Author: John

Excuses

~ John ~ Leave a comment

My car broke down.  I couldn’t get childcare. I forgot it was today.

As a domestic relations mediator, I’m used to excuses.  The reasons why people don’t show up for their court-ordered sessions.  My assistant and I confirm with folks via email and phone in the weeks and days before appointments, making sure they know where they are going, how much it costs, and when the appointment is scheduled.  And still the appointed hour can come and go.  I wait ten minutes with the other person, typically an exasperated co-parent whose body language telegraphs this is just what I expected.   Then I call the no-show’s cellphone, listen to the excuse, explain that I’ll have to issue a report for the judge, and listen to more excuses.  Or leave a voicemail that is never returned.

But lately, among a certain population, a new pattern is emerging.  When I call, they answer right away.  After the dog-ate-my-homework excuses, a question comes up.  “Can we just do it over the phone?”

That population is immigrants.  And although I do not ask, it often turns out they’re undocumented.  And the reason their “car broke down” is that they were afraid to come to the courthouse.   There’s good reason for this fear.  ICE explicitly targets courthouses as locations to arrest undocumented folks.  Public records enable ICE to know exactly who will be showing up, where, and when. It’s a highly accurate strategy.

Why do undocumented immigrants show up to court?  To get restraining orders.  Negotiate parenting plans.  Modify child support.  Fight evictions.  Register vehicles.  Defend against criminal charges.   The 14th Amendment gives all persons present on US soil equal protection under law, and in 1982 the Supreme Court held that this rule applies to undocumented immigrants too.  Every person physically present in this country has an equal constitutional right to walk through the courthouse door and ask a judge to protect their kids from abuse, or to seek child support for kids who are often American citizens.   To allow ICE to target courthouses literally bars the doors of justice to entire families.  This is why several state court judges have objected to these ICE tactics, and lawsuits have been filed.  But ICE, driven by Trump’s anti-immigrant frenzy, remains undeterred.

And a frenzy it is.  The official White House website calls MS-13 gang members “animals.”  Presidential tweets decry immigrant “infestation”.  Apologists argue that these epithets are meant to dehumanize only some immigrants and not others; but from a rhetorical standpoint it’s a poetic device called synechdoche, in which the part stands for the whole.  Anyway, that debate is now moot.  Our government has now progressed from verbal to physical dehumanization in its treatment of immigrants – criminals or not — by separating parents from children, depriving them of sleep, clean water, decent food, and adequate sanitation — conditions now well-documented in camps operated under the “zero-tolerance” policy.  Guards respond to detainee complaints with brutalizing scorn.  Our president’s willingness to treat people worse than properly cared-for animals, as a brazen instrument of policy, conveys the profoundest nonverbal message of all.

One might think that, with the family separation nightmare on the border now declared over, the human rights crisis has passed.  But zero-tolerance enforcement still separates families within the US every day, in ways large and small.  A parent in mediation recently argued to me that the kids’ mom should no longer have parenting time solely because she was undocumented: “What if she gets picked up?” the father argued.  “Where would the kids be then?”  A year ago such arguments would be dismissed as unconstitutional, and I’m hoping they would be on those grounds.  But the father’s practical concern is also legitimate; parents who live as fugitives cannot be maximally effective co-parents to their kids.

Hannah Arendt describes how totalitarianism progresses stepwise: “the Nazis started their extermination of the Jews by first depriving them of all legal status … and had carefully tested the ground and found out to their satisfaction that no country would claim these people before the right to live was challenged.”  It is possible that our president intends to go no further in violating the constitution he once swore to defend, now that he has stripped immigrants of their rights to equal enjoyment of family relationships and access to justice.  But it is also possible that we are in a ground-testing phase.  The direction and momentum of recent events do not bode well.

But even if we descend no further, it must be faced that some among us now live under an increasingly totalitarian form of government. Those bearing the weight of unfreedom may be among our families, friends and acquaintances; or they may merely be those who mow our lawns, harvest our food, frame and roof our houses, plump the pillows of our business trips, and call “housekeeping” as we check out.

Either way, the rest of us may now grapple with the question of what interpersonal obligations we owe to offset the injustices that increasingly surround us – or if we will even choose to see them.  For me, the least I can do is to stop making assumptions about the excuses I hear from mediation no-shows — to stop pretending that I can distinguish negligence from fear.

The Words that Are Not There

~ John ~ Leave a comment

In Boulder, Colorado, we are learning to read the words that are not there.

I recently read Anthony Marra’s brilliant volume of linked stories, “The Tsar of Love and Techno.”  It chronicles three generations of Chechnya over the past half-century.  It’s a world of ordinary censorship, of hinterland bureaucrats, obliged to erase things that exist and insert things that do not, spending their lives obliterating the lives of others in patient expectation of the day when their own lives will be in turn obliterated.  Along the way they make daily compromises to feed their families, commit private acts of rebellion, perform small mercies, and even make secret works of art.

We in springlike Boulder are miles away from Chechnya’s ruined dystopia.  But our local paper, the Boulder Daily Camera, is the property of hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which owns over 70 newspapers from the Boston Herald to the San Jose Mercury News.  Last week, the Camera’s local publisher fired its editorial page editor for publishing a commentary – not in the paper itself, but on his own online blog – that criticized Alden’s practice of looting its newspaper holdings for cash.  Our Editorial Advisory Board – of which I’m a newly-resigned member — sought to comment on Dave Krieger’s firing and were told we could not.  The newspaper, that for weeks ran letters to the editor complaining of the cancellation of Blondie and Peanuts, has not run one letter touching on the Krieger matter.  This silence joins a disturbing pattern — In Kingston, New York, the Daily Freeman’s editor has told its staff to erase from all news coverage any mention of parent company Alden’s management practices.

Instead, last Saturday, the Camera’s editorial page “reported” on the firing through omission and erasure.  Krieger’s name was missing from the masthead.  Mine was missing from the Advisory Board roster.  Whereas there are customarily five Advisory Board contributions, last Saturday only three appeared, the blank space filled with larger headlines and alternative copy.  One had to “read” the story by understanding what was not there.  This is now one develops the literacy of censorship.

Saturday afternoon, a dear friend in her eighties came to visit me.  Her family left Germany in 1933.  Her father was working for a literary newspaper during his postdoctoral year – it was the first outlet that Hitler closed.  She arrived at my door, her face haunted.  “This is how it begins,” she said.  I gave her a cup of tea and reassured her that we are not there, and we are not going there — not on my generation’s watch.  But I couldn’t calm the look in her eyes. In the morning paper she had seen ghosts.

Today, in the face of this public pressure the Camera could not render visible, our Boulder City Council will consider a resolution condemning Alden’s suppression of free speech and Krieger’s firing, and declaring the importance of independent media for the community.  As a result, the Camera’s city staff writer, whose beat it is to cover the council’s agenda, was able to run a small news item on the back page of today’s edition that covered the Krieger story – not for itself, but for Council’s proposed action addressing it.  Such are the small acts of provincial rebellion against central authority that might have featured in Marra’s stories.   Indeed, given this unfolding drama, Marra could not have invented a more deliciously ironic name for our paper than the “Daily Camera.” We will see how the tale turns out.

Boulder’s Assault Weapons Ban

~ John ~ Leave a comment

I never associate 4/20 with pot.  For me the day’s anthem has always been the dirge of Columbine, and not coincidentally, the birthday of Adolf Hitler.  The subterranean bells of Antichristmas.

So my heart beat for the kids who marched on Friday, demanding freedom — not to light up, but simply to live.  Parkland survivor David Hogg nailed it: “We’re children.  You guys are the adults.  You need to come up with a solution.” As our velocirapturous news cycle sprints off to devour its next victims, the moral challenge from his generation to ours remains.  How will we meet it?

In Boulder, our City Council took up the flag of gun control while the klieg lights were hot, drafting an assault weapons ban and passing it on first reading.  In doing so, we invited the issue, and many gun-rights activists, to town.  Having listened to their case at a marathon public hearing, Sam Weaver briefly considered taking the ordinance off the docket and putting the question to voters, but has now reversed course.  He’s right to change his mind.

He’s right because gun control is one of today’s most glaring failures of our representative government; therefore, gun control is among the most obvious places to start fixing it, in any way possible.  Since we live in the United States, it’s useful to go back to a seminal text of American democratic theory, Federalist Paper No. 10.  Authored by James Madison (sorry, Hamilton fans), this tract acknowledges that democratic governments fail when overcome by the narrow, interest-driven power of “faction”.  Allowing the people to govern directly permits this interest-driven impulse to take over, resulting in tyranny of the majority and collapse of freedom.  Modern examples of failed direct democracy, especially in societies riven by sharp ethnic tensions, are too numerous and tragic to recite.  As one observer put it after an African election and its bloody aftermath, “This was not an election.  It was a census.”

Madison argued that democracy can succeed only by two means.  First, the passions of self-interest must pass through the filter of representation by elected leaders, “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”  This ideal of public service, essential to the American form of government, was common in Madison’s day but is rare in ours — an absence we’re quick to condemn in our adversaries and overlook in our friends.

Second, Madison urged that the sphere of democracy be enlarged, so that the passions of one group could be offset by the passions of another, enabling representatives to balance and reconcile interests for the benefit of the whole.  Only in a large enough arena, governed by few enough representatives, could coherent and democratic decisions be reached.  A federal system, framed by our Constitution, achieved this balance.

It’s worked, more or less, for two hundred years.  But lately?  Rather less than more.  On gun control, not at all.  At the federal and state levels, “faction” has taken hold of the representatives, whose powers of wisdom and discernment have been replaced by ruthless advocacy, bought and goaded by supporters who brook no compromise and punish disloyalty.  What passes for debate has deafened us all.   And tearing at everything, a rising wind of fear: of neo-Nazis, of the government, of psychopaths, of godlessness.  Of each other.

Into this hurricane, council has launched its little boat.  In Madison’s terms, city government is too small a sphere for this action.  But since all the bigger ships have foundered, it’s obvious why we decided to venture out.  Our council members now have the chance to act like the legislators they were elected to be, and that by taking up this issue, they’ve chosen to become.  If, having heard from gun owners, there are interests to be balanced, then balance them.  If you have to face down a few of your own supporters in the process, welcome to elected office.  You could even seek a creative solution that reaches beyond the simple confines of an assault weapons ban, perhaps drawing upon the resources of sister municipalities less liberal than Boulder, to find a path towards saner regulation of weapons which many abhor and others champion.

Councilwoman Jill Grano called this a “no-brainer.”  It is anything but.  Still, you guys decided to pick up this flag.  It’s time to carry it.