Barbarism begins at home

Article first published as Barbarism begins at home on Blogcritics.

Accountability is in seriously short supply before, and especially after, massacres like the one Aurora, Colo. is now trying to fathom.

Not a moment too soon is it to say that as a nation and as a gathering of communities, we are miserably failing both the perpetrators and, as a result, the victims of such massacres.

Time and time again civic, community, and business leaders are day late and a dollar short--providing trite jeremiads about violent entertainment media or exploiting the tragedy to promote their pet cause in some ongoing culture war.

In what has now become a periodic sacrifice of innocents for the apathetic bliss of a nation, we are complicit in the following areas: first, given the depraved scope of the crime, we refuse to acknowledge how crucial is the effort to protect all children from physical torment or humiliation.

As a nation, and within our communities, we have yet to acknowledge that no individual treated with nurturing love and respect that he or she deserved as a child, is capable of treachery like that wrought upon Aurora.

One needs only to observe the magnitude of carnage to imagine what trauma could have warped a psyche so driven to commit these unspeakable acts. Our failure to protect children runs the risk of molding 'sleeper agents' capable of the slaughter movie goers endured in Aurora.

Second, and just as consequential, is when public sentiment caves in to the firearms industry's resistance to reform. As usual, gun makers and vendors prevail over gun control efforts. The National Rifle Association's sanctimonious messaging on the Bill of Rights' Second Amendment provides bullet-proof ideological cover for the ease and accountability-free purchase and possession of guns. Indeed, a $4.1 billion industry is at stake.

What possible solution could we piece together to restore public safety and relieve the anxiety of gun owners?

We begin by taking a cue from the often ignored phrase of the Second Amendment that mandates a "well regulated Militia". As it appears that a significant number of shooters tend to be socially isolated, gun registration could require owners to join and participate in an existing gun club or some kind of firearms affiliation. Registration could require a periodic gathering of owners for the purpose of reviewing safety, sharing best practices and maintenance methods. (Before the firearms industry and gun owners scoff in protest, they need reminding that all freedoms are accompanied by a measure of responsibility that make said freedoms possible.)

The underlying purpose would be to establish a network of accountability among gun owners, as well as a trust-building interface with the greater public. Firearms no longer only represent a means for individual self-defense. They have 'evolved' to pose a constant threat to public safety that merits an equally defensive response.

Cheating is profitable

"Mr. Barofsky joins the ranks of those who believe that another crisis is likely because of the failed response to this one. 'Incentives are baked into the system to take advantage of it for short-term profit,' he said. 'The incentives are to cheat, and cheating is profitable because there are no consequences.' "

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/business/neil-barofskys-journey-into-a-bailout-buzz-saw-fair-game.xml

Affordable Care Act--DOA (dead on appeal)? Does it matter?

As pundits jockey for position in anticipation of the US Supreme Court's decision on the Affordable Care Act, the outcome of the court's call matters little because the parameters of healthcare debate will continue to overlook what exactly drives costs up.

The topic remains so unspeakable--even suppressed--as if to illustrate its taboo status. However, without integrating it into the conversation about healthcare's (un)affordability, all ideas on how to control costs are, at best, acts of pantomime.

Healthcare's prevailing assumption reads something like this: medicine's success in curing humanity's ills depends on its profitability as an industry; its delivery, as a product or service, must be structured, without limit, for profit.

John Ehrlichman, special counsel to President Nixon, put it in much simpler terms. "All the incentives are toward less medical care," the aide confided to the president in a February 17, 1971 conversation about Kaiser Permanente's for-profit health maintenance organization, "because the less care they give them [patients], the more money they [healthcare providers] make."

President Nixon signaled his approval of such an arrangement and went on to make it public by signing into law the Health Maintenance Law of 1973. It brunted an effort by Sen. Ted Kennedy, who sought to legislate universal health coverage with his proposed "Health Security Act". Eventually, Kennedy came around to support Nixon's HMO bill--a decision the Massachussetts senator later regretted.

Such details help define this nation's healthcare legacy, orienting the debate away from the privileged place profit making has enjoyed for decades; moving the conversation toward the civic or humane values that our national character depends upon.

Is money allowed to cry 'fire' in a crowded theatre?

The US Supreme Court's recent call to let their Citizens United decision ride reinforces  a kind of Animal Farm persuasion that taints elections in this country: simply put, that all votes are equal but some are more equal than others. Take heart--billionaires will remain unfettered in their efforts to buy elections.

Those who defend Citizens United blinklessly assert that corporations are people, too, my friend--an argument so specious as to be worthy of drunks and defiant children. Who has yet to address the twisted irony about today's corporation--whose purpose is to manage personal liability (meaning, avoid personal culpability) for its members; and now they cling to the Bill of Rights? Not only do elite, moneyed interests want to have their cake--they want to inhale it as well.

If you have any doubt that corporations enable the abandonment of personal responsibility, you should read about the Wachovia money laundering scandal that no one remembers anymore--that not one official from the bank was even arrested doesn't improve anyone's chances of recollection.

Need a more recent reminder? Not one member of any financial institution that misled investors and spread toxic mortgage assets--leading to the 2008 economic meltdown--has been arrested.

Fast forward to 2010: the British Petroleum oil spill--no arrests. Oh, wait, the feds did recently file some fey obstruction of justice charge against a low ranking engineer for deleting text messages. It's an arrest certain to strike fear in the hearts of would-be polluters all over the world.

What to do? Many progressives are spreading the message about a constitutional amendment that would reverse Citizens United. It's a great idea, however, said amendment would have to pass through the congressional and statehouse machinery that is largely already owned by elite, moneyed interests.

The solution will require a de facto effort on the part of those who care for the common good. The challenge appears almost impossible: ignorance and apathy have joined forces to comprise the 40% of eligible voters who fail to show up at the polls come election time. We are failing to teach the 40% a civics-minded media literacy, the kind of knowledge informing each voter about his or her choices--that there is no obligation to support candidates for public office who trade their decision making for large, bundled campaign contributions. Ultimately they must learn (and it may come to the hard way) what is at stake for his or her quality of life and well being.

It's a goal comparable to Thomas Jefferson’s hope for an educated citizen--someone prepared for the tasks of self-government and encouraged “to judge for himself what would secure or endanger his freedom.”

No bully left behind

Rush Limbaugh and the conservative hacks who savaged and defamed Sandra Fluke for urging Congress to protect contraception coverage in The Affordable Care Act, deserve our pity; just as any other bully does.

All the smoke and sparks about sponsors, free speech, and religious freedom veil what Rush and all other agents of torment are telling the world about themselves. As well, all the PSA talk about bullies as a social menace, how to survive them, or about how "it gets better" (though that's a crucial message)--misses the message conveyed by their acts of cruelty. What they illustrate are the lengths (or depths) bullies are willing to go to forget or smother the memory of their own suffering (always endured as children).

Most certainly not one member of Rush Limbaugh's radio audience (numbered in the tens of millions) was present at any moment of humiliation or deprivation he experienced as a child. Yet his massive appeal owes to the bond he shares with listeners as individuals who rile up over any reminder of their own pain or vulnerability; summoning a pox upon anyone who might dare let their difference from prevailing norms, show.

Anyone who might scoff at this reality have no other way to account for how a grown adult could recklessly and repeatedly speculate on the sexual habits of a woman he knows nothing about. Oh, but Rush is an entertainer--a provocateur--wanting to reach the widest audience possible, his defenders explain away.

Indeed, leave it to Rush and his drones to 'give away the goods' as it concerns their own sexual hangups or unexplored psyches: sexual pleasure and self-empowered women rank as intolerable aspects of our culture that must--must!--be ridiculed, debased, caricatured.

The struggle against bullies demands another, mostly unexplored front--that is the threshold of their psyches. All responses to hostility should point out that the bully is just as wounded as the victim he attempts to afflict. Instead of allowing the brute imagine his actions come from a place of strength, the social menace should endure a gauntlet of reminders that the victim's greatest offense was reminding the agressor of his own weakness.

Rush Limbaugh and petty tyrants of his ilk may not reform their behavior as a result of being thus confronted; this approach at the very least reframes the prevailing conversation about bullies--that they share a deep kinship with the victims they torment to forget.