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HAT TIP TO HUGH CUTLER
Saturday, January 23, 2016
Friday, January 22, 2016
The Great Nestlé-Deer Park Billion Dollar Poconos Spring Water Grab
It has been said that the next world war will be fought over water, but in a rural northeastern Pennsylvania township a battle already is being waged between residents and an immense multi-national corporation that plans to pump hundreds of millions of gallons of spring water from the aquifer beneath their farms and homes.
Nestlé S.A. is the world’s largest food and beverage company, and it is no accident that a company with annual revenues larger than the GDPs of many countries has chosen tiny Eldred Township in the Pocono Mountains for two extraction wells that will pump 200,000 gallons of water a day for its Deer Park Natural Spring Water brand.
This is because the water is clean, plentiful — and free.
A 20-ounce bottle of Deer Park costs $1.29 in area convenience stores, and back-of-the envelope calculations show that for a minimal investment, Nestlé can generate about $825,000 in revenue each day from the Eldred wells. This translates into about $300 million a year and an astonishing $3 billion over the life of the 10-year mass extraction permit it is seeking from the state.
The compensation to Eldred residents from Nestlé would be exactly zero.
§
There is little question that Nestlé will prevail in Eldred.
The transnational corporation projects a benevolent image, but it usually gets what it wants and has weathered many scandals over the years as the price of doing business.
The most odiferous of the scandals was in the 1970s when it was revealed Nestlé was getting third world mothers hooked on its infant formula despite being less healthy and more expensive than breast milk. It backed down in the face of a boycott of its products — which range from chocolate and confectionery, frozen foods, coffee and dietary supplements to pet foods — and has since turned its attention to promoting bottled water, turning one of life's essentials into a global brand that only the better-off can afford while depleting a precious natural resource.
Nestlé has the largest bottled water market share in the world, with revenues of $7.3 billion last year from its Deer Park, Pure Life, Poland Spring, San Pellegrino and Perrier brands.
Eldred Township has a total area of barely 24 square miles and a mere 2,500 residents. Kunkletown sits at the only crossroads, but it is a town in only a figurative sense with a smattering of shops and nary a stop light. But there is lots and lots of water, and the township supervisors helpfully green lighted Nestlé's application to site two wells on an 80-acre, privately-owned sand pit by quietly reversing a ban on mass water extraction inserted into a regional planning code in 2014.
Residents have formed a citizens group to fight Nestlé and four homeowners, joined this week by about 25 other residents, have filed suit against the township supervisors over the 2014 zoning change. They say there already is anecdotal evidence that Nestlé's test wells are contaminating the wells of nearby property owners.
They can expect no relief from the agencies who will review Nestlé's permit application — the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources (DEP) and the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) — because the regulatory process is rigged and Nestlé holds virtually all the cards.
All of the hydrological tests and other data required in the permit process are provided by Nestlé. There are no independent tests to assess the quantity and quality of the water. Asked at a public meeting in Eldred on Wednesday evening how many mass extraction permits the DEP has rejected or required substantial modification to prior to approval, the agency's top Safe Water Drinking Permit Program official in northeastern Pennsylvania hemmed and hawed.
Pressed repeatedly to answer the question, his face growing increasingly red, he finally replied in a raspy whisper:
"None."
§
Eldred residents also can expect no help from local politicians.
The Poconos economy crapped out in the mid-2000s long before the rest of the nation, and for a while Monroe County led all counties in the U.S. in home foreclosures per capita. This is because politicians, not content to try to build the tourist industry and brand the Poconos as a special place with beautiful woodlands chockablock with trails, waterfalls, creek and rivers, as well as golf courses, ski slopes and family-friendly resorts, climbed into bed with rapacious developers and usurious financial institutions after the 9/11 attacks to sell the Poconos as a safe haven from a world gone crazy.
People flocked to the area from the Bronx, Queens and northern New Jersey by the thousands after 9/11, but the gauzy illusion that the Poconos was a paradise soon gave way to a harsh reality of which wise locals already were well aware: There was an apathetic political establishment resistant to reform, many roads and bridges were in atrocious condition, social services were overtaxed, schools ranged from mediocre to poor, crime rates were well above Pennsylvania county-by-county averages for adult major crime, drunk driving and vehicular fatalities, there was an increasingly degraded environment, and stratospherically high local tax rates that have been crushing to all but the relatively few affluent residents.
If there has been a bright spot amid a chronically sick economy, it is water.
There has been a proliferation of water parks, which are supplanting ski slopes as the region’s largest tourist draw. Five water parks have opened in recent years with more planned, which is not surprising when you consider that the parks' biggest expense, the enormous amount of water needed for their gigantic pools and slides, flow into the parks essentially free of charge because the taking and distribution of water is largely unnoticed, underregulated and the result of sometimes secret agreements between politicians and developers who are given tax breaks, zoning easements and handshakes for creating jobs, virtually all of which are minimum wage.
Water in the Poconos is clean and plentiful. The Delaware, the largest undammed river east of the Mississippi, flows along its eastern border with New Jersey. Nestlé has seven existing mass extraction sites in Pennsylvania, and bottlers have quietly pumped from Poconos aquifers for years to quench the thirst of people where water is a luxury and not taken for granted, or has been degraded as in Flint, Michigan, forcing people to buy water in bottles that are not biodegradable and add substantially to the enormous waste generated by a throwaway culture. Nestlé's designs on Eldred is merely the latest water grab.
The weak and ineffectual Poconos political establishment has long been prey to powerful outside forces like Nestlé, and environmentalists fear that once the water is gone — and it will run out — an explosion of fracking will occur when the thousands of fracking sites in counties to the northwest are played out and energy companies turn their attention to the untapped oil and natural gas supplies in the rich shale beds beneath those woods and mountain streams.
The Pocono Record is the sole media outlet of consequence in the region. It has ignored the story on its editorial page, seldom has a cross word to say about the ham-handed political establishment, and has been a slavish supporter of government giveaways to water parks. One of the Record's few reporters has covered the Nestlé-Eldred story aggressively — and impartially — but says his editors are being pressured by Nestlé to take him off the story.
§
The meeting on Wednesday evening was at the Eldred Fire Hall. It was called by the township supervisors and billed as a question-and-answer session where officials from DEP and DRPA were to explain their mass water extraction permitting and regulatory processes. Questions specifically pertaining to Nestlé were not allowed, but kept creeping in.
About a hundred people filled the firehouse meeting room, a darkened bingo board and the muted crackle of a fire radio providing the backdrop.
As the evening wore on, there was a palpable sense of bewilderment. While the township residents attending included an environmental biologist, a medical doctor and a few other worldly wise burghers who had no illusion that the regulatory officials' presentation was a dog-and-pony show, it gradually dawned on others that they were being hoodwinked.
These are simple folk, and that is meant in a most positive sense. They are hardworking. Most own their homes and farms. They are churchgoers, they vote, and they are proud of their community, its 274-year history and its traditions. Many fish on the Aquasicola and Buckwa creeks and hunt in the state gamelands below Blue Mountain, which forms the eastern edge of the Appalachians.
They came to the meeting believing that the township supervisors had done them wrong, and while no one has spoken in support of Nestlé at previous meetings, hard feelings have been pretty much held in check. The homeowners who filed suit decided to keep things within the family and take the commissioners to a county court rather than fight Nestlé head on.
Eldred residents had faith in government, or at least enough to believe the state would turn down Nestlé because it would see that their way of life would come to an abrupt end with a massive pumping operation drawing down their water and possibly contaminating their wells, while convoys of diesel smoke-belching 18-wheel water tanker trucks clogged their narrow roads. And no one knows what will happen when the water runs out, an eventuality not addressed in Nestlé's permit application or by the regulatory officials.
Residents left the meeting angry, shocked and disillusioned. And many of them knew that even thought a final decision is probably months away, Nestlé already has won.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF WNEP-TV
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Book Review: The Soaring Triumph Of 'H Is For Hawk' By Helen Macdonald
MABEL & HELEN
One of the joys of life at our mountain retreat are the hawks.
Red-tail hawks are everywhere, and sometimes where rabbits, mice and their smaller feathered friends don't want them to be. There are red-shouldered and sharp-shinned hawks, as well as other raptors from magnificent and immense bald eagles and osprey to elusive owls and a delightful nesting pair of diminutive kestrel. But there are no goshawks, who are fairly rare in North America but more plentiful in the United Kingdom and Europe, where they have been bred back from near extinction.
I've had a thing for goshawks for years. They are big hawks, the largest members of the genus Accipiter. They are gorgeous and, how to say it, extraordinary killing machines whose ability to track down and capture prey is perhaps unrivaled in the bird world. They can, for example, fly at breathtaking speeds upside down and reach up to grab prey. They can be tamed but never domesticated.
My fascination with gossies led me to H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, which was a genre-breaking runaway bestseller last year and the story of how the author adopted, raised and trained a goshawk whom she improbably named Mabel because, as superstition drenched hawkers believe, the more banal the name the better the bird will be.
H Is for Hawk turned out to be much more than an account of how Macdonald, a Cambridge lecturer and experienced falconer, purchased 10-week-old Mabel from an Irish breeder for £800 (about $1,100) to successfully training her to hunt using sometimes ancient methods. She also writes at length and intimately of her deeply personal trials and tribulations, and that is both a good and not so good thing.
A big reason for the book's success is that it is as much a story of Macdonald going to pieces -- and very nearly succumbing to madness -- following the death of her beloved father, a Fleet Street photojournalist, her retreat from the human world, and healing emotionally through her kinship with Mabel.
As unsympathetic as it sounds, the not so good thing is that Macdonald's soliloquies on her unraveling and her innumerable crises -- hostility to strangers and friends, wild mood swings, crying jags and self pity, and innumerable psychic scratches and bruises accompanying the physical ones from her training regime with Mabel -- began getting in the way for me. But without them H Is for Hawk would not be half the book it is, so I bucked up as Macdonald did.
At times Macdonald wants to become a hawk herself, "to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home." At other times she thinks she is becoming a hawk herself, and when she has slipped out of her great tattered hawking jacket and into street clothes, she is in disguise.
Macdonald's prose is wonderfully unhurried -- and gorgeous:
"The feathers down [Mabel's] front are the colour of sunned newsprint, of tea-stained paper, and each is marked darkly towards its tip with a leaf-bladed spearhead, so from her throat to her feet she is patterned with a shower of falling raindrops. Her wings are the colour of stained oak, their covert feathers edged in palest teak, barred flight-feathers folded quietly beneath. And there is a strange gray tint to her that is felt, rather than seen, a kind of silvery light like a rainy sky reflected from the surface of a river. . . . Those long, barred tail-feathers and short, broad wings are perfectly shaped for sharp turns and brutal acceleration through a world of woodland obstacles; the patterns on her plumage will hide her in perfect, camouflaging drifts of light and shade."
While falcon trainers are called falconers, hawkers are called austringers, and the language of the art is fascinating: Young hawks are eyasses, adolescents are passagers, and hawks caught as adults are haggards. They are held by the ankles by slim leather straps called jesses, and the hawk by the handler on gauntlets, gloves worn on the left hand. Hawks in proper and fit condition for hunting are in yarak. And so on and so forth.
Macdonald explains that Goshawks' volatile personalities are because the pathways between their sensory neurons and motor neurons pretty much bypass the brain. Wow.
"They react to stimuli literally without thinking," she notes, and squeaky doors, passing bicyclists and extraordinarily even two dimensional black-and-white drawings of prey can provoke their hunting instinct. Mabel is even aroused by Joan Sutherland on the radio.
"I laughed out loud at that," writes Macdonald. "Stimulus: opera. Response: kill."
By the time H Is for Hawk winds to an end and Mabel is domesticated (but not tamed), Macdonald has taken us on a journey well beyond her grief and Mabel's matriculation.
This is much more than a remarkable memoir, let alone a paen to the curative power of animals. There are fascinating side trips through England, both merry olde and modern, the history of falconry and the world of T.H. White, a hawker and beloved author of The Once and Future King, the series of Arthurian novels, who chronicles his unsuccessful attempts to flee his own failures as a person in The Goshawk, a book she read and reread as a child, as well as the perhaps inevitable exploration of the symbolism between woman and hawk. (White was a failure as an austringer, but later became an accomplished falconer.)
Hunting with a hawk took Macdonald to the edge of being human:
"Then it took me past that place to somewhere I wasn't human at all. The hawk in flight, me running after her, the land and the air a pattern of deep and curving detail, sufficient to block out anything like the past or the future, so that the only thing that mattered were the next thirty seconds. . . . The world gathered around me. It made absolute sense. But the only things I knew were hawkish things, and the lines that drew me across the landscape were the lines that drew the hawk: hunger, desire, fascination, the need to find and fly and kill."
H Is for Hawk is nothing less than a soaring triumph.
TOP IMAGE COURTESY OF GROVE ATLANTIC,
CENTER IMAGE BY CHRISTINA McLEISH
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Assessing Barack Obama's Legacy: A Great Man & Good President In Bad Times
WHAT THE CYNICS FAIL TO UNDERSTAND IS THAT THE GROUND HAS SHIFTED BENEATH THEM. THAT THE STALE POLITICAL ARGUMENTS THAT HAVE CONSUMED US FOR SO LONG NO LONGER APPLY ~ BARACK OBAMA (January 20, 2009)
There have been times over the last seven years when the hope-and-change mantra that propelled Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency seemed like a cruel fiction. Yet despite taking the reins of a war-weary nation in the midst of an economic calamity and having to endure the unrelenting enmity of an obdurate opposition party, Obama has wrought enormous changes during what has been the most transformational presidency in 80 years.
He has implemented far-reaching reforms in a dysfunctional health-care system, raised school academic standards, legislated pay parity for women, revolutionized the way we produce energy through harnessing renewable resources, fought back against global warming, taken on the epidemic of childhood obesity with his First Lady, provided deportation relief to young immigrants, legalized same-sex marriage and opened new opportunities for women and gays in the military. He saved the domestic auto industry, has added nearly four million jobs, reduced unemployment to 5 percent and the deficit by two thirds to a puny 2.5 percent of GDP, engineered egalitarian tax reforms and eliminated the most usurious of credit card abuses, while today the U.S. is an island of relative calm amid the global financial crisis. He also took out Osama bin Laden, isolated Vladimir Putin, normalized relations with Cuba, stabilized relations with Iran and ended the war in Iraq.
Obama's presidency has been, as a live microphone caught Vice President Biden saying on the day he signed the Affordable Care Act, "a big fucking deal."
§
Had the Supreme Court not stolen the 2000 election, Barack Obama would not have become the 44th president of the United States. Things would be very different had the smirking frat boy from the Texas oil patch not been so spectacularly inept, had the economy not belly flopped, and had the relatively inexperienced senator from Illinois not run on a message that galvanized an electorate desperate to turn America back from the dark side.
In exactly one year, the next president will take the oath of office. That president will be a Democrat and almost certainly will be Hillary Clinton -- the first woman president following the first African-American president -- and while she is more moderate than Obama has been liberal, she also is committed to closing addressing the most formidable issue facing America: the gap between the rich and everyone else. And she is campaigning like Obama is her new best friend.
Despite anguished cries of government overreach from Republicans, Washington's share of the economy has grown infinitesimally over the last seven years, and Obama has effectively made the case -- as does Clinton on the stump -- that providing a helping hand like health insurance to millions of people is not government overreach, while interfering with a woman's right to choose most certainly is.
Meanwhile, a new Gallup poll shows that Americans identifying themselves as liberal is at a 23-year high despite the Republican drumbeat of doom and gloom, and that is a really good thing.
§
There have been setbacks, as well as outright failures, on Barack Obama's watch.
He has played much too nice with the Republicans and a deeply dysfunctional Congress. He chose many of the very same insiders for the most important administration fiscal positions who were asleep at wheel or looked the other way as the seeds of the 2008 economic collapse were sewn, and his record on Wall Street reform is mixed. He failed to keep his pledge to shut the revolving door to lobbyists who go from industry to government and back to industry. He not only did not curb mass surveillance, it has grown. He has equivocated on the war in Afghanistan as 1,700 more Americans have died, while the Middle East is even more unstable than when he took office, a situation for which he -- and Hillary Clinton -- must share some of the blame. He has not been particularly effective in using the presidential bully pulpit to allay fears of terrorism, which has inadvertently made the Republican blowhard brigade seem stronger when they rail about foreign policy.
And most importantly for me, he issued go-free cards to Bush administration torture regime perpetrators. His rationale in not ordering the Justice Department to investigate these evildoers is understandable if disheartening: He did not want to begin his presidency with Republicans screaming blue-blooded murder over what they would view as political prosecutions, although they screamed anyway about practically everything else.
Yet Obama has been clever in the face of obstructionist Republicans even if it sometimes seems he has been content with a half a loaf when a whole loaf was needed. He has made recess appointments with some success and is taking unilateral executive action on gun control. He has understood that sweeping reform of environmental regulations is impossible because of the Republicans' big energy-fossil fuel mindset, so he has worked within existing regulations and fairly effectively at that.
Charges that Obama has let down African-Americans while not adequately advocating against racism are rubbish.
Obama remains a potent symbol for African-Americans. Their lives have improved during his two terms because of his trademark quiet determination, not fire and brimstone, while I find offensive the notion that just because he's black things would or should automatically be better. It's going to take a lot more than eight years to undo hundreds of years of racism.
§
Barack Obama's style has been as important as his substance: His determinedly placid temperament has enabled him to keep his head when others lose theirs, most notably during the Ebola outbreak crisis but in many other instances, as well. He has disdained the theatrical and possesses a calculated coolness that at times can be infuriating but became a personal trademark as the challenges -- and the Republican insults and dirty tricks -- piled up and his hair turned gray.
He has a gifted ability to engage when he speaks -- that is if you are inclined to listen in the first place. And you'd darned well better listen when the subject is complicated and his explanation is complex, which it sometimes is because of a tendency to slip into policy wonkery. George Bush invariably talked down to and tried to frighten us, while Obama has talked with us, appealing to our better nature and resilience as a nation.
And where Bush was a dismal speechmaker, Obama has been inspirational.
There was his 2008 "More Perfect Union" speech on race in which he renounced Reverend Jeremiah Wright's beliefs while embracing his faith:
"I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love. . . ."The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive . . . it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."
And his 2011 memorial speech speech for Christina Taylor Green and the other Tucson shooting victims:
"I believe that, for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us. That's what I believe, in part because that's what a child like Christina-Taylor Green believed.
"Imagine — can you imagine for a moment, here was a young girl who was just becoming aware of our democracy, just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship, just starting to glimpse the fact that someday she, too, might play a part in shaping her nation’s future.
"She had been elected to her student council. She saw public service as something exciting and hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.
"I want us to live up to her expectations.
"I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it. All of us, we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations."
Then there was the extraordinary eulogy last June during which he sang "Amazing Grace" for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was among nine people slain during a church Bible study by a self-avowed white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina.
§
Yes, Barack Obama has outstanding oratorical chops. But let's recall that his opponents in 2008 said that was all he had, and John McCain went so far as to label him a "celebrity" in one of the more memorable insults of that campaign season.
Although it hardly matters at this point, history will be kind to Obama. He turned out not only to be so much more than many of us give him credit for, he has been a transformational figure who happens to have been doing the most difficult job in the world while weathering vicious personal attacks.
Underlying his accomplishments, as well as his failures, is a humility that all great men possess. Everything bitter conservatives and disillusioned liberals said he was he has not been, and everything they said he could not be he has been.
Barack Obama has indeed been a big fucking deal.
WHITE HOUSE PHOTOGRAPH
My Favorite Barack Obama Photograph
Obama bows to 5-year-old Jacob Philadelphia, who raises his arm raised to see if the president's hair feels like his.
2009 PHOTOGRAPH BY PETE SOUZA/THE WHITE HOUSE
Folie Á Deux-Do
The Killa From Wasilla administers the kiss of death to a Trump presidency with her endorsement: We need look no further than the 2008 nomination of Sarah Palin for vice president to understand when the Republican Party left the rails. Seven years on -- following two crushing defeats in presidential elections and the probability of a third in November -- the destruction that the former half-term governor of Alaska has wrought is immense. She is a narcissistic, power abusing kook and liar, and deeply unpopular outside of a small but fervent base, and that makes her a perfect match for The Donald. Great to have you back, Sarah!
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Monday, January 18, 2016
Sunday, January 17, 2016
Politix Update: If Dr. King Looked Beyond The Grave, He'd Surely Be Disappointed
When I was first cutting my teeth in the newspaper business, my editors sent me out on "house ends," visits to homes where I would interview families of interest because something very bad of interest had happened to them.
It was the late 1960s and many of these house ends were the result of the death of a young man in Vietnam, usually an Army or Marine Corps infantryman who had been drafted or given the choice between prison or the military by a judge. Most of these young men were African-Americans and virtually all were from poor families.
After a while, these visits took on a certain surreal sameness.
Although I once found myself in the horribly awkward position of having arrived before the uniformed bearer of the bad-news telegram, I always was welcomed into these humble homes. I always was treated with respect. These were good people and they knew that I would give their now departed son or brother a respectful sendoff in the next day's newspaper.
The living rooms always were modest and always had a photograph of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a place of honor, often the same color rotogravure portrait scissored from an old Sunday Philadelphia Bulletin magazine.
I have no idea how many times I sat on a lumpy couch, ballpoint pen and spiral-bound A6 reporter's notebook in one hand, a snapshot of the victim in the other, with the wizened Dr. King looking down on me as I listened to the story of a young life snuffed out by a war that none of us understood, few supported and Dr. King adamantly opposed because he understood, as few others did, that there was a common link between the civil rights and peace movements.
I do know that too many of these young men perished because of a lethal one-two punch -- their skin color and economic status. They were not white and did not have have college deferments, as did a Dick Cheney, or a daddy with friends in high places, as did a George W. Bush.
It was the spring of 1968 and I had taken a week off from the house-end grind to join college friends in Daytona Beach, Florida. Our sunburns had not yet turned to tans and we had barely finished the first of several cases of Old Milwaukee beer (with pull tops, a recent innovation) when President Johnson shocked the nation by announcing that he would not seek another term. The Vietnam War had worn him down -- and out.§
And then four evenings later there was a commotion.
"They killed the nigger! The nigger's dead!" cried a group of drunken college students from Tennessee as they danced and whooped in the parking lot of the motel adjacent to ours. "They killed the nigger!"
My Old Milwaukee high evaporated in a flash. We turned on the television. Dr. King had been gunned down at a Memphis motel. I wanted to hurt those students. I wanted to throw up.
We drove north the next morning. As we approached Washington, there were huge black clouds of smoke over the city. We overtook a convoy of troop carriers filled with National Guardsmen, rifles slung over their shoulders. The riots following Dr. King's murder were well underway, and the New York Avenue corridor of tenements, flophouses, liquor stores and churches in Northwest Washington was in flames.
The rioting spread, and the next night. I was again in newspaper reporter's mufti and took my Daytona tan down to The Valley, a poor neighborhood in Wilmington, Delaware where young blacks were skirmishing with the city police and National Guard. There were fires and intermittent gunfire from snipers atop the row houses. At one point a bullet whizzed over my head. Yes, just like in the movies.
I was still shaking when I got back to my apartment the next morning. I cried over the inhumanity of my fellow man, for my black friends and for Dr. King.
My tears came honestly.§
My mother's father was a German Jewish immigrant who worked tirelessly for civil rights and went out of his way to hire blacks at his department store for jobs that did not involve dustpans and mops. He took his oath of citizenship so seriously that he paid a printer to publish a pocket-sized booklet with the Bill of Rights, an American flag on the cover, which he distributed to high school civics classes.
My parents took up the civil-rights mantle, and to use the parlance of the time, some of their best friends were Negroes. My father was the campaign manager for the first black elected to the local school board. That and my parents' habit of inviting black friends to swim in our backyard pool alienated them from some of their white "friends;" one neighbor forbade her children from playing with my brother and sister and I.
We went on bus trips to Washington for the big civil rights and antiwar protest marches. My father, never a religious man, found the experience of bearing witness on the Mall with several hundred thousand other people to be deeply spiritual.
Like me, they were heartened by the sea change in civil rights in the 1960s and 70s that Dr. King and his acolytes worked for so tirelessly. But they believed until the day they drew their last breaths that America remained a deeply racist society, perhaps just not as overtly so, and that much work remained to be done.
If Dr. King were to look beyond the grave today he surely would be disappointed. Although he would be cheered by the advances in civil rights, and there have been many, he certainly would wonder if the progress he and his brothers and sisters bled and gave their lives for is being reversed. Even with an African-American president, that is a fair question.§
One bright spot is the Black Lives Matter movement, which is a logical contemporary successor to Dr. King's crusade. It's fair to say that a Chicago police officer would not be charged with the murder of Laquan McDonald, as well as the resolution of some other recent high-profile cases where there has been a semblance of justice -- even if it has been justice delayed -- without the consciousness raising of the movement.
Barack Obama has pretty much avoided addressing racism head on during his presidency, and that's okay with me. The lives of black Americans have improved during his two terms because of his trademark quiet determination, not fire and brimstone, while I find offensive the notion that just because he's black things would or should automatically be better. It's going to take a lot more than eight years to undo hundreds of years of racism.
That racism is so deeply rooted in our culture that Republicans like Donald Trump, who is receiving endorsements from white supremacist groups, and that's just fine with him, can put down their dog whistles with relative impunity and deliver blatantly anti-minority messages. In fact, the Republican Party has become America's biggest hate group with the first black president its chief target. Which begs a question: Is it Obama's fault that the U.S. is more openly intolerant? Of course not. Many Americans were not ready for a transformational leader like Dr. King, let alone a transformational president.
Perennial Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee well represents the They're Agin' Us view when he claims that if Dr. King were alive today, he would be "appalled" by the Black Lives Matter movement's focus on the skin color of the people who are disproportionately killed in encounters with the police.
Besides being patently false, Huckabee's argument betrays an indifference to black suffering and an ignorance of the history the civil rights movement, which from its infancy focused on bringing an end to violence against African-Americans. Lest we forget, as so many people conveniently have, Dr. King's goal was to force the White House and Congress to confront the fact that African-Americans were being killed with impunity for "offenses" like trying to vote and for equal protection under the law.
Huckabee's view, as well as the bile spouted by other Republicans, are pathetic in historic and contemporary contexts, but then they are merely standing at a figurative schoolhouse door like George Wallace did in trying to protect the crumbling facade of a political party that is being washed away by an unstoppable demographic tide.
POLIIX UPDATE IS WRITTEN BY SHAUN MULLEN, A VETERAN JOURNALIST AND BLOGGER FOR WHOM THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN IS HIS 12th SINCE 1968. CLICK HERE FOR AN INDEX OF PREVIOUS COLUMNS. © 2015-2016 SHAUN D. MULLEN
IMAGE © MATT DAVIES/NEWSDAY
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