses. America incarcerates more people than any other modern nation in the world…Michelle Alexander says in her book, The New Jim Crow, that America “has not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” Incarceration is a form of racialized control which will only get worse because of the emerging and growing Prison Industrial Complex, created to bring huge profits to those who run it.

There are children who are dying of preventable disease because of their lack of accessibility to health care, and too few people seem to care. There is a feeling of disgruntlement amongst some law makers as government attempts to help those who are struggling; they see that as government helping the lazy remain lazy, even as the powers that be outsource jobs that many of these people used to have access to. Former Vice-President Dick Cheney said last week that President Obama would “rather give food stamps than build a strong military.” (http://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/dick-cheney-pentagon-budget-food-stamps-103906.html).

What are unemployed people supposed to do to survive? And why don’t so many lawmakers seem to care? Why don’t the lawmakers who were instrumental in outsourcing jobs to which many Americans formerly had access…care? If they don’t get help from the government, if they don’t have money or time to go back to school to get the skills they need to get the high-tech jobs that ARE available here…what are they supposed to do to survive? How is the cold-heartedness of our lawmakers any different from what rulers of other nations are doing?

I get goosebumps because America has a human rights violation problem …but will not own up to it or fix it. I get goosebumps because America has ALWAYS had a human rights problem…but has ignored that problem while she has gone traipsing all over the world to help other people who are suffering. That help would be noble if America would just hear the cries of her own people.

Perhaps I am too cynical but I feel like if America is helping people in other countries, it’s not because she cares about the suffering of the people, but it’s because there’s some economic gain in it for America.

Can a world power remain in power acting that way? Don’t world powers who disintegrate into money and power grabbing entities eventually self-destruct? When nations, world powers, don’t care about the masses, doesn’t that eventually mean their power is curtailed or forever altered?

It doesn’t seem to me that a nation can be concerned about everyone else but which ignores its own suffering can survive, ultimately. Eventually, the oppressed rise up and fight back. Isn’t that what we’re seeing in other countries?

I get goosebumps. Can’t write much more about it right now…but I get goosebumps.

It’s a troubling candid observation …

A Different Dream

As I have watched the festivities surrounding President Barack Obama’s second inauguration, concurrently being celebrated alongside the birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King, I find myself courting a different dream…and that is that the president’s presence, power and persistence in spite of tremendous odds, that more and more African-American boys will have someone in their lives whom they call “my dad,” aspiring to be like him.

When President Obama was first elected, he came to Columbus, Ohio. There was great excitement in seeing the president’s jet sitting in our airport; many people went to the airport and stood outside fences just to see him jaunt down the stairs of that big jet to go do … “president work.”

I was there, and I loved the jet and seeing the president, but what sticks in my mind are the images of young African-American men with little boys ( I assumed they were their sons) perched on their shoulders. I remember hearing so many of these young men saying to those little boys, “You can be president one day.” The little boys, some of them, clapped their hands and were clearly excited. I can still feel the energy those little boys and the men I assumed were their dads emitted that day. I suppose the presence of the president also ignited something inside their dads as well. Who knew that any of us would see an African-American be president of this country?

It was a powerful moment, on so many levels, but one of those levels struck me deeply. I know that little boys idolize their fathers, and I know that one of those little boys I saw that day internalized what their dads were saying to them. Those words for the little boys had power not just because the president of the greatest country in the world looked like them …but because their dads planted the seeds of hope into them that they could be anything they wanted to be.

Little African-American boys don’t often get that kind of encouragement. I have seen them labeled as behavior problems when they have just been being little boys. I have seen them ignored and tossed aside in schools, so that by third grade, many of them (African-American girls as well) have lost hope and excitement about life and learning. They are told they are bad and they can feel that not their teachers nor even their parents (mostly moms) believe in them.

I listened to Vice President Joe Biden‘s son today talking, saying, “my dad,” and I realized that not enough African-American children, and especially African-American boys, can say those two words. There have been plenty of sociological studies that try to explain to us why so many African-American men are not present in the lives of their children, and for sure, there are cultural, sociological and historical reasons for the plight and condition of African-American men in this country …but our little boys need their dads. They need dads who show them what strength and perseverance is. They need dads whom they can follow around and get advice from that only a dad can give a son. They need dads to show them how to stand up when the world knocks them down.

A lot has been said that America’s “War on Drugs” has resulted in more African-American men being incarcerated than whites; indeed, America has more people in prison than any other modern industrialized nation. Michelle Alexander, in her book, The New Jim Crow does an amazing job of showing how this “war,” initiated by Ronald Reagan, ended up being an instrument which made it legal to throw blacks in jail, not as much for violent crime as for minor drug offenses.

The “war” itself has resulted in “keeping blacks in their place,” some have argued. Once out of jail, these formerly jailed men cannot, oftentimes, get jobs, find housing, get food stamps, secure a driver’s license …they in effect have been shut out of life as it must be lived in America. They cannot survive, and many end up back in jail.

And who suffers? The society as a whole for sure, but especially the little boys who are left behind, with no fathers, and too often, overworked mothers who cannot give them what their dads need to give them. A recent movie called The House I Live In, directed by Eugene Jarecki, shows what the “war” has done in this country…It is sad and disturbing, but a fact of our American life.

And so on this Martin Luther King holiday, thinking about his “dream,” I am stuck on a different dream – a country where the unfair and unjust “justice” system that has put too many African-American fathers in jail will be addressed, modified, changed …so that more little boys can sit on the shoulders of their fathers, and be inspired as to what they can do.

A candid observation…

Forty Years Later- Justice

I breathed a sigh of relief, revealing a breath I had unknowingly been holding, as I read that outgoing North Carolina Gov. Beverly Purdue gave a full pardon to the “Wilmington 10.”

But I also felt a familiar tinge of anger and bitterness. Justice often comes slowly, especially when it comes to cases or situations involving black people.

In her pardon, Gov. Perdue said “These convictions were tainted by naked racism and represent an ugly stain on North Carolina’s criminal justice system that cannot be allowed to stand any longer. Justice demands that this stain finally be removed.” (http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/31/north-carolina-governor-pardons-wilmington-10/?iref=allsearch)

The Wilmington 10 became nationally known in 1972 when nine black men and one white woman were accused and convicted of conspiracy and arson in the firebombing a white-owned store in a black neighborhood. Among the 10 convicted persons was Ben Chavis, who at age 24 at the time of the incident, was the oldest of the group. Chavis was sentenced to 34 years in prison, and was imprisoned from 1972 to 1979.

In 1978, the sentences were reduced for all of the Wilmington 10, and two years later, North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt overturned their convictions. Among the reasons cited was misconduct by the prosecutor of the case. Gov. Perdue said, in her comments about why she granted the pardon, that information given to her had revealed that there had been much injustice served in the case.

In an article on CNN, the author wrote, “Perdue said that among the key evidence that led her to grant pardons of innocence were recently discovered notes from the prosecutor who picked the jury. The notes showed the prosecutor preferred white jurors who might be members of the Ku Klux Klan and one black juror was described as an “Uncle Tom type.”

The author continued, “Perdue also pointed to the federal court’s ruling that the prosecutor knew his star witness lied on the witness stand. That witness and other witnesses recanted a few years after the trial.” (http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/31/justice/north-carolina-wilmington-10/index.html).

All along, the 10 people had protested that they were innocent, but to no avail. The case received international attention and condemnation. When the United States criticized Russia for having political prisoners in the 1970s, that country commented that the United States had little ground for its criticism, citing the political prisoners in America known as the Wilmington 10.

That it took 40 years for this pardon to be granted is one issue, but a larger issue is that this type of injustice, so often meted out to African-Americans and other persons of color, is and has been so much a part of the American justice system. Michelle Alexander lays out the scope of the injustice experienced by African-Americans in her landmark book, The New Jim Crow, pointing out how the “war on crime” adversely and disproportionately affected African-Americans, but even before that, it was clear that America had a justice system that was anything but just for them.

In the book Slavery by Another Name, author Douglas A. Blackmon brilliantly lays out how the convict leasing system was based on and depended upon, injustice as concerned mostly people of color. One could be arrested for just about anything and, through an unsophisticated yet highly successful system of cooperation between the justice system and farmers and businessmen who needed cheap labor in order to realize huge profits. Blackmon describes how that system essentially criminalized black people, mostly men, and kept them enslaved to those farmers and corporations for years, and nobody said anything about it, though what was being practiced was peonage, which was illegal.

Thus, the roots of injustice toward black people are deep, watered and nurtured by, none else than the “justice system” itself. It became easier and easier to label black people as “criminals” as they were frequently arrested for the slightest “offense,” something that could be as minor as being stopped on the way to looking for a job because they had no money. The things black people were arrested and sentenced to a life of slavery to farms and corporations garnered no questions or outrage from an apathetic country that was being led to believe that these troublesome black people were in fact bad, and deserving of getting “justice” so that society would be safer. It was a manipulated image that took hold.

So it is not surprising that when Chavis and the others who comprised the Wilmington 10 were arrested that the prosecutor did whatever he had to do in order to get them convicted. The justice system supported injustice toward blacks. The Wilmington 10 reportedly had two trials; the first one ended in a mistrial when the prosecutor, Jay Stroud, said he was sick. In that trial, the jury was made up of 10 blacks and 2 whites. In the second trial, which resulted in the conviction of the defendants, the jury was made up of 10 whites and two blacks.

Chavis, who was once a member of the United Church of Christ, never stopped working for justice. From the beginning, he and the others knew that they had been wrongly accused and wrongly convicted; bigger than that, he knew that the injustice had been allowed to take place because of the racial tensions in North Carolina and in the United States.

“Although we were totally innocent of the charges, it took almost a decade of court appeals, state-witnesses recanting, federal re-investigations, years of unjust imprisonment and cruel punishment before the Wilmington Ten had our unjust convictions overturned, names cleared,” Chavis said in an article which appears on his website (http://www.drbenjaminchavis.com/pages/landing/?blockID=73315&feedID=3359). He said that the arrests and convictions were the result of “federal officials (who) conspired together to unjustly frame, arrest, try, imprison, and repress members of the Wilmington Ten who were actively protesting the institutionalized racial discrimination and hostilities surrounding the forced, court-ordered desegregation of the public school system in New Hanover County and Wilmington, North Carolina from 1968-1971.”

It is good that Gov. Perdue issued the pardon, but it begs the question of how many other unjustly accused and convicted people of color, most often African-American, are sitting in prisons today. Some whites may be surprised and shocked that such a travesty of justice occurred “back then,” but here is what is sobering: this type of injustice is still happening. Racism, resulting in bigoted attitudes toward and beliefs about black people, still accounts for many arrests today. Prisons are overflowing with young black men many of whom, in the final analysis, were arrested for minor drug possession charges. Their presence in our prisons is making someone wealthy. Prisons-for-profit are cropping up more and more. Institutionalized slavery still exists.

So, I am glad for the pardon of Chavis and the others. Because of the pardon, those of the group who remain alive will get some monetary remuneration, and that is a good thing. They will get some money for each year they were incarcerated. I am glad about that.

But I am sad, too, because, the more things change, the more they remain the same …

A candid observation …

The Big Business Called Prisons

Cover of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarcer... — Cover via Amazon

While the country, or parts of the country, express justified rage and anger toward Rush Limbaugh and his hideous and inappropriate statements directed at Georgetown Law School student Sandra Fluke, another outrage is being allowed to move forward, quietly but steadily.

In a February 14, 2012 article posted on The Huffington Post, the story was told of how a private corporation, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is offering cash-strapped states big money for their prisons. The article, by Chris Kirkham, said,”As state governments wrestle with massive budget shortfalls, a Wall Street giant is offering a solution: cash in exchange for state property. Prisons, to be exact.”

CCA is a for-profit operator of prisons. That means the corporation, and others like it, exist because there are prisons; their financial success depends upon prisons continuing to exist and continue to be filled. According to Kirkham’s article, CCA is “a swiftly growing business,with revenues expanding more than fivefold since the mid-1990s,” as the “War on Drugs” became a major issue in America.

Harley Lappin, who retired as the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, is the Chief Corrections Officer (CCO) of CCA, and Board members include only one African-American, Thurgood Marshall, Jr., the son of the late United States Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall.

What’s the big deal, you ask? The big deal is that America cannot seem to let go of its plantation system. With money in the picture, as the driver of how prisons are operated, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that there is a big incentive for America to keep its prisons filled. CCA is doing business; it is not interested in rehabilitating people. In a recent letter to governors of 48 states, Harley Lappin wrote “…CCA is earmarking $250 million for purchasing and managing government-owned corrections facilities. The program is a new opportunity for federal, state or local governments that are considering the benefits of partnership corrections.”

In that same letter, Lappin said that on January 12 of this year, CCA assumed ownership and management responsibility in a transition described as seamless. This transfer culminated a process that, according to state officials, generated more than $72.7 million in proceeds for Ohio taxpayers (he was talking about the purchase of an Ohio prison),about $50 million of which was allocated for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.”

What does all of this mean? It means that the “new Jim Crow,” as Michelle Alexander has so excellently written about in her book by the same name, is alive and kicking. Who will fill the prisons? Black and brown people mostly, as has always been the case. What Alexander describes in her book as “military policing” will increase in urban neighborhoods, so as to make sure the source of profit for those who are buying the prisons, does not disappear.

Clearly, the target of prison inmates, since the Reagan Administration’s declared “War on Drugs” has been black and brown people, primarily men, who are addicted to crack cocaine. From the time the “war” began, there was money to be had for state and local law enforcement agencies for the numbers of people they arrested. Now, with this blatant “prison for profit” industry rising as one of the, if not the, fastest industries in America, there will be even more money earned on the backs of America’s black, brown, and poor people.

CCA has recently found an additional source of revenue-makers: illegal immigrants. The HP article said that CCA has found a “new opportunity in the business of locking up undocumented immigrants.” It’s business, not personal, right?

While the politicians are mouthing off about contraception, nobody talks about this unethical use and misuse of law enforcement; in fact, the very existence of this “in-your-face” modern day plantation system leads one to muse, “what law enforcement?” If the focus of arrests and imprisonments were all drug users, prescription drugs and powder cocaine as well as street drugs, there would be much less room for cynicism. As it stands, however, under the guise of “law and order” and “protecting the taxpayers,” black and brown people are disproportionately going to be the ones who help CCA and other for-profit prison corporations get wealthier and wealthier.

There is so much that goes on in this country that “we the people” know nothing about. It is by design. If we do not know, “they” can do what they want. And in this instance, that is exactly what is happening, and what has been happening since the Conservative darling Ronald Reagan declared this infamous “war on drugs.”

With the war on women being waged in this GOP presidential nominee battle, as well as the war on voting rights, primarily for black, brown and elderly voters, and this unsavory ploy to keep prisons filled with only certain offenders, it makes me wonder about all this talk about “values.” The term seems to have a very narrow focus, but then, that is nothing new. From the beginning, “we the people” was a very narrowly defined group of white, male property owners, and the fight going on today seems intent on trying to keep that vision from slipping into obscurity. Women have pounced on the attack on themselves and their rights, but black and brown people, and now, undocumented immigrants, need to pounce on the very sneaky attack being waged on their very capability to remain free and eligible to become a part of “the American Dream.”

If CCA continues to have its way, the number of black and brown people who are in reality off of the plantation will be greatly decreased, and the new “massa,” big business, will go merrily on its way.

A candid observation …

Doctors Getting Away with Murder

There is something wrong in America.

Prisons all over this country are filled, mostly with African-American men. The dramatic increase of arrests and incarcerations of African-American men coincided with President Ronald Reagan‘s “war on drugs,” and most of us Americans have smugly assumed that the war was declared in response to the appearance of crack cocaine in urban areas. According to Michelle Alexander, who brilliantly discusses disparities in incarceration between whites and blacks in her book, The New Jim Crow, the Reagan administration declared the war before crack cocaine began to ravage inner city neighborhoods, but used the spread of the drug to secure funds to carry out policies which exacerbated sentencing disparities.

The “war on drugs” led to policies that resulted an explosion in the penal population in this country, accounting for an increase from 300,000 inmates to over 2 million in less than 30 years, Alexander writes. The end-result is that this country incarcerates more people than any other developed country in the world. Alexander writes that “the United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.” (p. 6)

But even as more and more attention is paid to those who use crack cocaine, more and more doctors are getting away with murder, prescribing pain and other medications that are no less damaging or dangerous than is crack. While the prison system is allowing legalized discrimination of African-Americans, American society is allowing legalized murder.

It has been said that Whitney Houston used crack; she herself said she used cocaine, but what we all know by now is that she used prescription meds, and was able to get them fairly easily. She apparently had doctors on both the East and West coasts, and in her room was found bottles of Xanax, lorazepam, and valium – which are all benzodiazepines – as well as Ibuprofen, Midol and Amoxicillin.

I have heard doctors say that there is no way she should have been taking Xanax, lorazepam and valium at the same time. And the danger of her taking those drugs together was exacerbated by alcohol.

It is no secret that there is a double standard when it comes to crime and criminals; street drugs are looked down upon and those who use them are regarded as the dredge of society, while prescription drugs are acceptable. Go into any affluent neighborhood and it’s easy to hear people talk of the anti-anxiety drugs and pain meds they take regularly. It’s almost fashionable to take such drugs, and, contrarily, not fashionable not to take them. The people who are on prescription drugs not as criminals, though some get them illegally and “doctor shop” in order to satisfy their habits, and are socially accepted.

And who is getting away with supplying the drugs? The drug sellers or providers. On the streets, the drug pushers are labeled thugs by society, but in the suburbs, the drug pushers are called …doctors.

If America is going to have a “thing” about drug use, oughtn’t its concern be about all drug use? I think of Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, and Keith Ledger, recent stars who died not because they used crack, but because the sophisticated drug pushers called doctors prescribed them the drugs they were demanding.

The rampant use of drugs – on the streets and in affluent society – makes me wonder why it is so many of us need to self-medicate. Something, somewhere, has failed if so many people in a country where opportunity is so much more available than in other countries are so unable to cope with life. I have no idea about the pressures in the music and entertainment worlds that seem to lead so many people to a state of deep unhappiness, so deep that they cannot cope without medical help. At least, in urban areas, where men cannot get jobs, where poverty is rampant and there seems to be no way out, there appears to be a justifiable reason to want to escape…but what is it when one is “on top?”

Whatever the reason, my point is that since America is so interested in putting “bad” people away, and since we have more money pumped into building new prisons than we do in improving public schools, then room in the cells ought to be made for medical doctors who are violating the Hippocratic oath to “first, do no harm.” These doctors are “doing harm. They are getting away with murder, and they ought to be made to pay for it.

A candid observation …