Law, Purpose and Context, Policy & Events
From a free course provided in 2022 by Miami University illustrating the many reasons we need and greatly benefit from explicit institutionalization of policies valuing Diversity, upholding Equity, and fostering Inclusion.
https://oxfordobserver.org/8672/briefs/miami-launches-free-course-in-diversity-equity-and-inclusion/
https://oxfordobserver.org/8672/briefs/miami-launches-free-course-in-diversity-equity-and-inclusion/
Sometimes in the course of human events it becomes necessary for the ordinary citizen to speak up about the government that is supposed to be for the citizen, when it is not. The founding of this country began with a list of the bad things the government was doing to the people, instead of for them. The America of today seems to break down into two categories: those who believe the misinformation spread by the rightwing media and identify as against some kind of mythical bad liberal government that has supposedly constructed a big wasteful bureaucracy that serves just to perpetuate itself; and those who remain committed to getting good information and not choosing, but accepting, facts, and who know that our government is a set of carefully constructed tools for civilization.
Some time ago I had the recurring image, like a daytime nightmare, of America – all of us – as a woman being raped. I shared that with my wife after I couldn’t stand to quietly experience it any longer and she wrote a letter to the NY Times expanding on that idea. They didn’t print it. Too strong, I guess. It was and is disturbing because it is so awful and so apt. Since then, a letter was printed about that theme, not so shockingly put perhaps, and with good advice on standing up to abusers - discussed below.
I feel compelled to share another very disturbing image. It is that of the chain saw, used to illustrate the cutting of waste and fraud at federal agencies, but actually doing immediate and deadly harm to people. I can’t help but imagine the chain saw cutting into real people and – forgive me for saying this – with blood and bits of bone spewing everywhere. Because federal agencies are made up of and are about people.
People want a quick answer to how we can respond to the assault on our democracy, to the removal of the restraints and checks. We all need to figure out how to respond. The images above are examples of the use of symbols to communicate an emotional response. They are also reminders that we are in shock, and must work ourselves out of it. We need to organize, start and join initiatives, stand for principle, speak up. One thing is to avoid fighting each other over tactics. We need many responses, and they can be knitted together. We must have a goal not of crushing enemies but of restoring democracy, and seeking recruits to that.
One more disturbing image exemplifies what is happening to us today. One of the places the Administration is attacking is Columbia University, where there are many useful things, such as the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund https://www.csldf.org/ and the Climate Deregulation Tracker of the University’s Sabine Center. The https://climate.law.columbia.edu/climate-deregulation-tracker let us see all during Trump One just what they were doing, and how the courts turned so much of it back – saved us from the very worst. The Climate Reregulation Tracker (https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/climate-reregulation-tracker) told us what Biden restored. Now, too, to our horror but necessary edification, the Center has the Climate BackTracker (https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/climate-backtracker)[i].
Already the BackTracker has 62 items, including the announcement March 12 of the “Biggest Deregulatory Action in History” https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-launches-biggest-deregulatory-action-us-history in which the new Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said:
“While accomplishing EPA’s core mission of protecting the environment…We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion…” (emphasis added).
[i] See also Harvard Law’s regulatory trackers and links to others, as well as a database of information formerly on federal sites: https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/tracking-the-trackers/ and
environmental justice and community health: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/ejtools.
Some time ago I had the recurring image, like a daytime nightmare, of America – all of us – as a woman being raped. I shared that with my wife after I couldn’t stand to quietly experience it any longer and she wrote a letter to the NY Times expanding on that idea. They didn’t print it. Too strong, I guess. It was and is disturbing because it is so awful and so apt. Since then, a letter was printed about that theme, not so shockingly put perhaps, and with good advice on standing up to abusers - discussed below.
I feel compelled to share another very disturbing image. It is that of the chain saw, used to illustrate the cutting of waste and fraud at federal agencies, but actually doing immediate and deadly harm to people. I can’t help but imagine the chain saw cutting into real people and – forgive me for saying this – with blood and bits of bone spewing everywhere. Because federal agencies are made up of and are about people.
People want a quick answer to how we can respond to the assault on our democracy, to the removal of the restraints and checks. We all need to figure out how to respond. The images above are examples of the use of symbols to communicate an emotional response. They are also reminders that we are in shock, and must work ourselves out of it. We need to organize, start and join initiatives, stand for principle, speak up. One thing is to avoid fighting each other over tactics. We need many responses, and they can be knitted together. We must have a goal not of crushing enemies but of restoring democracy, and seeking recruits to that.
One more disturbing image exemplifies what is happening to us today. One of the places the Administration is attacking is Columbia University, where there are many useful things, such as the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund https://www.csldf.org/ and the Climate Deregulation Tracker of the University’s Sabine Center. The https://climate.law.columbia.edu/climate-deregulation-tracker let us see all during Trump One just what they were doing, and how the courts turned so much of it back – saved us from the very worst. The Climate Reregulation Tracker (https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/climate-reregulation-tracker) told us what Biden restored. Now, too, to our horror but necessary edification, the Center has the Climate BackTracker (https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/climate-backtracker)[i].
Already the BackTracker has 62 items, including the announcement March 12 of the “Biggest Deregulatory Action in History” https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-launches-biggest-deregulatory-action-us-history in which the new Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said:
“While accomplishing EPA’s core mission of protecting the environment…We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion…” (emphasis added).
[i] See also Harvard Law’s regulatory trackers and links to others, as well as a database of information formerly on federal sites: https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/tracking-the-trackers/ and
environmental justice and community health: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/ejtools.
A dagger is a weapon, not a tool to fix something. Calling science religion is another very disturbing thing. It is like one of those evil spells that make things look like the opposite of what they are. It is the religious zealot who cannot manage a respect for the truth, not the calm scientist, but the zealot who lashes out in fury with a dagger. What religion is justifying this murderous thrust? Ordinary businesses comply. Some companies – often “dirty” – (fossil fuel, chemical, toxic product producers) - fight with a seeming belief in polluting with impunity.
The NY Times did print a letter that addressed some of my anxiety about the attack I see on America the Beautiful (see blog 10/14), which the headliners entitled Rise Above Your Bully. Nechama Liss-Levinson, who treats victims, wrote that the Republicans’ “Fear of consequences for not agreeing, pre-emptive yielding to a demand, and parroting the powerful other are all behaviors of someone being abused.” She noted that the president’s behavior “has all the hallmarks of an abuser. Gifts following the abuse keep the victims feeling special and attached.” One can only hope that her advice to the members of Congress gets through, to “remember who you were before the abuse”, and core values, and to support others who feel the same way and get legal help. She tells the members that “You are stronger than the abuser. Your strength comes from a place of conscience”.
The Viet Cong used to call invading America a “Paper Tiger”. The GOP has that quality. We can stand up to it. But our institutions will also have that quality too if we don’t stand up for them. We can continue to joke about the long waits at the Registry of Motor Vehicles but our agencies are the closest thing some people have to family. They are actually a kind of humane providence to replace the absence of a protective deity. Neither a dagger nor a chain saw is appropriate when you are talking about real people, and assault and battery is not what you do to something beautiful.
With a certain lens, the right wing’s dagger is seen as a toy-story plastic fake knife, because it is an illegal tool, and seeing and saying that reduces its power. Musk’s chain saw is a kind of evil toy, and seeing it that way helps people understand this brutality as emotional immaturity rather than bold action. It is certainly the most inefficient and wasteful and fraudulent effort, as well as cruel and extremely damaging, that we have seen within or outside of government in many years. One man's efficiency is another man's poison.
Though our living beauty, the Bill of Rights, is being violated every day, we can use it to speak up. We can speak and act with faith too in what holds that up: the rule of law and respect for the courts. We are in a constitutional crisis now because the Administration is flouting court orders, so assertion of these principles is the necessary response.
The day he pardoned those who attacked our capitol and killed police, the days he fired professional prosecutors and replaced them with loyalists, the day he parroted Putin’s outrageous lie that Ukraine started the war – these have all been days when everyone should have realized that the crisis is here, the attack on our country is happening now. He’s attacking law firms, judges, media, people.
How about that our new face to the world and our own citizens is that of a bully, how do we like that? How about the attempt to restore exclusionary societies? How is any of this American?
We began as a country with a “decent respect for the opinions of mankind” (Declaration of Independence), symbolizing freedom within an order that we would establish for ourselves.
This was instead of violent competition. We discard it and that comes back.
Those programs and mechanisms put in place to bring about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion may have needed improvement, but their purpose is to fulfill the original and ongoing intent of the Constitution and the clear needs and rights of the people. Everyone who goes along with discarding them discards not just their own humanity but the essential American idea.
Liss-Levinson writes: “Abusers generally collapse when faced with a community of strength”. She advises those members of the GOP who may not love what’s happening[ii]: “You can leave a legacy of integrity and courage.”
The day we had the letter about our president the abuser the Times’ frequent commentator Thomas Friedman characterized this administration as essentially telling the world that the US foreign policy is “smash and grab”, and that Trump is a “geopolitical shoplifter”. Silence now makes us complicit.
Friedman quotes Lincoln on how the only power that can destroy America is ourselves. “As a nation of freemen”[iii], he said, “we must live through all time or die by suicide.” This quote is haunting Friedman and he says if you are paying attention, it is haunting you too. I find it also contains some hope, that if we remember our freedom, our individual consciences and desires for it, our dedication and loyalty to that, we will be strong enough to win through.
Places like the Sabine Center, Democracy Forward, the ACLU, Democracy Docket, the State Democracy Defenders Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Planned Parenthood, the ethics in government groups, the immigrant rights groups, have been saving, thus far, a great portion of our American system of law. They and the judges who have ruled against the Administration’s legal violence are what makes us great, like the original patriots, who refused to take abuse and be demeaned. Without them, we would be revealed to the whole world to have no clothing - no ideals, no protections, no offer of friendship, no idea of relationship – without them we would be a country of pretend, hollow people, pushing each other and being herded. There is much we can do now to bring life back to the America that people can love. We can breathe sighs of mourning and utter cries of anger but it is not unlikely that doing the work will be satisfying and successful if we do it with the founding principles as our guide and their restoration our goal.
[ii] Sample short list: betrayal of our friends, embrace of monsters, chain saw to our protections, weaponization of justice, constant dumb trade wars, having to kiss the ring, giving up the powers of Congress.
[iii] “These Words Are Vanishing in a ‘Free Speech’ Administration”, New York Times, March 11. The speech dictators that George Orwell warned us could come, and now have, could insist this really means just men and not people.
The NY Times did print a letter that addressed some of my anxiety about the attack I see on America the Beautiful (see blog 10/14), which the headliners entitled Rise Above Your Bully. Nechama Liss-Levinson, who treats victims, wrote that the Republicans’ “Fear of consequences for not agreeing, pre-emptive yielding to a demand, and parroting the powerful other are all behaviors of someone being abused.” She noted that the president’s behavior “has all the hallmarks of an abuser. Gifts following the abuse keep the victims feeling special and attached.” One can only hope that her advice to the members of Congress gets through, to “remember who you were before the abuse”, and core values, and to support others who feel the same way and get legal help. She tells the members that “You are stronger than the abuser. Your strength comes from a place of conscience”.
The Viet Cong used to call invading America a “Paper Tiger”. The GOP has that quality. We can stand up to it. But our institutions will also have that quality too if we don’t stand up for them. We can continue to joke about the long waits at the Registry of Motor Vehicles but our agencies are the closest thing some people have to family. They are actually a kind of humane providence to replace the absence of a protective deity. Neither a dagger nor a chain saw is appropriate when you are talking about real people, and assault and battery is not what you do to something beautiful.
With a certain lens, the right wing’s dagger is seen as a toy-story plastic fake knife, because it is an illegal tool, and seeing and saying that reduces its power. Musk’s chain saw is a kind of evil toy, and seeing it that way helps people understand this brutality as emotional immaturity rather than bold action. It is certainly the most inefficient and wasteful and fraudulent effort, as well as cruel and extremely damaging, that we have seen within or outside of government in many years. One man's efficiency is another man's poison.
Though our living beauty, the Bill of Rights, is being violated every day, we can use it to speak up. We can speak and act with faith too in what holds that up: the rule of law and respect for the courts. We are in a constitutional crisis now because the Administration is flouting court orders, so assertion of these principles is the necessary response.
The day he pardoned those who attacked our capitol and killed police, the days he fired professional prosecutors and replaced them with loyalists, the day he parroted Putin’s outrageous lie that Ukraine started the war – these have all been days when everyone should have realized that the crisis is here, the attack on our country is happening now. He’s attacking law firms, judges, media, people.
How about that our new face to the world and our own citizens is that of a bully, how do we like that? How about the attempt to restore exclusionary societies? How is any of this American?
We began as a country with a “decent respect for the opinions of mankind” (Declaration of Independence), symbolizing freedom within an order that we would establish for ourselves.
This was instead of violent competition. We discard it and that comes back.
Those programs and mechanisms put in place to bring about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion may have needed improvement, but their purpose is to fulfill the original and ongoing intent of the Constitution and the clear needs and rights of the people. Everyone who goes along with discarding them discards not just their own humanity but the essential American idea.
Liss-Levinson writes: “Abusers generally collapse when faced with a community of strength”. She advises those members of the GOP who may not love what’s happening[ii]: “You can leave a legacy of integrity and courage.”
The day we had the letter about our president the abuser the Times’ frequent commentator Thomas Friedman characterized this administration as essentially telling the world that the US foreign policy is “smash and grab”, and that Trump is a “geopolitical shoplifter”. Silence now makes us complicit.
Friedman quotes Lincoln on how the only power that can destroy America is ourselves. “As a nation of freemen”[iii], he said, “we must live through all time or die by suicide.” This quote is haunting Friedman and he says if you are paying attention, it is haunting you too. I find it also contains some hope, that if we remember our freedom, our individual consciences and desires for it, our dedication and loyalty to that, we will be strong enough to win through.
Places like the Sabine Center, Democracy Forward, the ACLU, Democracy Docket, the State Democracy Defenders Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Planned Parenthood, the ethics in government groups, the immigrant rights groups, have been saving, thus far, a great portion of our American system of law. They and the judges who have ruled against the Administration’s legal violence are what makes us great, like the original patriots, who refused to take abuse and be demeaned. Without them, we would be revealed to the whole world to have no clothing - no ideals, no protections, no offer of friendship, no idea of relationship – without them we would be a country of pretend, hollow people, pushing each other and being herded. There is much we can do now to bring life back to the America that people can love. We can breathe sighs of mourning and utter cries of anger but it is not unlikely that doing the work will be satisfying and successful if we do it with the founding principles as our guide and their restoration our goal.
[ii] Sample short list: betrayal of our friends, embrace of monsters, chain saw to our protections, weaponization of justice, constant dumb trade wars, having to kiss the ring, giving up the powers of Congress.
[iii] “These Words Are Vanishing in a ‘Free Speech’ Administration”, New York Times, March 11. The speech dictators that George Orwell warned us could come, and now have, could insist this really means just men and not people.
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