The real "us against them": We must all come together to face economic predators

Once native people lived all across this land—18 million by many estimates. They had thriving towns, farms, cities, nations with laws and vast lands populated by ancient tribes.

The first Europeans to come may have been among the privileged and well-connected, sent by monarchs to claim land for their overlords. But more followed and these were mostly the poor--the workers, the landless, the desperate, those set outside the law. They worked on indenture or were beholden to company towns. And things went even worse for the native people, who died by genocide and disease. Then the overlords brought African people to this land, already in chains.

It is hard to sort out who was more victim and how many times. Often the greatest injustices were those perpetrated by some who were already victims themselves. When poor landless whites faced the choice between starvation labor in eastern factories or a desperate trek to occupy land where native people still lived, they were already caught in a trap. If they wanted a hope of living free at least for a few generations, the choice was to send the men on ahead to scout a piece of land, mark the corners and then travel back east to register their claim. Then they moved their families west in a migration so hard and dangerous that only sheer desperation could spur them to it. And the people already on the land often fought back.

Creative commons image of light snow over fall leaves in front of a rundown neighborhood view by James jordan via flickr.com

There were exceptions, of course. There were a few who crossed the cultural divide and joined forces—white and native together. And these often were the strongest of them, but they were rarely allowed anything but the margins of society. They were, after all, the greatest threat to the rulers of industry and commerce--people of the lower classes, joined across divides.

Today, most of the people who support Trump’s overtly racist regime are poor and marginalized themselves. The administration is seeking a second ethnic cleansing of our country, and those they call to do the dirty work (the deputized paramilitaries called “federal agents”) are those only somewhat less desperate--the people who were recently forced from steady middle-class jobs by the machinations of technology giants and international finance. They were never given much beyond a factory-work education, and all that talk of retraining them for new technologies was never serious. Instead, they’ll be used, at least temporarily, as masked agents to rip families apart, brutalize those with the “wrong” skin color, tear people from their homes and deport people to countries they have often never lived in at all.

I live in a scrappy, working-class neighborhood in a red town in a deep red county. There are known “meth houses” on nearly every block. But interspersed with them, side by side, there are the homes of struggling families, people who work full-time at Walmart and can’t afford food, people who work at the trailer plant or on the railroad or in timber. A few work for the schools or as social workers. Some are retired.

The better houses here are the ones with patchy, partly green lawns and a few flowers. The homes are low and weathered, but the people who are still trying have painted a bit of trim semi-recently or fixed a broken step. There are no easy places here—only the homes of those who have given up and of those who are still fighting for another day of survival.

And most of them support the regime of ethnic cleansing. They want someone to blame for their struggle because it’s obvious to everyone that it should not be this hard, that working full-time has to be enough to survive. There must, then, be someone stealing away our hopes.

Their myriad screens have an answer. It’s the foreigners, the immigrants, the furtive brown faces at windows in some of the rental homes on the edges of town, in the agricultural camps along back roads in the summer, in the back lots of construction-supply stores. “They are the problem.” They are “criminals” or just vaguely “illegal” to begin with. And most of my neighbors believe it.

I try to tell them the facts, the history, the way it’s always been. These quiet neighbors of ours are not illegal. Many are not even immigrants. Some have lived here since before white people came. Others have lived here for 30 years or for a few generations. Many have no other home. But most importantly, they are like us, just struggling to survive. They work for less, take less, exist on less even than we do. And it’s all because of the same thing—the tyrants of industry and commerce, slightly changed in their methods from 200 or 400 years past, but essentially the same, and in an eerie number of cases, they have the same family names, passed down by wealth and privilege.

When, on occasion, my neighbors allow me to explain this, their eyes drift across the tracks, to the nicer houses across town, the tall windows and gabled rooves, the pretty yards with plentiful water and old trees. These, they nod, are the rich. But it’s hard for them to believe that these people are the enemy. They are the doctors who helped their old parents, the lawyers who settled their divorce, the professors who taught the lucky few who went to college and the people who work in the offices. They know them far more than they know those furtive shifters, and so they return to their original belief quickly enough.

I cross the tracks nearly every day, to go to the little health-food shop, the farmers’ market, the bank, the doctor’s office or some other errand. Most of my neighbors drive over the tracks in battered sedans and belching pick-ups. I walk, the gray wind whipping my coat around my knees, because I cannot drive and have no vehicle. And nearly every day, a train stops on the tracks, carrying our timber off to distant cities, carrying away the trailers from the plant, carrying back crates and crates of things sold to us down at Walmart and the other big stores, and more than anything carrying all the goods of America from city to city, merely passing through our mountains. The trains block the road for a good 30 minutes and I stand in the icy wind of winter or the scorching heat of summer.

And when I can wait no longer or when I must get to a doctor’s appointment if I don’t want to lose my place in a waiting game of many months, I call a friend to give me a ride. He drives a red 4Runner and he lives in one of those bigger, nicer houses on the other side of the tracks. He can drive around the blocked railroad on the larger roads to get me. He’s a kindly older man, a friend of my mother’s, who has worked as an insurance appraiser all his life. Because of that, he can be certain that he has earned all he has--his comfortable house in the better part of town with a large yard and in-ground swimming pool and two vehicles in a two-car garage. He worked for what he has, and he looks at the broken-down houses of my neighborhood with benevolent disdain.

“They just need to work a little harder. They’ll see. It’s about effort.”

He too supports the ethnic cleansing, the tyrannical president and the billionaire rulers. “The rich pay the vast majority of taxes,” he tells me on our short drive.

He’s not wrong as far as the taxes go. The top 10 percent of income-earners in the US pay 70 percent of federal taxes. The top 50 percent of earners pay a whopping 97 percent of income taxes. That means half the country pays just three percent of the taxes.

“The whiners just think money grows on trees.” He looks out at the shabby gray houses and the barren streets.

But there he’s wrong. To be at the 50 percent mark of American incomes, one has to earn about $38,000 per year. That’s in a country where economists estimate a family needs at least $100,000 per year to obtain basic necessities, including housing and health security. Those in the lower 50 percent of incomes aren’t paying a lot in taxes because they are struggling just to survive.

But his underlying assumption--that those my neighbors see as wealthy are also struggling--is correct. People at the “top 10 percent” mark of incomes are not the super wealthy. They are upper-middle class with incomes over $250,000 per year. Certainly, that’s comfortable, but it isn’t outrageous or a guarantee that hardship will never strike again. And in fact, they are losing ground in this economy along with everyone else.

We are used to hearing economists complain that the average employee’s inflation-adjusted salary in the US has stagnated over the last 50 years, while the incomes of the wealthiest 1 percent have ballooned (by more than 400 percent, in fact). But what is less often said is that even the upper-middle class has lost ground in terms of their share of wealth over the past half century.

One major measure of the health and balance of an economy is the percentage of wealth owned by various economic classes. As astronomical incomes have flowed to the top 1 percent over the past few decades, the share of all the things of economic value in the US (savings, property, stocks, etc.) owned by the top 1 percent has increased from about 22 percent of US wealth in the late 1980’s to 31 percent today.

Given how much the poor and middle class have suffered in recent years, one might assume this is mainly because the very richest are exploiting those classes to gain wealth. But while that contributes, most of their gain came on the backs of what is called “the next 9,” the upper middle class people who are in the top 10 percent, but below the top 1 percent. That group owned 37 percent of US wealth in 1989 and now owns about 33 percent.

At the same time the cost of a college education is 7 times (700 percent) higher than it was 50 years ago, and the cost of a medium home is 20 times (2,000 percent) higher. These costs and most other real costs of living for middle and upper-middle-class families far outstrip the official “inflation rate” which is mainly based on the cost of minor consumer goods.

Although my neighbors on the other side of the tracks may think of the comfortable houses in my friend’s neighborhood as “the rich,” we are all actually in the same “not the top 1 percent” category. My friend is correct that he and his cohort pay tax rates between 26 and 37 percent. What he doesn’t realize is that the wealthiest individuals use a variety of tax loopholes (unrealized capital gains, long-term capital gains, off-shore accounts and things like the “buy, borrow, die” strategy) to avoid paying taxes. The very wealthiest people in our society pay as little as 3.4 percent of their incomes in taxes. Many of the top corporations pay nothing at all and instead receive massive government subsidies.

There is a gigantic monstrosity of an elephant in our national living room that very few of us are acknowledging. We are constantly reminded about the deep divide between red and blue, liberal and conservative, black and white, old and young, even men and women or some other dividing line. All the while, the real divide is 99 percent of the population versus a handful of economic predators.

While it’s possible that not everyone who has ever been in the top 1 percent is an economic predator--using unethical business practices, tax gimmicks, legalized bribery and massive disinformation campaigns to abuse, disenfranchise and exploit the rest of the nation--many have and they continue to.

My struggling, impoverished, Trump-voting neighbors should not be my enemies. Immigrants as well as well-rooted Americans of all colors and speaking various languages have done us no harm and should be natural allies. Even my friend from across the tracks and his more comfortable neighbors have more in common with us than they do with the predators that exploit and divide us.

If we could just realize this and stand firmly against economic exploitation and the legalized bribery that controls our political system, we would all benefit. There is no zero-sum game among us. We all gain if we take down the predators. We all lose if we don’t.

Getting the ballot to the box

What does voter suppression look like?

As most of my readers know, I've never been a good party-line holder. Not of any party and least of all the Democrats. I told them flat out after the debacle of the 2016 primary that I was pulling my primary registration and giving it to whoever showed a backbone.

The staffer on the phone, sighed and said, "Yeah, I get it." And in his tone of voice I heard that he probably really did. I'm not a good party member, but I don't judge people for making their own call. 

Volunteers for the Democrats kept calling me anyway and around about early August this year I was glad they did. "Send in a form to request your ballot," one of them told me.

"But I'm registered and we've had mail-in ballots forever in Oregon. They just send it to me automatically," I protested.

"Not this year. There's trouble with ballots. Fill out the form." 

So, I did. I may not be a good soldier on the party line, but we are on the same battle field and at the moment headed in the same direction. I appreciated the heads-up.

And it came none to soon. My ballot did not show up in September as it used to. By the first week in October, I had to wonder. So, I called the county clerk. Sure enough, they had sent my ballot three weeks earlier in response to the request form, but it never arrived.

Not only that but the county worker told me the rules have changed. No one cares about your postmark anymore. The ballot has to be in the box at the county by November 3 or it's all over. And my ballot already had less time to make the return trip than it had taken to get to my remote location.

Creative Commons image from the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association photostream

Another volunteer from the Democrats called again. "Did you do it?"

"Yup. But I've got a problem," I told them.

This year the usual machinations around voting have become cut-throat, they tell me. Everything before was like child's play. Now everyone's dead serious and the lengths some will go to in order to keep people from voting are shocking. 

In just my situation, there was the unannounced rule that you have to request a ballot months in advance. Then there is the intentional crippling of the postal service, resulting in major delays. And finally, if you somehow manage to get your ballot, you have to get it back on a timeline you can't control or it's all for nothing.

I'm not even one of the people who has to take unpaid leave and stand in line for hours in the midst of a pandemic. I'm not even in danger of having my ID questioned or my registration pulled because my name shares three letters with that of a convicted felon. 

My husband, shakes his head, observing from the comfortable distance of a European. "Those lines..." he says. "You see lines like that in countries like Belarus, when they actually let people vote. You never see people waiting in line to vote in normal countries. It's just the countries with questionable democracies and... the States." He paused long before finishing. 

I had been telling him for a long time that there is trouble in American democracy, but I think this was actually something that shook him a little. 

This year of all years, there is more voter suppression in the US than anyone has seen before. Pundits on TV say that this is because Trump and his people know he can't possibly win if everyone votes. 

Voting is suddenly harder than ever and it has never mattered more than it does now.

One rainy afternoon, I lie on the couch with my ten-year-old son listening to a radio program. They play a clip of Trump telling white supremacists and neo-Nazis to "stand back and stand by" in that ominous way he did. 

My son, who is a dark-eyed, olive-skinned naturalized American, shudders and raises up on an elbow, fixing me with his round pools of serious soul. "Mama, I don't think we should go to America. It's too dangerous." 

We are, in fact, more than considering moving back to the mountain valley of my birth--for better special education services for the kids and for the cohesion of local community. I don't blame my son for being nervous. He may not even realize that he could specifically be a target of those racists, but he knows well enough that our little family always stands out with unmatching skin tones, a blind mother and a lot of free thinking. 

Like most, I can't guarantee the safety of my children. I can't personally hold a line and be sure they will be protected. But this vote does matter. My ballot may not matter any more than it has before--one card in a sea of paper--but if I'm feeling the pinch, so are a lot of others.

The Republicans have attempted to suppress the vote among people of color for generations. The reason is clear enough. While a few people in such areas might vote for them, the statistics are clear. Most people in diverse and disadvantaged areas vote for the "anyone but the Republican" candidate. Not to put to fine a point on it but it really isn't accurate to say they habitually "vote Democratic." 

The same holds true for civilian voters abroad. I wonder if overseas military bases are awash in voting options. They might be. It likely depends on the stats, though I know quite a few soldiers who have seen a thing or two of the world and are ready for change. But it doesn't take a sociologist to figure out that overseas civilian voters are going to vote for "anyone but..." 

That's likely why the hammer has come down and my ballot is AWOL. 

And more importantly, that means a lot of other ballots are AWOL, as the volunteer on the phone confirmed. There are also statistics showing that Democrats vote by mail far more often than Republicans, hence the dismantling of the postal service and attacks on mail-in ballots in general.

Oregon does supposedly have the option of email voting, which I've never tried, so I go back to the county clerk's office and ask if I can do it that way. Finally, after two months of persistence, I get a ballot. It's via email and it doesn't look much like the ballots I'm used to but it's the best shot I have. 

I spare a moment of thanks for the staff of our county clerk's office, who logged multiple emails and phone calls over one ballot, and the Democratic party volunteers, who are working like their lives depend on it. 

I'm sick with an intestinal parasite and my son is going back on Covid lockdown as his school is closing tomorrow. I can barely get out of bed but I"m going to get through the paperwork for the email ballot. This is the time we have to fight for our votes. 

And I'm also adding my voice to the rising warning about voter suppression. Get your votes in early. Make sure you're still registered the way you thought you were. Make sure you've got your ballot. Take no chances. There are no done deals. If enough people can be prevented from voting, anything can happen. 

Blessings from my hearth to yours. May you be warm, safe and well. 

Mumbled oaths: What to do about kids and the Pledge?

I had heard it was making a resurgence during the Trump years.

For a couple of decades, I enjoyed entertaining people in other countries with my tales of Cold-War-era American schoolroom machinations, when we were required to stand and solemnly pledge allegiance to our flag and then practice hiding under our desks for shelter from Russian missiles.

Creative Commons image by Charlie Marshall

Since Trump took office, I have heard increasing reports that old Pledge statutes have been revived and more and more schools require the recitation of the oath again.

With one of my kids going to school in the US this year, that reality has hit home. My daughter is attending school in Oregon this year, while living with her grandmother, and scarcely a week went by before a note came home from the teacher directing her guardians to explain the importance of the Pledge to her.

My mother’s response was, “Well, it might be an issue, since she is a dual citizen.”

That wasn’t my first inclination, but she does have a point there. If one did believe in the Pledge, wouldn’t it be an issue that a kid clearly couldn’t pledge all loyalty to only one of their two nations? I wonder if school officials in rural Eastern Oregon even know that a person can have more than one nationality. But I frankly doubt they care, since back in my day they always insisted that immigrant children and atheist children swear to the flag and under God, regardless of reason or feeling.

I am sure it was controversial back in the 1980s too… somewhere. But it wasn’t controversial in rural Eastern Oregon where I grew up. There was no public voice of dissent and thus no controversy.

At that time, there was no possibility of open challenge or opting out in school. But there was also no question that my family were dissidents. Some of my earliest memories involve standing on a sheet of black plastic in the sunshine while adult hippies cut out around my shadow to use as a template for chalking onto the streets during nighttime direct-action protests against nuclear weapons.

Some will always claim that anyone critical of their government, must “hate their own country.” But we didn’t hate America. We just didn’t think America was much different from any other part of the globe.

I loved the land I grew up on passionately, but I was not particularly interested in where the borders were. When I was seven, my family spent a few months in Mexico and I quickly bonded with local kids. As a teenager I was concerned about justice for Central American people brutalized by US-backed paramilitaries. Even living in such an isolated, rural place I was aware of and focused on the wider world.

So, it did not seem reasonable to me that I should pledge my allegiance to a flag or the nation for which it stood. My allegiance was already given to truth and justice and human rights wherever they stood. Certainly, my parents instilled some of this in me just by talking politics and hanging out with other people who talked politics in a progressive, international and compassionate spirit. But a lot of the spit and fire for it probably was of my own making.

My older brother also had a significant influence on me and was similarly disposed. When I first entered school, he warned me about the Pledge and eventually he also gave me the means to deal with it, apparently unbeknownst to our parents.

It may be worth pointing out that we had been brought up in a dissident family, where our spirituality, our politics, the extra garden plot out in the woods and even our reading choices, were clearly in opposition to the mainstream and better kept quiet. I don’t recall my parents or any other adult in our circle of friends explicitly telling me to keep our beliefs or politics secret, but I think my brother may have sworn me to silence for my own protection.

So, we did not challenge the Pledge openly either. By the time we entered school, we knew the authorities of society would not take kindly to our views and that we were too small a minority to change things. At least, I’m assuming that’s why we went straight to subterfuge. We weren’t habitually dishonest in most things.

My brother’s method, which he passed on to me, was to recite different words—based on a quote by Matt Groening—that are close enough to the Pledge to go undetected by the casual lip-reading of teachers. The point was not to make a serious alternative pledge that actually meant something. The point was to simply opt out of the one on offer without being detected, even if we happened to be leading the Pledge in front of the class.

For that possibility, it still had to start with the same few words, so we departed a little from Groening’s original and said. “I pledge allegiance to the flakes of the untitled snakes of a merry cow and to the republicrats for which they scam: one nacho, underpants with licorice and jugs of wine for owls.”

It worked fine and saved me from agonizing over being a hypocrite. For many years, I firmly believed my brother had invented it himself, but the wonders of the internet have lead me to its original source.

In any event, when I told my mother this, she was shocked and appalled and forbid me to teach it to my daughter. For one thing, the local school is a charter school and she immediately had visions of my daughter being expelled for unwisely sharing our version, regardless of the 2020 Oregon law that makes it technically legal for kids to opt out of the Pledge. And under the “my roof, my rules” law of our family, my mother gets to call this one.

The truth is that my daughter was not brought up in the atmosphere I knew as a child. We have never hidden much and while we are still outside the norm, inside the US or outside it, I haven’t raised my kids to fear authorities or to keep secrets. I didn’t think I had to, and while I think a parent has got to do whatever it takes to protect their kids in the situation at hand, I don’t think fear and secrecy is the best policy unless safety requires it. If I can choose, I would rather choose openness.

And as such, my daughter is ill prepared for this situation and hasn’t been good at keeping secrets, even about things like someone’s birthday present.

So, what can we do as parents and grandparents if a child doesn’t want to recite the Pledge? Well, there are a few options:

1. One could research local laws, and use them.

2. One could tell a reluctant child to simply mouth the words and not think about it too much, whether they want to or not.

3. Or one could discuss the issues with the child and figure out what part is bothering them and help them secretly change just those few words that bother them most. The child could pledge allegiance to the earth or to truth and justice or something of the like, reciting the edited version without actually informing the school.

The first option above—the option to use laws and reason to demand the child’s right to remain silent during the pledge—is something that has to be chosen based on the specific situation and the openness of the school administration. I might fight that fight if I was there in person and my child had a strong opinion on the matter, but I also might not.

As I said, Oregon law actually makes it legal for a child to remain silent during the Pledge. However, as I discovered as a child with a disability, integrated into an unwilling school by legal force, using that one in a school that is against it can make for a miserable experience.

It would take energy and time that might be better spent elsewhere. And it could result in lengthy homeschooling, which would be exceedingly difficult with my particular child. This decision really depends on the local community atmosphere, how committed the child is and whether or not the child is completely alone in their reticence.

The second option is my mother’s first choice and she was the one who successfully taught me to fly under the radar.

It would also be true to my daughter’s Czech roots. The Czechs—being a tiny nation squashed between superpowers—long ago perfected the art of pretending smiling loyalty to whomever held the castle at the moment.

Just recite and block it out. That was my husband’s first inclination, having grown up with similar anti-democratic tactics under the Communist regime of the East Bloc. His response was: “She’ll just have to bow her head the way we did under the totalitarian Communists. Her father and grandfather and great-grandfather all did it, and so can she.”

“As far as I heard great-grandfather went to jail several times rather than bow his head,” I ventured.

“Yeah, but he too learned in the end.”

I am not really as opposed to that kind of dodging as you might think, given my vehemence about integrity. I dislike it for what it tells kids about oaths, keeping one’s word and integrity, but I can also make up creative ways a kid could interpret those words.

If you are being forced to swear something through rote recitation in a group, I don’t believe it reflects that much on your honor if you don’t mean it. The shame belongs to those who would practice such abuse of an oath, one which permanently cheapens and degrades the concept of one’s word for an entire generation..

The final option is the one I am most likely to recommend to others. If swearing allegiance to a flag and a state and under a god that you don’t believe in bothers either the parent or the child or both, there are options. Certainly, I would prefer to teach children openness, integrity and the sacredness of an oath. But this may well be the best of the bad options those in positions of power have left to us.

If it is the “God’ part that bothers you, which is understandable for some of my Pagan friends, a child could recite “one nation under the gods” or “one nation under the sun.”

Despite my Pagan persuasion that isn’t actually my primary issue, though i don’t like the god bit either. My issue would be with swearing to a flag and to one nation. A child could recite, “I pledge allegiance to the flags of the United Nations, and to the earth for which they stand, one world, indivisible, under the sun with liberty and justice for all.”

Even that clearly isn’t perfect. Not all the states of the United Nations are anything you’d want to pledge loyalty to. But it’s close and it matches the wording enough that while it is easier to detect than my brother’s version, it is less likely to cause offense if exposed and more likely to be accepted by authorities as a reasonable alternative.

A child could insert, “the flags of my countries” if the issue is strictly that the child has allegiance to more than one nation.

For me, this is still very much a stop-gap measure, even if such alterations were officially approved by school officials. My greatest beef with the Pledge is not its wording, not the one nation or the one god or anything of the like. It is the way it handles oaths of loyalty.

i firmly believe that an oath should mean something quite sacred and it should always be a true act of will, i.e. voluntary.

Each autumn, there is a week in which I put images of the Roman goddess Fides, goddess of oaths, up on my altar to give offerings to her and restate my oaths—oaths of marriage and adoption, oaths of loyalty and pledges to action. This just happens to be that week as well as the week of this minor crisis for my family.

Those who claim the Pledge of Allegiance is something positive for teaching civics are sorely mistaken in my view. I find that the Pledge not only does not teach good civics, it does the opposite. It teaches children, even those who don’t have an issue with it, that an oath of loyalty is something akin to words everyone is forced to mumble regardless of the meaning.

It is also like dedicating an infant or toddler to a religion they don’t yet understand. An oath forced on a child is not sacred. It is instead something vile and antithetical to honor.

Even if all oaths may not be entirely voluntary even in adulthood, we as adults at least have some idea what they mean and what the consequences of not taking such an oath may be. Even if forced into an oath, an adult should do all they can to keep it. Otherwise, we should be prepared to take the consequences of not making such an oath or the consequences of breaking it. Sometimes oppressive circumstances make that a terrible choice. But we have the choice.

A child who is told, “Stand here, raise your hand and say these words,” isn’t bound by honor in that way. But the child is taught by this that oaths are cheap and meaningless mumbles. That is the wrong hidden deep in the Pledge.

It is no surprise that the more authoritarian and fascist a state is the more such rote, mumbled oaths it requires. I know it is incendiary to call the Pledge of Allegiance fascist. Clearly it is not such a terrible thing on a day to day basis. I’ve lived through it along with most other Americans. But it is akin to fascism in that it promotes the concept of the automatic, thoughtless loyalty that fascism is built upon. That is the harm in a few seconds of mumbled words at the start of the day.

Here is one of my oaths, one I mean and which I recite anew with each new moon. I don’t make my kids say it because I believe it should be fully empowered through choice.

I pledge allegiance to the goddess of compassion and strength, and to the planet earth for which she stands, one ecosystem under the moon with interconnection and hope for all.

This is the oath I hold above all others. I have, out of necessity, made sacrifices of my comfort, time, resources and safety in the protection of the earth and I expect I will be called to do so again, in accordance with this oath. That is what such a pledge of allegiance should mean, after all.