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reasoningdaily · 10 months

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NEWBERN, Ala. — There’s a power struggle in Newbern, Alabama, and the rural town’s first Black mayor is at war with the previous administration who he says locked him out of Town Hall.

After years of racist harassment and intimidation, Patrick Braxton is fed up, and in a federal civil rights lawsuit he is accusing town officials of conspiring to deny his civil rights and his position because of his race.

“When I first became mayor, [a white woman told me] the town was not ready for a Black mayor,” Braxton recalls.

The town is 85% Black, and 29% of Black people here live below the poverty line.

“What did she mean by the town wasn’t ready for a Black mayor? They, meaning white people?” Capital B asked.

“Yes. No change,” Braxton says.

Decades removed from a seemingly Jim Crow South, white people continue to thwart Black political progress by refusing to allow them to govern themselves or participate in the country’s democracy, several residents told Capital B. While litigation may take months or years to resolve, Braxton and community members are working to organize voter education, registration, and transportation ahead of the 2024 general election.

But the tension has been brewing for years.

Two years ago, Braxton says he was the only volunteer firefighter in his department to respond to a tree fire near a Black person’s home in the town of 275 people. As Braxton, 57, actively worked to put out the fire, he says, one of his white colleagues tried to take the keys to his fire truck to keep him from using it.

In another incident, Braxton, who was off duty at the time, overheard an emergency dispatch call for a Black woman experiencing a heart attack. He drove to the fire station to retrieve the automated external defibrillator, or AED machine, but the locks were changed, so he couldn’t get into the facility. He raced back to his house, grabbed his personal machine, and drove over to the house, but he didn’t make it in time to save her. Braxton wasn’t able to gain access to the building or equipment until the Hale County Emergency Management Agency director intervened, the lawsuit said.

“I have been on several house fires by myself,” Braxton says. “They hear the radio and wouldn’t come. I know they hear it because I called dispatch, and dispatch set the tone call three or four times for Newbern because we got a certain tone.”

Not only has he been locked out of the town hall and fought fires alone, but he’s been followed by a drone and unable to retrieve the town’s mail and financial accounts, he says. Rather than concede, Haywood “Woody” Stokes III, the former white mayor, along with his council members, reappointed themselves to their positions after ordering a special election that no one knew about.

Braxton is suing them, the People’s Bank of Greensboro, and the postmaster at the U.S. Post Office.

For at least 60 years, there’s never been an election in the town. Instead, the mantle has been treated as a “hand me down” by the small percentage of white residents, according to several residents Capital B interviewed. After being the only one to submit qualifying paperwork and statement of economic interests, Braxton became the mayor.

Stokes and his council — which consists of three white people (Gary Broussard, Jesse Leverett, Willie Tucker) and one Black person (Voncille Brown Thomas) — deny any wrongdoing in their response to the amended complaint filed on April 17. They also claim qualified immunity, which protects state and local officials from individual liability from civil lawsuits.

The attorneys for all parties, including the previous town council, the bank, and Lynn Thiebe, the postmaster at the post office, did not respond to requests for comment.

The town where voting never was

Over the past 50 years, Newbern has held a majority Black population. The town was incorporated in 1854 and became known as a farm town. The Great Depression and the mechanization of the cotton industry contributed to Newbern’s economic and population decline, according to the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Today, across Newbern’s 1.2 square miles sits the town hall and volunteer fire department constructed by Auburn’s students, an aging library, U.S. Post Office, and Mercantile, the only store there, which Black people seldom frequent because of high prices and a lack of variety of products, Braxton says.

“They want to know why Black [people] don’t shop with them. You don’t have nothin’ the Black [people] want or need,” he says. “No gasoline. … They used to sell country-time bacon and cheese and souse meat. They stopped selling that because they say they didn’t like how it feel on their hands when they cuttin’ the meat.”

To help unify the town, Braxton began hosting annual Halloween parties for the children, and game day for the senior citizens. But his efforts haven’t been enough to stop some people from moving for better jobs, industry, and quality of life.

Residents say the white town leaders have done little to help the predominantly Black area thrive over the years. They question how the town has spent its finances, as Black residents continue to struggle. Under the American Rescue Plan Act, Newbern received $30,000, according to an estimated funding sheet by Alabama Democratic U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, but residents say they can’t see where it has gone.

At the First Baptist Church of Newbern, Braxton, three of his selected council members — Janice Quarles, 72, Barbara Patrick, 78, and James Ballard, 76 — and the Rev. James Williams, 77, could only remember two former mayors: Robert Walthall, who served as mayor for 44 years, and Paul Owens, who served on the council for 33 years and mayor for 11.

“At one point, we didn’t even know who the mayor was,” Ballard recalls. “If you knew somebody and you was white, and your grandfather was in office when he died or got sick, he passed it on down to the grandson or son, and it’s been that way throughout the history of Newbern.”

Quarles agreed, adding: “It took me a while to know that Mr. Owens was the mayor. I just thought he was just a little man cleaning up on the side of the road, sometimes picking up paper. I didn’t know until I was told that ‘Well, he’s the mayor now.’”

Braxton mentioned he heard of a Black man named Mr. Hicks who previously sought office years ago.

“This was before my time, but I heard Mr. Hicks had won the mayor seat and they took it from him the next day [or] the next night,” Braxton said. “It was another Black guy, had won years ago, and they took it from.”

“I hadn’t heard that one,” Ballard chimes in, sitting a few seats away from Braxton.

“How does someone take the seat from him, if he won?” Capital B asked.

“The same way they’re trying to do now with Mayor Braxton,” Quarles chuckled. “Maybe at that time — I know if it was Mr. Hicks — he really had nobody else to stand up with him.”

Despite the rumor, what they did know for sure: There was never an election, and Stokes had been in office since 2008.

The costs to challenging the white power structure

After years of disinvestment, Braxton’s frustrations mounted at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he says Stokes refused to commemorate state holidays or hang up American flags. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the majority-white council failed to provide supplies such as disinfectant, masks, and humidifiers to residents to mitigate the risks of contracting the virus.

Instead of waiting, Braxton made several trips to neighboring Greensboro, about 10 miles away, to get food and other items to distribute to Black and white residents. He also placed signs around town about vaccination. He later found his signs had been destroyed and put in “a burn pile,” he said.

After years of unmet needs of the community, Braxton decided to qualify for mayor. Only one Black person — Brown Thomas, who served with Stokes —has ever been named to the council. After Braxton told Stokes, the acting mayor, his intention to run, the conspiracy began, the lawsuit states.

According to the lawsuit, Stokes gave Braxton the wrong information on how to qualify for mayor. Braxton then consulted with the Alabama Conference of Black Mayors, and the organization told him to file his statement of candidacy and statement of the economic interests with the circuit clerk of Hale County and online with the state, the lawsuit states. Vickie Moore, the organization’s executive director, said it also guided Braxton on how to prepare for his first meeting and other mayoral duties.

Moore, an Alabama native and former mayor of Slocomb, said she has never heard of other cases across the state where elected officials who have never been elected are able to serve. This case with Braxton is “racism,” she said.

“The true value of a person can’t be judged by the color of their skin, and that’s what’s happening in this case here, and it’s the worst racism I’ve ever seen,” Moore said. “We have fought so hard for simple rights. It’s one of the most discouraging but encouraging things because it encourages us to continue to move forward … and continue to fight.”

Political and legal experts say what’s happening in Newbern is rare, but the tactics to suppress Black power aren’t, especially across the South. From tampering with ballot boxes to restricting reading material, “the South has been resistant to all types of changes” said Emmitt Riley III, associate professor of political science and Africana Studies at The University of the South.

“This is a clear case of white [people] attempting to seize and maintain political power in the face of someone who went through the appropriate steps to qualify and to run for office and by default wins because no one else qualified,” Riley added. “This raises a number of questions about democracy and a free and fair system of governance.”

Riley mentioned a different, but similar case in rural Greenwood, Mississippi. Sheriel Perkins, a longtime City Council member, became the first Black female mayor in 2006, serving for only two years. She ran again in 2013 and lost by 206 votes to incumbent Carolyn McAdams, who is white. Perkins contested the results, alleging voter fraud. White people allegedly paid other white people to live in the city in order to participate in the election and cast a legal vote, Riley said. In that case, the state Supreme Court dismissed the case and “found Perkins presented no evidence” that anyone voted illegally in a precinct, but rather it was the election materials that ended up in the wrong precincts.

“It was also on record that one white woman got on the witness stand and said, ‘I came back to vote because I was contacted to vote by X person.’ I think you see these tactics happening all across the South in local elections, in particular,” Riley said. “It becomes really difficult for people to really litigate these cases because in many cases it goes before the state courts, and state courts have not been really welcoming to overturning elections and ordering new elections.”

Another example: Camilla, Georgia.

In 2015, Rufus Davis was elected as the first Black male mayor of rural, predominantly Black Camilla. In 2017, the six-person City Council — half Black and half white — voted to deny him a set of keys to City Hall, which includes his office. Davis claimed the white city manager, Bennett Adams, had been keeping him from carrying out his mayoral duties.

The next year, Davis, along with Black City Council member Venterra Pollard, boycotted the city’s meetings because of “discrimination within the city government,” he told a local news outlet. Some of the claims included the absence of Black officers in the police department, and the city’s segregated cemetery, where Black people cannot be buried next to white people. (The wire fence that divided the cemetery was taken down in 2018). In 2018, some citizens of the small town of about 5,000 people wanted to remove Davis from office and circulated a petition that garnered about 200 signatures. In 2019, he did not seek re-election for office.

“You’re not the mayor”

After being the only person to qualify and submit proper paperwork for any municipal office, Braxton became mayor-elect and the first Black mayor in Newbern’s history on July 22, 2020.

Following the announcement, Braxton appointed members to join his council, consistent with the practice of previous leadership. He asked both white and Black people to serve, he said, but the white people told him they didn’t want to get involved.

The next month, Stokes and the former council members, Broussard, Leverett, Brown Thomas, and Tucker, called a secret meeting to adopt an ordinance to conduct a special election on Oct. 6 because they “allegedly forgot to qualify as candidates,” according to the lawsuit, which also alleges the meeting was not publicized. The defendants deny this claim, but admit to filing statements of candidacy to be elected at the special election, according to their response to an amended complaint filed on their behalf.

Because Stokes and his council were the only ones to qualify for the Oct. 6 election, they reappointed themselves as the town council. On Nov. 2, 2020, Braxton and his council members were sworn into office and filed an oath of office with the county probate judge’s office. Ten days later, the city attorney’s office executed an oath of office for Stokes and his council.

After Braxton held his first town meeting in November, Stokes changed the locks to Town Hall to keep him and his council from accessing the building. For months, the two went back and forth on changing the locks until Braxton could no longer gain access. At some point, Braxton says he discovered all official town records had been removed or destroyed, except for a few boxes containing meeting minutes and other documents.

Braxton also was prevented from accessing the town’s financial records with the People’s Bank of Greensboro and the city clerk, and obtaining mail from the town’s post office. At every turn, he was met with a familiar answer: “You’re not the mayor.” Separately, he’s had drones following him to his home and mother’s home and had a white guy almost run him off the road, he says.

Braxton asserts he’s experienced these levels of harassment and intimidation to keep him from being the mayor, he said.

“Not having the Lord on your side, you woulda’ gave up,” he told Capital B.

‘Ready to fire away’

In the midst of the obstacles, Braxton kept pushing. He partnered with LaQuenna Lewis, founder of Love Is What Love Does, a Selma-based nonprofit focused on enriching the lives of disadvantaged people in Dallas, Perry, and Hale counties through such means as food distribution, youth programming, and help with utility bills. While meeting with Braxton, Lewis learned more about his case and became an investigator with her friend Leslie Sebastian, a former advocacy attorney based in California.

The three began reviewing thousands of documents from the few boxes Braxton found in Town Hall, reaching out to several lawyers and state lawmakers such as Sen. Bobby Singleton and organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. No one wanted to help.

When the white residents learned Lewis was helping Braxton, she, too, began receiving threats early last year. She received handwritten notes in the mail with swastikas and derogatory names such as the n-word and b-word. One of theletters had a drawing of her and Braxton being lynched.

Another letter said they had been watching her at the food distribution site and hoped she and Braxton died. They also made reference to her children, she said. Lewis provided photos of the letters, but Capital B will not publish them. In October, Lewis and her children found their house burned to the ground. The cause was undetermined, but she thinks it may have been connected.

Lewis, Sebastian, and Braxton continued to look for attorneys that would take the case. Braxton filed a complaint in Alabama’s circuit court last November, but his attorney at the time stopped answering his calls. In January, they found a new attorney, Richard Rouco, who filed an amended complaint in federal court.

“He went through a total of five attorneys prior to me meeting them last year, and they pretty much took his money. We ran into some big law firms who were supposed to help and they kind of misled him,” Lewis says.

Right now, the lawsuit is in the early stages, Rouco says, and the two central issues of the case center on whether the previous council with Stokes were elected as they claim and if they gave proper notice.

Braxton and his team say they are committed to still doing the work in light of the lawsuit. Despite the obstacles, Braxton is running for mayor again in 2025. Through AlabamaLove.org, the group is raising money to provide voter education and registration, and address food security and youth programming. Additionally, they all hope they can finally bring their vision of a new Newbern to life.

For Braxton, it’s bringing grocery and convenience stores to the town. Quarles wants an educational and recreational center for children. Williams, the First Baptist Church minister, wants to build partnerships to secure grants in hopes of getting internet and more stores.

“I believe we done put a spark to the rocket, and it’s going [to get ready] to fire away,” Williams says at his church. “This rocket ready to fire away, and it’s been hovering too long.”

Correction: In Newbern, Alabama, 29% of the Black population lives below the poverty line. An earlier version of this story misstated the percentage

#alabama #Newbern Alabama #A Black Man Was Elected Mayor in Rural Alabama #but the White Town Leaders Won’t Let Him Serve #Patrick Braxton #AlabamaLove.org #black lives matter

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wheelsup · 3 years

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coffee is the sixth love language | part two

Summary: Over three cups of coffee, Spencer realized his feelings for you. And over three cups of coffee, he acts on them. gn!Reader.

A/N: the italicized this time indicates Spencer’s thoughts, not reader’s. part of this story is inspired directly from these comments made by @doctorthreephds on the reblog! thanks for letting me incorporate them :)

category: fluff, sfw

warnings: technically none, but the “profiling” part is kind of a reach.

word count: 3k

Once Spencer was firmly resolute on asking you out, he knew he wanted it to be special in a way that only the two of you could appreciate. He realized that he had yet to be the one bringing you coffee, and so it felt only right that it should be how he makes his first move. He woke up extra early on a weekday morning to stop by your favorite coffee shop on his way to work because he knew you loved their banana nut muffins and double-brewed coffee. It was an extra twenty-five minutes out of the way for work each way, so you only got to go there on the rare occasion that you had a day off and were not out of town on a case. It might have been ridiculous to drive fifty minutes for a single damn muffin, but Spencer wanted to make this perfect for you by any means necessary. This was one of the special times that Spencer drove his car, needing the extra speed in order to complete his mission.

He picked up your regular drink order and the muffin and was anxiously on his way back to Quantico. As per his plan he arrived at the office before you did, though not too much earlier because he wanted to make sure your coffee was still hot by the time you got it. If Spencer’s calculations were correct - which they almost always were - you would arrive within a two to four and a half minute window from when he did. Spencer took out a sharpie from his desk drawer and delicately scrawled a message onto the top corner of the pastry bag holding your muffin. He thought it felt like something out of a cheesy romance novel, the kind of novels that you could find in the fifty cent clearance bins, but dammit if Spencer didn’t deserve a little cheesy romance in his life. The other benefit of this was that he thought he would almost certainly choke on his words if he had to ask you himself. He set the two items on your desk and returned to his own to sit and observe. Spencer hoped it would be the first of many coffees he could buy you.

It wasn’t until you had already walked into the bullpen and were halfway to your desk that Spencer realized he had forgotten to sign his name to the bag. How were you supposed to react to him asking you out if you didn’t actually know it was him? And oh God, he left unsealed food on the desk of an FBI agent, with no indication of who had put it there. That is infinitely more suspicious than it is romantic. He wouldn’t be surprised if she took it straight to the trash can. So long for cheesy romance, Dr. Reid.

But Spencer was absolutely elated when your first reaction was to peek into the bag and gasp out of joy at what was inside. He watched you break off a piece of your beloved banana nut muffin and chew it gleefully, and all he could think of was how cute you looked when you were happy. Shortly followed by concern that a federal agent would so readily eat unmarked food that could have been tampered with. That’s something I should bring up to her on the date.

Spencer’s stomach was in knots not knowing if you would pick up on the message. You swallowed that chunk of the muffin and turned the bag over to find an almost illegible black script that you had nearly missed: Would you like to have coffee with me? It just felt like all of the air had been knocked out of your body.

It didn’t even take you half a second to know who this was from; there were so many tells it was Spencer. Before you even noticed the note, you knew it was from him when you saw what was inside the bag. The whole team knew what your favorite coffee shop was because you had talked about it enough times. Hell, you even owned a oversized tee with their name on it that you kept in your go bag as a sleep shirt. But nobody knew what your favorite muffin was because you never mentioned it. In fact, if you thought about it there were maybe only a handful of times over the six months you’d been at the BAU that you even elected to eat this pastry in lieu of a real breakfast. But if anyone was going to detect a pattern, it would have been Dr. Reid. Of course he would pick up on the fact that you only picked those out at cafes when you felt like having a sweet treat, or that when Penelope brought in baked goods for the office you would only indulge if you saw your favorite item in the lineup.

You already knew it, but in case you had any doubt, the note itself confirmed your theory twice. One indicator was the phrasing choice would you as opposed to will you. Use of would posits a hypothetical, as in hypothetically, would you have an interest in drinking coffee together, rather than a hard, come with me to get coffee. The hesitance in the tone came off as if the sender were testing the waters, wanting to put the idea out there without coming off as too strong. Because it was reserved, it gave you room to think if you would genuinely enjoy doing so as opposed to making you feel like you should oblige. That level of respect screamed Spencer to you. And though it was so glaringly obvious, if you needed some concrete evidence it was the fact that nobody else had such endearingly atrocious handwriting like Dr. Reid. It was something you always found hilariously ironic for a man who often analyzes other people’s writing styles for work. You wondered what his way of scribbling said about him, and hoped he could tell you on that date of yours.

You looked straight at him, finding that his eyes were already fixed on you.

“Yes.”

One word was all you had to say to make the lump in Spencer’s throat disappear, replaced by the sensation that his heart was leaping out of his chest. He was going to keep that memory stored in his brain forever, just to replay the moment when the future of your relationship changed with a simple word. Little did he know that when you finished that muffin, you neatly folded the pastry bag and tucked it into your desk drawer, saving it for the exact same purpose.

_____

Spencer had gotten to see your favorite coffee spot already, so for your date you requested that he take you to his to make it even. It was small, but incredibly cozy under the soft ambiance provided by string lights and charm of their mismatched furniture. There was one exposed brick wall adjacent to another that was a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf; it housed copies that loyal patrons left behind for others to pick up. All of those books had different colors of post-its peeking out from the pages. It was almost too eclectic and disorganized for what you would expect Dr. Reid to be into, but at the same time it made perfect sense to you.

“You know, I think I just learned something about you.” You leaned gently into his side to tell him, both hands wrapped around your coffee cup because you were too nervous to know what else to do with them. Spencer was the kind of guy to sit adjacent to you at a table, rather than across, and you loved that about him. You loved having him as close to you as possible.

Spencer’s lips pulled at the edges to form a perfect, lazy smile. “What did you learn about me?” The team had an agreement not to profile each other, but under your gaze, Spencer never felt the kind of scrutiny that came with picking people apart. He trusted that whatever you had to say was going to be kind.

“I think this place says so much about you. Something about how all those books are donations passed on from locals, and that people feel comfortable taking a book off the shelf and opening it up to read what others recommend. The fact that they leave little notes in it for the next reader to share what those stories meant to each of them. Nobody asked those people to do that, but they all chose to take part in these small actions that ended up creating an entire community.” It was one of the most beautifully human things you’d ever witnessed. A group of people engaging in understated and innocent gestures of love between perfect strangers, completely unprompted. “I think you value simple acts, the kind that can take on profound meaning without even intending to. Like when silence feels so comfortable when you’re with the right person.” You paused to take in his reaction as a gauge for how right or wrong you may be. He gave no objection to what you had posited, eyes simply glued to you in intense focus. Spencer was hanging on everything you said, wordlessly encouraging you to divulge more theories you’d developed on him.

“And, visually, this furniture reminds me of a family home. The kind where some items were handed down for generations, some bought new, and others gifted by a distant relative who has no idea what the family likes.” Spencer’s soft laughter mirrored your own at your very accurate description of the shop’s decor. The room truly could not be more disjointed in its aesthetic, but that was entirely its charm. “It probably reflects that there are some aspects of your life that just don’t make sense to you, that almost seem to conflict with each other. For a guy so smart, I’m sure it’s scary to feel like you don’t understand something, and there are probably dark spots in that brain of yours that you try to hide from the world. But in this room, these things that don’t seem like they work together actually amount to something so lovely. And just like the charmingly hideous suede couch and the oddly fur-covered armchairs, every facet of you deserves appreciation because without them you wouldn’t make up to be the beautiful person you are overall.”

Neither of you could pinpoint the moment which your hands had drifted together, fingers loosely intertwined in gentle embrace. There was too much to unpack in what you had said for Spencer to know where to begin. The only thing he could say for sure was that he was astounded by how deeply you understood him without him ever saying any of those things. He considered that maybe you understood him better than he did himself and wished that he could spend his whole life observing the world through the same rose-tinted lenses with which you viewed him. At a loss for words, Spencer chose not to say any right then. The silence I have with you is the most comfortable I’ve ever had.

_____

After each of you consumed one too many caffeinated beverages, you still were not prepared to let the date end. You were willing to sit there and have as many espresso drinks as you could to keep talking to Spencer.

The universe must have been in support of your romance as the overcast skies broke and began to rain just minutes after the two of you had left the shop. Spencer was walking you back to your apartment, clearly forcing his long legs to slow down their naturally fast stride so to extend how long it took to get there. He could get an extra thirteen minutes with you this way. Spencer was given his perfect excuse to keep the date going in the form of heavy downpour; his apartment was far closer than yours, and he proposed you two should seek shelter together until it stopped. I hope it never stops.

Spencer held tightly onto your hand as he ran with you through the rain, giggling all the way to his apartment. He may not like wet, cold climates, but he sure did like holding your hand. Being next to you made him feel incredibly warm somehow when the temperature outside was very much not. And you felt completely at peace sitting on Spencer’s couch wearing one of his sweaters that he lent you. Truthfully, your own clothes weren’t so wet from the rain that it was necessary, but you both pretended it absolutely was just to be able to experience this.

It was clear that the rain would be going for a while and all you wanted to do to pass the time was continue listening to Spencer talk. You discovered that when he’s not interrupted, he loves to go on runaway tangents, often bouncing between different trains of thought as one idea sparked him to remember another. It was almost a sport to keep up with him, but it was perhaps the only one you’ve ever enjoyed. It was so easy when everything he said interested you. You loved that Spencer taught you something new every day, but no matter how niche a piece of trivia or shocking an unknown fact was, it could not beat the things that he taught you about himself. He was letting you in on so many unseen dimensions of himself whether he knew it or not, the explicit ones revealing implicit ones.

You had happily stayed in his home for hours, absorbing every word he spoke. What entertained you the most was the ability of your conversation to jump from deep, serious places to lighthearted stories filled with jokes and teasing and back again in a way that felt completely natural. Your favorite anecdote of his was the story of how he got addicted to coffee. It was the BAU’s favorite inside-joke that Spencer liked his coffee sickeningly sweet and you always wondered how he could tolerate it. Just looking at it made your teeth ache. When he told you why, you thought that the backstory was even sweeter than the coffee.

As a twelve year old college student, Spencer found himself experiencing sleep deprivation for the first time in his life. The course load was more rigorous than he had in high school and even the boy genius needed to readjust to the new expectations of college. More importantly, he needed to cope with pulling late nights at the library if he wanted his first degree by the time he was eligible for a driver’s license. The Red Bulls that the other kids seem to gravitate to seemed far too aggressive for Spencer, their potent smell of chemicals a huge turn off. They were definitely not for him.

He remembered how often his mom used to drink coffee, always in the morning while Spencer got ready for school. Being at CalTech and away from his mother, who remained in Las Vegas most of the time due to her condition, made him so homesick that he took up a coffee habit as a reminder of her. He loved the way it smelled like every comfort he had ever known.

Though he appreciated its smell, Spencer, of course, was not ready back then to love the way it tasted. He was still after all a twelve year old boy who had a sweet tooth like any other kid. The bitter drink was almost offensive to him, so he always made his coffee with extra, extra sugar. He was a menace to the baristas at the campus coffee cart because they would have to refill the shaker every time he stopped by. As it turned out, Spencer was actually a little troublemaker in his youth.

You utterly adored this story and the way it humanized Spencer in a way that other people did not consider often enough. Yes, he was the genius in incredibly advanced classes for his age, but he was also a little kid who behaved as all little kids did. He also experienced struggle and had to cope with it just like everyone else. He was not, as some chose to believe, a complete anomaly beyond understanding. Those many misunderstood idiosyncrasies Spencer had started to feel grounded as you learned more about him and could appreciate how and why they came to be.

But the night was dwindling down and two of you had gone through many stories since the start of your day together. Hitting a caffeine crash, you found yourself unable to keep some rogue yawns at bay. It was only eight o’clock in the evening, not an unreasonable time for you to ask Spencer to drive you back home. The rain was letting up to a mellow drizzle. Spencer was running out of excuses to keep you here.

But you thought about how still hadn’t heard about his first pet lizard, which he caught in his backyard, and you didn’t yet know what kind of music he listened to when he was fourteen. And you no longer thought you needed to make excuses to stay with him longer, so you told him honestly that all you really wanted was to stay the night with him and keep hearing his stories. So you asked him if he would set on a fresh pot of coffee, just so you both could sip at it, staying awake all night together.

He happily did so, and while he set the large coffee pot on and took out two cups from his cabinet, he thought, this is the first of many wishes of yours that I’d like to make come true.

______

PART THREE

Tag list: @rexorangecounty @rachel-voychuk @snitchthewitch @spencer-blake-supremacy @happyreid187 @rainsong01 @librarymagic

#spencer reid #criminal minds #spencer reid fic #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x you #spencer reid fluff #mgg #matthew gray gubler #spencer reid self insert #spencer reid x y/n #criminal minds imagine #spencer reid imagine #spencer reid fanfic #fluff #my fic #criminal minds self insert

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forsetti · 4 years

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On Racial Justice: Time For Action

When I was in high school, a young girl went missing. There was a rumor she had been abducted. This was years before cell phones and then internet. Word spread through phone trees, in diners, at the gas station, in the barbershop and hair salon. The entire county became quickly invested into finding her. It was as if someone took a big stick and beat the hell out of our little beehive.

She was found, later that day, up one of the canyons that bordered the rural valley where we lived. She had been killed. I know this because my father was the county coroner, as well as the local mortician. As the news of her murder spread as quickly her abduction had earlier in the day, a wave of anger and fear blanketed the valley. Anger because of what had happened to “one of their own.” Fear because there was an existential threat to their own children out there, somewhere, still at large. The beehive was whipped up into a frenzy.

I can't remember if it was later that same day or the next but the local police soon found and arrested what they described as “a drifter from California,” for the young girl's abduction and murder. They locked the man up in the little jail that was located in our town hall.

Once news of the arrest and jailing hit the hive, the emotions that had been building over the past couple of days began to boil over. By that evening, after a number of drinks at one of the local watering holes, a number of men had worked themselves up into a frenzy over what had happened. At some point, one of the men suggested they drag that “mother fucker” out of the jail and administer some “good ol' country justice.” Before you could say, “vigilante justice,” a number of armed men in pickup trucks were parked in front of the town hall ready to reenact their own personal version of “Death Wish.”

With all respect to the local police force, the few officers on duty were able to talk the inebriated, heavily armed group off the ledge. The men eventually drove off to their respective homes, no one was lynched, and a crisis was averted. A few hours later, in the middle of the night, the police transferred the prisoner to a larger jail a hundred miles away.

The reason I bring up this story is because I am reminded of it every time I hear white people lecture black people on how to behave after one of their unarmed sons and daughters is killed by the police. I watched, in real time, an entire community get worked up to a fever, murderous pitch over the course of a couple of days over the murder of one of their own. Yet, people just like those I grew up around who, within a few hours, rationalized a lynching over one unjust death, cannot imagine the release of pent-up fear and anger many black communities feel that has been building for generations.

The reason Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the National Anthem wasn't because of the killing of one person. The reason there were riots in Ferguson MO in 2015 wasn't just because of the death of Michael Brown. The reason there are protests and riots in all fifty states right now isn't just because of the deaths of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor. The reason for all of these is the centuries-old, systemic practice of viewing and treating black bodies as expendable.

When citizens do this like we've recently seen with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, it is horrible and deserves moral outrage and legal repercussions. When this happens at the hands of those entrusted to serve and protect the very people it kills, without consequences, it is evil. When this happens over and over and over and over....again, it is a moral failure not just of the law enforcement officers who do this but of our society because we've turned a blind eye to the deaths, pain, and suffering of our own.

It doesn't take a lot of thought to imagine what would happen if it was unarmed white people being killed by the police. One of the turning points in how the nation viewed of the way our government was handling the Vietnam War was shooting deaths of four young, unarmed students at Kent State in 1970. Like the rural area where I grew up, white America doesn't tolerate the killing of their own by agents of the government. Not for one fucking second.

Yet, a whole lot of white America can't seem to understand why Black Americans get so worked up whenever one of their own is murdered by the police. I've seen more video of white people screaming at police for pulling them over or for asking them to obey safe practices during a pandemic than over the killing of their fellow, unarmed citizens.

I know there are a host of hot takes as to why white America doesn't really give a damn about the killing of unarmed minorities. If the analysis doesn't begin and end with, “as a whole, white America views minorities as inferior and expendable,” it isn't worth a damn. This doesn't mean all of white America is racist. It means that, as a group, white America doesn't care enough to change the status quo. This shouldn't be a revelation to anyone who pays attention to the world around them. White America hasn't given a damn about minorities since, forever. They have really never cared about Native Americans. They've only given a half-assed care about blacks and that was only after seeing images of church-dressed men, women, and children being attacked by police dogs and brutalized with batons and fire hoses at the hands of racist, Southern police. Once the Civil Rights Act passed, White America pretty much went back to not giving a damn about black people. It almost seems like giving blacks the right to vote was all the care White America could muster and a lot of them couldn't (and still can't) do that. The fear and anger the people in my community felt over the course of a few days back in the late 70s led them to be willing to break whatever laws they deemed necessary to get the justice they felt they deserved. Imagine this same fear and anger not building up over a few days but a few centuries. Imagine not one member of your community being unjustly killed but dozens and dozens each and every year. Imagine the fear and anger not that these deaths were the result of some random person but by the very people hired and entrusted to protect your community.

The surprising thing isn't that black Americas are angry. The surprising thing is they've kept their anger in control as well as they have. White Americans protest and riot over their favorite sports team winning or losing. They protest and riot over a beloved football coach being fired. They protest and riot over having their favorite drink being taxed. They protest and riot over not being able to get their hair cut and flower beds properly tended. Black Americans are protesting over the killings of their loved ones.

I cannot imagine what it is like to fear for your life every time you encounter the police, regardless of the circumstances. I cannot imagine worrying about any of my children being harmed, let alone killed by the police. I cannot imagine being punished more harshly by the police and courts for doing the same things that others have done. I cannot imagine being viewed as “violent,” “lazy,” “a thug,” “a threat,”... , no matter how wealthy or successful I am, by a good portion of society, just because of the color of my skin. I cannot imagine my water supply being poisoned with lead and no one with any power gives a damn. There are thousands of things about being black in America I cannot even imagine.

Just because I can't imagine these things doesn't make them not real. It doesn't make them not important. That I cannot imagine these things just means I've been fortunate enough to be on the other side of the systemic racism in our country. As I watch the current protests over the latest police killings of unarmed blacks, I'm hopeful and afraid. Hopeful because the number of protests not just in big cities but around the country in towns large and small means, like the images on tv from the 60s of the Civil Rights marches, are having a real impact on white America. Fearful because I know the history of this country when it comes to the levels it will go to protect the white patriarchy.

Within the past few years, I watched the election of someone who is the personification of white supremacy as a backlash to the first black president. Trump won the election because the majority of white men and women voted for him. They may not do the same next time around but that they did the first time tells you all you need to know about where White America stands when it comes to racial justice and equality.

When it comes to the deaths of unarmed blacks by police, to the overpopulation of our prison system, to the gross wealth disparity of whites and blacks, to too many issues to list here, to my fellow White Americans, I quote Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” You know damn well you wouldn't tolerate being treated how blacks our in our country. You know damn well you wouldn't tolerate the killing of your sons and daughters by anyone, especially the police.

It is time to stop pretending the problem isn't systemic and it is the responsibility of minorities to fix. White America built the system. White America has and still does, to a great extent, support it. White America, all of it, benefits from it. It is up to us to dismantle it. We can either go down as the ones who did what was necessary to live up to the promises of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, or we can go down in history as just another era that made promises it never intended to live up to. This isn't something that could or should wait another day to happen. It is centuries behind schedule. Trying is no longer enough. To quote a Jedi Master, “Do or do not, there is no try.” We owe it ourselves but, much more importantly, we owe it to Black Americans past and present.

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kootenaygoon · 5 years

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So,

Until I moved to the Kootenays in 2014, I’d never been politically engaged enough to be able to make an informed vote at the municipal level. Politically I had UVic-style leftward leanings, but that didn’t mean I understood the implications of the sort of decisions a city’s mayor and council would make. What did I know about bylaws? Or taxes? I thought it was stupid that we had to buy stickers to put on our garbage bags, but beyond that I didn’t have any pressing concerns about how they were running things down at Nelson city hall.

With the election coming up, I knew I had to wrap my head around the various issues in the city and how they related to the people we were voting into power. The mental health crisis was going to be a talking point, I knew from Police Chief Wayne Holland, and there was talk the dog bylaw might finally be overturned. The most interesting element to me was weed legalization and its implications. The hottest topic was affordable housing. When Calvin assigned me to interview all of the city council and mayoral candidates, at first I felt daunted by the scope of the project — more than 10 interviews and thousands of words over the course of a few weeks. I realized pretty quick, though, it was my opportunity to deep-dive into this shit.

If I was going to be a real journalist, I would have to get into politics.

Greg was on the city hall beat at that point, and anytime Tamara, Calvin or I had a question about the election or the people involved, it was him we went to. Some of the candidates Greg knew from growing up in the area, others from covering them in previous elections, but there was nobody he couldn’t give us a multi-year rundown on. He would swivel in his chair and gesticulate with one scholarly finger in the air, opining in his radio announcer voice. The longer I worked alongside him the more I admired his encyclopedic knowledge, how relentless he was about pursuing the truth, sometimes scouring through old archives to better understand a crime that happened 100 years before he was born and other times harassing clerks to get damning documents on criminals still working their way through the court system. He was the Star’s greatest asset, and everybody understood that.

One afternoon I sat in the newsroom with Greg and talked about the elections of the past and how they influenced the one coming up. He told me Phil McMillan, the compassion club director, had run for mayor on a cannabis slate around ten years previous. And a local actor named Richard Rowberry had campaigned as the ghost of Nelson’s first mayor, John “Truth” Houston. One former mayor he spoke about with affection was Dave Elliot, who was remembered mostly in town for stopping an expansion of the local Walmart. The executives were in back-room negotiations to double the store’s size into the next lot when Elliot broke confidentiality and raised the alarm with the community. Ultimately he purchased the neighbouring land, along with a number of other Nelson families, just to stop the deal from going ahead. The property had been sitting vacant ever since — a visual testament to the Kootenay spirit of opposing development. A number of projects had tried to get off the ground there, including a condo complex, but the math just didn’t seem to be right. It was prime lakeside property, fenced off, the yard full of abandoned machines, broken concrete and waist-high grass.

Depending on who you asked, it was this move that got ultimately got Elliot ousted. Some felt he over-stepped. The right-wing types felt he was too hippy dippy, and wanted someone who would champion the small businesses on Baker Street with more diligence. Dooley was a reliably conservative city councillor at this point, and ended up taking the big seat in 2005. By the time I showed up in the Kootenays he was the longest serving Nelson mayor in history.

According to Greg, Dooley was hyper-popular and heavily favoured to win. But there were murmurings in the community about dissatisfaction. He seemed like a perfect Irish gentleman to me, polite and amiable, but apparently some felt he was a a bully in the council chambers — as evidenced by the signs stapled to telephone poles around town that read ‘Bully for Mayor’. That being said, he had a number of impressive accomplishments under his belt and had proven himself adept at finding new revenue streams for the community, whether it was from the provincial and federal governments or from organizations like the Columbia Basin Trust. Many credited his contribution for making the new skate park possible. No matter what anyone said, they couldn’t question that he loved his community deeply, and wanted to create a better future for its residents.

Then there were the cops.

“What are they going to do about that cop that punched the woman? That’s what I want to know,” Paisley asked one evening, while I was watching TV. She had come up with a plan, along with her new burlesque friends, to hold a topless protest outside the NPD station.

She carefully poured vegan muffin batter in to a baking sheet.

“I can’t believe we’ve got a proven woman-puncher just working away at the police station like nothing happened. That fucker needs to be fired.”

“He still might be. Depends on how things go with the trial.”

“What’s left to know? Didn’t he admit doing it?”

That situation was an ongoing black eye for the NPD, and they were also under scrutiny because they were requesting a $300,000 boost to their budget. Another smouldering question was how they would deal with the end of cannabis prohibition. They were still busting people routinely, whether it was for grow-ops or possession, and residents wanted to know when that would change. The new mayor would be head of the Nelson Police Board, giving them power over Holland and his force, so this was an opportunity for pot advocates to land an ally in a strategic spot. Dooley was openly hostile to cannabis, and had gone on record a few years previous vehemently opposing an anti-violence initiative related to pot decriminalization, so he clearly wasn’t the right champion. That’s why a new provincial organization called Sensible BC, represented by pot activist Dana Larsen, announced its intentions to get involved in an attempt to eject him.

They wanted someone pot-friendly running the province’s weed capital.

One afternoon I met the local Sensible BC representative, Herb Couch, who was perfectly named for his position. He wanted to see less money wasted policing cannabis, and announced his intention to quiz each candidate on their stance and instruct his followers to vote accordingly. Couch had the backing of Phil McMillan and over 1000 dispensary members, so his influence wouldn’t be insignificant. He was a chill, soft-spoken former high school teacher sporting a signature cowboy hat and a vibrant orange shirt. Relentless about his activism, to the point of annoying some, he’d also been a vocal advocate for the preservation of Red Sands Beach.

I liked him right away.

“Sharon wants to know why we’re writing so many stories about pot,” Calvin said, after the interview with Couch ran. “I don’t think she’s a fan of this Herb character.”

“So many stories? We’ve just done the one.”

“Well, and it’s come up as a topic in some of the other stories about the election. The candidate profiles, a few of them had whole sections about their views on weed.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“She says this isn’t even a relevant municipal issue. Legalization is a federal issue.”

“Right, but it has municipal implications.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like it will affect the police budget. How’s that not relevant?”

“Let’s just cool if with all the weed stuff, okay? People want to know about their taxes, about affordable housing, about all kinds of other stuff. This whole election can’t just be about marijuana.”

The moment Severyn announced his candidacy, the campaigning got ugly. Late-night vandals drove all around multiple neighbourhoods to collect his lawn signs, which featured cartoon moustaches, and dump them outside of town. He showed up at the Star office distraught, frustrated that his comrades in the police department weren’t doing more to figure out who the culprits were. (“You know how much those things cost? And that comes right out of my pocket,” Severyn lamented.) He made totally inappropriate accusations about Dooley, yelling in our foyer, and the rhetoric continued to devolve from there. It was clear to even the casual observer that the two men absolutely hated each other.

Dooley was furious that Severyn would even consider running against him, and more furious that the political dunce seemed to have hundreds of voters’ worth of support. He took it as a personal insult. During campaign events Dooley barely contained his frustration. I watched him repeatedly lose his cool.

Into this mix came Deb Kozak. Sporting a tidy grey bob and a simple pearl necklace, she had a sing-song friendliness to her voice and a fierce determination in her eyes. She’d been on council with Dooley and, though she wouldn’t say it directly, clearly had issues with his leadership. Observers believed she would’ve never been able to take Dooley on in a two-way race, but with Severyn as a wild card she stood a chance to take a strategic majority. If successful, she would be the first female elected mayor in history — a feat fellow councillor Donna Macdonald had tried and failed to accomplish twice. Deb had a maternal energy, and a general optimism about bringing people together and accomplishing positive things. It was a hopeful time in politics, with Obama in power down in the U.S., and I believed things were trending upwards. Culturally we were evolving, and our leadership reflected that, right down to the municipal level. By the end of our first interview it was clear she had my vote, whether I could admit it openly or not.

She seemed audacious.

“One thing I’ve learned as a councillor, and even before that, is I’m good at conversation. And I’m good at welcoming even difficult conversations. We have a diverse community, and sometimes that leads to conflict. I think you work through those things, and you make better decisions when all those groups are pulled together, or at least have an opportunity to share what they think about the future,” she said.

Kozak had arrived in Nelson in the 80s, just after David Thompson University and the Kootenay Forest Products plant shut down. The economic downturn was in full swing, and she’d been inspired by the ambitious moves made by the council at the time. They set out to give the downtown core a makeover, making it more attractive to tourists.

“It was a very frightening time. But it was at that time that the council of the day took a bold step forward to rejuvenate Baker. They said ‘we’re going to rip off all the old clapboards off these beautiful buildings and we’re going to go for it,” she said.

She wanted to be similarly ambitious.

“I bring to the table experience, passion, heart and mind. What I have to offer is almost fearless exploration of who we can be.”

The Kootenay Goon

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Sunday, June 27, 2021

People in advanced economies say their society is more divided than before pandemic (Pew Research Center) A median of 34% of adults across 17 advanced economies feel their society is more united than before the pandemic, but about six-in-ten report that national divisions have worsened since the outbreak began. In 12 of 13 countries surveyed in both 2020 and 2021, feelings of division have increased significantly, in some cases by more than 30 percentage points. Some of these divisions reflect how people view the social limitations they have faced, such as stay-at-home orders or mask mandates while in public.

Historic heat wave blasts Northwest as wildfire risks soar (AP) The Pacific Northwest sweltered Friday and braced for even hotter weather through the weekend as a historic heat wave hit Washington and Oregon, with temperatures in many areas expected to top out up to 30 degrees above normal. The extreme and dangerous heat was expected to break all-time records in cities and towns from eastern Washington state to Portland to southern Oregon as concerns mounted about wildfire risk in a region that is already experiencing a crippling and extended drought. Seattle was expected to edge above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) over the weekend and in Portland, Oregon, weather forecasters said the thermometer could soar to 108 F (42 C) by Sunday, breaking an all-time record of 107 F (42 C) set in 1981. Unusually hot weather was expected to extend into next week for much of the region.

Why police have been quitting in droves (NYT) When the media adopts a storyline, sometimes stories that fit into the narrative are retained while those that don’t quite fit are discarded. While there’s been a wholly justifiable focus on police brutality, there hasn’t been much attention paid to a group of people caught in the media crossfire: good cops who do a good job but are still treated like the bad guys. Those cops are quitting in high numbers. Consider the experience of Officer Lindsay C. Rose in Asheville, N.C.: “Various friends and relatives had stopped speaking to her because she was a cop. During a protest in June around Police Headquarters, a demonstrator lobbed an explosive charge that set her pants on fire and scorched her legs. She said she was spit on. She was belittled. Members of the city’s gay community, an inclusive clan that had welcomed her in when she first settled in Asheville, stood near her at one event and chanted, ‘All gay cops are traitors,’ she said. By September, still deeply demoralized despite taking several months off to recuperate, Officer Rose decided that she was done.” Rose wasn’t alone. At police departments across the country, “retirements were up 45 percent and resignations rose by 18 percent in the year from April 2020 to April 2021.” About a third of the Asheville police force has left the job. Their chief explains: “They said that we have become the bad guys, and we did not get into this to become the bad guys.”

Disappearances rise on Mexico’s ‘highway of death’ to border (AP) As many as 50 people are missing after setting out on three-hour car trips this year between Mexico’s industrial hub of Monterrey and the border city of Nuevo Laredo on a well-traveled stretch of road local media have dubbed “the highway of death.” Relatives say family members simply vanished. The disappearances, and last week’s shooting of 15 apparently innocent bystanders in Reynosa, suggest Mexico is returning to the dark days of the 2006-2012 drug war when cartel gunmen often targeted the general public as well as one another. As many as half a dozen of those who disappeared on the highway are believed to be U.S. citizens or residents, though the U.S. Embassy could not confirm their status. One, José de Jesús Gómez from Irving, Texas, reportedly disappeared on the highway on June 3. Most of the victims are believed to have disappeared approaching or leaving the cartel-dominated city of Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas. About a half-dozen men have reappeared alive, badly beaten, and all they will say is that armed men forced them to stop on the highway and took their vehicles.

Prominent Nicaraguan opposition leaders and journalists flee an escalating government crackdown (Washington Post) The stream of high-profile opposition leaders, journalists and members of civil society fleeing Nicaragua has surged, as the regime of President Daniel Ortega wages the most alarming political crackdown in the country’s recent history ahead of a November election. In the last week, several of the most influential critics of the Ortega regime sneaked out of the country—convinced they would be detained if they remained. Journalists for mainstream publications were stripped of their passports, but decided to leave anyway. Even some of Ortega’s former top Sandinista comrades are seeking refuge abroad. The consequences for remaining in the country could be dire: Over the past several months, at least 16 opposition figures have been jailed. Journalists have also come under threat in recent weeks. Veteran journalist Miguel Mendoza was detained on June 21, when police broke into his home. The day before that, police arrested Miguel Mora, the former director of 100% Noticias. Mora had stepped down from his role at the outlet to run for president. Julio López, another prominent journalist, was stripped of his passport last week. He decided at that point to seek refuge in Costa Rica.

Russia launches Mediterranean drills amid rift with Britain (AP) The Russian military on Friday launched sweeping maneuvers in the Mediterranean Sea featuring warplanes armed with state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles, a show of force amid a surge in tensions following an incident with a British destroyer in the Black Sea. Moscow said one of its warships fired warning shots and a warplane dropped bombs in the path of British destroyer Defender on Wednesday to force her out of an area near Crimea that Russia claims as its territorial waters. Britain denied that account, insisted its ship wasn’t fired upon and said she was sailing in Ukrainian waters. The Russian drills that began Friday in the eastern Mediterranean come as a British carrier strike group is in the area. Earlier this week, British and U.S. F-35 fighters from HMS Queen Elizabeth flew combat sorties against the Islamic State group.

Pakistan’s leader sparks protests by blaming women ‘wearing very few clothes’ for sexual assaults (Washington Post) Pakistan’s prime minister is facing protests and calls for a public apology after suggesting there would be fewer sexual assaults if women dressed more modestly. In an interview with Axios earlier this week, Imran Khan was asked about whether there was a “rape epidemic” in Pakistan, where advocates believe that a large number of assaults go unreported. “If a woman is wearing very few clothes, it will have an impact on the man unless they are robots. I mean, it’s common sense,” he responded. Women in Pakistan responded by sharing photographs of the “modest” clothing that they were wearing when they were sexually harassed, as well as anecdotes about inappropriate behavior they have encountered—such as unwanted touching—even when conservatively dressed in traditional headscarves and shalwar kameez. It’s the second time in recent months that Khan — who was one of Pakistan’s top cricket players and a national celebrity before he entered politics—has come under fire for his comments about rape.

Thirteen peacekeepers wounded, six soldiers killed in Mali militant attacks (Reuters) Thirteen U.N. peacekeepers, 12 Germans and one Belgian, were wounded in northern Mali on Friday by a car bomb, the U.N. mission said, while Mali’s army said six of its soldiers were killed in a separate attack in the centre of the country. The attack in the north targeted a temporary base set up by the peacekeepers near the village of Ichagara in the Gao region, where Islamist insurgents linked to Al Qaeda and Islamic State are active.

UN: Madagascar droughts push 400,000 toward starvation (AP) The U.N. World Food Program says southern Madagascar is in the throes of back-to-back droughts that are pushing 400,000 people toward starvation, and have already caused deaths from severe hunger. Lola Castro, WFP’s regional director in southern Africa, told a news conference Friday that she witnessed “a very dramatic and desperate situation” during her recent visit with WFP chief David Beasley to the Indian Ocean island nation of 26 million people. Hundreds of adults and children were “wasted,” and hundreds of kids were skin and bones and receiving nutritional support, she said. In 28 years working for WFP on four continents, Castro said she had “never seen anything this bad” except in 1998 in Bahr el-Gazal in what is now South Sudan.

As virus surges in Uganda, hospitals accused of profiteering (AP) As he struggled to breathe earlier this month, Dr. Nathan Tumubone was tormented by thoughts of hospitalization as a COVID-19 patient. Thinking of the costs involved, he knew he wanted to stay home. “The truth is I didn’t want to go to hospital,” said the general practitioner. “We’ve seen the costs are really high, and one wouldn’t want to get in there.” As virus cases surge in Uganda, making scarce hospital beds even more expensive, concern is growing over the alleged exploitation of patients by private hospitals accused of demanding payment up front and hiking fees. Although the practice of requiring deposits from patients has long been seen as acceptable in this East African country where few have health insurance, it is raising anger among some who cite attempts to profiteer from the pandemic. Some hospital bills shared by families of COVID-19 patients emerging from intensive care show sums of up to $15,000, a small fortune in a country where annual per capita income is less than $1,000.

Intel report is inconclusive about UFOs (AP) A long-awaited U.S. government report on UFOs released Friday makes at least one thing clear: The truth is still out there. Investigators did not find extraterrestrial links in reviewing 144 sightings of aircraft or other devices apparently flying at mysterious speeds or trajectories. But they drew few other conclusions and instead highlighted the need for better data collection about what’s increasingly seen by Democrats and Republicans as a national security concern. In all but one of the sightings investigated, there was too little information for investigators to even broadly characterize the nature of the incident. Long the domain of science fiction and so-called ufologists, the subject of UFOs has in recent years drawn serious study from the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. Congress last year required the creation of the report delivered Friday. While its lack of conclusions has already been made public, the report on what the government calls “unidentified aerial phenomena” still represents a milestone in the study of the issue.

#headlines #news

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seriousbusinessforhumans · 3 years

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In trying to determine the formula that led to the Biden/Harris victory, as if such a formula could be replicated in a lab and distributed to every state in the country and work just as well, a predictable woke vs anti-woke debate has broken out, complete with its predictable false choices. The anti-woke say white suburban Independents who flipped from Trump to Biden gave us Biden. The woke credit members of the Democratic base—Black women, Latinos, and activists who worked to get out the vote for Biden, etc. This dichotomy forecloses the possibility that both kinds of groups, and therefore appeals to both sorts of rhetorics and ideologies, were necessary to drag Biden over the finish line. Though it's still way early, and though there's still tons of precinct-level data to work through (once it eventually comes out), here's who seem to be the heroes of this Democratic victory:

(including Stacey Abrams and Fair Fight Action in Georgia, Latino and Native activists in Arizona, Culinary Workers in Nevada, Madison and the suburbs in Wisconsin, the spirits of George Floyd, John Lewis and maybe John McCain)

The Educated-White's Alliance With People of Color

The "Blue Wall" was reactivated thanks to two counties in Michigan. Biden won the state by a little more than 2.5 points, but it was the double-punch of Washtenaw County (home of the University of Michigan) and Wayne County (home of Detroit, the Blackest city in the U.S.) that knocked out Trump. Combined, both counties sent 70% of their votes to Biden. A part of the current left in the U.S. has been characterized by an alliance between educated/cosmopolitan white Americans and people of color. Evidence of this alliance, which the French economist Thomas Piketty claims is new (educated white Americans voted Republican before the 1980s) could not be better expressed than the results in Michigan.

Stacey Abrams

This novelist of romances and thrillers (a new one is coming out in May 2021) has become an icon of American politics. Her story has all the right elements for iconography. She ran for governor against a "good old boy," Brian Kemp, and lost by a small margin because of voter suppression. Did a little soul searching (“I sat shiva for 10 days") after the loss, then she "started plotting.” Two years later, the nonprofit she runs, Fair Fight Action, is in the news because Georgia turned blue. By a few votes, true. But it looks like Abrams rose to her feet after defeat and helped beat an unusually popular white mess of a president. Though this iconography is impressive, it excludes, as all icons do, a lot of important details. One, Georgia is not far from becoming a majority-minority state. Its white population, excluding hispanic whites, is 51%. Its Black population is 36%. This means that Georgia is actually less white than Florida and Texas and more like rainbow California. Another detail is that a program activated by the state in 2016 automatically registered people through the "the driver’s license application form." This vastly expanded the state's voting pool. That said, Abrams's activism undoubtedly excited the Black vote and gave the struggle against voter suppression in Georgia and the U.S. its much-needed icon.

The Spirit of George Floyd

There has been a lot of talk about the spirit of John McCain and of John Lewis. The former, who was savagely insulted by Trump on several occasions, sent his supernatural vote-Biden vibes to Arizona, the state that made his political career. The latter sent similar vibes to his neck of the woods, Clayton County, Georgia. But there is probably a much bigger spirit to consider in this presidential election. It is the spirit of George Floyd, a Black man killed on May 25, 2020 by the knee of a heartless Minnesota police officer. There's much talk on the center-left about how Trump claimed a larger part of the white vote this time around because many whites were scared away from Biden by all of the BLM protests....But this view may not contain much reality. In May and June, the GOP was actually out-registering Dems. It's only after Floyd's death and the BLM demonstrations that Dems experienced a voter registration spike. George Floyd might turn out to be the most important spirit of this presidential election. Also, he may have left a powerful and possibly lasting impression on Minnesota's voters (Biden won the state by seven percentage points).

John Roberts Jr.

This is not a happy thing to say, but it must be said: An important figure in the presidential election and Trump's untergang is the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts. On October 19, he sided with the justices on the left and sent a decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court back to that court. As a consequence, the state was allowed to count votes for three days after the election. The GOP's plan was to block counting until election day (that worked), and to only count mail-in votes that arrived on election day (that did not work).....And if the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's ruling was snapped liked a twig by five SCOTUS votes, Trump would likely have pocketed Pennsylvania.

Arizona's Latino Activists, Navajo Nation, and a Lot of TV

This year Joe Biden became the first Democrat to win Arizona in 24 years. NPR chalks up the win to a variety of factors—an influx of younger, more liberal tech workers from California seeking cheaper rent in a similarly sunny locale; a failed Trump campaign strategy of avoiding cities for the rural areas, and a decade of Mexican and Central American activists organizing to boot Sheriff Joe Arpaio and push back against the county's anti-immigrant laws. There's a lot of support for all that. Politico reports that 18 to 29-year-olds made up the highest percentage of new voters this year, and Biden won big in the cities and college towns where those young voters typically live. On the activism side: according to the Intercept, it's looking like Biden won 70% of the Latino vote in Arizona, increasing Hilary Clinton's 2016 share by nearly 10 points. Bernie Sanders's "Latino strategist," Chuck Rocha, told the outlet that groups such as Living United for Change (LUCHA) and Aqui Se Vota were on the ground, battle-tested, and ready to go, which helped a lot. And those voters voted early. According to Politico, "As of Friday, there was a 62% increase in Latino votes cast early statewide compared to the same point in 2016, according to data provided by Hawkfish, a Democratic research firm." Biden also significantly out-performed his 2016 margin in a couple rural counties that overlap with Native Nations, according to High Country News. And though we’re not sure yet, a high proportion of urban Natives likely voted for Biden in the cities as well, but certainly the Navajo Nation, "went solidly for Joe Biden, with 73,954 votes compared to just 2,010 for incumbent President Donald Trump — a 97 percent turnout for Biden compared to 51 percent statewide." Finally, the person in the Biden camp who decided to spend so much money in the Phoenix media market also deserves a hat tip. Biden flooded the zone for the last six weeks of the election.

The Culinary Workers Union in Nevada

The guy to read on Nevada is Jon Ralston, who obsessively followed the early voting and polling in the state throughout the race. He highlights the the Culinary Workers Union, who represent the beating heart and legs and arms of Nevada's Democratic machine, and their work registering Democratic voters in the field. Biden ended up basically matching Clinton's numbers in Clark Count (Las Vegas), but he out-performed 2016 numbers in Reno. Why? Multiple Biden and Biden surrogate visits, plus a core of Latino activists who "doubled down" on door-knocking in a county that's 25% hispanic.

Madison and the 'Burbs in Wisconsin

The Cap Times argues this one's easy. Basically, the cities of Madison and Milwaukee got bigger, and so did Biden's margins compared to 2016. The people pushed out of those cities—and those who chose to move to the surrounding suburbs—brought "their liberal views with them," according to a Republican strategist quoted in the piece.

Grassroots organizing in PA

The story in Pennsylvania looks to be the same as the story elsewhere in "Blue Wall"—Biden drove up margins in the cities and in the suburbs. We'll have better data later, but according to exit polls from 2016 and 2020, Biden did better with Black and Latino voters than Clinton did. Tenacious organizing from grassroots groups over the course of the last four years no doubt played a roll in this win.

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pcvkaplowitz-blog · 6 years

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In Retrospect...

“Stand up when your name is called” directed the Costa Rican border agent standing in the front of our bus. Coming from Nicaragua I’d heard a lot about Costa Rica, it seemed like everyone I talked to knew somebody working across the border. The more politically minded would tell me that the only reason Costa Rica was prosperous was because of the Nicaraguans who fled during the war. Since then the border crossing is hard for Nicaraguans, and usually it would have been harder for me as well, but the U.S. Embassies in Nicaragua and Costa Rica had already coordinated with the Costa Rican government to ensure our evacuation went smoothly.

“Josh Wynn” called the agent, and I though back to killing the scorpion and chinche with Josh “Bootylicious” Wynn what seemed like an eternity ago but actually only been the week prior. In Somoto, Clare “Fachenta” Davies looked on in horror, silently praying that the next two years of service in Nicaragua wouldn’t be filled with dangerous insects in a remote mountain village. The bugs were a hardship we expected to face. Indoctrinated with the mantra of resiliency the prospect of leaving Nicaragua before the 27 months term of service ended barely figured into the imagination. Now, almost two months after arriving we were crossing into Costa Rica.

News of the protest first reached me on Thursday while travelling from Somoto back to my training site by way of Managua. The handful of the other volunteers who happened to be traveling on the same bus with as me received texts notifying us of the protests. The first messages were innocuous, telling us that we must take taxis to avoid loitering in the Managua areas. The severity increased with each successive notification until finally we were told to disembark in Tipitapa and avoid Managua all together. In Tipitapa we rendezvoused with Peace Corps officials who drove us back to our sites. Even then I failed to comprehend the extent of the upheaval brewing.

Once safely in Niquinohomo the news of the protests came through filtered sources. It was clear that the initial protest was in response to an executive order changing social security but the reason for the volatile nature of the protests was unclear. The only news channels broadcasting on TV served as offered biased critique and inaccurate reports, skewed to support Ortega. My host sister works in the Mayor’s office and downplayed the protests. Other locals in my house claimed that the protests had been used as an excuse for vandals to loot stores. They all seemed to think there would be a return to order soon. These viewpoints contrasted sharply with those of other members of my community.

On Friday it became apparent that the unrest was bigger than originally apparent. People complained of election fraud, lack of representation, and the disconnect between the Ortega of today and the former Sandinista leader. Some accused Ortega of selling out Nicaragua for his personal profit. Additionally, it became apparent that the peaceful protests had been responded to with violence. Riot police took to the streets and counter-protestors fought the demonstrators. In Tipitapa, where I had been hours before, a Nicaraguan was killed. State news claims the murder was by vandals intent on burning the mayors office, but a number of other sources allege the vandals were paid by the government to cause violence and delegitimize the protestors.

Peace Corps sent me another notification: “Standfast.” The emergency action plan was officially underway. In Niquinohomo it remained calm, it seemed surreal. I had heard the news but assumed it was exaggerated like the way Fox covers the protests in Ferguson and Chicago. I still thought things would settle down. I didn’t pack a go-bag and walked around town in my flip flops chatting with the neighbors.

That night there was a large march in Niquinohomo. Hundreds of people paraded through the streets wearing black, waving Nicaraguan flags, tearing down Sandinista propaganda. Trucks and biked honked their horns. The people chanted. “They have the right to demonstrate” said my sister who works at the Mayors office. She didn’t join the protestors though, I heard anyone who worked for the state (including teachers and local and regional officials) would lose their job for demonstrating or criticizing Ortega. The police in Niquinohomo waited on the street corners and watched. The police in other sites were not so patient.

Violence blossomed over the weekend. Police fired live rounds into crowds, killing students. Snipers on the rooftops in Managua targeted people seeking refuge in a church. I was told “They’re aiming at the head and the heart, they’re trying to take people out.” In Bluefields a journalist was killed, shot in the head while streaming on Facebook live because his channel had been cut off. Across the country the army was deployed.

My friend living in El Rosario texted me: “I heard they are coming to burn our alcaldia (trans. mayors office)...” Her family locked down their house and she slept with her knife. The mob never came for her but in Leon, Diriamba, Masaya, Managua, Bluefields and other cities it did, burning down the mayor’s offices. In Masaya fighting between the police and the citizens was especially severe. “It’s a war over there,” my host family warned me.

Ortega spoke but his two-hour speech only managed to enrage the crowds. His themes were tangential, and his demeanor was slow. He reminded me of a tortoise with Alzheimer’s. He called for dialogue but only with the heads of the COSEP, a group of business leaders that spent the past decade eating out of Ortega’s hand. Later he revoked the executive order, but it wasn’t enough to calm the crowds. Some businesses closed. Many grocery stores and gas stations were looted.

Peace Corps activated the next step of the Emergency Action Plan on Sunday, “Consolidation.” At this point Peace Corps Volunteers in Managua were locked down in the central office, unable to leave even to go pack their belongings for the evacuation. Trainees in Diriamba had spent the prior night gathered at the house of a volunteer avoiding the disturbances downtown. I packed half my things, expecting the reversal of the order to be enough to reverse the consolidation decision.

At 9:00 pm I got a call telling me that I’d be picked up the next morning for Consolidation in Grandad before eventual evacuation to Costa Rica and the States. Reluctantly I admitted that I would have to leave tranquil Niquinohomo. My host mom was upset “We have food, we have water, we have electricity, this house is very secure!” She told me. “Out there is where the craziness is, everything is fine here!” I had to explain the order was from the Ambassador and it was for all volunteers not just us. She still didn’t want to see me go.

I left twice. At 10 AM the van picked us up and I helped load bags on the roof, tying the bags down as the sun beat down. I finished securing the bags and hopped down, ran to hug the host families goodbye, and hopped in the van. We got on the road and began our briefing session when Daniel “Freak” Tassitino asked me where my backpack was. I apologized profusely as we turned the bus around to go grab my laptop, passport, and camera. Twenty minutes later and I was back on the road with my backpack and a big IOU for Daniel’s host family.

In the bus Ashley explained the situation. Official reports of death were underreported and estimates are that 100 people were killed over the weekend. The plan was to stay in Granada for two days and get all volunteers together before moving on to Costa Rica and eventually the United States. The Embassy was evacuating all non-essential personnel. There were concerns about accessing food, water, and gas. Some routes to the embassy had been blocked off leading to fear about being cut off. It felt good to be with the other trainees. We felt safe together and I trusted Peace Corps to keep us safe.

The customs agent began calling names I didn’t recognize. The names of the Volunteers who shared our bus. All the trainees and volunteers got evacuated together. In Granada we mingled awkwardly. The group was conflicted. I’d met some of the volunteers before and I tried to take advantage of the opportunity to talk with them and meet other people who could share some perspective with me. At the same time I tried to avoid being insensitive to those taking the transition harder than I was. Some of the older volunteers resented being pulled away from their families for the last time without being able to say goodbye. Some had friends in jail. But here in a fancy hotel we enjoyed drinks by the pool and catered meals, almost as if nothing happened.

Granada looked peaceful. I knew there had been protests earlier in the week but the tourist district we stayed in was tranquilo. The first day we were locked down in the hotel. There was nothing to occupy our time that first day except the pool and Flor de Cana rum. I don’t think it really hit me that I’d be back in the States in less than a week. When we to packing up all our stuff and leave our homes I told my friend Troy “Sweet T” Marderosian that “best case scenario this is all just an annoyance.” The first day in Granada were like a little bourgeoisie vacation at the time and I enjoyed it while briefly under the impression that we may return to our normal routine before too long.

The briefings began the second day in Granada and it was made clear we would be leaving the country. Don Howard, the seemingly implacable country director, choked up during his speech. He tried to sound hopeful, but the gloomy reality of the situation couldn’t be ignored. The uncertainty that had provided refuge and hopes of a quick return during the consolidation process morphed as Peace Corps switched to “Evacuation” mode. Staff members families were sent to the United States. The Director traveled with an escort from the embassy. The immediate confusion of what going to happen now turned into an anxiety about what’s going to happen next.

We boarded the busses. Fifty volunteers per bus, our belongings stuffed into the storage spaces, only a few hours behind schedule we headed toward the border. Jammed packed, I was grateful for the air conditioning. No stops, I was grateful for the bathroom. Although, we did get off for a minute right before the border while they searched the busses, it was fast almost cursory. And now here we are getting ushered into Costa Rica. When they called my name, I waved from the back row, popping my head above the seats, acutely feeling the privilege of my blue and gold passport.

The border crossing made me think of all the people we were leaving behind. Don Howard had mentioned that all the staff accompanying us were leaving their families. How could anyone be asked to leave their family in an agitated country to accompany some privileged gringos across the border? And what of our own friends and host families? I’m grateful Niquinohomo is safe but the protests have continued. I’m outraged at the injustices committed by the government in Nicaragua, the lack of representation, the twisting of the facts. I also can leave at will. I’m privileged to disconnect.

“Poverty is not knowing if you can ever leave” Said Peter Hatch during our training. And now I’m leaving a country just when the situation gets hairy. It’s funny that just a few weeks prior I was surprised that people had been complaining to me about the government and now there were riots in the street. I guess the people had enough. A number of people told me that Ortega had sold out to corporate interests.

“Nicaragua could be the richest country in central America” said my neighbor. But the country has a brutal history of dictators using the natural resources for their own personal gain, complicit in this is the buying power of the United States and other foreign countries. The U.S. has been responsible for starting wars in Nicaragua and benefited from exploitative trade agreements. It is the pinicle of irony that an American businessman pressured Ortega to reverse the Social Security mandate that sparked the riots. Civil disturbances are bad for business.

“The people don’t trust COSEC, they’ve been stealing from Nicaragua for the past 20 years” Said Ashely. The people have power in the streets, but when they let the business sector speak for them they lose that power. Ortega has dictated who he will negotiate with, the streets don’t care, the streets shout “Ortega, Somoza, son la misma cosa.” The streets want change. The people are finding their voice. And I am leaving.

In Costa Rica the change is noticeable. The countryside houses have cars in front of them. Even the roads in the mountains look different. Although I haven’t had the chance to travel much of Nicaragua, For the first time since moving to Latin America I got to see the Pacific Ocean. We check in and settle into rooms at another nice hotel and meet up for the first debrief sessions.

The sessions at the hotel are mundane. They cover the logistics of the departure. The specific reasons for leaving. They leave the future floating in ambiguity. They share the resources Peace Corps offers to deal with the transition. My mind meanders, my pen doodles on the page. I look around and see other people drifting off in their own worlds.

As a volunteer the time in Costa Rica felt protracted. Our debriefing meetings were done en mass and despite many voices asking, the answer I really wanted was absent. I still don’t know if I’m going back. The officials refused to speculate. It’s really up in the air. At least, I better understand the process of how the decision is going to be made.

The suspension of activities works on 30 day cycles, starting with the date we left the country. Every 30 days the staff in the embassy will assess development in Nicaragua. The criteria they will use to determine if we are cleared to return is the same criteria that factored into their decision to evacuate. These include, access to food and water, access to gas, freedom of travel, peaceful demonstrations. Protests are acceptable as long as the threat of violence is low.

Now I wait. In the meantime, I’m keeping myself occupied, see friends, travel, write, organize my photos… I can already feel a shift in my attitude. When I first got bck I was enthusiastic to explain the situation and confident that I would return, my brain still focused on the content of training. Now, hardly a week later I am thinking in terms of plans and things I would like to do here, imagining my goals for after Peace Corps.

In some ways it’s good to have this opportunity to think a little bit more of my goals for after Peace Corps and direct what I want to get out of the next two years. Assuming I still go. I still want to go but I’m dreading what the culture shock will be like going back and forth. I felt like I was just settling down and getting ready to live in Nicaragua for two years when I got pulled out. If I have to go to another site the wait could be another 9 months, and I don’t know what I would do in the meantime…

So while my head is still spinning it is only because once again the future is unknown. Thrown back into the chasm right when I was getting comfortable with my plan for the next two years.

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fapangel · 7 years

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President Trump is about to lift the Obama error ban on allowing the Police to getting and using military grade equipment and weapons. Is this a good thing or bad in your thoughts on this?

It’s good, because “militarization of police” has absolutely nothing to do with the equipment they use, because the difference between military and police is all about training, not toys.

We’ve a ready example in the Chris Dorner manhunt, where a single ex-military man with a rifle drove the Los Angeles Police Department insane with terror. The LAPD were so terrified of this one man with a rifle that on two separate occasions they mag-dumped on civilians in pickup trucks that were the wrong model and color to be the suspect’s vehicle. One man was rammed off the road before LAPD officers riddled his vehicle with bullets, and two little old Hispanic ladies, who were driving away from the cops when the LAPD lit them up with over a hundred rounds.

The attacks that rattled the LAPD so badly that they were blowing away any civilian in a pickup truck that got within a hundred yards of them were described by Dorner himself as “unconventional asymmetric warfare,” (and indeed were.) For the military, which has been fighting urban/rural insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan for 16 years now, that’s also known as “Tuesday afternoon.” Soldiers operating road checkpoints have established procedures for flagging down vehicles, and when they open fire, they actually stop the vehicle and kill the occupants with swift and lethal efficiency. Few incidents illustrate the vast discrepency between trained military soldiers and police officers better than the Dorner incident, but the many errors of the fabled FBI raid on the Waco compound, where the Feds had all the time in the world to bring in specialized “shooters,” equipment and lay plans for an orchestrated assault, and managed to get four FBI agents - and every noncombatant in the compound - killed anyways is a close second. The cavalcade of planning fuckups in that raid are heartbreaking to read. There is absolutely no comparing civilian law enforcement and actual soldiers - which is often seen in reverse when governments try to use soldiers as police in various overseas “peacekeeping” operations. The military has their own dedicated branch of military police for a very, very good reason.

Equipment vs. Mindset

A few years back MuckRock got tons of data via FOIA request on what equipment was distributed to which states - go ahead and look up your own state, if you’d like. The sample data in the MuckRock article (for Missouri) matches what I found for my own state - namely, the vast majority of things local PDs buy is the kind of stuff you buy at your local military surplus store - clothing, supplies and various odds-and-ends, not advanced electronics or weapons. Adverse-weather gear, magazine pouches, clothes, kneepads, scope rings, scope mounts, even filing cabinets make up the vast bulk of it. This shouldn’t be a surprise - most of what any Police Department spends is on boring essentials like these. They already have guns, because Law Enforcement has always had access to the same vendors that supply the military. All they get from this program is a bargain.

And what a bargain. A tremendous amount of caterwauling and hand-wringing was done over local PDs buying surplus MRAPs, but police departments have always had armored personnel carriers - they’re called SWAT tanks. A SWAT Tank has exactly one job - to drive a bunch of highspeedlowdragoperatorz from the “road” end of the driveway up to the house housing the “barricaded gunman.” Traditionally you have two options for buying these - pay a specialized company to up-armor an existing commercial vehicle, which is very expensive (this Nat. Geo documentary shows the process in detail,) or buy an actual military APC that’s also offered in disarmed “law enforcement” models from a major arms manufacturer (even more expensive.) The MRAPs, however, are worn-out from service in Iraq and Afghanistan (which is why Iraq got so many of them free; they weren’t worth the cost to ship home,) and the military is eager to be rid of the rest, as they’re useless for anything outside of their specialized role and all the armor makes them a maintenance hog. Local PDs, however, are going to leave them in a garage most of the year, and these vehicles come with stuff like built-in night vision that would cost your average PD more to buy alone than they’re paying for the entire vehicle.

This applies to everything else available through the program. Police have always used grenade launchers of any kind employed by the military for deploying tear gas grenades, they’ve always been able to buy select-fire/fully automatic rifles and submachine guns, (many, like select-fire variants of Ruger’s Mini-14, were built and marketed specifically to Law Enforcement markets,) and of course most police wear body armor. PD’s have always been able to buy pretty much any weapon of mayhem or destruction they can justify, with the only limit being the budget - and many PDs have long had a penchant for buying fancy toys that spend most of their time collecting dust in an armory.

The problem has nothing to do with equipment. Consider this picture of police officers from the Ferguson riots, helpfully labeled by Business Insider (fullres here:)

There’s only one piece of equipment in this photo that police rarely, if ever, have used in decades past. Not the short-barreled rifle - they’ve always had those, especially SWAT teams. Not the mag pouches - every cop has two of them on their duty belt. Kevlar helmets are standard-issue riot gear, and so are gas-masks, (for protection from their own tear-gas.) That’s all the same old shit.

The problem is the camouflage uniforms.

Of everything in this picture, it’s the MARPAT camouflage that is completely useless for police officers standing on an urban street. Not only is there no woods to hide in, but the aim of a police officer, especially deployed for riot duty, is to be visible. Police uniforms are a visible symbol of their status as enforcers of law and order. These officers lined up outside of the Ferguson PD are a great example of riot gear combined with the visible uniform presence, with the man closest to the camera displaying the usual “uniform” of either SWAT or riot control - a simple single-color black outfit with patches on it. This Minneapolis Police statement concerning SWAT uniform color changes illustrates why - dark uniforms don’t blend into urban environments any better than anything else, but they do make the presence of body armor (almost always black-covered) less obvious to anyone that might be shooting at them. And even then, their vests say POLICE on them in Big White Letters.

A reminder - SWAT teams are specialized shooters; armed and armored for full-on firefights - and even they subordinate tactical effectiveness of their outfits to some degree to maintain the symbols identifying them as enforcers of law and order. Even if they didn’t, they’d use purpose-made urban camouflage, not milsup MARPAT that does nothing (to say nothing of those coyote-brown combat boots.)

That MARPAT camo is the visible symptom of the real problem - these police are playing as soldiers, which they’re most certainly not. The camo doesn’t just complete the “image” of a high-speed-low-drag-OPERATOR, it also works against the image of Enforcer Of Law And Order which has always been an integral part of how police keep the peace; by emphasizing their presence as a deterrent to would-be crime. Even riot control ops rely on this; the image of a uniform line of black-clad cops beating their batons on their shields like an advancing shield-wall of ancient warriors is potent and intimidating. Abandoning that image to drape themselves in military garb is the one tangible, equipment-related signifier of their shift in mentality. Even the uniforms would’ve meant nothing had the Ferguson PD not acted the way they did; running around in gaggles vaguely resembling “fire teams,” pointing rifles everywhere like kids playing soldier, rather than comporting themselves as riot control officers always have (with specific tactics, weapons and equipment meant for the job.)

Hyperventilating over “military equipment” is a folly exclusive to people utterly ignorant of firearms and the distinctions (or rather, lack thereof) between them, and Obama’s cancellation of the program only shut off a cheaper source of vital mundane equipment needed by every department, and of serviceable SWAT rifles for the many, many small PDs that are trying to up-gun for possible response to active-shooter terrorist attacks with limited small-town budgets.

Mentality

Years ago, one of my family members was a beat cop in a local city PD. Whilst milling around outside of another Suspected Barricaded Gunman call, one of the SWAT team members scuttled over to a mud puddle in a pothole, dipped his fingers in, and started smearing his face with mud, for face camo. The nearby rubbernecker’s gaggle, observing this display on a balmy summer afternoon with nary a cloud in the sky, stared in silence before turning their baffled, questioning gazes, as one, onto my relative.

He could only sigh, shrug, and say “Uh… they don’t get out much.”

The urge to play Soldier is nothing new - just check out an airsoft event sometime if you doubt me - but the Dorner manhunt and the Waco mess exemplify the disasters that ensue when police officers mistakenly think they’re capable of doing a soldier’s job, or that police situations should be approached like they’re soldiers jobs. Arguing about where the police buy the same equipment they’ve always used will simply obfuscate the source of the problem, rather than solving it.

Sheriffs are elected officials. If you don’t know who’s running your PD - and how - you should educate yourself. The power is in our hands - it’s about time we used it.

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gingerandwry · 5 years

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Birmingham, Alabama

For my next trip... I’m taking a three week road trip through the American South to some parts familiar and others unknown. My trip began in a part unknown (to me anyway): Birmingham, Alabama, a city perhaps best remembered for its brutal opposition to blacks’ civil rights in the 1950s and 60s. I’ve heard good things about it since, but the past seemed like a good place to begin.

I started my first day at the cute Red Dog cafe, the kind of place filled with millennials and MacBooks that you can find in gentrified neighborhoods the world over. While this globalized hipster culture is somewhat lamentable, it’s reassuring as well and a sign of Birmingham’s economic progress. From there I headed to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. It’s in an historically very significant area. The neighborhood was a black exclusionary zone (one of the few areas of the city where blacks could live, work and own property and businesses). It’s between the Gaston motel (a black-owned motel that became a headquarters for civil rights leaders) and the 16th Street Baptist Church, a popular meeting place for the movement made infamous when a bomb there killed four young girls in 1963. And across the street is Kelly Ingram park, the site of many marches and protests, including a youth-led one where the police and fire department set dogs and high-pressure water houses on hundreds of adults and children.

The museum starts with a short film describing the city’s history. Interestingly Birmingham was founded after slavery, in 1871, as an iron producing town. It grew and prospered quickly, largely on the backs of black labor who were given the worst jobs for a pittance. And despite having never known slavery, the city became renown as one of the strictest and brutalist enforcers of segregation. The next few displays depict life under Jim Crow and some truly stomach-churning artifacts of black stereotypes and white supremacy. It then shifts to the long struggle to end segregation and win the vote and equal rights. It’s a familiar story but the resonance is so local here. As I’ve learned about the civil rights struggle throughout my life, I never really put together how much of the most intense fighting happened in just the one small part of the South. Rosa Parks and the bus boycott in nearby Montgomery. Dr King’s Birmingham home bombing and his famous letter from the local jail. Governor Wallace who won election-- and even carried five Southern states during his 1968 presidential campaign-- with his promise of “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”. Police beating up peaceful marchers in nearby Selma. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. The city’s Police Chief, Bull Connor, and his notorious attack dogs and water cannons. Freedom Riders being beaten and killed across the state. Of course people fought for civil rights all over the South (and later all over the country), but Alabama-- and especially Birmingham-- were the epicenter. All the familiar speeches, history, newsreels and photos felt devastatingly real seeing them there.

The problem that all history museums face is deciding when and how to end because history never ends. In this case, by the late 60s the segregationists started to accept defeat (Wallace’s campaign notwithstanding), and the action moved away from Birmingham and Alabama. The Civil Rights Movement itself splintered into countless factions espousing varying goals and methods, the chaos of which helped spur a backlash and the election of Nixon by his “silent majority.” The museum kind of rushes through the late 60s and ultimately ends by celebrating the 1979 election of Birmingham’s first black mayor, Richard Arrington, Jr (depicted with an entirely pointless recreation of the mayor’s office). While that is an achievement to be lauded and the curators probably felt compelled to leave visitors feeling uplifted, it parallels (and foreshadows) the “problem solved” mentality that followed Obama’s election. Gaining legal equality was a first step (or second, after ending slavery), but I think it would have been powerful for the museum to highlight some of the many ways racism still persists: in politics, government, urban design, economics, business, education and health, not to mention in many hearts and minds. (Arrington’s election was followed three years later by Wallace’s re-election as governor to a fourth term.) A final, more uplifting display could depict the ways that blacks’ civil rights struggles inspired others like women, gays, Native Americans and immigrants. (There actually are some colorful displays honoring a few civil rights causes around the world, but they seem more random than anything.)

After seeing the museum I walked over to the church (which was closed) and through the park, which has several haunting sculptures depicting the violent crackdown on young protestors there. It’s all so calm and quiet now, it’s almost hard to believe what was happening there in my parents’ living memory.

(For the surprising backstory on the above statue and the photo on which it’s based, check out this podcast of Revisionist History.)

From there I went to the Birmingham Museum of Art. I actually just wanted to see the sculpture garden which had a good sampling of thoughtful and whimsical works. After a quick lunch stop at a middle eastern place (which still managed to be brown, fried and greasy since this is the South), I went up to Vulcan Park. It’s the site of a massive statue of Vulcan, the god of fire, and it’s the largest cast-iron statue in the world. The museum next door is an ode to Birmingham and iron, the metal that built the city literally and figuratively; iron mining and production was the dominant industry for the city’s first 100 years. While I liked learning some of the city history and seeing the old photos, the generally unqualified enthusiasm raised doubts about how fairly the story was being told. It was at least a stark contrast to the unflinching, ugly history lesson I experienced earlier.

That evening I visited a couple gay bars, Chapel (housed in a former church and up until a few months ago, a leather bar named Spike’s) and Al’s. Chapel’s crowd was thin but admirably diverse. They felt like the high school outcasts who had all banded together. And the drag show (featuring queens and kings in equal number) was cute but decidedly low-rent DIY. The host was wearing a Star Trek costume.... Al’s was the opposite, the popular clique in high school. It looks like your standard pop-fueled gay dance bar, and their drag show was much more polished. (Apparently Birmingham gay bars are all about drag shows.) The star that night was Trinity “The Tuck” Taylor who grew up in Birmingham and is now in the final four on RuPaul’s Drag Race. So that was probably exciting to anyone who cares.

On Saturday I slept too late again, but eventually got up and made my way to brunch at Five in the hip little Southside area (near the gay bars). I then drove to Sloss Furnace, a massive dormant ironworks, originally built in the 1880s. Much of the machinery and infrastructure is still in place (tho rusted away), and you can walk around and explore. It’s captivating, like walking around an ancient ruin, but one which was still in use only 50 years ago. It’s a lot to think about as you wander through the deserted behemoth: how massive this operation once was, how many resources it sucked up, how much iron it produced, how many people died working it, how much it grew Birmingham’s economy and how it’s now literally a shell of its former self just 150 years after it was built. Along with the Civil Rights Museum, Sloss is another reminder to Birmingham just how quick and difficult change can be.

The mini-museum at Sloss unfortunately is not so inspiring. Obviously it’s very pro-iron, like the one at Vulcan Park, but its white-washing of history is both comical and offensive. There’s no mention of the environmental impact. The factory towns sound like great places to live (they were not). The (mostly immigrant and black) workers are described as pioneers seizing opportunity, not exploited labor. The only mention of the racist division of labor was an admission that the factory had separate baseball teams for whites and blacks (but supposedly they would all go to each others’ games anyway so it was all good). In one confused sentence we learn that Sloss had a “decent safety record” but injuries and deaths were also very common. In fact we learn the best protection a worker could get was from having good coworkers (not from, say, adequate gear, precautions and risk reduction, all of which cost money). And, by the way, the state’s whole iron industry went into decline after the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the removal of tariffs on foreign iron. (No mention of how these events impacted the quality of air or the cost of iron to builders and consumers.) The ingenuity, hard work and rapid success of the city’s iron industry is very impressive but it’s worth remembering the cost.

For dinner Saturday night I went to Hot & Hot Fish Club, one of the city’s finest. It was delicious but didn’t seem especially distinctive. I’m not sure why it’s on so many must-do lists. I figured some sleep would do me good so I stayed in that night.

For my last day I visited the popular Five Points South and Homewood areas. Five Points is (or was) a hip area (it’s near the University), but that’s hard to see, especially on Sunday when most businesses are closed. It has some lovely Spanish Revival and Art Deco buildings, but it’s very small and a bit run-down. Homewood is better kept-up, kind of like a quaint 1950s main-street but with yuppie boutiques selling linens and children’s toys. It has a lot more shops and restaurants, and I found a good lunch at Real & Rosemary and a friendly coffee at Henry’s.

After that I visited the Botanical Gardens. As one would expect in early February, not much was in bloom, but the gardens were still very nice. They’re sprawling and serene, with a good mixture of design styles. Half the gardens are built into a hillside, and the terraced paths offer ample opportunities to get lost and discover. And of course there are lots of gazebos because this is the South. The evening was chill. I had dinner at a Southern burger ‘n beer chain called Jack’s (pretty good but small burger) and stopped at Chapel for a drink. The tiny crowd was once again eclectic and this time watching the Grammys.

Birmingham is definitely a small city in Alabama (especially for the gays). I sensed racial and socioeconomic stresses beneath the surface-- or rather around the edges. (I spent my time in the center between downtown and some very fancy neighborhoods, and I hardly saw any black people although they are 75% of the population here.) And yet it has a hard-to-define appeal. By all logic it should be a cultural backwater, but it’s not. Despite its origins as essentially a factory town for iron producers, its deeply disturbing racial history, and its on-going racial and socioeconomic divides, it seems determined to persist, to accept its past and celebrate the openness and diversity that came out of it. In the city’s early days, its rapid growth and economic success earned it the nickname “The Magic City.” During the Civil Rights era, it was re-dubbed “The Tragic City.” But Birmingham’s drive to prosper despite-- and because of-- its past has brought back much of the magic.

#birmingham #alabama #travel #intentionaltravel #gaytravel

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antoine-roquentin · 7 years

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In the nineties, during the aftermath of the first Goodyear layoffs, Summit County, where Akron sits, began to be known as the “Meth Capital of Ohio,” ranking third in the nation in the number of registered meth sites. Laid-off workers fell into biker gangs that sold the drug out of area bars. It was the city’s first drug crisis. It lasted for decades, until the next crisis arrived.

When driving into Ohio from the Northeast, as I now do several times a year, one of the first things one sees when crossing over is the towering Goodyear plant. The headquarters, and then the old factory. It is a haunting image, the “GOODYEAR” atop the factory with its lights blinking or fading, smoke seeming to rising out of nowhere, the windows broken or blackened. It is, in some ways, how I know I have returned home, to the site of a vanishing promise that I have not yet been able to articulate to anyone in my new region.

On a Friday night in the fall of 2016, Akron reported twenty-one heroin overdoses. The day before, there were four overdose deaths reported in Akron, bringing the total number of deaths due to overdose that year to 112. During one particularly startling stretch in July, there were 236 overdoses reported in just three weeks. This was a sharp spike from the period of January through June, when Akron paramedics got 320 overdose calls. In 2015, someone died from a drug overdose every two hours and 52 minutes in Ohio. The problem is worst in the northeastern part of the state.[*] The river towns, the factory towns, the towns where there was once hope and now less.

Today, heroin has become inexpensive to make, and therefore inexpensive to purchase, without cutting into the high it gives. To make it even cheaper, traffickers began cutting it with Fentanyl, a powerful opioid painkiller. Some would even cut their heroin with elephant tranquilizers, too powerful to be consumed by the human body, which is what kicked off the influx of overdoses in Akron last year. There is seemingly no end to it. In towns like Akron and the even smaller towns that surround it, officials have begun to throw up their hands and just let the epidemic play out, hoping that there will be a population left when it does.

It is perhaps hard to look at all of this in a historical context, as a story of how misfortune echoes down generations. Goodyear, having effectively outsourced its labor to places all over the globe, is back on its feet now. But the layoffs of the early nineties and the early 2000s had a lasting impact in Akron. There is no story that’s just an ending. Akron wasn’t always as hopeless as it seems now. The people who were laid off in each of those two eras were parents, neighbors, community members who supported the town and helped it thrive. Without their income, the town suffered, and without the ability to move anywhere else, their struggle was passed down to their children. In one decade, thousands of Akron’s working class were rendered jobless, and as the old story of deindustrialization goes, many of them didn’t have skills that transferred out of the factory and manufacturing settings they were trained for.

The Winemillers live on the eastern edge of Clermont County, about an hour east of Cincinnati, where a suburban quilt of bedroom towns, office parks and small industry thins into woods and farmland, mostly for corn and soybeans. Apple orchards and pumpkin farms — now closed for the season — are tucked among clusters of small churches, small businesses and even smaller ranch-style brick houses. Every so often, the roads wind past the gates of a big new mansion or high-end subdivision being built in the woods.

Jobs have returned to the area since the recession, and manufacturing businesses are popping up along the freeway that circles Cincinnati. The county’s unemployment rate is only 4.1 percent, and every morning, the city-bound lanes of skinny country roads are packed with people heading to work.

But the economic resilience has done little to insulate the area from a cascade of cheap heroin and synthetic opiates like fentanyl and carfentanil, an elephant tranquilizer, which have sent overdose rates soaring across much of the country, but especially in rural areas like this one.

Drug overdoses here have nearly tripled since 1999, and the state as a whole has been ravaged. In Ohio, 2,106 people died of opioid overdoses in 2014, more than in any other state, according to an analysis of the most recent federal data by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

In rural Wayne Township, where the Winemillers and about 4,900 other people live, the local fire department answered 18 overdose calls last year. Firefighters answered three in one week this winter, and said the spikes and lulls in their overdose calls gave them a feel for when particularly noxious batches of drugs were brought out to the countryside from Cincinnati or Dayton....

The younger Mr. Winemiller said that being back in the farmhouse had helped save his life by yanking him away from old patterns and temptations.

He started working on the farm when he was 12, driving tractors even though his father had to attach pieces of wood to the pedals so his legs would reach.

“I want to get back to it. That’s the whole idea,” he said. “It’s in my blood. It’s the family name. I’ve done enough to disgrace our name. I want to do everything I can to mend it.”

Death has pulled the men closer, but at home, arguments erupt over whether each understands what the other is going through. The son says he is grieving just as much as his father. The father says he is in recovery just as much as his son.

Quietly, apart from his son, Mr. Winemiller worries about leaving him alone in the farmhouse when his 16-hour days in the fields resume.

“I hate to say this, but because of his past, I don’t trust him,” he said.

They pulled into the Clinton County Adult Probation offices for the son’s twice-weekly drug test, then set out again for the drive to a new treatment center where he gets counseling and doses of buprenorphine, which can help addicts stay off opioids by keeping them from experiencing cravings and withdrawal.

The son was starting to feel anxious and queasy. He cracked open the car window. “I’m going to get carsick,” he said. “I’ve got to take my medicine soon.” He slipped one of the tiny strips into his mouth. Better.

Their conversation curled like a river as they drove. Mr. Winemiller was concerned about the low prices of crops like soybeans and corn. His son talked about an intervention the two of them had staged just down the road a few nights earlier — talking about their own losses and the younger Roger’s treatment — after a 33-year-old neighbor overdosed at his family’s home.

The younger man pointed at the red sign of a budget motel: “I used to buy drugs there.”

He said he had bought from dealers who drove out to the countryside for a day and set up “trap houses” in trailers or apartments where they would sell to all comers.

He and his father talked about motorbikes, weather and politics. The elder Mr. Winemiller, who was among the 68 percent of voters in the county who supported Donald J. Trump for president, was rankled by scenes of political protest on the news. He saw only disorder and lawlessness.

“There are too many people who are too wrapped up in their lives. All they want to do is go out, bitch and complain,” he said. “My view on Donald Trump, he’s what this country needed years ago: someone that’s hard-core.”

He likes the toughness. After his son and daughter died, he began meeting with sheriffs and politicians at forums dedicated to the opioid crisis, urging harsher penalties, such as manslaughter charges for people who sell fatal hits of opioids.

kinda surprising how little i see about the opioid epidemic, especially since it’s maybe the most important part of explaining why donald trump was elected (in the sense that the racism has always been there, but this part that draws usual democratic voters away is relatively new) and explaining politics in general in america today (america’s individualist ethos, fostered on it by capitalism, condemns those who suffer from drug addictions rather than places them in helping communities, leaving those who typically vote, whether they be black middle class communities in the throes of the 80s epidemic or white ones in the throes of the modern one, wanting more crackdowns, more policing, and more violence as a punitive measure).

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tomhasson-blog · 7 years

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Equal Rights By Peter Tosh: Revisiting The Masterpiece 35 Years On

Originally published on The Quietus - April 2012

35 years on from its release in April 1977, what was Peter Tosh addressing with his Equal Rights album, asks Thomas Hasson, and what, if anything, has changed since?

In response to the Jamaican government’s refusal to allow Black Power supporter Dr Walter Rodney permission to re-enter Jamaica after his trip to a black writers conference in Montreal, The Rodney Riots began on the 16th October 1968.

Concerned about the effect this Guyanese civil rights thinker would have in Jamaica, the government declared Rodney, a lecturer in African History at the University of the West Indies, to be an undesirable person.

But the very move the government made "to save the nation" (as The Gleaner, a Jamaican daily broadsheet, put it) was the very thing that sparked chaos.

Taking part that day in the demonstrations and looting was one Winston Hubert McIntosh, known to most as Peter Tosh. He placed himself behind the wheel of a coach, drove it towards a local shopping precinct and rammed it through a glass storefront. All around him people piled in to loot what they could before climbing on board the coach as Tosh backed out and ferried them all back to Trench Town.

Both the police and army were dispatched to quell the violence that was spewing out onto the streets of Kingston, causing millions of dollars in property damage. People were killed and many were injured.

These random acts of violence and destruction had the government spooked. But scarier still was that protesting alongside Tosh and the Trench Town activists were middle class students. This was unprecedented. Between them they had been heard to chant slogans pertaining to Black Power, a movement that was causing ripples not just in Kingston, but across the world.

On the very morning that the Rodney Riots began, 1,500 miles away, African American athletes and Olympic medal winners Tommie Smith and John Carlos were to be seen giving the Black Power Salute as the U.S. anthem played at Mexico City’s Olympic Stadium.

This silent gesture was one of the strongest political statements in the history of the Games. It was not, however, a welcome gesture. The athletes were booed as they stood down from the podium and subsequently ejected from the US Olympic team.

Peter Tosh may have been imprudent in his method of protest, but all around him, signs pointed towards something indisputable. Things were not equal. They were not right.

The anger inside of Peter Tosh had been building for many years; as a child he was asked to sing at his local church a hymn that included the lyrics; “Lord wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.” He was nine years old and it filled him with disgust.

Personal, national and international events had conspired together to create anger and frustration within Tosh about these iniquities.

"The truth has been branded, outlawed and [made] illegal. It is dangerous to have the truth in your possession. You can be found guilty and sentenced to death." Peter Tosh.

In 1977 Peter Tosh released Equal Rights, a rallying cry against what he called the ‘shitstem’, his declaration of rage against the injustices he had seen all around him.

It was his finest studio album, cementing his position as one of the most outspoken artists of the 70s. And although he’d suffered at the hands of the ‘shitstem’ many times before, the album notably called not for revenge but for justice. Revenge is personal, justice is political.

Setting out his stall with a version of 'Get Up, Stand Up', Tosh makes it clear that equal rights will not come without a fight. He follows this call to arms with 'Downpressor Man', a warning to any and all oppressors of him and his brethren. “You can run but you can’t hide” Tosh sings, ominously.

At no point does this record relent from its militant message. “Don’t underestimate my ability,” he sings on 'I Am That I Am'. And on 'Stepping Razor' (the Joe Higgs song Tosh claimed as his own before a legal battle forced him to credit Higgs) he lets it be known in no uncertain terms just how dangerous he is.

He sings on the title track of the album that he doesn’t want peace, but that he needs “equal rights and justice”. It’s here that he asserts his message most powerfully. By dismissing peace so easily, he maintains that what’s needed won’t come without a fight.

What Tosh hopes to achieve is made clear in the album artwork. Six identical images of Tosh’s face, head turned and wearing a beret and his trademark goggles, are repeated on the cover of the record, calling to mind both propaganda posters during wartime and those of political leaders fighting for office. Look closer and you see that the edges of each image are perforated like a sheet of stamps; the idea of CBS designer Andy Engel.

Those whose images grace postal stamps generally are not singers, they are typically the leaders of countries. It would appear that this is where Tosh saw himself; as a leader of people, leading the fight for equal rights.

But as much as the album is informed by Tosh’s struggle for justice, it is influenced equally by his faith. Tosh had been exposed to the teachings and way of life of the Rastafari as far back as 1963, and by the time he released Equal Rights he was a convert. Both 'African' and 'Jah Guide' make music of his beliefs. Dealing with identity in the former track, Tosh makes clear that to be black is be African; one of Marcus Garvey’s key teachings. In 'Jah Guide' Tosh delivers a rousing justification for the upcoming fight for equal rights: “Jah guide I through this valley.” His path was righteous.

“Every form of victimisation is universal, not only in Jamaica.” Peter Tosh

Herbie Miller, Tosh’s then-manager and production coordinator has said that the struggle to liberate southern Africa (Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa) was a key influence on the album: “The theme of this whole record is to do with that particular struggle, of the Africans in Africa, and the Africans outside Africa.” He said that Tosh had wanted to document this particular struggle with “machine-gun lyrics in a suite tying together songs that all related to those both within and without Africa.”

The final track of Equal Rights, 'Apartheid', opens with the sound of gunshots. Eight years before the Artists United Against Apartheid were put together by Steven Van Zandt, Peter Tosh was singing that there were "certain place in Africa, black man get no recognition. You got to fight against apartheid”.

Peter Tosh was murdered in 1987. He didn’t live to see the ending of enforced racial segregation in South Africa, nor Nelson Mandela’s election as the country’s first ever black president in 1994.

Thirty-five years have passed since Tosh called for equal rights and justice. During that time an African American has become President of the United States, Desmond Tutu has won the Nobel Peace Prize for his outspoken criticism of the apartheid regime, and closer to Tosh’s home, an organization called Jamaicans For Justice (JFJ) has been established. Since 1999 JFJ have fought for respect, freedom and the right to a peaceful existence for citizens of Jamaica.

However, just last month in Florida, USA, an unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin was shot dead by George Zimmerman, a non-black vigilante, because he “looked suspicious”. Trayvon was walking home to his family carrying a bag of sweets. The case is reminiscent of the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence whose death sparked an inquiry that exposed institutional racism in the UK.

Equal Rights is passionate and critical of the world Tosh saw around him, with observations that resonate to this day. Self-produced and recorded with a team of musicians including the rhythm-section powerhouse of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare who credit their international career to their work on Equal Rights and the subsequent tour to support the album. It is Tosh’s masterpiece.

When recording his Red X tapes, which were intended to form the basis of a never completed autobiography, Peter Tosh said: “I am here to play the music and to communicate with the Father spiritually so I can be inspired to make music to awaken the slumbering mentality of people.”

Equal Rights does just that.

#Peter Tosh #Bob Marley #The Wailers #The Quietus #Bunny Wailer

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viralnewstime · 4 years

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As Joe Biden met with community leaders in a Kenosha church on Thursday, roughly four dozen of the voters he needs to win Wisconsin waited on the street outside, several layers of brick away from the man running to be their President.

The crowd on the street outside Grace Lutheran Church represented the coalition that Biden is counting on to win the White House: moderate suburban women and disaffected Black voters, union workers and remorseful Donald Trump supporters, first-time voters and grizzled activists. Some may still need persuading. When asked why he was here to see Biden, one activist who refused to give his name said, “I’m not here to see him, he should be here to see us.”

Except Biden barely saw them. The campaign is extremely concerned about protecting both the candidate and his supporters from COVID-19, which is why Biden has so rarely traveled outside of Delaware since March, and why he has bucked tradition by not holding any in-person rallies. This trip to Kenosha, which came two days after President Trump staged a photo-op in front of buildings burned during the riots after Jacob Blake’s shooting, was his first trip to Wisconsin since the pandemic began. The visit took on outsize symbolic importance, both because of Biden’s light swing state schedule and because Hillary Clinton ignored Wisconsin in 2016, allowing Trump to narrowly carry a state that helped lift him to victory in the Electoral College.

The Vice President started his visit by meeting with members of the Blake family. Then he traveled to Grace Lutheran to hear from local leaders, including activists, business owners, religious leaders and police officers. Apart from a livestream of that conversation, the trip seemed designed to attract as little attention as possible: partly to avoid crowds, the campaign didn’t release the location of the event ahead of time, even to press. (I found it only by following road closures and scouting local police movements.)

The voters gathered outside the church didn’t seem to care much that they didn’t see the Vice President. Many said they planned to vote for him, whether they got a chance to see him in person or not. “I think people have formed strong enough opinions at this point, it might not make a difference,” says Emma Steidtman, 17, who turns 18 in a few weeks and will be voting in her first election. She plans to vote for Biden simply “because he’s not Trump.”

But in conversations with the people waiting outside for a glimpse of the Vice President, it was clear that his Wisconsin coalition was hanging together, if only barely.

Morry Gash—APJustin Blake, uncle of Jacob Blake, protests outside the Grace Lutheran Church where Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled to hold an event in Kenosha, Wis., Sept. 3, 2020. Biden met with Blake family members earlier in the day.

Black voters are especially important to Biden’s math in Wisconsin, especially in the aftermath of the Blake shooting and the subsequent protests, which have left Kenosha blighted and deepened America’s racial strife. That’s why Biden traveled to Kenosha in the first place: to demonstrate his empathy for grieving families and his capacity to heal the nation’s wounds. Still, some Black residents greeted Biden’s visit with a response that was lukewarm at best.

“I just hope they get Trump out of office,” says Shaletha Mayfield, 36, a pharmacy technician standing on the lawn of a house across the street from the church. Her brother Jamar Mayfield, a 37-year old production technician, snorted, “I’m voting for Kanye.” Mayfield later clarified he was joking about voting for West, whose Presidential campaign has been boosted by GOP operatives in an apparent effort to divide Black voters. But the quip revealed how little he trusted Biden. Both siblings say they voted for Clinton in 2016 and plan to vote for Biden in November, not that it matters. “I think it’s rigged,” says Shaletha Mayfield. “I don’t think Biden stands a chance.”

Jamar Mayfield said he appreciated that Biden visited Blake’s family, but was skeptical of his motives. “Is he just trying to get a vote?” he said of Biden. “He’s said some racist sh-t too.” Mayfield added that he liked Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris, the first woman of color on a major party presidential ticket—especially the senator’s track record on rehabilitation programs for young nonviolent offenders.

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Next to the Mayfields, Helen LeClaire, 64, wore jean shorts and a paisley-printed top and held a hand-painted sign that said “Attn: Suburban Housewives & Children: Wake Up!” LeClaire voted for Clinton in 2016, and says she plans to call her two sisters, both married to Trump-supporting Republicans, “and say if they love me, they better vote for Biden and not tell their husbands.”

David Sanchez waved a six-foot long Biden-Harris flag nearby. “I didn’t want Hillary. The way she spoke,” says Sanchez, 65, who says he voted twice for Obama and then for Trump in 2016. Sanchez, wearing a Harley Davidson T-shirt and a black bandana, said Trump lost his support after the President started a public feud with Harley Davidson. “He came out of the gate acting like a jerk,” he says with a sheepish shrug, adding that he had kept his 2016 vote mostly secret: “You’re the third person that I’ve told.”

Other Trump voters in the crowd said they were still undecided. “I’m scared sometimes he’s gonna get us blown up, but he’s brought the economy back,” says Debby Baartz, 43, who says she’s still weighing her options this year. Baartz, who drove over from a nearby town in Illinois, says she was disappointed when Biden didn’t come out to greet the gathered crowd as he left. “I understand it’s a very trying time, but this is when we need you,” she says. “This guy wants to be President? Come out and meet people.”

Alex Wong—Getty ImagesDemocratic presidential nominee Joe Biden waves as he participates in a conversation with parents and educators in Wauwatosa, Wis., September 3, 2020.

Trump has attempted to paint the racial unrest as evidence of the dangers of a liberal America, but some Wisconsin voters aren’t buying it. Dave Swartz, a 56-year old electrician, wore his International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers T-shirt and carried a handmade “Dump Trump” sign made with red electrical tape. “Trump said there’s gonna be civil unrest under Biden’s presidency, but we have this on Trump’s watch,” he says. “Trump is President, Biden isn’t.”

Swartz says the union leadership supports Biden, but many of the rank-and-file union members are still for Trump. “Somebody told me I was drinking the Kool-Aid,” he says. “But I prefer the blue Kool-Aid to the orange Kool-Aid.”

Biden ended his visit at a local home on a leafy street nearby, meeting with educators and parents about the challenges of starting a new school year during the pandemic. As he left the meeting, roughly 200 neighbors who had spilled out of their homes to see him from their lawns cheered “Let’s Go Joe.” This time, the Vice President walked out into the street to wave, and to offer a parting message: “Don’t forget to vote!”

#Blogger

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newstechreviews · 4 years

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But in conversations with the people waiting outside for a glimpse of the Vice President, it was clear that his Wisconsin coalition was hanging together, if only barely.

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Alex Wong—Getty ImagesDemocratic presidential nominee Joe Biden waves as he participates in a conversation with parents and educators in Wauwatosa, Wis., September 3, 2020.

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Monday, March 8, 2021

Chaos in Global Shipping (NYT) Off the coast of Los Angeles, more than two dozen container ships filled with exercise bikes, electronics and other highly sought imports have been idling for as long as two weeks. In Kansas City, farmers are struggling to ship soybeans to buyers in Asia. In China, furniture destined for North America piles up on factory floors. Around the planet, the pandemic has disrupted trade to an extraordinary degree, driving up the cost of shipping goods and adding a fresh challenge to the global economic recovery. The virus has thrown off the choreography of moving cargo from one continent to another. At the center of the storm is the shipping container, the workhorse of globalization. Americans stuck in their homes have set off a surge of orders from factories in China, much of it carried across the Pacific in containers—the metal boxes that move goods in towering stacks atop enormous vessels. As households in the United States have filled bedrooms with office furniture and basements with treadmills, the demand for shipping has outstripped the availability of containers in Asia, yielding shortages there just as the boxes pile up at American ports. The pandemic and its restrictions have also limited the availability of dockworkers and truck drivers, causing delays in handling cargo from Southern California to Singapore. Every container that cannot be unloaded in one place is a container that cannot be loaded somewhere else. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Lars Mikael Jensen, head of Global Ocean Network at A.P. Moller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company. “All the links in the supply chain are stretched. The ships, the trucks, the warehouses.”

Coronavirus aid package (NYT) A divided Senate approved $1.9 trillion in aid for an ailing nation. The package would inject vast amounts of federal resources into the economy, including the largest antipoverty effort in a generation. A few of the crucial provisions include: Another round of one-time direct payments of up to $1,400 for millions of Americans; an extension of the $300 weekly unemployment benefits through Labor Day; and a benefit of $300 per child for those age 5 and younger—and $250 per child ages 6 to 17. / $45 billion in rental, utility and mortgage assistance; $30 billion for transit agencies; and billions more for small businesses and live venues. / $350 billion for state, local and tribal governments; $130 billion to primary and secondary schools; $14 billion for the distribution of vaccines; and $12 billion to nutrition assistance.

As violence surges, some question Portland axing police unit (AP) Elmer Yarborough got a terrifying call from his sister: She wept as she told him two of his nephews may have been shot in broad daylight as they left a bar in Portland, Oregon. He drove there as fast as he could. An officer told him one of his nephews was heading to the hospital and the other, Tyrell Penney, hadn’t survived. When Penney was killed last summer, unrest was roiling liberal Portland as protesters took to the streets nightly to demand racial justice and defunding police. At the same time, one of the whitest major cities in America was experiencing its deadliest year in more than a quarter-century—a trend seen nationwide—with shootings that overwhelmingly affected the Black community. Responding to the calls for change in policing, the mayor and City Council cut several police programs from the budget, including one Yarborough believes could have saved his nephew. A specialized unit focused on curbing gun violence, which had long faced criticism for disproportionately targeting people of color, was disbanded a month before Penney, a 27-year-old Black man visiting from Sacramento, California, was killed on July 25. More people died of gunfire last year in Portland—40—than the entire tally of homicides the previous year. The number of shootings—900—was nearly 2 1/2 times higher than the year before. The spike has continued this year, with more than 150 shootings, including 45 people wounded and 12 killed so far. Police had warned of possible repercussions of ending the unit, pointing out cautionary tales in other cities that had made a similar choice.

Uptick in crimes against Mexican politicians points toward violent midterm election (Reuters) More than a hundred murders of Mexican officials and candidates in recent months point to the country’s midterm elections becoming the most violent in decades, local consulting firm Etellekt said in a report. Between September 2020 and the first week of March, 126 Mexican politicians and candidates were assassinated. On June 6, Mexicans will elect 500 lawmakers, 15 governors and more than 20,000 local officials. “In March alone, one politician been assassinated per day. If this rate continues, it could be the most violent elections since the Mexican Revolution,” said Reuben Salazar, referring to the armed conflict between 1910 and 1917.

Europe staggers as infectious variants power virus surge (AP) The virus swept through a nursery school and an adjacent elementary school in the Milan suburb of Bollate with amazing speed. In a matter of just days, 45 children and 14 staff members had tested positive. Genetic analysis confirmed what officials already suspected: The highly contagious coronavirus variant first identified in England was racing through the community. Bollate was the first city in Lombardy, the northern region that has been the epicenter in each of Italy’s three surges, to be sealed off from neighbors because of virus variants that the World Health Organization says are powering another uptick in infections across Europe. Europe recorded 1 million new COVID-19 cases last week, an increase of 9% from the previous week and a reversal that ended a six-week decline in new infections, WHO said Thursday. The variant first found in the U.K. is spreading significantly in 27 European countries monitored by WHO and is dominant in at least 10 countries: Britain, Denmark, Italy, Ireland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Israel, Spain and Portugal.

Swiss narrowly back proposal to ban face coverings in public (AP) Swiss voters narrowly approved on Sunday a proposal to ban face coverings, both the niqabs and burqas worn by a few Muslim women in the country and the ski masks and bandannas used by protesters. The measure will outlaw covering one’s face in public places like restaurants, sports stadiums, public transport or simply walking in the street. It foresees exceptions at religious sites and for security or health reasons, such as face masks people are wearing now to protect against COVID-19, as well as for traditional Carnival celebrations. Authorities have two years to draw up detailed legislation. Experts estimate that at most a few dozen Muslim women wear full-face coverings in the country of 8.5 million people. Supporters of the proposal, which came to a vote five years after it was launched, argued that the full-face coverings symbolize the repression of women and said the measure is needed to uphold a basic principle that faces should be shown in a free society like Switzerland’s. In the end, 51.2% of voters supported the plan. There were majorities against it in six of Switzerland’s 26 cantons—among them those that include the country’s three biggest cities, Zurich, Geneva and Basel, and the capital, Bern. SRF public television reported that voters in several popular tourist destinations including Interlaken, Lucerne and Zermatt also rejected it.

Etna keeps up its spectacular explosions; ash rains on towns (AP) A particularly spectacular blast from Italy’s Mount Etna volcano belched out a towering cloud of ash and lava stone Sunday onto Sicilian villages, the latest in a series of explosions since mid-February. Italy’s national geophysics and volcanology institute INGV said the powerful explosion at 2 a.m. was the 10th such big blast since Feb. 16, when Europe’s most active volcano started giving off an impressive demonstration of nature’s fire power, coloring the night sky in shocking hues of orange and red. Increasing tremors rattled the mountain throughout much of the night. Ash and small lava stones rained down on eight villages on Etna’s slopes Sunday morning, while lava flowed from the southeast crater slowly down an uninhabited side, as it has been doing for the last three weeks, the institute said. Locals swept ash and lava stones from their front steps and balconies. They have taken to covering cars parked outdoors with carpets, blankets and sheets of cardboard to make cleanup easier after each blast.

Escalating violence ups pressure for Myanmar sanctions (AP) The escalation of violence in Myanmar as authorities crack down on protests against the Feb. 1 coup is raising pressure for more sanctions against the junta, even as countries struggle over how to best sway military leaders inured to global condemnation. The challenge is made doubly difficult by fears of harming ordinary citizens who were already suffering from an economic slump worsened by the pandemic but are braving risks of arrest and injury to voice outrage over the military takeover. Its unclear whether the sanctions imposed so far, although symbolically important, will have much impact. Schraner Burgener told U.N. correspondents that the army shrugged off a warning of possible “huge strong measures” against the coup with the reply that, “‘We are used to sanctions and we survived those sanctions in the past.’”

China tells Biden to reverse ‘dangerous practice’ on Taiwan (AP) China’s foreign minister warned the Biden administration on Sunday to roll back former President Donald Trump’s “dangerous practice” of showing support for Taiwan, the island democracy claimed by Beijing as its own territory. The claim to Taiwan, which split with the mainland in 1949, is an “insurmountable red line,” Wang Yi said at a news conference during the annual meeting of China’s ceremonial legislature. The United States has no official relations with Taiwan but extensive informal ties. Trump irked Beijing by sending Cabinet officials to visit Taiwan in a show of support. “The Chinese government has no room for compromise,” Wang said. “We urge the new U.S. administration to fully understand the high sensitivity of the Taiwan issue” and “completely change the previous administration’s dangerous practices of ‘crossing the line’ and ‘playing with fire,’” he said.

Pope calls for peace from ruins of Iraq’s war-battered Mosul (AP) Pope Francis made a emphatic appeal for peaceful coexistence in Iraq on Sunday as he prayed for the country’s war dead amid the ruins of four demolished churches in Mosul, which suffered widespread destruction in the war against the Islamic State group. Francis travelled to northern Iraq on the final day of his historic visit to minister to the country’s dwindling number of Christians, who were forced to leave their homes en masse when IS militants overtook vast swaths of northern Iraq in the summer of 2014. “How cruel it is that this country, the cradle of civilization, should have been afflicted by so barbarous a blow, with ancient places of worship destroyed and many thousands of people—Muslims, Christians, Yazidis—who were cruelly annihilated by terrorism—and others forcibly displaced or killed,” Francis said. “Today, however, we reaffirm our conviction that fraternity is more durable than fratricide, that hope is more powerful than hatred, that peace is more powerful than war.”

Massive explosions rock Equatorial Guinea’s largest city; many feared dead (Washington Post) At least four explosions shook Equatorial Guinea’s largest city on Sunday afternoon, sending giant plumes of smoke into the air and destroying dozens of buildings. Images broadcast on state-run television showed injured residents fleeing, some seeming to carry bodies of the dead. The Health Ministry tweeted that the number of dead was not known but that at least 300 were injured. The news reports, aired on TVGE, noted that the explosions occurred in the vicinity of a military armory in the city of Bata but that information on what exactly happened was unavailable. Footage showed patients streaming into hospitals, and a news anchor pleaded with viewers to donate blood. Equatorial Guinea is a small and impoverished country on Africa’s Atlantic coast, wedged between Gabon and Cameroon. Its president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, has been in power since a coup in 1979 and is renowned for his repressive rule, vast network of corruption and lavish vanity projects. While the country is rich in oil and timber, the majority of its million and a half citizens is poor, with some measurements putting the extreme-poverty rate at 40 percent.

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theliberaltony · 4 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

California is a place of superlatives and extremes — it’s the most populous state in the nation, with the hottest deserts and the tallest trees, the flashiest celebrities and the best avocados. And in terms of pure math, it is Super Tuesday’s largest prize. About 10 percent of the total pledged delegates in the Democratic presidential primary will be up for grabs in California on Tuesday — or, to put it another way, about as many delegates as Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Oklahoma, Utah and Minnesota combined.

But California has often been overlooked in the Democratic primary, stuck in June at the end of a months-long process, in which the state’s millions of votes mostly functioned as a rubber stamp for the winner.1 That changed, though, in 2017, when the California legislature moved its contest up with the hope of giving the state the kind of influence over the process that befits its massive delegate haul. It seemed like this year, California voters could finally get their due.

Except when I arrived in Los Angeles on Wednesday, it didn’t feel much like a presidential primary was underway. And as I drove into the city from the airport, the only political billboards I saw were for local elections, like district attorney or county supervisor. Several presidential candidates had scheduled quick, last-minute trips to California, but the state wasn’t getting more attention than smaller, more geographically manageable Super Tuesday states like Arkansas, Alabama or Colorado.

Look at the polls, and it’s easier to understand why candidates mostly chose to save their energy for other states. According to our average of polls in California, Sen. Bernie Sanders has the support of 33 percent of the state’s voters, with all of the other candidates in a messy, distant scuffle for second. And driving that lead, according to a Los Angeles Times/University of California, Berkeley poll released Friday, is Sanders’s commanding support among some of California’s key voting blocs — Latinos, young people and the very liberal. According to our model,2 he has a 93 percent chance of winning the most votes, and could walk away with more than half of the state’s pledged delegates.

Almost a year ago, Sanders made a risky bet to go big on California. And since then he has steadily ramped up his presence in the state, making a big, long-term investment in winning over its voters. It’s true that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has dropped millions in California over the past few months and vastly outspent his competitors in TV ads. But Sanders, more than any other candidate, has made California a key part of his strategy, relying on the army of volunteers he began to build four years ago, when he lost California to former Sen. Hillary Clinton, 53.4 percent to 45.7 percent.

Sanders’s operation could make him unstoppable in California on Tuesday — especially if it can help him capture the support of voters of color who tended to break for Clinton back in 2016. The question now is whether it’ll work.

“Even more than Nevada or South Carolina, California will demonstrate the degree to which Sanders has successfully expanded his support into communities of color,” said Dan Schnur, a political strategist in California. “That was his biggest obstacle in 2016. The results in California will show if he’s figured out how to overcome it.”

Covering one of the first four states in a presidential primary is a little like entering a weeklong political carnival. The candidates ricochet across the state, hosting concerts and sports events, lunches and town halls, trying to win over undecided voters and turn out their base in the final frantic days before the vote.

True to stereotype, California’s primary has a more laid-back mood. That’s because the state’s massive scale and the way it runs elections are less suited to frenetic, retail politics campaigning. For one thing, many Californians don’t vote on Super Tuesday at all. Most of California’s voters received mail-in ballots in early February. By the time I landed in Los Angeles, more than 750,000 Democrats had already sent their ballots back. For the first time, some early voting centers were also open for more than a week before Super Tuesday. And now, according to Political Data, Inc., a group that tracks early voting in California, 20 percent of Democratic voters who received a mail-in ballot have returned it. Deanna Lepree, a 29-year-old nursing student, told me outside a polling place, where she had just cast her ballot for Sanders, that many of her friends from school had voted already. “After class today, they were talking about how they’d voted, and I thought, ‘Gosh, I’d better get to it,’” she said.

There were no candidates barnstorming up and down the coast. Instead, it was up to the organizers and volunteers to keep stolidly canvassing and phone banking — the way they’d been doing for weeks or even months. And in terms of their presence on the ground, Sanders and Bloomberg have a huge advantage over the other candidates. Sanders has 23 field offices scattered throughout California, according to data gathered by FiveThirtyEight contributor and political scientist Joshua Darr, and Bloomberg has 25.3 The other two candidates with a field presence in California — former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren — have only a fraction of that reach, and one of Warren’s four offices has been open for less than a week.

As I started criss-crossing the city to see how the various campaigns were getting out the vote, it was clear that young Californians were a big part of Sanders’s push. He has the support of 61 percent of voters ages 18 to 29, according to the L.A. Times/Berkeley poll, and 53 percent of voters ages 30 to 39 — far more than any other candidate. On the idyllic, leafy campus of the University of California, Los Angeles on Thursday, a group of Sanders’s student supporters had staked out a place on the quad with a table full of “Students for Bernie” stickers and pins and a battered, slightly-too-short cutout of Sanders that the students chipped in to buy for $45 on Amazon. “He’s been through a lot,” said Dylan Portillo, 21, a junior who has the honor of schlepping the Sanders cutout back and forth from his apartment. “People really love taking selfies with him.”

Henry Burke, 21, told me he volunteered for the Sanders campaign in 2016, while he was still in high school. As soon as Sanders announced he was running again, he signed up to help out. “In 2016, we were pretty much running just on enthusiasm,” he said. But this year, he thinks the campaign is more organized and streamlined. He pulled an app out of his pocket to show me how he can quickly look up a voter’s registration status, which he said is especially helpful for students who may not know where they’re registered, or if they’re registered at all.

Outreach to voters of color — particularly Latino voters — has also been an important part of Sanders’s California strategy. On Saturday night, as the results of the South Carolina primary trickled, I stopped by Sanders’s field office in East Los Angeles. The space was buzzing with volunteers and organizers who seemed unperturbed by Biden’s first big win. Every few minutes, they would ring a bell when a canvasser returned with a voter’s mail-in ballot, which the campaign has been collecting to submit on their behalf. Steven Gibson, 64, who volunteered for Sanders in 2016 and now works as a regional field director for the campaign, said that even after months of work in communities of color in Los Angeles, he was surprised by the energy for Sanders in heavily Latino neighborhoods like the one surrounding the field office. “You’ll walk down the street in a Sanders shirt and young black or Latino people will stop you and say, ‘Hey Bernie, I love Bernie!’” Gibson said. “That wasn’t happening in 2016.”

“The Sanders campaign missed some opportunities in California four years ago, I think in part because they didn’t really understand the state,” said Paul Mitchell, a California political consultant and the vice president of Political Data, Inc. He pointed to the campaign’s aggressive outreach to independent voters — who were more likely to support Sanders in 2016 but, thanks to the quirks of California election law, have to jump through extra hoops to vote for the Democratic presidential candidates — as an example of the campaign’s newfound savvy. “This time, they’re focusing on early voters and Latinos and independents. In some ways, this primary feels like a makeup campaign for them.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders has overwhelming support among young voters in California, including Latino and African American voters.

RONEN TIVONY / SOPA IMAGES / LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES

Sanders’s lead in the polls is, however, dependent on voters who have historically been less likely to vote — particularly young people, independents and Latinos. According to the L.A. Times/Berkeley poll, slightly more than half (51 percent) of Latinos are now supporting Sanders, up 13 points from January. He also has the support of half of voters who identify as very liberal.

One way to judge the success of his outreach machine is whether he can consolidate support among these groups and convince them to turn out in high numbers. And that’s not an easy task, particularly in a place like Los Angeles, where the presidential primary can easily be forgotten. Many voters told me they weren’t really talking about the election with their friends. “It’s confusing to me, because I think this election is so, so important, but I just don’t think most people are that interested in it,” said Avery Robinson, 21, who is planning to vote for Sanders.

On Friday afternoon, I followed two Sanders volunteers, Jess (who asked that her last name not be used) and Graziela Flores, as they went out door-knocking in a South Los Angeles neighborhood with a mix of black and Latino residents. Back at the local Sanders field office, standing in the backyard of a big, rambling house, an organizer named Justin Lewis had told them not to worry about convincing undecided voters. Their task was to find Sanders supporters and persuade them to go vote — today. “We’re going to be reaching out to people who don’t vote regularly, who might not realize they can vote early,” he said to a group of about 20 volunteers. “Your job is to help give people the inspiration you feel when you go vote.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s aggressive ground game in California, which his campaign has been constructing for months, built on an enthusiastic volunteer base from 2016.

MIKE BLAKE / REUTERS, DAVID MCNEW / GETTY IMAGES

It was a hot day, and we wandered down sun-baked streets lined with bungalows, with sleepy dogs basking in front yards. Very few of the voters Jess and Graziela talked to knew that they could vote early. One young man was thrilled to hear that he could vote for Sanders before Tuesday, and said he’d round up his whole family to go that afternoon. But it was a struggle to convince others that voting was worth it. Another man paused by his car and said he’d heard good things about Sanders but wasn’t sure he had time to vote. Jess pressed him, pointing out that the early voting center was just a few blocks away. “Bernie is promising free college and free health care,” she said. “We have to help him win.” He laughed and said he’d promise to try. “I’d say that’s a win,” said Jess, 25, a recent Los Angeles transplant who knocked on doors for Sanders in New York in 2016. “He seemed like he was really going to think about it.”

As in Nevada, where Sanders’s victory in the caucuses was powered in part by strong Latino support, the Sanders campaign has consciously targeted Latinos in California — opening field offices in Latino neighborhoods, hiring Latino organizers and starting their efforts early. Latinos are the largest racial and ethnic group in California, making them a key group to mobilize. They also skew young, which makes them an even more logical target for Sanders, whose coalition in the early states is mostly defined by one thing — its youth. Yet Mindy Romero, a professor at the University of Southern California, says it’s rare for campaigns to do this kind of concerted outreach to Latinos. “Within the Latino community in 2016, [Sanders’s] support wasn’t so high,” she said. “But now he’s the only candidate doing a real ground game in Latino communities and that can send an important message to historically marginalized communities — a sign of trust and respect.”

Sanders’s bet on California was never guaranteed to pay off. California is, in many ways, a presidential primary candidate’s nightmare — you won’t get far with handshakes and meet-and-greets in a state with 20 million registered voters, 200-plus languages and almost 400,000 miles of highways. “Normally in California, the conventional wisdom is, you don’t do grassroots because it doesn’t matter,” said Mike Madrid, a GOP strategist in California who focuses on Latino communities. “It’s throwing money down a rat hole because we’re too big. We’re too diverse. You basically have to set up a 50-state strategy in one state.”

But in the end, the quirks of California’s Democratic primary process — and his rivals’ struggle to break into a clear second place — could end up vindicating Sanders’ choice to focus so heavily on his West Coast prize. The state’s pledged delegates are split into two pools: 144 are reserved for candidates who can crack the 15 percent threshold statewide, and the remaining 271 are divvied up according to the candidates’ performance in the state’s 53 congressional districts. Candidates with fewer resources and some strategic savvy can run up their totals by focusing on districts where their support is strongest, and it’s possible that Biden in particular could improve his standing after his victory in South Carolina. But a strong first-place finish for Sanders and a muddled scrum for second place — with several candidates clustered around the 15 percent threshold — could be, in the words of pollster Mark DiCamillo, a “perfect storm” for Sanders.

“If Sanders is the only candidate who gets significantly above 15 percent, that means he’s not only going to win statewide, he might be the only candidate who gets delegates in every district,” DiCamillo said. “That means he could rack up several hundred delegates just in California. That’s a big deal. And he could do it with less than one-third of the statewide vote.”

That’s all good news for the Sanders campaign in theory. But this year’s primary will tell us a lot about how far a tactile, boots-on-the-ground strategy can go in California. Biden is also popular with voters of color — particularly black voters — and Bloomberg has made some inroads with older Latinos, who tend to be more politically moderate.

The Sanders outreach machine made the difference for at least one voter, though. Dana Goldman, 35, said that he was “99.9 percent sure” that he was voting for Sanders but wasn’t sure whether he was registered or how he could vote. I watched as a Sanders volunteer pulled his phone out of his pocket and gave Goldman the information he needed with a few swipes of his thumb. Goldman, impressed, promised to vote and show up for a “March to the Polls” event the following day. “I was going to maybe follow through with making sure I’m registered to vote, but now that these folks are here and I’m feeling inspired by their energy, it’s like, ‘OK, I’m definitely going to go vote and show up for your thing tomorrow,” he said. “That little bit of outreach — it makes a huge difference.”

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