FOURTH OF JULY REFLECTIONS

 

I wanted to wish all of my fellow Americans a happy Fourth of July yesterday…but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Couldn’t muster any happiness about what’s happening in my native country today. It’s all just too grim.

Maybe it’s the weather. Here in Patagonia, it’s raining and snowing, cold and dark. It’s more fitting of the state of my nation—once the beacon of democracy, the temple of individual rights—than a sunny day full of brass bands, fireworks, picnics and beer.

But then again, if we give any thought at all to the actual significance of the Fourth of July, we Americans—at least every small-d democrat among us—should have been in mourning yesterday. Not for our origins, which were noble, but for what we’ve lost along the way, and especially what we’ve lost in the last five and a half years.

I would like to say—have wanted to say since January 20, 2020—not to worry. That things can only get better. But that appears to be a fatuous lie. Indeed, in terms of freedom, civil rights and justice, we are abysmally worse off than we were just last month. With the far-right in Congress throwing their full support behind an insurrection that—let’s stop pussyfooting around and call it like it is—sought to overthrow the government of the United States and perpetuate the reign of an autocrat who had clearly lost a free and fair election, and with that self-same autocrat refusing for the first time in US history to leave office peacefully after his election defeat, the Supreme Court was the last bastion standing against this indubitable war on democracy and what used to be known as “The American Way”. But in the last days of June before the Fourth of July recess, that ship clearly sailed as well.

Events in that democratic bloodbath at the Supreme Court in the fateful last days in June included a judicial restructuring that very apparently sought to bolster the ambitions of one segment of the population while debilitating the rights of another. In the process, the power of the Court—like the GOP before it—was unmistakably usurped by the far right, effectively sidelining the normally moderating influence of the chief justice. That institution’s erstwhile principles of respect for settled judicial precedent when it favors individual freedoms, as well as for legally acquired rights, were cavalierly tossed out the window.

This was the intended mission that former President Donald Trump—and the major party that he managed in a few short years to take over through a veritable political reign of terror—hoped the three justices they named to the Court would take up. They haven’t been disappointed. And those newly appointed justices have found an echo for their extreme beliefs in senior Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who was previously a sort of judicial lone wolf in his far-right opinions.

In the latter days of June, and in practically one fell swoop, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down one of the most essential of women’s civil rights—the right to autonomy over their own bodies and their own destiny. This was a hard-fought right that had been federal law in the United States for very nearly a half-century.

With the exception of the right to vote, which women didn’t enjoy for the first time until 1920, and which was a mere first small step in their equal rights struggle that continues today, Roe v Wade was arguably the most consequential decision in favor or women’s rights in the history of the United States. It eschewed the political and religious strictures that had been imposed on women since the nation’s founding (a sort of Christian “sharia law” that precluded a woman’s right to corporeal autonomy), and upheld the right of women to invoke the principle of “my body, my choice.”

Coco Das, an organizer with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, put it succinctly when she told The Guardian, “This decision not only goes against the will of the people—the majority of people support abortion rights, legal abortion—it goes against modern progress, the progress of history.” Das describe the Supreme Court’s controversial decision to overturn Roe v Wade as being “based on biblical literalism, a fundamentalist Christian fanatical movement.” As I said before, the equivalent of Christian “sharia law”. She added that the Court’s so-called “conservative” majority are “really trying to transform (American) society to one that’s dominated on the basis of white supremacy, male supremacy, Christian supremacy. It’s very dangerous. Without the right to abortion, women can’t be free, and if women aren’t free, nobody’s free.”

But the Court didn’t stop there in its June onslaught in favor of the extreme right. Its far-right justices also ruled in majority decisions against states’ rights when it comes to arms control, against environmental protection, against Native tribal law, and against the founding constitutional principle of separation of Church and State.  

The Court ruled to disallow a 1911 New York state gun law that imposed strict restrictions on carrying firearms outside the home. The decision, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen, came halfway through a year in which the US has suffered a record three hundred nine mass shooting incidents in which two hundred twenty people have died. In his opinion, echoed by the “conservative” Court majority, Justice Thomas posited that New York laws that recognized people’s right to keep guns in their homes, but restricted the right to carry them freely in the street without good cause violated the “right to bear arms” embodied in the Second Amendment.

The Court also voted in favor of a former high school football coach who was suspended for praying with athletes on the field after games, a practice which imposes religious manifestations on secular public school activities and flies in the face of a sixty-year-old precedent indicating that imposing prayer of any kind on public school children violates their First Amendment right to freedom of religion. The justices also rejected a Maine law that prohibited religious schools from drawing tuition aid from public funds. In her dissent against this measure, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “This court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers fought to build.” 

And finally, the Court also in June moved against a long-held precedent of tribal law on Native land and curbed the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to pursue major polluters. The rightist majority decided that, from now on, state prosecutors will be able to pursue criminal cases for crimes perpetrated by non-Native persons against Native persons on tribal land—a decision which, according to Cherokee Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr, signifies that “the US Supreme Court (has) ruled against legal precedent and (against) the basic principles of congressional authority and Indian law.” The next day, the Court decided to support litigation brought by West Virginia that insisted the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) be restricted in its regulation of planet-heating gasses from the energy industry.

Regarding this last measure, former New York Mayor and current special envoy to the UN Michael Bloomberg said, “The decision to side with polluters over the public will cost American lives and cause an enormous amount of preventable suffering, with the biggest burden falling on low-income communities and communities of color.” 

Lawrence Gostin, a law professor at Georgetown University and director of the World Health Organization’s center on Global Health Law made a realistic assessment of the current situation in the US when he said, “We’re absolutely in a constitutional crisis. And our democracy is now one of the most fragile democracies among our peer nations. We haven’t fallen over the cliff—we still abide by the rule of law, more or less, and still have elections, more or less—but the terms of our democracy have really been eviscerated by the Supreme Court.”

This is not a conspiracy theory. The lines of what’s happening have been sharply drawn. Never, since the Civil War, has the United States been so deeply divided, or so in danger of democratic dissolution. To my mind, then, this year’s Fourth of July was the saddest in all of my seventy-two years. I’m fervently hoping that better, more democratic times lie ahead, but I won’t hold my breath while I wait.      

MASS SHOOTINGS: WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?

The latest US mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, less than an hour from my home town, left nine dead and 26 injured. It has the dubious distinction of being the 250^th such attack nationwide, this year! And the second in just over half a day. The other one was in El Paso, Texas, just thirteen hours prior. Between the two mass shootings within a 24-hour period, the casualty list included 29 dead and 52 wounded. This is a much more horrifying list of dead and wounded for a single day than those reported in many a war zone worldwide.

Both attacks—the one in El Paso and the one in Dayton—were carried out with high-capacity assault rifles (purchased legally in the case of the El Paso domestic terror attack—let's call it what it is), while in Ohio, we still don't know whether the mass-murderer was legally armed or not.

In El Paso, the shooter used a legally purchased Kalashnikov AK-47, a highly popular and highly effective combat weapon of the type carried by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. In the Dayton shooting, the killer's weapon of choice was a .223-caliber assault rifle. He had multiple high-capacity magazines, most of which he was unable to use, thanks to the fast and highly effective work of the Dayton PD, who promptly killed him.

This description corresponds to an M-16, the exact same weapon I was trained with during the Vietnam War era and that I carried on numerous alerts with the 32nd Army Air Defense Command in Europe, while many of my fellow veterans used it extensively in combat in Vietnam and Cambodia.

A number of veterans I've spoken with, including my childhood friend Steve Combs, who was decorated for his actions as an American Special Forces NCO in Vietnam, concur with me that this type of weapon has no place in the hands of civilians. So too does another friend with a long career in law enforcement, former Ohio Deputy Sheriff John Curry. Anyone who has undergone training with an M-16 knows that its only purpose is to lay down heavy fire and to kill or incapacitate as many of the enemy's number as possible. It is not a hunting rifle. It is an anti-personnel weapon specifically designed to kill large quantities of enemy combatants quickly and effectively in the shortest time possible.

The M-16’s accuracy as a semi-automatic weapon is legendary, within an effective range of up to 550 yards. An experienced shooter can fire between 40 and 60 rounds a minute on semi-automatic. On full automatic, this weapon can lay down withering fire at a rate between 600 and 800 rounds a minute.

The Dayton shooting clearly demonstrated these grim traits, since the shooter was able to kill or wound 35 people in under a minute. Had it not been for the stellar performance of Dayton police, the casualties could have easily run into the hundreds.

Despite appearances, this wasn’t a battlefield. It was the nightclub district of a quiet Midwestern city. In El Paso, it was the local Walmart. In neither place could any of the victims have guessed that they would come under fire while shopping for groceries and other items, or while they were out for a Saturday night of fun. All of the people killed or injured were innocent bystanders targeted by a crazed sociopath.

Clearly, this is not something ordinary everyday people should have to think about. But the reality is that today they must, every time they go out of the house, considering the now sadly common frequency with which anyone, anywhere in America, can suddenly be targeted by a domestic terrorist with a weapon of war that has no business being in his hands. 

Politicians on both sides of the aisle are skirting this issue because they are afraid of what tackling it will do to them with gun owners at the polls. This is the case as well of people who continue to staunchly defend the supposed right of any citizen to have any weapon he or she desires, including arms that should be strictly military grade ordnance. How many more people have to die or be injured in mass shootings before the nation’s political leaders realize there’s something very wrong in the United States? Something that doesn’t happen at this level, outside of war zones, anywhere else in the world.

Will defenders, not of the right to bear arms, but of the right to own military-grade weaponry, need to lose members of their own families in random mass shootings before they wake up? And will politicians wait to act until their constituents make it impossible for them to punt with regard to ownership of weapons of war, while continuing to accept vast sums of National Rifle Association hush money?  

There's a lot more at stake here than whether or not the Second Amendment implies that any citizen should be able to own enough ordnance to start their own private war. What's at stake is the safety and security of American streets and public places. What’s at stake are the lives of friends and family, people we all know and love.

Nobody ever thinks that it will happen where they live... And then it does.