Non-violence is a sword that heals

My Sunday movie was the 1988 film Stand and Deliver. It is a true story of Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos) hired to teach computers in East Los Angeles in 1980. But the school couldn’t afford to buy computers, so he ends up teaching math in a place where his students have Spanish surnames. We follow one class of students through to graduation in 1982. He has to convince them an education matters. If all you can do is add and subtract you’ll spend your life pumping gas. Some of the boys in the class swagger like gang members and don’t want to be seen as smart. He has to convince fellow teachers that students will rise to expectations and these students are worth teaching. He has to convince parents that their children can have a better life. And he has to battle the Education Testing Service who accuse his students of cheating. I think a few of the actors playing the students went on to decent movie careers, though the only name I recognize now is Lou Diamond Phillips. Looking up the movie on IMDB didn’t help in identifying actors because it shows how the actors look now (or perhaps in the last 10 years), not how they looked when the movie was made. The IMDB trivia page noted Olmos shadowed the real Jaime Escalante for many days and Olmos wrote dialogue based on what Escalante actually said. So it is good Escalante said the movie was 90% truth and 10% drama. I enjoyed this one. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. While there are stories in the national news about the possibility of being infected by COVID, flu, and RSV all at the same time, Michigan is doing well on the COVID front – at least in the reported COVID cases. The peaks in the new cases per day over the last few weeks are 1233, 1002, 852, and 555 – heading in the right direction. The number of deaths per day remain at their ongoing low level. The Martin Luther King holiday happened since the last time I posted. So here are a few things that were discussed about the day. Charles Jay of the Daily Kos community called us to continue King’s dream of economic justice. A few quotes from King:

“God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject poverty.” “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.” “And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.”

Jay then discussed how it was that the rich acquired more than a trillion dollars during the pandemic. Paul Fell, as part of his Daily Felltoon, tweeted a cartoon about economic equality:

Did you see how much the university is paying its new coaches?! Meanwhile, our professors make a fraction of that for turning out doctors, teachers, engineer, and Nobel Prize winners. Big Deal! Not a one of ’em can throw a 70-yard touchdown pass and win the Superbowl!!

Aysha Qamar of Kos wrote about King’s influence around the world. Nelson Mandela of South Africa was highly influenced by King as he worked to end Apartheid. In Northern Ireland Catholics used King’s teachings to challenge the discrimination they experienced from the Protestants. King’s vision was a part of the social movements in Eastern Europe in the 1980s that finally swept aside Soviet rule. And in India the Dalits, the “untouchables” in India’s caste system, used King’s non-violent teachings to challenge that system. David Fitzsimmons of the Arizona Daily Star tweeted one of King’s central messages:

If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness and your chief legacy will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a King quote:

When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love. Where evil men would seek to perpetuate an unjust status quo, good men must seek to bring a real order of justice. Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.

YoursINegritude stole an image we can use when conservatives quote MLK. Remember Clippy, the paperclip help character from a long ago version of Windows? The image is of Clippy asking:

Hi! It looks like you’ve quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. out of context instead of engaging with the complex reality of white supremacy in America. Would like some help with that?

This one isn’t directly about MLK, though appropriate for his life’s work. A few weeks ago during the children’s time at my church the presenter talked about the book The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss. She didn’t just talk about it, she had the kids act it out. The story is about one group of sneetches who have a star on their bellies who look down on another group of sneetches who don’t have stars. So those without get stars and the first group takes them off and proclaim the better sneetches don’t have stars. And round and round they go. The kids would go into a tent where the presenter’s husband would attach or take off the stars. At the conclusion the kids, at least the older ones, got the point. Laura Clawson of Kos wrote about a teacher of the Olentangy Local School District in Ohio reading that book to students. The reading was being recorded for the NPR Planet Money podcast. Yeah, I didn’t think that book was about economics. But apparently the book, with all that activity to add and remove stars, is about open markets. Or something. This is one of several books discussing economics for kids on that podcast. After they got into the book a ways, a third grader made a connection, “Like, white people disrespected Black people, but then, they might stand up in the book.” A moment later, Amanda Beeman, the district’s assistant communication’s director, stopped the reading. That halt and the children’s confusion are are now a part of the podcast. Ohio does not have a law preventing teachers from discussing race. Well, not yet. Republicans have introduced such a bill. Even without such a law the political climate has teachers and school officials already censoring what goes on in a classroom. And even if the book says nothing about white people and black people students can’t be allowed to figure out the topic is racism. A book published in 1961 during the Civil Rights era is now too risky for a classroom. I recently wrote about the protests in Lützerath, Germany trying to stop an open pit coal mine from eating the town. The protesters didn’t reoccupy the village. But... Leah McElrath quoted FaggotsForFuture, who wrote, “It was a political victory: we showed the greens that anyone who tries to screw the #climate movement will get hurt politically. We are not to be messed with!” McElrath also wrote the police inflicting violence against the climate activist seemed to be having fun. Laura Clawson of Kos wrote about a feature of the Inflation Reduction Act signed last year. There will be a variety of rebates and tax credits to help households shift away from fossil fuels. States need to enact laws to get the money to their residents, so the money may be available by the end of this year. So start thinking about it now! Money will be available for such things as: weatherization materials such as insulation and window upgrades; heat pumps to replace the furnace, air conditioner, and water heater; and solar panels. Hunter of Kos discussed the latest silliness from conservatives. Another major scientific study shows that gas stoves are not a good idea. The emissions of that flame in the house can lead to asthma in children. That prompted many conservatives to proclaim that Biden was coming after their stove and that the only way he’ll get it is to pry it out of their cold dead hands (extra points if you remember the last thing they insisted their cold hands would grasp). Hunter noted two things related to this tempest. First, there is regulation:

If all washing machines came with optional robot-arm attachments that would spontaneously rip the livers out of a small percentage of passing toddlers, we'd regulate those washers pretty darn quick. Robotic vacuums cannot be shipped with optional spinning knife attachments just because it would look cool. You can no longer put cocaine in your old-timey bottled cough syrup even if it does really perk your patients up, because reasons. There are some things we're good at regulating, and some things we're not. The "not" parts tend to coincide with very particular lobbying efforts.

See the fights over tobacco, lead in gasoline, and now fossil fuels in general. The second thing is that the loudest conservatives…

are catering to a crowd that very much believes mundane aspects of our modern American life are causing nationwide illness and death. That's their thing. It's their whole personality, in fact. They just believe the dangers are always coming from the opposite direction of whatever our nation's top experts are currently warning about.

See COVID vaccines and the latest generation of broadband infrastructure. So, yeah, the tempest over gas stoves will continue to be a thing. Hunter also discussed the latest blather from Sen. Mike Lee of Utah. Lee, surely working for ways to gut the federal budget, asked:

Please (1) name any federal regulatory agency whose elimination would negatively impact your life, and then (2) specify whether that agency’s necessary functions couldn’t be performed at least as well at the state or local level, or by a non-governmental body.

Lee then suggested that states would step up and handle food safety and while there would be variations from state to state this won’t be a problem. Hunter then asked Kos readers for their lists of necessary federal departments and agencies. The discussion was lively. Mother Mags: Food safety, work safety, etc. would get watered down in red states. hijean: see the meat industry during COVID. tmseattle: Texas electricity isolated themselves from the national grid to avoid following national regs. That was a disaster a couple Februarys ago. RO37:

Do I like having a single national currency instead of needing a book of exchange rates on hundreds of private and state run currencies (DoT) Do i like drugs that I know work when I take them, and food that won't poison me? (FDA) Do I like breathing clean(er) air? That my asthma prone family hasn’t triggered for my children? (EPA) Do i like that the DOJ can crack down on the most racist police departments? Do I like reading novel, watching TV shows, and listening to music (Dept of Commerce—patent office) Do I like that China or Russia can't just march to my door and there's acoordinated national defense? Dept of Defense

Katwoman added:

Do I like having an independent organization investigating mass casualty accidents and recommending changes regardless of profit impact? (NTSB) Do I like knowing the resources entire country will help my state in the event of a natural disaster? (FEMA) Do I like preserving our natural landscape for the animals who live in it? (NPS and BLM) Do I like having one exceptionally trained organization in charge of search and rescue on and around my country’s ports? (USCG).

And several noted that corporation want one set of regulations, not fifty. See the complaints that California has much more stringent car exhaust regs than the rest of the country. So, yeah, they want the federal government and it various agencies to regulate and not the states.