On April 20, 2010, several seemingly disparate items converged in my mind, which tangle led to this ruminative diary. It's about big change, gob-smacking wrongness and long odds. It's meant to be mildly inspirational, for those who like that sort of thing, if perhaps insufficiently inflammatory to get much notice in the Age of Beck. I write and publish it not because I think my reflections have the power to catalyze Big Changes, but because my private reflections simply required me to put them into some formal shape, and I thought the result might be of some interest to my fellow Koslandians. Please do go below the fold to learn how and why Mandela, Arizona, DC and the US "Senate" converged in a way that compelled me to write.....
First, a confession: even though I was born in the same year as Al Gore, the State of Israel and the apartheid National Party government in South Africa, I have only recently begun to read Nelson Mandela's memoir, "Long Walk to Freedom". In recent days, I have been reading the section in which he recalls the 1948 rise to power of the National Party and the mass protests of its program of harsh racialist restrictions on "non-whites".
Into this painful recollection of the cruelties of that now-gone regime came news, via what Rachel Maddow endearingly calls the "TV machine", that legislators in Arizona had passed a law which, in the guise of tightening immigration enforcement, would give Arizona police the right to demand documents from anyone they had a "reasonable suspicion" was in the country illegally. Diarist Lets Breakthroughposted a nice quick summaryof the events on this front. Not being a lawyer nor a licensed constitutional expert, but just some guy who can read and reason, the legislation would seem to be patently unconstitutional on 4th Amendment, "unreasonable search and seizure" grounds, but that's just me; I'm the type that sees things that are patently absurd and wrong and says "say what??????". I know, too naive for words!
What Arizona SB 1070 reminded me of, however, under the influence of the Mandela memoir, was the pass laws of the old apartheid regime. A racially focused cousin to the travel restrictions imposed on Soviet and Chinese citizens at the nadir of individual freedom under those Communist governments, the pass laws did not seem to me to be very many steps beyond what the Arizona Senate had wrought. None here (save perhaps some trolls or the terminally dyspeptic) will debate the wrongness of such laws. But Apartheid, despite being imposed by a small minority, took most of my lifetime to be abolished. The awfulness of that realization, however, took my memory back to the late 1980's.
The Rev. Victor Carpenter served as minister to the Unitarian Church of Capetown in the 1960s. In the '80s he returned to visit his old congregation. I heard about his revisit during a talk he gave to a gathering of our fellow UU ministers in Southeastern Massachusetts one gray day in the late 1980s. He was so deeply sad to tell us that he saw no way forward to the end of the evil system of apartheid short of what would amount to a race war/violent revolution. If Rev. Vic were to see this diary by some miracle, I would say to him, "though I bowed to your wisdom and experience that day a quarter of a century ago, I hoped then you might be proven overly pessimistic". It was not neat or easy, but the end of apartheid came, not many years later, through mostly non-violent means.
Arizona's wicked statute could, as of this writing, be snuffed out by Gov. Brewer. The SCOTUS may seem like a thin reed, but it should have no trouble dispatching SB 1070, though, alas, not for many moons. It's likely to be a big mistake on the part of those who crafted it. But it's a part of a larger problem, the nativisit-crypto-fascist vein that has been pulsing loudly in the darker corners of the national psyche of late. We sometimes comfort ourselves that"only" 18% believe the sun goes around the earth. But I still worry that the anti-fact infection and its more dangerous visceral reptile-brain syndromes could spread and go pandemic, as they did in '30s Germany. All the same, this diary wants to be about hope, about "Yes We Can".
Mandela did not accept that the only choices for South Africa were race war or unending apartheid. He knew other forces could bring about needed change, and set himself to the task of helping make it happen.
On the same April 20 news day came a bulletin that non-voting DC Congressperson Eleanor Holmes Norton had asked that the DC voting rights bill be pulleddue to a poison pill placed in it by the congressional servants of the Big Gun Lobby.
This diary does not wish to engage the questions of Second Amendment Absolutism or the Legislative Ethics of Poison Pill Amendments, chewy as such topics might be on another day. Instead, I wish to challenge all my fellow Kossopolitans who are NOT DC voters to consider how long YOU would put up with having no voting representation in Congress. I have no patience for all the weaselly arguments that may be presented as to why it has to be the way it is. I have a sister-in-law who's lived in DC for three decades and is a very wise and thoughtful citizen whose vote counts for nothing in Congress, while the 18% who believe the sun goes around the earth and Obama was born in Kenya get to have full representation. Plain and simple, this is an injustice which has gone on for two centuries and more. Its long-standing factuality means, to some, that it can never be dislodged and corrected. Well, Dr. Carpenter turned out to be wrong about South Africa. Nelson Mandela turned out to be right. If you dig pallin' around with radicals, the militant comrades at the League of Women Voters are just one far-out cabal you can join with in search of justice for DC voters.
I wrote a diary a while back about the fundamental anti-democratic wrongness of the US Senate's very structure and was gently chided for not surrendering to the impossibility of reforming the patent injustice embedded in our Constitution, which has come to mean a Wyoming voter has 68 times the clout of a California voter, Senatorially speaking. Who can reasonably argue that this long-persisting, deep-seated Uglyhood is not evil in the same way that DC voters' Taxation without Representation or the Apartheid pass laws or SB 1070? If you should care to go back and read that diary and the comments and have any ideas on how to overcome the Article Five Obstacle, I would be most grateful if you would post such ideas in comments. If you are fo the opinion that it's hopeless to try to undo the Senatorial Structural Injustice, please don't comment.... I get that point of view. It's just that Mandela was right about the pass laws.... and I know SB 1070 will go down..... and I know DC citizens will eventually get full representation in Congress..... so why should not all American voters have fair and equal representation in BOTH branches of the Federal legislature? The sovereignty of the several states was not a strong enough rationale to sustain the moral evil of slavery; surely it should not be allowed to stand as a bulwark to such evils as the 68:1 Wyoming:California voter misweighting fiasco!?!?
Thanks for reading.
PS - I, for one, after watching Rachel's riveting McVeigh Tapes show, am happy that no neo-Nazi-inspired types decided to McVeigh-it-up on Hitler's Birthday, which was, of course April 20 also (remember Columbine!). One day at a time we walk out of the shadowed edges of the abyss.