A symptom of mental insufficiency

 Here is the news report:

Republican state house representatives Jon Hansen (R-Dell Rapids) and Scott Odenbach (R-Spearfish) authored the “COVID-19 Vaccine Freedom of Conscience Act.” The bill would effectively ban COVID-19 vaccine mandates under any and all circumstances in South Dakota.

And here is the context:

War	Combat deaths	Civilian deaths	Total deaths
Civil War	214,938	450,000	650,000
World War I	53,402	63,114	116,516
World War II	291,557	113,842	405,399
Covid-19 10/29/2021			743,050

The coronavirus has inflicted more deaths than any of our wars.

At this point, it is killing at the rate of more than 71,000 a day. If the government did not take measures to combat the enemy in our world wars, the citizens would revolt.  In the current case, government agencies are trying to implement measures to control and mitigate the disease outbreak.  But groups of citizens are rising up in opposition to those measures.  The major health organizations in South Dakota have mandated that their employees be vaccinated.  Today, a group of GOP legislators met to require a special session of the legislature that will deal with banning or severely limiting vaccine mandates.  

That raises the question if mandates for other vaccines will be revoked.  Currently. the law requires that to be admitted to school, children must be vaccinated for poliomyelitis, diphtheria, pertussis, rubeola, rubella, mumps, tetanus, meningitis, and varicella.*  It does have exemptions for religious or health reasons.   But if legislators are so concerned about mandates for Covid-19 vaccinations, can they ignore the requirements for other vaccines?

Or is their concern about Covid vaccines just another matter of the mindless, belligerent posturing of the Trump syndrome?  Some seem to believe that the more stupidly you behave, the more you are asserting your personal rights.  And there is no doubt that people have the right to be stupid, if that is their preference.

The whole question of public health versus the right to make personal choices is a sign of the mental failure that grips the country.  The issue is not a matter of partisan politics.  It is a matter of whether people have the rational intelligence to understand established science or whether they are attuned to strange spirits they think might be lurking under their beds, or acting according to urban legends they believe to be scripture.  It is a matter of people who are cognitively competent versus those inflicted with  grave mental defects.  In the past the cognitively competent have prevailed and have passed laws that protect the public health.  In the present, we have a strong anti-intelligence movement that resents and resists science and any other ideas produced by knowledge and intellect.  A war between knowledge and ignorance has broken out.  And the warriors of ignorance found a leader in Donald Trump, who professes the right to be stupid.  

But killing 743,000 people is not merely a matter of being stupid.  It is a matter of malice.  To stand idly by insisting on the right to personal choice is no different than standing idly by when the Gestapo marched people to the gas chambers.  Our fight, if there is one, is not with Covid-19.  It''s with stupidity compounded by malice.  The best we can do with people who wish to stand by and blather about their personal choice not to mask or vaccinate is keep them at a distance.  

Our nation is divided.  If the divide is between the intelligent and the stupid, the intelligent can think their way to a better way of life.

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*13-28-7.1. Immunizations required for admission to school or early childhood program--Exceptions--Rules.

Any child entering school or an early childhood program in this state, shall, prior to admission, be required to present to the appropriate school authorities certification from a licensed physician that the child has received or is in the process of receiving adequate immunization against poliomyelitis, diphtheria, pertussis, rubeola, rubella, mumps, tetanus, meningitis, and varicella, according to recommendations provided by the Department of Health. The Department of Health may modify or delete any of the required immunizations. As an alternative to the requirement for a physician's certification, the child may present:

(1)    Certification from a licensed physician stating the physical condition of the child would be such that immunization would endanger the child's life or health; or

(2)    A written statement signed by one parent or guardian that the child is an adherent to a religious doctrine whose teachings are opposed to such immunization.

The Department of Health may promulgate reasonable rules, pursuant to chapter 1-26, to require compliance and documentation of adequate immunization, to define appropriate certification, and to specify standard procedure.

Insurrectionists in training

Chamberlain high school students at a basketball tournament.

If you wonder where the January 6 insurrectionists come from, look at events in places like South Dakota. We have an academy for aberrant behavior that is fully accredited by Misfits For Trump. 

The photograph to the left was taken at a basketball tournament in Huron.  I posted it in March and noted that at a time when we were being asked to mask up and maintain social distance, these kids were doing the opposite, in addition to displaying a campaign banner for a president who had been voted out of office.  The ostensible purpose for this gathering of students was to support their high school team in a tournament.  The question it raises is what influences were exerted on these kids to turn a sports event into a political rally for a deposed president?  

When I posted the picture and the question, a former legislator responded:  "What a bunch of crap ! These students are free to express themselves even if you don't agree with them ! I am proud of them ! Leave them alone ! White power hand signs ? Really ? If these students had all been black would you feel the same way ?"

That response answered the question in part, and revealed the kind of influences that were diverting the students' interests away from competitive sports into an irrelevant political issue.  The stupidity and racial malice of the comment displayed the kind of intellectual environment the students are living in.

High school age boys pissing on a sign they vandalized.

A more recent event involving high school aged students took place at the state fair.  The South Dakota Standard gives a full account of a bunch of kids harrassing people and vandalizing the Democrat building, and no one, aside from a few Democrats, much caring.  Again,  this behavior seems to have the full approval of adults.  Part of the adult population has adopted the malicious belligerence of Donald Trump as the standard of behavior.  It's what we have to look forward to in South Dakota.

It is just people expressing themselves.  Stupidity and malice on parade.

 

Where do the women go?

Gabby Petito, a vulnerable woman in distress.

The coverage of the death of Gabby Petito has been remarkable for the information left out.  The report was that her remains were found at a campground in the Grand Teton National Park. There were no details about who found her or under what circumstances or how she was murdered. (It was finally reported that she'd been strangled.)  She had been reported as a missing person for weeks before her body was found, and her case became the subject for the social media and the news media.  Stories lamented the fact that the case seemed to be another "missing white woman" case, while the cases of missing women of color do not get the kind of attention that Gabby Petito did.  The coverage reflects a nation dominated by the petty and the peevish, unable to competently address the actual issues that arise.   The issue in this case is that Gabby was in a state of threat by her boyfriend and, although authorities were involved over time, no one seemed to know what to do about it.  Except to quibble about whose demise gets the most attention.

In the local community of Aberdeen, a billboard offers a reward of $10,000 for information concerning a Native American woman, Monica Wickre.  Known as Mona, she was last seen April 7, 1993.  Her family filed a missing person report on April 26.  Her body was found floating in the James River by canoeists on June  16.  While the sheriff's department says it has people of interest in the matter, it hasn't progressed on  the case in 18 years.  The family has put up the  reward to elicit information about what happened to Ms. Wickre.

From the standpoint of journalism, the pictures of Gabby Petito are what attracted so much attention to her story.  She was a pretty white woman, but the forlorn misery she projected in the pictures and videos of her are what motivated so many people to find out her story.  Her expressions made an appeal to those who are disturbed by seeing a living being in distress.  Social service organizations understand that appeal with their fundraising.  Anti-cruelty organizations show pictures of dogs chained outside in freezing weather, and social service organizations show young teenagers bedding down on the streets with tattered blankets.  The videos of Gabby projected that same vulnerability and anguish that elicits sympathy and a desire to do something to relieve the misery.

That white women get more attention when missing than women of color and different cultures is a well-established fact, and it is a symptom of the racism that pulses through our culture.   However, that problem is being met with the formation of movements such as #MMIW,  Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.  The movements call attention to the subjection of minority women to menace and abuse, and some take measures to try to stop it.  

The abuse of women and children generally involves motives of bullying and sexual predation.  To bully is to seek to harm, intimidate, or coerce someone perceived as vulnerable, according to dictionary definitions. In the military, we used the synonymous term "fuck over."   There is a malevolent motive behind bullying that must be acknowledged, and it is a motive that is a cancer to democracy.  Some people have a compulsion to assert dominance over other people.  They measure their success and importance in life by how many people they can bully.  Or fuck over.  Such people reject the concept of equality except for themselves.  They rank people according to wealth and power, always placing themselves at the top of the order.  Of course, they have traditionally ranked women in the lower orders.  However, there is a ranking on the basis of perceived class and power that overrides gender distinctions.  The important point is to understand that bullying proceeds from that rejection of equality as basic to human rights. 

The urge to dominate is a primitive one. It is the urge that operates in dog packs and chicken flocks.  When human society descends to a striving for dominance,  it means people behaving with a lack of intelligence.   Still, much of human society operates as a competition for dominance.  When dominance is an objective, it creates an underclass upon which to inflict its discriminations and its violence.  Women are traditionally assigned to that underclass.  But gender is just one pretext for designating membership in an underclass which can be abused.  Those who strive for superior status are mentally incapable of understanding the concept of equality.  And practiced equality is essential to liberty and justice for all.

When we get news of the death of Gabby Petito or Monica Wicker, we long for justice in their names.  In our righteous  indignation over their loss, we do not confront the failures of those institutions which are the guardians and enactors of our democracy and rules of decency.

A former priest I know has compiled a list of the Christian precepts of equality which he says the church fails constantly. Some of them, as expressed  in the Bible, are:

• A righteous man knows the rights of the poor; a wicked man does not understand such knowledge. Proverbs 29:7

• “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.  Matthew 7:12

• There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.  Galatians 3:28

• Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. For each will have to bear his own load. …Galatians 6:1-18

• Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.  .Philippians 2:3

On the governmental front, there is a movement to banish Thomas Jefferson from the iconography of our democracy because he was a slave owner and he lived his life in ways that seem to contradict the words he wrote in our nation's founding document, the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

If we banish Jefferson, how should we regard our  founding document composed of his words?   He was a complicated man.  He saw the evil in slavery, but thought the slaves, who had been deprived of the educational and social means to live as free people,  needed to be prepared for such freedom.  To banish Jefferson is to evade some harsh facts about our democracy and the struggle to achieve it.  And to deny the facts in our founding is to give into the malice that Lincoln warned us about.

The anger that drives the denunciation of Jefferson is  the same anger that kills women in our society.  It is the anger of those who do not understand the premise of equality and the respectful treatment of others it demands.  If we are to protect women and other vulnerable people from malicious violence, we have to understand the perpetrators as failures of our culture.  

As an old professor, I can say that such general understanding is possible.  But given the current state of our politics and the people who create it, such understanding is not likely.

The belligerence that is a cancer

There is a strain of people who see recommendations and warnings as violations of their personal freedom and their personal choices.  They react with anger at vaccination mandates to protect public health.  They seem to see the admonition not to strangle women with the same belligerence.

Equality is regarding the lives of others as equally important as our own.  Making personal preference more important than the well being of others is a denial of equality.  Women like Gabby and Monica are sacrificed to the angry gods of self-adoration.  Democracy can be ruled by the ignorant, the angry, and the mentally deficient.  It has failed us all when equal treatment failed Gabby and Monica.

Our democracy has been bullied to death, but it cannot rest in peace.

 

America is ending.

Some people think that the number of patriots in America has diminished, or that some of their countrymen are anti-American.  What they don't understand is that when a country elects  a person of the character of Donald Trump as president, it has failed as a democracy.  

It is not a partisan matter.  The two party system presents different ways that people think a democracy should be run.  That is not the issue when a person like Trump enters the picture.  The issue is whether you want a democracy that is open, honest, and competent in the quest for liberty, equality, and justice, or you want a fraudulent system in which self-proclaimed winners prey upon designated losers.

The obsequious groveling of Republicans before Trump in the belief that he is essential to the party is obscene.  Seeing Sen. Chuck Grassley giving Trump's ego a blow job in public is to witness ultimate degradation.  Republicans who once castigated Trump now line up to service him.  The grossest obscenity is that the GOP calls itself the party of Lincoln.  You can't claim the virtues of Lincoln while fawning in adulation over the likes of Trump.  That 74 million voters preferred Trump as president defines the state of the country. Despite the loss to Joe Biden,  those people have put the rest of the nation on notice that about half of its citizens do not believe in or want what have been considered the democratic virtues.

This is not new in western civilization.  My ancestors, as is true with most descendants of immigrants, faced political and social corruption.  Rather than engage in a futile struggle to reform their countries, they chose the American frontier.  As people line up at the southern border to escape  corrupt societies, few are aware that half of America prefers the kind of governance and society those refugees are fleeing.  

The contentions that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that January 6 was a patriotic protest are evidence that the U.S. is making George Orwell's 1984 come true.  People who prefer humane decency over malevolent bigotry face a dilemma.  With the Trump campaign to subvert the voting system, many realize that America probably cannot be salvaged in the voting booth.  The fights over masks and vaccinations for Covid-19 is an overwhelming measure of intellectual and moral deterioration of the country.

In 1984, the protagonist has a  job in the Ministry of Truth in which he alters the historical record to fit the needs of the Party. That is just the kind of party the GOP has become.  It has promoted a version of January 6 which denies that the insurrection was an attempt to stop the counting of votes in Congress, and contends it was just a peaceful demonstration.

During World War II, we lost 405,399 soldiers to combat.  In our deadliest fight, we lost 620,000 in the Civil War.  As of today, we have lost 719,725 lives to the coronavirus.  A significant number of people are resisting attempts to mitigate the disease as an infringement of their freedom to the point of violence.  When so many people have descended to this state of dementia, democracy cannot be sustained.  

The angry resistance to health measures is more malignant and debilitating than the disease.  We have preventions and potential cures for the virus that attacks the lungs.  We have no equivalent resources for the malignancy that debilitates the mental  and moral faculties in some people.

Unlike our ancestors, we have no America to move to.  Thinking people see the futility in trying  to change minds that demonstrate an aversion to the premises of equality and justice.  Still, many people would rather cede part of the country to them rather than live with their demented bigotry.

Reports in the media note apathy among Democratic voters.   But some of the discussions on the internet do not reflect apathy as much as a recognition that America has changed and large parts of it have undergone an intellectual and moral failure.

In some of those discussions, the idea of a counter migration has been raised.    Some have proposed organizing a body of people to colonize in another country,  Others have discussed establishing democratic enclaves in the U.S.  much like the Amish, or on the order of Indian reservations.  Others simply contemplate a move to another country.  And some discuss America as the object of a cancel culture.  A colleague says that the election of Trump as president was a cancellation of American culture.

But the significance of recent events for all Americans is that almost half of our countrymen  have rejected the qualities that once defined our democracy.  They are closing that America down.

If there is apathy among some voters, it is because the vote is being undermined, and they must decide how they wish to respond to the closing of America.

Northern State building a monument to avarice

Some turmoil on the Northern State University campus lingers.  While the state university system has seen a slight decline in enrollments of 0.35 percent, Northern has led the decline with 2.65 percent.  

• Black Hills State University: 3,539, down 1.91%
• Dakota State University: 3,216, up 1.04%
• Northern State University: 3,340, down 2.65%
• South Dakota School of Mines and Technology: 2,418, down 2.38%
• South Dakota State University: 11,465, up 0.53%
• University of South Dakota: 9,464, down 0.05%
• System total: 33,445, down 0.35%

In April, the Northern State campus went through an episode that the university seems not to have the intellectual or moral resources to work through.  Without any kind of explanation, the president of the university was abruptly fired.  The firing raised questions which have never been answered.  That is a perilous state for an institution of higher education to be in.  Higher education requires a high degree of openness and forthrightness to retain credibility.  

 On the same day, the head of the university's foundation left his job and shortly after the director of athletics left.  Then this month the  university announced it was suspending the search for a new athletic director.  This was after a previous announcement that three candidates were invited to the campus for interviews.  The departures of  administrators were reported as a matter of routine, but to people familiar with the workings of higher education, they are indicators of an institution in turmoil.  However, in a state which ranks at the absolute bottom for its administration of higher education, turmoil is business-as-usual. 

The recent departure of college administrators leave the public with a perception that the university has an uncertain future.  The departed president posted an accounting of his tenure:

When I accepted the presidency at Northern State University I promised to transform the institution; in five years this has happened. The academic sector has added over twenty programs; enrollments have stabilized and are now growing; the campus footprint has increased in size by nearly 15%; we have built seven new facilities, the first new buildings on campus since 1987; and the campus has rebranded itself as a desired destination within the region. These outcomes are possible due to the outstanding leadership team I have had the fortune to develop and lead, as well as exceptional community partnerships and support we have facilitated. Since my arrival in 2016 we have invested over $110 million in facilities. An initial donor investment resulting in $49 million to build two residence halls and a regional science center was the impetus to articulate a new vision with a campus master plan that then transformed into a capital campaign. This campaign, The Educational Impact Campaign (EIC), was co-chaired and led by me; has concluded and raised an additional $62 million to build three additional facilities critical to fulfilling the vision of Northern State University as a valued regional asset. An additional $5 million in scholarships was also raised as a result of the EIC campaign. Of course, the most essential element of the student experience is their academic development. Under my leadership we have placed an emphasis on developing infrastructures to ensure student success and retention, including the affirmation of the liberal arts as the foundation of learning to develop students who are intellectually developed in order to become leaders in their careers and communities. NSU’s recent admission as an associate member of Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC) also confirms the importance of liberal arts learning and the development of critical thinking skills for all of our students, a point of pride for our campus. It is also important to note that retention and graduation rates continue to improve; efforts to build stronger industry relationships within the region have led to over 65% of our graduates remaining in state after graduation. I believe all of these efforts confirm a legacy at Northern State, but more importantly, confirm that this institution is sustainable and poised for many successes well into the future.

That outlook for the future seems to have been abandoned.  The firing of the president and the decline in enrollment present quite a different vision of what is, in fact, taking place at the university.  Despite the fact that the university has started a new academic year with new facilities and expectations for growth, it has seen a drop in enrollment that cannot be explained  away by the pandemic.   NSU is in the grip of political forces which have no interest in actual scholarship or effective teaching.  Prior to the departure of President Downs, he was being threatened to be fired by some legislators if he did not abandon plans he had for enhancing diversity on the campus.  Still, the university is asking for $29.5 million to replace  its Lincoln and Briscoe Halls, which the legislature will have to approve.

Dr. Downs' messy firing was a signal to professors that the university is not a good place to work and to students that it is not a good place to study and learn.  It was a demonstration that  academic probity is not much of a concern in the way it does business.  Its lavish new football stadium features party suites and a lounge and bar. It reflects the values of the people in control at Northern.

It seems they are building a monument to avarice.