Calling on American youth to improve our national human condition

Keep marching, children- So, here it is, in 2023, and thousands of students across the nation, including in Uvalde, Texas, walked out of schools protesting gun violence, and the callousness and cowardice of lawmakers who do little- and outright refuse- to stop it.

In the Virginia State Capitol Building, a beautiful bronze and marble sculpture of Barbara Johns. In 1951, she and other students led a strike to protest the conditions at their racially segregated school.

Echo history opinion by Cary Clack published in the San Antonio Express-News:  

But let's begin in 1951:  

It’s 1951 and R.R. Moton High School is a dump.

Pre-Brown v. Board of Education, the Black high school in Farmville, Virginia., is evidence that separate isn’t equal. 

All while the white high school across town, Farmville High, has all the resources needed for the education and comfort of its students, but on rainy days at Moton, students used umbrellas to keep dry in classrooms because of the porous roofs.

On April 23, 1951, the principal of Moton High receives a phone call that two of his students are going to be arrested at the bus station, so he leaves to go help them.

It’s a trick, and in his absence a note written in his name is sent to each of the classrooms calling for everyone to gather for a general assembly. Not knowing their reason for gathering, the 450 students and 25 teachers wait for their principal to explain.

But when the curtain opens, standing on stage isn’t the principal but Barbara Johns, a 16-year-old junior, who had manipulated the principal’s absence so she could call on the student body to protest the second-class conditions of their school. 

Barbara Johns (1935-1991)

She asks, then demands, the teachers to leave the auditorium. Those who don’t are politely escorted out by students.

Moton High lacks, among other things, a cafeteria, lockers, a science lab, a gym, and an infirmary. Johns tells her fellow students that since their parents and other Black adults haven’t been listened to by the white establishment, it’s time for the Black students to act.

She called for a strike and leads all the students on a march out of school to the county courthouse and into the offices of the school superintendent. All day, the students demanded better schools.

When their demands are rebuffed, Johns reaches out to NAACP lawyers. In a mass rally, the lawyers warn Farmville’s Black community of the dangers involved with filing a lawsuit, but the students respond that there aren’t enough jails to hold them.

Over the next few months, Johns is harassed. The Ku Klux Klan burns a cross in her family’s front yard. Fearing for their daughter’s safety, Johns’ parents send her to Montgomery, Alabama., to live with her uncle, Rev. Vernon Johns, pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Now it’s 1963, and the man who succeeded Vernon Johns at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr., is leading a civil rights campaign in Birmingham to desegregate public facilities. King spends Easter weekend in jail. After his release, protests continue but the campaign isn’t capturing the nation’s attention.

That changed on May 2, when Black youth, more than 1,000 and some as young as 6, poured out of 16th Street Baptist Church singing freedom songs. Police used paddy wagons, squad cars and buses to ferry the children to jail. The next day, when another thousand-plus students rolled out of church and down the street, Bull Connor ordered high pressure water hoses, dogs and batons be turned on them.

Birmingham now has the attention of the world.

It’s 2023, and last Wednesday, and thousands of students across the nation, including in Uvalde, walked out of school protesting gun violence and the callousness and cowardice of lawmakers who do little to stop it.

One of the Uvalde students was Jazmin Cazares, a senior at Uvalde High School. Her 9-year-old sister, Jacklyn, was one of the 21 people murdered at Robb Elementary. 

Jazmin was part of what she described on Twitter as a 77-minute sit-in, explaining, “That’s how long it took for police to enter rooms 111 and 112 at Robb Elementary.”

Students have been marching with urgency since the 2018, school shooting in Parkland, Florida., stole 17 lives. The name of the student-led movement arising from that massacre, “March for Our Lives” is an indictment of a nation whose leaders leave children with no option but to march for their lives.

Their marching and activism make many uncomfortable because marching and activism always makes people uncomfortable. Nonviolent protest is supposed to make people uncomfortable.

While imprisoned in Birmingham, Easter weekend, 60 years ago, Dr. King began composing his classic, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as a response to clergy critical of him and the protests.

“You may well ask,” King wrote, “‘Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?’ You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”

And it worked.

Because of Barbara Johns and her schoolmates, their lawsuit was one of the five cases of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate wasn’t equal. 

A statue of Barbara Johns will replace that of Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol.

Because of children marching in Birmingham, city leaders and business owners desegregated public facilities.

There is a direct line between Barbara Johns’ generation and Jazmin Cazares’ generation.

So, walk together children. Don’t you get weary.

Maine Writer calls on American youth to rally our recalcitrant policy leaders and champion a movement to improve our national human condition. 

Wacko in Waco- Donald Trump leads dumbing down of MAGA cult

San Antonio Express News opinion echo letter:
Intelligence lowered in MAGA tRump crowd-think.

Intelligence lowered:  Watching parts of the MAGA Waco (aka WAKO! group think beer hall rally) gathering evoked pity for America.

French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon tendered that, regardless of an individual’s education, once in a crowd, the average intelligence of participants lowers significantly; crowd-think instead of individual rationality.

Gustave Le Bon (b. May 7, 1841- d. December 13, 1931)

This was evident in the rabble’s cheering to gibberish by Ted Nugent; U.S. Rep. (street walker Congressperson) Marjorie T. Greene, R-Ga.; Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the My Pillow Guy CEO Mike Lindell and other sophists.

The crowd evinced a foolish, blind servility to a cult leader with life-long habitual betrayal of goodness and truth.

Carlos Valle Jr., Laredo, Texas

Warnings continue to stop antisemitism- Holocaust history must be remembered

"...historian Richard J. Evans, 'The Oppermanns was 'the first great masterpiece of anti-fascist literature'. Set in the aftermath of Hitler’s rise to power, the novel revolves around the Oppermann brothers: Gustav, a literary critic and the book’s central character; Edgar, a prominent surgeon; and Martin, the manager of the family’s furniture company."

Echo Editorial opinion published in the San Antonio Express-News: 

SAN ANTONIO — In his 1933, novel “The Oppermanns,” Lion Feuchtwanger did what all great writers do: He captured the specific to reveal the universal.

First published in 1934, but fully imagining the future of Germany over the ensuing years, The Oppermanns tells the compelling story of a remarkable German Jewish family confronted by Hitler's rise to power.

"The Oppermanns", represents a dual tragedy, fictional and real, for the author is eerily prescient in his depiction of a Jewish family in Germany. It is a hard read because we know what will happen in the world beyond the fiction. A nation will succumb to hate, and millions of people will perish as a result.

In fact, "The Oppermanns" can be seen, in retrospect, as a warning, a siren alerting the country — and the world — to the evil in their midst. Some listened, but many more did not. The death camps emerged, and the victims multiplied: men, women and children, their bodies stacked in the fields outside Auschwitz and Belzec and Treblinka and …

America is not Nazi Germany, and a second Holocaust is not looming. But the rhetoric of 2022, bears a chilling resemblance to the rhetoric of 1934. Vile words lead to vile deeds. Antisemitic attacks are on the rise — and must be condemned at every turn.

We have heard vile words recently. When celebrities utter these comments, it adds poison to an already toxic environment. It corrodes our national spirit, legitimizing in the minds of some attitudes that have no legitimacy in a just and caring society.

Kanye West, the rapper who calls himself Ye, may be a gifted artist, but talent is no shield against the malignance that can rot a person’s soul. Ye, who sported a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at a recent fashion show, tweeted he would go “death con 3” on Jewish people — an ugly comment that sparked a rally in which white supremacists hung a banner from a freeway overpass in Los Angeles: “Kanye is right about the Jews.”

The Road To Hell: Berlin, 1933:
Lion Feuchtwanger’s “The Oppermanns.”

Unlike the response in 1933, Germany, the reaction here has been swift, just and decisive, especially among the business community. Companies associated with West — Adidas, Balenciaga, CAA and MRC — cut him loose, although we would say it took too long. West claimed he lost $2 billion in one day.

“We cannot support any content that amplifies his platform,” CAA and MRC executives wrote in a joint memo.

Before West unleashed his tirade against Jews, former President Donald Trump said American Jews “better get their act together,” a comment critics decried as condescending and antisemitic.

“No President has done more for Israel than I have,” Trump, who has a daughter who converted to Judaism and Jewish grandchildren, posted on his media platform, Truth Social. “Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.”

In another incident, Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving promoted “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake up Black America,” an antisemitic movie based on the book of the same title.

“The Brooklyn Nets strongly condemn and have no tolerance for the promotion of any form of hate speech,” the team tweeted.

Each incident has occurred against the backdrop of rising antisemitism. The Anti-Defamation League reported 2,717 antisemitic incidents in 2021, three years after 11 people were killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue; the figure represents a 34 percent increase over the previous year.

“You had Jews being beaten and brutalized in broad daylight, say, in the middle of Times Square or Los Angeles or the Strip in Las Vegas, where people who were simply identified as Jewish came under assault and attack,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, told PBS. “That was new.”

When antisemitic incidents arise, the entire community must respond in full force.

In a 1933 review of “The Oppermanns,” the New York Times said it was aimed at both Germany and “the world outside.”

“It is … bearing the message, ‘Wake up! The barbarians are upon us!’”

Almost 90 years later, Joshua Cohen expressed a similar sentiment in the New York Times.

“His (Feuchtwanger’s) example shows that art can challenge power, as it were, ‘powerfully,’ and yet have no political effect,” he wrote.

Antisemitism does not sprout from a single seed; it is sown and nurtured across communities and across nations.

Yes, 2022, is not 1933. But the real-life tragedy of “The Oppermanns” is that it may be as relevant now as it was then.

More opinion echoes to support #MarchForOurLives ~ Texas

Change dialogue~ MySanAntonio.com
Another "echo" published in a letter to the editor in the San Antonio Express-News: opinions blogged by me, selected from random searches in US newspapers.

Marjory Stonemann Douglas High School 

If I could shake the hand of every student who spearheaded the #marchforourlives movement after the senseless attack killing 17 promising students, I would do so in a heartbeat.

I am proud to see our future generation filled with forthright, sensible young leaders able to organize, unite and lead efforts to create a better society. The mass shootings at schools have left the country in a stonewalling debate where some have gripped their guns more tightly, while others condemn their very existence.

I feel that the gun control issue is blurred by misconceptions of what gun control entails. Most feel gun control means total erasure of the Second Amendment, which could not be further from the truth.

Raising the age requirement to ensure that buyers are mature enough to purchase a gun would be a big step toward sensible gun control.

Having more corporations follow outlets such as Dick’s Sporting Goods, which banned sales of assault-style rifles, would make it harder for individuals to obtain these types of weapons.

Reinforcing background checks and revamping the process, along with gun education, could mean the difference between life and death.

Educating our community that guns are not the enemy but rather a tool our forefathers understood will help change the dialogue and perspective of our country.

Letter to the editor from Patricia Macias

Failed Trump leadership will require aggressive repairs

#Vote_Blue! 

Hillary Clinton warned us about Trump’s dangerous views on guns.

What Trump is breaking in our hard won democracy will take a long time to repair ~ opinion echo published in the San Antonio Express News by author Eugene Robinson

As the saying goes, you don’t miss the water until the well runs dry. This deeply aberrant presidency threatens to cost the nation much more than even some of Donald Trump’s harshest critics may realize.

From 1988-1992, I was the Washington Post’s correspondent in Buenos Aires, covering all of South America. It was a time when countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Chile — emerging from years of authoritarian rule — were struggling to re-establish democratic norms, and I learned one important lesson: It’s easy to lose the habits and values of democracy, but incredibly hard to get them back.

Perhaps most difficult of all is to recover lost faith in the rule of law. That is why Trump’s very public desire to use the legal system as a weapon against his political opponents is so damaging. “Lock her up” is more than a call to imprison Hillary Clinton. It is, potentially, a tragic epitaph for the consensus view of our legal system as a disinterested finder of fact and dispenser of justice.

In the countries I covered, military rulers had imprisoned, exiled and assassinated their internal foes. It was understandable that democratically elected governments would struggle — sometimes successfully, sometimes not — to find ways to hold the murderous generals and admirals accountable. Decades later, however, the pattern still persists.

Democratically elected presidents such as Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil have been hit with serious criminal charges since leaving office. Alberto Fujimori of Peru was extradited from Chile, tried and imprisoned for years before the current president pardoned him on humanitarian grounds. In the United States, we do not seek to jail our out-of-power leaders. Trump, with his repeated calls for the Justice Department to go after Clinton, is determined to establish the custom.

Those former leaders were charged not just with political offenses but also with corruption — another bad habit that Trump is trying to instill.

In most of the South American countries I covered, transparency was a joke. Public officials were assumed to be in the pocket of some special interest — rewarded not just with campaign donations but with secret offshore bank accounts and the occasional suitcase full of cash. I reported on a coup in Paraguay that was led by a general — a lifelong public servant — who, even before seizing the presidency, had built himself a mansion that looked like a replica of the Petit Trianon palace at Versailles.
Trump and his family have refused to divest themselves of their businesses or even draw more than a flimsy veil between their official actions and the impact those actions have on their personal finances. Does the administration’s policy toward Panama really have nothing to do with a bitter dispute over the Trump-branded hotel in Panama City? Does the administration’s tough new attitude toward Qatar really have nothing to do with that nation’s refusal to invest in Jared Kushner’s debt-laden real estate company?
It’s not the potential answers to those questions that are so corrosive; it’s the questions themselves. 

As in many countries whose governance we scoff at, Americans must now wonder whether policy is being tailored for our leaders’ personal gain.

During my years in Buenos Aires, every once in a while some renegade military officer would make a pathetic attempt to stage a new coup; once, when I called home at the end of a long reporting trip, my wife matter-of-factly advised that from the airport I take the long way to our house because a would-be generalissimo was blocking the shortcut with a bunch of tanks, making traffic simply a mess.

I came to cherish the long American tradition of civilian control of the military. 

Now we are forced to rely on three generals — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, chief of staff John Kelly and national security adviser H.R. McMaster — to keep an ignorant and impetuous president from rashly triggering Armageddon.

Despite his recent joke about making himself president for life, Trump won’t be around forever. 

But the damage he is doing will remain — and it may take years of hard work to repair.

eugenerobinson@washpost.com

San AntonioTexas letter to the editor- "GOP chaos"

Republicans don't live the Christian values supported by their right wing Evangelical supporters- Melania and Donald don't live together so American taxpayers pay for two households.

GOP in tatters: Letter to the editor published in the San Antonio Express News in Texas:

Republicans can abandon the idea that they are (IMO- Christian) conservatives.

Donald Trump, who routinely criticized Barack Obama for his random Hawaii vacations, is flying to Florida every weekend to play golf, all at taxpayer expense. 

Security is costing Americans an arm and a leg, considering Trump and Melania decided to live in separate households. Considering the size of the Trump dynasty, his children, his wife and himself all traveling in different directions has greatly increased the cost of security.

It wouldn’t be so bad if he were a great president!

But, all Donald Trump has done is cause chaos with his loose-cannon executive orders to ban Muslims, ignoring the Constitution, which prohibits discrimination based on religion, and his attempt to repeal Obamacare and replace it with the GOP plan providing next to nothing. A list of hospitals and mortuaries would have been more helpful and wouldn’t have taken three weeks to write up.

Republicans, so afraid of leaving their children and grandchildren a big deficit, are not saying anything now. Not only will the debt/deficit be bigger under Trump, there also won’t be an environment left for future generations when he gets done undoing all the regulations that have been protecting it for years.

Alice Chapel, Spring Branch