A few months back, I joined the local branch of Next Door, a nationwide “service” for communities members to talk to each other. Early on I encountered frequent right-wing posts, typically attacking the town mayor (a Democrat who is not entirely popular among Democrats).

In recent days, I made a long, angry post condemning the federal government’s response to the coronavirus. I noted at the start that the post wasn’t meant for trumpites, but very shortly (and not surprisingly), right-wing complaints poured in, charging me with being “inappropriate” within site rules. (Of course right-wingers had had no hesitation about making political comments when it suited them, but frankly, I didn’t care or have a need to report them–I’m not a believer in free speech for nothing.) I then posted the second statement below, which addresses the difficulty of defining key terms like “inappropriate.”

The complainers went to some head office and had me suspended pending my agreement to obey the rules (which I’m not about to give). So far as I can tell, there’s no way of appealing or challenging this summary judgment; I suspect the rules are enforced according to personal, perhaps conservative, standards, without concern for nuances or hearing what an accused has to say.

So far as I can tell, there’s no appeal. As you’ll see in my second of two posts below, before being jettisoned I addressed the problem of defining key terms, which I suspect was more of an intellectual exercise than judges wanted to (or could) handle.

I should note that a fair number of people from the site have made supportive and sympathetic responses to a variety of my posts critical of the government.

I know that intolerance and bullying come with the territory of speaking out, and I accept that part of it; I had announced that I wasn’t going to reply to such attacks. But I have to say that the personal experience of the attacks–invective laced with blanket, general praise of trump (bereft of any argumentative basis)–was unsettling, especially in having me come face-to-face, so to speak, with how these bullies operate.

POST 1: THE TRUMP VIRUS, THE PRIMACY OF MONEY, AND ONGOING US GOVERNMENT TERRORISM

[ALERT: If you think Trump can do no wrong (or no serious wrong), don’t waste your time reading or replying to this rage-driven message. You’ll only be annoyed. No, wait—DO read this, and reply ad nauseum. Assume my response each time is: “Fascinating and insightful! You have converted me! Tell me more.”]

The new, maniacal mantra, “we mustn’t make the cure worse than the disease,” is the latest terror tool of this administration and its privileged allies (as opposed to so many supporters who have no privilege). Only to those who value economic flourishing above all else are the isolation and other economy-compromising cures worse than the endurance of the pandemic. Carpe diem and all that.

I’m reminded of the dictum, paraphrased by many, that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it (you would have thought the world history of health disasters along with contemporary lessons from places like China and Italy would have been sufficient warnings). I’m also reminded of Lenin’s contention that capitalism is so profit-oriented that it would sell the rope to hang itself.

I like to think I’m a cynic, but I’ve been blown away by some of the post-2016 election federal terrorist attacks on people and culture. And I never supposed that despite their moral repugnancy, otherwise supposedly literate people running the government would join hands with a compulsive liar of limited intelligence (or is it dementia?) in creating a hell on earth that promises to engulf them, too.*

You don’t have to be anti-capitalist to recognize what is wrong with prematurely undoing draconian rules for ending the pandemic—you just have to acknowledge what you don’t know and then, when seeking rational understanding, consider the credentials of those giving out advice. Do they have the scientific background and practical experience to provide a high likelihood (nothing is perfect) of knowing what they’re talking about, or are they pretty uninformed, gut-driven, money-centered people who typically (coincidentally, of course) have wealth and power your can maximize their own protection and healing regardless of what goes on around them.?

As medical personnel become decreasingly available, as hospitals become overwhelmed, and as ventilators and other key medical equipment become unavailable to handle the out-of-control spread of the virus, the wealthy and powerful will have their own reassuring resources as they tut-tut over the o-so-sad sight of the rest of us falling into a health and social abyss that they may even characterize as of our own making. A few of them may perish from the pandemic, but the rest will accept that in the spirit of omelets and egg-breaking, some martyrdom of their own kind may have to occur.

I almost feel sorry for the non-wealthy, non-powerful lemmings who continue to cling to the fantasy that this president and his acolytes represent a moral second coming—at least figuratively and, in some cases I fear, quite literally. (How many evangelicals are rooting for the end of days?) But unfortunately, even were I able to cheer for their punishment-fitting-the-crime fate (I don’t—I’m not a believer in the death penalty for even the most egregious actions), I’m afraid that as they blindly and gleefully leap to doom, they will be clutching the hands of many of the rest of us.

Behind this new mantra are self-serving ideas like: “Many of us are going to get this disease anyway. ‘Only’ a small percentage of coronavirus sufferers will die or be permanently debilitated.” “Many of the victims are drags on our system anyway.” “Like soldiers, let the dead be honored for their ultimate sacrifice on behalf of resurrecting a ‘Great America’ that we should all value above anything else and to hell with those who don’t.” You can add your own conscious and unconscious meanderings of the beneficiaries of any Return-to-Normalcy** action.

I suppose we could view this imminent policy sabotage as creating a version of a draft lottery for us ordinary folk. And a strategic path to full employment for a diminished work population.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this way of thinking has an extremely high probability (if you believe the experts) of producing premeditated mass murder under the guise of economic necessity. Indeed, most of the federal “strategy” until now has been furthering that result and should be the basis for International Court trials of the villains.

Ahead of us may be destructive riots and military control as large numbers of desperate people, like so often in the human past, decide they have nothing left to lose.

Other than to continue holing up at home for some indefinite period, I have no power over the fate of what’s going on around me, near and far. Writing a short essay like this helps vent my rage and impotence, but I know it’s not going to have the effect we need.

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*Why should I be surprised? The same self-interest, non-empirical argumentation, and general denialism here has already been routinely used by those who avert their attention from the overwhelming evidence that a climate crisis has been upon us for some time now and that ignoring it threatens to destroy life, biologically and culturally, as we know it.

**I deliberately use “normalcy,” a made-up word by an under-educated Warren Harding who, as I understand, died of a heart attack in the wake of frequent predatory sexual behavior.

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POST 2: REFLECTION ON THE MEANING OF “INAPPROPRIATE”

Not sleeping well with my enormous anxiety, presumably shared with others, about what the coronavirus is doing and going do to myself and other human beings (or how this pandemic may be predictive of the future as climate problems accelerate), I slept til noon and then saw multiple email references, often including the word “inappropriate,” to criticisms of my post yesterday about the Trump Virus. My guess is that when I look, I won’t reply to any. In any event, I’m writing this without prejudice of knowing details about any specific attack someone may have made.

Like yesterday’s post, this is intended for an audience that even in disagreement can reflect on the content. Reminder: I am not writing for anyone who will reject my words out of hand (though I don’t think they do need to keep being reminded that people like me are out there and active).

Let me start with this thought experiment:

• Pause and think about an atrocity in which you feel a personal interest—for example, rape or discriminating against members of a particular group now or in past history (Italians, Irish, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Armenians, people of varying colors, etc., etc.).
• Now, with details as possible, imagine a scene or scenes when those people were most alarmingly targeted with discrimination in areas like employment, emotional or physical assault, tarring and feathering, being gunned down, lynching, even made the victims of genocide. (If you’ve been such a victim, recall how you felt and maybe still feel.)
• Would you deem it “inappropriate” to speak out, strongly, against such treatment? Would you call for moderation and some abstract notion of civility (a concept I generally like, but which has its own culturally conflicting meanings)? Would you argue that nothing can be fixed overnight and we all need to be patient? Would you ask for tolerance and respect for leaders or other rabble-rousers who encourage this treatment? Would you say that maintaining (or returning to) an economic status quo (remember, for example, that proponents of American slavery argued the US economy couldn’t afford emancipation?) was more important than radical measures to combat those injustices? Would you say the whole issue was “just” political, as though morality and politics have no intersection?

It was in response to what I (and numerous others) perceive as equivalent atrocities in response to COVID-19 and its inseparability from the past 3+ years of our federal administration that I carefully chose tone and diction which to me felt “appropriate” to the subject. No—the critical nature and resistance to intelligent guidance on the subject DEMANDED my tone and diction.*

Generally in life, I have long since recognized that it’s fruitless to argue with anyone if you don’t share basic assumptions about the topic. (Simple example: if you believe/assume/have faith in some deity or divine realm and I have core faith to the contrary, we have no basis for building agreement, though if we’re curious and thoughtful, we might both gain interesting understanding about why we differ.) However, that doesn’t give anyone, including me, the right to demand that anyone stop talking. Free speech and all that.** We can always choose to ignore what we don’t like. (I shall not here go into the incredibly difficult issue of what constitutes crying in a crowded theater or how to define a line crossed from speech to violence, some or many subtleties of which I probably don’t know.)

A related principle: Often, our basic assumptions are built into the very words we use: we assume we’re using a word in the same way when, if we checked, we’d learn isn’t true. On any controversial subject, it can be vital to define terms.

I am aware that I can alienate people just because I sound highly educated—just as others may, equally unfairly, be experienced as alienation for (apparent) lack of education. One of my fears about our current national inability to heal enough to get past these traumatic years is what feels like a growing empathy gulf between various educational levels, rural and urban and suburban cultures, ways of making a living, anti-constitutional and constitutional forces, gun acolytes and efforts to protect us from gun crazies, and so on.

On my end, I try to be hyper-aware of my positions of economic and cultural privilege and not let them frame my attitude towards those with different backgrounds and places in life.^† I chastise peers (including the occasional puffed-up former professor) who condescend towards those of less knowledge, make chauvinistic remarks, and all those other ugly, all-too-common human heritages that prompt us to elevate ourselves over others. I am conscious that numerous smart people never went to college, and that huge numbers of people, regardless of educational or other handicaps our culture foisted on them, have fashioned lives, however unfairly forced to do so, that make the best they can for themselves, their families, and their neighbors.*** And I am well aware of that I lack a vast, unknown amount of knowledge and skills that others have.)

HOWEVER: While acknowledging that there’s far more I don’t know than I do, I will NOT apologize for my own achievements in life. I would like to think that the skills of all sorts of other people contribute to my daily well-being in all the abundant walks of life on which I depend but don’t (and often can’t) take care of myself, so I can offer others (and have offered) benefits from the kind of thinking I’ve been trained to do and keep expanding no matter how old I’ve grown.

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*Several years ago, I read a fine scholarly book on the evolution of diseases of recent centuries and how they were often manipulated for nefarious gain (as 14^th-century warring armies catapulted into enemy lines the bodies of bubonic plague victims, or when European-Americans gave indigenes blankets deliberately laced with smallpox). The author shared an ethnic heritage with some of the victims and did not hide his anger. Embedding such emotion within the best scholarly research was new for me, but I quickly realized how “appropriate” it was—indeed, how crucially it deepened my understanding of the interplay between “facts” (a slippery idea in their own right) and feelings.

**Those of you who know about the 1978 anti-semitic “March on Skokie” may be interested that I have always stood what the ACLU defense of the constitutional right to demonstrate of those haters. I have always believed that shutting up one kind of speech will gradually lead to justifying shutting up ones I consider important.

***One of my own core beliefs is that the rest of us owe the marginalized rapid corrective measures. And to be clear: I marched against retrograde policies of pre-trump administrations of any party. I expected to be resisting some of Hillary’s policies if she had been elected (or rather, if majority rule had prevailed). I am not thrilled with the prospect of Biden; however reluctantly, I will certainly vote for him, but I will also be prepared to work against unacceptable policies that may ensue. But like so many others, I feel that the current administration is a quantum leap beyond any civilized or rational pale.

^†I grew up on a tiny chicken farm on in my late teens my parents had to file for bankruptcy, through 3^rd grade I attended a one-room schoolhouse with outdoor privvies, during some of my childhood I was targeted with anti-semitism, and I try never to forget where I came from.