Black lives matter. Absolutely! But we will not have a functioning civilization unless all lives matter and throughout American history we as a nation have failed to make black lives matter just as much as white lives. That must stop now!
Right now this controversy is manifesting itself in the form of demonstrations against the police, including demands to defund and/ or eliminate the police. Anyone with any intelligence understands that the latest, most strident demands are illogical, but they are also the natural result of earlier more logical demands going unheeded.
Anyone with even minimal intelligence understands that this problem has been with us for a long time. Donald Trump is a sociopath and an incompetent fool, but this problem didn’t start with him. This, like almost everything else he touches has metastasized under his blundering attempts to ignore it and is fast becoming a danger to our democratic state.
In a righteous attempt to stop murders of black people by the police, demonstrators all over the land have gone off the deep end, calling for a situation that is neither functional nor acceptable to the general public. Even as I write this, both houses of congress are promoting bills that will deal with the current police problem from different points of view. Neither will be successful. Nor will any other proposed legislation until after the election. We are currently in a logjam that can only be loosed by a change in administration.
Right now we have a Senate that is being backed by about 1/3 of the voters in the country and a House that is backed by about 2/3rd’s of the voters in the country. Neither group having the votes to overcome their own internal majority. That must change if we are to make any progress in the goals that many of us see as absolutely necessary to bring our nation out of this quagmire.
Winning the Presidency in November just won’t do it. For the Democrats to be able to do what they need to do to save the country from Trump’s excesses, they must win both Houses and the Presidency. If they can accomplish that they may, if they can control their own party, be able to move in directions that will at least begin to solve some of the problems that rational thinkers recognize as the principal obstacles to our country’s success.
If we can get to that point, if the Democrats can take the House, the Senate and the White House, they will be faced with the monumental chore of solving two kinds of problems. They will have to solve real problems, like unemployment, healthcare, failing education, outrageous military spending and crumbling infrastructure but they will also be faced with the aspirational, ethical problems like policing, prison reform, poverty and human rights. The problems in the first group are those whose solutions, result in a physical effect. This person gets a job. That money taken from the military budget is given to expand summer camps for poor children, to add courses in a community college or to build a new bridge.
The problems in the second group can also, when solved, have physical results, but they primarily impact the soul and that has just as important an effect on us as anything else… more.
Right now the principal motivation for action comes from the awful series of murders perpetrated by police against black men, especially that of George Floyd. These events have filled the streets of our cities with enough demonstrators to make the point, even to those least involved, that something must be done. The leaders of that grand eruption, the Progressive Democrats, have led the cry for change in a very impressive manner and they must continue to apply the pressure from their congressional seats because no matter what the volume of the demonstrations nothing will be done about this until after a new government takes office on 1/21/21 and it will be counterproductive if the demonstrations continue until then.
Why do I say that?
Chaos is the antithesis of good government. If Trump has done nothing else, he has proven that concept. Constant demonstrations will lead to chaos, blunting its own effect and creating opportunity for vandals or political opportunists masquerading as vandals and demonstrators to undermine the goals of the demonstrations. The point has been made. Now is the time for the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s to take up the cudgel in the House and Senate and keep the dream alive. That is their job as Progressive liberals. Once a new government is in place it will be the job of the Moderates to pick up the sword from the Progressives and turn their labors into legislation.
Why do I have the presumption to assign duties to different segments of the Democratic Party? I don’t. I am not assigning. I am observing what each group has done well and how they could best blend to achieve the optimal result. The progressives are the attack force, identifying the problem and launching burning spears at it. Their approach to the police tactics with the black population makes this evident, but their approach to a solution makes it just as evident that they will never be able to accumulate the congressional votes to pass legislation necessary to deal effectively with the problem they are trying to solve.
“Defund the Police” is not the way to achieve the goal they seek. “Eliminate the Police” is even worse. Both these approaches scare the living hell out of the average citizen and turn them off to any investigation of how to really solve the problem. They know the situation is wrong but they are more terrified of the solution. That’s why we need the Moderates to take over and work out a viable solution that will give us the kind of policing we need without weakening our cities and leaving them open to renewed violence.
The NYS anti-bail law is a perfect example of what I am speaking about. It was created to deal with a real and very unfair situation, but it was created by crusaders, rather than legislators so they solved the unfair aspect of the bail system but left us with an unacceptable reality in which violent criminals flood the streets, free to recommit the same crimes for which they have just been arrested. Those who created this law only looked at the immediate problem they were interested in solving, not the entire effect of the bill they were writing and passing. In fact they created a bigger problem than the one they sought to solve. Now we have to go back, kill the current law, figure out how to make a new law that will solve the problem of unfair bail without endorsing recidivism and start from scratch with a whole new bill.
We don’t need this kind of mess to happen when we approach the solutions to our problems with the police. The simple fact is that we will always need some kind of law enforcement no matter what we do. It is human nature to seek the best personal solution to all problems no matter how that resonates with those around us. A guy with starving kids is more likely to commit a crime to feed them than a guy with well-fed kids is to commit a crime to send them to Disney Land, making the guy with the chubby Disney fans a far less significant drain on police resources. I understand that this is not always true but the percentages are with me.
So, the goal; the reduction of need for police resources, comes first with the solution of the problems of the guy with hungry kids and second with the solving of crimes and that’s the way we should approach the whole problem.
We must consider ways to reduce the need for police before we consider the reduction of police presence. Once we have accomplished that we can look at ways to winnow the force and that must start with the hiring process. Sure we have to go through the people we already have and discern who has the proper mind-set to be a cop and who never should have been considered in the first place, but look at what we are doing.
We have barely begun the project and we are already looking at process. The Progressives have brought us to the factory and now we must build the law and that’s where the Moderates are needed. They will, because it’s their way of doing things, look at all aspects of the problem, even the ones that bore them or with which they disagree. That is not the way of Progressives. The Progressives are at their best when they lead the charge. “Defund the Police” is a great slogan… not a great solution.