Eating your vegetables

It's no secret that I weigh more than I should.  The reasons for that are simple:  I eat more than I should, I eat the wrong kinds of foods, I don't exercise enough.  I'm not a fan of vegetables; I tolerate them, mostly because I have to.  I'm on a diet now, and part of that diet involves eating vegetables I don't like--but I do it because I need to lose weight to improve the length and quality of my life.

Over the last 10 days, as I've watched the Trump transition move forward, it occurred to me that the eat-your-vegetables analogy can be used to describe the Trump/Republican approach to government.

I have heard several people tell me, in all seriousness, that they voted for Trump because, as a successful businessman*, he can do a better job of managing the federal government than a career politician like Hillary Clinton.  The theory, I suppose, is that running a vast business enterprise requires skills that, properly applied, will make the government run more like a business (and, by extension, like a successful business).  Meanwhile, the lack of business experience means that a politician will make all the same mistakes the supposedly inefficient government makes, and things will never get better.

* I think that at best the jury's still out on whether Trump qualifies as a successful businessman.  But we'll take that at face value for the moment.

This strikes me as the kind of argument that stupid people think sounds smart.  It's fraught with problems, and it takes for granted certain things that just aren't so.

First, the federal government is an enormously complex organization that has 320 million customers and 320 million owners.  With the possible exception of Facebook, no private business has that many different constituents to try to please.  (Facebook has, what, a billion accounts?  But it has an extremely narrow focus, compared to the federal government.)

Second, for what it must accomplish, the federal government is incredibly efficient.  I'll use health care as an example:  The federal government provides health care to the poor and the elderly through Medicare and Medicaid.  The cost ratio of those programs--the percentage of each program's budget that goes to "overhead expense" rather than health care services--is under 3%.  Private insurers, who by law are compelled to spend 80% of the premiums they collect on health care services, struggle to meet the implied cost ratio of 20%.  Meanwhile, Medicare and Medicaid must insure everyone who is eligible for them, while private insurers can choose the kinds of customers they want to serve, to some extent.

Third, private businesses exist primarily to serve their shareholders.  If a business line isn't serving the shareholders (i.e., it's losing money), the business will generally shut that business line down.  Private businesses have broad latitude to make those kinds of choices.  The government has to find a way to do the things that are needed, even if they are costly.

The problem with the Trump transition--and, I suspect, an enormous wake-up call that happened when Trump met with President Obama last week--is that Trump is used to running his organization as a top-down, hierarchical organization.  Trump has the authority to decide for his companies what they will do, to hire whomever he wants to do those things, to fire people when they don't meet his expectations, and to change directions when his businesses fail (and he has repeatedly done so, apparently with few consequences).

As President, Trump will not have that authority.  The President is powerful, but he is still subject to the law.  He cannot simply do whatever he likes; the law imposes on him certain duties that he cannot shirk; before he can spend money, Congress must agree that it should be spent; and the Constitution imposes still other limitations on his activities.  There is a process and procedure associated with doing things.

Which brings us back to the business of governing.  Only totalitarian dictators get to impose their will upon the governments they head.  Governance in a democratic republic like ours, with the separation of powers like ours, requires compromise and negotiation; it requires knowing the rules and following the procedures.  In short, being the President requires a special set of skills that is completely different from those of a standard--or even a celebrity--businessman.  It requires being able to eat your vegetables, even if you don't want to, because the instant gratification of a meat-and-dessert diet isn't worth the long-term problems.

There are many things about the government that could be improved.  Trump has focused lately on our free-trade agreements, Obamacare, and taxes.  Many of the people who voted for him did so because they liked his message on those topics--they see problems with these things, and they thing that simply removing the thing will solve their problem.

Lost your job because the company moved production to Mexico?  End NAFTA.

Can't afford health insurance anymore?  Repeal Obamacare.  (Or repeal parts of Obamacare.)

Don't have enough money?  Cut taxes.

The problem with these "simple" solutions is that the system exists as it does because the system was designed to solve a problem--perhaps a different problem than one you are experiencing, but a problem nonetheless.  We might take a broadsword to the establishment, but the yesterday's problems will still exist.  NAFTA came about because it was difficult for us to sell enough goods to our nearest neighbors because of trade barriers.  Obamacare came about because 45 million Americans didn't have health insurance and mostly resorted to emergency care.  Our tax code exists as it does because deciding who pays for what is a matter of negotiation and compromise.

It might feel good to end NAFTA, but what about the American companies that sell products to Canada and Mexico?

It might feel good to repeal Obamacare, but what about the 20 million Americans who will lose their access to health care?

It might feel good to cut taxes, but how do we fund the programs that you rely on?

Governing is hard work, and it requires smart work from people who know what they're doing--from people who are willing to eat their vegetables because that's required for the best outcome.

I have more to say on this topic, but it's been a long week.

A duty to oppose

If you know me—and, let's face it, if you read this blog, you probably know me personally—you know that I'm unhappy with the results of Tuesday's election, to put it in the weakest terms possible.  Over the last 36 hours, I've been fending off some of the darker aspects of my personality and experiencing some emotions that I don't often feel:  anger, fear, depression, anxiety.

About a year and a half ago, I challenged the Republicans to nominate Donald Trump.  I believed at the time that there was no way that the American people would see fit to put him into office.  It's sort of the equivalent of electing Elvis as president.  Sure, he's popular, but he's utterly without qualifications.  (Those who watched the 1990s Teri Hatcher-Dean Cain version of Superman will recognize the election of a "surprise, I'm alive" Elvis as a minor plot point.)

So, I guess, the lesson is "be careful what you wish for."

But make no mistake:  His election cheapens the Presidency.  And that he was apparently elected with the second-most votes cheapens his election.

Various responses to this development suggest themselves.  My first thought was to move.  That's not a hysterical reaction, steeped in hyperbole.  Rather, it's a pragmatic solution to a central question:  Do I really want to live in Donald Trump's America?  Why not move to Australia or New Zealand, or to Canada, or even Belize (where they speak English, not that it's a problem)?

See, for the first time in my lifetime, in Wednesday's early-morning hours, I felt ashamed to be an American.

I didn't feel this way when George W. Bush was elected, because even though I thought he was a buffoon, he did have significant experience at the business of governing.  In fact, I believed--and still believe--that Bush was and is a good man who tried his best, sometimes under very difficult circumstances, to do his job in a way that would benefit people.  While we have strong disagreements about the best way to do that, I believe that his goal was to leave things better than he found them.  He may have failed, but I'm talking about motivations.

Donald Trump, by contrast...I can't speak to what's going on inside his mind.  But his words, his plans, his rhetoric, his behavior—all of them point to a classless, uncouth person who lacks decorum, who acts exclusively in his own self-interest, and who is willing to access his constituents' darker inner hatred of others to achieve his goals.  He is a disgusting human being who has no place in the Oval Office.  Unfortunately, the framers of the Constitution failed to include "not being a disgusting human being" among the qualifications for the Presidency.

I thought we were better than that.  I thought we had finally turned the corner and moved past that.  Unfortunately, we have not.

I should make clear, of course, that I do not believe that everyone who voted for Trump hates racial and sexual and religious minorities.  But everyone who voted for him is willing to tolerate, activate, and use that sort of hatred, as long as it doesn't interfere with their goals.  In a way, that's far worse.

See, the problem with Jim Crow wasn't only that the laws and the policies themselves we so onerous and degrading--it was also all the ostensibly good people who stood by and let it happen, who couldn't be bothered to take a stand.

So let's not mince words:  Even if you don't personally hate black people and Latinos and homosexuals and Muslims and disabled people, and even if you personally think that women shouldn't be subjected to sexual assault and degradation, if you voted for Trump, you said, loud and clear, that you are completely OK with people who do think that way having access to the levers of power in this country.

And that, my friends, is a viewpoint that I find shameful, and I'm not afraid to say it.  If it offends you, tough. It's up to you to repent of that particular sin.

So, in the end, the most important question is, "What do we do now?"

The next four years are going to be tough.  Even if Trump ends up resigning or getting removed from office—I think the odds of that are far greater than any president in my lifetime (I was born more than a year after Nixon resigned)—the next guy in line is no better and is in many ways much worse.  So our goal is to spend the next four years limiting the damage that these people have caused us, as best we can.

We will not be able to do a lot to stop this runaway freight train, but maybe we can slow it down, and maybe we can make sure that if anyone has to feel the pain this causes, that pain is visited on the people who caused it.  I don't have specifics on that point, but I do have the general solution. 

We oppose everything.

We use every available lever, every parliamentary trick, every delay tactic, everything we have at our disposal, to oppose this hateful agenda.

We use the courts and the court of public opinion.  We protest. We sue. We kick and scream and yell.  We rise up.  We say no, even if it's something we might like.

We make them earn everything.

Above all, we stay and fight, because this is our America, too, and we have a duty to save her.

America is already great

One of the genuinely bizarre aspects of this election cycle is the slogan that's central to the campaign of Donald J. Trump, emblazoned in plain script on a baseball cap:

MAKE AMERICA

GREAT AGAIN

I have spent much of the last year pondering what that slogan is intended to convey.  It implies that America was once great, but that it no longer is, and that some change needs to be made to make it great again.  I will admit to being deeply ambivalent about this slogan.

It would be easy to write off Mr. Trump's supporters as mostly white, mostly male dim bulbs whose principal lament is that they are living during a time of the ascendancy of the minority.  These people view prestige and prosperity as a zero-sum game; they believe that the body of straight American white men, of which I am one, must lose something in order for a black person, or a woman, or an immigrant, or a homosexual to gain something.  It's a better time today to be a person of color, or a woman, or gay, or transgender, than at virtually any other time in our history, so it must be a worse time to be a straight white man. 

And maybe there's something to that.  It's hard to tell someone who has very little that the little they have came as a result of some privilege they didn't realize existed.  Perhaps on some level, they recognize that competing without the advantage of the cultural weights placed on minorities might result in them losing some fights they now win.

It's no wonder they're angry.  And it's no wonder they would get behind someone who tickles their emotions in all the right ways.

In the opening scene of the Aaron Sorkin-led HBO series The Newsroom, Jeff Daniels, playing newsman Will McAvoy, is giving a panel seminar at a university, and he is asked what it is that makes America the greatest nation on earth.  After seeking three times to demur, the host pushes him for a "human answer."  McAvoy shocks the audience, then, by saying that it's not, then proceeds, in a classic Sorkin monologue, to explain why we used to be great and why, having lost so much of that, we're not.  And there is some justification for the position.

The truth is that we have never quite lived up to our promise.  Slavery is a deep and permanent stain, not only on our history, but on our Constitution, which enabled it and allowed its exploitation.  We have never done right by our First Nations peoples.  We have exploited immigrants from Ireland, from China, from Mexico.  Despite the almost unimaginable wealth of resources we have, millions of Americans live in crippling poverty.  We have oppressed women, sexual minorities, racial minorities, religious minorities.  We have burned up far more than our share of the world's energy reserves, and contributed massively to at least three global environmental crises in my lifetime:  global warming and climate change, the thinning of the ozone layer, and the pollution of the world's oceans and resulting damage to food fish stocks.  We have interfered in democratic governments around the world, often contrary to our own principles.  We have started wars and led coups d'etat.  We remain the only nation to use nuclear weapons in combat.

The debit side of our ledger is full of misdeeds, so full, in fact, that it would not be difficult to imagine an objective observer concluding that, on the whole, the American Experiment has been a disaster for the world.

And yet...I take a different view.

In spite of all of these terrible things, we are still great.

In fact, you might even say that we are great now because of all of these things, and because of what we have done to correct them.

After all, it is my belief that whether you are great or not depends not so much on whether you commit wrongs, but on what you do to right them.

This is as true for nations as it is for individuals. No one is perfect.  We all do things that we shouldn't.  We all do damage to others.  It's inescapable.  So there must be some other way to judge whether a person or a nation is great.  I choose to believe that greatness resides in the impulse to right wrongs.  And no one is better at that, as a nation, than we are.

I can remember being about 8 or 9 years old, and reading about a famine in Africa, in Ethiopia specifically, and seeing pictures of young children with bellies distended from malnutrition, and of impossibly thin people, quite literally starving to death.  There were famous appeals--Band Aid and USA for Africa, among others--centered on raising money to send food aid to Ethiopia.

At that time I was also becoming politically aware, not just in terms of politics in this country, but of the geopolitical events that shaped the 1980s.  We learned about glasnost and perestroika, Russian words meaning "openness" and "restructuring" that defined the efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev to reform the Soviet Union, and that caused me to think about what, precisely, they were "restructuring."

The significance of these things in my own consciousness and self-image cannot be understated.  They were important to developing my concept of what it means to be an American, what our place is in the world, and why we do the things that we do.  Perhaps most importantly of all, I began to recognize what a stroke of luck it was for me to be born here.

I believe, despite all of our many faults, that this country is great, that it has been great since its founding, and that, all things considered, on balance, it is indeed not only the greatest nation on earth, but also the greatest nation that has ever existed.

Yet Trump and his followers disagree.

My first instinct, with confronted with personal conflict, is introspection.  Where is the error in my own thinking? I ask.  If Donald J. Trump, or any other political figure, or my next-door neighbor or closest friend implies rather strongly that America is not great, what are the factors that lead them to a vastly different conclusion than I have drawn?

I've watched them, the Trumpites, very carefully, to learn the answer.  And they have spoken their answer loudly and clearly.  They believe that America is not great, that it has lost its way, precisely because of all of the reasons why I believe this country is great.  They resent the broadening of civil rights.  They resent the equality of women, of racial minorities, of sexual minorities.  They hate marriage equality and they would dearly love to turn back the clock to the 1950s, or, sadly, the 1850s.

See, all those reasons that I cited above, about how we've fallen short of our promise from time to time--for the average Trump voter, those are good things.  When Trump says he wants to make America great again, he's talking about rolling back the progress we've made--depending on your perspective--over the last 50-150 years.

This is not the kind of "greatness" to which we should aspire.  We're better than that.

In short, to quote Mr. Trump's opponent, America is already great, and we are great because we are good.  We are great because we want to get better.  We want more people to live in freedom and to prosper.  We want to lend a hand to those in need.  We want to cure disease and end wars and protect the innocent and to stop the crimes of the guilty.  We know that our strength is only as good as what we do with it, and we know that we are stronger when we work together to do good things, rather than when we emphasize our divisions and work to exclude others from the American Dream.
We have come too far, fought too hard, shed too much blood and sweat, and suffered too much heartache to return to the "bad old days."  

On the brink

It has been a while since I've foisted one of these blog entries on the 2 or 3 people who read this blog--just over three months--and for that I am sorry. It's been an extremely busy summer, and something had to give.

I am spurred to write, however, by some genuinely disturbing developments in the presidential campaign.

There are not many "things" that I love in this world.  People, sure.  Ideas, sure.  But I am at the stage in my life when things matter to me only as much as they are useful to me.  I have lost virtually all of my sentimentality toward objects.

But there is one thing that I love, that I have genuine reverence for, that means more to me than just about anything in the world, save my family.  It might sound corny, but that thing is the Constitution.

In the last couple of weeks, the Donald Trump campaign has imploded.  His polling numbers are showing a precipitous decline, and he keeps making unforced political errors that have cost him support.  At this point, I am reasonably confident that all Hillary Clinton has to do to get elected is keep quiet and let Trump continue his nose dive. 

I have had little doubt about this development since I asked the Republicans to nominate Trump about 15 months ago.  People thought I was joking; I wasn't.  I knew that Trump would not be able to sustain a long campaign without becoming a caricature of himself.  I think Hillary could have beaten pretty much anyone in the GOP field--she would've had a tough time with John Kasich, I think--but Trump held the right combination of appeal to the average GOP voter and utter political incompetence.

He's going to lose.  You can read it on his face, as his comments become increasingly volatile and desperate.

But there have been three developments over the last couple of weeks that I regard as exceptionally dangerous--an existential threat to our Constitution that has not been seen since the election of 1860.

The first development was Trump's decision to invite to the second debate a woman who, as a 12-year-old girl, was raped by a man whom Hillary Clinton was appointed by the court to defend.  She was reluctant to take the appointment, but as a new female lawyer in a small town, she did not believe she could turn it down without incurring the wrath of a judge before whom she would likely have to appear many times.  She strongly believed her client was guilty.  She put him through a polygraph, which he passed--and which she noted later, with a chuckle, that the experience undermined her faith in lie detectors.  But, as all attorneys must do, she gave him the best defense she could, guilty or not.  She hired an expert witness to test some evidence--a pair of the victim's underwear, allegedly with a semen stain--that the Arkansas State Crime Lab had already tested and found consistent with the defendant's blood type.  Recall, by the way, that this was 1976, well before the availability of DNA testing.  All they could do at that time was test for blood type, a blunt instrument, but effective at ruling people out.

And it turned out that the crime lab had destroyed the evidence in the process of testing it.  For that reason, she was able to get that evidence excluded (properly).  And because the rest of the prosecutor's case was weak, she got them to agree to a one-year jail term and five years' probation on a plea bargain; he could've gotten 40 years on the original charges.

Now, what happened to that girl was a terrible thing.  I don't think anyone would argue otherwise.  But Hillary's involvement in the case had nothing to do with what happened to that girl.  Hillary's involvement was to provide the defendant with the defense the Constitution says he was entitled to.  That is how our system works, and to some extent or another, the existence of the right to counsel in criminal prosecutions is very likely the most fundamental right that an individual has in being able to stand up to the government.  It is un-American to criticize an attorney for defending a criminal defendant, especially on an appointment.  But Trump has now done so.

The second development was the response from the Trump campaign to an article in the New York Times detailing the allegations from several women who claim to have been groped or otherwise sexually targeted by Trump in the past.  Recall that in the second debate, under persistent and heavy questioning from Anderson Cooper, Trump denied that he ever groped a woman as he described in the Access Hollywood video that became public last Friday.

That kind of denial is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.  Several women have come forward to allege that he did just what he claimed never to have done, and the New York Times has reported their allegations after corroborating their stories.  Trump's response:  To have his attorney write a letter to the Times, calling the allegations libelous, and to demand a retraction with threats to litigate.

For its part, the Times has stood its ground, and good for it.  Even if he doesn't know it, his attorneys should:  Public figures are fair game when it comes to comment on matters of public concern.  The First Amendment guarantees the right to publish such allegations, even if they are false, as long as the publisher is not motivated by actual malice, a standard that in practice is impossible to meet.  Fun fact:  In the Supreme Court case that established that standard, the defendant was none other than the New York Times.  (See New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964).)

Trump's threat of a lawsuit--which is far from his first against the press--is inconsistent with the First Amendment.  The free press is an important part of our country's Constitutional foundation.

The third development has come more subtly.  Now that it's clear that Trump's campaign is failing--slain by the candidate himself and his inability to keep his mouth shut--he has begun to murmur about a "rigged election."  Now, to be clear, I think we fall well short of fully fair elections in this country.  There are serious questions, questions that deserve examination, about gerrymandering, voting apparatus, registration issues, and concerted efforts to keep certain (pro-Democratic) groups from voting.  But those problems are primarily structural in that they are geared toward gaming the outcome of an apparently fair election, not toward "rigging" the election in the sense of falsifying the outcome.

Our elections are not "rigged."  By and large, the results we will receive on the night of November 8 will reflect the votes as they were actually cast.  Any "rigging" that occurs is at least a step removed from that:  gerrymandering that allows one party to maximize the effectiveness of the votes it receives; election officials who decide to "purge" voting rolls based on spurious criteria; voting machines that don't work properly or that are arranged to make it difficult for votes to be cast; and onerous registration requirements that deny citizens the ability to exercise their voting rights.  We can and we must do something about those things, but no one is sitting in a lonely county clerk's office flipping vote totals.  The votes we see will be the ones that were cast.

But Trump says otherwise--and that's something no major-party candidate has said since the election of 1860, in which Republican Abraham Lincoln prevailed over a fractured Democratic Party, and which led directly to the Civil War. Not even Al Gore, who has as strong a claim as anyone to having been the victim of a rigged election, allowed himself to make that kind of statement.

Trump knows that many of his supporters are volatile.  Many of them are looking for an excuse to use the "Second Amendment remedies" he praised at one point in the campaign--a thinly veiled threat of violence if they are unhappy with the result.  That, too, is against the very concept of our Constitution.  Our system provides for free and frequent elections, with transitions based on voting, not violence.  If you cannot commit to the orderly, reasonable, nonviolent transition of power from one administration to the next, then you have no place holding office in this country.  Our Constitution demands at least that much.

When I became an attorney, I swore an oath to support the Constitution of the United States.  Though there were other elements of the oath of my office, that was the first part, clearly set forth at the beginning and clearly the most important part of the oath itself.  That oath is much the same as the oath sworn by every officeholder in this country.  It is implied and imposed on all of us.  After all, it is our Constitution that makes us who we are as a people--not our national origin, or our race, or our sex, or our color, or our religion, but our common belief that the Constitution is the supreme law of our land.  We owe it to ourselves and to those who come after us to guard against all who would do damage to it, Donald Trump and his supporters included.

What will it take?

Oh, a storm is threat'ning
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away

Last week was an extremely disappointing week, and in some respects heartbreaking.

On Tuesday, two Baton Rouge police officers shot and killed Alton Sterling. Police were called to the store in front of which Sterling was selling CDs on the basis of an anonymous call indicating the Sterling had been brandishing a weapon.  Sterling, a homeless black man who sold CDs on the streets of Baton Rouge, was in the process of being arrested when one of the officers on the scene shouted that Sterling was going for his gun, at which point he was summarily executed, on video, by the police.

On Wednesday, during a traffic stop purportedly for a broken tail light, a police officer from St. Anthony, Minnesota (a suburb of St. Paul) shot Philando Castile, also a black man, four times, killing him.  Castile was, by all accounts, fully compliant with the officer's requests during the stop and notified the officer that he had a concealed carry license and a weapon in the car.  As Castile reached for his wallet, the officer shot him as Castile's girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter watched.

On Thursday, during an otherwise peaceful protest of the Sterling and Castile killings in downtown Dallas, a black man, an Army veteran, shot fourteen white police officers, killing five of them.  Later, after negotiations with a Dallas PD crisis negotiator failed to produce a surrender, the bomb squad sent a robot with a bomb into the area where the shooter was holed up and detonated that bomb remotely, killing him.

Protests continued through the weekend, and some of them were marred by minor violence.

On a personal level, a dear friend of mine, who was family of my family, and with whom I had shared family holidays, and who was a valued teammate on our championship trivia team, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on Thursday.  On a personal level, his passing leaves a gaping hole in my life that has predominated over how I feel about the incidents noted above.  I do not cry often, but I cried when I heard that Norman had died.

It has been hard over the last few days to wade through the enormity of what happened last week. But wade I must, because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.

When Michael Brown was killed, they said it was OK because he was a tall, lanky, man-sized thug, a criminal who had just stolen from a store, who needed to be stopped, and who punched, then charged at the police officer.

When Freddie Gray was killed, they said it was OK because he had a record and he was engaged in mayhem when they loaded him into the police transport.  Never mind that they failed to buckle him in, then drove erratically, causing him to break his neck.

When Tamir Rice was killed, they said it was OK because at 12 years old he, too, was man-sized, and because he was playing alone in a public park with a toy gun, and so what if the officer shot him dead within 2 seconds of arriving on the scene?

Brown, Gray, Rice--these young black men are three of hundreds like them.  Their murders--and yes, they were murdered--have all gone unpunished for various reasons, such as prosecutors who refuse to prosecute, grand juries that refuse to indict, and juries and judges that refuse to convict police officers.  Excuses are offered instead of action, and the summary executions continue.

Ooh, see the fire is sweepin'
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost its way

Don't get me wrong.  I am not suggesting that extrajudicial killings are always inappropriate.  Much to the contrary, most of the time, when police officers kill, they do so in unquestioned self-defense.  When a person is shooting at police or others, or genuinely threatening to do so, the use of deadly force is justified.  I am not talking about these kinds of killings, and statistics that show that more than 500 black persons have been killed by police in 2016--a startling figure--obscure the reality that many of those persons were killed because they were engaged in criminal activity that left police with little choice, if any.

But if killing Michael Brown was OK, and killing Freddie Gray was OK, and killing Tamir Rice was OK, what sorts of police killings are not OK?  What will it take for us to agree, nearly universally, that a police killing was, in fact, unjustified and unjustifiable homicide that should be punished as a murder?  Shouldn't it be in every case that efforts to resolve the situation without killing are exhausted before the gun is fired?  At what point does summary execution become unacceptable?

Since the Castile and Sterling murders entered the public consciousness, I have seen lots of people attempting to side with the police who murdered these men.  "Sterling had a record," they said.  That's true, but lots of people have criminal records; that doesn't mean they should be executed.  "He was resisting," they said.  But the video I've seen doesn't show voluntary resistance. It shows the natural reaction a person would have to being pinned down by police based on a crime he hadn't committed.  I don't believe that any of that justifies the police officers' behavior.

I can see some space for a rational mind to disagree, even if I think it's wrongheaded.  So we fall back again.  Maybe that one might in some universe be considered justifiable, we say.

And then we look at Castile.  Castile was a law-abiding, model citizen. He had no record.  He had a concealed carry permit, which he announced to the police officer and was in the process of retrieving when he was killed.  His girlfriend was in the car. Her four-year-old child was in the car.  He did everything right, and the cop shot him anyway.

He was straight-up murdered.

Nevertheless, I've seen some half-hearted defenses.  "The video just shows the aftermath, not what happened before," they said. "Wait for the body camera video," they said.  "He didn't say the right words when talking about his CCL," they said.

Here we have a case that's clear-cut, for which there is simply no defense.  Perhaps the officer feared for his life.  But that fear was irrational. It was based not on objective facts or a rational interpretation of the situation, but on the unfounded belief that Castile was about the put the officer's life in danger.  What was the basis of that belief?  It's hard to imagine a situation in which a white man gets summarily executed for trying to notify the officer about a gun in the car.

You would think that reasonable people, on those facts, might be willing to concede that the Black Lives Matter movement has a point.  Maybe all those extrajudicial killings aren't as justified as we thought.  After all, if those killings were based on the race of the decedent, they are per se unjustifiable.  We've all been told that this sort of thing doesn't happen.  We were told that with Michael Brown and Freddie Gray and Tamir Rice and all the others.

But maybe that was a lie.

What will it take for white people to admit that it was a lie?

What will it take for white people who defend these bad-apple police officers to admit that, to them, black lives haven't really mattered much?

What will it take for the white people who have spent so much time and effort pointing out that ALL LIVES MATTER that it's really just an effort to enforce a status quo in which black lives don't matter at all?

What will it take for these people to understand that BLACK LIVES MATTER doesn't mean BLACK LIVES MATTER MORE but BLACK LIVES MATTER TOO?

What will it take for everyone to recognize that true support for police departments means making it not just possible, but reasonable, and expected, that bad cops get prosecuted for their crimes and get removed from police work?

The floods is threat'ning
My very life today
Gimme, gimme shelter
Or I'm gonna fade away

There is an old saying that to love your country means accepting what it does, right or wrong.  I have never subscribed to that view at all.  I love my country.  And when it does something wrong, I have a responsibility, based on that love, to say so and to do everything in my power to correct it.  The same goes for police.  I have a deep, abiding respect for the good people who serve us as police officers.  They put themselves on the line for us.  When we run away from danger, they run toward it.  But when bad police commit crimes, they don't just harm the people they damage directly.  They harm everyone by undermining the respect we have given them.  And when good cops and prosecutors allow bad police to flourish without consequences, even if all they are doing is standing idly by, they become as bad as the bad cops.  Their inaction is a poison.

That's why what happened in Dallas, a city I work in and live near, was so horrifying.  Like many large urban police departments, Dallas PD has made a strong effort to root out bad police and to re-earn the respect of the people they serve. They have worked to get the poison out. The five police officers who died, and the nine others who were injured, were protecting people who were protesting against police brutality.  They deserved better than they got.  I am not sorry that the man who killed them is dead, and aside from his family, I doubt you'd find many people who are sorry.

War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away

But maybe the tide is turning.  The old bigots are being exposed.  Finally, we're seeing some recognition of the point that some of us have been making for a long time--grudging recognition, but that's progress.  In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch said, "First of all, if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."  What will it take?  I say that would be a good start.

I tell you love, sister, it's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
It's just a kiss away
Kiss away, kiss away

Lyrics from "Gimme Shelter" by M. Jagger and K. Richards. Copyright © 1969 ABKCO Music, Inc.

Sadness

One of the things that makes me me is my ability to compartmentalize my life.  Most of the time, we lawyers are spending our time getting paid to deal with other people's problems.  I don't think I could do my job without the ability to separate what I'm doing, when I'm lawyering, from the other things that I do.

And when I have other responsibilities or problems or tough times, if I can't do something about a bad thing right away, I tend to push it out of my active thought pattern until I can do something.

Just don't think about it.

The same goes for events.  Although the case could be made that these times we live in are the greatest times for humans of all time, and I certainly believe that the best for us is yet to come (and my only true regret in life is that I won't live long enough to see what we become), sometimes bad things happen.  And I have to go on, somehow.

Just don't think about it.

A very bad thing happened late in the night last Saturday.  A gunman who apparently had delusions of being affiliated with ISIL, who was a Muslim (although I'm not sure that it's entirely relevant to what happened), and who very probably was fighting some personal issues regarding his sexuality, armed himself with a high-powered rifle, went to a gay bar in Orlando, and opened fire, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others before he was killed by police.

I don't know how to deal with that emotionally, so I haven't.  I've just pushed it back.  That's my process.

 Just don't think about it.

Instead, I've spent more time over the last week than I usually would explaining, yet again, why we need to make some changes to our laws and our processes to try to keep this kind of thing from happening again.  I also wrote a blog entry, which you can read, expressing my frustration with people whose first, and usually only, inclination when hearing this horrible news is to hop onto social media and make sure that everybody sees they are #prayingfororlando.

But I haven't written or spoken publicly about the deep sadness I feel for what happened.

Now, with some space, I have to think about it, and to write about it.

I have more gay friends than I would have thought possible 25 years ago.  I have always considered myself liberal and open-minded to a fault, but for a long time I had a blind spot when it came to homosexuals.  I was for their freedom in theory, and I certainly respected their right to exist without persecution.  I was for gay marriage long before it became legal anywhere in the world.  But on a personal level, I felt uncomfortable around homosexuals.  My immature brain told me that if I wanted a political career--something I considered long before--it would be better not to get too close, to distance myself from people who were pariahs in our society.  If I ever wanted to be elected to high office, it would be better not to have any whispers about my being close with gays.

When I look back on that me, even though I understand the logic behind my rationalization, I very nearly don't recognize myself.  As a general proposition, I've always thought that the best way to act was to be nice to everybody, even the people nobody else is nice to.  Especially the people nobody is nice to.  I never had a problem applying that principle to people who didn't have as much money as I did, or who weren't as smart as me, or who had physical or mental disabilities, or who were of a different race, or who just weren't popular.  But I had a blind spot when it came to homosexuals.  That was something to snicker about, to make cutting remarks, to tease.  I'm sure the work "fag" escaped my lips on more than one occasion.  I really don't know why I was like that.  But I am deeply ashamed of it.

When I came to realize how wrongheaded I was, I changed.  Now, my 40-year-old self doesn't care what people think about me.  I count many gay people as friends, some as close friends (and I wish I had more). Somewhere along the line I began to recognize that if you have any hope of being a good person in this world, you have to be a friend to others first.  If wealth or power or status flow from that, it's great.  But being wealthy or powerful or famous is meaningless if you treat people poorly on your road to getting there.

When I think about what happened in Orlando, I think about N and J and T and D and C and B and E and T and A and R and L and P, and about so many more, some of whom are out and proud, and some who stand with one foot in the closet.  I think about them having fun in a place that is supposed to be safe for them to be, where they can be themselves, not hiding from a society that still treats them as second-class citizens. 

And I think about the violation of their safe space. 

And I weep. 

I almost never cry; I'm not wired that way; but this is an exception.

Just don't think about it, my brain pleads.  I ignore the request.

It could have been any of them.  And for someone out there like me, it was one of them. Or 49 of them. 

It makes me angry.  I'm full-on livid, in fact.  You see, we're not done yet.  We're on a long journey toward equality.  We've taken a few really big steps, but the road ahead of us is perilous and filled with obstacles. I can see the future we are working toward, and it is beautiful.  And 49 people who should've had the chance to see it, won't.

And it reminds me that I am mortal.  I will not see how it turns out.  None of us will.  And that is my sadness.

But we can't stop.

Don't pray. Act.

I'd like to think that I need to know about humanity can usually be gleaned from my Facebook feed.

But lately I've been giving some consideration to turning it off for a bit.

It was predictable, you see.  A horrible thing happened over the weekend in Orlando.  The most visible reaction on my Facebook feed was "Prayers for Orlando."  Sometimes it was styled with a hashtag:  #prayersfororlando.

I try really hard to accept that as the response people have to a tragedy.  There are many well-meaning people who want to express their sorrow, their grief.  For some, it is merely to say, "I'm thinking about you, and I acknowledge the grave thing that has happened to you."

If you are a believer, I suppose it's a rational response.  I accept that those who offer it are entirely pure-hearted about it.

But when I read it, or hear it, I get this terrible heavy choking feeling in the pit of my stomach.  It's a physical, visceral response to these stimuli, like all my internal organs are being squeezed and shunted to the side as the hurt and the anger and the sadness wash through me.  It is terrible and disgusting, like a vomit that won't come out. 

See, I've heard it before.  Yesterday it was "Prayers for Orlando."  Before that it was "Prayers for the Netherlands."  And before that it was "Prayers for Paris."  And "Prayers for San Bernardino."  And Prayers for Oregon."  And "Prayers for Charleston." And "Prayers for Paris" again.

Lots of prayers.  Poor return on the investment, mostly because—and I recognize that this is an uncomfortable truth—prayer is, for many people, what you do when you can't, or won't, or don't want to, do anything else.

So, don't pray.  Don't pray for Orlando.  Don't pray for anywhere else in the world that has suffered this kind of violence.  Don't pray for war-torn areas, for refugees fleeing the destruction of their homes, for famine-stricken areas, for those suffering from disease.  Because all of those prayers are meaningless if all you're going to do is pray.  They mean nothing if you're not going to back them up with action.

Give blood.  Donate money.  Volunteer.  Ask someone who's hurting what you can do to help.  Advocate for better laws.  Vote. 

When you hear someone say that the people killed or injured in Orlando deserved it because of their lifestyle, speak up and say no--no one deserves this.

Write. Speak. Spend. Vote. Give.

Then grieve.  Then resolve to make the situation better, and do something else that moves us toward that.

And once you've done something, if you want to pray, go ahead.

But not before.