February 2nd - Do America's Actions towards Mexicans Make us Hitler?

Honoring Imbolc on the Day the Mexican-American Deportations Began.

How to honor Imbolc, the European pagan holiday, as a white* American while holding it in tension with the fact that Feb. 2nd is *also* one of the worst days in Mexican-American history (both the official day America stole Mexico in the 1840s and the mass deportations of the 1930s)? As an antiracist, I cannot in good conscience just celebrate Imbolc this year without acknowledge the best and worst of my ancestors that February 2nd lays bare. I'll do the more fun, ancestral stuff tomorrow.

February 2nd is a day of purification. Pre-Christian European pagans would engage in "Spring" cleaning because of the first signs of spring (the sun returning, crocus flowers blooming, etc.), and February is named after the purging of sweat (fever = feber in Latin). Europeans and those in Catholic Central/South American/Caribbean nations take down their Christmas decorations. Today, neo-Pagans are celebrating the holiday Imbolc. Witches, get out your brooms - for cleaning your rooms, but also your cast out things in your life that are holding you back (there is attracting and repulsive magic, acquiring and letting go, and today we let go).

But there is another kind of purification associated with those of European descent - a very evil kind - that my fellow white Americans need to recognize, and to take responsibility for. America has committed crimes against Chicanos, and does what it always does - waits long enough for historical amnesia to set in. But the wounds remain, and the least I am asking you to do today is to bear witness to the human cost of "Make America Great Again." Purity is an illusion, but we should engage in trying to purge in the sense of healing - to go through the discomfort like a fever - and sweat off our illusions about American nationalism being anything other than white nationalism. Then we can ask the question, "where do we go from here"?

Hitler's program of aggressive territorial expansion was called "lebensraum," a German word meaning "living space." Hitler's purification program was part of a larger European trend called a "pogrom," which was essentially a riotous "purge" of Jews. To do this, he enlisted the work of “stormtroopers.” America, in its form of nationalism in the name of money and power for white people, with its entitlement mentality for whites, is no better than a fascist country like Hitler's. And yes, both governments would tell you they are doing it for peace.

I. Lebensraum Feb. 2nd, 1848 -- "Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends US war with Mexico. After invasion by peace-loving America, México cedes over 1/3 of its land — parts of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado & Texas — to the US. 25,000 Mexicans & 12,000 Americans lost their lives in the 17-month imperialist visitation led by Southern slaveholders to expand plantation slavery. Regiments from Virginia, Mississippi, & North Carolina rebel & 9,207 desert during this land grab." (quote from the Daily Bleed, an amazing calendar)
General (and future U.S. President) Zachary Taylor ordered scores of U.S. soldiers executed for refusing to fight in México. The Southern planter class insisted that the U.S. Army go down to México City and take the whole country, as well as Cuba and some Central American countries, for more plantations.
The treaty leads the American newspaper called the Whig Intelligencer to boast, with no sense of irony, "we take nothing by conquest.... Thank God."

II. Pogroms Feb 2nd, 1931: The first Chicanos that were a part of the mass deportations of Mexicans were rounded up in a park in Los Angeles. Some of the worst round-ups would later take place in Detroit. “There were deportations in states as far flung as Alaska, Alabama and Mississippi.” In the end, 1.8 million were deported in the pogroms. As if to add insult to injury, it was on the same date that México had officially been stolen by America.
The context was the Great Depression, characterized by high unemployment. From 1931-1936, Mexican-Americans were targeted for mass deportations called "repatriation" - a false name, given how as many as sixty percent of those sent “home” to México were U.S. citizen. City and county governments would go through their employee index, find anyone with a Mexican-sounding last name, have them arrested and deported, to free up job openings for whites.
"The raids were vicious. With national concerns over the supposed burden that outsiders were putting on social welfare agencies, authorities targeted those Mexicans utilizing public resources. In Los Angeles, they had orderlies who gathered people [in the hospitals] and put them in stretchers on trucks and left them at the border.”
"The efforts were equally chaotic. The first raid in Los Angeles was in 1931—they surrounded La Placita Park near downtown L.A. It was a heavily Latino area. They, literally, on a Sunday afternoon, rounded everyone up in park that day, took them to train station and put them on a train that they had leased. These people were taken to Central México to minimize their chances of crossing the border and coming back to the U.S.”
"It was not like there was a master committee mapping out blocks. It was more fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants. As in, Here’s a park where Mexicans go, okay let’s go there.”

As a social worker, I have to take responsibility for the fact that social workers were often the ones doing this. It was the Great Depression, and everyone was on some sort of assistance, no matter their race or ethnicity. Social workers cut off Mexican people's food rations to push them out of the country, leaving them to starve, rather than the cruder method of holding a gun to their head. As a socialist, I have to acknowledge that American socialist policies were for the poor whites first, and its poor people of color last, if at all. Ethno-nationalism, whether we are talking about Nazi’s national socialism or Trump’s supposed desire to increase employment through infrastructure projects, is always going to present itself as “America first/Germany first,” and you can tell who they believe their country is supposed to be - Anglo-Saxon Americans/Aryan Germans - by who they exclude - Latinos, Blacks, and Semitic peoples. Nationalism distorts socialism.
III. Stormtroopers:
"Perhaps more than anything, the humanitarian cost of the Hoover-era deportations are the specter that looms largest over Trump’s immigration policy of today. Given the burden mass deportations would have placed on the federal bureaucracy, Hoover’s administration outsourced the raids, targeting and deportation to local and state officials—persons not particularly well versed in constitutional law, nor the sensitivities surrounding deportation."
"Trump appears ready to do the same: while the administration has directed the hiring of 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to oversee the dramatic increase in deportations, the administration has also revived the controversial 287(g) program, which recruits local law enforcement and sheriff’s deputies to assist in deportations. they don’t have the training, expertise or sensitivity to enforce accurate immigration decisions.”
On ICE agents: "Two officials in Washington said that the shift [in policy]— and the new enthusiasm that has come with it — seems to have encouraged pro-Trump political comments and banter that struck the officials as brazen or gung-ho, like remarks about their jobs becoming “fun.” Those who take less of a hard line on unauthorized immigrants feel silenced, the officials said."
Will America ever take responsibility?
"In the meantime, only a limited number of Americans seem to even be aware of the gross mistakes their country made in the name of security. While still a state senator, Dunn successfully sponsored the Apology Act, an official mea culpa from the state of California to its Mexican residents—it passed in 2006. He also led efforts to have a memorial erected in La Placita park, the site of the first raids on L.A.’s Mexican community, where it now stands in memoriam."
"And yet, when Dunn took his apology proposal to members of the U.S. Congress, no one was interested. 'They would say, ‘Immigration is really volatile right now. We’re gonna look like we’re only fighting for Latinos.’ We couldn’t convince anyone to pick it up.'"
"Those whose families were affected by the deportations—in some cases forever changed—appear no more eager to delve into the sins of the past. “They never talked about it,” said Herrada, “there was a lot of shame associated with it … They didn’t know why they got deported. They didn’t know what they did to bring that on. The only thing they knew was that they were Mexicans—and this only happened to Mexicans.”
She added, “My grandfather still didn’t want to say he was deported. And my father, on his deathbed, said to me, You know, I never liked that word. He was really angry that I had used it.”
Quotes from Alex Wagner's article "America’s Forgotten History of Illegal Deportations," which includes information about the oral history project, “Los Repatriados: Exiles from the Promised Land.” The last quote was from Elena Herrada, one of the founders of the oral history project.
*Shep Glennon is a mixed race (one side: WASP, other/Other side: French-Afro-Cuban) neo-Pagan and a Christian-Muslim. Whew!

Me Too: Holding Men Accountable vs. Shaming Men

Do we need a parallel "Me Too" movement where we identify with the men who are abusing?

I think it's about time to say "Time's Up" on the silence around sexual abuse, and break the wall of mistrusting women, and I really don't think the oppressed hating the oppressor is bad *unless* the oppressed construct an ideology that mimics the oppressor. For instance, shaming just replicates the myth of individualism. Aziz Ansari, who was accused of pressuring a woman to have sex, should not be shamed and written off. Even Harvey Weinstein - because any man (and woman!) could have been Harvey Weinstein if they were tempted with that amount of wealth and power, because we've all been conditioned by society to think that we men can get whatever we want, and that people with power are unaccountable.

 Making Weinstein a scapegoat prevents all of us from looking at ourselves and seeing that, Me Too, I have an inner Weinstein, I have an inner rapist, I have an inner sexist, I can imagine that under the right circumstances I could have been/still can be capable of *anything*. And I need to treat this like an addict in 12-step treats their addiction: realize the urge in me to exploit someone because they are vulnerable is always there and not going to go away, that there is a selfish single-minded part of me liable to ignore body language that says "I'm uncomfortable," or a part of me that says "I always need to finish what I start" that would blind me to a look of "I'm tired," that is willing to pressure someone to give me what I want. This is a part of me, and while I cannot be "cured" of my bad me, I have to hold it responsible. I have to work on knowing my triggers, to talk to other men in recovery who can call me on my bullshit rationalizations, who won't shame me while doing it.

When the woman, hurt and angry that Ansari was ignoring that she did not want to go that far sexually, shouted "you're just like all the other men!", there we can unpack that in one of two ways: yes, and yes. Yes, all men are conditioned to think like he did, and that's unacceptable for men to act on. And yes, it's possible she was trying to shame him by saying that, but he could, and for the love of all that is good, *all* men should take it another way: as a charge, as a call to action: men's self-help groups to recover from toxic masculinity.

What I'm saying is that self-righteousness is worse than hate. I don't think it's possible to both shame someone and hold them accountable at the same time. When you hold someone accountable, you say, "there's a problem with your behavior, it's a pattern. And it's part of a larger problem in this world. You need to work on your problem, and we as a society need to work on the larger problem."

When you shame someone, however, you say, "you *are* a problem." Therefore there's nothing you need to do, to work on yourself and change, you just need to go away, because you are toxic and everything you touch is corrupted.

All the studies show that shame is related to eating disorders, bullying and aggression, depression, domestic violence, addiction, suicide, and incarceration. Guilt is inversely related, meaning the more guilt, the less of those things. Because unlike guilt, which looks at behavior, shame looks at the person and the fact "there's something wrong with them," they are "alien." That destroys agency, and it pinpoints the problem with individual actors (people, agencies) and thus stops short of realizing that society's problem deserves ultimate blame. It replicates the myth of individualism.

Weinstein didn't invent what he did - it's as old as King David in the Bible - he had tens of thousands of years of history backing him up, putting the gun in his hand and asking him to pull the trigger. I'd be more surprised if people like Trump and Weinstein *didn't* exist. We all need to see ourselves as compromised by the same system which created these people - that they are not monsters, or, they are acting on the same monsters inside of us all.

A Christmas Carol of Imagination and Chaos, as seen by a feminist Muslim panentheist

Thou hast thy mighty wings outspread

And brooding o'er the chaos shed

Thy life into the impregn'd abyss

The vital principle infused

And out of nothing's womb produced

The heav'n and earth and all that is

                                                  (hymn by Charles Wesley)

Wesley also wrote "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," but I prefer this one as my Christmas Carol, the universe being born when pregnant potential, infused by the creative life force, gave birth to quarks and leptons.

And are not you and I part of the original potential of the big bang? Are we not a dream, a promise that it held to unfold its possibilities? We've got promise, just like her, we've got potential.

We are the promise of our Mother Chaos ancestor and her dreams to unfold herself, to create on higher levels. We are born limited as a collapsing of her random possibilities, born in the midst of a different kind of chaos - humanmade, societal injustice. We are born embodying the principle that evil is a failure of the imagination, that zero-sum games are discreation, that many binaries and definitions we assume get us unnecessarily into a mess and cause massive, collective denial, and that such denial itself constitutes a crime.

But as co-creators with God, we can unlimit our imagination, and in doing so unleash the potential of our ancestors, through a daily recovery program: and I say "daily" and "recovery" to bring attention to the fact that we are addicted to our limited ways of thinking. Optimism is a crime: there is no cure here, no one-off born-again enlightenment that allows us to transcend old scripts.
Nevertheless we can learn to question ourselves, to be more receptive to challenges to our deeply held and cherished attachments, investments, assumptions, loyalties. We can learn to say "not either/or but both/and" a bit more.
We can validate things we disagree with on some level, however limited.

I open myself up to thee, Allah. In my manger of making the same mistakes over and over again, I ask that you impregnate my soul with your rūḥinā / rūaḥ. By being open to your creative coping, to your healing life force, new paths appear, where there once stood only limitations. To prepare myself, I seek to balance my moments of drive, seeking, calculating, consuming, task-orientedness with awe, slowness, not doing anything, chanting, playing (doing something not as a means to an end, not having an end-point in mind before beginning), improvising, so that I can be *listening* to what is inside of me,

I lift my open hands or put my antennas out, just to receive a message from the moment, to create a space, to see what it tells me. I certainly don't do this enough, I often run away from empty spaces. I'm afraid that they are a waste of time and I have a million things I should be doing, could be doing. I think that these spaces are nothing.

But nothing is pregnant. And that is something to sing about.


(*now PLEASE go back and click those links, to Torah-influenced process theologian Catherine Keller, and what the Torah and the Qur'an /and, separately, / James Baldwin and Catholic theologian Thomas Merton in conversation have to say, as well as various links which you can concretely apply to your racist cousins)

Fact check: Did the Pilgrims actually kill Indians, is Thanksgiving originated in oppression?

Fact check: The Pilgrims actually killed Indians, making Thanksgiving a holiday originated in oppression. Rated: Mostly False.

The Puritans committed a genocide. The Pilgrims often get blamed for it. People get satisfied with this blame and move on.
The more we blame the Pilgrims, the further from truth telling we get because now there's no motivation to investigate the Puritans, the actually guilty party behind the evil Thanksgiving. White people can't afford generalizations about our ancestors- we have to know which ancestor did what and to who. How will we take responsibility for genocide if we don't face history accurately?*

*Though this doesn't negate that the word "pilgrim" may be triggering to people of color, a generic term used colloquially as interchangeable with the Puritans (two U.S. Presidents have even confused the two groups); even in their day, lower-case "p" pilgrims was once used as a generic term for both Puritans and Pilgrims.

We need to let people know there are no sacred cows in American history. Jefferson, Franklin, they were total white supremacists who wanted America white (and certainly not "men of their time," because other white people disagreed with them). And Columbus was very much a Hitler, or worse, because Hitler didn't even rape children and help establish child prostitution rings. And just as some cities have changed Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day, Thanksgiving needs to recognize how New England today is the result of the systemic genocide of Native Americans. We need to use it as an occasion to give reparations that Natives want (monetary, land, healing, power over their resources and destiny, centering of voices, truth-telling, etc, not one-off and on one day but as a process, and year round). But we should not be so iconoclastic that we conflate the Puritans and the Pilgrims.

the Pilgrims didn't kill Indians for Thanksgiving, it was the Puritans. I think that's an important distinction to make. The Pilgrims who landed on the shore and fasted with the Wampangoag (that's not a typo for "feast", they actually had a three-day *fast*) were peaceful white folks, and the Puritans were bloodthirsty extremists. It's like the difference between moderate Muslims and extremists. When the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony had Thanksgiving, it was with the Indians. When the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony had Thanksgiving, it was thanking God for winning a genocidal war against the Indians. Two very different Thanksgivings, reflecting two very different cultures.
*Not that it made much difference to Natives like Will Rogers who understandably regret letting any Americans on shore.

One author quotes Plymouth Governor William Bradford, who was the Pilgrim leader, as he described the war which led to the Thanksgiving. But while the author almost makes it sound like Bradford endorsed the war, in actuality, he was only describing it. The war, led by Puritans leaders John Endecott and John Winthrop, was led by bands of Puritan butchers and it was Puritan Winthrop who was the governor which Bradford describes as declaring "a day for Thanksgiving" for winning this war. Pilgrim leader Bradford actually criticized this war as fueled by ignorance about natives; Bradford likely could have had no sway over the hotheaded Endecott, because Endecott's own men tried to stop him from raiding Indians, and they were ignored.

The Puritans and their ways eventually overtook the peaceful Pilgrims, just as the peaceful Quakers and Amish and Mennonites in Pennsylvania and New Jersey had their voices drown out by the aggressive money-and-power lovers. They just weren't interested in empire, in subjugating, quantifying, and regulating bodies, and in the kill-or-be-killed world, they all ended up losing power in government. Quakers and Pilgrims sat by as aggressive and ethnocentrist factions within them took advantage of their newfound freedom when greedy, power-hungry people took the helm after the utopian leaders like Bradford died (Pilgrims) or quit politics in protest of the French and Indian war (Quakers). These aggressive mobs taking Indian lands acted with impunity in Plymouth (leading to King Philip's War), and Indian Boarding Schools proliferated in Quaker lands. And then there is the issue of those who sat passively by as potential for justice turned to self-serving silence in the face of injustice; the masses needs then, as now, to be reckoned with. But their utopian ancestors - the ones at Plymouth who protested bigoted whites going to war with Indians, the ones in Quaker lands who instead of condemning Indian religions sought to learn from them because they already saw them as "communing with the inner light," they need to be recognized and honored.

The first generation of Pilgrims at Plymouth were a mostly peaceful time, due to the leadership of Gov. Bradford and Wampanoag leader Massasoit. Pilgrims could be, and were, executed for the murder of Indians, and sometimes Indians received more lenient punishment than Pilgrims. The Pilgrims were not perfect; there were often political reasons for this fair treatment. And the Pilgrims certainly thought they were the hottest shit. According to womanist theologian Kelly Brown Douglas, they saw themselves as defenders of their ancestor's folk culture which had been tainted by Catholicism, represented by the high Anglican Church/Church of England. There was also petty theft. They also almost starved one year soon after they landed, and went looking for Indian help. They happened upon an empty Wampanoag village (that turned out was abandoned, but they had no way of knowing this) and after realizing no one was home, out of desperation, stole from a granary and graves. One Pilgrim said "we meant to have left some beads and other things in the houses as a sign of peace and to show we meant to trade with them," but left in a "haste...but as soon as we meet the Indians, we will pay them back for what we took" (Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pg. 86). (Sounds like a self-serving rationalization to me.) Despite these several survival attempts involving petty theft of empty villages, which continued, half of the Pilgrims died within the first year, including that winter of starving. This happened before the first Thanksgiving dinner, with the Wampangoag, which took place in in 1621.

In 1637, over a decade after the first Thanksgiving, the Puritans went to war with the Indians- it was called Pequots war. It was ethnic cleansing. The Puritans celebrated it as Thanksgiving. *This* isn't the one that we celebrate as a Holiday, and it's important not to conflate the two. The Pilgrims present a good opportunity to show that we can't just say "well the Puritans were just people of their time," or "well Indians were hostile so they had to defend themselves," because not all white people were getting into fights with Indians and stealing their land and slaughtering them; the Pilgrims prove this. Because of the Pilgrims, apologist arguments justifying racism don't work.
After the deaths of Massasoit and Winthrop, just a few years apart in the 1660s, the Pilgrims lost their stabilizing forces that had maintained peaceful relations, and became more like their aggressive Puritan cousins in their ways- they hungered for land, English cultural domination, and they treated Natives more harshly during sentencing. This went against their ancestral culture which told them to behave like good Christians toward the Natives, something which Puritan culture had lacked. Josiah Winslow, for instance, was the son of a Pilgrim who dealt fairly with the Natives; Josiah, unlike his father, however, undertook evil land dealings; he was thus more Puritan in his style. By the 1690s, the Pilgrims lost their charter and were absorbed completely into Puritan culture.

We celebrate and romanticize the first Thanksgiving (the Pilgrim one). We ignore the second one (the Puritan one). We should not do either. The Puritan one lays bare the violence of whites and their twisted logic, whose justifications and motivations are the inherited legacy of New Englanders' white Yankees. We inherited Puritan culture, not Pilgrim culture, and we must reckon with it. So this claim that Thanksgiving originated in genocide may not be true, but it has an important element of truth in it that we must be reckoning with. That's why I rate this claim as "mostly false."

Yet the Pilgrims who washed ashore, probably looking lost as hell (they had aimed for Virginia), offer a strain of whiteness not defined by inhumane desire for control and consumption. They represent a potential: that first generation who managed to have fair dealings with Natives all the way down to their criminal justice system. Whites must be looking at the Amish, the Mennonites, the Quakers, the Pilgrims, and reckon with this element as well [they were not perfect]. Some of these groups not only resisted slavery but on principle resisted any dealing with people or companies related to the slave trade. What made them different? How can they be a model, however a limited one? These are questions we should also be thankful to deal with, from ancestors we Euro-Americans should be thankful to have.

Sources: "The Truth About Thanksgiving" by Richard Shiffman on Huffington Post
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen
Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God by Kelly Brown Douglas

Further reading on the Puritans [must-reads for white Americans]:
American Nations by Colin Woodward [start with this easy-to-read one]
Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer [an epic]



"The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history." – James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 92.

Opioid Crisis is a white, corporate terrorist attack

"America is enduring a death toll equal to September 11th every three weeks." 2017 Commission on Combatting Drug Addiction.
"They attack us, but they also attack their own people, that's crazy." White Americans at the dinner table when talking about Muslim terrorists killing Muslims

Opiates are the new opiates of the masses? Compare how many Americans were killed due to religious (Christian, Muslim, etc) violence last year (19 in 2015, the last year I could find data) to the 62,000 killed from opioids (more than car accidents or homicides). Realize that one family-owned corporation is behind this and has been to court before for criminal misbranding and exploiting doctor's ignorance about the strength of oxycodone (2007 trial, guilty plea), and is now (Jan 2017) being sued by an entire town for allowing their drugs to enter the underground market by ignoring suspicions going back to 2009 reported by lower-level employees (Everett, Washington). Entire states have done this as well: Kentucky sued them in 2015 for $1 billion. And as I began writing this article, the states of New Jersey and Alaska just sued them for fueling its opioid crisis as well, for "deception." New Hampshire also claims this corporation refused to share information with them or heed their calls for investigation.

The Sackler family's Purdue Pharma is a terrorist organization whose destruction is just as devastating as overtly violent extremists; the Sacklers wipe out entire towns, and use legislation to kill DEA regulations (2016 Amendment to the "Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act" (find the link to it on this article) gives drug companies more *freedom* to police themselves from ending up supplying the underground market, like the gun companies; just like the above case where Purdue ignored suspicions its drugs were being smuggled. But piracy and capitalism have a long partnership). All in the name of liberty, this country's god (to quote Jefferson who said this); more to the point, freedom to increase profits without accountability, which in this country is our *real* god.

In order to be omnipotent, Purdue cornered the market by making Valium compete with Librium, a drug which was basically the same. To do this, they created a term for "stress" called "psychic tension" and linked it to everything from sleep problems to indigestion to depression. It became the first $100,000 drug by being marketed for virtually everything.Then they discovered oxycontin, which was at first solely for cancer patients. Their gold rush was about to run dry when the patent ran out, so they had to regenerate and reinvent themselves: they created a time-release oxycodone. Instead of marketing it just to cancer patients, they did it for back pain, menstruation, for toothaches. The terror began: more and more people would feel insecure that they would not be protected from pain if they did not have that painkiller their neighbor did, and more and more doctors would feel insecure if they were not thinking they were treating their chronic pain patients the best they could. No one knew the true strength of the drug they were getting. They weren't supposed to, leading directly to the guilty plea mentioned above.

In America, we fall. A lot. It's the leading cause of emergency room visits. But because medical knowledge is as inaccessible to us (especially if one corporation created the drug and has trade secret privilege) as the divine was to the non-priest/scholar, the Sacklers were empowered to name and define our reality, to take on the religious role of healer for us, we get over-prescribed (but don't think WebMD is the new Reformation).

We also fall into the Western idealist trap of thinking that our bodies don't matter, that we should just consume tasty foods, drinks, and electronics, with bad posture and lack of moving around. Society reinforces this by placing demands on us that tell us we don't have time to care for our bodies. ** These are all religious standpoints, and we're buying into it.** Lower-back pain and other issues related to sitting and doing repetitive motions are on the rise, common sources of opioid prescriptions, according to doctors and workplace safety organization OSHA. Our postures and motions are as determined for us as Catholic kneeling-and-standing and Muslim salat rituals- it's the corporate ritualization of America.

So we are being killed by a terrorist organization that is trying to brainwash us, to do all of our thinking for us. We all claim to follow the same religion, the American Creed of "give me liberty with as few restrictions as possible." Purdue Pharma is a part of ALEC, a lobbying group that goes so far as to write draft legislation for politicians, and uses the word "liberty" all over their website, claiming to be in the heritage of Patrick Henry, who once said, "Give me liberty or give me death!" This is the use of ideology, of religious conviction, of jihad; and what religious extremists always do is hide their lust for money and power under seemingly innocent religious terms.

Terrorism involves the intent of inciting fear, people tell me. Maybe both the drug companies and ISIS have the goal of inspiring a mindset of insecurity. One is the insecurity of terrorized Americans not feeling protected from outsiders, the other is insecurity of not feeling protected from pain and stress. Both end up killing people in the process. Is this not terrorism, then?

Remember, the number one victim of Islamic terrorism are other Muslims, it not seem that way because they happened outside of our borders. We Americans are likewise our own greatest victims. We are the greatest sacrifice to America's Moloch and Mammon- control of resources (including human resources) and greed-driven profits.

For a country that values freedom, addiction should be the antithesis to this. But we'll never cure opioid addiction until we cure our addiction to the rhetoric of "liberty" when used by corporations. Purdue Pharma is just one of many corporations who exploit that rhetoric to kill fellow Americans and say they're doing it to save us, but it's really just to regenerate themselves through profit bonanzas. Our bodies are their frontier for their gold rush, and they won't stop until they've tamed us. Our bodies are means to a religious end - a heaven on earth of stored treasured - they won't stop until they've emptied our pockets and killed us. It's parasitic.

And why didn't Trump declare opioids a "national emergency" like he said he would, and like NJ governor Chris Christie called for him to do? He only now declared it a mere "public health emergency" which will not fund the response as much as a national emergency would. A 9/11 every three weeks and Trump isn't being tough on opioids, but he's only tough on religious extremists since it doesn't fuck with corporate profits. In fact, Trump nominated Rep. Tom Marino, Big Pharma's advocate, to the position of drug czar, which is like letting the fox guard the henhouse.

**********

JOE RANNAZZISI: That’s out of control. What they want to do is do what they want to do and not worry about what the law is. And if they don’t follow the law in drug supply, people die. That’s just it. People die. … This is an industry that allowed millions and millions of drugs to go into bad pharmacies and doctors’ offices, that distributed them out to people who had no legitimate need for those drugs.

BILL WHITAKER: Who are these distributors?

JOE RANNAZZISI: The three largest distributors are Cardinal Health, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen. They control probably 85 or 90 percent of the drugs going downstream.

BILL WHITAKER: You know the implication of what you’re saying, that these big companies knew that they were pumping drugs into American communities that were killing people.

JOE RANNAZZISI: That’s not an implication, that’s a fact. That’s exactly what they did.

[But an investigative journalist who did a piece for Esquire called "The Secretive Family Making Billions From the Opioid Crisis" responded to this interview.]

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Joe Rannazzisi, who ran the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, which regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry, speaking with CBS correspondent Bill Whitaker. Of course, he became a whistleblower. Christopher Glazek, talk about the significance of what this man said.

CHRISTOPHER GLAZEK: Well, you know, the opioid epidemic has many different actors in different parts of the chain. And this investigation focused on the distributors, who are basically the people who carry the opioid pills from the manufacturer and give it to specific pharmacies. And there’s been a lot of litigation focused on them. Some thought that, you know, they knew, that they had had reason to know, that certain pharmacies maybe were involved in diversion. And they have this ongoing struggle with the DEA about what’s appropriate to seize and under what circumstances.

In my view, what you want to do when you look at the opioid crisis is look at where the real profits are. And it’s actually not with the distributors. It’s really with the manufacturers. And, you know, people kind of think they’re following the money. And McKesson and Cardinal are these huge, giant companies. But you really want to follow the margin, because that’s going to tell you who’s controlling a market and who’s kind of like a minor toll taker. And the fact is that the manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, which really created this market, created all this business for Cardinal and McKesson, etc., they had much more detailed information about where pills were going. They knew down to the prescription level, you know, what doctors were prescribing what. The distributors didn’t know that. The distributors—all distributors knew was about pharmacies. So they really are just one part of this giant chain. But Purdue had the aerial vision of the entire thing."

Source: Democracy Now, "Who Profits from the Opioid Crisis?"

I am a Latino Klansman

So many Latino names and faces emerging in the alt-right Charlottesville rally/riot and KKK. Have Latinos joined the quest to be the next Irish, Italians, Jews? To "become white"? (whiteness used to be restricted to Anglo Saxon Protestants) Of course. It's been like that for a while, but not to this extent before, I don't think. There's deep desperation here on Latino's part, to fit in. And there's desperation on these white supremacist group's part, they must be strapped for membership, and trying to prove they're not racist, just concerned about white people's place in an uncertain future where Latinos and other immigrants will surpass whites (in population terms! Don't worry), and hoping they'll help maintain power (see? I told you not to worry. They won't surpass you in power. You can train them!)

A devil's bargain. Hate groups accept Latinos who hate and blame the same people they do, Latinos who will throw poor Latinos under the bus too.
Latinos get acceptance and the feeling that they're better than section 8, welfare collecting brethren who thinks the world owes them something. Of course, this involves making gross generalizations, but no matter. You know there's at least *some* stereotype fulfillers, and, hey, you're getting to wear these cool outfits and to troll people.

But how happy are you? Something's missing and broken inside. You yearn for a holy war, but then you'd be bored if you killed all your enemies. Deep down you believe that redeeming is much more meaningful. But you need a better job, and you're pissed at people on welfare because you're not doing much better than them by working.

Or you're in college and women are everywhere in power on campus taking out hatred of men on you, and passing oppressive rape laws, and you need to start a revolution that creates an America that rewards the best mental genes that rise to the top out of the barrios and from across the borders, that brings eternal renewal to our country , by deporting, by exterminating, or by sending to work camps the parasites on the top at the Federal Reserve and UN and media and big banks and Soros, and all the parasites at the bottom who hit you up for money but have a welfare mentality themselves.

But what if you're really boring and unoriginal, perhaps slow or unloveably weird, just another person whose resume is so-so, what if you get discovered? Discovered as desperate? You need enemies to distract from this. And you need to show you're down for any and everything, in excess.

Even if you worry you're not special, at least there's a bunch of whiners out there thumping Rules for Radicals and Communist Manifestos as they rage about identity politics whom you can point to as the *real* whiners. You selfish dividers focusing exclusively on your identity group. American has no color.
I should know, I'm a Latino Klansman.

People used to shut me up every time I expressed negativity, so I don't know how to love others who express negativity, because I don't know how to love myself. No one came to attend to me when I cried. Or, if they did, I got called a pussy. Then when a woman - a woman!- called me a pussy one time, I knew I had to shove it all into a black hole. Now anyone talking about reparations and privilege and "safe spaces" is done. Life isn't fair. This is America. Get over it. Fuck away from my hard-earned money you jealous crab. Get your own! The stars and stripes means motherfucking freedom you Muslim Nazis and hey did you know Hitler was a Socialist? #makeamericagreatagain #maga sorry do I offend you, you must hate free speech too

I could be the next person to be rich as Jay-Z, rich as Trump! But you lazy liberals want free everything, at *my* expense, by taxing me. I'm struggling with debt and my job is high pressure and I don't see my family often and I think my wife is turning my kids against me but I can just *taste* that big money, that Trump sized net worth, right around the corner. But Democrats, you know those n***as and wetbacks and Jews [there's a difference between Black people and n***as,  Latinos and wetbacks, it's just that there's more bad than good, I'm just a special breed] and libtards possessed by guilt are only thing preventing me from getting there.
Fuck em. This is war.

This is war. Who cares if Shirley Sherrod had to be taken down due to doctored tapes that made her sound like a reverse racist. Reverse racism is real. Who cares if Planned Parenthood provides the only accessible necessary services in town for poor people. This is a Holocaust against babies. Yet y'all want my tax money?

My tax money is only going to F-16s, and badges on patrol against animals who hate the police and law and order anyway. Who cares if a few Iraqi or North Korean children get incinerated, the best defense is a good offense. Who cares if a few people get racially profiled, it is Black people and my disowned brown people coming from the bad neighborhood doing all the crime anyway, who cares if I myself get stopped, here's my ID officer, better safe than sorry. Did I take the words out of your mouth, officer? Btw, I'm not one of *those* Latinos. I'm more like Zimmerman. I'm your self appointed lapdog. Notice me. Recognize me. I'm Latino and validating everything you say. Isn't that good press for you? Need me. Please for the love of God, can I finally be indispensable for once?


note,
This is written by a white man of Cuban* and European descent
*Which means I'm part West African**, because conquistadors didn't bring women with them, and my DNA test didn't result in Taino blood
**8% to be exact.

A Problem With Simply Framing Racism as Evil

Trump today: “Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans”

Yes, Trump, racism *is* evil. However, the more we talk about it like that, the less people are going to admit that they are racist. I am racist. I'm in recovery, but I'll never be cured. Talking about racism in addiction terms has helped me go from 8th grade me: "let's kill all the racists and that'll solve the problem," to today where I realized that it's not a matter of identifying enemies and "bad guys" (which is very self-righteous of me).

Overt racism exists on a spectrum, and what I think really matters is the degree to which we've internalized and actualized unconscious racist belief systems and emotional reactions. I think it really matters that this is a spectrum which everyone is on, including everyone I know and love, and myself as well.

From this angle, focusing my energy on overt bigots/white supremacists is finding scapegoats at the cost of holding myself and my community accountable.

I've heard a Trump supporter say that Dylan Roof should be shot. I've heard a police officer say that the cops who killed Laquan McDonald should be executed. How convenient: now there is no responsibility to look at how white supremacy and police brutality don't happen in a vacuum, but in fact are part of the dominant culture in America. There is no responsibility to see how they or I could have become Dylan Roof or those murdering cops if a few things in our life had gone differently. These men are my friends and I don't want them thinking that they should be ashamed when they realize that they have the same implicit biases against Black people as overt racists (see the website projectimplicit and take the test "race"). Or the University of Colorado test where average people hesitate less when they pull the trigger on unarmed Black and Latino people.

Instead I want them to think about the implications of these subtle, unconscious biases playing out in how Black Americans get treated in terms of pay, job offerings, respect, homes, 911 calls, arrests, sentencing, parole, and being put on a track (college prep, remedial, special, advanced placement, etc.) in school and manager track at work, etc. and how this plays out in their occupation. I want them to think about how politicians can ring all sorts of bells when they say phrases like "welfare queens" and "supercriminals," etc. I want them to think about how we can stop these stereotypes.

I want them to think of themselves as people in recovery trying not to be in active addiction, knowing it's a life-long process of self-examination and working the 12-steps. We're not completely in control of our thoughts and feelings, which can be fucked up ("what is he [this Black man] doing in this [my] neighborhood?" I recently thought to myself because it was so unusual and I had to categorize him by making up a context), but *we* are not fucked up for having them. We're doing just what we were trained to do by a system that can't get over its denial (polls show most white people think they are the most oppressed victims of racism), self-obsession (making historically non-white characters white; not casting Latinos, Asians in roles enough and Black people mostly for stereotypes), willful ignorance (this Pepsi commercial), and fear of changing ("I'm not a racist but I'm scared about the future of America becoming mostly non-white. Fuck press 2 for English!"). In other words, a system that displays all the characteristics of addiction.

The question is, for me in this context (far be it for me to say "the" question), can we wean ourselves, our loved ones, and thus our country off of white supremacy- not just in white pride movements but in the actual literal white supremacy where "The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today" and we all know that in this country wealth means access to happiness (family time, vacations, chance to find ourselves, travel abroad), politics (lobbyists), influence (buy media time), respect (sadly, our country believes that the ability to generate wealth is alone enough a sign of virtue, though the opposite may be true), justice (attorney fees), services and aid (potholes fixed; no botched response to hurricanes or lead poisoning in water), and most tragically of all, health (see the PBS special Unnatural Causes). Currently America is a white supremacist nation for all of its policies which exacerbate this condition of whites being supreme over Blacks in terms of respect, power, control, etc. - policies which are enumerated in many books but to me most importantly in Black Wealth/White Wealth and The Hidden Cost of Being African-American both by Tom Shapiro, and Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood by Peter Medoff (about the obstacles in place for a Black community who tries to, God forbid, have control over its own resources in this country if they want to develop their own neighborhoods their own way).

The kind of racism of Roof and those officers who killed Laquan McDonald, and the man who plowed into a group of antiracist protesters, is criminal and tragic and deserves full prosecution. My point is, the FBI doesn't just go after the muscle/hit-men in the Mafia. These are the ones at the bottom of the pyramid, with the crime boss on top. America's crime boss of racism is its own institutions, its own psyche. In order to change that, that takes work in our own community institutions' to undo its complicity and teach our children about invisible structures of modern racism, reading books to know how we got here and what to lobby for and against, it takes a campaign to delegitimize commonly held assumptions (such as "urban renewal" and "war on police" and "school redistricting"), it takes work on our own selves and its complicity (from our unconscious biases, othering language, to our gentrifying bodies). Not just a dismissal of racism as "evil" or the idea that we can punch or kill or protest our way out of this. (though some strategic violence and protests are important once one has identified key institutions and higher level culture-setting individuals)