One that puts love of country above all else

My Sunday move was Cowboys from 2020. The setting is northwest Montana, beautiful scenery. Josie – Joe – is a preteen transgender boy. He tells his father Troy, who understands. His mother Sally does not. Mom is so insistent that her child is female that Joe runs away with his father. But Dad has mental health issues. Part of the story is Joe and Troy trying to get to Canada. Another part is Sally working with the cops, saying Troy kidnapped Josie. A third part is flashbacks to show how the situation got so critical, including Sally accusing Troy of being too much of an influence on their child. He uses male pronouns for their child, she uses female. Joe explains to his father that he feels alien in his body. When we see Joe in bed his stuffed toy is a green alien. I had written before of the saying that if a gun is shown in the first act it will go off by the third. I’ve since learned Chekhov was the one who said it. I thought of that because a gun is shown in the first few minutes of this movie. And yes, it is used. I thought the acting was well done, the story engaging, the scenery beautiful, and in all an enjoyable evening. Danny Feingold of Capital & Main posted on Daily Kos noted climate emergencies are affecting both red and blue states, so: “How can we forge a non-ideological consensus to take on the climate emergency?” We don’t have time to vote in a unified Democratic majority, and some Democrats, like Sen. Manchin, are in the pockets of (or co-owners of) fossil fuel companies.

So where does that leave us? Perhaps the answer is to reframe the need for urgent climate action in the most American of ways: as one that puts love of country above all else.

We are all under threat from a common enemy, one that doesn’t “distinguish between races, creeds, religions or political affiliations.” A solution, proposed by former Republican Reps. Ryan Costello and Francis Rooney in an op-ed for Politico, is for environmental organizations to actively engage in right-of-center communities. Get the citizens wanting climate action and their representatives might follow. Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote that the Supreme Court disallowing affirmative action in college admissions may not turn out as expected. The key passage in Roberts’ decision is how the student might write their essay and how it would be used by the college:

A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.

All minority students have faced stereotyping and discrimination because of the way the appear to the white majority. Minority students have already been writing about this in their admissions essays. And college admissions officers and high schools counselors now know this is the way around the affirmative action ban. Many colleges will now suggest this as a topic for the student’s essay. A majority of white people believe discrimination against them exists. A much smaller percentage say they have actually experienced it. That reverse racism has been disproven makes no difference in people believing it is true. And hard right organizations have sent letters to those 200 highly competitive colleges threatening lawsuits of they don’t comply with the Supreme Court ruling. So even if white kids are discriminated against, they can write about it in their essays too. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quotes an article by Kate Shaw in the New York Times. Here’s part of the quote.

Since Justice Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court has sided with religious plaintiffs in every major religion case except a few exceptions on the shadow docket, representing an essentially unbroken streak of wins for Christian plaintiffs. This last point is significant. Where historically some of the court’s most important religious freedom rulings have protected members of minority religions from discrimination, the big winners in the recent cases have been practitioners of mainstream Christian religions.

I cleaned out a lot of browser tabs that are for things on Twitter I can no longer access and I don’t care very much if I never get the links back. Yeah, I’ve still got a few tabs for tweets that I might discuss without linking back to the original. Then there are tabs for threads I know I can get through the thread reader. Like this one by Michael Harriot from late April. He beings with a link to an article on ProPublica showing a stopped train with a black child crawling beneath it. When a train blocks a crossing for hours kids risk their lives by crawling underneath. The train could start at any moment. And ambulance and fire trucks are frequently blocked. Harriot explains that many towns historically segregated by race. His first example is train tracks. The less desirable housing was downwind from the noise and smoke of the trains. That’s where we get the expression, “wrong side of the tracks.” If a town with two high schools finds they have to close one, they aren’t going to send the white students to where the black people live. So a lot of black kids have to “cross the tracks” to attend school. Many had to face long walks and obstacles the white students didn’t have to face – like reservoirs that sometimes had high water or a ravine that didn’t have a convenient bridge. And in the 1950s many black neighborhoods in cities were wiped out through eminent domain so a freeway (for white people) could go through and become another barrier. Harriot takes on the false narrative that black people don’t value education. His rebuttal starts with black districts get about $2K less per student. White school libraries have more books. Yet, most black students attend these black schools. Another way this is racist is black people pay taxes too. Black people do value a good education. But that’s not what’s available to them.