Raoul Peck's "I Am Not Your Negro" is one of the finest documentaries I have ever seen-I would have stayed in the theater in New York to see the film again if the next showing had not been sold out. The newly released film powerfully illustrates, through James Baldwin's prophetic work, that the insanity now gripping the United States is an inevitable consequence of white Americans' steadfast failure to confront where they came from, who they are and the lies and myths they use to mask past and present crimes. Baldwin's only equal as a 20th century essayist is George Orwell. If you have not read Baldwin you probably do not fully understand America. Especially now.

History "is not the past," the film quotes Baldwin as saying. "History is the present. We carry our history with us. To think otherwise is criminal."

The script is taken from Baldwin's notes, essays, interviews and letters, with some of the words delivered in Baldwin's voice from audio recordings and televised footage, some of them in readings by actor Samuel L. Jackson. But it is not, finally, the poetry and lyricism of Baldwin that make the film so moving. It is Peck's understanding of the core of Baldwin's message to the white race, a message that is vital to grasp as we struggle with an overt racist as president, mass incarceration, poverty gripping half the country and militarized police murdering unarmed black men and women in the streets of our cities.

Whiteness is a dangerous concept. It is not about skin color. It is not even about race. It is about the willful blindness used to justify white supremacy. It is about using moral rhetoric to defend exploitation, racism, mass murder, reigns of terror and the crimes of empire.

"The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure," Baldwin wrote. "Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents-or, anyway, mothers-know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing."

America was founded on the genocidal slaughter of indigenous people and the holocaust of slavery. It was also founded on an imagined moral superiority and purity. The fact that dominance of others came, and still comes, from unrestrained acts of violence is washed out of the national narrative. The steadfast failure to face the truth, Baldwin warned, perpetuates a kind of collective psychosis. Unable to face the truth, white Americans stunt and destroy their capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism. They construct a world of dangerous, self-serving fantasy. Those who imbibe the myth of whiteness externalize evil-their own evil-onto their victims. Racism, Baldwin understood, is driven by moral bankruptcy, narcissism, an inner loneliness and latent guilt. Donald Trump and most of those around him exhibit all of these characteristics.

"If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have needed to invent and could never have become so dependent on what they still call 'the Negro problem,' " Baldwin wrote. "This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them; and this not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role a guilty and constricted white imagination has assigned to the blacks."

"People pay for what they do, and, still more for what they allowed themselves to become," Baldwin went on. "And they pay for it very simply by the lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today."

Footage in the Peck documentary of past murder cases including the 1955 lynching of the 14-year-old Emmett Till is interspersed with the modern-day lynching of young black men such as Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. Images of white supremacist parades from the 1960s, with young men carrying signs proclaiming "Keep America White," shift directly to footage of Ferguson, Mo. This juxtaposition is almost too much to bear. If it does not shake you to the core you have no heart and no understanding of who we are in America.

The film begins with Baldwin's 1957 return from France, where he had been living for almost a decade. He comes back to join the nascent civil rights movement. He was deeply disturbed by a photograph of Dorothy Counts, 15, surrounded by a mob of whites spitting and screaming racial slurs as she walked into a newly desegregated high school in Charlotte, N.C.

"I could simply no longer sit around Paris discussing the Algerian and the black American problem," he said. "Everybody was paying their dues, and it was time I went home and paid mine."

In short, he returned to the United States so that black children like Dorothy Counts would not have to walk alone through a sea of racial hatred.

He spoke and participated in hundreds of events for the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, however, largely held him at arm's length. Baldwin was too independent and outspoken about the truth. His words made King's Northern white liberal supporters uncomfortable. Baldwin was supposed to speak at the 1963 March on Washington, but King and the other leaders of the march replaced him with the actor Burt Lancaster. Baldwin steadfastly refused to be anyone's "negro."

Baldwin was, like Orwell, an astute critic of modern culture and how it justifies the crimes of racism and imperialism. In his book "The Devil Finds Work" he pits Hollywood's vision of race against the reality. The Peck documentary shows clips from films Baldwin critiqued in the book including "The Birth of a Nation" (a 1915 movie Baldwin called "an elaborate justification of mass murder"), "Dance, Fools, Dance" (1931), "The Monster Walks" (1932), "King Kong" (1933), "Imitation of Life" (1934), "They Won't Forget" (1937), "Stagecoach" (1939), "The Defiant Ones" (1958), "Lover Come Back" (1961), "A Raisin in the Sun" (1961) and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967). In film after film Baldwin pointed to the ingrained racial stereotypes of African-Americans in popular culture that sustain the lie of whiteness.

Blacks were, and often still are, portrayed by mass culture as lazy and childlike, therefore needing white parental supervision and domination, or as menacing and violent sexual predators who needed to be eliminated. These Hollywood stereotypes, Baldwin knew, existed as foils for an imagined white purity, decency and innocence. They buttressed the myth of a nation devoted to the ideals of justice, liberty and democracy. The oppressed, because of their supposed character defects, were the architects of their own oppression. Oppression was for their own good. Racism was a form of benevolence. Baldwin warned that not facing these lies would see America consume itself.

In "The Devil Finds Work" Baldwin also wrote about the film "A Tale of Two Cities" (1935). He had read the novel by Charles Dickens "obsessively" as a boy to understand "the question of what it meant to be a nigger." This novel and other novels he consumed, such as "Crime and Punishment," spoke of the oppressed. He knew that the oppression of the characters in these stories had "something to do with my own." The books "had something to tell me." He wrote:

I was haunted, for example, by Alexandre Manette's document, in A Tale of Two Cities, describing the murder of a peasant boy-who, dying, speaks: "I say, we were so robbed, and hunted, and were made so poor, that our father told us it was a dreadful thing to bring a child into this world, and that what we should most pray for was that our women might be barren and our miserable race die out!" ("I had never before," observes Dr. Manette, "seen the sense of being oppressed, bursting forth like a fire.")

Dickens has not seen it all. The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the population-control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dispossessed and starving laboring in the fields which others own with their transistor radios at their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the Pope, one of the heads of the civilized world, forbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, forced on them, the wretched. The civilized have created the wretched quite coldly, and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death; these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world. There is a "sanctity" involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child's arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the "vital interest" of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child.

"The truth is this country does not know what to do with its black population," he said. "Americans can't face the fact that I am flesh of their flesh."

White supremacy is not defined, he wrote, by intelligence or virtue. The white race continues to dominate other races because it has always controlled the most efficient killing mechanisms on the planet. It used, and uses, its industrial weapons to carry out mass murder, genocide, subjugation and exploitation, whether on slave plantations, on the Trail of Tears, at Wounded Knee, in the Philippines and Vietnam, in cities such as Baltimore and Ferguson or in our endless wars across the Middle East.

The true credo of the white race is we have everything, and if you try to take any of it from us we will kill you. This is the essential meaning of whiteness. As the white race turns on itself in an age of diminishing resources it is in the vital interest of the white underclass to understand what its elites and its empire are actually about. These lies, Baldwin warned, will ultimately have fatal consequences for America.

In not so merry old medieval England, wrongful injuries between people either were suffered in silence or provoked revenge. Cooler heads began to prevail and courts of law were opened so such disputes over compensation and other remedies could be adjudicated under trial by jury.

Taken across the Atlantic to the colonies, this system -called tort law or the law of wrongful injuries -evolved steadily to open the courtroom door until the nineteen seventies. It was then that the insurance industry and other corporate lobbies began pushing one restriction after another through state legislatures-not restrictions on corporations' rights to sue, but restrictions on the rights of ordinary people to have their day in court.

Lawmakers, whose campaign coffers were stuffed by corporate lobbyists, were not concerned about advancing their passing rules that arbitrarily tied the hands of judges and jurors-the same judges and jurors who were the only people to see, hear and evaluate individual cases in their courtrooms. Legislation imposing caps on damages -as with California's $250,000 lifetime cap on pain and suffering -was especially cruel for those victims of medical malpractice who were young, unemployed or elderly and thus do not have significant enough wage losses to receive sufficient damages.

In recent decades, the nonsense about our society being too litigious (except for business vs business lawsuits) has become even more extreme. Not only do we file far fewer civil lawsuits per capita than in the 1840s, according to studies by University of Wisconsin law professors, but jury trials have been declining in both federal and state courts, with trials down by 60% since the mid-1980s.

My father used say that "if people do not use their rights, they will over time lose their rights. This truism brings us to a new book by University of Connecticut Law Professor Alexander Lahav, with the title In Praise of Litigation (Oxford University Press). The title invokes the necessity of legal recourse in a society whose ordinary people are being squeezed out of their day in court, being denied justice, and are becoming cynical enough to want to get out of jury duty-a right for which our forebears demanded from King George III.

Professor Lahav makes the point we should have learned in high school, or at least college. The right to litigate is critical to any democratic society. Imagine living in a country where no one can sue powerful wrongdoers or the government. We have names for countries like that. They're called dictatorships or tyrannies.

Here is author Lahav's summary: "Litigation is a civilized response to the difficult disagreements that often crop up in a pluralist society. The process of litigation does more than resolve disputes: it contributes to democratic deliberation. This is the key to understanding what this process is supposed to be about and what should be done to improve it. By appreciating the democratic values people protect and promote when they sue -enforcement of the law, transparency, participation and social equality -reformers can work toward a court system that is truly democracy promoting."

It would be more reassuring if more judges reflected those words. Were that the case, they would be fighting harder to expand the shrinking court budgets (about two percent of state budgets) that are increasingly causing civil trials to be deferred or courtrooms to be temporarily closed. Tighter budgets lead judges to excessively pressure lawyers to settle or go to arbitration. The latter is a malicious inequity between consumers, workers and other people unequal in power vis-a-vis big corporations like Wells Fargo, Exxon/Mobil, Pfizer and Aetna, who force consumers to sign fine print contracts that limit people's rights to use the courts.

The usual sally against praising civil litigation is the claim of too many frivolous suits. Whenever Richard Newman, the Executive Director of the American Museum of Tort Law, hears that asserted, he asks for examples. They are not forthcoming. For good reason. Litigation is expensive; lawyers have to guard their reputations and judges, who largely lean to the conservative side, are in charge of their courtrooms. They are quite ready to approve motions to dismiss a case or summary judgments.

We have to take a greater interest in our courts. They are open to the public for a reason. Students need to visit them and understand what the burdens are on courts, and how our civil justice system can be improved. When I ask assemblies of students if they have ever visited a court as a spectator, hardly one in ten raise a hand.

Courts should not be places of case overloads and long delays. They should be welcoming temples of justice where judge and jurors engage in reasoned deliberation for the advancement of justice as part of a functioning democracy. The demands for justice are such in our country that courts should have more judges, more juries and more trials.

I'm still here in Las Vegas, covered in neon and surrounded by false hopes. But still and all, riding up and down The Strip in the front seat of the Deuce bus at night is magical, almost like Christmas; there are that many colored lights.

But the towering Trump building here, rather like Trump's foreign policy, is pretty much in darkness at this point. Why is that? Some say that it is because he forgot to apply for a casino license. I should wander over there tomorrow and find out.

Many of the things that President Trump is doing right now are also foolhardy, forgetful and half-baked. Many of the things that he is doing right now are also divisive, dangerous and even downright un-Christian and mean. However, he is doing one important thing right -- he is going after the CIA.

You remember the CIA, don't you? The folks who gave us the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam debacle, the tortured nightmares of African and Latin American dictatorships one after another and that tragic mess in the Middle East.

I wouldn't put it past the CIA to have had a hand in creating 9-11 either but still can't prove it -- at this point.

So. Trump stands up to the CIA. Gotta give him snaps for that. But going against the CIA is now (and always has been) a big fat no-no inside the Beltway, and so Trump will have to pay for his mistake -- hopefully not with his life. Hopefully his sudden retirement will not involve plutonium or shoes made out of cement.

And then suddenly Trump will be gone. Just like that. And then the American media will be all cheering at the top of its lungs -- gambling on the mistaken idea that what comes after Trump will be better than him. That the CIA and the Deep State will suddenly start being kind to both us peons and to American democracy once Trump is gone.

But, as they say in Las Vegas, that will be one sucker bet.
(c) 2017 Jane Stillwater. Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you're at it, please buy my books!

Those of us who consider it disgraceful to have a giant statue of Robert E. Lee on his horse in a park in the middle of Charlottesville, and another of Stonewall Jackson for that matter, should try to understand those who think removing one of these statues is an outrage.

I don't claim to understand them, and certainly don't suggest they all think alike. But there are certain recurring themes if you listen to or read the words of those who think Lee should stay. They're worth listening to. They're human. They mean well. They're not crazy.

First, let's set aside the arguments we're not trying to understand.

Some of the arguments being passed around are not central to this attempt at understanding the other side. For example, the argument that moving the statue costs money, is not what I'm interested in here. I don't think cost concerns are driving most of the support for the statue. If we all agreed that removing the statue was important, we would find the money. Simply donating the statue to a museum or to some city where Lee actually lived would quite possibly produce a new owner willing to pay for the transport. Heck, donate it to the Trump Winery and they'd probably pick it up by next Thursday.(1)

True, if the statue is simply moved to a different Charlottesville park, Charlottesville will have to pay, and that money could have gone to creating a new park with monuments to peace and civil rights, etc. Perhaps there are people for whom this really is the central argument. Perhaps they are also consistent in their frugality and put up the same struggle against billion dollar highways and trillion dollar militaries. Perhaps the announcements of how much good could be done for the poor with the money that could be spent to move a statue are being made by some people with a history of caring about the poor. We'll save trying to understand them for another time.

Also tangential here is the argument that removing a statue erases history. Surely few of these history fanatics protested when the U.S. military tore down the statue of Saddam Hussein. Wasn't he part of Iraqi history? Hadn't the CIA meant well and gone to great efforts in helping to put him in power? Hadn't a company in Virginia provided him with important materials for making chemical weapons? Good or bad, history shouldn't be torn down and erased!

Actually, nobody's saying that. Nobody's valuing any and all history. Few are admitting that ugly parts of history are history at all. People are valuing a particular bit of history. The question is: why? Surely history supporters don't believe that the 99.9% of Charlottesville history not represented in monumental statuary has been erased. Why must this bit of history be monumental?

There may be those whose historical concern is simply for the past 90 years or so of the statue being there in the park. Its existence there is the history they are concerned about, perhaps. Perhaps they don't want it changed simply because that's the way it's been. I have some sympathy for that perspective, but it has to be applied selectively. Should we keep a half-built frame of a hotel on the downtown mall because my kids have never known anything else? Was history destroyed by creating the downtown mall in the first place? What I'm interested in trying to understand is not why people want nothing to change. Nobody wants nothing to change. Rather, I want to understand why they don't want this particular thing to change.

Here's what I think we should try to understand.

Supporters of the Lee statue whom I've spoken with or read or been yelled at by think of themselves as "white." This is important to them. They belong to the white race or the white ethnicity or the white group of people. They don't -- or at least some of them don't -- think of this as a cruel thing. They see many other groups of people engaged in what some 40 years ago was intentionally described by its participants as "identity politics." They see Black History Month and wonder why they cannot have a White History Month. They see affirmative action. They read about calls for reparations. They believe that if other groups are going to identify themselves by superficial visible features, they ought to be allowed to do so too.

On Thursday Jason Kessler, a blogger seeking to remove City Councilman Wes Bellamy from office, described the Robert E. Lee statue as being "of ethnic significance to southern whites." No doubt, he thinks, and no doubt he's right, that if there were a statue in Charlottesville of a non-white person or a member of some historically oppressed minority group, a proposal to remove it would be met with cries of outrage at the violation of something of value to a particular group -- any group other than "whites."

One might ask Mr. Kessler to consider the significance of the fact that there actually are no statues of non-white people in Charlottesville, unless you count Sacagawea kneeling like a dog beside Lewis and Clark. Or you might ask how his condemnations of political correctness fit with his denunciation of Wes Bellamy for old comments hateful toward gays and women. But what I'm asking you to ask, instead, is whether you can sense where Kessler or the people who read his blog may be coming from.

They denounce "the double standards" that they perceive all around them. Whether you think those standards don't exist, or think they're justified, it is clear that a lot of people do think they exist and are convinced they are not justified.

One of my professors when I was at UVA many years ago penned some thoughts that were widely cited a couple of months ago as having been a prediction of Donald Trump. This professor, Richard Rorty, asked why struggling white people seemed to be the one group liberal academics didn't care about. Why is there no trailer park studies department, he asked. Everyone thought that was funny, then and now. But an anything else studies department -- any race, ethnicity, or other identity, except white -- is very serious and solemn. Surely ending bigotry of all sorts is a good thing, he seemed to say, but meanwhile a handful of billionaires are gathering up most of the wealth of this country and the world, while most everybody else is struggling, and somehow it's acceptable to make fun of accents or teeth as long as it's white people you're mocking. So long as liberals focus on identity politics to the exclusion of policies that benefit everyone, the door will be open to a white supremacist strongman offering solutions, credible or otherwise. Thus opined Rorty long ago.

Kessler may see a bit more injustice out there than actually exists. He thinks that radical Islamic, mentally disturbed U.S. veterans are neglected until they engage in shooting sprees because of fear of political correctness. I highly doubt it. I've never heard of many mentally disturbed veterans who weren't neglected. A tiny percentage have any interest in radical Islam, and it is exclusively those, who seem to end up on Kessler's blog. But his point seems to be that there are non-white people who do horrible things, and that it is frowned on to make cruel generalizations about them -- in a way that it is not always frowned on to make cruel generalizations about white people.

You can point to counter-trends. Numerous studies that show up only in the social media feeds of people who've read other similar studies have found that the U.S. media much prefers to cover killings by Muslims of whites than killings of Muslims by whites, and that the term "terrorist" is almost exclusively reserved for Muslims. But those are not the trends that some people are paying attention to. Instead they're noticing that critiques of racism are permitted to make generalizations about white people, that stand-up comedians are permitted to crack jokes about white people, and that identifying as a white person can put you into a historical storyline as part of the tribe that created, not only lots of fun and useful technology, but also environmental and military destruction and oppression on a brand new scale.

Once you're looking at the world this way, and your news sources are too, and your friends are too, you're likely to hear about things that show up on Kessler's blog that none of my acquaintances have ever heard of, such as the idea that U.S. colleges are generally teaching and promoting something called "white genocide." Believers in white genocide have found a single professor who claimed to support it and then claimed he was joking. I don't claim to know the truth of that matter and don't consider it acceptable as a joke or otherwise. But the guy wouldn't have had to claim he was joking if it was accepted standard practice. Nonetheless, if you believed your identity was tied up with the white race, and you believed people were trying to destroy it, you might have a negative reaction to giving Robert E. Lee the boot, I think, whether or not you considered black people inferior or favored slavery or thought wars were justifiable or anything of the sort.

Here's how Kessler thinks white people are treated, in his own words:

"SJWs [apparently this stands for "social justice warriors"] always say that all white people have 'privilege', a magical and immaterial substance that belittles our hardships and dismisses all of our achievements. Everything we've ever achieved is portrayed as just a byproduct of our skin color. Yet, somehow with all this 'privilege' it is white America that is suffering the most from epidemic levels of depression, prescription drug abuse, heroin abuse and suicide. It is white Americans whose birthrates are precipitously declining while the hispanic population skyrockets due to illegal immigration. By comparison blacks have a higher rate of happiness. They are taught to be confident. All of the schoolbooks, entertainment and revisionist history portray them as plucky underdogs who earn everything over enormous obstacles. The whites are the only ones who are inherently evil and racist. Our great societies, inventions and military achievements are portrayed as ill-gotten and undeservedly won on the backs of others. With so much negative propaganda twisting their minds no wonder white people have so little ethnic identity, so much self-hatred and are so willing lay down and take it when anti-white bullies like Al Sharpton or Wes Bellamy want to shake them down."

UNDERSTANDING US TOO

All right. That's my limited attempt to begin to understand supporters of the Lee statue, or at least one aspect of their support. Some have declared that taking down any war statue insults all veterans. Some are in fact quite openly racist. Some see the statue of a guy engaged in fighting against the United States as a matter of sacred U.S. patriotism. There are as many combinations of motivations as there are people supporting the statue. My point in looking a bit into one of their motivations is that it is understandable. Nobody likes unfairness. Nobody likes double standards. Nobody likes disrespect. Perhaps politicians feel that way too, or perhaps they just exploit others who do, or perhaps a little of both. But we should continue trying to understand what people we disagree with care about, and to let them know that we understand it, or that we're trying to.

Then, and only then, can we ask them to try to understand us. And only then can we properly explain ourselves, through grasping who it is they currently think we are. I don't fully grasp this, I admit. I'm not much of a Marxist and am unsure why Kessler constantly refers to opponents of the statue as Marxists. Certainly Marx was a Union partisan, but nobody's asking for a General Grant statue, not that I've heard. It seems to me that a lot of what Kessler means by "Marxist" is "un-American," bitterly opposed to the U.S. Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington and all that is sacred.

But which parts? If I applaud the separation of church and state, the limited executive, the power of impeachment, the popular vote, and limited federal power, but am not a fan of the Supreme Court, the Senate, slavery, winner-take-all elections without ranked choice voting, or the lack of protections for the environment, am I a Marxist or not? I suspect it comes down to this: am I labeling the Founders as fundamentally evil or basically good? In fact, I'm not doing either of those things, and I'm not doing either of them for the white race either. I can try to explain.

When I joined in a chant of "White supremacy's got to go" recently in Lee Park, a white man demanded of me: "Well, what are you?" To him I looked white. But I identify as human. That doesn't mean that I pretend to live in a post-racial world where I neither suffer the lack of affirmative action nor benefit from the very real privileges of looking "white" and having had parents and grandparents who benefitted from college funding and bank loans and all kinds of government programs that were denied to non-whites. Rather, it means that I think of myself as a fellow member in the group called humans. That's the group I root for. That's the group I hope survives the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the warming of the climate. That's the group I want to see overcome hunger and disease and all forms of suffering and inconvenience. And it includes every single person who calls themselves white and every single person who does not.

So, I don't feel the white guilt that Kessler thinks people are trying to impose on him. I don't feel it because I don't identify with George Washington any more than I identify with the men and women he enslaved or the soldiers he whipped or the deserters he killed or the native people he slaughtered. I don't identify with him any less than with those other people either. I don't deny all of his merits because of all of his faults, either.

On the other hand, I don't get to feel white pride. I feel human guilt and pride as a human, and that includes a great deal. "I am large," wrote Walt Whitman, as much a Charlottesville resident and influence as Robert E. Lee. "I contain multitudes."

If someone were to put up a monument in Charlottesville that white people found offensive, I would object vigorously to that monument, because white people are people, like any other people. I would demand that that monument be taken down.

Instead, we happen to have a monument that many of us humans, and people who profess other identities, including African American, find offensive. So, I object vigorously to this monument. We should not engage in what many perceive as hurtful hate-speech because others deem it to be of "ethnic significance." Pain outweighs moderate appreciation, not because of who feels is, but because it is more powerful.

If someone were to make a monument of some old hateful tweet from Wes Bellamy -- and my understanding is that he would be the last to suggest such a thing -- it wouldn't matter how many people thought it was nice. It would matter how many people thought it was painfully cruel.

A statue that symbolizes racism and war to a great many of us has an enormously negative value. To respond that it has "ethnic significance to southern whites" as if it were a traditional soup recipe misses the point.

The United States has a very divisive history, dating perhaps from Mr. Jefferson's two-party system, through the Civil War, and right on into identity politics. While Kessler claims African Americans are happier, and that Latinos are not happier but somehow winning through immigration, no U.S. groups record the levels of happiness found in Scandinavia, where, Marxistly or otherwise, there is no affirmative action, no reparations, no targeted benefits, and no labor unions out for the interests of their members alone, but rather public programs that benefit everyone equally and thus gain widespread support. When college and healthcare and retirement are free for everyone, few resent them or the taxes paid to receive them. When taxes fund wars and billionaires and some piddly handouts to particular groups, even the biggest fans of wars and billionaires will tend to view taxes as the primary enemy. If Marx ever figured that out, I'm unaware of it.

I'm willing to concede that supporters of the statue are not all pushing racism or war. But are they willing to try to understand the perspective of those whose parents recall being kept out of Lee Park because they were not white, or to consider the viewpoint of those who understand the war to have been fought for the expansion of slavery, or to take into account what many of us feel heroic war statues do for the promotion of yet more wars?

If seeing black people praised in a movie like Hidden Figures is difficult for someone who identifies as white, what does being excluded from a park for being black feel like? What does losing your arm feel like? What does losing half your town and all your loved ones feel like?

The question of whether the Washington Redskins should be renamed is not a question of whether the quarterback is a jerk or the team has a glorious history, but whether the name offends millions of us, as it does. The question of whether to send General Lee off on the horse he never rode in on is not a question about the people whom the statue doesn't deeply disturb, but about all of us whom it does deeply disturb.

As someone who objects as much to the war element of the statue as to the race question, and who objects to the dominance of war monuments, to the virtual exclusion of anything else, on the Charlottesville landscape, I think we all have to try to imagine the viewpoint of some other people as well. Ninety-six percent of humanity lives outside the United States. Have we asked Charlottesville's Sister Cities what they think of Charlottesville's war statues?

Good morning America, and welcome to those proverbial "interesting times." We have a so-called President seemingly coming unhinged in public, a dystopian aura infusing politics at every level, a resurgence of hatred made safe by irresponsible rhetoric, and a cultural fascination with misdirection and blatant untruths. At the same time, there's a burgeoning opposition movement contesting every brick in the apocalyptic wall, mobilizing in the streets and through its tweets alike, constituting a potential political counterforce-perhaps not only in this moment, but for the foreseeable future.

With football and baseball both on hiatus now, the national pastime seems to have swung to watching the unraveling of this Administration and the fantastic foibles of its terrific protagonist. This has all been a boon to the major media outlets, as well as to the Saturday night satirists and their ilk. It's also a familiar posture for the general public to be in, regardless of political ideology, accustomed as many people have become to consuming "reality" programming, celebrity scandals, and infotainment gossip.

But of course this is different, and the actual reality of this moment isn't really all that funny anymore. There's a reason why rates of stress and anxiety are on the rise, and why the blogosphere is buzzing nonstop. And it isn't only the political left who are fueling a resurgence of resistance right now-the pushback on the unfolding insanity is also driven by large numbers of moderates, and even some principled conservatives who can't stomach the erosion of basic liberties and established processes.

It's too soon to say how this will play out, but even some casinos may be taking action on how long the President has left in office before things fully implode. The strength of the resistance that has formed-with its marches and memes, its protests and parodies-will have something to say about this, especially if more people inside governmental structures sense that it's safe to start pushing ahead. While the courts and Congress may have the final say, it's been the people who have brought us here.

And that's an amazingly hopeful thing to consider, especially for those of us who believe deeply in "people power" and the arc of justice being bent through social movements. Yet it's also important to be cautiously optimistic about all of this, for a few reasons that are ultimately interrelated. Resistance to a perceived common threat (i.e., a mercurial and maniacal chief executive) can be a galvanizing force, but not all resistance is the same and, even more to the point, opposition alone isn't enough to save us.

Undoubtedly, the pace and furor of the Administration's descent into chaos is unprecedented in recent memory and has unified many perspectives in their joint disdain for machinations with Moscow, saber-rattling at allies, refusing to comply with basic disclosures and ethics rules, commingling the business of the state with personal business interests, appointing an unqualified cabinet, pandering to racism and sexism, and much more. This is all so objectionable that it has provided a clear focus for the resistance.

Yet things are more complex than simply a mass protest against a despotic regime. Within that struggle is another one between those who want to restore the promise of American values, and those who are pointing the compass toward a world that hasn't yet been realized. Shall we seek to return to a time when cherished values were honored, a political system of checks and balances worked seamlessly, and a social contract was upheld with equal opportunity and justice for all? Or will we chart a new course?

While we consider this, the deeply rooted existential threats of perpetual war, escalating inequality, rampant environmental degradation, and climate change remain untended and spiral further out of control. So while this particular moment is deeply troubling, perhaps it's not as divergent in the big picture as it may seem. The key issues of war/violence, inequality/injustice, and environment/climate were already marked "urgent"-and if the election had gone the other way, they would remain so.

If we're concerned about root causes and structural change, it can be hard to see a path forward under any circumstances at this point. Except, perhaps, for the emergence of a robust resistance, if it can keep the momentum going and harmonize its two primary strands into a longer-term struggle that addresses the core issues. The structures of political economy are like the ocean: tumultuous on top, but decidedly stolid underneath; if change is to be meaningful, it has to get beyond the surface and into the depths.

How can this change occur? One wing of the resistance takes the view that the system is basically sound and its processes can be used to upend a corrupt administration. Arguments from this sector often take the form of appealing to baseline American values and core principles. Its tools of advocacy frequently include calling Congress, mounting legal challenges, and working with supportive elements inside the system. Their campaigns generally focus on this President and his cadre as the root of the problem.

Another segment is more pointed in its view that the system is essentially broken and its processes have been used to oppress people through intolerance and violence. This perspective includes advocacy aimed at dismantling structures of inequality, calling out the exploitative nature of business as usual, and interrupting specific instances of injustice. Their protests will often go beyond approved marches, and their messaging might include broader concerns about the institutional roadblocks to progress.

The current Administration and President have provided an obvious point of convergence for these strands, but should the acute crisis pass in some manner (for instance, via impeachment or resignation), it's not clear that this resistance will keep marching in unison. More promisingly, some of the emerging discourse around themes of being indivisible and stronger together can help build more durable bonds, providing a potential opportunity to weave a web of related struggles that might bring real changes.

The annals of social change demonstrate the power of working across such variants, yet also the ways in which fractures can develop that undermine effective and tangible alterations. Struggle built on a framework of "the enemy of my enemy" only goes so far, even when the shared adversary in that equation is as blatantly bizarre as the one we have before us now. The task is to cultivate resilient relationships that transcend common threats by focusing on mutually beneficial ideas and solutions.

Here we find ourselves, then, poised on the cusp of history. Before us are the prospects of things going completely off the rails, or perhaps restoring a semblance of order in time, or imagining a truly better future. Yes, this Administration is a clear threat to progressive policies and traction on core issues-but even if it was suddenly removed from office tomorrow, we'd still be faced with an array of intractable existential crises and a political system that has been unable (or unwilling) to adequately address them.

Resistance in this sense isn't merely about opposition, but also about articulation and building up capacities for growth and resilience. Before us is an unprecedented moment of grave challenges and enormous opportunities; with the gears of power showing their bare teeth in full view, we can see the exposed core of baseline problems more clearly. We now have no excuses for not addressing them.

We can work together and seize this chance to restore what worked, reject what didn't, and reimagine what can be. We owe it to ourselves, those who have struggled before, and those who will inhabit the future, not to be primarily reactive and willing to settle for only cosmetic changes. Someday, hopefully, we will look back and remember this as the very moment that we wove the threads of a better world.
(c) 2017 Randall Amster J.D., Ph.D., is Director of the Program on Justice and Peace at Georgetown University. Among his most recent books are Anarchism Today (Praeger, 2012) and the co-edited volume "Building Cultures of Peace: Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

Dear Deputy Fuhrer Pruitt,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your total sellout to your 1% brothers, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Republican whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 03-15-2017. We salute you Herr Pruitt, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence