Yes, this is who we are...
June 6, 2022
Change will not come because we looked into our national heart and found goodness lying therein. The heart of America is not one thing. It is sometimes kind and generous and wise, but it is also dark and hateful and murderous. That is who we really are — all of it. If for a moment you forget, just wait. In another few days, there will be another massacre.
... Paul Waldman, The Washington Post, May 25, 2022
(See complete article below)
Since this group's last conversation, the United States has been engaged in a non-stop revelation of who we are.
On May 5th, an unprecedented leak from the Supreme Court shifted the foundation of our legal system.
On May 14th, in the parking lot of a neighborhood grocery store, an eighteen-year-old armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle, the N-word emblazoned on its front sight, began shooting. Ten Black Americans were murdered while shopping for groceries.
And on May 24, before we could even begin to process this latest manifestation of America's never-ending display of blatant racism, another eighteen-year-old killed 19 children and two teachers in a rural Texas elementary school, reminding us yet again how this country fetishizes and celebrates guns.
The media has been full of reporting on these not so shocking events, making it more difficult than ever to select materials to share. We are assuming that you are also being overwhelmed; so we have tried to highlight some of the articles that we feel are among the most important.
MAY 5th...
The loss of an established right, a slippery slope,
and a new abortion battleground
_ _ _ _
The New York Review of Books (June 9,2022) published a series of five brief essays under the title The End of Roe? (above). All are worth reading although the ones by Sherrilyn Ifill and David Cole may be of particular interest to this group.
The Michelle Goldberg article above (The New York Times, May 6, 2022) contains a dire warning and includes a number of embedded links, among them one (HERE) to a draft paper, "The New Abortion Battleground" (Temple University Law School), slated to appear in the Columbia Law Review.
The quotation below is taken from the Abstract of "The New Abortion Battleground"
This Article examines the paradigm shift that will occur if (and, likely, when) the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this coming summer. While most commentators are focusing on what a post-Roe world looks like within individual states, this Article examines the challenging legal issues that will arise across state borders and between the state and federal government. We emphasize how these issues intersect with innovations in the delivery of abortion, which can now occur entirely online and transcend state boundaries. The inter-jurisdictional abortion wars are coming, and this Article is the first to provide the roadmap for what lies ahead. -from "The New Abortion Battleground" Abstract
and John Oliver explains all of it.....
MAY 14th...
The Great Replacement Theory
"... We can get into the textual background of the term if you want to, but it’s basically a new language for the same set of ideas that have worked to connect many different kinds of social threats into one broadly motivating, violent, and frightening world view for people in the white-power movement and on the militant right. The idea is simply that many different kinds of social change are connected to a plot by a cabal of élites to eradicate the white race, which people in this movement believe is their nation. It connects things such as abortion, immigration, gay rights, feminism, residential integration—all of these are seen as part of a series of threats to the white birth rate. One thing you’ll notice in the manifestos and in the talking points, really going back through the twentieth century, is this focus on the reproductive capacity of white women in maintaining the white race as a nation.
-- Isaac Chotiner, "Making Sense of the Racist Mass Shooting in Buffalo" The New Yorker, May 15, 2022
Read the entire article HERE.
For a PDF of the article click HERE.
MAY 24th ...
Pro-Life? or Pro-Gun!
The article on the right is the one quoted at the top of this page, written by Paul Waldman in the May 25th edition of the Washington Post.
"...you would be challenged to find a more heavily armed place in the United States than Uvalde. It’s a town where the love of guns overwhelms any notion of common-sense regulations, and the minority White ruling class places its right-wing Republican ideology above the safety of its most vulnerable citizens — its impoverished and its children, most of whom are Hispanic."
Access the article directly by clicking the image on the left. Read a PDF of the article below:
Opinion _ I’m from Uvalde. I’m not surprised this happened. - The Washington Post.pdf