Out of work? Strap on your wittle gunny-poo and have a parade.

More than 400 people lost their jobs at Northern Beef Packers during the past week.  Not to worry.  A bunch of patriots are having an Open Carry Walk in Sioux Falls this Saturday.  The title refers to people openly parading up and down the street with firearms.  It does not refer to carrying open beer cans or bottles of single malt, which act might get you arrested.  It is promoted as a demonstration of First and Second Amendment rights.

 It is an occasion for grown ups to forget their troubles and live out their juvenile fantasies, which were honed on Saturday afternoon movies and television reruns.  When you carry a weapon in  public, it is a sign.  The sign says:

 "Me big man.  Me have big gun.  Me can shoot the shit out of you any time me want."

 One strongly suspects that great patriot and humanitarian, George Zimmerman, is the inspiration for the event.  

We don't know if the  unemployed are invited to participate.  Their weapons, if they have any, might be in hock.  But we assume that anyone so inclined can carry dolls or wheel doll buggies and join in the festival of things juvenile.
  
Men and women who have attained the status of maturity and conscious citizenship don't have to play at being men and women.  Their attitudes and lives attest that they have attained constructively adult status.

We wonder if the patriots who attend might pause a moment or two to read the names of the victims at the Aurora movie theater or the Sandy Hook elementary school.  Or maybe pause and consider the 19,184 souls who, according to Center for Disease Control estimates, died at the muzzle of a gun since Sandy Hook.  Sixty percent of those were suicides, which is a great comfort.  But the Open Carry Walk sponsors say the event is to demonstrate responsible citizens carrying firearms.

That should bring great comfort to everyone.  It might even suggest a solution to those despairing of finding work in this great land. 

Jim Crow woke up from his nap

To us old veterans of the civil rights movement,  current American times project a familiar attitude.  But it has been evident for some time.  Barack Obama is connected to it.  He is not the cause, but he has elicited the symptoms of the racial divisions that once reigned over most of the nation.

In 2008, I was convinced that a black man could not be elected president.  The reason was that I heard many people from both major parties disparage Obama because of his race.  After he won the election, I realized that my perception was affected by the state I live in.  There are many Democrats who, like their GOP counterparts, think people of color do not qualify for equality, freedom, and justice.  South Dakota is committed to racial exclusions, and contains nine monuments, called reservations, to that end.  Its history of subjugation is relentless and continues to be a political force in the present.  The nation moves forward in eliminating discrimination of people who come from differing cultures and choose differing lifestyles, but South Dakota is one of the  refuges for those who demean and oppress those who are different.   

The election of Barack Obama inspired a renewed wave of racism. Many people who resent those of  other races abandoned reticence and renewed their denunciations of black people now that they had a target. The GOP leader in the Senate announced shortly after his election  that the main agenda of his party in Washington would be to see that Obama did not get elected to another term.  The obstruction of anything Obama wanted to do became the major business of the GOP congress people.  The tactic was to attach his name to things he proposed, such as Obamacare,

and to proclaim that it had to be a bad idea because that N-word person proposed it.  The criticisms were directed not  at the plan, but were personal assaults on the character and personality of Obama.  In the South until the civil rights movement, drinking fountains contained the sign "Whites Only," presupposing that use by a black person would contaminate the water.  The term Obamacare was used to designate contamination, bolstered with accusations of socialism, government takeovers  of personal rights.

A favorite accusation is that Obama has designs on confiscating all firearms in the U.S. so that if the ex-slaves do revolt, the population will not have the fire power to stop them.  Of course, Obama has never proposed the registration of all firearms that could lead to  identifying gun owners so that Big Govmint would know where to go for confiscation.  

After the Sandy Hook massacre of children, Obama and Joe Biden did propose some regulations to keep guns out of the possession of criminals and the mentally unfit.  But, of course, you know the rule associated with the  N-word.  Give them an inch and they will take the whole yard.  So, it's better to  keep the U.S. a killing field than let it be subverted by a black man and his minions, who may be Muslims, Marxists, and who knows what other villainy.  

The election of Barack Obama, then, reignited some old racial hatreds and resentments, and excited some into an overt racial rage.  Most bloggers and commenters who are anti-Obama avoid the N-word, but lavishly use all the stereotypes associated with it in writing about him.

The Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case has intensified the racial divide,  and exposed the tactic used to enforce what might be called the new racism.  Racism is old.  But the current tactic is to deny the presence and influence of racial hatred as a force, while intensifying it.  That is the recent development in its application.   Jim Crow now does his act in white face. The most prominent of those faces are Rush Limbaugh and the anchors on Fox News.  

The new racism is also evident on the blogosphere, as many good Americans forthrightly tell blacks and other minorities where their place is and not to step out of it.  Many seem to think that Trayvon Martin got what he deserved because he stepped out of his place.  They portray George Zimmerman has a dedicated, zealous patriot who volunteered to keep his neighborhood safe from thieves by patrolling with a loaded weapon to search out likely-looking suspects.  They ignore the fact that Trayvon Martin was a 17-year-old boy returning to the house he was staying at from a convenience store with a bag of Skittles and a can of juice.  Boy, did he look suspicious.  But in coming within the vigilance of George Zimmerman, he stepped out of place.  And here is a lecture from the SD blogosphere for all 17-year-old black kids with hoodies to heed:

... Trayvon Martin was a fool as well.  Despite the efforts of some to paint Martin as St. Trayvon, he was clearly a young man with a record of  bad judgement and offensive opinions.  Throwing the media narrative on its head, its seems far more likely that Trayvon Martin held both racist and homophobic opinions than George Zimmerman, who seems to be a basically decent, if foolish, man.  And, not to put too fine a point on it, when you are smashing a man's head into the sidewalk, you are asking for trouble.  There are no "good guys" in this story. 

 It is not clear where the "homophobic opinions" were expressed, but what is significant is the absence of any possibility that Trayvon Martin was, perhaps, standing his ground against being stalked by a menacing person looking for prey.  But in the Jim Crow tradition, black people have no ground to stand on and are totally out of place if they think they have a right to  defend themselves against menacing aggression.  

Another post seems to thinks that all people of differing status should be exempted from racial viewpoints:  "And, Zimmerman is as much Hispanic as he is "white"."  The writer seems unaware that Hispanics, too, hold anti-black racial attitudes.  There is, for example, no faster way to lose one's honey cajones that to go to Mexico and mistake one of its citizens for a black.  The writer must also be unaware of the wars between black and Hispanic gangs.  

Bloggers  make much of the fact that black kids kill other black kids in great numbers, so why shouldn't some honkeys get their share of kills?

White American cannot come to terms with the fact that it is its much-vaunted culture is what created the violence that boils in minority neighborhoods, causes massacres at Sandy Hook, made reservations places of hopelessness and despair, and motivates stalkers to gun down 17-year-olds sauntering along with Skittles and cans of fruit juice.  Moral equality and justice is not part of the white culture, as many conceive it.

The stand-your-ground laws and the voter ID laws are part of the re-energized Jim Crow.  Proclaim the hatred throughout the land and take America back to what it once was.  

Or renew the battle for equality and civil rights. 

 

 





















































































http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5371904020164697258#editor/target=post;postID=6153431426159178810;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=852;src=link

  

George Zimmerman got his trophy.

We shoot them now. 

The most damning element here is not that George Zimmerman was found innocent: it’s the bitter knowledge that Trayvon Martin was found guilty.   [Jelani Cobb  ,The New Yorker.]

On a rainy night in February,  George Zimmerman loaded his pistol, tucked it into his butt holster, got in his truck and drove to a place where he set up his stand.  Stand, as in "deer stand."  He got lucky that night.  He was on a "coon" hunt and here one came.

It was a young buck, 17 years old, sauntering along with a can of iced tea and a package of Skittles, hood on his sweat shirt over his head against the rain.  A prime specimen.  Zimmerman called him a punk.  Punks always get away, he said when he called the police dispatcher.  Not this one, however.  Zimmerman was there with his loaded weapon to stalk him.  

Zimmerman was volunteering for a neighborhood watch.  A nice pastime, because there is always a chance that you can shoot a buck.   When he saw him, in a sportsman-like gesture, Zummerman called the police dispatcher, reported the sighting, and offered to stalk it.  The dispatcher said we don't need you to do that.  But always the sportsman,  Zimmerman did it anyway.   

Somehow a fight ensued.  No one, except Zimmerman, knows how it started.  It is clear that Zimmerman got beat up a bit.  He ended up reaching into his butt holster, pulling his weapon, and blowing Trayvon's heart out.  You see, Trayvon pulled out his sidewalk and slammed it against Zimmerman's head.  Zimmerman was found not guilty of the second-degree murder charge.  Or manslaughter.

It is a lesson for us all.  Brooks Johnson says, "I guess the lesson is pack a gun for the times your body can't cash the checks your mouth wrote."

Zimmerman was standing his ground.  So was Trayvon, but he really has no ground to stand on.  Don't you idiots out there understand? Trayvon is the prey.  He is  not supposed to fight back.  That's the law.  There is a court precedent in Florida that says so.  
 
So, all you liberals and others out there who bought guns and ammunition to defend against the Zimmermans had just as well   get rid of them.  You don't count.  You're the designated prey.  The ground is not yours to stand on . 

Those Democrats just keep going and going

[Ed. Note:  The writer referred to below as an "erstwhile member of the press"  wrote to correct that designation.  He states that he is "editing a newspaper in Wyoming, writing a column that is published in several newspapers in five states, working on magazine articles, producing blog posts and planning [his] next book."  We noted that he was a staff member of the Mitchell Daily Republic who contributed to the paper's blog, and there was an announcement that that association had ended.  We should have noted that his "erstwhile" designation was in that particular capacity, not a leaving of the journalistic profession.  There were other corrections he suggested, but they were matters of perception and opinion, not facts.  We regret and apologize for the factual error. ]

When I first moved to South Dakota, I was thrown into a state of culture shock from which I never fully recovered.  It was caused by the way people talked about other people.  I was not the only one among new professors at NSU who noticed.  It was a topic of concern among those of us who came from other parts of the U.S., and it was a major factor in the social relationships we formed.

I first noticed it in personal conversations with some of my  colleagues during which they made disparaging and somewhat  slanderous comments about other people behind their backs.  There are people who malign other people everywhere, but the maligners are quickly noted and avoided.  The reason is obvious.  If someone is talking in negative and damaging ways to you about other people behind their backs, you know that person is most likely talking about you that way also.  Until I came to South Dakota,  such people were kept at a distance because in any situation that requires some social tact and cooperation, these people are a destructive impediment to any human enterprise.  Back-biters and  slanderers were held in ill repute and were shunned and avoided. And considered to be grossly deficient in intelligence.  One did not want to be associated with them.

They do occur everywhere, but the difference that caused the culture shock is that in South Dakota malicious gossip about others seemed to be the rule.  That is not to say that justified criticism is not made in other  places when people misbehave or are incompetent, but the way it is handled is paramount.  I worked for an editor who refused to tolerate malicious gossip.  Ambitious young reporters who were looking for plum assignments would often malign other reporters to him in hopes of gaining some kind of favored status.  If they made a negative allegation about another person's work, he would call the person being criticized into his office and asked the complainer to present the criticism to that person's face.  The person who made the criticism would have to explain the basis for his criticism and justify it, or be exposed as having malicious intent.  


If a reporter or editor did show incompetence or  slovenliness in the discharge of professional duties,  the fact would be duly noted in the daily, early morning editorial conferences in which mistakes were noted and resolved and plans for the day and upcoming editions were covered.  Competitive motives among staff members were kept in check by a cooperative attitude fostered by the management.  The newspaper had developed a highly competent and smart staff and the staff members regarded each other with a knowledge of and a respect for the work they did.  

The attitude at the newspaper was representative of the culture of the region.  People who gossiped maliciously about other people were despised.  Children who made false tattles about other children were quickly challenged about their motives by parents and teachers.  Back biting was simply not socially acceptable.  Complaints about other people were quickly challenged for their legitimacy,  and if a child was making a vindictive accusation, the child would be held to account for it.  Genuine grievances against bullying or violating activity were carefully separated from vindictive and resentful allegations.  

I was shocked when I came to South Dakota and witnessed adults engaging in middle school accusations and disparagement against others, especially in a circumstance which requires professional respect and courtesy for productive work to get done.  

However, with the Internet, media comment sections, and television, those middle school modes of conduct have become a significant and deleterious part of the national culture.  We have an abundance of humanity at its meanest, lowest, and stupidest in reality television, comment sections, and the halls of Congress.  

While I was shocked to find adults engaging in this kind of behavior toward each other in South Dakota,  I found reason for great hope and expectation from my writing students, most of whom came from rural and small town South Dakota.  One of the assignments in expository writing was to profile their hometowns, correlating the objective facts about their towns with what they observed.  For students from the smaller communities, a common feature they described was the town cafe.  Some regarded town cafes  as a joke, some were a bit disapproving of the daily coffee-and-gossip, and some detested the town cafes as sources of malignancy.  Whatever attitudes the students regarded the custom of malicious gossip with, their consensus was that the town and human race would be better off without it.  

At one time, I was involved in placing foreign exchange students in homes in the rural communities.  There were a couple of times when the students were so alarmed at the rancor they found among the factions in the towns that we had to remove them to other communities.  In our exit interviews and evaluations with the host families and students, the malicious gossipers were often mentioned as a factor that detracted from the exchange experience.  A number of school administrators and teachers commented that the students experienced all aspects of America, and some of it was not pleasant, inspiring, or favorable to the image of America.  Host families for the foreign students were carefully vetted, but we were advised by the placement organization to note which communities had engaged in destructive behavior and not place foreign students in them.

Twinges of that old culture shock returned last week with the announcement that chair and executive director of the South Dakota Democratic Party, Ben Nessulhuf, was stepping down to manage a Congressional campaign in Iowa.  His departure is the most recent of five prominent Democratic candidates and party officials to leave the state.  The reactions to his announcement  raised twinges of that old culture shock. Comments from some members of the press and comments on blogs tended toward that hateful, stupid, meanness that so often characterizes South Dakota.

In referring to Ben Nesselhuf's dual role as chair and executive director,  one erstwhile member of the press said, "It was a big job, and he failed big time. His departure is the proof of that."  The bitter condemnation in that statement resonates with the resentment of a jilted lover, and it refuses to acknowledge the job that Ben took on.  It assumes that Ben is leaving because he failed. 

Recent campaigns to gain state offices have cost the South Dakota Democratic Party a lot of money.  It incurred a stifling debt load.  One of Ben Nesselhuf's accomplishments  was to free the party of that oppressive debt.  The removal of that large obstacle is ignored in that presumption of failure.  So is Nesselhuf's fifteen years of political work as a state legislator, a candidate for secretary of state, and the work he has contributed to the party over that time. 

In good, old South Dakota tradition, the soul seems soothed by pronouncing him a big time failure.  However, nothing seems to incite South Dakotans into a big time rage like someone else's success.  And so, the convention is to pronounce a person with some accomplishment a total failure.  

There are hordes of commenters on the Internet and presumably in the town cafes who remark with great authority on anything and everything.  Very few have ever been a candidate for public office, run or been very active in the actual work of a campaign, or done any of the drudgery, which can be very unpleasant, of a partisan campaign.  They flood the comment sections with all the cliches about organization and personalities, and they bicker back and forth and posture as knowledgeable, competent strategists.  Their utterances are loaded with accusations and condemnations.  And one realizes that their only pathway to self-esteem is to diminish other people through resentful, petty slanders.  But one who has actually campaigned also realizes that their words come from big egos with small minds, and not from carefully analyzed experience.  

Criticism of South Dakota touches a very tender spot in the state psyche.  If one is critical or suggests matters that might need improvement,  the inevitable response is that if you don't like it here, leave.  What is referred to as the brain drain, the mass migration of young people to other places, is largely because talented people have found things they don't like here and have left. One of the major things people don't like is the constant back-biting and denigration of what other people are and do.  Fair, open, and honest criticism is useful, but constant, petty carping tires the mind and weighs heavily on the human spirit.  People who aspire to productive and constructive lives conclude they will have to build them elsewhere where the social and cultural climate permits.

The comments that followed Nesselhuf's departure announcement say nothing really about his performance in the work he did here.  But they are quite explicit in mapping out the predominant mindset that prevails in South Dakota.  They portray an endemic small-mindedness and a resentment toward those who rise to service.  People support and give lip service to public service, but only for those who fecklessly serve the platitudes and carefully refrain from doing anything that rises above mediocrity.  

It is that desire to rise above mediocrity that moves younger talent to leave.  As the above mentioned blogger wrote about Ben Nesselhuf,  "... he may need to wait for the crowd to thin to make it out the door. A lot of young Democrats had the same idea."  And a lot of young Democrats are leaving a lot of people feeling jilted.  And left behind.  Those young Democrats all mentioned improvements in their personal and professional lives as motives for their moves.

Those left behind, no matter which party, cannot conceive of the idea that they might be what is driving young people to move to other places--places where they will find criticism and opposition, but also find an acknowledgment and respect for honest effort and hard work.  And perhaps some recognition for achievement that gains national attention.  As it is now, that kind of achievement is held against them.

In South Dakota, resentment is a way of life.  And most young people want to leave the culture of the town cafe and rise above the small-minded platitudes and petty resentment. In a sinking culture, people wait for a leadership to descend and redeem them.  A number of people with impressive credentials and work histories have stepped up in recent years.  But, as Christ advised his disciples when a place rejected them, they have shook the dust of this place off their heels and left.  Those left behind are enraged because a leader has not led them.  It never seems to occur to them that they have to redeem themselves. 

The decline of the Democratic party in South Dakota is not from a lack of leaders.  In a democracy, the will of the people ultimately determines the kind of place a community is.  The people get what they want, what they vote for.  South Dakota likes a monolithic, single-party system.  The state is not determined by its leaders.  It is determined by its people and those they prefer to act as leaders.  People with a different vision of the state shake the dust from their feet and move on.

They leave behind a culture that will busy itself with carping, back-biting, and petty slander.  And more people will leave. 

Oglallas plan to return Badlands to the bison

The Oglalla Sioux tribe and the National Park Service are drafting legislation to give 133,000 acres of the Badlands National Park over to the bison.  Plans are to establish a herd of about 1,000 in the southern part of the park. 

The Washington Post reports that a portion of the Badlands from which Lakota people were driven off to make a bombing range during World War II will be returned to tribal management for the purpose of reclaiming the prairieland and reestablishing bison in their place in the ecosystem.

For those who want a taste of range fed bison,  novelist Dan O'Brien offers a Wild Idea from his nearby ranch.

Choosing not to be a fool

That part of the nation which still labors under the delusion that the noises it makes are some kind of communication is in the throes of a massive hysterical fit over Edward Snowden.  Is he a hero, a traitor, or a self-sucking jerk off?

Who cares?  

The only thing that concerns the 99 percent, or at least should, is how to endure a new world order that holds them in serfdom.  Or more basically, to decide if one even wants to endure.   

Columnist David Brooks fears that the nation is caught up in cynicism.  He seems to ignore the fact that the choices left us are being cynical or stupid.  It seems better for most not to be a fool.  If you have to go down, it is at least better to understand what is pushing you down. 

Perhaps nothing is more stupid than the political debate under which the nation is submerged.  It centers on the idea that we can either live in a free capitalist society or a government-controlled totalitarian one,  Marxist per chance.  What those who engage in this bicker fest just cannot grasp is, what difference does it make to the 99 percent whether the force that determines the quality of their existence is a totalitarian corporation or a totalitarian government?  Have any of those people so outraged over what the NSA is doing checked their credit reports to see what kind of information corporate America is collecting and circulating about them? 

People who bicker and like to pass judgments on other people have been confounded by the Occupy movement.  They have denigrated it because it did not engage in any of those wasteful, pointless efforts that they think are mandatory rituals of activism.  Occupiers did not issue an agenda, they did not elect leaders to represent them, and when police took action against them, they chose not to be active.  The establishment thinks they were effectively vanquished.  That's okay.  Like Bartleby in Herman Melville's story "Bartleby the Scrivener,"  they have shrugged and indicated to the establshment that they "prefer not to" participate in its games and rituals.  

Some will condemn the Occupiers for not fighting the good fight.  But there is no good fight.  There is just pointless fights that resolve nothing and improve nothing.  The paradigm of this pointless waste of life and energy is the recent wars we have fought:  Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan.  All they do successfully is kill people and generate hatreds that lead to more killing and dismissal of any sanctity or possibility for human life.  All we get in the end is a death count over which there is a mass clucking of tongues and an exchange of accusations and pseudo-rhetoric which corrupts the language.  

The epiphany of what we have become is the Great Recession from which some say we are recovering, but has, in fact, changed the country in irrevocable ways.  The big fact is that, according to Financial Times, the profits at the end of the Great Recession were 25-30 percent higher than they were at its onset, but wages as a share of the national income sunk to 58 percent.   The Occupy people confronted this fact and have chosen a course of inaction that will not result in angry, pointless, unproductive confrontations and more destruction of lives.  

A book was published this spring, Barbara Garson's Down the Up Escalator: How the 99 Percent Live in the Great Recession, that chronicles the way people's lives have been  changed and their way of coping with that change.  Barbara Garson, author of the satire on Lyndon Johnson, MacBird, is a master of what is known as the Wall Street Journal story.  It is a story that does not dwell on the theories and arguments about some  trend, but rather she lays out the facts of the trend and focuses on stories that illustrate how it affects real people and how they deal with it.  In this book, she relates how
"hard-working people are learning to make do with less money, less opportunity and less free time,"  and "show little interest in jumping on the treadmill required to keep up a middle-class lifestyle"  (L.A. Times review)

In one example she explores, a young college graduate watches his father who is a manager of a warehouse for a big box store have his wages frozen over the years while he is given more workers to supervise and realizes the company is trying to force him to quit.  The son has part time, rather menial employment, but decides to make it work rather than get on the hopeless treadmill he sees his father treading.  

Garson sees the beginnings of the Great Recession and its consquences beginning in the 1970s with outsourcing and offshoring of American jobs.  Then with Ronald Reagan's firing of air traffic controllers and officially embracing trickle-down economics, government joined corporations in the subjugation and economic disenfranchisement of American wage earners. One of the people she presents in her book is a Viet Nam veteran who frequented a cofee shop she worked at after he was discharged from active duty.  She relates he told her that in Viet Nam, "his company had stayed stoned the whole time. “Our motto,” he once told me, “was ‘let’s not and say we did.’”  That tactic of survival is in a way what the 99 percent are adopting.  They are surviving with what they have and doing without all those trappings that once defined the middle class.  Garson writes, “If the majority of Americans was earning less and producing more, who was going to buy all the stuff?” 

She says, "If you’re not a worker, not a consumer and you don’t earn significant income from investments, then you don’t have much of a place in capitalist society,”  And that is where the 99 percent finds itself.

Wage earners have been excluded from the opportunities that the middle class spent a century in building. As the KOS reviewer says:

We know the policies that would fix [America]. What we don't know is how to get there, how to overcome a broken Senate and a gerrymandered House and both political parties being more responsive to big money than to working people.

The response of the 99 percent is not action, but simply logic.  If you are excluded from partaking of the products of your labor, why participate in the labor?  By withholding participation and consumption, the establishment will eventually implode upon itself and fall into the black hole it has spent so much time and energy creating.  In the meantime, we can use those remnants of the economy available to us and use our "wit, shit, and grit" to get along.   

As the establishment falters, we can replace it with forms of government and a culture of sustenance that respects people and returns opportunities to them.

It takes patience and the spirit of creativity, quiet industry, and humor.  It will come to pass, and decency may inherit the earth.  

When politics are down and dirty, why bother?

My hopes for my grandchildren include their escape from South Dakota.  This has stirred some positive Democrats to come to the defense of their state and to launch some lofty speculations about what could redeem the state from its single-party government  and its descent into a hate-based version of conservatism.  

This week I turned over my duties as an officer in a county Democratic Party after almost 15 years.  I am allied with the Party on most issues.  I do not think government has the right to overrule women in their choices about their own bodies and their families, or the right to interfere in anyone's choices about those they wish to share and build their lives around.  I do believe that government has to be big enough and strong enough to enforce the standards of equality and justice for each individual and to provide recourse for people being oppressed, suppressed, and defrauded  by bureaucracies and corporations.   In its role as guardian of liberty, equality, and justice,  I think that government must help those who wish to protect the environment from wasteful and polluting human activities,  that it must establish policies to make healthcare accessible to those who are excluded from it, to provide a safe and efficient infra-structure so that the enterprises of its people can function and prosper, that it must regulate finances for the benefit of the people and not the crooks, and that it must operate on a frugal budget adequate to carry out those functions.  

There are many in the Democratic Party who think that in order for the Party to regain power and influence in the state they must relinquish those principles which identify the Party.  To those who think that the only way to grasp onto a shred of political power is to give up basic principles, then why not simply become a Republican?  Those who think that the essential liberal values are too important and defining to be sacrificed are regarded as left-wing extremists.  To win elections, the strategists say, one has to give up the very values that define the Democratic Party.  This intelligence comes from those political theorizers and strategists who comment on blogs and have, apparently, never faced the situations that real people find themselves in or actually engaged in a political campaign.  They have a wide range of notions of what the Democrats must do to regain power.  And most of those notions involve being a Republican.

Some Democrats are in a quandary because what they think are the only people who could be viable candidates for Sen. Tim Johnson's Senate seat have declined to run.  That leaves Rick Weiland, a man with a strong record of work and service, but who has lost two previous attempts to make it to Congress.  Those keyboard strategists have already dismissed him, because he does not seem to possess that "star" status that makes the political heart flutter and the mind go blank.  But they mostly dismiss him because he is a Democrat who has not dutifully renounced his values in order to appear to be what they term a moderate.  Which, as Rick Weiland says, is a Republican.  

Those keyboard strategists seem to think that being in power, even at the cost of any political integrity, is more important than representing the issues that concern real people who are struggling against a state government that has no interest in them.  

Rick Weiland represents a political choice, not an abject submission to the majority party and those who endorse it.  Those Democrats who dismiss Weiland have not the political wherewithal to recognize that whoever runs for the Democrats is taking on the Republican establishment, not just one candidate.  And that establishment has put into office two of the most feckless and unproductive people in Congress.  One wonders why these Democrats dismiss and denigrate Rick Weiland rather than go after the records of the feckless twins, John Thune and Kristi Noem.  Their major legislative initiatives were contrived by the febrile minds of conservatives, which make up fantasies to rail against.  John Thune sponsored legislation to prevent the EPA from imposing a tax on bovine flatulence.  The EPA never intended or even considered such a tax.  But John in his belief that he had a big issue in saving cow farts from the EPA persisted.

Kristi Noem took the same tactic when she promoted the legislation that would prevent the EPA from regulating the dust raised by farming.  The EPA looked to see if there was a public health menace in farm dust which contains the residue of herbicides and pesticides, but it never considered coming into farmland and telling tillers of the soil to keep the damned dust down.  

Our brilliant Democratic strategists dwell on Rick Weiland, who has never been involved in any stupid political stunts of the magnitude of Thune and Noem,  and they solemnly designate him a loser against the records and personalties of the likes of the dust and fart chasers.  These strategists have the right to form and express their opinions, but other people have the commensurate right to dismiss them as stupid and totally obtuse to the real issues that confront so many people in South Dakota and the nation.  Before the Internet, such opinions were generally confined to the corner tavern where they could be expressed and then forgotten by the next morning.  Now they circulate through the cyber atmosphere like cow farts and toxic dust.

It is one of the reasons that people who believe some constructive things can and should be done give up on the absurdity that politics have become.   One of the most notable counteractions to the insult-and-abuse obsessions of current politics is the Occupy Wall Street movement.  It is misunderstood and assumed to have petered out.  Its critics moaned that it failed to announce an agenda and get organized to take some kind of massive action other than make known its dissatisfaction with a country being controlled by the one percent. People so indoctrinated in politics as usual fail to grasp that the Occupy people see the usual modes of announcing plans and organizing people are what the movement wants to avoid.  The usual mode for conducting political business has deteriorated over the years to the point that it is mired in malice, bickering, and  total moral and intellectual inertia.  Occupy people see our political structures as nothing more than obstacles to addressing social issues, and they are convinced that circumventing politics-as-usual is the only way to deal with the problems we face.

An example of circumventing the established order is J.R. Fleming of Chicago who found it absurd that foreclosed houses in the Southside of Chicago were empty and abandoned by the  banks while thousands of people are homeless.   He has formed an organization  that occupies and restores abandoned houses and puts people in them.  He tells interested people: 

“The government failed us. The market failed us. Harvard, Yale and the University of Chicago failed us. Our government — the government — doesn’t belong to us. Forget them; they forgot us. We need to solve our problems ourselves.”

So, while people bicker over candidate personalities and exchange ignorant, ego-driven political opinions, the people who confront the real problems that need solving avoid politics and get to work in ways that actually accomplish something.  The first major accomplishment is getting free from our political system.

The police may close down the Occupy demonstrations, but they can't reach the real work being done.