Yes, we have a duty to resist, but…

I’ve avoided commenting on the iconoclastic vandals/ rioters for at least three reasons.

1. I’ve been hoping that there’d be some point to to their violence – or that at least there’d be some accord with the peaceful protesters’ righteous demand for reform. Given how bad our tribal information sources are these days, I was hoping that something favorable would emerge about their motives. …Other than burning Bibles and the usual socialist/communist self-delusions, of course.
2. Quite opposite the manipulative canard we’re told about the efficacy of peaceful protest, there has always been, in any real social movement, a yin-yang duo of intellect and force, peaceful protest and violence.  For example, Mohandas Gandhi versus Rash Behari Bose, or Martin Luther King versus Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.  I am personally very anti-violence in my personality as well as political ideology and ethos.  But…change is necessary.  Our government is horrifically corrupt.
3. Truth be told, I’m a bit of an iconoclast myself.

But as of now, the violence has only served to unfairly discredit and distract from the peaceful protesters’ goals.  Whether by design or stupidity is pretty much the same yield…the violent destruction has been absurdly, mindlessly destructive as well as counterproductive.

On the other hand I’m deeply conflicted.

I feel like a hypocrite promoting peaceful revolution by nullification, change of heart and mind, personal responsibility, civil disobedience, tribal law/ election reform and innumerable political campaigns, yet silently wishing for the other half I know is necessary for actual societal and cultural change.

I’m not aware of anybody saying it better than former slave Frederick Douglass.  Here’ just a few snippets of a speech we should all read in its entirety:

“The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just.  For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others, or put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others.  Such a man, the world says, may lie down until he has sense enough to stand up.  It is useless and cruel to put a man on his legs, if the next moment his head is to be brought against a curbstone.”

“Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.”

The following puts a sharp point on today’s circumstances as contrasted with better-grounded movements:

“I am aware that the insurrectionary movements of the slaves were held by many to be prejudicial to their cause.  This is said now of such movements at the South.  The answer is that abolition followed close on the heels of insurrection in the West Indies, and Virginia was never nearer emancipation than when General Turner kindled the fires of insurrection at Southampton.”

…And my favorite, most-often cited part:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand.  It never did and it never will.  Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.  The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

The rioters’ absence of such intellect, clarity and purpose reveals them to be self-immolating fools; either as tools at the whim of others, or as brutish embodiment of dysfunctional minds.

But I’d better be clear on something…it’s not only black people who should be concerned about our government.  Our culture is sick from the bottom-up as well as top-down.  Inequality under law hurts everybody, ultimately – even the people who’re now draining the lives of the lower castes for their benefit.

You can say whatever you want about our Founding Fathers and past generations’ American Dream – we never did anybody’s vision correctly.   But where we’re headed is disastrous by anybody’s ideology, or hopes for tomorrow.

My hopes, as always, are for a public epiphany that actually acts-out a better culture.  But as always, my hopes greatly exceed my expectations.
Sigh…

I’ll end with another excerpt of Douglass’s speech:

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning.  They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.“

Flag day on Sunday may be too much…

Flag Day, like Independence Day and Constitution Day, has become, for me, anyway, a predicament.

I want very much to enjoy the feelings of pride and mystic oneness with untarnished heroes of yesteryear.  I’d like to sing our anthem with joy.  I’d be delighted if I could feel that nationalism was about righteous unity and a shared experience of liberty and justice for all with my fellow citizens.  I wish I could hoist a flag and feel I’m expressing equality under constitutional rule of law, with truth, transparency, peace and prosperity now and forevermore.

But, dang it…

The flag is a symbol that, to me, and very sadly, has become an emblem of corruption and self-deception.  Our Pledge to obey it (written by an apostate socialist, BTW) was considered idolatry by Christians a hundred years ago.  Adding “under God” to it in 1953 changed what, exactly?

Do we stand in church with our hands on our hearts and solemnly pledge to obey God?  I’ve not seen that happen.

Besides, how CAN we obey a flag?  Are there any rules?  Who decides what the flag is telling us what to do, and how far we’re to go in obedience?

Do we mean what we’re actually saying?

Our Anthem is a similar self-deception.  Do we still believe we’re “the land of the free and the home of the brave” when… aren’t we struggling against liberties lost to fear of everything from impoverished Arabs, to marijuana and viruses?

Our nation is a corporate abstraction not so different from other corporate identities, tribes, corporations, clubs or clans.  We should be acutely aware that the difference between crime rings and nations is often more matter of scale than culture or law.  When Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel beat the Mexican government in a straight-up military engagement, wasn’t there at least a little confusion about who’s really running the country?

Governing is always by force.  But very, very rarely, a government rules by some authority higher than just brute force.  The USA’s national government was created, authorized and very literally delimited by constitutions, state and federal…that, unfortunately today, nobody reads, and most dismiss as outdated.

Yet it’s to constitutions that soldiers, police, politicians and new citizens are to pledge their support and defense against all enemies both foreign…and domestic.

And it’s to those constitutions that we all turn at some point when we want at least the parts we like (maybe a few of the Bill of Rights) when we feel we need defense from…our own government.

Yes, our government.  You know…the people with the flags on their uniforms, “Under God” on their money, and big bald eagles topping flagpoles guarded by soldiers.

You know…the people a lot of us are protesting against today for their injustice, lawlessness, corruption and brutality.

I get that flags are powerful.  Anthems are powerful.  Slogans are powerful.

But carried through generations, they become a religion unto themselves.  Tribal/corporate membership identity is powerful right down to our DNA.  We crave the feeling of belonging to a pack…often most when opposed to some other clique, clan, club or country.  Historically, and today, that tribal fervor becomes violent at the whisper of a rumor.

We actually tend to WANT us versus them, with all the emotions, symbology and triumphant, martyr-making images that go with that scenario.

My dad was a decorated WWII pilot and POW.  He weighed just over 90lbs when freed, and I believe all of his kids were deeply affected by his unspoken trauma.  The triangle of flag presented after his death means a lot to me.  But that particular flag is about my dad and not about our imperiled nation.

A lot of people see the flying flag more like a disgraced celebrity than a proud aspiration.  Others have good reason to see it as a symbol of class struggle and injustice.  Those who see it as a physical embodiment of virtue are history-whitewashing romantics…which must be pleasant – but is ultimately a destructive self-delusion.

But it may also be a dangerous red-herring bait-and-switch.  “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” *

I have a suggestion.

I believe we should drop the abstract, arbitrary symbols associated with our ungoverned, corrupt and dangerous government, and make this really, really simple.

We should make sure that what we espouse and pledge to support is written in black and white constitutions that we’ve read and actually do support, and not to feelings inferred from symbols no longer related to those words.

We need to be, in my opinion, razor-sharp in focus, and completely serious in our dedication to truth, justice, and …something better than what is now the American Way:

I propose we pledge our allegiance not to a bit of cloth made in China, but to constitutional rule of law under our existing state and federal constitutions as written and amended, full stop.

 

 

*Some say Sinclair Lewis said or wrote this.  But this has been pretty-well debunked.  Others ironically claim that Huey Long said it.  But that’s even less-likely.
But it doesn’t much matter who said it, because it’s turning out to be embarrassingly, damnably correct.