The story elements below point to a fact of life in the United States these days, that we are divided not only in regard to what we think but, more importantly, in how we think and, because the line that divides us is hardly ever crossed, the discourse that should be the centerpiece of democratic process is dead.  If it cannot be revived, than what should be a United States of America is impossible.  Personally, I cannot, no matter how hard I try, find good reason to respect the thinking of those who hold to Mr. Trump.  I, like Ms. Hicks, “feel like I am in a bizarre world,” me for the very reason that Ms. Hicks can find reason to believe as she does, that 67% of Republicans approve of the way Mr. Trump responded to what took place in Charlottesville, that a black woman could possibly support Mr. Trump and argue that the outrage over Mr. Trump excusing the acts of those professing racial hatred was political and disingenuous.  Ms. Hicks is identified as a black woman.

Perhaps we have reached a point where the divide is so wide as to be swallowing all hope for a better nation.

I hope not.

 A Deal Breaker for Trump’s Supporters? Nope. Not This Time, Either.  By SABRINA TAVERNISE

AUG. 19, 2017.  NY Times

• Sixty-seven percent of Republicans said they approved of the president’s response to the violence in Charlottesville last weekend, compared with just 10 percent of Democrats, according to a CBS News surveyconducted over the past week.
• But in an increasingly tribal America, with people on the left and the right getting information from different sources and seeing the same facts in different ways, it reflects the way Mr. Trump has become in many ways both symbol and chief agitator of a divided nation.
• I feel like I am in a bizarro universe where no one but me is thinking logically,” she said. “We have gone so off the rails of what this conversation is about.”
• Hicks, who is black and grew up in Charlotte, N.C., welcomes the public soul-searching on the meaning of Confederate monuments. She believes that the statues were erected to intimidate black people and that they should be taken down. But instead of focusing on that, she sees opponents of Mr. Trump focusing on Mr. Trump.

To get past this truly ugly moment in our history, we need to reflect on how we got here, how we have allowed selfishness and lack of proper empathy bring us to a point where we have a man who cares for no one except himself, who thinks only of himself and acts to serve himself no matter who is harmed by those actions. He is the epitome of got mine-fuck you, an attitude that is not his alone, an attitude promoted with a twinge of old time religion to make it seem the gods’ goal. To defeat evil we need to understand evil beyond those who carry it, to honestly come to know it and its roots so that we can do what is necessary to get rid of it that insure that it will not come back. The Nazi thing fits with the business thing and the fact that Wall Street thrives as Trump holds the office should be telling. People who get good from evil are evil themselves, right? Yell about Trump the man but it is Trump the symptom that is what ails us.

As always, there is a cause for the malady and it is that cause we need to discuss. It must be obvious to anyone concerned with seeing what is before them that there are a great number of people terribly dissatisfied with where we are as a nation and where we seem to be going. They are dissatisfied because the lives they live are not the lives they would like to live. They feel that, a good number of them, that they have no control over their lives and, as the great economic disaster of our recent past shows, they are right. People become mean when they cannot, even if they work had at it, find their way to a secure future. Someone else–big banks, corporations (remember the great period of layoffs followed a few years later by great drops in paycheck?)–for that someone else’s purposes is, by law and by the way business is done, allowed to determine their futures. I hate what the anger brings about and I hate even more the conditions of life that some have forced upon others that kill off the joy and happiness that should become with living the life of a human being. There is no excuse for hate unless what is hated is that that is inhumane and, thus, hateful.

Go about your daily lives in one of the “better” countries in the world now and ignore the fact that there are good numbers of people who are being pushed around by wealth, stepped over, crushed, thrown into the garbage.  The cities are looking better, the riffraff out of sight, their plight not to be worried about because the whiskey bars and upscale beerhalls are aplenty.  The quality of life in the neighborhoods is a hell of a lot better and affordable only to those who can afford the good whiskey and the craft beer.  The police keep the streets safe and quiet and are told not to notice the humanity of the men and women and their children too who cannot afford to live decent lives, the indecency of it a mark against them and not those who create the conditions that make such lives the only ones possible for those without decent wages. Poor and burned alive

The President of the University of Nevada, Reno had this to say about not taking action against a student who marched with far right-wing hate groups in Charlottesville last weekend.  Despite a call from some that action be taken against the student by the University, the University President, Marc Johnson had this to say,

“What he did was to go to Charlottesville, participate in a rally: which is under the constitutional right to assembly. And he spoke out, which is his right to free speech.” “The university does not necessarily — well, we definitely do not — support the content of his message,” Johnson said. “But we have no constitutional or legal right to fire him from his job or expel him from the university.”

The article in the Reno Gazette-Journal in which Johnson is quoted also references the ACLU’s defense of the student’s first amendment rights.

“Officials from UNR and the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada referenced the First Amendment in defending Peter Cytanovic, a 20-year-old history and political science major.”

Cytanovic’s beliefs are odious but he does have a right to speak his beliefs and the right to speech needs to be understood and defended.  Thanks Marc Johnson and thanks to the ACLU for upholding the Constitution!

This article is an important one for those who care about freedom to read. To condemn an organization like the ACLU because it defends the rights of scumbags to speak their minds is to not understand the meaning of and the reason for freedom of speech in a democratic society.  There have been many incidents lately when institutions such as universities and groups with liberal leanings have acted illiberally by trying to keep those with terrible ideas from telling others of those ideas.  Such moves to silence are stupid moves because they do not make the terrible ideas go away, only help to hide them when exposure might allow right action against their having any effect on people’s lives.  And, too, it makes censorship acceptable and it cannot be made acceptable if we care to have a free society.  It places some in charge of determining which ideas get heard and which do not.  Is there really anyone we should trust to make such decisions?  When we hear something obnoxious we have both a right and duty to point out what is obnoxious about what we are hearing.  We do not have the right to take away freedom of speech from those we think obnoxious.  They probably think us obnoxious and they have no right to interfere with our speaking of what we believe to be true and right.

https://theintercept.com/2017/08/13/the-misguided-attacks-on-aclu-for-defending-neo-nazis-free-speech-rights-in-charlottesville/

Powell became a Supreme Court Justice. Consider whether or not reference to the document attached below, a memo to the United States Chamber of Commerce, might be the manifesto for the movement that has brought us to today, to a state in which the people work for business interests rather than, as it would be in a well educated, well informed democracy, a state in which the purpose of business was to serve the people.  Could it be that the trope that socialism of any kind is destructive to democracy (see Milton Friedman) was born not only of the “red scare” but of a parallel movement to insure that all would believe fully in the capitalist system even when good numbers, the majority, were being screwed by an economy crafted to make labor cheap and profits high?  Here is a link to the memo, written in 1971.  Consider the meme so prevalently accepted to reflect truth that universities and colleges are dominated by left-wing professors who are enemies of the American way, the proper American way.  Could it be that anything that does not support a system that is obnoxious in many ways, hostile to the well-being of so many, can and has been considered anti-American, anything and anyone questioning the viability of capitalism categorized as a person hostile to America?  And who gains from such a belief being instilled in people through an educational system?  Might it be true that educational institutions have been and continue to be forced by the powers that control, those with wealth and the organizations that benefit them, the Chamber of Commerce, for example, to teach what is not true but what those powers wish be taught?  Could it be that Powell and his acolytes have managed to co-opt the educational system, kindergarten through college, to insure that their “American way” grows more dominant and the people controlled to believe that what they see with their own eyes to be against their own best interests good?

Here is the link: http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/