The Fight For Hope

The Never-Ending Battle

 Before writing today’s article, I want to post a reply to my article Peas in a Pod written by Don Klemminic.

“The advocates of the ranked-choice ballot have been pursuing what I would call the low-road approach to the ranked-choice ballot: one state at a time--a painfully slow process. This is an emergency. We need to take the high road: Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to make changes in our electoral process. When the Democrats regain the votes to accomplish this (the Republicans are currently hopeless), we need a law enacted that says that henceforth, all Federal elections will use the ranked-choice ballot. The current ballot, featuring the spoiler effect, strongly favors the incumbent in either branch of the duopoly, so enacting this will require nobility on the part of the Democrats. When they regain the votes to enact this, I hope that a public campaign will be mounted urging them to take this patriotic step. For the individual citizen, passionately supporting this campaign may be the most important political act they ever have the opportunity to accomplish.”

Fay Reid who writes Fay’s substack, has also posted that congress could permit national referendums on important issues like gun control and abortion.  There is absolutely nothing in the constitution that says such a thing cannot occur.  

Another issue I think is important in any future voting rights legislation is to let the states maintain authority but to require automatic voter registration.  This would eliminate all future discussions on who is eligible because everyone (of voting age) is eligible and can never be stricken from the rolls in their lifetime.  If they moved into a new district or state there voter registration should be able to automatically move with them.  I am going to be posting more about this tomorrow in my column Weird Thoughts and Logical Conclusions.

Hope From Inclusion

In the first stage of my life there was hope. When something happened that didn’t seem fair or right or just to me, I nevertheless believed there was always going to be a better tomorrow, that all we had to do was give everyone the same opportunities in life.  And I developed a sense of responsibility that my success or my failure was not dependent upon personal acclaim, but on whether others treated each other inclusively.  My school days were centered around organizing events, parties, competitions and dances, and educational events  that would involve as many as possible. My ego was not stroked by being the best and winning for myself, it was stroked by bringing as many as possible into the competition.  I never won any of my competitions, and many others were often more talented than I; but if it became apparent I might win, yes, I would lose.  Psychiatrists say this is a person who self-fulfills his own failure and I’ve been told I fit that mold; and there are plays written and books written about the endless dreamer who never achieves success.  Then there is the opposite, the Theodore Dreiser, or Thomas Hardy hero/heroine who falls because of their own success.   But from whatever perspective one might wish to view the “loser”, whether because of his lack of moral character, lack of adequate skill, or some inner self-fulfilling failure, I reject the concept as applied to myself; therefore I naturally reject the concept as applied to anyone else.  From my perspective, I never saw my success being dependent on what I achieved for myself, but on the degree that I encouraged others to participate and be fulfilled.  If there were to be sporting events, I didn’t try to organize just basketball, although I was more inclined to play that sport, but to arrange a volleyball event,  a softball event, and setting up board game events all going on simultaneously.  I didn’t try to organize events for boys and events for girls, I encouraged everyone to participate together. And if someone wanted to play basketball one day and softball the next, so be it.  As long as everyone participated, I felt I was successful, I had achieved success..  Sometimes though I erred.  Sometimes I would find someone who would never participate and I would get in trouble because I could never get it into my head that if I could only get them to participate it would be better for them, and I overpressed them and sometimes had to suffer consequences when they would go to authorities, usually at that stage in life, teachers.  So with teachers I got the reputation of being something of a social misfit.  I never quite understood it.  Or maybe I did.  If in class the teacher would ask the class for an answer to a question, I didn’t raise my hand to provide the answer, but if the teacher would declare such-is-such is so and I had read that maybe such-and-such might not be so, then I would feel quite free to speak out of turn and suggest that maybe it was not.  So I would be sent from the class.  But after class, the classmates would gather round to ask me to explain.  Instead of saying I was right and the teacher was wrong I would try to explain there were alternative ideologies or different interpretations and discussions would ensue, and my fellow students would begin to seek answers and find more and more interpretations and we would gather again, and many who had one idea, or who had accepted one idea began to listen to others and we would throw out everything we had previously held as inviolable and tried to determine amongst ourselves what we thought, we tried to develop more consensual ideas, and I often found that I.myself, actually no longer might believe in the rightness of what I might have originally thought.  

So I developed a great hope in humanity.  I would follow the news and from an early age I became sort of a news junkie.  I didn’t really grow up with a TV but my father subscribed to the Stars and Stripes and we would receive a couple of other stateside papers in the mail that would be somewhat outdated, and he subscribed to several weekly magazines.  I began to learn first impressions were not always the impressions I might have had on the morrow since some of the news we got was stale. 

And the news, especially my immediate response, was often volatile.  Of course I generally read of these events in the early morning and I would frequently wake the family screaming at the newspapers or the events described.  I was angry because ofttimes what happened and the immediate aftermath was vicious and seemingly a refutation of my hope that all in the group were equally important.  So growing up in the 50’s, that was often centered around two subjects.  The civil disturbances in the south, and what I thought was the repression of ideology in the attempt to suppress “communism”.  I was angry even before I knew a damn thing about communism when I read about HUAC and blacklists and the response to the Cuban revolution.  I didn’t know enough at first to favor or disfavor the ideology of communism, and when I did begin to learn about it I didn’t understand its grouping into a singular ideology, or even a single type of government, except that they were all autocratic.  But then what does America do, support the autocrats who were not “communists”; support Batista as having been a good autocrat, but Castro as a bad one. So the news created despair and countered my hope.

And then the government took action against the horrors being inflicted upon black Americans.  And I began to see hope can only come when the government defeats despair proactively.  Even before the great legislation of the Johnson era, Eisenhower sent troops into the south to defeat the Bull Connors, the government began to take an interest in justice in the south. Especially after white freedom riders and white northern youths began to join southern blacks at the lunch counter sit-ins.  Okay, at that time I saw that as very positive, an attempt to show unity and move towards consensus.  I saw that hope could rise from despair, if once again people moved in concert with, and not in, opposition to each other.

But the other thing that embedded itself upon me was that despair was defeated by action.  Without action of both the judicial and executive branches to show the rhetoric of divisiveness had to be dealt with forcefully, the legislative landmarks of the Johnson era could not have occurred.  Action led to the legislation and action followed the legislation.  Without both judicial support and executive enforcement against the bullies of divisive rhetoric, the legislation that came in the middle of the 60’s would never have been possible.  But you can go back  a century beyond that and you can see that the first civil rights era occurred not before but after the government intervention in the four year war to end slavery.  But at the time there was not a lot of judicial action either before or after the war.

Of course, the freeing of slaves in battle in no way made them equal simply by fiat and so there was a flurry of legislative activity to do so.  And some executive (mostly military) action while the southern states were under military leadership.  But released from their military overlords, southerners developed the first Klan.  That Klan and the Klan that developed later in the earliest decades of the 20th century cannot be compared.  The first Klan did not hide behind sheets, did not burn crosses and did not go after teenage boys who might whistle at white women (if he tried to touch one that might have been different).  They did not necessarily target only black Americans (primarily, but not only), but they consisted primarily of the lower echelons of the former slave-owning aristocracy and those who had been enabled by that aristocracy, wealthy merchants and traders and lawyers. These were the people that were more or less left out by the new southern state governments and by much of the reconstruction policies.  Their attacks were mostly against black political participants in the government or in leadership organizations to further black participation in government and education.  And they also used the same tactics to intimidate some white leaders who were prompting policies to reorganize southern life.  

“Originally the Ku Klux Klan was established innocuously enough as a social organization by six ex-Confederate officers in the small Southern town of Pulaski, Tennessee. In the spring or early summer of 1866, the six men gathered one evening in the Pulaski law office of Judge Thomas M. Jones, the father of one of the founders, to create their new fraternity. All the men were fairly well educated, members of prominent families in the area, but they were bored. They wanted to form some organization that could offer them entertainment in their spare time. Consequently, they found an organization patterned after a previously prominent college fraternity, Kuklos Adelphon. They adopted the basic ritual of this fraternity with some changes. They took the first part of the name, Kuklos, Greek for circle or band, altered it slightly to Kuklux and added Klan for alliterative appeal. Thus, the Ku Klux Klan was born.”

-https://americansall.org/legacy-story-group/post-civil-war-birth-ku-klux-klan-kkk

The creme of the aristocracy mostly had their lands restored, but those that had sponsored the southern war effort by purchasing southern bonds and greybacks had no recourse, because congress refused to reparate any of those bonds or redeem any of those greybacks.  But they made plans to replenish and repay all those who had northern greenbacks (not exactly on a level playing field, but that’s another story) and had purchased bonds to support the northern war effort.

Meanwhile,  in the north, promises of more freedom from labor tyranny that had been promised by service in the northern war effort (as would later be promised to blacks who joined the war effort in WW1) did not materialize.  

Thus The NLU (National Labor Union) was born in 1866.  Well before the Knights of Labor, that is generally considered the first American labor organization.  At its height they claimed a membership of 600,000, although businesses suggested there were 800,000 of these “terrorists”.  Modern scholars like to say there were much less.  I guess it depends on whether you consider participants who might have been affiliated with the NLU or actual membership records.  In the North, where inflation caused prices to double by 1864, many workers suffered because their wages did not rise as fast as the cost of living.. Workers responded to this problem by forming new organizations and demanding change. The thousands of seamstresses who were employed making soldiers' uniforms petitioned President Lincoln and the War Department to raise wages at government-run clothing plants. Other workers carried out strikes, which became increasingly common  during the second half of the war. Some strikes by workers in military industries, such as one 1864 strike by employees of the North's largest cannon manufacturer, were ended forcibly by troops. 

The Civil War experience led more Northern workers to join unions for they saw themselves having little common interest with their employers.  The NLU sought to bring both these burgeoning trade unions and a new group of activists that had formed into what they called “eight-hour leagues” under one umbrella to lobby the congress  for workers’ efforts.  They decided that rather than striking and creating violent clashes with employers they would band together to seek legislative remedies through arbitration.  Their effort was to combine not just skilled tradespersons, but the unskilled and the farming homesteads together. By 1868 they had achieved a cornerstone of their platform, the eight-hour workday for, at least, all government employees. This was a very hopeful sign of continued progress and it was a marvel achievement in unifying all communities for a common cause.

There was not, however, a lot of black participation in the NLU, primarily because the newly freed slaves supported the Republican party whom they saw as their “liberators”, whereas most of the unionists were supporting the democratic party.  Some say it was racial, and I will not suggest that there were no racial elements involved, the very attempt of the NLU at inclusiveness would exclude, to some degree, racism as the only factor had the political divide not been more decisive.  As unionists would learn in the next century, success depended on convincing blacks and whites to unite against the common oppressor, and if the party ideology had not been so markedly opposed I think there would have been an attempt to include more blacks within the wider NLU umbrella.  After all, the goal was to enlist all of the producers of wealth in common unified action for common benefits.  And the leaders of the movement never expressed any divisive racial rhetoric, but they did spew a lot of vindictiveness against Republicans. 

 In the 1866 elections, the Senate increased its majority, but in the house the Republicans won many former democratic seats and the north saw the opposite tide, but the balance became somewhat closer with the republicans remaining the majority.  But then the house maintained its majority and the senate increased its strength because of Republicans from the south that had not been readmitted to the union.

But the strong unionist movement in the north and the rise of the first clan spreading across the south was  beginning to cause some discontent among Republicans that they would be able to retain their majority.  By 1868 with blacks now participating heavily in the south, the house moved more towards the Republicans,and the Senate saw several seats flip back to the Democrats.  While Grant overwhelmingly won the electoral college for president, the popular vote was exceedingly close.  Laborers and farmers simply did not support the Republicans, and there was a lot of anti-black rhetoric on the democratic side. 

Anticipating that the 1868 election might prove troublesome in the north, congress passed the eight-hour day for public employees in 1868.  But it did nothing and was not implemented whatsoever.  Taking office, Grant began to take action.  He directed all government agencies to implement the eight hour day.  While many did so, somewhat reluctantly, they also saw it as an opportunity to reduce wages, since workers were working fewer hours

 And of course we know of Grant’s actions against the Klan in the south that actually began before the passage of the 15th  amendment and the establishment of the Department of Justice.  From his inaugural address onwards, Grant did attempt to interfere with the Klan by letting it be known he would support  anyone who claimed they had been terrorized by the klan and take action against them.  Now the Klan began to hood themselves to prevent identification and arrest and being brought to federal court.  Later, with his new powers  post-1870 he was able to nearly end the powers of the first clan.

Whether Grant was a good tactical military leader, whether he was an effective president, or a drunk with no idea what corruption was going on around him, that is another story, another debate.  What Grant did do was effectively use action by the executive to calm a lot of fears.  He would also be the last Republican president to win a majority of the northern vote, popularly or electorally in the industrial north for the rest of the 19th century, even though the republicans would dominate the presidency during that time, and often the legislature,it was from large financial spport from eastern capital  and the new western states that were coming into the Union.

A Hundred Years Later

Like Grant before him, it is another debate on Eisenhower's leadership and on whether he supported labor or civil rights.  He was however a man who was prone to use his executive authority, this time because of judicial decisions that marched towards a greater justice for all.  Eisenhower may have very well seen those decisions negatively.  He may well have seen those decisions as the cause of the disturbances in the south, as some claim.  But Eisenhower also thought that he had the executive duty to enforce those decisions and he was not wont to use his executive authority when he felt it necessary, he was not wont to send troops to enforce those decisions if necessary.  He was not wont to employ U.S.Marshalls to protect students who might be prevented from trying to attempt to attend the schools they were now entitled to attend.  He didn’t do much to tamp down the rhetoric however.  No one gave him that authority and he did not take it upon himself to do more than was necessary.  Military to the core, what he wanted was an orderly society.  He thought the government should function as the military in its stability and any destabilization of the society was detrimental to that stability.  He didn’t like MCarthy. He didn’t like the rhetoric of his own V-P,or the HUAC committees and the blacklists.  Again with no authority, he just stayed out of the fray and did nothing to tamp down the rhetoric.  He may have been fortunate in inheriting a relatively balanced economy fostered by strong unionism.  But it is obvious he saw that balance, and the stability it created as necessary to maintaining the stability in society.  He did not like any of the rhetoric and I think he would have taken action against it, if he could have, just as he would have against anyone in the military who might have created chaos against the stable order of the military who might speak out of turn.  But like his long ago predecessor, George Washington, he permitted the rhetoric, but acted swiftly against rebellious actors to that stability.  But like Washington, he also was troubled by what he saw was the divisiveness he saw such rhetoric creating in the order of the society.  And like his predecessor he used his farewell address to warn against it.  While generally known as a warning against the military-industrial complex, I would like to point out a few lesser known passages that I believe have great resonance today.

“In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the Nation should go forward. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.”

“ We yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.”

“Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research-these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

“But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs-balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage-balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between action of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.”

“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.”

“The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

“Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we-you and I, and our government-must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”

“Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”

“Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we…Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment.”

And he concludes his speech with the hope I have always dreamed of becoming the reality of life.  The dream against the rhetoric of hate, and the actions of leaders against hate, who need to go beyond calling out the wrongs, and proceed with actions against wrong. 

“We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”

My early life showed to me that people can be brought together, that they benefit from being able to both work and play and learn together.  I have been angered by those who refuse to recognize that hatred and fear are not the “natural state” of humanity but are promoted by those who are wishing to gain from polarizing others against each other.  They have always done this by presenting people with “fake news”.  It hasn’t always been fake by necessarily attempting to falsify the news, but to distort.   Hate is a distortion.  Of course slavery benefited black Americans to adjust to servitude, but slavery did not benefit anyone by forcing them into servitude.  Nor did it benefit any white man to be paid wages to benefit another.  How exactly does someone else paying me to produce a profit for him actually benefit me?  Could he who owned the steel mills or the road gangs I worked on have done the work I did?  If he cannot do the work himself but relies on me to do it for him am I benefiting or is it only he who is benefiting?

Don’t tell me that, well, he had the idea.  I’m not even sure that he did, but if the owner of the mill actually invented the idea of steel himself, why then did he not make it himself, or why did he not  ask me to join in making it with him and sharing the proceeds with him?  How has anyone ever benefited from wages from another who gains the ability to pay those wages by the fruits of what I created?   

This is “fake news”.  

How is the black man who works beside me worth less when he is doing the same as I? But if he and I are equal could we not make the steel without him and without his wages?  Of course we could.  But wait, we are told, you do not have the capital to do so and so the investor is needed who has the capital.  

This is “fake news”. 

 Before human beings were forced into mines to dig up more iron, human beings were using iron they had found on the surface and we all had the capital to gather the iron and make better tools.  Before we were forced into mines  to pull out more iron than we needed so that he could collect it and use it to force us into the mines, we did have the capital to collect the iron necessary for us.  He gains the capital by forcing us into the mines.

This is”fake news”.

Capital is not needed except to exploit others and prevent them from the same opportunity to the resources the one who has the capital  has gained from his exploitation.

This is why “fake news” must be presented to us in order to keep us from realizing we don’t need capital to invest, that what we need is the one who has the capital he uses to exploit those who don’t to not have the exclusive right to the capital he has to exploit the rest. The importance of fake news is that if we become aware that human success is when humans act in conjunction with each other they are quite capable of having and fulfilling all of our needs.  We are quite capable of selecting from among us who is the best at bringing us together.  And so we must be placed into hierarchies of importance.  These hierarchies destroy our capacities to be individuals working in conjunction with each other.  And without these capacities we turn to breaking our necessary human bonding in order to fulfill our needs and we become individuals competing against each other for the resources we need.  We move to ridiculous ideologies of individualism and that leads us back to ridiculous ideologies of bonding by like ideologies, or skin colors, into false identifications of false communities.  

If there be a hierarchy above me, then I develop a hierarchy that someone different from me is less than me.  The consensus necessary for human survival, and the necessity of human diversity becomes distorted into individuals seeking communities of likeness in opposition to the necessary communities that promote our individuality instead of distorting us into members of like-minded, or like sexes, or like skin colorings.  

From my experiences, that led to both my despair and my hope, we are not faced with much of a choice today.  If the choice is only maga white-supremacists who have lost all hope and are totally misled into despair and the only hopeful vision is to destroy those who they see as not themselves; or the status quo that has led to that despair, we are back to the failures of the hope of the 1860’s and the 1960’s that led us to the despair that led us to the magaism—the magaism that defeated reconstruction;the magaism that defeated the civil rights of the Great Society, or the magaism of the current right.  

Magaism is taught to us by unfulfilled hopes and overwhelming despair.  If we return a moment to the sisyphus story.  There is hope everyday in pushing the stone up the mountain, and hope again when we continue to push it when it falls back down. But if we become crushed under its weight and despair of success, and lose the hope that we can continue to push the stone up the mountain then we despair and blame the failure on the other.  But if instead we join together and just keep pushing the stone up the hill, when it begins to tumble, together we can find another approach and continue our hope of success.  But if instead we are left to lie beneath the stone and our only recourse is to be “saved” by the owner of the stone if we sacrifice ourselves to him, then we have only despair.  

Should we be able to survive our current maga crisis, the future must be different, it must not be the same weight placed upon us.  That will take leaders of action who will prevent the oppressors that create the despair under which we have been told we must toil.

The UnUtopian is written as a forum and sharing. If anything touches a note, please offer it to others. And please feel free to comment. I always learn from those who do so.

Philip S. Foner History of the Labor Movement in the United States v.1

https://americansall.org/legacy-story-group/post-civil-war-birth-ku-klux-klan-kkk

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address