Let’s Be Part of the Solution!

The only good thing about this time of physically distancing is that I’ve been able to take a wealth of webinars that have improved my knowledge base, introduced me to wonderful speakers, gotten me to read books I might not have, and given hope to my soul.

I mention the last not because the webinar topics are sweetness and light. No, they all have to do with racism in one way or another, whether in policing reforms, the development of Black theology, author discussions, or one I’m involved in now, “After the Protests: Where Do We Go From Here?” featuring James Forman Jr.

A lawyer, Dr. Forman is a professor at Yale Law School and came to public attention when his book, Locking Up Our Own, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018. He is not only passionate about mass incarceration, but also the number of Black judges and prosecutors who have shown little mercy to Black defendants. His time as a public defender in Washington, DC taught him a lot about that subject.

As the son of civil rights activist James Forman and Constancia Romilly, activism is in Dr. Forman’s genes. His father will be better known to Americans for his involvement in SNCC and the Black Panthers. Romilly is the daughter of British aristocrats. Her mother was the Hon. Jessica Mitford, a fierce anti-fascist, Civil Rights worker, and author; her father was Esmond Romilly, who went missing in action during a bombing raid over Nazi Germany. Constancia was also involved with SNCC, where she met Forman Sr.

In Part 1 of the two-part webinar, Dr. Forman talked about his experiences as a public defender and organizations in which people can get involved in the fight for justice. Some of these are strictly for the Washington, DC area (the webinar was sponsored by the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in DC), but all have some good ideas for justice work. These organizations are:

Council for Court Excellence (CCE)  http://www.courtexcellence.org/get-involved

Justice Policy Institute http://www.justicepolicy.org

The Sentencing Project, https://www.sentencingproject.org/actions/

Equal Justice Under Law, http://www.equaljusticeunderlaw.org/takeaction

To my interest, a link was also given for the ACLU of Massachusetts’ breakdown of the Boston Police Department’s budget, which is fairly shocking. https://data.aclum.org/2020/06/05/unpacking-the-boston-police-budget/

Anyone can register for the second part of Dr. Forman’s presentation, which will be held on Thursday, September 3, at 7 pm. Go to https://www.nyapc.org/ and scroll down to where it says McClendon Scholars in Residence.

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Another way to put that angry energy to good use is the Vote Forward project. Once a person registers, Vote Forward gives them pre-printed letters with people’s names and addresses on them. You print them out, add a hand-written note about why you vote, put them in an envelope and address and stamp them, and then wait for news of the date on which they are to be mailed. All letters must be mailed on the same day. I’ve signed up for 20 names from Texas so far. Vote Forward suggests having an online letter-writing party with friends. The letters won’t be mailed until early October, so there’s plenty of time.

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The Poor Peoples’ Campaign: A National Call to Moral Revival is also working on getting out the vote. On Monday, September 14, there will be a Zoom conference from 7 to 9 pm for anyone interested in finding out what the plan is. I’ll be posting the link closer to that time.

So there are ways we all can help and it can all be done in our own homes. What could be easier? I know how easy it is to bitch about our current government; I do it all the time. But without trying in practical ways to change that, I don’t feel I have the right to bitch.

Breath of Life or Death?

Three years ago, I preached on Pentecost Sunday at my church.

In the week preceding that Sunday, a terrorist attack in London wounded or killed some 35 people; at least 90 women and children died in a terrorist attack in Kabul and several more killed at a funeral; two men were stabbed to death by a white supremacist in Oregon for defending young Muslim women, and African-American college student Richard Collins III was fatally stabbed by a white supremacist on his college campus.

And once again, in the week before Pentecost, George Floyd’s breath was quite literally taken from him in a brazen murder committed by police.

Many commentators have noted the tragic relationship between those who are dying of COVID-19 who cannot breathe and Mr. Floyd’s death by asphyxiation. The vast majority of the nearly 110,000 citizens who have died would not have died if not for the criminally inept non-action of the so-called president. Mr. Floyd need not have died either, but for the criminally inept policing of the Minneapolis police.

For many priests and pastors, the other tragic irony is that Pentecost is a celebration of the giving of holy breath to the disciples, which turned them into apostles.

And even more ironic, tongues of flame appeared above their heads in the room in which they had been hiding. This emboldened Peter to address the crowd who had come to Jerusalem to celebrate Shavuot, and as he did, everyone in the crowd, no matter what language they spoke, could HEAR and UNDERSTAND each other.

In the Greek, the Holy Spirit is called “pneuma,” which literally means breath. It came in the form of a great wind, which rushed through the dwelling, clearing away the disciples’ fear and anxiety about when the advocate that Jesus had promised was going to come.

In our 2020 case, wind created by military helicopters hovering over protestors brought down branches that hit some of them and drowned out their pleas for understanding that black lives matter.

It also deafened the cowardly General Mark Milley, who strutted around Washington, DC, in his fatigues checking on his “soldiers” when, in effect, martial law was imposed on the city this week. Of all people, he should have known best about Posse Comitatis Law, which forbids the US Army and Air Force from acts of war on US soil.

And here is yet another tragic irony in this most devastating week. The Law of Posse Comitatis was signed by President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878, supposedly at the “end of Reconstruction.” In fact, Reconstruction was nipped in the bud because the law gave an easy out to secessionist states from having to be held accountable for slavery and the post-Civil War uprising of vigilante groups not just limited to the Ku Klux Klan. President US Grant had allowed a military presence in the South and had virtually destroyed the Klan and its ilk. Hayes was elected as Southerners who had signed the oath of allegiance to the Union were regaining political offices and influence.

So a law that helped to re-create the Ku Klux Klan and other “night riders” and ushered in the Jim Crow era, which still has not ended, is now being breached to quell the descendants of those newly freed people who were in effect re-enslaved when Reconstruction failed.

For Christians, Pentecost symbolizes a holding to account of those in the Jesus Movement to follow  Jesus’s words and actions to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth by raising up the most marginalized and the most vulnerable, binding the wounds of the soul-sick and the physically sick, and living in communion with one another by acknowledging all of us as brothers and sisters.

But on the day after Pentecost, the wannabe dictator in the White House declared war on all of us and then defaced a church by going into, taking a Bible and using it for a photo opportunity.

Lamentation for George Floyd

White men and women have thought of black bodies for centuries as something they can do what they will with.

Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the 13^th Amendment nor the Voting Rights Act nor the institution of a category of felonies called hate crimes has changed this.

Black bodies have only been good for making wealth off of or using as scapegoats for white rage.

How long, O Lord, how long?

The murder of George Floyd was committed in plain sight; the four cops knew exactly what they are were doing. They intended to kill him and they did, right out in public. How can we breathe when he couldn’t?

How long, O Lord, how long?

I fear the pandemic of white supremacy more, a great, great deal more, than I fear COVID-19, though for black bodies, both are methods of genocide.

How long, O Lord, how long?

I woke up today with such a weight of anger, grief, and despair that I could barely move. Prayer time didn’t help. All I wanted to do was post to white policeman, “Keep your fucking hands off black bodies.”

How long, O Lord, how long?

The list of names has gotten so long, we could fill a Vietnam Memorial with them. George, Amadou, Philando, Oscar, Jamal, John, Sandra, Ahmaud, Breona, Emmet, Jordan, Eric, Jimmie Lee, and hundreds of others whose names are recorded at the Equal Justice Initiative’s Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.

This list doesn’t even include the thousands of black bodies who have been killed or neglected in prisons.

How long, O Lord, how long?

When Saul sent men to kill David, David wrote Psalm 59 in lament. When I read verses 1-7 now, I hear the voices of all the black bodies crying from their graves.

59 Deliver me from my enemies, O my God;
protect me from those who rise up against me;

²  deliver me from those who work evil,
and save me from bloodthirsty men.

³  For behold, they lie in wait for my life;
fierce men stir up strife against me.
For no transgression or sin of mine, O LORD, 

⁴  for no fault of mine, they run and make ready.
Awake, come to meet me, and see!

⁵  You,  LORD God of hosts, are God of Israel.
Rouse yourself to punish all the nations;
spare none of those who treacherously plot evil.

⁶  Each evening they come back,
howling like dogs
and prowling about the city.

Darkness for the People of the First Light

I’d like to tell you about when I first heard of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe.

I’d been on Cape Cod for about two months or so in the early 1980s, living aboard a schooner with a dysfunctional man, a German shepherd, and two cats. This will be relevant later.

Somehow, Malcolm had gotten to know a member of the finance board of Mashpee, and so we went to meet her and her husband for drinks one afternoon.

She kept referring to the “Monigs,” and I had no idea what she was talking about. I finally asked. She laughed; “Oh, that’s what we called the Wampanoags – More Nigger than Indian.”

Welcome to white Mashpee. And oh yes, the name Mashpee is derived from Algonquin meaning “great water.”

When I started working for The Enterprise newspaper in Falmouth, I got a lot more education about why so many white people ostensibly hated the Wampanoags, or People of the First Light. It went back to a land suit that the tribe had filed and it went on for years, tying up a lot of developers’ plans.

The next big story, which was the first of its kind I’d come across, involved the police shooting of a young Wampanoag man. The following is from a Maoist (!) website, the only place I could find to refresh my memory.

“On May 1, 1988, David H. Mace, a white police sergeant in the Cape Cod town of Mashpee, Massachusetts, shot and killed David C. Hendricks, a 27 year old Mashpee Wampanoag, following his pursuit of Hendricks’ car for a traffic violation. Sergeant Mace fired eleven shots from his semi-automatic 9-millimeter pistol. Seven struck David Hendricks. … The last five shots were fired at point-blank range through the driver’s side window after the car had stopped. … The Wampanoag and many of their supporters have suffered from police harassment and surveillance during memorial walks and demonstrations for justice concerning the Hendricks case.”

The longer I lived on the Upper Cape, the more familiar I became with members of the Mashpee Wampanoags. The term “tribe” is used loosely, because it was not until 2007 that the Mashpee group received this designation from the US government, despite the fact that they had lived as a tribe in the indigenous sense of the word from ancient days. One hundred fifty acres of the town that was surveyed and incorporated by white folks in 1847 were ancestral lands, yet the Wampanoags had no say or control over them.

Back to the boat, Chantey. Many people assumed Malcolm and I were wealthy because she was such a beautiful boat and kept up very well. She was built in the 1930s on Long Island using oak from a demolished brewery. Only two families had owned her before. The fact was, though, that I was spending almost every penny of my savings and my pay on her, and we did all the work on her ourselves. Every winter I helped schlepp hundreds of pounds worth of masts, gaffs, and spars on foot to a warehouse where they would be sanded down and varnished. I spent one summer just stripping caulk from the deck seams and heating up tar on a propane stove to replace it. I scraped barnacles from the hull and repainted it with red lead paint.

One day a very preppy looking young man stopped to admire Chantey and we got chatting. He invited us to his family’s compound, which was tucked away in Mashpee. I felt very ill at ease, but Malcolm came from a pedigreed family and could bullshit his way around anyone. However, it soon became apparent what our economic situation was, and the young man, actually called Buff day, soon lost interest in us.

Fast forward to the mid-1990s when a hotshot real estate developer, who had already bought up and developed prime seashore land in Mashpee, bought a mini-mall and decided to create a new Mashpee by building a huge complex called Mashpee Commons. His name was Buff. How many Buffs have I ever known? Just the one.

It seemed like a further slap in the face to the Wampanoags. Buff’s premise was that Mashpee didn’t have a center and therefore didn’t create community. “It will put Mashpee on the map,” he avowed, though the land suit and the killing of David Hendricks had already done that. Cape Cod Life Magazine called it the “heart” of Mashpee.

Capitalism as heart. Fancy stores that local people cannot afford to shop in. Condominiums that local people cannot afford. Never mind the heart of the Mashpee Wampanoags and their years-long fight for their lands and their status as a tribe. Never mind the hearts of the Hendricks family, who never received justice for David’s killing. The policeman was on full salary of $75,000 for five years while not working before he left the all-white force. All attempts to try David Mace for murder went for naught.

So when the Trump Administration’s Department of the Interior in February informed the tribe that it was disestablishing its lands when it was becoming increasingly clear that a world-wide pandemic was going to hit the US like a bludgeon, it got national attention and outrage. It represents yet another broken treaty, in essence, where treaties should not have had to be made in the first place. They are the legacy of “Manifest Destiny” and the white man’s push to own an entire continent rather than share it with the human beings who lived here already.

What I have not found through Googling stories about this situation are any expressions of sympathy from the white residents of Mashpee. Yes, I could have missed them, but my sense is that there would have been a lot of press if the town’s establishment had made its support unequivocal.

I do recommend a work that I found on line, MashpeeIndiansofCapeCod, the thesis of one Mark A. Nicholas presented in 2001 for his Master of History at Lehigh University.

 

CORVID-19 Treatment Must Be Free

Part of the money allotted by Congress to address the CORVID-19 pandemic should be for free screening and treatment.

And someone should be appointed, though not by the White House, to monitor the areas of the country where screening kits are being sent and ensure that the poorest areas get them in a timely and equitable manner.

In addition, CDC specialists should be allowed into all border concentration camps to screen people there throughout the length of this latest crisis. I do not trust the CBP or ICE at all not to introduce the virus on purpose. I hate to think that way, but that’s the country we’ve become.

Because the Poor People’s Campaign is on my mind daily, my first thought in the past week was whether people who live in poverty or low wealth would present themselves for screening if they have no insurance to cover the costs that hospitalization and quarantine could rise to.

Even for the so-called elderly, Medicare has high co-pays and uncovered costs if you can’t afford a supplemental plan.

I’m not a scientist, obviously, but I will hazard an educated guess that people living with the stress of staring into the jaws of poverty have compromised immune systems, which would make them easy pickings for any new disease going around.

Since self-reporting when one has symptoms is good citizenship, because it can contain the virus, then free medical care just makes sense and will ensure that no one is left behind.

As for where screening kits are sent, because of the slow and ignorant response to the virus shown by the White House, there is a shortage of such kits. Again, I hate thinking it, but I wouldn’t be surprised (especially after reading Dark Towers by David Enrich about Deutsche Bank) if corruption in the form of bribery for kits is not tried to attain them by wealthy enclaves.

The kits need to be acquired in ample numbers and distributed as soon as possible to rural areas where there are no hospitals and inner-city clinics as well as to more affluent areas. States need to be monitored as well, again by an independent agency, to make sure the states are distributing the kits equitably.

What about the homeless? How will they be screened and/or treated if they are not living in shelters? Will the prejudice against them borne by the immoral narrative that they are responsible for the systemic poverty that affects them hold sway? Or will trained medical teams be dispatched to areas under bridges and other homeless encampments to bring what could be life-saving help?

It is difficult to read and hear news about CORVID-19 without getting panicky. Panic can lead to the most selfish acts human beings can perpetrate. At this point, containing the panic could be as important as containing the virus. I don’t mean that agencies should soft-sell the news and pretend it’s not a big deal, but straight, practical information is important.

I haven’t even mentioned yet my fear of the stupid stock market plunges and how they will be used to raise prices on many common items whether legitimate or not.

In the end, any crisis of this kind will have a worse impact on the poor. Do not let them be forgotten. And think about joining the Poor People’s Campaign and helping us get our demands met. www.poorpeoplescampaign.org

 

MSNBC, The Economy is not Fine!

The media is doing it again.

Suddenly, because Iowa tried something new to tally yesterday’s caucus results, every media outlet is reporting that the entire Democratic Party is in “chaos.” You can bet that those news reports are going to come up quickly in the president’s campaign talking points. He’s already tweeted about it.

A few months after the 2016 election, Chris Hayes of MSNBC gave a heartfelt editorial saying that he thought the media had been complicit in the results. We did too much coverage of Donald Trump, he said in effect, because of his outrageous statements and behavior. MSNBC mainly covered Hillary Clinton when news about the Benghazi hearings came up, to her detriment.

And for three years now, MSNBC, and Mr. Hayes himself, have been repeating the narrative that the economy is doing just great. Even having had the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, A National Call to Moral Revival as a guest, he and others at MSNBC have  been continuing with that narrative.

That narrative is FALSE, FALSE, FALSE.

And be sure that you will hear it again and again in tonight’s State of the Union address.

As Bishop Barber and his co-chair, the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, are eager to tell you, the economy is not doing fine for almost half of the country who live in poverty or low wealth

Yup, 140,000,000 people in this country live in poverty or low wealth. Don’t believe me? Read The Souls of Poor Folk, an exhaustive economic look at the poverty statistics. Then look at the Moral Budget that poverty economists have created to show how the abundant wealth of this country can be reassessed to ensure the well-being of every child, every woman, and every man in this country.

And while the majority of those people, 66%, are white, the impact is much, much bigger for African-Americans because of the systemic racism that intersects with poverty, as do ecological devastation, militarism, and religious nationalism.

Would thousands of people from across the country plan to join the Moral March and Assembly on Washington, DC, on June 20, 2020, if they thought the economy was doing just fine? Would 250,000 people a year be dying because of poverty if the economy was doing just fine?

Just two weeks ago, another immoral policy went into effect that 900,000 veterans and 5,000 active-duty service personnel off of SNAP benefits. Why would they have needed SNAP  benefits in the first place? After all, 53 cents of every discretionary tax dollar goes to the Department of Defense, the most money allocated anywhere in the federal budget.

But that money doesn’t trickle down to the folks with boots on the ground, or those who might have left boots and arms and sanity on the ground. It goes to multinational corporations that spend trillions of dollars to build bigger and more lethal war materiel.

Ecological devastation is the third horseman of the systemic poverty apocalypse. Governmental neglect of the effects of climate change and industrial depredations always hurts people living in poverty more than anyone else. How many wealthy people do you know who can’t drink the water in their towns? How many mansions are situated near creeks and rivers running with raw sewage and industrial toxins? Ask the people of Flint, MI, or those who live in the area of Louisiana called Cancer Alley. Ask the indigenous people trying to reclaim precious land that has been polluted by corporations with ties to government.

Please consider joining us on June 20, 2020, in Washington to help turn the moral narrative on poverty, to speak truth to power in the very halls of power, and to bring justice to the most vulnerable people in our society.

All the information you need is on the Poor People’s Campaign’s website, including how to join a bus from hundreds of towns and villages across the United States. And watch this video: https://youtu.be/GjHz2xZqz0o 

Screw You, Anonymous

A Blog by Cynthia Pease

MSNBC was all over the soon-to-be-released book Warning by Anonymous last night.

The book is written by the same unknown Trump administration official who wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times last year to assure us that there were grown-ups in the room who were trying to rein in the orange monster’s worst impulses.

Now Anonymous is saying that it is an impossible task and the dangers to the US are greater than ever.

Can the dangers be worse than the threats on the life of the whistleblower?

Can the dangers be worse than they are for the hundreds of families separated at the border?

Can the dangers be worse than they are for Ambassador Marie Yovanovich, who feared for her life even before testifying before Congress?

Can the dangers be worse for the Latinx, Jewish, and African-American people targeted by white supremacists?

Can the dangers be worse for people living in poverty or people of low wealth who continued to be blamed for being poor though everything is being done to take away even what they do have?

You say that you were a proud supporter of the president and even when you wrote your essay, that you believed in his policies. Then you are just as dangerous as he is, and you and your ilk are certainly not the adults in the room. You are as much to blame for where we are as he is.

You apparently have as few guts and as little patriotism as he has. If you really thought things were this bad, you would have come out publicly and said so, or used the whistleblower law. Our beloved Elijah Cummings begged people to contact his office and promised to protect them. But you went the public route in a murky shadow.

I can’t believe you’re being taken so seriously that Rachel Maddow would devote much of her program to reading aloud from your book, or that Ben Rhodes would freak out about you on her show.

If you can’t be as brave as the many heroes who have testified before Congress in the last few weeks about the Ukrainian extortion attempt, then you’re a joke. Do you get some thrill out of your tell-all hidden behind the name Anonymous? Do you sit in meetings with this foul administration and pat yourself on the back because you think you’re exposing corruption?

Others are doing it much better than you, and putting their names and bodies on the line.

Go back to your dark hole where you scribble your screeds and repent for your own part in bringing us to this nightmare we are living in.

In other words, Anonymous, screw you.

William Parker and the Christiana Riot of 1851

It is fascinating to me how the Divine conspires to lead me on a path that takes me to related interests.

I’m taking a course on Movement Theology through the Kairos Center at Union Theological Seminary. The Kairos Center’s director is the Rev. Liz Theoharis, who is also co-leader with the Rev. William J. Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign. I saw them both in New Hampshire recently at a march and rally.

The course is free and can be taken through Zoom, and it very obviously contains all the themes of the Poor People’s Campaign.

In this week’s reading is part of the Narrative of William Parker. He was an enslaved orphan in Maryland, frustratingly close to free states. He saw friends’ families split up by being sold away and was determined that would not happen to him. At the age of 19 or so (he never knew his exact age), William and his brother made a break for Pennsylvania. Traveling northeast, they spent many nights hiding from patrols. Even after reaching York, they and other fugitives had to beware of slaveowners and bounty hunters who, because of the federal Fugitive Slave Law, could go into a free state with impunity and kidnap back those making their way to freedom. William pushed farther northeast nearer to Philadelphia, where the Underground Railroad flourished.

William had met Frederick Douglass when both were still enslaved and now got to hear and be further inspired by the great man. William Lloyd Garretson was also influential on the young William Parker, and he formed a band of the newly free that did all it could to disrupt the kidnappings and defy the Fugitive Slave Law. They were not afraid to fight back.

He settled in Christiana, about halfway between Philadelphia and Lancaster in an area where there were Quaker allies. Still, Maryland’s nearness to Pennsylvania was always a factor in marauding slaver-takers being in the area.

Parker and his band were involved in many skirmishes to keep refugees, and themselves, from being kidnapped. The most notorious such took place at his home in Christiana, where he had living with him an enslaved man who had worked on the plantation of one Edward Gorsuch in Maryland.

In September 1851, Gorsuch had himself and his sons and friends deputized to be able to arrest the refugee and bring him back. The posse was given information that the man they were looking for was hiding in William’s house and surrounded the house at daybreak. Gorsuch and a ruthless kidnapper named Kline made themselves known to Parker and a parley ensued in which Parker told them that if they entered his house, they would not leave it again.

Within two hours, William’s band of men and other neighbors, including two Quakers, confronted Gorsuch’s posse and a shoot-out occurred that left Gorsuch dead and one of his sons severely wounded. It is said that the Christiana incident put an end to slaveholders trying to enact the Fugitive Slave Law in Pennsylvania.

Nevertheless, William and his wife and children made their ways separately to Toronto and thence to the Buxton Settlement near Chatham, where many other formerly enslaved people had settled.

As for Edward Gorsuch, there is a website called Officer Down Memorial Page. One page honors him for his “sacrifice,” i.e., getting killed while trying to kidnap a black man he had enslaved. From 2010 to 2015, seven memorial statements were left on his entry on the website thanking him for his service. All are anonymous, though one notes it was left by someone who works for the Border Patrol. Since there is no information about why he was considered an officer of the law, for two days, so it would be interesting to know whether the people who made the comments have any idea who he really was.

When I saw the name “Gorsuch,” I immediately thought of conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, whose appointment to SCOTUS came after Mitch McConnell ensured that Merrick Garland’s appointment would never happen.

Neil Gorsuch grew up in Colorado, far from Maryland, and I could find no definitive connection between them. However, Libertarian blogger Will Griff posited in 2017 that the two must be connected because of the unusual name.

And while Gorsuch’s entry on the ODMP page says that his “watch” ended in 1851 (i.e. his death occurred), I think it is much important to note that William Parker’s much longer and heroic watch ended in 1891 at the apparent age of 70 at his home in Canada.

The Time For Moral Action is Always Now

I’ve spent the last week talking about the unfolding impeachment drama, so I’m not going to write about whistleblowers and telephone transcripts today.

I am something that grieves me in all this, even while I am so glad that we might be seeing the end of the man in the White House and his minions.

I grieve because “high crimes and misdemeanors” has a wide definition, and ultimately, impeachment depends on finding the incumbent unfit for office. Yet our representatives, except one, didn’t take advantage of the definition.

Among all the other scandals involving the regime, the sanctioning of white supremacism and the treatment of asylum seekers at the border seemed to me to be grounds for impeachment. Donald Trump’s racism was a matter of public discussion long before he ran for office. I would add anti-Semitism to that even though his own daughter converted to Judaism and he supports the criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. You really can’t be a white supremacist and love Jews.

His very announcement of his candidacy was one long racist rant about Mexicans.

But only one lone man had the courage to stand up and call for impeachment for moral reasons rather than strictly political ones.

Rep. Al Green of Texas spoke out before anyone on the necessity of impeachment because of the moral depravity of the so-called president. He has doggedly filed articles of impeachment since 2017 and has also received many threats on his life for his moral stances.

Yes, many politicians spoke out about Charlottesville and the concentration camps at the border, but Congressman Green was the only one who stood up in the House and said the “I” word early on.

I do believe we are seeing the regime cave in on itself, both because of the whistle-blower and the transcript of the telephone call with the president of the Ukraine.

Make no mistake, however, that this is the end of white supremacy in this country or the assault on the poor, the environment, African-Americans, Native Americans, and Latinx.

We still need a moral reckoning and revival in this country. Dr. William Barber, co-leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, calls it the Third Reconstruction. We need to take a deep dive into our history and study the intersections of racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and militarism.

I have no doubt that Congressman Green will continue to fight for moral right-ness. He knows that governance is not a business. I think he knows that restoring the US to a superpower is not the goal, but making the US a moral power in the world is what is needed.

A country that cares about the most vulnerable of its citizens is more important than a country that has the biggest nuclear arsenal. We rise best when we raise those on the bottom. There is a lot of work to be done, and we can’t wait for the 2020 election to dig in and do it.

The time for moral action is always now. Not tomorrow, not next week, not next year.  Now.

A Tale of the Wirloman Noongar of Australia

When I saw that there was going to be a panel on Australian Aboriginal Authors at the recent National Book Festival, I was keen to attend it.

My mother introduced me to the Australian mysteries of Arthur Upfield back in the 1970s. They introduced me to some of the world of indigenous people down under. Bruce Chatwin’s wonderful book Songlines about indigenous creation myths further piqued my interest. I’ve seen “The Last Wave” and “Bliss” and read many other books about Australia’s history, and I guess I thought I was pretty knowledgeable.

But I never read books about indigenous people by indigenous people in that country.

I was fortunate to be able to speak with each of the authors, Kim Scott, Brent McKenna, and Jeanine Leane while getting books signed. I also had a wonderful talk with Belinda Wheeler, their US representative, though she is Australian. I put the question to her that I wondered whether Upfield’s books were considered racist by indigenous people. You see, his detective hero, Napoleon Bonaparte, is half white and half indigenous. In the books, he is portrayed as using his white heritage for logic and reason and his indigenous heritage for intuition and knowledge of tracking and of surviving in the outback. There were many times when I winced at descriptions of “blackfellas,” but I didn’t stop reading the books.

She explained that yes, many people do find them racist; others say, though, that a lot of people would never know of the situation indigenous Australians were historically, and are still to some degree, in if not for Upfield’s books.

Kim Scott is also in the picture above, second from the left. It is the Wirloman Noongar Reference Group, which worked on promoting the indigenous language. The T-shirts reflect the fact that “Wirloman” means “curlew.”

So my self-education continues. I read first Mr. Scott’s book Taboo, written in 2017 and published in this country by Small Beer Press this year. Let me say right off that it is numinous in the sense that it takes the reader out of oneself and marks that period between ignorance and revelation that white people of all countries need to experience. Mr. Scott’s writing is beautiful and the story more than compelling. One does have to pay attention because there are time slips, but it is no chore to page back and forth to grasp the timeline. And time slips seem to be part of the indigenous experience in this story.

A Wirloman (Curlew) Noongar himself, Mr. Scott uses a real incident to write about the attempt of older Australian indigenous people to teach the young their heritage and the attempt of young indigenous people to learn their native language and to connect with the land that bore them.

John Dunn, a white colonial, was murdered in 1880 in Cocanarup in southwestern Australia. Yandawalla, a Noongar man, was arrested and charged with the crime. Though he was acquitted, reprisal killings took place. Mr. Scott quotes The Western Mail newspaper from 1935: “. . . members on the station were then granted license to shoot the natives for a period of one month, during which time the fullest advantage was taken of the privilege.”

In Taboo, several related Noongar travel to Kokanarup for the dedication of Peace Park, meant to be reconciliation for the past. The Coolman family and friends go early in order to visit ancient sites and talk with a white farmer whose descendant was the man killed in the 1800s. One of the family is a young woman Tilly, whose mother was white and whose father was Jim Coolman, a Noongar whom she only  meets where he is imprisoned. He has led a prison initiative to teach younger prisoners their language and culture.

One of those younger prisoners is Gerald Coolman, a nephew, who is soon to be released and will be Tilly’s protector on the trip. Tilly has been the victim of sexual and emotional abuse, kept imprisoned in a house by a white man who chains her up like a dog and forces her into sexual submission. It was Gerald who broke into the house and freed her.

Moreover, Tilly was fostered as an infant by Dan, the white farmer who is grieving the death of his wife and also becoming more convinced that the land his ancestors farmed should be returned to the Noongar.

The tension builds up as the Noongar visit sites and plan for how they will present themselves at the Peace Park dedication, especially since Tilly’s tormentor shows up and stalks her.

There are so many strands to the story that the reader needs to weave together to make sense of it. Above all, the land and topography plays a vital role in the story and is almost a character itself.

White American readers will see their own history of oppression of indigenous and enslaved people in Taboo. The fact that Mr. Scott’s story resonates with shameful histories around the world will either make people want to learn more or to turn away.  It is to be hoped that we will envision more about what we need to do to atone and make reparations in our own country while yet learning about how white supremacy did its damage in other parts of the world.

A note: I learned from the panel that the UN declared 2019 the Year of Indigenous Languages. There are about 200 different indigenous languages in Australia. The Noongar language was considered “extinct” in 2009 but “living” in 2015 thanks to efforts to teach Noongar people young and old the ancient words of their ancestors.

Mr. Scott has written several books that appear to be available online as e-books. He is currently professor of writing at the School of Culture, Media, and Creative Arts at Curtin University. He lives in Fremantle, Australia.

Small Beer Press (smallbeerpress.com) is to be commended for publishing books for “independently minded readers.”