Our Public Pedagogy of
Incivility
Michael
Shermer wrote a compelling summary of what the best available data shows
about the relationship between gun ownership and violence—at the individual,
family, and state levels.
Laura
Bischoff analyzed the struggles surrounding Issues 2 and 3 on the Ohio
state ballot for this Fall.
All week we have read about the ongoing Ohio charter
schools controversy and the ‘fog machine at the Pentagon.’
In the sports pages we see that Atlanta Hawk’s player Thabo
Sefolosha was found innocent by a jury in NYC of obstructing justice,
resisted arrested and disorderly conduct charges filed after the police broke
his leg.
Rick
Pitino’s NCAA powerhouse basketball program is now under investigation for
allegedly providing strippers and prostitutes for recruits and their fathers.
Dana
Milbank analyzes how a few dozen far right Tea Party members of the House ‘have
plans to bend the entire House to their will,’ no matter the consequences.
And William
Hershey notes that incivility in politics resulted in defeat for
Republicans in 1964 and then again for Democrats in 1968, when Ray Bliss
restored civility within the Republican Party to defeat a sitting VP (before
Bliss was fired by the victorious Nixon who then rolled back civility efforts…and
was defeated as a result).
What do these stories have in common?
Men with power corrupting civil society and our body
politic? Just the way it is? Competing echo chambers in the internet era
insulating opponents from the need to engage with alternative perspectives? Far right business groups funding think tanks
to provide ‘data’ to support any opinion, no matter how inconsistent with the
best available data?
The best available data shows that a gun in your home for
protection is 22 times more likely to be used to kill a member of your family
(suicide, accidental shooting, homicide) than to be used against an intruder
and states with the strongest gun laws have the lowest firearm fatality rates
while states with the most permissive gun laws have the highest firearms
fatality rates.
As a result, Shermer argues, it is no accident that 1.35
million Americans have been the victims of gun fatalities since 1970 (compared
to 1.39 million who have died in all wars since the American Revolution); mass
public shootings now occur once every 1.6 weeks (compared to once every 2.6
weeks before 2010); and in 2014 alone 66,019 Americans were killed or injured
by a gun…180 per day, 7.5 per hour. Not
an accident; a choice.
Issue 2 seeks to make the citizen initiative process more
restrictive to prevent business interests from ‘using the citizen initiative
process to their benefit’ as they did when they got a constitutional amendment
passed authorizing four casinos the sponsors of the initiative now profit
from. Issue 3, to legalize marijuana, is
being portrayed as another abuse of power by business leaders sponsoring this
initiative.
There was no effort to change the initiative process to stop
the casino amendment or after it passed or even now, just as we have seen no
effort to reign in the business leaders profiteering on tax dollars as they
impoverish our public school system in the charter school scandal.
And that effort now, targeting Issue 2, depends on a willful
misreading of the Issue 2 language. If
the sponsors of Issue 3 really cared about reducing the ability of business
interests to exploit tax payers they would widen their scope to include
preventing their own business allies already doing just that.
Thabo Sefolosha was assaulted by the police and then charged
by those officers with the standard charges used to punish anyone who takes
issue with police brutality: obstructing justice, resisted arrested and disorderly
conduct charges. When a jury heard the
evidence they found him innocent of all charges.
Were he not a wealthy NBA star he would not have been able to
fight this systematic assault that makes NYC look a lot like the small town
politics detailed in the DOJ’s Ferguson Report, where all the power players are
in on the ‘conventional wisdom’ that ‘these people’ are unwilling to accept
individual responsibility or accountability so it is okay to demonstrate a lack
of individual responsibility and accountability in punishing them. His civil suit may shine a light on this, but
for how long?
As a life-long athlete and sports fan I am deeply offended by
the Rick Pitino’s and Joe Paterno’s and countless others who feed on our sports
frenzy to become role models for misogyny, ignorance, and the blindness of the privileged
who insist they deserve to be above the law.
As a life-long political junky I am deeply offended by the Tea
Party, Heritage Foundation, Pentagon PR experts, Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter
types who feed on our democratic openness to become role models for (see above)…such
that a president seeking reasonable restrictions to reduce regular violence is
greeted by hate-filled, misinformed, privileged protesters persuaded by the
likes of these to see themselves as put-upon victims rather than among the privileged.
“Civility requires practice,” Hershey tells us and I
agree. What these stories have in common
is that they reveal elites in our country providing ordinary Americans with
repeated opportunities and invitations to be (and become) less civil, to be
less skilled in the art of democratic citizenship, and less able to make democracy work for all of us.
Incivility, like our vigilante tradition and new jim crow, is shown here to be an elite-led form of violence eating away at the great American experiment.
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