Onwards and upwards, but not for all

Trigger warning: gun violence, racism

Yesterday, ten people died and seven were injured in a shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. Motivated by the public outcry, President Obama gave a speech on the event and the issues it raises yesterday which still dominates my newsfeed and in all likelihood yours as well. He laid out a basic argument for gun control and against a hypervigilance for over-regulation of firearms and related weapons:

We talked about this after Columbine and Blacksburg, after Tucson, after Newtown, after Aurora, after Charleston.  It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun.

And what’s become routine, of course, is the response of those who oppose any kind of common-sense gun legislation.  Right now, I can imagine the press releases being cranked out:  We need more guns, they’ll argue.  Fewer gun safety laws.

Does anybody really believe that?  There are scores of responsible gun owners in this country –they know that’s not true.  We know because of the polling that says the majority of Americans understand we should be changing these laws — including the majority of responsible, law-abiding gun owners.

That is understandably deeply moving. It taps into one of the great beliefs in the United States about this country – that we are an evolving country, tethered by traditions but not ensnared by them. We can – and do – blaze forward, the story goes, changing ourselves in order to make life better. This story is sometimes about this type of regulation on a product, but can also come in the form of appeals to how the franchise has expanded, widening the voting population towards something today considered to be an approximation of universal suffrage. Obama is, I suspect, quite consciously marrying those two tales together, crediting the ostensibly safer and healthier life of the average US citizen to the theoretically democratic achievements of this country. We can literally vote ourselves to safety.

Unfortunately, it’s increasingly unclear that any part of this narrative is true. Past regulations on firearms and present day regulations on cars and other products Obama later mentions were opposed at almost every step by a major industry if not several. Those two are some of the most successful campaigns for that matter. Even as cars have reduced the dangers in an accident, they’ve gotten better at concealing their emissions, disguising the threat they pose to a stable and useful climate for us and ultimately everyone else in the world. Almost all of these improvements are rooted in economic bottom lines. It’s better to make a product that doesn’t easily and regularly kill your customers – that’s just basic business sense. But longer term damage to its consumers, to their descendants, and to the broader world can just be “externalities“, at least for much longer than that other kind of threat.

When it comes to more general issues of social and economic security that same statistics crop up repeatedly showing that many problems have lingered or even worsened. Food insecurity remains prevalent in the US. Union membership – long a bulwark for lower and middle classes to protect their interests – has drastically declined, as has (for that and other reasons) the political effectiveness of unions. Fear of poverty, of want, and of homelessness are barely considerations in the economic and political system in which we live, and so have at best been allowed, and at worst encouraged as “motivation“. The idea that we have become safer than those before us downplays these concerns and denies the observable reality that sometimes things actually have gotten worse.

Suffrage, still full of historical holes like felon disenfranchisement, has recently taken a hit from the dismantling of the pre-clearance system. Already, Alabama appears to be coordinating mass suppression of voters of color in advance of the 2016 election with no effective federal oversight. Other states are likely to follow suit. Even before that structural link in US democracy crumbled, we were already facing an effective plutocratic check on at the very least national elections, and by one study’s standards, were no longer a democracy, but rather an oligarchy. A majority of people in this country – citizens or not – might want basic regulations on weapons, but does that mean anything? For years, in spite of popular outcry, it hasn’t.

New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, from here.

Further along in his speech, Obama presented what he viewed as a few analogues to what he hopes we could accomplish on gun control, saying among other things, “When Americans are killed in floods and hurricanes, we make communities safer.” One needs only point to Katrina as an example of how limited those improvements often can be. Over a thousand died, and over a million were displaced. More valued populations threatened by later hurricanes have been better protected, so perhaps the government learned something from that disaster. But those lessons learned in catastrophe haven’t been applied to repair the still hurting (and specifically Black) communities in New Orleans, but to preserve the business centers of Houston and the greater New York area. In fact, as the devastation of Hurricane Katrina created the opportunity for a wealthier and Whiter demographic to move in and replace dead or displaced residents, parts of New Orleans seem poised to attain a similar status, only without the people who originally lived there.

Progress appears to be a privilege, increasingly reserved only for some in this society. It seems vital that we ask who gets left behind, and not only when the answer is “almost everyone.”

Counting the deaths

It’s a tragedy of the modern age that the deaths from certain policies or politics have to be counted in order to force the acceptance of new ideas and practices, but unfortunately, that seems to be the reality. Unfortunately, as the death count for civilians in Iraq showed, those numbers aren’t always received equally, with certain lives mattering more than others. Perhaps the lives of US citizens and residents which are lost as a result of the current government shut down will gain more traction, however?

In any case, I want us all to remember and as this progresses tabulate the human cost of the shutdown from the following:

• Influenza – the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has already released an initial flu vaccine, but all additional monitoring and later releases are up in the air as long as the government is shut down. In short, we’ll be dealing with a half-implemented influenza program, and it might be revealing to note how many people die this year from the flu in comparison to other recent years.
• Tropical Storm Karen – the tropical storm is expected to make landfall tomorrow near the New Orleans area that was previously devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Karen is currently passing over waters the were abnormally warm at about this time of year which allowed Katrina to gain an unexpected degree of strength. Monitoring for that outcome appears to not be on the list of emergency services that will be provided by the federal government. Admittedly disaster management will be provided by the government, but in a state that historically has required federal assistance in response to tropical storms under these precise conditions (among others), any reduction in how much that help will likely be strongly felt.
• Tornadoes – eastern Nebraska has already been hit by one tornado (which thankfully didn’t cause any deaths), but the storm system likely to produce more stretches from Oklahoma to Wisconsin and will remain a threat for the rest of today and through tomorrow. As with Tropical Storm Karen, gaps in federal emergency assistance are possible.
• Cancer – the National Institute of Health will not be taking in any trial patients (who are usually children) for cancer treatment and remission prevention, during the shut down. It’s worth asking someone to take a look into the lives of those affected by that unfortunate result.

Of course, the question is, who could connect these dots and calculate the differences between what would have been inevitable in all of these situations and what these various government programs could have done. The sad answer is that the data that non-governmental sources would likely use would be information collected by the government and hosted on its websites (which are all of this moment, shut down). The government is unlikely to be allowed to take such measurements and others would likely rely on its information to make much of a statement about what’s happened.

In short, we’re likely losing lives because of this shut down, and we have no means of working out how many.

Bullies

TW: racism, classism, cissexism, sexual assault, heterosexism

I’m tired of Michael Brown being allowed to publicly joke about the horrendous conditions he helped create in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, which still haven’t been fully resolved. His newest “joke” only makes sense if you automatically assume that the people of New Orleans are innately unstable and unable to deal with basic technical delays. That tells you something about how he interpreted their anger at being abandoned for days with little food and clean water.

(The partially blacked out stadium during the Superbowl, from here.)

I’m tired of MTV giving air time to cissexist speculation in front of a young transgender woman about her sexual assault and identity that was then broadcast across India. Their speculation that Sherry identified as female for this reason or that wasn’t so much asked as announced. Her own story of who she is and why and what it all means was swept away in favor of a cisgender man being able to tell her what was really going on. Of course, the excuse is that all of this is an experiment in terms of seeing how Sherry would respond to pressing circumstances. Because the difficulties and nervousness that accompany a technical performance are the same as having your gender identity dismissed and defined for you on national television?

I’m tired of having powerful academic institutions willingly participate in the political targeting of a well-known queer programmer-activist. MIT has been revealed as essentially having cooperated with the federal investigation against the expressed interests of many of its faculty and students as those of the actual company (JSTOR) whose intellectual property was “stolen”. What seems to have upset them is that someone fought against their control of information distribution.

I’m tired of straight people from straight families saying they should be the ones to decide legal definitions of parenthood and accompanying policies to the explicit exclusion of members of queer families.

I’m tired of bullies. Aren’t you?

All this has happened before and will happen again…

TW: racism, hurricane-related damage, erasure of Black people from national narratives, erasure of Indigenous people, class warfare

Over at the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman, who until recently was one of their main Europe-based correspondents, has written an intriguing (and free to read) take on the situation in New York following Hurricane Sandy’s destruction. In a nutshell, it’s a very meandering look at how this is, or at least should be, some sort of a wake-up call about the massive toll our national infrastructure is going to take over the coming years. Ultimately it concludes that the substantive investment required to make adjustments as the climate changes will only be available to the wealthy, namely in Manhattan. On the other hand, the working and middle class neighborhoods of Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and eventually even the Bronx will probably receive public assistance only to rebuild, rather than to retrofit for new sea levels.

The problem is of course that Kimmelman treats these facts as things that have only just now rudely erupted into the national discourse. But, it seems obvious that the low-lying coastal edges of New York would face chilling new risks as the climate changed and that assistance would be concentrated in the well-to-do neighborhoods when you think about it. After all, there’s already been an example of an almost identical series of events, just with more Black people involved.

(Apparently what New Orleans looked like when the levies broke after Katrina went down the memory hole. Originally from this article which discusses the way post-disaster investment was primarily directed at wealthier residential districts and business areas.)

I don’t want to pick on Kimmelman, but that is a pretty glaring omission. To his credit, he has done some really important and interesting reporting on issues that affect Black communities in various cultural contexts, but that’s precisely the problem: his coverage in both articles has treated the experiences of primarily Black individuals in isolation. He appears to be able to cover négritude or Katrina with sympathy and interest in the lives of Black people, but importantly he stops there. The reality of Blacks in France, in the US, or anywhere in the world are in these writings exclusively that – about Black people. They aren’t analyzed as part of the larger culture, perhaps because like many people still today Kimmelman might not think of Black people in those terms. Alternatively, Kimmelman might draw connections between primarily Black experiences and national events, but shy away from writing about it, fearing that his readers will reject any such article for treating Black people as part of the larger country.

Regardless of cause, the effect is that the national consciousness is bleached. The regrettable tragedies this year in New York and New Jersey eclipse the equally appalling devastation in 2005 in New Orleans. The former are something that affects the national consciousness of all Americans, while apparently the latter was a “niche” disaster. Just like the new hurdles imposed by climate change on economically disenfranchised Native American communities, apparently Katrina didn’t happen to “real” Americans.

Admittedly, Kimmelman does imply that there’s interplay between race and class, especially in the demographic distinction between Manhattan and the other boroughs. He does that with a single line in the recent piece, in which he noted,

That billions of dollars may end up being spent to protect businesses in Lower Manhattan while old, working-class communities on the waterfronts of Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island most likely won’t get the same protection flies in the face of ideas about social justice, and about New York City, with its open-armed self-image as a capital of diversity.

In Kimmelman’s eyes, that appears to be the extent to which the way Black people and other people of color can contribute to this national realization of the dangerous interplay between inequality and climate: as additional flavor to the class war. And remember, if there’s not enough White people involved, it falls off the radar, so vague association is supposedly the best that people of color can hope for, at least from Kimmelman and those who think like him.