Excerpts from the pieces at the top of my reading list from the past week follow below.
Don’t Let This Week’s Events Distract Us From Other Critical Issues
Jim Aloisi, We cannot be passive actors in COVID recovery
The choice before us is unambiguous: we can be passive actors in the process of COVID-19 recovery, or we can be active participants engaged in “building back better.” Passive actors let others make the choices for them or rely on the “marketplace” to collectively choose what recovery looks like…
We can’t build back better without transportation, land use, and housing policies that squarely meet the demands of an extraordinary time. My objective here is to address the transportation component of that triad…
Our destiny remains in our hands, and we can build a better post-pandemic metro Boston only by developing broad consensus and taking decisive action. That is what leadership is all about. Passivity is no answer. Retreating to the false comfort of the pre-COVID status quo is no answer. History, and future generations, will rightly judge us harshly if we fail to take up the task of rebuilding a better, more sustainable and equitable society following COVID-19. There is no time to waste.
Miriam Wasser, Want To Know If Raw Sewage Gets Dumped In Your Local River? There’s A Bill On Baker’s Desk About It
Among the many bills sitting on Gov. Baker’s desk is one requiring cities and towns to notify residents any time raw sewage ends up in a local river or water body... The bill, if enacted, would require wastewater operators to send out email or text notifications to local and downstream residents within two hours of discovering a sewage discharge, and updates every eight hours for as long as the problem persists. They will also have to publish information online about how much sewage-laden water was released and put up signage near problem areas.
Send Gov. Baker via this link – https://www.mass.gov/forms/email-the-governors-office.
Call and leave a message on Gov. Baker‘s Constituent Services line – (617) 725-4005.
Vanilla ISIS
Nate Powell, About Face: Death and surrender to power in the clothing of men. [Ed.: An essay in the form of a graphic novel so no excerpt.]
A better way to make sense of the news of the past few days — not only the violent occupation in Washington but also the historic Senate victories by Democrats in Georgia — is as a long-run contest between two competing American traditions: one committed to preserving the status quo racial hierarchy and one fighting to advance equality… Although they were hardly the first to notice the “two traditions” framework, political scientists Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith sketched an influential version of it in an important 2005 paper called “Racial Orders in American Political Development.” They identified two governing coalitions that have traded power across the centuries of American history: a “white supremacist order,” as they put it, and a “transformative egalitarian order.”…
As this week shows, the two American traditions do not move in clear cycles, with one triumphant and the other dormant — only for the pattern to reverse itself. They clash and compete for support contemporaneously. Trump’s election in 2016 was a triumph for the ethno-nationalist tradition, and the storming of the Capitol was the predictable conclusion of his ascendancy. But the other tradition is very much alive, too. To make sense of the struggle, we have to see it clearly.
Two traditions. Two governing coalitions. This is America.
National security Malcolm Nance’s take on the insurrection at the Capitol stood out for me. Nance interviewed by Peter O’Dowd on WBUR, How Were Pro-Trump Extremists Able To Storm The U.S. Capitol?
“I’m not being flippant when I say ISIS is infuriated that they never came up with this idea of coming in through a mass protest, doing a hostage barricade and executing everybody inside the building because that was viable [on Wednesday]. And I don’t know if the people that had five firearms on them or the noose that was set up outside the Capitol, whether they fully intended to have a murder cell in there, who would be completely and wholly independent from the protesters, enter that building, lay siege to it and start killing people.
“Every person in management failed. Every person in that part of the Capitol Hill Police force who allowed those protesters in, who did not guard the building, failed. Now there’s a template for taking over the United States Capitol building. All you need is a mass protest of people who look like anybody other than Black Lives Matter and antifa, and you can just take over a state building. It’s happened before. And I think that in many statehouses across this country, they fear that it’s going to happen again very soon.”
Anna Sauerbrey, Far-Right Protesters Stormed Germany’s Parliament. What Can America Learn?
On Aug. 29, during a demonstration in Berlin against government restrictions to rein in the spread of the coronavirus, several hundred protesters climbed over fences around the Reichstag, the seat of Germany’s national Parliament, and ran toward the entrance. They were met by a handful of police officers, who pushed the crowd back and secured the entrance….
In the days that followed, Germans asked themselves a series of questions: Was this “a storming of the Reichstag,” evoking dark memories of the building being set on fire in 1933, which led to the suspension of the Weimar Republic’s constitution? Was it a sign that our democracy was under threat? Or was this just a bunch of extremist rioters exploiting a blind spot in the police’s strategy?…
Seyward Darby, The Far Right Told Us What It Had Planned. We Didn’t Listen.
History holds important lessons, if only we are willing to hear them. This moment — men and women breaching the Capitol’s barricades, entering the chambers of Congress and demanding the nullification of the presidential election based on nothing more than lies and conspiracy theories — is a culmination, but it is not an ending. It is not, as some pundits have suggested, white supremacy or Trumpism’s “last gasp.” It is the manifestation of a long-held right-wing fantasy. Opponents of democracy stormed the nation’s seat of power. They walked out, many unscathed and uncuffed, to fight another day.
They told us they were going to do it, and they did.
Albert Fox Cahn, The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance
We don’t need a cutting-edge surveillance dragnet to find the perpetrators of this attack: They tracked themselves. They livestreamed their felonies from the halls of Congress, recording each crime in full HD. We don’t need facial recognition, geofences, and cell tower data to find those responsible, we need police officers willing to do their job.
Greg Sargent, The real lesson to be drawn from ‘Lincoln’
It’s folly to apply the Civil War to the present to begin with, but if we must do this, one of the key lessons of “Lincoln,” and his life and times, is that he knew when not to compromise. History was shaped largely by Lincoln’s intransigence at the right moments.
Ending On A Positive Note
Paul Kingsnorth, 2016: Year of the Serpent
I was sitting in a packed room in the middle of a wild and wet Dartmoor listening to the mythologist Martin Shaw tell an old northern European story called The Lindworm. It is a tale about an unhappy kingdom. The king and queen want a child, but no child will come. An old wise woman tells the queen what she must do to conceive. She must breathe her desires into a glass and place it on the ground. From that ground, two flowers will grow: one red, one white. The queen must eat the white flower; under no circumstances must she eat the red one. Then she will bear a healthy child.
Of course, the queen is unable to resist eating the red flower too, despite all the warnings. The king and queen agree to tell no-one of the transgression, and the queen duly falls pregnant, but at the birth something terrible happens. The queen gives birth to a black serpent, which is immediately caught and flung in horror through the window and into the forest. People act as if nothing has happened, and the serpent is quickly followed by a healthy baby boy. But when the boy becomes a man, he meets his serpent brother again in the wood, and the huge black snake comes back into the kingdom to wreak terrible damage.
It’s a strange and disturbing story, and if it contains a lesson, it is, suggests Martin, that what you exile will come back to bite you, three times as big and twice as angry. What you push away will eventually return, and you will have to deal with the consequences.
2016, in the West, feels like the year the exiled serpent returned. Many things that were banned from the public conversation – many feelings, ideas and worldviews which were pushed under, thrown into the forest, deemed taboo, cast out of the public realm – have slithered back into the castle, angry at their rejection. Some people thought they were dead, but it doesn’t work like that. Dark twins can’t be destroyed; terms must be met, agreements made. The serpent must be accommodated….
In the story of the Lindworm, it is not the king or the queen, nor a heroic knight on a white charger, who finally draw the serpent’s threat like poison from a wound. It is a young woman from the margin of the woods, who brings new weapons, and new cunning, into the court, and does the job which the owners of the kingdom had no idea how to do. But she does not kill the serpent. Instead, she reveals its true nature, and in doing so she changes it and everything around it. She forces the court to confront its past, and as a result, the serpent is enfolded again back into the kingdom.