Tag Archives: “take a knee”

Idiocy In Indiana

Sorry for cluttering up your inboxes, but blame the headline and story in the Indianapolis Star. 

Clearly, It isn’t only Washington that is suffering from a surfeit of buffoons.

I ‘m old enough to remember when Harrison Ullmann, then editor of Indianapolis’ alternative newspaper Nuvo, routinely called the Indiana General Assembly “the World’s Worst Legislature.”

And that was before Milo Smith was elected to embarrass Bartholomew County.

Smith, as you may recall, was the legislator who refused to allow the House Elections Committee to even hold a vote on a redistricting bill, killing last session’s effort to reform gerrymandering–and not so incidentally, protecting his own safe seat.

Smith has also been in the forefront of efforts to pass anti-LGBTQ legislation–despite the fact that his own son is gay. There is something truly despicable about a parent actively trying to make his own child a second-class citizen.

Smith’s disdain for bedrock American values like civic equality and liberty have once again come to the fore: he has announced his intent to file a bill that would force the owners of the Indianapolis Colts to refund the admission fee of fans “offended” by players “taking a knee.”

What was it that Forrest Gump always said? “Stupid is as stupid does”?

One of my former students texted me to ask whether this idiotic proposal wouldn’t also be unconstitutional–after all, government would be forcing the team’s owner to infringe players’ rights or lose money. The answer is yes. (My students are required to encounter the Constitution; clearly, Indiana elected officials are not.)

It’s bad enough that this proposal spits on the First Amendment’s protection of every American’s right to protest–to express a political opinion without incurring government’s sanction. Even worse, Smith wants government to penalize the private-sector team owners if they fail to carry his unconstitutional water.

Perhaps he’d like to fine other businesses when their employees took public positions with which others disagreed?

Next November, I’m fervently hoping for a “wave”– voter turnout massive enough to wash away the ignorant and self-important occupants of seats gerrymandered to be “safe.” Milo Smith and his ilk need to be removed from the Indiana Statehouse, and despite the best efforts of those engaged in partisan redistricting, high turnout will turn them out.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have Representatives with at least a nodding acquaintance with the U.S. Constitution and with our most foundational American values?

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Talking About What We Understand

One of the bloggers I follow is Doug Masson, a thoughtful and impressively erudite observer of the circus that is current American politics. I was especially struck by his recent post on the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, and mainland American preoccupations.

Puerto Rico is suffering. Like a lot. 3.4 million Americans have been without power for 5 days and the prospect of getting the electric grid up and running seems to be distant. 90% of the distribution system may have been destroyed. 91% of cellphone sites are also out of service, according to the FCC.

Despite this crisis, I’ve been hearing more about whether football players will stand or kneel during a game. Judging from the emotional energy spent online during the past couple of days, the manner in which sports professionals choose to observe the national anthem and conduct their protest is more alarming than the prospect of 3.4 million Americans facing a humanitarian crisis. Hell, I’m guilty of knowing and talking more about Kaepernick than what’s going on in San Juan which is, by the way, the only Puerto Rican city I can name without looking at a map.

Masson is certainly not alone in pointing out the difference in what I might call the “emotional investment” in these two issues. He is, however, the only one to point out a disquieting reason for that difference: something he identifies as the “bike shedding effect.” That is a term I had not previously encountered (and I’m not entirely clear on its derivation even after reading his post). Masson shares an illustration:

He provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.

This example really hit home, because it was reminiscent of an experience my husband shared with me some twenty years ago. He was the architect for a new school building, and he was presenting the preliminary plans at a school board meeting. He anticipated a number of significant questions about the design–everything from room sizes to emergency exits to features affecting pedagogy–but the only discussion the board engaged in centered on the size of the elevator for handicapped individuals, and whether it should be large enough to accommodate one wheel chair or two.

The Board spent over an hour on that issue. No other was raised.

My husband was dumbfounded. On his way out of the meeting, he ran into a friend and shared his befuddlement; the friend–who was pretty savvy–just smiled and said, “You know, people talk about what they can understand.”

As Masson goes on to explain in his post, it’s relatively simple to form an opinion about what respect for the flag entails (and whether and how people of color should complain when the country doesn’t live up to its ideals). Whether those attitudes are knee-jerk or considered, they’re relatively straightforward.

Puerto Rico is another matter. Significant numbers of mainland Americans aren’t even aware that Puerto Ricans are American citizens (I have my doubts whether Trump knew that before the hurricane–after all, they’re brown people). Relatively few of us have traveled there, have relatives there, know much about it, or know what FEMA is or should be doing in the face of massive devastation.

So we talk about what we (think we) understand. That’s rather obviously what Trump is doing with his diatribes against the NFL.

The problem is, as America’s problems mount, it becomes very clear that there are so many pressing, important issues that most of us don’t understand. (Guess what! Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing…) But rather than informing ourselves about them–we focus on  recent TV shows, or an outrageous celebrity, or “those people” who disagree with us.

And then we wonder why democracy doesn’t work.

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