Only In America

On Civil Rights...

"Show Your Rights!"

As an Arizonan, for reasons anyone can look up in a Wikipedia article on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I have an aversion to discussing the merits of whether or not there should be a Federal national holiday bearing his name. Nor will I make any comment related to the recent tragedy in Tucson, plenty of others will do that. The point to me has always been, if anyone deserved a day of commemoration for acts that brought about a huge permanent shift in civil rights, it is Dr. King. He is a human symbol of a historical development well worth observing. What I believe many people still don't comprehend is that not only did he fight discrimination and win desegregation and equal rights for black people in the United States, he permanently affirmed in American and international culture the idea that civil rights are for all people. He enduringly affixed the concept that civil rights are an "inalienable right" for everyone, through his leadership, by using the nonviolent and legal system methods he chose to achieve his goals.

Much can be written about how activists have taken his work into social and political science, turning what he accomplished on its head, misusing it for their grinding agendas. In the United States I am referring primarily to the use of the legislative or administrative process of government to reach the objective of affirmative action, rather than the US Constitution to demand equality through the legal system. The former involves the political and bureaucratic classes constructing artificial contrivances that always seem to end up removing barriers for some and creating them for others, that can also be re-legislated in a more harmful direction. The latter assures permanent resolution through definitive court decisions which are difficult to reverse and applies equitably to everyman.

Far better in my mind to argue your case through the US Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, to attain your rights.

US Bill of Rights

• First Amendment – Establishment Clause, Free Exercise Clause; freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly; right to petition

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

• Second Amendment – Militia (United States), Sovereign state, Right to keep and bear arms.

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. ^[5]

• Third Amendment – Protection from quartering of troops.

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

• Fourth Amendment – Protection from unreasonable search and seizure.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

• Fifth Amendment – due process, double jeopardy, self-incrimination, eminent domain.

No person shall be held to answer for any capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

• Sixth Amendment – Trial by jury and rights of the accused; Confrontation Clause, speedy trial, public trial, right to counsel

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.

• Seventh Amendment – Civil trial by jury.

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

• Eighth Amendment – Prohibition of excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment.

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

• Ninth Amendment – Protection of rights not specifically enumerated in the Constitution.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

• Tenth Amendment – Powers of States and people.

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.

Arizona Landscape

Sunrise, Sunset...

Arizona Landscape

Turning a new leaf for a new year...

Arizona Landscape

Valves...

Thinking Out Loud

Real Life is like fiction...

So why not write about it?

It is time, actually overdue, to recharge my creative batteries, set a new aspiration to challenge myself with. I do not remember a time that I was not writing something, even as a small child I scribbled in childish scrawl little stories and made notes my father proudly called his "five year olds diary." I was a very early voracious reader and to the chagrin of my siblings and later my classmates I had a vocabulary and ability to spell grades above the one I was currently in. My aunt would show me off to adult friends when I was a kindergartener and say to me "Spell Czechoslovakia!" to be followed by "Spell encyclopedia! hypothetical! observatory!" and her favorite: "Mississippi," which she had taught me as M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-in-your-I" to my mother's annoyance.

Naturally as a youngster I wrote fantastical stories where my mind wandered into far-fetched situations I imagined myself as the hero. Pure Fiction. My notes were observations of things I saw, thought about, lists of things I wanted to do, devised out of boredom when I was riding in the car with my parents or waiting for something or someone. All Non-fiction. As I grew older, around eight or nine, I started becoming more interested in history and started reading some good quality history books. Although I still read fiction, it was mostly historical and political things I was interested in reading.

As an overactive child, both in mind and physical activities, my parents had a lot to deal with in keeping me occupied. My father had the idea I start writing a history of where we lived, to keep me engaged during certain times, when my parents, sister, aunt and uncle and cousin, needed a break from me. He figured it accomplished two things, kept me quietly preoccupied and out of others hair, as well as develop my writing abilities. Due to my reading interests, the result in the long term was that by the time I was 13, my interest was focused solely on writing non-fiction.

It was a pattern set for life. Through undergraduate and post-graduate degrees and beyond I have taken classes in Journalism, Non-Fiction Writing, Technical Writing, Historical Writing, Policies and Procedures Writing and Legal Writing. I have also written and published, in their medium, in each of these categories. I'm not being modest when I state that a lot of it wasn't very good, since much of it wasn't. My first website in the late nineties was topically political, modeled after Andrew Sullivan's pioneering website blog, where I first got the idea to start blogging. It was far better in my imagination than I'm sure it was in actuality. The same could be said for my writing for a website in the early part of this past decade.

The upshot of it all is in spite of a lot of bad writing, I've learned to write non-fiction, particularly policies and procedures, history and political articles, essays and blogs fairly well. There is truth in the axiom "writers write every day" because it does hone your skills. In times when I wasn't writing anything in particular, I wrote long letters and later email to friends who mutually returned the favor with long well written replies.

In 2005 I became enamored with video and the following year YouTube. Since then I've played around with video blogging and learned some editing and have developed a moderate skill at it. I started this blog in 2007 and for over two years played around with it but have placed back in draft mode most of the work from that time period. In 2009 I decided to get more serious with it and by the end of the year pledged to myself I would work in 2010 at it every day and develop my own style with it, which I intend on continuing.

All that just written to say this: to grow more in my writing I have decided to tackle fiction and am going back to the very junior college, now a Community College, that I began my college career at decades ago. I'm taking a freshman level class, although not a beginning one, in structuring and writing fiction. I decided to take the classroom route for a variety of reasons, primarily discipline and mostly to be around other aspiring fiction writers. This particular school is known for "robbing" the universities of good professors because of the school atmosphere and pay. Therefore the instructor is not only your standard PhD but also a published author of recognizable books and an interesting character in his own right. It also opens the door for me to be less intimidated going to writer's workshops. My mission is to stimulate and stretch my imagination to keep the creative juices that sustain me flowing.

This blog will remain what it is, a work in progress of non-fiction blogging of my personal observations of real life and social commentary about it. My ultimate intention is to learn the new world of self distributing ePublishing and if I end up writing any worthwhile fiction, I will produce it in the form of e-books, as well as non-fiction work as electronic articles. To me being creative and especially writing is something I can't imagine not doing and will continue the rest of my life, just as some people do woodworking, quilting, photography, rebuilding cars, vlogging, gardening, playing music or whatever captures their verve.

Arizona Landscape

Streaming towards sunset...

Economic, Social and Geopolitical

Out of Arizona...

A berserk act with state, national and global implications.

The violent shooting eruption that occurred on Saturday, January 8, 2011, when US Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was critically wounded, six people died and over a dozen others injured by one gunman, has reverberated around Arizona, the United States and both Hemispheres. To state that most Arizonans initial reaction was shock and fear, would be an understatement. Everyone has their own mechanisms for dealing with such news but it is fair to say that many Arizonans will go through various stages of a grieving process. We have only just begun to absorb the impact of what happened that day.

Why Arizona?

It is fair to say that many of us decades long (three or more) residents and second and third generation Arizonans are asking "What has happened to our state?" The question is in the larger context and not solely related to the brutal shooting fracas in Tucson. Arizona has been considered a conservative state since the Sixties in the era of Goldwater, when conservative here meant a more libertarian "live and let live" attitude. In the Eighties we tilted more to the right as social conservatives began to become a stronger force in state and local politics as the evangelical fundamentalist movement grew nationally as well as here. It was then a lack of tolerance began creeping into our culture. It was clear by 2000 that intolerance had become a more prominent feature of our social landscape and that "live and let live" had finally died after lingering attempts at survival. Many of us began to feel uncomfortable with the prevailing social attitudes among the voting population and felt they had swept in like unwanted tumbleweeds during a wicked dust storm.

The irony is that most of us ourselves are of a conservative bent, fiscally conservative and social libertarians but not social conservatives, raised by parents in the tradition of Barry Goldwater and Sandra Day O'Connors Arizona. An Arizona that was wide open spaces with plenty of room for other people's opinions. We had become outsiders in our own state.

This is attributed by many of us to the decision of the "movers and shakers" to build an economy on unlimited growth, engineered primarily by real estate developers and mortgage companies, on the foundation of construction. The price of which we are paying for now in two ways. The first is the obvious housing bust we have experienced that lags only slightly behind California and Nevada and is among the top in the nation. It was unsustainable from the beginning. The second is a less obvious byproduct and almost never openly discussed and that is immigration from within the US...not illegal immigration from Mexico. Illegal immigration in large part is a result of the legal migration of people from other states in the US who wanted the cheap labor of the illegal migrants from south of the border.

We had an influx of Americans who did not come here to invest in the State of Arizona's way of life and to contribute and become involved in it socially, culturally, economically or politically but rather to escape to a "lifestyle" of fun and sun beyond their financial means. A perpetual California of the Mind. We had inexpensive housing with a low cost of living and the basis for that is another unspoken reason, we also have low wages. That also meant we attracted people who commonly, certainly not all of them but a large segment, didn't have higher education and with lower skill and economic denominators. People involved mainly in construction or the byproducts of the industry, joined by plenty of retirees on fixed incomes, with almost no spread of other types of employment and income. In general these were people not very interested in investing time and money into developing a high-level economy, strong cultural institutions, solid educational systems and long term sustenance. This negatively impacted our strong points and drove out our solid manufacturing, computing, defense and aerospace industries.

This phenomenon became clear to a lot of us after the 1993 recession when population, housing and other construction began growing nonsensically gangbusters; in a state with limited water and energy resources. Those of us who pointed this out were rewarded with being called elitist spoil sports who just didn't understand The American Way...never mind it was an ephemeral desert mirage of the real American Way.

Can you hear us now?

The bottom line result is we have a population largely ignorant of their own local area much less the history, culture and politics of the state. When and if they do get involved, it is at the level with the least knowledge, resulting in local and state officials elected without the electorate really knowing what they really stand or rather, don't stand for. The trend got worse in the 2004 election and progressed from there and we now have a State Legislature who operates at the basest of political animal instincts. Propositions, Referendums and Initiatives were passed by voters with short sighted concern for the damage to the long term interests of the state's economy.

We don't stand apart, only at the forefront.

My belief though is we are but a microcosm of the country, that things tend to come to the forefront here earlier than most states, due to our population being more forthright. At the very least we are honest, for better or worse, about our antipathy and mindset. Dung flinging didn't originate here but was developed as a fine art, by both of the two major political sides, outside of this state. We simply have a population that absorbs and mirrors it, our best hope is that we learn from last Saturday's events but I'm not counting on it.

What happened here could have happened anywhere in the country. Already the Limbaughs, Olbermanns, Becks, Maddows, et al have sharpened their arrows and tightened their bows and are projecting more venom into the atmosphere. This in spite of it being long past the time we lower the rhetoric, vitriol and character assassination from both sides of the spectrum to focus on legitimate differences in opinion in a more civilized manner. Although the gunman might be mentally unsound, it has to be considered that the toxic political atmosphere that has escalated these past 15 years or so, infiltrated his thinking and influenced him into action.

It occurs to me that as all of America absorbs what happened, it's possible that many of us who have become tired of the extreme bombastic rants from the television, radio and internet, will speak out against it while still supporting free speech. A key element people should remember is that the people blasting us with these negative invectives, are making huge amounts of money from it, go home at night to a comfortable home and do not suffer the consequences of what they have said. This includes not just the Mainstream Media but the Political Class whose arrogant, petty bickering and backbiting is effrontery to civility, the US Constitution and the people of America. We do ourselves a disservice if we listen, tolerate or repeat it and we should be asking not only "What has happened to our country?" but also "What can I do to stop the caustic atmosphere and help improve the climate of our discussions and debate in this country? While still preserving people's right to speak their minds, no matter how much we disagree?"

Arizona Landscape

In the desert with no name...

Geography of the Mind

Navigating a toxic culture...

We live in a time with so much information bombarding the wired and wireless world, the old and new media, online and offline life, that if we are not discriminating and filter a lot of it out we become overloaded. So much of it is like zany Morning Zoo radio that our minds drive time in the wrong direction, on roads that either lead us endlessly to nowhere or to dead ends. It is up to us to distinguish what we are exposed to, distilling the stream of data flowing in, to avoid pollution of our intellect.

This can be difficult to do but critical since more than we cognizantly recognize, our everyday lives are affected by what we see and hear, consciously or not. It has the ability to affect our judgment and perceptions more than we realize. There is a menu of junk for the brain readily available that damages our mind just as much as fast food does our body. Much like surface-radiation inversion creates a bad air quality cloud over an urban area, too much mix of poisonous information creates a low quality cloud over our critical thinking.

Some of this can be hard to turn off but an effort to do so is not as hard as it seems. There's a barrage of messages, sales pitches, broadcasts, banners, announcements, links, friend requests and spam to fend off. The first place to start is television and radio, few original ideas come out of them and they're mouthpieces for their sponsors, noise is not news. My choice is not to watch it at all. The web is both wonderfully full of information but a lot of it is disorganized and useless. Because most of our media and communications have moved onto the internet, it is not as easy as turning off the television or radio, since it also contains a lot of useful and valuable information. This requires choosing careful discrimination on what sites to go to and how much time we spend on them to avoid saturation.

Another source of information blast is not so easy to quiet and that is people. We may be exposed to cynical contrary people we can't avoid in our work, family and in public. We can choose our friends and who we associate with by choice. Avoid negative people and don't listen to constant whining and failures. Anyone who is involved in too much excess or extreme at anything, constantly complaining, never resolves their own problems, stay away from them. The chances they're going to change are highly unlikely. With inescapable people at work and family members this requires developing a mechanism to tune the discord out, a difficult but not insurmountable task. There are ways to mute their dissonance both by your approach and response to them but it requires some trial and error effort.

The more distilling down of the babble of information streaming at us from multiple channels we do, we discover that day to day life becomes more harmonious and less disquieting. Cleaning out the clutter of the clatter and chattering blows the bad air out and improves our field of vision. The knowledge we intake is of better quality and allows us to breathe clearer air and think with more clarity and calms the mind and soul.

Arizona Landscape

Tapatio Cliffs...

View of pollution cloud overhanging desert floor of The Valley

photo by Gregory A Z Nelson