Ordinary Citizens

I’ve encountered the term “ordinary citizens” in my daily reading of news reports with disturbing frequency lately. I make no apology for this bit of pedantry, but the uniquely American idea is that all of us citizens are “ordinary citizens.” That is what is meant by “equality.” So, why the insistence on this differentiation?

I grew up white and fatherless in Montgomery, Alabama in the fifties and sixties. Chaos, destruction, anger, violence, fear, suspicion and outright hatred permeated the cultural atmosphere. It was a time between worlds, as Matthew Arnold put it, “the one dead; the other, powerless to be born.”

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., James Meredith, Floyd McKissick, Bull Connor, John Patterson, George Wallace, Bobby Kennedy, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, strode across our lives playing out the end-games of official institutional racism—the, let it be said here, ubiquitous Jim Crow civil and social system. This was not just a southern thing, it was an American thing. Churches, schools, community centers, hospitals, YMCAs and YWCAs—every single aspect of the separate-but-(un)equal culture was shattered. Old ways came to an end. Nobody knew what the new ways would be.

In more ways than we ordinary citizens yet know, it’s like that now.

To make matters even more complicated, there was also a war on, and it brought the forced conscription of young men around Montgomery county. The young men taken were mostly the black and the un-well-connected white. Jim Crow working unimpeded at the Federal level.

We lived our day-to-day lives inside a tornado roaring through a bone-yard.

Fifty years on, the civil system in the US—the core institution of the old institutional racism, holding its power as it always has by structural process and political appointment—remains. No longer the exclusive provenance of white people, the civil system is multi-racial and multi-cultural. It retains its steely grip on the real levers of power—the ability to operate “the system,” the sure but mostly unseen hands administering the rules that direct, control and influence the daily behavior of ordinary people. Barak Obama’s triumph is as much a signal of the change in this system as anything else. Surely, and all to the good, Mr. Attorney General Holder notwithstanding, it is not about race anymore.

In the modern civil system, we have exchanged the Jim Crow positioning of African Americans at the bottom rung of society for a far less-obvious, more sophisticated but similarly insidious system devoted to the civil positioning of ordinary Americans without regard to race, creed or national origin. The modern system is based, as it really has always been, on economics and influence. The working and the non-working poor, the old, the sick, the un-or-poorly-educated, the fringe-religious, the drug addicted, the foster-system-ed, the illegally or dubiously resident, the un-credentialed, and the newly scandalized and always manipulable—the un-creditworthy—have replaced the ham-handed color-profiling civil system extant under Jim Crow.

These new “untouchables” of the civil caste system are the modern grist for the institutional grinding wheel—not so readily identifiable as by the color of our skins, but just as easily targetable by the new-breed manipulators who own unfettered access to our information, our systemic fingerprint, our social and cultural identity.

The N-words and the J-words, and the S-words, and the C-words, and the W-words of 20th century America have been replaced by a 21st century profile generated from answers to a series of questions which feed the new –ism Gnostic code. What is your credit score? Do you have insurance? What is your social security number, your driver’s license number, or your government-issued ID number? Who has custody of your children? Are both biological parents present in the home? What was your taxable income the last three years? Do you own or rent? Do you receive or are you required to pay child support? Do you have a chronic illness? Heart disease? Diabetes? Do you have a disability or some other personal situation which causes you to be unable to work? Are you obese? Do you use or have you ever used tobacco? Have you now or have you ever had a sexually transmitted disease? Are you HIV positive? Do you have a compromised immune system? Do you take prescription drugs? Brand name or generic? Have you ever been convicted of a crime? Have you ever been arrested? Would you take a drug test?

From the answers comes your “ordinary citizen” profile, your consequently assigned place in the civil hierarchy.

People insist on continuing to ask, is racism alive in America? Oh, yes, the same old sorry racism that across the USA exploited the labor and defenselessness of women like Rosa Parks, that stoked the angst of W.E.B. Dubois, Malcolm X, Bobby Seale, and John Carlos, that prompted The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King to re-invent non-violent civil disobedience for America.

Pause to ponder that—Civil disobedience.

Everyone knows that on many levels, racism still lurks among us. We don’t need a Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Or an Eric Holder to remind us of our old and current racial sins. We are culturally, like the oft caricatured repentant drunk “taking the cure,” forever trying to do better. But our credibility is shot, our past overshadows our present, and nobody really wants to let us forget it. That’s just how it is right now. How it is.

But the racism debate is a red herring.

What’s lost in all our learned and emotional discussions of racism, of institutionalized racism, is that the civil system, populated with an overwhelming majority of white people during Jim Crow, but today a modern marvel of diversity, exerts ever more complete control over our ordinary citizen lives, our opportunities, our access to capital, education, healthcare, utilities, transportation, technology, child care, elder care, and on and on. And while the old methodology of institutional racism against black people has fallen away, the new methods, casting their much wider net of civil-control, achieve the old ends far more efficiently. Here, the “beyond-ordinary citizens” achieve their inflated status.

We need look no further than the immediate past presidential election. The winner of the election is clearly a fortuitous anomaly. Thank God that barrier is breached forever. But the practical. on-the-ground mechanics of Barak Obama’s electoral victory lead us to one inevitable conclusion. Our national and local political apparatus clearly wants us to continue to stay racially and culturally divided, to get us to continue to vote in blocs, to remain, for their purposes, predictable—“working-class white” vs African Americans vs Hispanics vs Indian-Americans vs Asian Americans. Picking at the scabs over the old wounds of racism keeps us comfortably divided and eminently predictable.

How is that system any different than the Jim Crow system?

Our best thinking and our best exhortations would lead us to say, would that our race would rise up, that it would set aside its differences as to color and gender and creed and national origin. Would that our race would confront today’s injustices not as the scion of Jim Crow’s racial system, but as the scion of Jim Crow’s civil system. Would that our race, our human race, might stand together and proclaim that the least able of America are as worthy as the most able, should have the same access to the national bounty in clean water, air, power, fuel, technology, education, healthcare, opportunity, and that every person in the US merits the respect and deference given to kings from birth right through to the natural ends of our lives. Would that as a race of enlightened humans, we might see past our own petty and narrow prejudices, and view a far greater vista for ourselves. That we would all see one another as “ordinary citizens.”

That was and is the uniquely American idea. That is the idea of “all men are created equal.” Race-baiting from whatever perspective serves one and only one purpose—to keep us diverted from that idea, from that core principle. Racial and social injustices are real. The horrors perpetrated in the name of the superiority of one race over another, one gender over another, one religion over another, one national origin over another, one tribe over another have happened and continue to happen around the globe. Just ask a Bosnian, or a Serb, or a Hutu, or a Tutsi, or a Sunni or a Shiite, or a Christian. Asking people to forget those horrors, or to just get over them, is like asking an amputee to forget the lost limb. Not happening.

Remember, then, the chaos and the horror of what has happened as the overt result of racism, and unite in the vow to never give it place anywhere in our culture again. But with that same passion and unity, remember that racism is a vicious, despicable, intolerable tactic, but it is a tactic, employed to advance a greater strategy—the superiority of one person or one group over another.

With that distinction in mind, we must coldly look to the other –isms in America, economic-ism, age-ism, sex-ism, health-ism, greed-ism, child exploitation-ism, self-aggrandizement-ism, and any other –ism (the glorification of the trivial-ism, for example) which seeks to vault one person’s fundamental civil status above another and confront them for what they have always been, the most sinister -ism of all, the tyranny of civil institutions-ism, the tyranny of the institutional state over its ordinary citizenry. Americans are all “ordinary citizens”: nothing more; nothing less.

Forget that, move beyond that, and all hope for the uniquely American idea lies slain.

NOT GOING GENTLE . . .

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. . . .”
From: Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” 1952

Several of my 60-ish and 70-ish friends have confided to me recently they are giving up, going on unemployment until they can draw Social Security, or going for “early retirement” which means drawing a slightly diminished SS check and opting into Medicare at the earliest possible moment. It’s just too hard to find a decent job or to start a business in “these economic times.”

Eight months ago most people never used the words, “the economy” in a sentence even once in a week. They were too busy using the words that are making a comeback now, “gas prices.” Now they say, ”the economy” or “this economy” every couple of hours. We’re scared and demoralized. The president scared us even more so he could get his precious stimulus bill passed. It passed. $13 more a week (if you’re working) starting around June. Oo-rah!

Then what?

Part of the problem is the age-discrimination thing. It’s hard to get people excited about it. What with so many single moms needing in-vitro fertilization and all. The forty-somethings at the bureaus which are supposed to enforce the laws against ageism have no vested interest in vigorously doing that. They think, “what if I need that job? Why should it go to or stay with that old person?” We’re used to that thinking because we subscribed to it back in the me-decades, the seventies, eighties and nineties. What goes around . . .

What my 60ish and 70ish fellows really mean is, “I’m dropping off the grid.” We’ll draw our puny government assistance all right—we deserve it; we paid into it all these years. But we’ll do things for which we can get paid in cash, and like Daschle or Geithner, we’ll forget to report it. Hey, we’re old, our memories are going.

This is how we’ll get our revenge against the marginalization of our kind—us old folks. We’ll babysit, carpenter, yardwork, powerwash, appliance-fix, car-fix, odd-job, flyer-handout, business-consult and any number of other invisible economy jobs, and the government won’t get the benefit of our taxes any more, or of our individual and collective wisdom (which it clearly doesn’t want, representing as it does, according to that limp-viper, Harry Reid, the “failed thinking of the past.”

Fail this!

Oh no, we’ll NOT go gentle into the good night of desperation and compliant despair, walking lockstep into the faceless maw of government-run warehouses for the old; we’ll coldly, quietly, invisibly, with all the beauty, cunning and calculation of that most elegant villanelle, “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”