There's No Excuse for This

My last post was about believing absurdities leading to committing atrocities.  Well, we have one, and it's right down the block from my house, at Chabot Elementary School.  

We have no kids, but as neighbors, we're on the school mailing list.  Last night about 11:10PM I got an email from the principal.  They had arranged a playdate last Saturday for all the families and children of color who attend the school; they were trying to "to increase a sense of belonging among all of our students and their families."  It seems to have gone very well, especially in a school and a neighborhood that is mostly white, although the news reports suggest that the kids at the school are about 45% BIPOC. 

The email continued, "A member of our community found the idea of this playdate exclusionary and posted their thoughts and questions on Reddit.  This post has gone viral inviting emails and calls from all sorts of anonymous folks who do not understand what we are trying to do at Chabot and in OUSD."  And finally the principal included this appalling message:

“Hi there you racist pieces of sh**! Just wanted to stop by and let you know that if you keep this sh** up we're going to put you back in chains or in the jungle where you belong. Go ahead and keep pushing for segregation. If you want a race war we'll f***ing give you one and you won't like how it ends. Have a wonderful day :)”

This is a school that serves children from kindergarten to 5th grade.  I was and am appalled.  But I wasn't surprised when I left the house at around 10AM to go to an exercise class and saw the school intersection blocked off with crime tape, at least 2 Oakland Police cars there, a couple of Oakland cops walking around, and a person being interviewed by someone carrying a TV camera.  I walked down to see what was up and was told by an ABC reporter (yes, I'm apparently somewhere on ABC's coverage, although I haven't found myself yet; 2 of my friends have contacted me!) that there had been a bomb threat!  I now know from the news coverage that the bomb threat came via email at 7:30 this morning, fortunately before the normal start of class, and that the police, the FBI, and a bomb dog unit were going through the school to make sure it was clear.

If you Google Chabot Elementary Oakland CA today you'll see all the coverage. By noon when I returned from my exercise class it had all been cleared away - I assume they didn't find a bomb.  But it looks like the principal has decided not to have any classes today; there are no kids on the grounds.  I was relieved to see an Oakland police car turning the corner by the school as I left on an errand this afternoon.

There is no excuse for this crap.  Wikipedia says, "There is broad consensus across the biological and social sciences that race is a social construct, not an accurate representation of human genetic variation." I agree with Wikipedia that the genetic differences between the races are smaller than 1%.  

 The whole "race" business was invented by our European ancestors, centuries ago, to explain why they kept finding people (in the areas they were colonizing) who didn't look like them or act like them.  You may not have European ancestors, but I do.  I'm afraid the whole "race" business was really developed because a portion of the human race wants to have someone they can look down on, someone they can feel superior to - because they are disturbed by the people who (for financial, social, or political reasons) are "superior" to them.  We clearly have some of those people making trouble at Chabot Elementary.  I wish they would grow up and get a life.

Because We Say So - Marijuana

Full disclosure:  I don't use marijuana.  I tried it once in college and was not impressed.  I also don't smoke cigarettes; with my tendency toward asthma, I don't like inhaling smoke.  And I no longer drink alcohol.  So I have no stake in this.

But I have always wondered:  why is it, that people can buy and consume booze and cigarettes with no issues, but for decades, if they bought marijuana, they were setting themselves up for arrest and possible prison.  It's not the addictive properties; as far as I know, pot isn't addictive, and alcohol and tobacco are.  Too much alcohol, too much tobacco, will kill you; even the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration admits that “No death from overdose of marijuana has been reported.”  I've lost at least 3 relatives to entirely legal tobacco use.

A very interesting post by Becky Little on history.com (Why the US Made Marijuana Illegal) confirms what I remember reading elsewhere.  In the 19th century ("at least since the 1830s"), marijuana was a normal part of the medical pharmacy.  It has real medicinal uses; we've determined recently that it can help with epileptic seizures.  I've seen boxes in museums that were used by 19th century ship's doctors; they have a partition for marijuana.  This was a normal medical tool.  You could buy it in a pharmacy.  And yet, between 1916 and 1931, 29 states outlawed marijuana; and the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 (they couldn't even spell it) banned it nationwide, in the face of objections from the American Medical Association!

Given all our recent discussions of systemic racism, I concluded that it was banned in the '30s because it was a drug largely used by people of color - I was thinking about the Harlem Renaissance in the '20s.  I was right about the systemic racism, but wrong about which people of color.  According to Ms. Little, during and after the Mexican Revolution in 1910, a lot of Mexicans immigrated to the United States.  These Mexicans smoked marijuana to get high, and they terrified the good people of the United States, who didn't understand people who were too poor to drink booze to get high.

This has been fully written up by Eric Schlosser in his book Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, but I have to share some of the details because they are hilarious - and sad.  The Texas police apparently believed that marijuana incited violent crimes (it doesn't), including a "lust for blood" (ditto), and that it gave people "superhuman strength" (no, it doesn't do that either).  But people were additionally terrified by a 1936 movie (?!) called Reefer Madness, which warned parents that drug dealers would invite their teenagers to jazz parties and get them hooked on “reefer.”  The Marihuana Tax Act passed the next year, and the feds and the states continued to increase punishments for the substance until the people they were arresting morphed into upper-middle-class white college students, in the late 1960s.

Marijuana is now legal in California, and in a number of other states; and so it should be.  I know people who use cannabidiol for medical conditions, especially cancer treatments.  It's still illegal at the federal level.  

We banned the use of marijuana because we didn't like or understand the people who used it, because they didn't look like us or speak our language, and in spite of the fact that we knew the substance was medically useful.  How stupid was that?  Let's eliminate the Federal ban and go back to the 19th century, but with better technology.

Cops and Guns

There has been a lot of public discussion lately of why police are armed, and why armed police are called to situations which could be - and maybe should be - solved with something other than armed force.  This is especially the case when unarmed people of color end up being shot.  On one NPR discussion the other day, I heard a commentator ask why cops need guns anyway; and I didn't hear anyone respond with the reason that came to my mind.

Full disclosure here:  I am a community policing volunteer, and have been for over a decade.  I'm on the steering committee of a local council that is supposed to be a conduit between Neighborhood Watch groups in our area and the police.  I've worked with a number of cops, who were about as varied as most groups of humans.  As for their attitudes toward people of color, I couldn't tell you.  The neighborhood I live in is about as white and upper income as Oakland, California gets.  But I never heard of any of the cops we worked with shooting anyone; and believe me, in this area when a cop shoots someone, it makes the news.

But why do cops need to be armed?  British cops aren't, among quite a list of others.  I say American cops need to be armed because Americans, as a group, are armed.  In a 2017 survey cited in Wikipedia, there were 120.5 firearms for every 100 citizens in the U.S., the vast majority of them not registered.  And Money magazine says that, during 2020, nearly 40 million guns were bought legally (note the caveat!), and another 4.1 million just in January 2021.  There are literally more guns than people in this country.

This has nothing to do with how cops are trained to handle situations, or their general attitude toward people of color, which is a whole different issue.  But an unarmed policeman in America would be an absolute sitting duck.  He assumes the people he's looking at are  armed because, in fact, they may be.

Our problem in the U.S. today is not cops with guns.  Our problem is too many guns, generally.

Did my ancestors own slaves?

I've been interested in genealogy for some time, and with the help of Ancestry.com I've traced my father's family back to the early 19th century. In fact, I recently turned up an ancestor who was born in 1777.

I find several things interesting.  I have yet to find an ancestor in my father's line who wasn't born on this continent.  My mother's family came to the U.S. in 1921 (from Canada), but the Ivy line, and the associated Moody line (my paternal grandmother's people) all seem to have been here from quite early.  Even the guy born in 1777 came from North Carolina; he moved his family to Tennessee between 1805 and 1810.  They all seem to have lived, before the Civil War, in the "border states" - Tennessee and Kentucky. Based on census and other records, they all seem to have relocated to Missouri sometime after the Civil war.

Literary Racism

As a reaction to the closure of libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic, I've been re-reading some of my extensive collection of classic detective stories, collected over most of my adult life.  Specifically, I've been re-reading Ellery Queen novels, which I've read off and on for most of my adult life.  In recent years I've been exploring new mystery writers at the local library, but that stopped with the shutdown, so I returned to what I had.

The Ellery Queen novels debuted in 1929 with The Roman Hat Mystery and continued into the early 1960s, after which the authors, Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, also allowed other writers to create Ellery Queen novels which didn't feature their detective, Ellery Queen, as a character.  Most of the novels and stories I've been reading were written in the 1930s.

Given the Black Lives Matter protests over the last few weeks, I'm unusually sensitive to racism.  I didn't think of Ellery Queen novels as racist, but I notice that while the Ellery Queen character almost never uses racial slurs, the New York City cops who feature in many stories do.  This includes the character Inspector Richard Queen, Ellery's father.  I especially noticed the use of the phrase "the shine" to refer to what a more educated person would probably have called "the Negro."  This was well before the use of phrases like black, African American, or people of color.  I also noticed that even when not using racist slang, descriptions of Negro characters, such as hotel maids, were condescending at best.

You can't go back and change history, or classic novels.  In fact I've seen much worse racism in "tough guy" detective novels by Raymond Chandler and  Mickey Spillane.  I think the explanation has to be that some people in the 1930s talked that way, and the authors put it in for realistic effects.  I still think the Ellery Queen novels are worth reading for the amazing logical puzzles they present.  I've always preferred puzzle mysteries to the shoot-em-up types.

And now we have to admit...

One week ago, a man named George Floyd died at the hands of four policemen in Minneapolis.  On camera. 

On the same day, May 25, 2020, in Central Park, New York City, Christian Cooper, a birder, asked a woman with an unleashed dog to leash her dog.  This was in an area clearly marked "dogs must be leashed."  The woman refused to comply and became abusive, so Mr. Cooper began recording the incident, during which the woman called the police and told them she was being "threatened" by an African-American man - who had done nothing worse than ask her to obey the park rules.

Christian Cooper and George Floyd were both African-American.  The policemen, and the woman with the dog, were white.  That's the point. 

These two incidents, on top of a series of other incidents in various states where black people were killed by police, have set off a firestorm of largely peaceful protests, unfortunately sometimes accompanied by violence and looting, in major cities all over the country.  For the last 6 nights.  My county (Alameda) in California was put under curfew last night because of disturbances all over the county, including such largely white towns as Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill.  In my entire life I've never been aware of so many large public protests, in so many different places all over the country, all at once.

I attended public school, and a public university, in the United States (California, specifically).  Apart from being told about slavery in the South and about the civil war generally, I don't recall any emphasis on the fact that the U.S. is a racist society.  I came out of my schooling believing the legends of a free, democratic society, where everyone had a chance to succeed.  This despite the fact that I got into a major fight with my father when I was in high school, because I signed an Open Housing petition circulated by the local Methodist minister.  My father was from southern Missouri, but had never really talked about his attitude toward African-Americans.  But we had the Open Housing petition because Napa, CA in the 1950s was "redlined."  Black people couldn't buy there.  I'll never know, because Dad is gone; but I've recently wondered if that was why we moved from Vallejo (very racially mixed) to Napa in 1950, when I was 4. 

I've always been a student of history, and the more I've learned about American history in the years since I left university, the clearer it is that the basic assumption of our social arrangements is that people of color are inferior to white people.  Even, occasionally, when they are well educated and well-to-do.  And this is still so.

I think we all have to admit now that the society we live in is racist, and values or devalues its members based on the color of their skin.  It saddens me; I thought we were better than that.  I was wrong.  I don't think I'll detail here all the reasons this is so; as an aging white woman, I have no direct experience of them, and there are memes all over social media which include them in excruciating detail.  They start with inferior education and go on to low paying job opportunities, lack of access to health care, and housing options in food deserts, but the real issue is the treatment of people of color by the police.

I don't know what we do to fix this.  But it's becoming clear that we have to do something, probably starting with major changes in policing attitudes and approaches.

It's also becoming clear that white people are realizing we must do something.  The policeman who knelt on George Floyd's neck has been fired, and arrested for 3rd degree murder (whatever that is).  The woman in the park has lost her job (she was fired when the story went viral) and the dog (the rescue operation where she got it took it back). 

There were times when nothing would have happened to either white person; in fact the policeman had a record of 18 complaints, none of which had ever led even to a reprimand.

Ironically, I think we owe the last week of demonstrations to social media.  If those incidents hadn't been recorded, and shared widely on social media, it's possible that nothing would have happened, again. But they were, and there were consequences.  We've complained a lot about social media the last few years.  But in this case it may be the driving force pushing us to look at our racisim - and fix it.  So we don't have to look at any more terrible videos.

Within Our Gates

I had an amazing experience last night.  I attended a showing, at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, of Within Our Gates, a 1920 silent film directed by Oscar Micheaux.  I don't normally go to any movies these days, although I've always had a soft spot for the great silents.  I went to this one because the film was accompanied by members of the Oakland Symphony and the Oakland Symphony Chorus, directed by Maestro Michael Morgan.  I've sung with the Symphony Chorus since 2000, although I don't sing in the Chamber Chorus that performed last night; I knew all the singers and some of the musicians.

If you've never seen a silent film accompanied by an orchestra, with or without chorus, you may not realize that the performers are seated with their backs to the screen.  In fact, a chorus member told me they weren't allowed to see the film.  Only the conductor can see the screen, and Maestro Morgan had to coordinate the action in the movie with the composer's score.  I might add that it was black as the inside of your hat in that theater, except for light from the screen; and silent movies don't generate the light that modern movies do.  As far as I know, the singers had memorized the score; I didn't see many music lights except for the orchestra.  The score they performed was a world premiere, composed by Adolphus Hailstork of Rochester, New York, who attended the performance.

Within Our Gates is the oldest surviving film made by an African-American director.  You can see a plot summary on the Wikipedia article I linked.  The film was released only 5 years after Birth of a Nation. Wikipedia suggests that "critics have considered Micheaux's project as a response to Griffith."

 I never thought I would see a movie, with an all-Negro cast (to use the period term), describing the lives of African Americans in 1920.  The main character, Sylvia Landry, seems "middle class."  She can read and write, she has nice clothes, she can afford to travel.  She lives in a nice house, she visits people and they visit her.  But in a flashback, we learn that she grew up on a plantation, where her illiterate father worked for the owner, and was lynched after someone else shot the owner and he was blamed for it.  Yes, there is a lynching scene, and an attempted rape. 

It's one thing to know, from reading, that people lived and thought a certain way, and that certain things happened.  Seeing it in a movie is a whole different experience.  It was jarring to see these things: 

• A Southern woman tells a northern philanthropist, who was considering supporting a school to educate black children, that there was no point in educating Negroes, they were just good for "porters and field hands," and "they just want to go up to Heaven."  
• A Negro preacher tells his congregation they will go to Heaven because they are poor and uneducated, while all the white people will go to Hell because they are rich and educated.  
• The plantation owner complains to his servant that Sylvia (the daughter of his fieldworker) is educated and can work out what her father's debts really are, instead of what the owner wants them to be.  
• And then, of course, there is the lynching.  No, they didn't show the actual hanging.

And on top of all this, it was a good movie.  The acting was as good as silents ever got, and better than some I've seen.  For instance, I've seen Metropolis, a great classic, but frankly the acting is awful; this was much better, more like you were watching real people.  The characters were presented fairly, there were good and bad Negroes, and good and bad white people.  It was another world, that I never expected to see.  I will remember it.

Rudyard Kipling and the Confederate Flag

There was much public discussions recently, following the murder of 9 members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., over the practice of flying the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina state capitol (among other places).  The flag at the South Carolina capitol has been removed to a museum.

People also discussed, again, whether the Civil War was about slavery, or about states' rights.  The official position of many Southerners, especially Southern officials, has been that the war was about states' rights.  In the course of the discussions, however, some people used Google to look up the state secession documents, which are readily available - and several of the documents make it crystal clear that the state is seceding because the U.S. government no longer supports slavery.  South Carolina's declaration, which was issued first, is quite explicit.  (Virginia's secession document, on the other hand, essentially says, "We're outta here," without giving a reason.)  The Texas declaration is even more interesting.  It contains this phrase, which I quote for consideration (emphasis mine):

That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.

A lot of the discussion I've read has suggested or stated that the Southern states essentially made this doctrine up to annoy people and make themselves wealthy - and they were wealthy.  In the first half of the 19th century there was much more wealth in the Southern states than in the Northern states (see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century, Harvard University Press, 2014, pp. 158 - 163).  The South made a lot of money off the peculiar institution; but its preferences weren't only based on money, as the Texas declaration makes clear.  The white citizens of the South believed firmly that Africans were created by God as inferior beings, fit only to serve.  But they didn't invent that belief. 

And that brings me to Rudyard Kipling.  For no good reason, I recently decided to read Kipling's novel Kim.  I found it at the library, in a battered Penguin Classic edition, with the famous introduction by Edward Said.  As I read the introduction, I found myself hearing echoes of those secession declarations, in passages like this:

...whether we like the fact or not, we should regard its author as writing not just from the dominating viewpoint of a white man describing a colonial possession, but also from the perspective of a massive colonial system whose economy, functioning and history had acquired the status almost of a fact of nature.  This meant that on one side of the colonial divide, there was white Christian Europe; its various countries, principally Britain and France, but also Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy , Russia, America, Portugal and Spain, controlled approximately 85 percent of the earth's sruface by the First World War.  On the other side of the divide, there were an immense variety of territories and races, all of them considered lesser, or inferior, or dependent, or subject.  The division between white and non-white, in India and elsewhere, was absolute, and is alluded to through Kim:  a sahib is a sahib, and no amount of friendship or camaraderie can change the rudiments of racial difference.  Kipling could no more have questioned, that difference, and the right of the white European to rule, than he would have argued with the Himalayas.

 Kim was written in 1901.  England abolished the slave trade (but not slavery itself) in 1808, with the Slave Trade Act of 1807; the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. But Said, and Kim, make it clear that, 70 years after the abolition of slavery, the attitudes which had justified slavery were still current.

If you don't understand where you came from, it's hard to know where you are.  I've read numerous other sources which make clear that white Europeans and Americans, in the 18th and 19th century, considered all the races of color as their inferiors, and even as separate species ("descended from different Adams," as Stephen Jay Gould quotes - see below).   Some scholars even used the developing science of anthropology to support this.  The best explanation I've read is the first chapter of Stephen Jay Gould's great book, The Mismeasure of Man (W. W. Norton, 1981), in which he reviews the attitudes of 18th and 19th century European and American scientists to the "inferior" races.  In fact, I think the concept of race was invented during this period, to explain all these strangely complexioned peoples that the colonization process was revealing.  Remember, if you go back 150 years from the mid-18th century, you're in a world where the vast majority of Frenchmen had never met a German, much less a person of different skin color; and there were no white people, or black people, resident in America at all.

The Southern planters didn't invent their attitudes about Africans.  They inherited them from the civilization that produced the United States:  Great Britain, where those beliefs were accepted wisdom. 

The most astonishing thing about the Declaration of Independence is that Thomas Jefferson, a Southerner who never freed any of his slaves, could write "all men are created equal."  Not "all white men of property," which is probably what he meant.  All men.  And over the last 239 years, we as a country have taken what he wrote, and tried to make it true.  We haven't even convinced all Americans; we haven't succeeded yet; we're still working on it.  But that phrase has truly changed the world.

Poisoned Policemen??

We've all heard the stories and seen the videos about police officers shooting and otherwise abusing unarmed black people.  I heard a special on NPR the other day that made a connection in my mind, and raised a question I have to ask.  Allow me to digress to get there.

Police officers shoot guns, mainly with lead bullets.  They train, regularly, on shooting ranges, so their skills will stay sharp.  The Seattle Times has released a report on the impact of unventilated indoor shooting ranges on the health of police officers.  I heard a radio broadcast of this on Saturday, April 11, but the report is also available online:

Lead endangers officers

This is Part 4 of their 5 part series, Loaded with Lead.  I was astounded to hear that lead exposure in a single week actually killed a training instructor:

In Londonderry, N.H., a 35-year-old police sergeant died of lead poisoning just days after training his fellow officers at a private indoor-gun range.

The range had a ventilation system that wasn't working.  He went home, went to bed, and never woke up.

Lead is a poison.  It kills people.  We've known this for centuries.  It's beginning to become a major issue in some police departments; some have stopped using lead bullets, some have stopped using indoor firing ranges.

But what does lead poisoning do to you, before it kills you, other than making you feel sick?

The Mayo Clinic page on symptoms of lead poisoning states that symptoms of lead poisoning in adults include:

• Declines in mental functioning
• Memory loss
• Mood disorders

I don't believe I've heard anyone ask the question:  do the officers who were involved in those publicized incidents train on unventilated, indoor shooting ranges?  Were they, in fact, suffering from lead poisoning?  Most of the studies of lead poisoning that I can easily find are of lead poisoning in children; there's not much about adults.  But the studies of children suggest that severe lead poisoning in children can lead to "aggressive, violent behavior and explosive tempers."  Does it do that in adults?  Does anyone know?

I'm not trying to suggest that the officers in the publicized cases were not racists; they may have been.  But is a racist with lead poisoning more dangerous than a racist without it?  Do we even know??  Is anybody asking?

The worst thing about shooting ranges is that nobody is responsible for inspecting them, and that applies to private ranges as well as ranges owned by the police.  I strongly recommend you read the entire Seattle Times series, especially if you are a shooter.

If you regularly shoot on an unventilated, indoor shooting range, your health is at serious risk.  If nobody regulates shooting ranges, the people who spend time there are responsible for finding out how healthy the environment is, on their own.  You get to choose whether to ask the questions or not.

But I still wonder about the officers in Ferguson, on Staten Island, and in North Charleston, South Carolina - on what kind of shooting range did they train??

Blaming Obama

I've been mulling this one over for a long time.  It's been 6 years since Barack Obama was elected president the first time.  He was elected again 2 years ago, which means he again persuaded a majority of voters to cast ballots for him.  And yet people of all views constantly blame him for whatever they think is wrong, as if he could correct all the sins of the world with a wave of his hand and simply chooses not to.

I'll take flack for this, but I don't need an explanation when I hear someone with a southern accent say, "I can't stand Obama."  Many from the South, especially senior members of Congress from the South, can't stand the idea of a black man in charge, and they don't bother to hide their feelings.  Interestingly, the self-identified Republican caller on CSPAN, who used the N-word about the president, was attributing hatred of "that n*er Obama" to Republicans in general.  (He was from San Diego, sigh.)  But I heard a caller on Michael Krasny's Forum program this morning ranting (in a New York accent as I recall) that he hated Obama even though he voted for him.  Why?  Because we went through an economic meltdown (which Mr. Obama was instrumental in ending, by the way), and no bankers went to jail.

I'll get to that in another post, but right now I want to posit a theory:  I believe a lot of the people (maybe even some Southerners, but certainly all the annoyed "lefties") who "can't stand" Obama, say that because he isn't doing what they wanted him to do.  They had an agenda item - jailing bankers, or raising the minimum wage, or "taking care" of immigration, or some other item.  He said he was on our side, and we assumed that he would take care of our agenda item. Then when he decided that other things were either more necessary or more possible, we felt betrayed.  I personally feel betrayed by his hounding of the press; he said he'd be "transparent," and he clearly isn't.

But I'm not in his shoes.  I don't sit down in that office and have to answer to the entire country, plus the rest of the world.  No one who has never been President of the United States can really grasp what that job is like.

And I think he's done a good job.  He's done a lot of what he promised; a lot of what he promised and didn't get done (immigration, tax reform) can be reasonably blamed on the Republican Party, which openly declared they wanted him to fail.

He entered office in something as close to the Great Depression as I hope we see in our lifetimes.  His team pulled the country out.  We are not where we'd like to be, but the financial system isn't in meltdown.  There was a time there where nobody could get any credit - banks couldn't get the short term loans they run on - that's now fixed.

He said he'd get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan; we're out of Iraq, and we're about out of Afghanistan.  Leaving Iraq may have been a mistake in hindsight, but I couldn't see any flaw at the time in the way he handled it; Al-Maliki's demands were not reasonable.  Leaving Afghanistan - we'll just have to see.  But he kept the promise.

He said he'd fix health care, and he did - more people now have health care than did before.  It isn't perfect, but it was designed by a committee and you know what that means.  (It didn't help that the U.S. government is incapable of managing large IT projects; but that predates Obama by decades.)

On top of all this, he is calm, dignified, intelligent, and publicly unflappable. You never have to wonder what he just said.  As far as I can tell, he's done overall about as good a job in the Presidency as anyone could do, under very difficult conditions.

I also want to give him credit for something he didn't do. He didn't get us involved in the mess in Syria.  I think he knew - and I agree with him - that if we send American troops into Syria, we will own Syria; and we'll own it for decades.  At some point the Middle East either has to fix itself or deteriorate into warring tribes.  I don't want to own Syria.

History will judge him, no matter what the Republicans say.  It will be very interesting, if I live long enough, to see what that judgment is.

Reconciliation??

The first step in learning a new choral piece is to read the text through, several times.  The Oakland Symphony Chorus just began preparing Ralph Vaughn Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem, a cantata written in 1936, between "the war to end all wars" and the "world war."  (For those of you in the S.F. Bay Area, we'll perform it on May 20 at the Scottish Rite temple in Oakland, with the Oakland Youth Orchestra.)

In the context of the recent incident in Florida where a "neighborhood watch captain" followed and shot a young black man returning from a convenience store, the text of the third movement of our new piece struck me. 

Before I get to that, I want to say that as a community policing volunteer in Oakland, I am disgusted by George Zimmerman.  Any real Neighborhood Watch volunteer would know his neighbors well enough to be aware of their visiting relatives, and would understand who "has a right" to be walking around in the neighborhood.  That's what Neighborhood Watch is about.  George Zimmerman appears to have had no idea that "his" gated neighborhood could legitimately have a young black man walking around in it - which means he didn't know the neighborhood very well, did he?

But I digress.  A lot of Dona Nobis Pacem is set to poetry by Walt Whitman.  I had forgotten how great Whitman's poetry is. The third movement uses this eloquent text:

Reconciliation

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly, softly, wash again and ever again this soiled world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin -- I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

Does George Zimmerman really feel that Trayvon Williams is not "a man divine as myself," merely because the face in the coffin is brown and not white??  If he does, what a terrible judgment on us all that we allowed him to learn to think that way.