Kids Against Guns

Once again thousands of Americans poured into the streets to express a clear political position. This time it was high school students horrified at the mass murders of other students and at the unwillingness of politicians to do anything about it.

Students lay down in front of the White House last Monday. Survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida rallied at the state Capitol and urged legislators to change gun laws. Thousands of students across the country walked out of school last Wednesday to protest gun violence.

A nationwide school walkout is planned for March 14, lasting 17 minutes for the 17 Florida victims. Then come a march in Washington, called March For Our Lives, on March 24, and a National High School Walkout on April 20, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting.

We never know what incident will provoke a mass social movement. Wikipedia conveniently lists all school shootings with 3 or more deaths over the past two centuries. There were 3 in the 19^th century, one in the first half of the 20^th century, 6 more before 1990. Then there were 9 in the 1990s, 5 in the 2000s, and 11 since 2010, more than one a year. Before Columbine in 1999, only one incident involved more than 7 deaths; since then, six with 10 or more deaths. In the past year, three school shootings have left 26 dead. If we widen our gaze to all shootings at schools, then there was one every other day in January, mostly without deaths.

After Columbine and Sandy Hook there were protests about how easy it is for those who plan mass murders to get powerful weapons, but they didn’t last long enough to force politicians to listen. Will this time be different?

Days after the Florida massacre, Republican state legislators there voted not to consider a bill to ban large-capacity magazines and assault weapons. Instead, as school shootings increase, the Republican response has been “More guns!” Republican state lawmakers recently decided to bring guns onto college campuses in Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, Kansas, Wisconsin and other states. Two Republican candidates for Congress, Tyler Tannehill in Kansas and Austin Petersen in Missouri, are giving away an AR-15 as part of their campaigns. Donald Trump’s call to arm teachers and spend millions training them fits neatly into the Republican policy of arming everybody.

It’s useful to stand back and think about whether this idea has even been proposed for other similar situations. Dylann Roof murdered 9 people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, on June 17, 2015, with a Glock .45-caliber handgun. On November 5, 2017, Devin Patrick Kelley killed 26 people at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, with an AR-15 pattern Ruger AR-556 semi-automatic rifle. These mass killings are the most horrific of a growing wave of church shootings.

Dallas Drake and his team of researchers at the Center for Homicide Research in Minneapolis counted 136 church shootings between 1980 and 2005, about 5 per year, but 147 from 2006 to 2016, over 13 per year. Should we arm priests and rabbis and ministers?

Right now, the political engagement of young Americans for gun control is very high. Can the kids accomplish politically what generations of adults have not be able to do – prevent further school massacres?

The political protest of youngsters can move national politics in particular circumstances. In May 1963, schoolchildren marched in Brimingham, Alabama, to protest segregation and discrimination. That Children’s Crusade had political effect mainly because of the violent response of Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor and his policemen, and the bombing a few months later of the 16th St. Baptist Church, killing four little girls. Politicians learned that attacking children with fire hoses and batons is stupid. Now they politely listen and then ignore the youngsters’ message.

The Australian response to a massacre in 1996 is sometimes brought up as a model for the US. The government not only banned further sales of semiautomatic weapons, but confiscated 650,000 guns. Since then there have been no mass killings. But an Australian gun owner and supporter of restrictions argues persuasively that Australians, with their very different history, don’t like guns and offered no opposition to this revocation of their right to own weapons of mass killing. Too many Americans love guns for this to work here. Our culture accepts, even glorifies gun violence.

But it is not necessary to transform our culture to deal with guns in America. Most of the kids may not be able to vote yet, but persistent political action could shift the small number of votes needed to defeat the small number of state and federal legislators who stand in the way of majority votes for banning assault rifles and large capacity magazines, for tightening rules about who can own guns.

We’ll see if students can keep up the pressure all the way to the elections in November. That would require behavior uncommon among teenagers – long-term political engagement. It may save their lives.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, February 27, 2018

President Trump Versus Trump Voters

Donald Trump became President because millions of Americans believed him when he promised to protect their financial health. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid keep the budgets of most Americans, especially the elderly, above water. Trump promised over and over again not to cut them.

He did this loud and clear, as a way of differentiating himself from other Republicans. Even before he officially announced his candidacy, he told the conservative “Daily Signal” in May 2015: “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid. Every other Republican is going to cut, and even if they wouldn’t, they don’t know what to do because they don’t know where the money is. I do.” His announcement that he was a candidate the next month included “Save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security without cuts. Have to do it.” In July 2015, he said, “The Republicans who want to cut SS & Medicaid are wrong.” In October 2015, he said, “I am going to save Medicare and Medicaid.” In February 2016, he said, “We're gonna save your Social Security without making any cuts. Mark my words.”

Trump’s promise not to cut Social Security included explicit statements that he would not raise the retirement age, as he said in the Republican debate in March 2016. “And it’s my absolute intention to leave Social Security the way it is. Not increase the age and to leave it as is.”

In fact, that was never his intention. In his book “The America We Deserve” in 2000, Trump compared Social Security to a Ponzi scheme and suggested that the retirement age be raised to 70. In a private conversation with Paul Ryan after he won the nomination, Trump responded to Ryan’s plans to cut Social Security: “From a moral standpoint, I believe in it. But you also have to get elected. And there’s no way a Republican is going to beat a Democrat when the Republican is saying, ‘We’re going to cut your Social Security’ and the Democrat is saying, ‘We’re going to keep it and give you more.’”

And that’s what happened. Trump convinced voters he would protect government programs which insured that average Americans would be able to get health care and retire with some financial dignity. Once he was President, he returned to his “moral standpoint”, the exact opposite of what he had promised.

As soon as he was elected, he appointed former Dallas mayor Tom Leppert as his Social Security advisor. Leppert is in favor of privatizing Social Security and Medicare. Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney also favors privatization.

In May 2017, Trump’s budget plan for 2018 proposed drastic cuts in Medicaid. In June, he supported the Republican Senate health care bill, which made big cuts to Medicaid.

Now the White House has released a new Trump budget, which makes huge cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Under the heading “Reform disability programs”, Trump proposes cuts in Social Security programs which support poor and disabled Americans, totaling $9 billion over the next four years and $72 billion over the next ten years. On the issue of how people will be affected, nobody could be clearer than budget director Mulvaney. When asked in the White House press room, “Will any of those individuals who receive SSDI receive less from this budget?” Mulvaney replied, “I hope so.”

Funding for Medicare will be cut by $266 billion, mainly for patients who still need care after being discharged from hospitals. Medicaid will be cut by $1.1 trillion over ten years, by putting a cap on how much will be spent on individual patients.

Other cuts in Trump’s budget: Meals on Wheels, home heating assistance, and teacher training. He wants to eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities.

Every poll shows that most Americans are opposed to cutting Medicaid, Social Security, and the other welfare programs that Trump wants to cut or eliminate. So why is Trump ditching his promises not to cut these programs?

A poll of voters before the 2016 election showed that Republicans, even more than Democrats, said they wanted a leader with honesty, and that was most true for voters with incomes under $50,000 a year. After the election, over 90% of Republican voters believed that Trump was “a strong and decisive leader” who “keeps his promises”.

It is hard to imagine a leader who is less honest than Trump. He has broken his promises about issues which hit Americans right in the wallet and pocketbook. It does take a “strong and decisive” person to repeatedly promise Americans that he will protect their interests in order to get elected, when he had no intention of doing so.

Will Trump’s so-called “base” ever wake up? Does he have to shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue before his supporters recognize who he is? Or was he right that even that won’t hurt him?

Steve Hochstadt                                                                                

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, February 20, 2018

A Divided America is a Weak America

I always root for Americans at the Olympics. I’ve never heard of most of the American athletes at these Winter Games, but I want them to beat other athletes I’ve never heard of, who happen to come from other countries. The German TV commentators we are watching root for German athletes. The Berlin paper writes about every German athlete who does well. It’s a crude but harmless form of nationalism that infects people across the world.

The modern Olympics were conceived as a way to reduce nationalism, to promote peace through sport. They haven’t worked out that way, but nevertheless every two years the opening Olympic ceremonies hopefully proclaim the ideal of world unity.

The opening ceremonies at PyeongChang in South Korea last Friday were marked by spectacular special effects under the title “Peace in Motion”. Peace is particularly important in Korea, whose Cold War division constantly threatens to explode into war. The South Koreans decided to make peace the symbol of these Winter Games, with dramatic images of white doves everywhere. Lee Hee-beom, president of the PyeongChang Organizing Committee, said, “We hope that the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018 will spread that message of peace around the world in the coming weeks.”

The decision by the two Korean governments to field one slate of athletes was an unexpected effort at unity through sport, the most hopeful sign in decades of a possible reduction in hostilities. Athletes from North and South Korea carried a specially designed “unification flag”, displaying the entire Korean peninsula as one unit. Four Korean singers covered John Lennon’s ode to peace and unity, “Imagine”.

Olympic symbolism can only temporarily obscure reality. A half century of Korean division and the wild threats to world peace made by the North Korean dictator will not disappear because North and South Korean women play some ice hockey games as one team. South Korea’s President reacted hesitantly to the invitation extended by North Korea to visit the North for talks after the Games. In a poll last week in South Korea, only a minority approved of using the unification flag.

Outside of the Olympic venues, the world is bitterly divided. The Cold War between the communist East and the democratic West is only a memory, but a new cold war is developing within Western democracies between a resurgent populist right and the democratic center. Democratic norms long thought to be beyond criticism are being repudiated by extreme conservatives with increasing popular support. Right-wing parties with fascist overtones are challenging democratic structures across Europe.

While Americans might come together for two weeks to root for our athletes in PyeongChang, after the Olympics are over, we will return to an angry partisan political confrontation at home. Negative feelings about the other political party have been growing in the US for a long time. The proportion of both Democrats and Republicans who feel “very negatively” about the other party has tripled since 1994. A majority of voters from both parties believe the policies of the other party are a threat to the nation. Most Americans recognize these tensions. Two-thirds of both Republicans and Democrats say the conflicts between partisans are “very strong”, a significant increase over the past 5 years.

It would be wrong to characterize our division as right versus left: triumphant conservatives in the wake of Trump’s victory are attacking the American middle. Led by Trump himself and cheered on by what used to be a weak and mostly despised right-wing fringe of KKK fans, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists, conservatives are assailing our fundamental democratic institutions: a free press, law enforcement, higher education. A Fox News poll last August showed that two-thirds of Republican voters believe the news media are a bigger threat to the US than white supremacists. Most Republicans believe that American universities have a negative effect on our country.

Trump’s constant vilification of our nation’s basic structures and his demonization of anyone who does not support him contribute to the growing partisan divide, but are not its major cause. American conservatives have been drifting into opposition to the society we live in for years. Trump’s labeling Democrats as “un-American” and “treasonous” for their opposition to his policies merely echoes the name-calling of prominent conservatives like Ann Coulter and Alex Jones, and publications like the National Review and Breitbart News. Those ideas used to be on the wacky fringe of American politics, along with Nazi worship and white nationalism. Trump has brought them into the White House, and he uses his speeches and Twitter account to push this polarization ever further.

Across the country, extreme rightists have become louder, more visible, and more demanding. A report from West Point showed how violent attacks by the far right have increased since 2000.

America has become a battleground. Our political leadership deliberately stokes the fires of partisanship and hatred of all those “others”. Building walls is more important than building roads.

Olympic nationalism will temporarily cover up the war among Americans. We can not hope to be a great nation if we are so divided against ourselves.

Steve Hochstadt

Berlin, Germany

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, February 13, 2018