Tag Archives: The Great Divide

A Man Walks Into A Bar …

Posted on by under Political commentary, Social commentary

I saw this story last night and I admit that I had a moment of cackling glee.  Well, perhaps more than a moment, even.

Judge rules bar was allowed to kick out Trump supporter

But then, fortunately or unfortunately, my wiser self, if I can be said to have one, kicked in and I realized that there is really nothing to love here.

The Story:

A man walks into a bar in Manhattan wearing his Donald Trump “MAGA” hat.  The man, an accountant by the name of Greg Piatek, began complaining about the service.  Now, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know if the service was slow, if the bar was packed and the staff overwhelmed, or what.  But after he complained, he was told to leave … which he did.  And then he went and found a lawyer and sued the bar.

The Hearing:

His lawyer claimed that he was thrown out of the bar because of his religious beliefs, saying that he had visited the 9/11 Memorial and wore the hat as part of his tribute:

“He was paying spiritual tribute to the victims of 9/11. The ‘Make America Great Again’ hat was part of his spiritual belief. Rather than remove his hat, instead he held true to his spiritual belief and was forced from the bar.”

And thus, said the lawyer, the man was discriminated against on the basis of his religion.  Filosofa cries “FOUL” on this one, for since when does wearing Donald Trump branded clothing qualify as a religious rite or ritual?

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice David Cohen ruled that the law doesn’t protect people from political discrimination, meaning the West Village bar did not overstep its bounds in kicking out the customer. The judge asked Piatek’s lawyer, Paul Liggieri, how the bar staff could have even been aware of Piatek’s ‘religious beliefs’, and the following conversation ensued:

Liggieri:  They were aware he was wearing the hat.

Judge Cohen:  How many members are in this spiritual program that your client is engaged in?

Liggieri:  Your honor, we don’t allege the amount of individuals.

Judge Cohen:  So, it’s a creed of one?

Liggieri:  Yes, your honor.

The Verdict:

And then the judge threw the case out of court, saying …

“Plaintiff does not state any faith-based principle to which the hat relates. Here the claim that plaintiff was not served and eventually escorted out of the bar because of his perceived support for President Trump is not outrageous conduct.”

Now … I fully agree with the judge and would have been appalled by any other ruling.  But, this case brings to light a deeper problem, I think.  This was an isolated incident, and likely there was more behind the story than is told in the media, such as rude behaviour on the part of Piatek.  But if we extrapolate, if we ask ourselves how this might lead to future incidents of this sort, it isn’t a long leap to envisioning a nation where there are ‘democrat restaurants’ and ‘republican restaurants’, where the partisan divide is taken far beyond the Twitter bickering of today.  Is this a world we want?  Do we want to have to wear a certain colour, hat, or badge to prove we are of a certain political belief in order to be allowed to enter a public establishment?  And, while the hat Piatek was wearing is, to me, akin to the red cape waved in front of a bull by a matador, I also do not wish to live in a world where people are thrown out of bars and restaurants simply for wearing the hat.  After all … I wear my Obama shirt in public, which I’m sure is just as annoying to some as the red MAGA hat is to me.

So, my glee was short-lived and now I am left with a conundrum.  The judge, in my opinion, could not have ruled otherwise, however does this open a door for more such lunacy?  Only time will tell.

There IS NO Alt-Left!!!

Posted on by under Political commentary, Racism & Bigotry

Donald Trump likes to make up words.  Think of ‘covfefe’, which apparently represented some thought that surreptitiously popped into his head during his early morning tweeting session back on May 31st.

covfefe-e1502997991608.jpgIt is what Orwell referred to as ‘newspeak’ in his dystopian novel 1984, and the word has no meaning, though many have applied whatever meaning seemed apt at a given moment.  Playing with words is fun, but words are important, too, and one needs to be careful about changing the meaning, even subtly.

Today we seem to have something called ‘alternative facts’.  The common use of this phrase has its origin on January 23rd when Trump’s mouthpiece, Kellyanne Conway, attempting to explain why Trump and later press secretary Sean Spicer lied about the size of the inaugural crowd, told Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet The Press.  “You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving — Sean Spicer, our press secretary — gave alternative facts.”

And thus the word ‘alternative’ took on greater meaning in our everyday language.  The short definition of ‘alternative’ is: available as another possibility.  In the newspeak definition of alternative, it apparently means … well, whatever Trump and his hired minions want it to mean at a given point on a given day.  This makes it a bit difficult for those of us with logical minds to keep up with the mixed and often garbled messages that come from the administration.

Alternative, recently shortened to ‘alt-‘ is one word that seems to fly about in any context or no context at all.  The ‘alt-right’, for example, by definition is a loosely defined group of people with far-right ideologies who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of white nationalism, principally in the United States, but also to a lesser degree in Canada and Europe. Paul Gottfried was the first person to use the term “alternative right”, when referring specifically to developments within American right-wing politics, in 2008.

The term has since gained wide currency with the rise of the so-called “alt-right”. White supremacist Richard Spencer coined the term in 2010 in reference to a movement centered on white nationalism, and did so, according to the Associated Press, to disguise overt racism, white supremacism, and neo-Nazism. The term has since expanded to include anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-feminism and homophobia. In other words, if you aren’t a straight, white, Christian male, you are the enemy of the alt-right.

So, there is an ‘alt-right’ movement that is typically considered to encompass all white supremacist, KKK and neo-Nazi groups and individuals.  But yesterday, in his erratic and generally disgusting informal press conference, Donald Trump made reference to something I had never heard before …

“What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right?”

Say what????  ‘Alt-left’???  There is no ‘alt-left’?  Oh, but wait, we are in the age of newspeak and post-truth, so if ‘alternative’ means whatever Trump & Co. want it to mean at any given time, perhaps at noon yesterday, at least in the tangled-web mind of da trumpeter, there was an alt-left.  My research shows that the term ‘alt-left’ initially made its debut earlier this year, when violent riots erupted in Berkeley, California, during protests over an appearance by former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley.

But Trump’s use of the word yesterday started quite a buzz. David Duke, former KKK grand poobah, even came up with a newspeak ‘definition’ of the term:

“Alt-left = BLM/Antifa communists who have burned cities, murdered cops & viciously attack thousands. Not morally the same as the Alt-Right.”

Wait … the alt-right, white supremacists have morals?  Who knew? Then Fox’ resident idiot, Sean Hannity, came up with HIS own definition:

“The Alt Left Propaganda media will run with every leak to help distract from Obamas & Co’s role in spying on @POTUS.”

And then … Britain’s own alt-right conspiracy theorist and editor-at-large of InfoWars.com, Paul Joseph Watson, had to jump on the bandwagon with his definition!

“I would use “alt-left” to distinguish it from actual liberals, but the inmates took over the asylum. Mainstream left is the alt-left.”

Huh?  I must have a bit of fog on the ol’ brain today, for that made no sense at all!  According to an article in WIRED  …

“… the intent seems to be to frame alt-left as the opposite of alt-right and create a false equivalence between groups on the far ends of the right and left. But here’s the thing: No left-wing group has ever called itself the alt-left. And the groups smeared by the alt-left label don’t include anything like the heinousness of overt white supremacism that has increasingly defined the alt-right.

It’s a blanket term some right-wing media commentators and white nationalists have taken to throwing over groups they disagree with, like the umbrella of “fake news” they use to describe stories they disagree with. Doing so manages to both minimize the ugliness of the alt-right and vastly overstate the actions and intentions of leftist groups.”

Let me go on record at this point as saying that there is no alt-left!  Repeat after me, folks … there … is … no … alt-left.  Never was.  It is yet another label, and the labels are not doing anything to help heal what I have been referring to as “the great divide”.  It is true that labels such as liberal and conservative are useful to identify a set of ideologies, a set of beliefs.  But beyond that, today they are being used to mock, taunt, and stir the already bubbling pot of hatred and intolerance.

After its use in the Berkeley incident earlier this year, the term rather faded into oblivion, but now that Donald Trump has put it back into play, I think it may well become a part of the common vernacular, and we do not need that. The ‘alt-right’ choose to be called that, for to them it legitimizes their platform of bigotry.  As I said in an earlier post, I shall call them what they are:  bigots, racists, white supremacists and Nazis.  However, those of us with liberal values do not choose to be called the alt-left and I, for one, refuse to be referred to as such.  They called me a snowflake, and I laughed, for snowflakes are things of nature, things of beauty.  But here I draw the line.  THERE IS NO ALT-LEFT.

Filosofa Thinks …

Posted on by under Social commentary

snowflakeI don’t really mind being called a ‘snowflake’ … snowflakes are beautiful, each one unique, delicate and lacy.  The term in itself does not offend me.  However, I resent the meaning that has been attached to the term, resent the fact that people who would call me this assume they know how I think on every issue, when they will not even be bothered to take a moment to listen to me.  Lately I have been doing a lot of thinking about what I have referred to as ‘The Great Divide’ in our society.

In doing a bit of research, I found articles about what is now called ‘hyper-partisanship’ dating back to 2012, during the time of the election in which President Obama was running for his second term of office.  Wikipedia defines hyper-partisanship as “A sharply polarized situation in which political parties are in fierce disagreement with each other.”  Sounds about right. I would add, “… to the extent that neither is willing to listen to the other or even consider compromise.”

Our two-party system has been around since 1796, although both parties have evolved throughout the years.  The two-party system is not, in and of itself, a bad thing, and in fact may well be the only thing that stands between a democratic republic and a dictatorship.  However, even the best of concepts, taken too far, can spell disaster.  Today, the two parties seem diametrically opposed.  There is no longer any middle ground, no longer any place for those who are not radically opposed to all the ideas of the other.  No one side is 100% right, nor 100% wrong, but there is no room in the middle. The space that used to be the middle, the moderates, is gone, leaving in its place a wide chasm – a no man’s land.

great divide-2During the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Thomas Jefferson was away in France, but he nonetheless objected to a formal provision in the Constitution for a two-party system, saying …

jefferson-2“Men are naturally divided into two parties. those who fear and distrust the people and wish to draw all power from them into the hands of the higher classes [and] those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise, depository of the public interests.’’

230 years ago, yet those words seem to perfectly define today’s two parties, the Republicans and the Democrats.  The Great Divide may be a bigger problem for the continuity of the United States than even the person currently sitting in the Oval Office, for he will be gone soon enough, but the divisiveness in this nation will remain.  What happened to those who, just a few short years ago, were considered moderates?  The went to the left, or to the right … they were actually pushed left or right, as there could be no middle ground.

Though I largely blame the current occupant of the Oval Office for the depth of the divide, in truth, it has been a long time coming.  I could write a small book on the history that has led to this moment, and perhaps I shall do so one day, but for this humble post, I am limited by constraints of time and space, and would prefer to focus the remainder on … how can we fix it?  Or can we?

Obviously the divergence of socio-political ideologies is not going away, so we must find ways to work within that framework.  The solution must come from two groups:  the federal government AND We The People.  Yes … WE. The. People. Obviously there need to be level heads in government to fix that which is broken, but who chooses those heads?  We do.  The heads need to understand that their job is to re-unite a nation divided, to heal the wounds of the past 10 years or so, and to sincerely debate the issues, arriving at solutions that, if they do not please everybody, at least accommodate the citizens.  Healthcare, for instance … no healthcare plan that causes 24 million people to lose their insurance coverage can be considered viable.

The next thing that leaders in Congress and the executive branch must do is remove the influences of big business and lobbyist groups from both the election process and the legislative process.  As it currently stands, big business and lobbyists give millions, nay billions, to candidates who, in exchange, promote the interests of those businesses and lobbyists in legislation.  This is not … I repeat this is NOT … a service or a benefit to We The People.  Elections need to be about what the people of this nation stand for, not what will put more profit in the hands of CEO’s and the NRA.

And then we come to us … me, you, the family down the street.  We played a large role in creating the Great Divide … now it is time for us to put away our petty differences, our greedy desires and try to help heal a nation torn asunder.  We must, once again, remember that we are all in this together and sometimes we may not like decisions that are made, but it is a nation of We The People, not ‘I The Person’.

What can we do?  First and foremost, we can … we must … educate ourselves, at least in the most basic ways in which our government works.  Then we must take it upon ourselves to learn about candidates, not just in presidential elections, but perhaps even more important, in the elections of our senators and representatives to Congress.  We must realize that everything we see on social media should be considered false information unless it can be verified through reliable sources.  98% of it cannot, therefore it is a falsehood.  We must stop listening to friends, relatives, and Facebook groups, take out our brains, dust them off and learn to think for ourselves.  That done, we must then vote for the candidate whose ideology seems destined to help the nation … it may not seem to help you as an individual at the moment, but if it helps the nation, it is still in your best interest. We must all learn to think on a more global, more long-term basis.

The other thing we all must do is learn to listen.  My observation in the past year, and I admit to being guilty of this also, is that we only listen to those whose ideas mirror our own.  We cut off ideas that we disagree with, boycott information that is contrary to our own ideology, and close not only our ears, but our minds to the thoughts of others.  What if, instead of saying “you’re wrong”, we said, “okay, but tell me why you feel that way”.  Or … “but what if …?”  We might just find that our beliefs are not as different as we thought.

Okay, yes, I know that by now you are saying, “Wow … Filosofa done gone and lost her marbles … she thinks she’s Miss Pollyanna.”  No … I am a realist, a pragmatist, and I know this is all pie-in-the-sky for most people.  But the reality is that this nation is ripe at the moment for a strong, autocratic leader to come in and completely change the structure of the democracy (democratic-republic, for those politico purists) that we have enjoyed for 230 years.  Donald Trump is not, was not, that leader, for his flaws are many and his honesty is a joke.  However, if somebody such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Vladimir Putin, or Norbert Hofer, someone with intellect, charisma and dreams of grandeur were to appear on the scene, I can easily see the demise of the United States of America that we have always known.  I know my solutions are pipe dreams, but perhaps they make us start to think … perhaps at least it is time for us to wake up and acknowledge that we have a real problem and that each and every one of us must contribute to the solution.  All I ask is that you think about it.

American Civil War Redux

Posted on by under Political commentary, Social commentary

The new American Civil War is not about slavery, but it contains undertones of racism.  It is not neatly divided along an imaginary line such as the Mason-Dixon line, but the divide is a much finer line, splitting homes, schools, families, and workplaces.  As was the case in the 1860s, there is no middle ground.  There are no soldiers in uniforms carrying guns, yet, but there are the media, both mainstream and social.  I have dubbed this war ‘The Great Divide’, and not since the civil rights era has this nation been so ideologically divided.

Trump’s dilemma, of which he is seemingly unaware, is how to unite the people of this nation.  Trump claims that he did not create the divide, and in that he is right.  America has always had a political divide; one that was probably at its smallest in the years immediately following World War II, when the nation came together in relief and the beginnings of a new prosperity.  But since the origination of the so-called Tea Party movement in 2009, the divide has been growing exponentially.  Ostensibly, the movement is in opposition to excessive taxation and government intervention in the private sector while supporting stronger immigration controls.  But beneath the surface, there are undertones of bigotry.  The beginning of the movement can be traced back to 19 February 2009, less than a month after the inauguration of the nation’s first African-American president.

With the divisiveness generated by the dissatisfaction of those associated with the Tea Party movement, the gap between right and left, liberal and conservative, Republican and Democrat, began to widen.  The right swung farther to the right and the left pushed back by going farther to the left.  By the end of President Obama’s first term in 2013, there was no longer any noticeable middle ground, no moderates who might have been able to help bridge the gap.

During President Obama’s second term, the gap continued to widen, with Republicans in Congress determined to throw up barricades to any and all of the President’s policies, even those they agreed with in theory.  The term, A House Divided, came to be the reality of the U.S. government, with Congress accomplishing less and less each year, and the President barely able to direct any meaningful domestic policy.

Enter the 2016 election and one narcissistic, demagogue candidate whose only hope to win the election was to “divide and conquer”.  So no, Donald Trump did not cause the divide, however he widened the gap by a very large margin.  He ranted, lied, cheated and stole, figuring either that he would clean up the mess later, or that it would eventually take care of itself.  But guess what?  Since taking office, he has only added to the gap, without the slightest attempt to bring the two sides together.  Now, nearly one-third of the way through 2017, there is more hatred, more disruptiveness, more bigotry, and more divisiveness than at any time in the last 50 years.

Which brings me back to my original point:  Donald Trump has many problems facing him, however perhaps the biggest one is the society that he helped split into two radically differing sectors.  Yet, instead of attempting to be more moderate, to take into consideration the needs and ideologies of both sides, he is as a bulldozer, plowing his way through any who do not agree with him.  Those in his camp applaud, while those outside the camp only get angrier and feel more and more marginalized.

A president needs to be much more than a politician.  He must also be a statesman and a diplomat, for he answers to ALL the people, not just those of his party, not just those who voted for him, and not just those who nod their heads in agreement every time he opens his mouth.  He represents We The People, every single man, woman and child living in this nation, and if he forgets that, he is doomed to failure.  Donald Trump has not forgotten that … he just never understood it to begin with.

We have seen much destruction and devastation within our country in the past three months, and if Trump persists in his goals to build a wall, to deport refugees, to ban immigrants, to defund environmental protections, to defund public schools, to destroy the ACA, and to strip civil rights from minorities, there will indeed be a civil war in this nation.  Where President Obama worked toward creating transparency in government, Trump has pulled the curtains shut tightly.  Where President Obama sought inclusiveness for all, Trump’s policies are clearly exclusionary.

Thus far, the only thing that has halted major outbreaks of violence throughout the nation is the expectation by those of us on the left that the investigations into the Russian connections of Trump and his gang will ultimately result in charges of treason, and Trump will be impeached.  In the event that those investigations are somehow stifled, or go by the wayside without satisfactory results, there will be an internal war in the United States.  There will be riots such as have not been seen in 50 years, families will be split asunder, and people will die.

I gave this much thought before writing this post, and searched my own soul, asking myself if I was being an alarmist.  The end result, after weeks of thought, is that no, I am not an alarmist.  I am, just as I have always been, a realist.  I talk to people on both sides of the invisible fence, and I know that both are spoiling for a fight. And the Great Divide goes well beyond politics, beyond even ideology … it goes to the core of who we are.

At this point, there are no simple solutions, no panaceas, and it will require more than our elected representatives can do to fix the problem. It will require that each of us, no matter which side of the partisan aisle we support, find it in our hearts to remember our humanitarianism, to be flexible, to be willing to meet the other halfway.  However, Trump and Congress must be the drivers of any possible solution. If they fail to understand the magnitude of the problem, if they ignore the problem and further divide the nation, if they discount We The People, they have only themselves to blame for being short-sighted.  They will pay the price at the polls next year, but we will pay in the streets this year.  Think about it.