Benign Neglect

Richard Nixon, after a few years of racial unrest, versus hundreds of years of slavery, brutality and even genocide, remarked that what American needed now was a few years of "benign neglect".

And this was after the civil rights "unrest" of 1960 to 1970.  

Ten years of unrest, versus almost three centuries of racism, segragation, discrimination and murder.

Yesterday, President Obama remarked that what we are seeing in the recent protests, most peaceful, is the product of years of indifference.

There is that term again, except this time the President was not calling for more of it, but calling for it to end.

I taught and led in lower socio-economic areas for over half of my educational career.  I saw everyday the product of "benign neglect" and "indifference" in the hopelessness of school children.

The memories are too numerous to recount.  It was a culture of very limited chances.  On the Grindstone Rancheria there was a culture of despair, with drugs and alcohol prevalent, sexual and physical abuse rampant and suicides common.

In Del Paso Heights, there was violence and a feeling of anger, repressed rage for the second class citizenship that people were doomed to from birth. 

In the 1970s in Del Paso Heights, a mostly minority school district was dominated by whites.  The sports teams were great, the test scores were not so great.  We had African American leadership, but little opportunity.  The district had police, and bands of teens roamed the halls, beating those who looked differently from them.  Teachers and aides were also fair game and you were schooled to not go alone across campus.  

I will never forget after a football awards ceremony, the star quarterback for Grant High School came up to me and asked me how to get into college, "Because if I don't get out of here I will be dead before I am 25".  

I gave him some advice, and he was dead, I found out later, by 22.

And what reaction was there from the "dominant culture"..indifference.

That is the incidious part, the indifference.  No longer do you see much blantant racism, it has gone underground via a "New Jim Crowe" that incarcerates African Americans and Latinos at high rates, wiping out whole generations of young colored generatioins.   

Native Americans now have casinos, but little else, as their suicide rate is climbing.

And we have a conservative plutocracy in the country, that threatens to run it...into the ground of denial and indifference.  Fox News puts up a wall of denial; the con is that racism is dead in America, discrimination is over, no need for any affirmative action, even though all the statistics show little progress for people of color since 1960.  The United States has not put a dent into racism in this country!

People of color know there will be no change, there has been so little so far after the sacrifices of Dr. King...so few. The white dominate culture is firmly in control, the rich get richer and poor, poorer.

The statistics don't lie either, if you are of color your chances for success in this country are way lower than if you are white.

We live in a country of lies and of radical right indifference, that often result violent denial.

So police profile, they kill people of color in higher percentages than whites, and they are never held accountable.

And the streets are mean where the Police work, and they get mean as a result, going from those who should protect and serve, to those who protect themselves and beat down the enemy, who is the community they are paid to protect.  

Until recently the white dominant culture neglected these realities.  

The neglect never has been benign!  The indifference is deadly!

Entrepreneur or fool?

Entrepreneurs: I just left an "idea" on the website of the California entrepreneur who wanted to split California into six states. My "idea" was to consolidate local school districts;not exactly a new idea breakthrough.

What bothers me about these "thinkers" is most of them are engineers by training. Now, some of my best friends are engineers, but they make rotten governors. 

Public Administration is actually a skill set. In our democracy it is one that is constantly criticized by businessmen and women who , because they can run a business, think they can govern. 

I am always reminded of the most spectaculor failure of an engineer trying to govern: Herbert Hoover.

Hoover was a man of business, who trainwrecked the American government.

Now to be fair, Hoover was a product of his time. In 1930 government had a minimal role to play in the economy. Free enterprise was nearly completely unregulated, and had put the country in the ditch for years.

The Great Depression taught the country that government regulation of the economy and bureaucracies were not bad.

Today we hear calls  to eliminate these same regulations as "bloated" and ineffective. That may be true that  some that are outdated, but the basic truth that government requires, well, laws, regulations and GOVERNMENT.  

And the free thinker , who is collecting ideas, as if they haven't been been made countless times before, is almost ludicrous.  It is like only business technology billionaires can come up with ideas to reform government.  You are talking fish out of water here.  They don't have a clue!

Over 300 million people live in the United States. The vast majority of the population live in highly complex urban environments. How on earth can we govern this with the minimalist approach of conservatives is beyond me?  

What we get with small government is ALWAYS poor government, poverty and ultimately, violence.

The Marshall Plan is given credit for saving Europe from Communist take over after WWII.  The reason it worked is Marshall recruited local government experts to rebuild war torn countries and public bureaucrats who knew how to make cities work.  And he got them cheap, many still had enlistments and were in the service, or extended to do the work for a few year; and Europe rebounded faster than anyone imagined.

Credit American City Managers, sewage experts, firemen, police; etc., all those mundane bureacrats that conservatives criticize every day.  

President George W. Bush imagined Iraq as a new conservative Marshall Plan.  He promised that a conservative approach, with privatization not public administration would rebuild Iraq cheaper and better, calling his efforts a new "Marshall Plan" for Iraq.  

Nobody calls it that anymore.  Bush's efforts were wrong headed and a disaster.   Water systems STILL don't work, billions of dollars were basically ripped off by private contractors and nothing works.  This led to a rebirth of opposition to American efforts for reform, sectarian violence, and a train wreck.

Why, well go back to 1930 and Hoover, and you find the same thing.  Anti-government politicians make rotten governors.  

Now , we have made the horrible mistake of allowing big money and corporations to buy what government we have, rendering state and local governments ineffective and actually aiding the huge gap between the rich and the poor.

We need government with a new reform movement, not to get rid of government, but get private enterprise whores out of it. Otherwise, we can brainstorm all we want, it won't work!  It has never worked before, witness Hoover and lately Bush.  

There is a saying, "The People get the government they deserve".  

Another Nameless Faceless Indian

She was a beautiful girl and very intelligent.  She was the top student in her class and would have been headed to a major college except for the "Rez".

You see on trhe "Rez" any Native American, especially a girl, who excelled in school was seen as uppity, as being stuck up, "acting better than us".  

And the pressure was telling.  I met with the girl for hours to try to bolster her spirits.  Our counselor did so as well, literally helping the girl question by question to fill out her financial aid forms.

The girls mother came in and we talked for hours as well,as to what we could do.  The girl  was depressed, angry, disorientated even and scared.  She had never been off the "Rez", had barely travellel at all.  She was a local Native American, had attended the school district all of her life.

And she was a winner.  She was one of those I met in my 35 years in education who you just knew was going to do great things.

So graduation came, she was Valedictorian and she prepared to attend Yuba College and end her "Rez" stay.

I retired that year.  In the fall I received a letter from her mother, thanking me for the countless hours of counseling, and informing me her daughter had at the last minute changed her mind, had got a boyfriend and moved to Willows.  At least she was out of here the mother said.  She hoped her daughter would enroll in Yuba College in the winter semester.

A year later the letter came.  The girl had hung herself.  She was gone.  Yet another Native American statistic, of a number that shoulld shame us all, more Native Americans commit suicide by percentage than any other group in America.  So a flame for the future, a hope for us all, was extinguished at 20 years old.

This last week I did a WASC in a remote area of California (I won't give the location for reasons you will soon know).  The next to last day of the visit, the Principal came to us and told us the visit would be very different.  A "sporatic student", a Native American sophomore who lived on the "Rez" had hung herself.  The girl had drug issues was all the Principal said.

The girl was 15 years old.  

A little over a century ago, this country deliberately stole billions of acres of land from countless Native American tribes.  Then a system of genocide killed millions.  The ones who were left, were "civilized" with a system of reservations, forced into inhuman conditions, and then took the children away to be "Americanized".  Carlillle Indian School put five year olds into uniforms, locked the children in dorms, with no mothers and little adult supervision, beat the children if spoke their native language, and produced Jim Thorpe, America's Greatest Athlete.

Later, his coach, Pop Warner, moved on to Stanford, who changed its mascot to Indians.  When I played there I was an Indian....Stanford changed it mascot to Cardinal because the history you are reading here, and some alumni still are upset.  We had a African American quarterback, who the publicity department put a Indian Headress on, and made him into a Chief as quarterback.  He wasn't Native American.  And the "song dollies", all white, put on short little skirts with Native American logos on them, the tom tom would sound, and here came the wild Indians.  

Later, when I found out the whole story that I was part Cherokee it made me ill!  And today we still have the Redskins, the Braves, the Utes, the Seminoles; etc.  

Meanwhile a wasteland of cultural destruction resulted in generations of alcoholism, drug use and yes suicide.  The noble savage and brave warriors the cartoons white culture put on the sides of football helmets, were in reality living in poverty, hopelessness and yes, suicide!

And, if it could be worse, then the dominiant culture discovered oil, took even more land, and plunged us into an industrial age that has loaded the atmosphere with CO2, cut all the trees down, and today it will be 95 degrees in Redding, California in April, and it hasn't rained for weeks.

Death, destruction, hate, genocide, environmental genocide; you name it, the white dominiant culture did it.  And they are still doing it!

Fifteen years old and hung from a door in her "Rez" room.  Twenty years old and dead of a deliberate overdose  and she was the top graduate in her class, with a limitless future.

You see, that is what it did, the American Holocaust, it killed the future for millions of Native Ameircans:including  my great great grandfather who was lynched because he was a Cherokee and married a white woman: and they made the children watch.

Several Native American Chiefs talked about this tragedy and foretold the furture.  They speak of a Reckoning, a time when nature and the Great Mystery, reacted to the holocaust, and strikes back at the invaders.

I have grandchildren.  I don't want them hurt no matter what.  They are a small amount mixed blood, with Cherokee history as part of them.  

But the dominant white culture continues in its headlong rush to reckoning.  Republicans don't believe in global climate change.  They scoff at any laws to build human beings rather than Apple watches.  They cut education.  They cut aid to the poor.  And they have cut assistance to Native Americans always....Democrats have done this too.  It as if the dominant culture does the same thing over and over expecting a different result, but their greed blinds them to the enormous danger!

Reservations and Racherias are not very nice places.  They are underfunded and underserved.  Only the Casino movement has helped put some money into education, health and welfare, but only for a small minority: and even they are fighting amongst themselves for the bounty, as their white masters stand back and chuckle.

But someone else is not chuckling.  The Great Mystery is not laughing.  And the reckoning is coming for all of us, a living hell on earth, of wars, starvation and ultimate the extinctiion of us all

I hope those two beautiful souls are in a better place.  I know we aren't!