Friday Potpourri: May 18th - Plessy V Ferguson, Repeal of the Debt Deal & 88 Billion Slaps in the Face

As will be the case from now on, Fridays will serve as a post to cover random subjects from the week. Most weeks the topics will have something to do with democracy, politics, government and/or civic engagement, but I make no guarantees as my interests are all over the place.

Plessy v. Ferguson: Today marks the 116th anniversary of the 1896 landmark ruling in which the Supreme Court said it was constitutional for states to have racially separated public facilities. This rule came to be known as "Separate But Equal". History will say that this ruling was struck down nearly 58 years later on May 17, 1954 in the landmark case ruling of Brown v. Board of Education. Separate but Equal was proven as logical idea in theory and yet impossible to uphold.

From this ruling the foundation for the Civil Rights Movement was forged (although quotes from MLK Jr. suggests it was founded in the earlier work of Ghandi's Movement in India) and subsequent policy leading to Integration and the end of Jim Crow law in the South. And yet, some could argue that the state of minorities in general have not improved, but worsened. Before Integration, the Black community (perhaps more out of necessity) was just that, a community. Blacks pooled their finite resources together to ensure the betterment of their race. Whether through business, the establishment of Black Colleges, professional baseball "The Negro Leagues" or merely pride in caring for their neighborhoods, the Black community knew the success or failure of one affected the progress of the race. Now, Blacks (when accounting for inflation) earn less per capita than the same year of the Civil Rights Act and are more likely to die due to violence/poverty or become incarcerated than they are to attend college or graduate from high school.

Yes, there is an African-American who sits as the President of the United States and by proxy, the leader of the free world. This is a wonderful accomplishment and should not be marginalized in any way, meanwhile a significant number states refuse to recognize homosexual citizens as equal to heterosexual citizens. California, the bastion of liberal america (if you believe popular media), actually beat North Carolina to that punch with Proposition 8 in 2008. It took North Carolina until May of this year to legally cement the inequality of homosexuals in their state.

I guess this whole time we've been overlooking the fine print within the statement "WE hold these Truths to be self evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" If we look real close there must be something written in invisible ink between the comma after the word "equal" and the word "that" which says, "unless they look, believe, or speak differently than a majority of their elected representatives."

Repeal of the Debt Deal: So, this week the House voted to amend the sequestration agreement within the Budget Control Act of 2011. If you don't remember why the BCA of 2011 is important, here's a refresher.

Last year, Congress  stared down the double barrel need to increase its debt ceiling (BTW, we're the only developed nation that actually created a need to vote on its ability to increase what is a superficial debt limit). House Republicans, in an unprecedented move, used this need as an opportunity to demand budget cuts that they deemed necessary. Senate Democrats stubbornly railed against what they characterized as holding the country's ability to pay its debt hostage with unrelated budget cuts.

As a compromise, they created a "Super-committee" of House and Senate members from both parties to create a resolution to this impasse. They failed and kicked the problem back to the House, where it began in the first place. The result of all this was discussions of financial nightmare scenarios, talk of a government shutdown and most importantly, the loss of the country's AAA credit rating by Standard & Poors. The silver-lining in BCA of 2011 was an immediate debt ceiling increase and a renewed bipartisan spirit created from the compromise . Both sides agreed to swallow difficult cuts in the case that there were unable to reach a balanced budget by the end of the 112th Congressional session.

Fast forward back to this week. The house, voted to avoid the cuts (specific to the defense budget) that were supposed to automatically occur if no balanced budget was created and approved by Congress. So, let me get this straight. Not only can the congress play wild west showdown with its financial obligations, it can take forever to do it, and  while doing it fight in such a way that the country loses the sterling credit rating that it has had for decades, but they can also decide (again at the last minute) to scrap the compromise it made to kick the debt can down the road?

I bet if I played Monopoly with any of them and begun winning to the point that they started owning me money, they'd probably yell "look out" and as I turned to see what was going on, I'd find the whole game board upside down with pieces, property and money all over the place as they walked out the door.

88 Billion Slaps in the Face: And here's the kicker! Today the House approved a defense budget of $642 Billion. Never mind that once again, Congress gave defense more money than they requested. The real problem for me is that public opinion continues to disagree on what $88 Billion of this generous budget will be used for, U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.

Since the second half of last year, a majority of public opinion about the U.S. military's involvement in Afghanistan says it doesn't understand why we're still over there and wants the operations to stop. I won't get into the justification of staying or leaving the region and what might be the ramifications. What I will say, is that in a time where every domestic penny is being scrutinized and efforts are being made to look at Medicare cuts among others, the fact that we continue to fund military operations that the country doesn't understand or agree with is a slap in the face. Make that 88 million slaps in the faces of the American people that these Congressmen swore an oath to represent.

Democracy's Reflection Can Be An Ugly Truth

It's Quiz Time Folks!

(Fear not, there'll be no math on this examination!)

Why does every state have the same amount of U.S. Senators, but not the same amount of U.S. Representatives?
Name the three branches of Government?
Which branch of government has the authority to declare war?
Who is the President of the Senate?

This next one is a bit easier:

Name the three top cable news channels?
What year is the next Presidential Election?
Name three political show hosts/pundits/commentators?

The first quiz is one that most natural born U.S. citizens would fail:
It's the USCIS (The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) exam. This is the same exam that all immigrants must pass before being naturalized as citizens of this country. At the heart of the USCIS exam are the civics and history of this nation, the very foundation of this society's existence.

Has anyone noticed that the words politics and government are often used interchangeably? While politics and government are related, thinking of them as synonymous terms would be like an electrician telling someone he or she was an engineer. An engineer may have a knowledge of electric circuits, but it doesn't define what an engineer is. The very same is true for government in relation to politics.

Politics is a tool of government, not the government itself. A government is a system of common agreements and practices which a society uses to ensure safety, security and prosperity. Politics is defined by Merriam-Webster's dictionary as: b) the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy.

What we see on cable news networks is about politics. What we see on television is rarely about government or policy, because neither of those topics is very exciting. The only places to honestly see government in action or real discussion about government would be one of the CSPAN channels or a local access channel showing a city council/school board meeting, but how many of you have ever watched or could consistently watch any of those channels? I would guess not many.

Politics, in a matter of speaking, is about what happens when different perspectives, ideas and opinions come together. When a child wants to have more dessert after dinner and decides to ask one parent over the other parent because by doing so he or she believes there is a better chance of getting the desired dessert, that child is engaging in politics. When a group of friends get together to play a pick-up game of basketball and before playing, agree on rules of how they'll play that game, that group is engaging in a form of government.

It is our society's complete ignorance of civics that has, in part, contributed to such a disdain for government, even though most people don't know what it is. The disdain most people feel about the state of this country is actually about politics and not government. However, because only the politics  of government gets attention and politics creates such a strong reaction in people, people believe they hate government.

People living in a monarchy or a theocracy might have plenty of reasons to hate the government because those forms of government often make decisions that none of its citizen have any power to inform or change. Ours is a democratic republic form of government, and as such, is directly connected to the citizens that it governs. Hating government in the United States is quite the same as a person hating the mirror they're looking into when s/he doesn't like the reflection they see.

For better and for worst, we are the government and the government is we. It does a great job of reflecting what we are as a country and just like the mirror, hating it will not do anything to help us look or feel any better. The only thing that will fix the ugly reflection we see in government's mirror is to take effective action and address the real issue which is the person standing in front of the mirror.

So, are we going to go buy another mirror OR are we gonna figure out what we need to do to take better care of ourselves so that we can once again smile at the reflection staring back at us?

Let The Conversation Begin!

In the matter of 24 hours I saw the window of possibility for the kind of open dialogue that provides space for authentic communication in this country slam closed and celebrated gladly as it was not just reopened, but kicked clean out of its frame.

Following a disturbing year of assaults on progressive social ideals, the state of North Carolina voted to approve legislation defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. And just this morning, on a national morning show, President Barack Obama said something no sitting U.S. President has ever said. President Obama told reporter Robin Roberts that he supported the right of  same-sex couples to marry. This announcement is significant for more reasons than I have time to talk about in this post, anyway, I'll get into that in just a moment.

Personally, I believe the government should completely get out of the marriage business altogether and leave that up to religious/spiritual organizations. For me, marriage is about ritual, tradition and dogma. Our government is set up specifically to have nothing to do with enforcing any religion's dogma, rituals or traditions (Save - using a bible for oaths of office and court as well as "In God We Trust", etc) and I'd say it's worked out pretty well so far. Let the government oversee the legal part of civil partnerships as it already does in business and the like, give all citizens equal rights and protection under civil unions and let the spiritual/religious institutions sort out the traditional/ritual ramifications.

Still, back to the moment at hand. In one fell swoop, President Obama just put one of the touchiest social issues in this country on the table for everyone to look at and deal with in whatever way they know how. Same-Sex Marriage. Past history tells me that this is a potentially explosive issue, but it all seems pretty cut and dry. A homosexual, is a human, not different type of species, mineral, vegetable or something out of a sci-fi flick. So is an African-American, a transexual, a diabetic, a mormon, an atheist and a communist. There is no species DNA difference between a homosexual and a baptist or a lesbian and a mormon.

These are all labels or subheadings, if you will, under the more important headings of "carbon-based life form" and "homo-sapien". In our country's constitution, every citizen has "unalienable rights" endowed by their creator and under those rights fall "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Citizens = humans, homosexuals/lesbians/transgendereds = humans, and therefore (using the transitive property) homosexuals/lesbians/transgendereds = citizens. It really is that simple.

And yet it's really not that simple because at the heart of this issue is whether or not we will continue to be a society that appreciates and makes room for different as long as we're okay with it and one that sees difference as an entry-point to a newer and bigger conversation where we give ourselves an opportunity to explore what it means to be human.

This is the next conversation. Actually, this is THE CONVERSATION. It is the same one that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and plenty of other great thinkers of this world's history have been pondering since we first began mastering words. It is this most important conversation that Obama's announcement might have just welcomed our society back into after decades with us figuring out how to get ahead, how to get over and how to keep from going under.

I don't know about you, but I think the conversation staring us in the face, is a much more fascinating one. So...let's get started!