The Natural Outcome of Abandoning Civility

By Bruce L. Cohen

“A harsh word brings forth anger.” – Proverbs 15:1b

“They have sown the wind, so they will reap the whirlwind.” – Hosea 8:7

“What seed a person sows, that crop shall he also reap.” – Galatians 6:7

 

This might just be the most obvious blog I have ever written: a real “no brainer.”

I am willing to risk being fatuous to effort fomenting public safety.

Unless both sides of America’s main political camps can find a way to dial back from the apocalyptic level of rhetoric they are firing at each other, it seems the recent spate of bomb mailings will most likely be only a beginning.

We can dissent and be civil.

We do not have to demonize to disagree.

Assignment of criminality should always be accompanied by sufficient and suitable proofs for filing of official process. No one should be called a criminal – much less, a super-villian – unless the accuser is willing to provide necessary levels of proof and follow process through to conviction or acquittal.

If name-calling is taught as improper even in the school-yard and debate team, then it has no place in the halls of government; and public assault on people as agents of evil has natural repercussions; especially in people on any opposing side of the argument who may be possessed of lesser or impaired powers of reason and/or self-control.

And if people keep labelling their opponents with epithets like “another Hitler” or “the soon death of the Republic” and other such jibes in order to obtain or retain power ––– then they may find they are signing their own death warrants. 

In a piercing irony, Hillary Clinton was targeted for one of these attempted murders by mail-bomb: and she said only weeks ago,

“We don’t need to be ‘civil’ with an enemy like the present Republicans, when our whole civilization is at stake! We can return to civility after we (the Democratic Party) have recovered power.”

It is chilling to think of the implications of using apocalyptic levels of vilification on one’s opponents. Perhaps even more chilling is to look back on the 2016 election are see the outcome of Mrs. Clinton – certainly one of the bigger brains in current politics – call a huge swath of voting America “a basket of deplorables” – apparently unaware or having lost connection to the fact that no candidate has ever insulted people into voting for him or her.

Unless we all immediately return to the basics of civility we were all taught in school is the bedrock of honorable dissent – there may soon be many fewer leaders to lead their respective camps forward in the good fight for “a more perfect Union.” As Malcom X said so chillingly in 1963, “chickens always come home to roost.” He was reframing the words of Abraham Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural, “it may be that every drop of blood drawn by the lash (of slavery) will be requited by one drawn from the sword (of our Civil War).”

It is time to prefer the teachings of Mr. Rogers over those of Mr. Machiavelli.

The end does not justify the means: and the cost of deliberately sustained, incendiary rhetoric war for votes will almost certainly lead to an inferno of yet undetermined breadth. 

I was around in 1968, when America exploded into barely-contained violence. I have no desire to return to the era having seen – and lost – “Bobby, Martin, and John.” Qualified national and international leaders are too rare to lose for no good reason.

Bruce Louis Cohen

© 24 October 2018

It is my understanding both sides of The Aisle (in the US Congress, the concentrations of the two major political parties, Democratic & Republican) have known for decades the Social Security & Medicare system is headed for bankruptcy some time early in this century due to the input vs. output ratio becoming unworkable; and by sheer math, they will be unable to make the promised payments.

For decades, for both sides of the aisle, Social Security & Medicare were “the third rail” of politics: touch them and die (politically): even mentioning fixing the ratio problem (by raising retirement age or altering payouts) would guarantee you lost your next election. So, everyone just avoided the problem.

Now, the train is still moving at 90mph headed for the wall EVERYONE knew was coming.

Spending bills require a 60/40 approval ratio in the Senate to pass. Some aisle crossing by someone to fix Social Security & Medicare is our only hope. Whoever chooses to do this will sacrifice his or her political future to save millions of lives. Here’s hoping there are some politicians who can rise to the ethical core of this situation in time.

Recommended reading: “Profiles In Courage” (Senator John F. Kennedy’s anthology of the stories of American politicians who made exactly this kind of choice.) Such courage and clarity IS possible. May we see it soon – for all everyone’s sake of every political party. Old age and illness have no political affiliation.

One citizen rhapsodizing on hope. 🙂

Bruce Louis Cohen • 19 October 2018

http://brucecohenwordsmusic.com/?p=1982

Nearly exactly 3 years ago, on 11 August 2015, I wrote this blog about the Donald Trump campaign for the Republican nomination for President. Donald Trump: The King Who Would Be President

This year (18 June 2018), Time Magazine published the magazine cover at left.

It’s nice to be right.

Here’s hoping influencers like Time Magazine don’t have it right too late.

Bruce Louis Cohen

21 August 2018

Post-Soviet Goals Without Noble Excuses For Them

“There no longer exists the sharp ideological divide between our two nations.” – President Vladimir Putin, 16 July 2018

This blog is intended to go beyond the rapid and basic post-game analysis being given everywhere in the media to the Trump-Putin Summit in Helsinki today. This is an attempt to look at the broad context within which that event and others connected to it are taking place: the heart and soul of concern in regard to Helsinki 2018 is not so much the day’s events as the nature of the current version of Russia participating in them.

From 1917 to 1991, the justification Russia gave the world for its aggression was its role as the primary agent of Marx and Lenin’s “Worker’s Revolution” addressing the terrible inequities visited upon the working class by the monied class. 

The Soviet flag said it all.

The hammer and sickle symbolized the workers, the star pointed to the five continents of the world, and the red backround represented the blood necessary to be shed in every country in the world to bring about that noble Revolution, and the installation of equity among human communities. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” is a creed beautiful, despite being unworkable thus far in human reality.

All that is over. 

Russia is no longer the captain-state of a Union championing an ideal.

What is left?

The Russian Flag now represents Russia – merely a nation: one among many.

Why then, does Russia “deserve” a great place in the world, greater perhaps than any other nation, and especially, primacy higher than the champion of democracy, The United States of America: a nation still formed around only a set of unifying ideas and ideals.

Germany accepted the Nazi re-definition of Germany as a rightful aggressor-state for three contrived reasons: (1) need for Lebensraum – land enabling the German people to live comfortably in, and feed their nation; (2) righting of wrongs: certain regions had been allegedly wrongfully taken from Germany, and it deserved them back – especially those humiliations visited upon The Fatherland by the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I; and finally, (3)  because Germany came to believe Germans were greater than every other genetic composition in the world. Their genetics allegedly made them the upper species in a Darwinesque view of a world in which the weak are rightfully eaten by the strong.

Their leader, Der Führer, meaning “The Leader” – was considered, and considered himself, a God-sent person intended by Heaven to lead his great-but-unjustly-crushed nation out of the humiliation of their defeat in World War I, and not only back into dignity, but beyond it into global domination.

What did Hitler’s rebuilt Germany do first?

Hitler’s machine killed off its internal opponents.

They then put Germany’s allies and the neighbor states into confusion with confounding actions and consistent breakage of treaties or understandings.

Then they attacked smaller, weaker states and disputed territories.

Czechoslovakia. Poland. The Franco-German Rhineland.

And onward to Poland, France, North Africa, and Russia.

And onward further into the global nightmare of World War II, necessary to stop the tyrannical German state from enslaving the entire world.

What has Putin been doing since coming into power?

He has been running Hitler’s playbook.

Internal enemies have been disappeared, or publicly poisoned with horrific toxins like Dioxin – driving opponents into exile, disability, or death. Then came Crimea. Meddling with American elections was a step straight out of Saddam Hussein’s delusional methods: as a puny weakling, pick on the hugest opponent you can find – then, at the last minute, back away – and thus “show the world” that you were brave enough to face off with the enormous champion. An exercise in pure ego and propaganda production.

Why has Putin been running Hitler’s playbook?

Why must Russians see Russia dominate the world?

Since Russia is no longer a champion of a noble ideal and goal, Russia’s only premises for aggression and expansion of influence are exactly the same three as listed in regard to Germany just above here. Russia must dominate because she is Russia. It is a tautology worse than 1930’s Germany’s, because Germany’s had specific justifying delusions in place. The Russian tautology begins and ends with one idea: Russian greatness makes Russia deserve to be great. There is now no idea of set of them for which Russian stands. She stand for Russia, and Russia’s interests: and that bald agenda is called “greed” and “ambition.”

Name any idea or ideal for which has Vladimir Putin stood.

I cannot think of a single idea or policy or political philosophy Putin has stood forth to champion. He advances the exaltation and power of the nation he commands – and by sheer osmosis, his own greatness as well.

The bedrock of United States foreign policy toward the Soviet Union was always that the USSR could only be relied upon for one thing: to act in its own self-interest. That interest used to exist under the masque of devotion to disseminate an allegedly health-giving political philosophy across the world.

Now – things are the same, absent the masque. 

There is no morality but loyalty to Rodyna (pronounced róe-dee-na “Motherland”). 

PRIDE COMETH BEFORE GETTING THY REAR KICKED

One of Sun Tzu’s precepts of successful warfare was to avoid underestimating your enemy. President Donald Trump seems to have committed that very basic error in regard to Vladimir Putin. The world can only hope he learns from the experience, as did some of his predecessors.

The meeting 16 July 2018 between Trump and Putin seemed a horrific mismatch.

It was like watching a schoolyard bully facing a hardened gangbanger.

Let’s be clear: Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer.

The K.G. freakin’ B.

To our knowledge, Donald Trump has never personally killed, nor ordered the murder of another human being. He is facing in Putin a man with a trail of dead bodies behind him –and those are only the ones we know about. If we could get access to Putin’s action record as a KGB officer, I am sure we would see a long list of people dead by his personal doing.

Trump needs to understand who he is facing in Putin, now and forward.

What every Bully needs is to face an unfearing citizen, willing to fight.

Bullies are, historically, incapable of a fair fight. They run for cover.

Khruschev learned the hard way what it means to face a man who can’t be bullied. Jack Kennedy was, frankly, smarter and tougher than Khruschev. Far tougher, far more willing to brave the risks of a nuclear fight than Russia had deceived itself into believing. 

Russia made the mistake of believing its own propaganda. They saw the American President Kennedy as Playboy-in-Chief of a nation of self-focused weaklings incapable of facing hardship for a greater cause.  Post-Stalin Russia and the survivors of “The Great Patriotic War” in which 25 million Russians died defeating the Nazi invasion of their country, had created an inner mythology out of their nightmarish winter warfare: only Russians really understood the meaning of sacrifice and hardship.

The real Jack Kennedy they faced was a man who survived in World War II having his patrol boat sawn in half in the middle of the night by a Japanese destroyer, and carrying so many of his wounded crewmen to safety on a nearby island, he permanently injured his back. The Jack Kennedy who surmounted debilitating and exhausting Addison’s Disease, and excruciating surgery, writing a national best-seller while recovering –and continuing to work on his political career despite horrific pain and great personal sorrows like the loss of his brother Joe, his sister Kick, and the lobotomizing of his disturbed sister Rosemary. No lightweight – a man tested by pain and battle. No mere playboy for Khruschev to kick around.

President Trump needs to stand close to Putin, tower over him, and call him an obviously over-bragging leader of a mostly 3rd-world nation trying to be great in all the wrong ways. President Reagan said it well: ‘The West in not perfect: but we have never had to build a wall to keep our citizens inside.”  The West is great because of freedom, not because we Dioxin-poison everyone who disagrees with us. That is the way of cowards who know they have no ideas of real value to offer.” Then walk away. Just walk away.

Vladimir Putin is the Adolf Hitler of a 2nd-rate Russia wanting desperately to return to the days of Yuri Gagarin and the pre-Cuban Missile Crisis presence Mother Russia was around the world, causing all nations to tremble. They long for that gravitas, even as Islamist fundamentalists long for the era of the caliphs and the expansions into Iberia and North Africa and everywhere Muslim armies marched and conquered. (They too, could not make their case for their ideas, so they too, used violence in place of cogent reason.)

Two US Presidents deeply dented Russia’s self-image into emotional and mental derangement:

President Kennedy faced-down Nikita Khruschev, a Soviet leader whose eldest son was older than the American President; and later, President Reagan spent the USSR into national economic collapse with his Star Wars missile shield program, his arms build up, and his space-race advancements. So – The Soviet “Bully” was faced-down in a real fight, and slinked away; and then, was openly given a beat-down in the schoolyard so to speak: the whole world watched the USSR forced to admit, in the words of their former Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev “The system we have been advancing for the last seventy years does not work.”

The flags say it all.

The flag of the Soviet Union was a statement of ideology.

The flag Russia adopted in 1991 after the erasure of the USSR, is a replay of what was supposedly the first “national” flag of Russia from 1668, and the flag used by the Russian “Tsar” (King), minus the royal insignia in the center.

Russia is now a “great” nation with a “great” leader – seeking to enfranchise itself with the “greatness” it “deserves” because of its “greatness.” If Putin could get away with it, I believe he would put his face in the center of the current Russian flag.

Sound familiar?

Aryan Supremacy was the fundamental belief that drove the German armies across the world.

The Aryans had a leader with an ego larger than the world could feed, a sense of entitled destiny.

Vladimir Putin is a bully who needs to be faced down in private, and  told by the American President who physically towers over him: “You are a short thug running an impoverished and failing 3rd world nation behind a thin 1st world mask. The only thing ‘1st world’ about Russia is its nuclear weaponry: and barely. I am a man who has created personal wealth and earned social prestige unimaginable by you, and I represent a nation that out-earns, out thinks, and outdoes you and yours in everything. Do not further test us, or I will do a Kennedy-Khruschev dance on your head in public that will take you out of power.” Then, walk out, smile for the cameras, and say, “We had a great meeting: it went exactly as the United States of America wanted.” And let Putin in public seem like a mighty genius. Putin needs that.

Like Kim Jung Il, Putin’s main concern is remaining President Putin.

Make that branch creak underneath him: he will not risk his power and privileges for ideals.

He is not a champion of ideals.

RECOGNIZING THE SEARCH FOR GREATNESS IN DISGUISE

The terrorists who flew the jets into the World Trade Center did not do so for God: they longed to see their people and their nations be great again. Religion merely served as the fuel and the excuse to be aggressors. What the militant Islamists want is for Islam to be exalted and Westernism to be humbled by their efforts in a way that shows Allah is “for” them, and their domination of the world. They will settle for nothing that puts Islam in other than the chair of human governmental and philosophical primacy – which naturally would mean, Arab supremacy.

Russia wants to be great again.

Its leader and people are heading down the old, wrong road that leads again to public humiliation after passing through misery and murder of millions. Hopefully, Russians will at SOME point – LEARN the lessons of history, like the Islamists who are trying to make Islam great by killing everyone who doesn’t accept their regressionist and repressionist agenda.

Like Khruschev with Kennedy in 1963, perhaps Putin will be awakened at some point. by something that does not go his way, and untie the knots of war he has been tightening. Even “Devil Anse” Hatfield came to understand there was no point to his multigenerational feud with the McCoy clan, and unilaterally declared cessation of hostilities from his side. Former Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev had the courage to look at the system he inherited and say aloud, “This is not working. We need ‘perestroika‘ (reconstruction).” He turned his nation from defending a failed system to exploring a renovated and adjusted one.

Perhaps President Trump will be sobered and opened to better advice by being humiliated this way in the open. Perhaps, in the days to come, he will stare into the White House hallway mirror in the residence and say to the reflection, “You got creamed in Helsinki. Time for Round Two – and it’s going to go differently the rest of the match.”

Jack Kennedy was seen by many in the world as a kind of Donald Trump figure in 1961. A rich, spoiled kid who got everything handed to him, for whom life had been far too easy.  They got Kennedy wrong in 1961. We can hope, some of what we are thinking of President Trump today, if not wrong, is at least within reach of remedy. President Kennedy learned from his first experience with Khruschev, and never made the same mistakes again.

Nothing in the world of boxing teaches you to “keep your left up” like getting hit by the other guy’s right hook, and finding yourself staring at the ceiling lights.

Bruce L. Cohen

16 July 2018

“Not to decide is to decide.” – 1960’s Motto About Taking A Stand On Viet Nam War

I hear a lot of talk among Americans about not voting in the coming election.

The argument is, “I don’t like any of the candidates – I’m disgusted with the whole thing. So, I’m not voting.”

I want to plead with anyone considering this course of inaction to choose otherwise.

Only four election cycles ago, a paltry five-hundred some votes were the difference between a President Gore and President Bush. Five hundred some votes decided The President in a country of three hundred twenty million people. Do you really want to abstain a President into office?

Ok – we all get it. Our Democratic System has given us this time around two candidates with record-setting unfavorables. Both the major party candidates seem vulnerable to criminal prosecutions during their first hundred days in office. We have never faced a President attempting to pardon himself or herself once convicted during their administration of a crime committed before it began. The President’s power to grant pardons for convicted offenses is only forbidden in cases of impeachment: there is nothing to prevent a President from pardoning himself or herself of crimes.  How bizarre would that scene be? A President would likely be impeached if convicted of – say – sexual assault or obstruction of justice: but before Articles of Impeachment could be voted in by Congress, the President would grant him/herself a pardon that expunges the conviction. So we would have a “country of laws” in which Impeachment might be blocked by a convicted lawbreaking President standing on the idea “we are a nation of laws, and according to the laws of this country, I am not under conviction for any crime.”

We may face a strange and strangely familiar future, to be sure. Hillary Clinton’s husband gamed out his own Impeachment process with his strategy team, and understood he would be convicted in The House, but in The Senate, all would vote along Party lines, and there would not be enough votes to confirm The House verdict; and that President Clinton was willing to let the country suffer the distraction, and spend the millions of tax-payer dollars to hold the bicameral trial – and let it go all the way to the end-game, simply because that President Clinton knew at the end, the law would enable him to escape conviction through pure politics, despite everyone knowing he had been proven to be manifestly guilty.

However – the pendulum of moral civic incumbency has now swung toward us, as America’s citizenry.

John Kennedy once said, “We must live in the world that actually is, not the one we wish would be.” Neither Harrison Ford playing James Marshall, nor Martin Sheen playing Jed Bartlet, will be appearing on our ballots. We now must be adults – we now must make the choice from among the actual choices our system has provided to us.

We have to face the sobering truth that neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump are “outliers.”

Both Major Party Candidates are accurate representations of the values and platforms of their Parties. Granted, they are somewhat caricatures personally – but their Leftism and Rightism are within the broader boundaries of their respective teams. Along with their widely acknowledged cartoonish qualities, come the overt negatives of realistic portraiture. Hillary’s long tenuous relationship with legality despite being an attorney and sworn officer of the court is deflating to anyone with commitment to law and order – and Donald’s mercurial nature and grade-school speech patterns naturally give any thinking person pause about making him the Leader of The Free World. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson are who they are as non-mainstream candidates, simply manifestly unequipped to be America’s Chief Executive; but all these are the choices our American Democracy has yielded through an accurate primary season in which the Parties chose whom they chose. We had over a dozen Republicans and Bernie et al among the Democrats.

Donald and Hillary won the primaries. They showed up – and now, must we.

It is certainly deflating to see a Presidential Candidate who could plausibly wind up convicted of criminal or criminally negligent defiance of US Security Laws, and or obstruction of justice through destruction of subpoenaed evidence on above a Nixonian level, and more. It is equally unpleasant to contemplate a President who might go on a binge of personal destruction against anyone who asks him a question he doesn’t like, as he did from the get-go with Megan Kelly in the first Republican Debate of the primary season (see my earlier blog, “The King Who Would Be President”), and others later, or indulge such rage on the world political stage.

Our present choice-set is less than ideal: but many have been the times the Presidency has been served such real-world non-ideals. It is little known that the most-admired President in our history – Abraham Lincoln – won his party’s nomination by outright election fraud. That’s right – Saint Abe stole his party’s nomination. Lincoln and his crew knew the majority of the tickets for the nominating convention had been purchased by his opponent, who had a far larger fiscal war chest than did Lincoln, and that those delegates would shout the loudest acclamation of their nominee, thus gaining him The Candidacy. So – Lincoln and his crew stayed up all night before the convention, printing counterfeit tickets to the event, and then arrived early in the morning, taking all the first places in the admitting lines – and thus, filled the auditorium with Lincoln-acclaimers who had stolen their seats from their legitimate owners who had paid for them. This act of manifest theft gave us the author of The Emancipation Proclamation and The Gettysburg Address. Knowing this – would anyone with even a smidgen of concern for human rights really want someone other than Lincoln in the White House between 1861 and 1865?

God, history, the universe – whatever you want to call it – seem to make things work out such that the person we need sits in The Oval, despite the human warp of their natures or paths there. John Kennedy was a C student, an entitled brat, and womanizer – and he literally saved the world with his dispassionately lucid handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Harry Truman was a failed haberdasher who followed the most capable modern President ever to hold the office, becoming President only because the People’s choice died in office; and Truman was so lightly regarded many in the Washington elite called him, “His Accidency” and joked that “To err is Truman.” Yet – Truman is now one of the most admired Presidents in our history, and he won re-election with a strategy demonstrating sheer political brilliance.

Winston Churchill told us, “Democracy is the worst system of government on earth – except for all the others.”

While the witticism is genuinely funny, the observation is deadly serious.

Democracy is hard, unwieldy, disorderly, and even chaotic.

So – is it ethical to “sit this one out?”

Imagine seeing Hitler’s Nazi Party gathering steam in 1936 Germany, after he and it had been voted into power in 1933 by a legitimate election you sat out ––– you were a German Jew or Gypsy or Slav  or some other kind of person Hitler had openly targeted for extinction in Mein Kampf as one of the non-Aryan “mongrel races” – but you stayed home, and several other millions did the same, out of dismay that someone like Hitler had plausible access to the Chancellor’s post, and the other choices were not sufficiently comfortable? The catastrophic errors Germans made by the millions in regard to the Nazi ascent into power were:

(a) they did not take Hitler’s stated programs and goals in Main Kampf seriously.

(b) they did not take his already-demonstrated behaviors seriously.

(c) they did not take their own responsibility to choose their leaders seriously.

The German electorate’s perfect storm of negligence resulted in the the loss of fifty million lives and over a decade of hell on earth we now call by the compact monikers “The Nazi Reich” and “World War II.”

So – to the many Americans talking about not voting, please consider the following. Imagine telling a veteran who gave his legs and arms to protect your right to vote, that you are sitting this one out. Imagine telling the wife of an American soldier slain in Afghanistan in his early 20’s, with two toddlers to raise on her own in his absence, that the coming Presidential choice is – just too unsavory, or too hard. We who live under the cloak of Liberty paid for with so much blood, life, and quality of life owe it to every man, woman, and child who ever laid down any of these precious things to protect this right, to use it.

Not to decide is to decide.

A paltry five-hundred some votes were the difference between a President Gore and President Bush. Five hundred some votes decided The President in a country of three hundred twenty million people.

Your one vote is not your one vote. You are one among a growing many.

I am no huge fan of either one of our Main Party choices. I also face realistically that neither of the two non-Main Party candidates is anywhere remotely close to qualified for the Oval Office.

So – I am going to vote for one of our two main choices.

How?

Firstly, I am going into the voting booth saying the Jewish blessing for seeing a miracle. We live in a country in which transfer of power is peaceful, and we choose our leaders. Then, I am going to make the choice that seems to me to be in the best interest of the nation and the world. I am also going to keep in mind that the same American Democracy having put Richard Nixon into the Oval Office was also able to remove him from it when it became necessary to do so. No President of ours has ever been permanently above the law. As Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, “No lie can live forever.”

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both immensely accomplished people asking us to give them a job for the next four years. That is all.

We still have a Free Press. We still have a Senate, and A House of Representatives, and a Supreme Court. We still have “The Two Man Rule” preventing any President from giving a unilateral and unstoppable order to launch nuclear weapons. The Secretary of Defense must agree with the launch directive in order to move to weapons release, and the order has to move through a chain of command to result in actual launch.

In sum – we have a System. It is called, a democratic republic.

That same System that protects us has given us the choice of either Hillary or Donald for our next President. It is not a permanent choice: it has a four or eight year shelf-life, and it is impeachable and removable under the right dire circumstances.

It is time to honor The System and its honorable slain and harmed Defenders above The Candidates.

It is also time to count – to matter.

One’s power cannot count if one does not use it.

If a mere six hundred of the right people choose not to use it – history might be changed.

For anyone to count – that one must vote. And only four election cycles ago – less people than one Caribbean cruise liner’s passenger list picked the Leader of The Free World for eight incredibly crucial years, including the “Nine Eleven” era.

The choice is hard – but that is what has fallen to us as Americans.

It is our duty not to flee from, but rise to such a moment – and vote.

The moment will pass. The Republic must endure.

May God bless America.

Bruce L. Cohen 20 October 2016

The Bahamas Know A Truth The American Black Community Seemingly Won’t Own:

Many Black Kids Are Trained Into Communication Habits Suggesting Violence

• 

“A harsh word stirs up anger the way a punch in the nose brings forth blood.” – King Solomon

“Do you want not to fear governmental authority? Do what is right, and you will have praise from the exact same people you now fear.” – Paul of Tarshish (a minority man of color) New Testament Book of Romans

“When confronted by a police officer, be courteous and cooperative.” – Government of The Bahamas to Its Citizens Visiting The United States Of America

In response to the developing racial tension in America between the African American community and the law enforcement profession, the Bahamian Government issued the above directive to its mostly of-color citizens. I also call attention to the fact that Governor-General, Dame Marguerite Pindling, and Prime Minister, The Right Honorable Perry Christie, are both people of color.

Their directive to their citizens speaks volumes.

Let me say as I start this piece: the following is not to define all police violence directed at African American as including the patterns below: this piece is a discussion of some plausible contributory factors I have not heard discussed yet at all in the public conversation about how Black people die too often at the hands of police.

The ghetto path to street-cred leaves Black kids dead.  I looked like a drug-dealing hippie for the first five years I was driving. I was obviously young. I had really long hair. I played rock and roll loudly on the radio in my convertible. I wore a Boone’s Farm Apple Wine T-Shirt with torn jeans and a cloth belt. Every cop who saw me thought, “There’s a drug collar.” I know what it feels like to be a target for cops’ attention. Now, we would call how I was viewed, “profiling.” Back then, I just looked more like people who used drugs than a lot of others, especially when driving through certain affluent neighborhoods known for drug use. I did not file a class action lawsuit on behalf of affluent white kids with long hair and bell-bottoms. I did not threaten riots if police did not start pulling over more kids in crew-cuts with US Marine tattoos on their biceps wearing “USA – Love It Or Leave It” tank tops. Even if I was wearing a Jerry Rubin T-Shirt with the motto, “Defy The System!” scrawled over an upside-down American flag watermarked with Angela Davis and her raised fist – I wanted cops to experience me as a harmless dude with long hair in clothes they would never wear. The last thing on earth I wanted was a policeman to see me as anyone whose conduct suggested in any way it would be a good idea for him to unholster his service revolver. I am now over sixty years old, and I still address every police officer as “sir” or “ma’am” or “officer,” regardless of their age or rank – especially, when they have approached me, and not the other way around.

In America’s less economically advantaged African communities, it is often the case they function in “honor society” pack and tribal pattern, where getting respect – and the ego, monetary, and romantic perqs that come with it – is often the result of the amount of alpha display behavior one does in the presence of peers. Far-too-often typical response to police, especially among youths looking to make their reputations, is open defiance and inflammatory humiliation of cops – especially, white cops.

The “snap-fight” – the quick humiliation humor of the schoolyard – comes into play. Such talk is too foul to offer an example of it here. It usually involves several references to the cop’s mother and suggestions as to where the cop might store his weapons. I went through several edits trying, and could not come up even with deletions in an example that cured it of being too uncouth to include.

As can be seen in video of police encounters young African Americans often accompany such verbal abuse with arm and body gestures looking a lot like Muhammad Ali warming up for a boxing match. Arm and body language that looks a lot like like moving to attack someone. These verbal and body-language habits are unique to low income African American communities; and they naturally heighten police perception of possible threat.

When you are a 175 pound white police officer facing a 300-plus pound young African American in a hoodie who refuses to show you his face or his hands, speaks to you in defiance of police directives, and with insults that would make Merchant Marine cry into his beer – and must, after enough resistance of cooperation, be physically subdued – for causes like a convenience-store robbery radio alerted to the officers about a perpetrator answering his description having occurred less than five minutes earlier less than a hundred steps from the location – your main thoughts as a cop would logically seem to be: “Get the subject under control, don’t let him pull a weapon from where his hands are concealed, and don’t let him get one of my police weapons away from me.” Pretty much everything else is on auto-pilot until after the sense of possible deadly threat is neutralized. Then, whether or not the subject is actually a suspect can be determined; and the police have a proactive responsibility to determine if the youth is a valid suspect for the crime or not. They cannot simply walk away from him because he is huge and acting dangerously toward them – and is of color.

It is at least plausible enough for consideration that the physical interactions resulting in what activists now call “needless” Black deaths at police hands over the past many years might might not have occurred at all if the response of the young African American to the police had been, “Yes, Sir – here are my hands, and I am going to slowly raise them now to pull back my hood.” That very likely would have been all there was to the encounters. The Broadway hit “Spamalot” made humor of my Jewish people’s ongoing experience of exactly such racial hatred: when King Arthur’s squire confesses to the King, who has been looking for a Jew, that he is Jewish – the King asks, “All this time, right before me? Why did not not tell me?” The squire replies, “It’s a habit we’ve gotten into around heavily-armed knights on horseback.” You just don’t go around casually and consistently provoking heavily-armed people. Such behavior is inherently dangerous – eventually, the law of averages is going to apply in your disfavor.

The Bahamian Government knows this.

They are of color. It is not a racial issue: it is a basic reasoning issue.

Just because they are of color does not mean they have no police force; or that Bahamians can defy or degrade them at will.

They are telling their citizens to give American police the same courtesies they recommend be given to their own country’s constables. It is mere sanity.

“Like punching someone in the nose,” taught King Solomon in Proverbs, “harsh words stir up strife.” It is mere cogent observation and thought.

The Bahamian Government did the African American community a great service this past week by role-modeling good parenting. Teach your children how to behave in a way that maximizes their safety. Don’t let your kids be convinced that the way to cred is to defy and humiliate police officers casually and consistently in front of their friends.

The ghetto path to street-cred leaves Black kids dead.  Snap-fighting rises from a standard four thousand years of ethics consider unsound behavior: “There are people who speak rashly, like the edge of a sword, and then say, ‘Hey, I was only joking!’ But a wise person’s words bring healing.” wrote King Solomon in Proverbs. “Provocation of an authority is like teasing a lion, but the one whose behavior is soothing finds safety.” Scripture preserves these basic sanities for following generations. Beyond King Solomon, the Scriptures of the Christian tradition advise, “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger” – and –“Let your speech be seasoned with graciousness as if it were salt, to impart grace to the listener.” These ideas were penned by New Testament writers James and Paul (actually, Yaacov and Shaül  – both of them, Jews Of-Color).

The entire quick-jab humiliation of the snap-fight is a long-known anti-productive pattern because it has enemy-creation embedded into it. Humans are honor creatures in our deep genetic coding – and we can’t live with humiliation. The humiliated will always be looking to even the score. We should aim to train young people to think before they speak, and become good at promoting peace, even in the event of disagreement. Shaming someone in public may win you points in the eyes of your peers for the moment, but you have also created an enemy: someone who is now on the downside of an honor debt, and will always be looking to even or reverse the scale. Such conduct creates vendettas – honor wars. Our low-income communities are filled with them. The streets have never ceased soaking up their blood.

If the government in the Bahamas can figure this out a few dozen miles from our shores and crystalize such wisdom into a few brief sentences from their travel authorities –then there is hope we might see such insight received here as unprejudiced from a source of-color – and activated among our communities of color before there are more Black kids lives lost due to inherited patterns of threatening behavior they see as normal, merely because they have not had other patterns modeled to them.

Can the community of color succeed in re-tooling? CNN on the morning of 12 July 2016 aired an interview with an African-American surgeon from Dallas who told of going out of his way to esteem police in the presence of his daughter: when cops are in a restaurant, he often buys them their meals in his daughter’s presence. When they were standing in line for ice cream, he often pays for the ice cream of the cops in line with them. He explained to CNN, he wanted his daughter to know he sees the police as the good guys. She is being raised into a positive attitude toward police. What are the chances, if a police car pulls that girl over when she is of driving age for whatever reason, legitimate or illegitimate – that she is going to defy, abuse, and disrespect that police officer when he approaches her driver-side window to ask for her license? I think even the most hardened BLM advocate would have to admit, the chances are far less she would give a response that sounds like a gansta-rap lyric, and more like a response Michelle Obama would give. In such a case, the likelihood she and the cop will wind up in a physical altercation is far less – and therefore, her chances of being killed by cop are far, far less.  What parents teach their children can and will positively change this pattern – or sustain, or worsen it.

Here is why treating the Black Lives dilemma as entirely a police-sensitivity matter falls flat. While giving police sensitivity training as to the communication habits of low-income communities of color will take up part of the slack as well; at the end of the day, if a young person’s reflex is to see the police as deliberately out to deprive him of dignity and safety – or, if to see the police as a mere tool to beef up cred in front of friends by letting fly with abuse and threatening behavior, as well as defiance of “show-your-hands” type police directives enabling police to do their jobs safely – then the police will still be forced by the defiance-behavior into the position of needing to subdue suspects in order to fulfill the positive responsibilities of their job. And – if subduing and capturing physical altercations are made necessary, then the law of averages will eventually take us into seasons of varying amounts of bloodshed – some as appalling as the present one.

Just in case American Black kids may be taught such conduct equals kowtowing to their oppressors, and cannot result in gain – may I point out we have a President and First Lady who are African American, athletic, Ivy-educated, and the most powerful and influential two individuals in the entire present world. My eldest son once said to me and my wife during his early years, “I like my manners: they get me stuff.” Well said. Is the leadership of the Free World so low a prize that the path having led successfully to it should be discarded in favor of what gets you “turf” on one corner in one low-income neighborhood? To our current chief-executive’s credit – it is hard to call to mind a person more dedicated to modeling conciliatory speech than our first African-American President, Barack Obama – who yet had the strength and insight to go after Osama Bin Ladin, and take him out when the hour called for such strength and resolve.

Let me close with how I opened.

This Op Ed is not to define all police violence incidents with People of Color as having these factors among their causes: this is to identify a major plausible contributing factor I have not heard discussed at all in the current public conversation about how Black people die too often at the hands of police.

It is for policy wonks and the public mind to decide if this line of thought has any merit worthy of action, and how to mobilize resources so as to socialize it effectively.

One man’s sincere thoughts offered in hope that 2016 will be the beginning of the end of the pattern of Black Lives lost at the hands of police – and any race’s lives lost needlessly at the hands of anyone of any color anywhere.

Yesterday, July 10, 2016, Rudy Giuliani fell into the media trap set by the implied emphasis in the slogan, “Black Lives Matter.”

He said in a televised statement, “Saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ is inherently racist.”

Mr. Mayor – saying ‘Black Lives Matter’ is not racist. It is mandatory.

What I believe you meant to say was that the BLM stance demanding the view “(Only) Black Lives Matter” is inherently racist; and you would have been correct.

Less than one lifetime ago, civilization fought a world war losing multiple tens of millions of lives to stop a militant political movement believing only kind of lives mattered. The Nazis believed only Aryan blond haired, blue eyed people of northern European extraction in perfect health and typically-developed lives mattered: Jews, Blacks, Gypsies, Mentally Retarded, Neuologically Atypical, Disabled, LGTBQ – all others were logs for the ovens next to the gas chambers where lives that did not matter were extinguished en masse – just as the white and police lives in Dallas were extinguished en masse a few days ago.

And – accusing people who say any other lives matter of anti-black racism is not so much racist as it is market-manipulative sloganeering and profiteering.

Coming up with a snappy slogan is easy: policy is hard.

Once people see the BLM sloganeers have no actual solutions – their “fifteen minutes” will be up.

Just as the LGTBQ community has widely succeeded in stigmatizing everyone who morally disagrees with homosexuality on ethical grounds as insane “phobes” or medieval “bigots” – the BLM leaders, who now get and keep their fifteen minutes of fame only if their motto gets and keeps traction, are manipulating the marketplace with the direct lie that to say the only humane sentence possible – “All Lives Matter” is racism equal to shouting the “N-Bomb” – is mere manipulation to keep the spotlight on themselves, and the cash and attention rolling into their organization.

Unbelievable how even people like Rudy Giuliani are losing their way right now.

I was a teenager in 1968.

It feels like that year is reemerging.

We must not lose another Martin and Bobby again to slogan-energized maniacs. We must not lose another Malcom and Jack again. We must not see more Medgars lost. We must not see another set of idealistic young Jewish civil rights workers murdered for giving their efforts to enfranchise communities of color. It must not become the Sixties again in the early Two-Thousands.

Black lives matter. White lives matter. Blue lives matter. Jewish lives matter. Gay lives matter. Yazidi lives matter. Boko Haram victim lives matter. ISIS-beheaded and burnt-alive lives matter.

All lives matter. Say otherwise – and you are de-facto, a racist.

We must not be market-managed into saying any one racial group is the only group that matters or truly suffers meaningful, relevant wrong, or deserves attention or remedy– which is what it means to “matter.”

Who in BLM wants to go to the wife and children of the Dallas policemen shot to death by a madman inflamed by rhetoric de-humanizing white policemen, and tell that wife and kids their husband’s death “does not matter?” I’d love to be there when they try. And – for the record – those white policemen who were there to protect the right of the blacks who were protesting to do so unharmed and unharassed – were the only people to run toward the source of the gunshots. Let me say it again: they ran toward the gunshots – to protect the black and other lives that mattered enough to them to risk and suffer death to insure their rights.

Who in BLM wants to go to the parents of Hallel Yaffa Ariel, a young teenage girl whose throat was slit in her sleep in her own bedroom in Israel just for being a Jew in a Jewish land – and tell her parents Jewish lives do not matter?

Who in BLM wants to tell the Veterans of every race who cannot get adequate post-duty medical care that their lives do not matter?

All lives do matter. We will not be manipulated by schoolyard snap-fight tactics out of saying the only sane, humane sentence available: “All lives matter.”

All means all. Black lives are included in the word “all.”

Let us be clear-thinking: any African American honest and honorable efforts toward their cause’s importance not being minimized or made backwater are certainly valid; but saying or implying “only” their lives matter is merely and only wrong. Moreover, threatening violence if any other lives or causes are stated to be legitimate other than theirs is frankly, evil. I know that is what America’s Mayor wanted to say – but he fell into the trap. He said the wrong thing on camera. Now the profiteers and exploiters will step in and make even more hay of it for the coming season.

Who is ready for their lives not to matter?

If BLM’s implied (“only”) keeps getting traction from people who equate concern for any other race than black with racism, and like the “New Black Panther Party” threaten “No Justice, No Peace” violence and rioting – then we must steel ourselves to wake to another announcement like the one that came from the Ambassador Hotel in the summer of 1968 – that we have lost yet another Bobby Kennedy. Or like the news we got from Memphis – that a walking miracle like Martin Luther King, Jr. has been taken from us. America cannot afford to lose MLKs and RFKs to sloganeering profiteers with no solutions – which gains them attention and cash, but does not proffer any useful fixes for the problems. One of the Black Lives Matter co-founders, Ms. Johnson, walked up to Bernie Sanders at a Sanders rally, pushed him away from the microphone his campaign paid for – and said, “You gonna let me speak, sucka – or you are against Black people.” So –on camera – she stole a microphone she did not pay for, stole a podium belonging to someone else, and demanded things that were not hers, and the Sanders Campaign was stuck with a nightmare p.r. decision. Tell a thief on camera she needed to go buy her own microphone, pay for her own event, and exercise her right to free speech without stealing things paid for by others: or be called a “racist” by a BLM leader on-camera. Bernie Sanders, with a bewildered look on his face and no words to reply, simply stepped aside and gave the thief what she demanded by use of law-breaking and threats of various kinds of harm if he did not do her will. It was an on-camera mugging.

This conduct, Ms. Johnson said in an interview on Fox News, is her ‘solution.’ She said, “You all gotta give up some of what you’ve got to us.” That simple slogan-like, unidimensional thought is an old, stale, unoriginal and totally invalidated solution called “redistribution of wealth”–––  and it is usually accompanied by crowds of the less-affluent carrying the impaled bodies of the more affluent over their heads on pitchforks while they chant whatever slogan someone has conjured to legitimize mass theft. Hieruslama Esta Perdita! (Jerusalem is lost!) was the cry that legitimized the anti-Jewish pogroms in Eastern Europe, killing Jews and taking some or all of what they had: the Jews (people who didn’t matter) supposedly had possession of Jerusalem (actually, at the time, Turkish Muslims had control of most of it). The Jews who didn’t matter needed to be thrust aside by the Christians who did matter: or, in our current season, by the post-Arabians who matter more than Jews do. Currently, ISIS is killing everyone who does not believe exactly what they believe: because to them, only their stripe of Islam matters – and chillingly, even a Muslim head of State has declared, “We are not loyal to ‘Iran’ – we are loyal to Islam. If ‘Iran’ must burn to the ground so that Islam may prevail,  Alla’hu Akhbar! (God is great!).” We live in an era of increasingly acceptable casualties: up to the nuclear devastation of an entire country. The Iranian Head of State offered his entire country as a casualty for the sake of his ideology: the reply was to the specific question of how Iran plans to attack Israel once it acquires nuclear weapons, when Iran knows Israel has the ability to launch a counter-strike that would turn Iran into an Iran-shaped smoldering pool of radioactive ash and glass. Iran’s view is, “Iranian lives don’t matter.” Certainly, the parents of suicide bombers are telling their own children, “Your life doesn’t matter.” No message any life doesn’t matter is legitimate. It is an heroic irony that the white and police lives which did not matter to the extent they were extinguished by the Dallas sniper were lost as they gave their lives willingly to protect the rights and the lives of the mostly-Black crowd – which Black lives, to the targeted, dehumanized white victims, most certainly did matter.

So – while ex-Mayor Giuliani may have marginalized himself to a yet-undetermined degree with his unwisely framed comment – I hope America can move past the blood-in-the-water response to something more constructive.

We need to keep our collective national eyes on the ball.

To slightly paraphrase how Aaron Sorkin closed his movie modeling an intellectual meritocracy in the White House when it was assaulted by sloganeering profiteers: “We have serious problems, and we need serious people to solve them. And to those who only want to tell you who to blame for it and who to hate for it – your fifteen minutes are up.”

MLK’s words resound, even from the grave: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

MLK’s mentor, Mohandas Gandhi put the same thought into the language of personal commitment: “I can think of many causes for which I would be willing to die; but I cannot think of a single cause for which I would be willing to kill.”

So, sloganeers – please exit the stage.

Policy-wonks – if there was ever a time for you all to figure out how to capture the attention and support of the public, now is such a time.

Presidents’ Precedents
Having Ethics vs. Using Ethics
by Bruce Louis Cohen

RE:     THE UNITED NATIONS SUMMIT THIS WEEK
THE DISCUSSION OF ISIS AND SYRIA

The speeches of Presidents Obama and Putin in the UN this week bring into stark relief for us the difference between genuinely having ethics and merely using ethics.

President Obama said in his speech at one point, the Syrian people cannot be expected to look past massive and horrible and long-term brutalities inflicted on them by Assad’s regime, and go on with that same abusive regime in power. A government using chemical weapons to subdue its own population from dissent is a government having lost the right to continue in power.
President Putin’s position is an absolute paradigm that “No President of America or France or any other nation is a citizen of Syria, and therefore has no right to choose who governs Syria.”

Putin’s idea sounds so moral, does it not?

His own country only survives because they actually do not believe, and have not practiced this precept.

In the case of the American President – a law professor by previous profession – his ethical position is clearly a legal concept called, “fruit of the poisonous tree.” It is not sound legally or ethically to permit wrongdoers to profit in the present or future from their misdeeds: one cannot murder someone, then write a best-seller telling the story, and rake in the profits for one’s own or one’s family’s benefit. The Assad regime has passed the line of no return on atrocity: they have lost their moral right to govern. They must move or be moved aside. Retention of the privileges of power is unthinkable, morally. If the Syrian people were allowed to hold a free election, it is inconceivable they would elect Bashar al-Assad. They would most likely vote in a new government, and call for the former leaders to be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in Syria, and at The Hague.

For such a government as Assad’s to continue in power with the assent of the civilized world is tantamount to civilization validating barbarism.

President Putin’s case to the opposite of President Obama’s is ridiculous to an extreme, and downright hypocritical, ignoring Russia’s own active past in similar matters.
Putin maintains no outsider has the right to move out a government of a sovereign nation, and install one different than the internal mechanisms of the country have led to being established.
Adolf Hitler had been democratically chosen by the German people; yet Russia played a major role in having the Nazi regime destroyed and its leader erased.Why then, did they not stop attacking Germany once the German advance against Russia was halted? Why did they cross the border into Germany? The answer is obvious: Hitler’s government was hegemonistic and immoral, and had done deep harm to Russia. From pragmatic need to deprive the German aggressor of resources to renew his efforts, and from the desire for justice and vengeance for the suffering Hitler inflicted on Russia, and his betrayal of his former Russian ally – these were all reasons Russians could see the situation clearly back then.

Putin claims not to see it now – because he is repeating the error that got Russia into bed with Hitler as an ally less than one lifetime ago: there is presently benefit for Russia in not seeing Assad’s nature or history.

They will.
When, Assad’s regime becomes toxic to Russian interests as did Hitler’s, then will Russia under Putin or whoever succeeds him: but at far greater cost. A despot does not think in terms other than self-aggrandizement and advancement of self-interest. There is no greater cause for Assad than Assad-maintenance and Assad-aggrandizement. Eventually, those agendas must clash with Russian aggrandizement and the advancement of Russian interests. As the old cold-war proverb goes, “The Russians can always and only be counted upon to do one thing: act in their own self-interest.” This precept governed all policy efforts in relation to Russia – including the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which almost destroyed civilization.

Despots are always ticking bombs: it is never a matter of if they will blow up in your face – only a question of when.

Russia – having tried to use Hitler also – will fulfill the Santayana maxim that “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” and we all will be stuck with the New York Subway graffiti addendum to it: “and those who do learn from history will be stuck dealing with the mess created by those who did not learn from it.”
Meanwhile – speaking as an American – while the world is lambasting our President Obama for appearing “weak” and letting Putin appear to play the “stronger man” getting the upper hand; I am proud to be a citizen of a country with a leader saying in the open that a Syrian mass-murderer getting richer and more secure through mass murder should not be rewarded by the world with assistance in the retention of his presidency.
The Syrian people, and the world, need a Syrian president with the agenda of caring for and advancing the well-being of the Syrian men, women, and children who wake up every day praying for a government that cares more about them than about shallow victories and self-glorification.

The American President acts as a leader having ethics.
The Russian President seems merely to be using ethics – or the aped appearance of them.
His stated ethical basis for his country’s policies and actions is obviously not their real motivation at all.

President Putin will, at some point in the future, learn the lesson Aesop taught in the Turtle and The Scorpion. Why did the scorpion sting the very creature permitting him to make and survive his journey across the river? Because it was his nature.

As for President-Professor Obama – thank you, Mr. President, for teaching the world that ethics are not a side-show, and strength is not only a function of position-play and ego-driven display-behavior.
My President lost no prestige in my eyes at the UN this week: he made me proud.

 

Bruce L. Cohen

29 September 2015 • Manhattan

“A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” – United States Constitution, 2nd Amendment, 1791

The 2nd Amendment must be well-read to be well-understood.
The Framers were genius-level intellects who chose their words with precision bordering on supernatural ability. The words and phrases they penned, in the order they penned them, give us understanding on the basis of written communication unrivaled outside mathematical notation.

With the United States yesterday experiencing its first on-air murder-by-gun of journalists, the country again churns the question of gun safety through the mill of public discourse.
It is surely time to stop the madness.
The educator in me yearns to believe perhaps a careful reading of the actual text in the Constitution would be a liberating experience for the American public: however, sadly, many Americans mistake the ability to decode the letters on a page for the skill of reading. They are not the same: true “Reading” goes beyond mere word-recognition or phrase-recognition to include contemplation of the nuances of meaning in the words, phrases, idioms, and word order, as well as the historical context within which the words were written.

The 2nd Amendment as written by The Framers simply does not give the American citizen the right in as unhindered a manner as possible to own and use firearm weaponry at whim: to assert so is to demonstrate a fundamental inability to understand written thought.

• The 2nd Amendment begins with the idea of not only regulation, but regulation done well. Regulation of people engaged in activity with firearms is put first in order of importance by The Framers: to assert otherwise is to fly in the face of the written page.
• Possession and use of deadly weapons of any kind is set by The Framers within the context of use in a militia: a non-private, organized military force under orders from superior authority in The State: gun use is not ascribed to private use based on private motivations.
• The above is not to say that people who demonstrate a legitimate need for weapons – for self-protection in dangerous vocations, or for hunting in responsible ways – might not be able under local, state, or federal regulation to obtain firearms. However, the main idea expressed in the 2nd Amendment is not the most regulation-free environment for private use of deadly weapons: it is well-regulated use within official military units acting in defense of The State.
• Now that the Armed Forces and National Guard and Police of the local, state, and federal authorities own and issue their own firearms to their military or para-military personnel, there is simply no militia-driven need for private citizenry to stockpile weapons and ammunition in case they are called up by their State to serve in the State’s militia.

The Framers could have written the 2nd Amendment thusly: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
The fact they chose to put before those words this phrase, “A well-regulated militia necessary to the security of a free State …” demands that the following idea be considered within that context. “Well-regulated” was the first priority in their minds and hearts for anyone engaged in any activity describable as military in any manner, or involving the use of arms: it does not specify firearms – it refers to anything describable as armament.

Consider parallel applications of the same formula:

• “A well-regulated atomic energy industry being necessary to the security of a free nation. the right of the people to mine and process fissionable materials shall not be infringed.”
• “A well-regulated auto industry being necessary to the prosperity of a free State, the right of the people to own and use motorized vehicles shall not be infringed.”
• “A well-regulated medical profession being necessary to the well-being of a free State, the right of the people to own and carry sharpened cutlery shall not be infringed.

All the above usable-as-armaments materials are well-regulated – and the most dangerous one, to an extreme degree. Certainly no one sane would advocate for as-unhindered-as-possible private use of fissionable materials, automobiles, or concealable weapons-grade cutlery: the atomic and automobile industries are deeply regulated, the carrying of weaponizable cutlery is also subject to state and federal regulation: minors are in many states and cities prevented from purchasing such blade-weapons at all, and the FAA will confiscate any such weapon before permitting the owner onto any aircraft. You can’t even board an aircraft with a nail-file, let alone a manifest blade-weapon. No substantive complaint is made in regard to these obviously-needed legislative envelopes for the sake of public safety.

The language of The Framers was not to insure that private citizens would, in the most unregulated environment possible, be able to own, stockpile, and use-at-whim deadly weaponry.
Given the number of gun deaths by accident or violent intent visited upon private American citizenry outside any “militia” context of any remote nature – it seems likely that if The Framers could be directly consulted about the current United States gun violence problem, their answer might be similar to that of Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth as reported in Matthew 19:4, when asked a manifestly inane question about a concept in The Bible: “Have you not read?” was asked in reply.

I imagine The Framers, varying only slightly – with Jefferson’s surely the representative voice asking incredulously, “Can you not read?”
Can you not read?
In accord with John Adam’s plea that “none but honest and wise men ever rule under this (White House) roof”  –  it is the American hope in regard to excessive gun violence that politicians of good will and wise, honest hearts will rise up above financial and political interests to save us all from further such preventable pain and loss.

We grieve with the bereaved families and friends – and look with hope for better laws leading to better days.

 

Bruce Louis Cohen, 27 August 2015