It has been over five years since seventeen students and faculty were gunned down by a killer at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in nearby Parkland. Since then, our struggle against such gun violence has not been particularly successful as the carnage goes on, and on.
Many of us participated in demonstrations at that time, and some still have the tee shirts we wore then. I do. Mine reads ‘Grandparents Against Assault Weapons.’ Others have similar slogans.
Recently, I have resurrected it and wear it in situations where it can be seen by many, such as visits to supermarkets and shopping malls, where it receives visual recognition and an occasional thumbs up.
If you still have a similar shirt
around, start making use of it again to rally the public’s support of measures
to curtail gun violence. Wear it! The problem
continues.
JL
* * *
The Truth About Governor DeSantis
Here’s a column from a Guest Columnist which appeared in last Sunday’s
Palm Beach Post. (It is copyrighted but
go ahead and sue me. I make no profit
from this blog and perhaps that newspaper might pick up a few subscribers because
of its inclusion here.) The author, W.
E. Gutman, is a noted retired author and journalist, and obviously no friend of
Florida’s governor. Please read it.
'Governor’s
Mis-telling of History Misses the Mark'
W.E. Gutman
- From Palm Beach Post (4/23/2023)
'People
always talk about the public interest, but all they really care about is
themselves and private property.'
—
Utopia, Thomas More (1478-1535)
Suddenly,
everybody is invoking the Constitution, some to awaken America’s flaccid
conscience by sanctifying its ideals, others by alleging that they have the
right to reject them. For many, a compact’s legitimacy must include the
privilege to ignore it.
The
view, recently revived, that the socioeconomic and political character of what
would become the United States of America was forged in August 1619, when the
first slave ship landed at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, and
not on July 4, 1776, when the colonists declared independence from Britain, is
a truth that many in this country find hard to swallow.
But
slavery is what fueled America’s economy for 250 years and this monstrosity
indeed began in August 1619 when 30 to 40 African men and women in shackles,
weakened by disease and a long sea voyage, were sold and consigned to a life of
unending toil, abuse, humiliation and premature death.
Out
of the barbaric system of chattel slavery grew nearly everything that has made
America exceptional — and aberrant: its economic might, income disparity,
asymmetrical and prejudicial legal and electoral system, the inequities of its
public health and education protocols, an astonishing penchant for violence and
the annoying pretense that it is a land of freedom and equality while endemic
racial fears and hatreds continue to plague it.
Predictably,
serving red meat as bait to his political base, Gov. Ron DeSantis, America’s
would-be Grand Inquisitor, wants to ban federal agencies from conducting
race-sensitivity training related to 'white privilege' and critical race theory
(CRT), which he dismisses as 'divisive, anti-patriotic propaganda.'
This
revisionist ploy follows a pattern by the governor of denigrating attempts to
process or reckon with the country’s fraught racial history.
Moreover,
the argument that CRT would imbue white students with a sense of guilt is as
spurious as it is outlandish. Most white students are too busy taking selfies
and engaging in moronic babble on social media to experience remorse for
atrocities that they know nothing about because history textbooks continue to
conceal or rework the truth.
According
to its detractors, CRT is 'an academic framework that centers on the idea that
racism is systemic in America.' Racism
in America is not only systemic, it is entrenched and persists to this day to
help maintain the dominance of white people.
It
is an enduring feature of American life. Long overdue, CRT is not an 'academic
concept.' It’s history revisited and restored.
Despite
his prestigious degrees, DeSantis is not a Malthusian theoretician. He is not
an intellectual. He is not a scholar. Groomed, later scorned by a scoundrel
like Donald Trump, and clawing his way to the presidency, he is a sullen,
charmless, callous pragmatist devoid of moral principles.
He
is insensitive to human suffering. His aim is to galvanize largely uninformed
white supremacists by spreading lies about the pandemic, masks, vaccination,
transgenderism and the 'left’s' plot to seize the precious guns which they keep
lovingly oiled, loaded and cocked.
He
angrily rejects the notion that the Earth’s ecosystem is on the verge of
collapse or that human activity is in any way responsible for the violent
atmospheric anomalies ravaging the planet. All he cares about is his career. He is such a power-hungry villain that he
threatened to withhold state funds from any school that encourages
mask-wearing.
He
is itching to create a Vatican-style Index of Prohibited Books (abolished in
1966 by Pope Paul VI) to protect schoolchildren from 'heretical' or
'libidinous' works.
DeSantis’
sinister genius is to have understood that democracy is an imperfect and
ultimately self-destructive system because it tolerates, nay, invites in its
very bosom, the existence and proliferation of undemocratic ideas that enable
wannabe inquisitors to find and burn heretics at the stake.
By
retreating into our self-woven ideological cocoons and the comforting darkness
of ignorance, we will not prevent the future from spawning other tyrants —
Attila, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Victor Orbán,
Jair Bolsonaro, Kim Jung Un, not to mention yet another Trump, Texas Gov. Greg
Abbott and DeSantis.
The
greatest obstacle to wisdom is not a lack of knowledge but the illusion that we
know everything.
W.E. Gutman is a retired Franco-American
journalist and published author. He lives in South Florida.
JL
* * *
About Newspapers
It is important to know what is going on, and no other media matches newspapers, in my opinion, in filling that role.
The firing of Fox's Numero Uno Liar points up the unreliability of TV news. But even honest reporters working through electronic media are often so devoted to particular causes, and subject to time limitations, that they leave much local territory untouched, news that is important to you. And as for dependence on the internet and social media for news, forget about it.
Read newspapers.
I read the Palm Beach Post daily in its paper version, although the inexpensive online edition is exactly the same. If you live in South Florida, I recommend that you subscribe to the Post (or the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, if you prefer it). I’ve tried both.
But you should be reading newspapers! Local ones where possible. The New York Times and the Washington Post are commendable, but they don't report on local matters that can be of great importance to you.
Because all newspapers are struggling to survive these
days, the Post long ago gave up its independence and is now owned by
Gannett, the publishers of USA Today, and now has a somewhat broader
Floridian and national flavor than just Palm Beach County and the Treasure
Coast, its traditional haunts. But its
local coverage is still quite adequate.
Probably because Gannett sets the rules, an ‘opinion/letters/editorial’
page is absent from the Post on Mondays and Tuesdays, but it resumes for
the rest of the week, and culminates with four such pages on Sunday, more than
making up for what is missing on Monday and Tuesdays. The column posted above is from such a Sunday
edition.
JL
* * *
The Tenth Amendment Warrants Study
Along with repeal of the Second Amendment, about
which I have written in two recent postings, consideration should be given to
repeal of the Tenth Amendment as well.
That Amendment goes to the heart of how ‘united’ the ‘United’ States really are or should be. It might end up being the last resort of the ‘originalists’ who believe in the precise wording of the Constitution and its Amendments, ignoring modern interpretations of what the writers put down on paper in 1789.
Other Amendments touch upon specific rights such as speech and religion (the First), or possessing weapons (the Second), or specific legal protections, but the
Tenth is a catch-all that might someday be the greatest threat to democracy,
if interpreted in a totally literal manner.
 |
| Hamilton |
The Tenth Amendment reads ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.' That is quite a mouthful. It brings to mind a 'jump ball' in basketball between a seven-foot center and a six-foot center, definitely favoring the States.
The one saving grace of its language is the part about some
‘powers’ being prohibited (by the Constitution) to the States and specifically given to the Federal government. (example: Vermont cannot declare war on Canada because only Congress has been given the power to declare war.)
But other ‘powers,’ if not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution, like declaring war, remain ‘reserved’ to the States, or to the people, according to the Amendment.
That’s a lot of ‘powers’ given to States (examples: gun laws, public schools, abortion, and until
1865, slavery) unless one takes the word ‘people’ to mean something other than the people of the respective separate States.’
Does it mean the ‘people of a
respective State’ or the ‘people of the entire nation’? Ultimately, this will require a Supreme Court determination. And as presently constituted, I do not trust
the Supreme Court.
JL
* * *
About the Debt Ceiling
Here's a quote from Hillary Clinton's op/ed column in yesterday's New York Times: "Today the competition between democracies and autocracies has grown more intense. And by undermining America’s credibility and the pre-eminence of the dollar, the fight over the debt ceiling plays right into the hands of Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia."
Republicans should take note of this.
JL
* * *
Coming up in May! The Return of the Original ‘Chrissy Frost’
Stories
All eight of them, originally included on this
blog back in 2017, recount the story of a Florida entertainer and will be published again on the blog . Together they form what might be a novella,
entitled ‘Time After Time – The Crissy Frost Story.’
JL
* * *
Housekeeping on the Blog
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time
there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and
we’ll see that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might
suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. (You can pass those email addresses to me by email
at jacklippman18@gmail.com . )
Forwarding
Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you
think might benefit from reading it.
If you
want to send someone the blog, exactly as you
are now seeing it, with all of its bells and whistles, you can
just tell folks to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or by providing a link to that address in your email to
them. I think this is the best method of forwarding Jackspotpourri.
There’s
another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though! Google
Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that
possible. If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of
every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email
addresses to which the blog will be forwarded, along with a comment from you. Each will receive a
link to the textual portion only of the blog that you now are
reading, but without the illustrations, colors, variations in typography, or
the ‘sidebar’ features such as access to the blog’s archives.
Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting, but I recommend sending them the link.
Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Have a nice day!
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