Politics – Page 10 – The Dream Café

Gun Rights, Mental Health, and Violence

I heard NPR talking about mental health today, as if that were the big issue with gun violence. I get more disgusted with them each time I listen. A little while ago, a tweet came by from Counterpunch that was pretty spot on. It quoted a tweet from the DOD in which they were gloating about their new gunship. Counterpunch said: “The Department of Defense tweets about actually killing people like it is a sport, and some people still wonder where this country’s violence problem stems from.” Ayep.

Of course, the reaction against the mental health obsession leads to confusion, but part of it is “mental health” and “emotional health” tend to get thrown into a big bucket that most of us don’t understand, leaving us talking about we know not what. And this leads to places where it sounds as if disability advocates are saying that, yes, someone who opens up in a school with a semi-automatic rifle is emotionally healthy, which I’m pretty sure isn’t what they mean. At least I hope it isn’t what they mean. But we live in an unhealthy society, one in which our leaders gloat about violence. “We came, we saw, he died,” said the Secretary of State, gleefully praising the cold-blooded murder of Gaddafi.

At the same time, police shoot down anyone they happen to feel like without punishment. Do you know how many murdering cops were prosecuted by the DOJ over the last 16 years? Zero. The message is clear, and you can hardly blame some poor over-stressed bastard for hearing it.

The illness of a society is, as always, manifested through individuals, some of whom, for various reasons, express it in horrific ways. Sensible gun laws? Sure. I’m pro Second Amendment, but I don’t have a problem with some reasonable limitations on military-style weapons, and making sure anyone with a firearm knows how to use it.

Also, cut it out with the idiotic arguments: Anti-gun people: pointing out that the Second Amendment was “passed by slaveholders” therefore we can get rid of it is reckless and stupid. So were the other nine. Also, you might want to remember that the most stringent gun laws this country ever saw were passed in California as a direct attack on the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

Pro-gun people: Oh, come ON. Thinking you can defend yourself against “the gummint” with a rifle makes as much as sense as the Dutch folktale of the woman trying to hold back the flood with a broom. And, if the Founding Fathers had somehow had the foresight to say, “A well regulated highway being essential for liberty, the right of the people to keep and drive cars shall not be infringed,” I don’t think that would have prevented states from requiring drivers licenses.

But the essential point is the one I started with: how can we expect to take on the violence in our society when it is praised, extolled, and demonstrated day after day, year after year, by those at the very top? For the last 17 years, there has not been a day in which this country was not bombing people, and hardly a day in which a cop wasn’t shooting someone. If you think this has nothing to do with the violence in our society, let me indulge in understatement by saying I think you are incorrect.

Do You Know The Names of these Men and Women?

I don’t. I wish I did, because I owe them a lot, and, if you’re American—maybe even if you’re not—so do you. These were participants in the Flint sit-down strike of 1936. Along with brothers and sisters in Minneapolis and San Francisco, along with steel workers and coal miners, garment workers and retail workers at Woolworth, they were part of the great strike wave of the 30s that shook American society to its core, and frightened the capitalists and their government so much that, trembling, and through gritted teeth, they gave us unemployment insurance, welfare, social security, a minimum wage, and legal protection for the right to organize.

But give the bosses credit: though they surrendered part of their wealth, they were not without cleverness. And as they gave up a few little bits of their plunder out of fear that if they didn’t they’d lose it all, they pulled their last trick: they pretended it was an act of generosity. And they put on their fake smiles, and hoisted Roosevelt on their shoulders, and said, “See what happens when you elect the right guy? That’s all it takes,” they said.

And some people bought it. Some people are still buying it. But if you want to know who to thank for those few things we’ve managed to wrest from those who get rich on our labor, don’t thank Roosevelt. Thank the men and women in that picture.

I wish I knew their names.

On Political Principles

A few months ago, a friend told me that she was tired “principles,” that people mattered more, or some such. I didn’t engage on the subject. For one thing I was a little too shocked at how you could manage to counterpose principles to people—I mean, what are political principles except generalizations of what we’ve learned about how to make things better for people? But I’ve been worrying at that remark in my head. What I kept coming back to is, “why now?” Why at this moment is the idea emerging that we ought to reject principles? It reminds me of a time years ago, when certain right-wing ideologues discovered that nothing worthwhile in history had ever been accomplished by people trying to do good except on an individual, “help your friends and family” level—that the desire to improve things based on ideas always made things worse. Crazy on the face of it, but I asked myself, “why now?” This was, by the way, during the Reagan administration, which ought to indicate the answer.

Turns out, my friend wasn’t the only one; I’ve come across it several times. “Shut up about your stupid ‘principles,’ this is something that effects real people,” is the battle cry.

Those who reject principles are, in general, distinguished by a willy nilly, shifting, fluctuating attention span that latches onto whatever the upper middle class is most concerned with at the moment. Going along with this, each one of those issues is seen in isolation, unconnected to the others except by the most vague talk of “the conservative agenda” or some such. The task, I believe, is to base one’s program, instead, on what is actually happening, both on and under the surface, on telling the truth, even when it is unpopular. The middle class does not want to hear, right now, that the media flood of allegations of sexual harassment and the way the results are playing out are more than just distractions, but are bringing back the methods of McCarthyism as part of the continuous attacks on democratic rights. It would be easy to just go along with the flow, or even stay silent, and avoid a lot of conflict.

But the working class has a better memory than a lot of people realize. The secret of Lenin’s policy was just that: to tell the truth, even when it was unpopular, even when it resulted in being reviled or mocked, because the working class remembers who told the truth, who gave the warning, who pointed out the danger. Kerensky, you know, was a “socialist.” What sort of fools would say he will betray, that he will not withdraw from the imperialist war, that he will not give land to the peasants, that he will not take not address the threat of famine, and that he is preparing for dictatorship? Only an “isolated sect” could say such things. Except they were true, and the Russian masses remembered who had told them the truth when it was unpopular. The most sympathetic of those elements pleaded with the Bolsheviks to “give Kerensky a chance” before condemning him. Had they “given him a chance,” he’d have taken it to crush the Petrograd working class in a Kornilovist bloodbath.

Those who adapt themselves to the masses’ beliefs of the moment without constantly studying the international political and economic situation as a whole, and thinking things through, and connecting the dots, are preparing themselves to be isolated. Those who want to be part of moving history forward, of true progressive change, need to constantly struggle to reject the easy, simplistic answers, to understand the truth, and to tell it. Willingness to do so provides the opportunity to give a conscious political expression to the needs of the working class, which in turn can result in a great step forward in human equality. The failure to do so results in defeat.

To rigorously seek out the truth, and to tell the truth, however unpopular—those are political principles. Rejecting principles leads to saying what people want to hear, with going along with the flow. It is opportunism, betrayal, giving aid and comfort to the enemies of equality.

That is the importance of principles in politics.

The World We Write About

My colleague Fonda Lee (author of Zero Boxer and Jade City, which I recommend) brought up the question on twitter of feeling conflicted about dealing with book release issues (readings, signings, &c) when, well, the world is going to Hell. I mean, you hear about another mass shooting, and then you’re expected to go to a bookstore and talk about your fantasy novel? How can that not be weird and uncomfortable? The thread is worth reading, if you’re interested

She got some excellent answers from various people that I can’t improve on, but it set me off in a different direction.

I’m going to repeat something I said a few years ago, in a comment on the World Socialist Web Site: “No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.”

I still agree with this, and, in fact, as the pressure-cooker of our society intensifies, I think it becomes more true. One might, of course, “inject” political and world views into one’s fiction, but that almost invariably comes across as clumsy, artificial, and gratingly didactic. The point I want to stress is that these stories we tell, whether we want them to or not, are powerfully influenced by our experience and our interpretations of that experience, and that means by the society in which we live our day-to-day lives. To be sure, the influence is often disguised and can appear in contradictory ways: sometimes an outraged rebellion against the status quo can turn out deeply normative; sometimes the cry for a return to an imaginary simpler time, reactionary in feel, can be subversive or even revolutionary in essence.

We, as writers, are observers who turn those observations from vague feelings into precise words, which, in turn, form images and make connections to the experience of the reader. I know some writers who can capture taste, smell, touch, and express them in words that make me cry. I know some writers who observe and describe individual human interactions in a way that permits me to see many of my past experiences in a new light. Others are skilled at noticing, deducing, and illuminating the motives behind seemingly inexplicable actions. Other are able to reveal and explain hidden social contradictions. And so on. And all the while they delight us with the thrills and fights and narrow escapes and wit and striking phrases for which we read adventure fiction.

What I’m getting at is this: The things that infuriate, sadden, or terrify us in our world are already there in our work. The degree to which we wish to bring them to the surface is up to us, but they are there whether we are consciously aware of them or not. When, as we write, we remind ourselves not to cheat, what we are really reminding ourselves of is that our job is to tell the truth, and the more we manage to do that the more successful (and moving) is the story. And when we go into a bookstore to do a reading of our tale of elves and dragons and unicorns three hours after a mass shooting or Trump’s latest threat of nuclear war, it will feel strange and uncomfortable, and to some degree it should—being aware of that contradiction simply means one is a decent human being. But it is worth remembering that our stories do not come out of nowhere, that the same world that has produced these horrors, has also produced our story, and that, dialectically, our story can have an effect on that world.

Not About Gun Laws

The debate about changing gun laws goes on, and there is a great deal to be said and this isn’t the place to do it. Comments about changing gun laws are liable to deletion. I want to talk about something else. I’m taking as a premise the following: the US has a problem with mass shootings, and, whatever your position on the 2nd Amendment, its value, and its interpretation, you ought to agree that it isn’t the only problem. This is a place to talk about what else can be done.

Here are my suggestions:

1) Universal health care combined with improvements to mental health treatment*.

2) Stop treating war as a normal condition, and an entirely reasonable way to secure profit, which is like broadcasting a message from the top levels of society that human life has no value. Of course, this will require an immediate end to war in the Mideast, and war crimes trials for those responsible.

3) End police militarization, murder, and terrorism, which also send the message that, to official society, individual human lives mean nothing. Disarming the police is a good start.

4) End poverty, unemployment, and homelessness, major contributors to stress, desperation, mental breakdown.

5) Better education. While learning is far from a complete cure for bigotry and xenophobia—the cause of many mass killings—ignorance certainly provides a good breeding ground for those conditions.

ETA: 6) A comment by David Hajicek reminds me that eliminating capital punishment should also be on the list for much the same reasons as 2) and 3) above.

Thoughts?

*In case it isn’t obvious to you, it is possible to object to stigmatizing people with mental health issues and still believe that there is a crisis in the US in terms of inability of the society to properly diagnose and care for people, and that people who randomly shoot down strangers are suffering from some form of emotional or neurological or psychological problem.