Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
May 22, 2022
Hi All – One week ago an 18-year-old white man drove 200 miles to a mostly Black section of Buffalo, where he killed 10 people and wounded 3 more. What can we DO?
One thing we should have learned by now is that the easy access to high-powered guns means that people will die. Buffalo was the 198th mass shooting (4 or more people shot) in 2022, an average of 10 a week. (And there have been 13 since Buffalo.) Despite warnings of mental health problems, the shooter was able to buy an AR-15 assault rifle. After every well-publicized mass shooting, it's the same story. The shooter used a military combat weapon that Congress or whoever has been unable to prevent from being manufactured or sold to people who have expressed publicly their interest in killing lots of people. Despite our zillion-dollar Pentagon budget, we have not managed to find a way to defend ourselves against somebody who can buy an AR-15.
We have also learned – or been reminded of – the trending variant of white supremacy called "the replacement theory." The bit of nonsense premiered in Charlottesville in 2016, when white guys with Tiki Torches marched and chanted "They will not replace us" and "Jews will not replace us." Historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explains what this means in a New Yorker article linked below. What is especially significant about this, in my opinion, is that these marchers and chanters are in existential fear of Jews, people of color, immigrants, and all those unworthy to live in the same country as these white guys; and the failure of white women to have more babies is a big part of the problem. This is all classic, old-school fascism.
Let us hope that the naming of so many enemies of the fascist dystopia will motivate the "enemies" thus named to unite in common cause, and to fight back on the many fronts where battle is now raging. We can do this.
Further Reading About The Buffalo Massacre
"We Are Not Terrified. We Are Tenacious." - Life against death in Buffalo.
By JoAnn Wypijewski, The Nation [May 20, 2022]
---- A "majority minority" city now, it is 43 percent white. I don't know what high-schoolers learn about their state anymore, but the City of Good Neighbors' history is linked to waterway commerce, grain milling, heavy industry, the railroad (Underground and over), immigration, … At least some of that must filter through to youth in the state's unnoticed tiny towns, because, in good times and bad, Buffalo is a city that is talked about. … The spirit of the people who held on—and it cannot be overstated that the East Side has survived because of those people, including the roll of the long and most recent dead—is evident now in the wake of horror. It is memorialized in the names, and the ages, of those killed: Ruth Whitfield, 86: Pearl Young, 77; Katherine Massey, 72; Heyward Patterson, 67; Celestine Chaney, 65; Geraldine Talley, 62; Aaron Salter Jr., 55; Andre Mackniel, 53; Margus Morrison, 52; Roberta Drury, 32. It is exemplified in the outpouring of mutual support. In love and in rage. In endeavors that have grown up from the roots. [Read More]
American Racism and the Buffalo Shooting
By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, The New Yorker [May 17, 2022]
---- Once startling and noteworthy, mass shootings have melded into the background of life in the U.S. Since January, there have been almost two hundred shootings involving at least four victims shot or killed, according to the Gun Violence Archive. A recent report published by the C.D.C. showed that, from 2019 to 2020, the over-all homicide rate involving a firearm rose by nearly thirty-five per cent. The Buffalo massacre stands out not only because of the number of people killed but because of the political nature of the assault. This must be viewed within the context of the growing normalization of racism and political violence in the U.S. If Dylann Roof, the white racist who killed nine Black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June of 2015, helped to inaugurate the racial grievance at the core of the Trump Presidency, then the Buffalo shooter's killing spree may be emblematic of its still rippling effects. Roof, whom the Buffalo shooter acknowledges in his manifesto as a "freedom fighter," also penned a manifesto full of deranged ideas, linking Black crime with the decline of white life in the U.S. [Read More]
---- Once startling and noteworthy, mass shootings have melded into the background of life in the U.S. Since January, there have been almost two hundred shootings involving at least four victims shot or killed, according to the Gun Violence Archive. A recent report published by the C.D.C. showed that, from 2019 to 2020, the over-all homicide rate involving a firearm rose by nearly thirty-five per cent. The Buffalo massacre stands out not only because of the number of people killed but because of the political nature of the assault. This must be viewed within the context of the growing normalization of racism and political violence in the U.S. If Dylann Roof, the white racist who killed nine Black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June of 2015, helped to inaugurate the racial grievance at the core of the Trump Presidency, then the Buffalo shooter's killing spree may be emblematic of its still rippling effects. Roof, whom the Buffalo shooter acknowledges in his manifesto as a "freedom fighter," also penned a manifesto full of deranged ideas, linking Black crime with the decline of white life in the U.S. [Read More]
News Notes
The messy process of mapping a new set of New York congressional districts (to take into account that NY will be losing one representative, based on the Census), has now been concluded. Here is a link to a good map of the redrawn congressional districts. One result of the new district boundaries is that the Rivertowns (from Hastings to Tarrytown, but not Sleepy Hollow) are in Jamaal Bowman's district, CD 16. Another result of re-districting is that Co-op City and some heavily Black neighborhoods in the Bronx are no longer in Bowman's district, meaning that he has lost 17 percent of his Black constituency.
Indeed, political line-ups in our part of New York are in turmoil, as Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney is claiming the rights to CD 17, now held by Mondaire Jones, and Jones has decided to contest a newly created district in lower Manhattan and a part of Brooklyn. For a first-glance overview of the districting changes, read "DCCC Chair and Rep. Mondaire Jones Flee Blue Districts, a Bright-Red Warning for Democrats," by Ryan Grim, The Intercept [May 21, 2022] [Link].
I think it is noteworthy that Representative Bowman is one of 60 House Democrats who have signed a letter to the State Department and the FBI calling for an independent investigation [i.e., not just Israel] into the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, while reporting for Al Jazeera. This follows his co-sponsorship of a Resolution introduced by Rep.Rashida Tlaib last week proposing to commemorate the "Nakba," or what Palestinians described as "the disaster," that led to the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians during what Israelis describe as their War for Independence.
Finally, I would like to call attention to a fund-raising campaign, sponsored in part by our friends at BanKillerDrones, which is raising money for a surgical operation for a Yemeni man struck by a US drone and in danger of losing his legs and his life. Veteran journalist Nick Turse describes the man's plight and puts it into the context of US drone warfare and the US refusal to compensate civilians injured in "precision" drone strikes.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting, we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil is held each Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. To learn about our new project, "Beauty as Fuel for Change," go here. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
This week's Rewards for stalwart newsletter readers are dredged up from my distant youth. I was surprised to learn that mathematician and song-writer Tom Lehrer is still perking at the age of 94. For those too young to have seen him in his prime, or those so old that they did, I hope you will enjoy "The Vatican Rag," "We Will All Go Together When We Go," and "The Elements." There are lots more online. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
The Violent Defense of Whiteness
New York Times [May 17, 2022]
Dr. Belew is the author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.]
---- The great replacement is the latest incarnation of an old idea: The belief that elites are attempting to destroy the white race by overwhelming it with nonwhite groups and thinning them out with interbreeding until white people no longer exist. This idea is not, at its core, about any single threat, be it immigrants or people of color, but rather about the white race that it purports to protect. It's important to be cautious and not too credulous when reading the writings of assailants in attacks motived by race, but we should note an important pattern: their obsession with protecting white birthrates. … White-power extremism reveals that the core of this ideology is not the victims it attacks, but rather the thing it attempts to preserve — and the mechanism that transfigures this ideology into racial violence. It imagines that a conspiracy of elites, usually imagined as Jewish "globalists," are deliberately working to eradicate both white people and white culture. This is why white nationalism is so often virulently antisemitic, and also why it feeds on deep distrust of the media, education, science and other arbiters of expertise. [Read More]
Entering the Season of Death at the Border
By Todd Miller, The Border Chronicle [May 19, 2022]
---- At first it was a bit startling to see a man stumble onto the road in front of me. I was just south of Tombstone on Highway 80 in southern Arizona, cruising at about 60 miles an hour toward the border at Douglas. When the man appeared, I was listening to a podcast and staring out into the landscape, a beautiful stretch of rural road parallel to the San Pedro River valley, with views on all sides of the Dragoon, Huachuca, and Mule mountain ranges. The man looked injured and so disoriented that I thought he was going to limp right into the road. Then he stopped and looked at me, driving toward him. He held up an empty plastic bottle. He wore a ripped white T-shirt, and his face had that raw look of a person who's been walking in the sun for days. It was mid-morning but already hot, forecast to be the hottest day of the year thus far, triple digits in nearby Tucson. He stared right at me and raised the bottle again. He had no water left. But I didn't stop because there was a white van on my tail and the shoulder seemed narrow. "What am I doing?" I thought, and pulled over, van be damned. I turned around, stopped, beeped to get his attention, and gave him my water bottle and all the food I had in my front seat. As I drove away, the voices on the podcast—a news show from New York—seemed a million miles away. I've been seeing people come out of the desert borderlands for two decades now, and it is startling every time. I couldn't get that man's desperate face and lunging limp out of my mind. The season of death in the borderlands had now arrived, as it does every year. [Read More]
Noam Chomsky: The Supreme Court Is Wielding Illegitimate Authority in the US
An interview with C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout [May 20, 2022]
---- The Supreme Court has traditionally been a reactionary institution. There is some deviation, but it's rare. The Warren Court's major decisions greatly enhanced freedom and basic rights, but not in isolation: There were popular movements, primarily African American but joined by others to a degree, which made it possible for the Warren Court's rulings to be implemented. Today's reactionary Roberts Court is reverting to the norm with its dedicated efforts to reverse this deviation. And it can do so thanks in large measure to the conniving and deceit of the leading anti-democratic figure in the Republican organization — no longer an authentic political party: Mitch McConnell. … The court has played its role in reviving the ugliest elements of the history we are instructed to suppress. Probably the most egregious decision of the Roberts Court was to dismantle the Voting Rights Act on ridiculous grounds (Shelby), offering the South the means to restore Jim Crow. Citizens United extended the Buckley doctrine that money is speech — very convenient for the very rich particularly — to giving virtually free rein to those sectors in a position to buy elections. Next on the chopping block is Roe v. Wade. The effects will be extreme. A right regarded by most women, and others, as solidly established is to be wiped out. That's almost unprecedented. Undermining of the right of Black people to vote by the Shelby decision is a partial precedent. [Read More]
The War in Ukraine
Ukraine: An Antiwar Dilemma
By
---- I've been watching this country at war for many years now and, after 9/11, began spending time with American veterans who came to disdain and actively oppose the very conflicts they were sent to fight. The paths they followed to get there and the courage it took to turn their backs on all they had once embraced intrigued and impressed me, so I wrote a book about them. While doing so, I was often struck by a strange reality in that era of American war-making: in a land where there was no longer a draft, most Americans were paying remarkably little attention to our ongoing wars thousands of miles away. I find it even stranger today — and please note that this takes nothing away from the misery of the Ukrainian people or the ruthlessness of Vladimir Putin's invasion — that the public seems vastly more engaged in a war its country is not officially fighting than in the ones we did fight so brutally and unsuccessfully over the past two decades. … I wanted American feelings of empathy for the terrorized to translate into the gift of peace, and now, I want some of our resources to be made available to rebuild the places and lives we destroyed in those countries over so many years. Instead, just as in the previous two decades, America's involvement in war, this time with Russia, is above all a bonanza for war profiteers and our military-industrial-congressional complex. [Read More]
Four Ways to Understand the $54 Billion in U.S. Spending on Ukraine
Bianca Pallaro and May 20, 2022]
---- The more than $40 billion in additional aid to Ukraine approved by Congress on Thursday brings the total U.S. commitment during the Russian invasion to roughly $54 billion, when combined with the aid package passed in March. The bulk of the aid is allocated through traditional foreign aid channels. That includes money to provide urgent support, health services and food assistance to Ukrainian refugees inside and outside Ukraine. The latest bill, which had been delayed for a week by the objection of Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, includes money for logistical support and training for Ukrainian military and national security forces, and for a fund intended to secure the continuity of Ukraine's government. Forty percent of the aid has been directed to weapons transfers, to provide medical and intelligence support to allied countries in Europe, and to deploy troops there. The bill passed Thursday allows President Biden to authorize the transfer of an additional $11 billion in American weapons, equipment and defense supplies to Ukraine, and allocates $9.1 billion to replenish that stockpile. [Read More]
Also useful/interesting – "Military-Industrial Complex Is Itching to Send "Hunter-Killer" Drones to Ukraine," by Sara Sirota, The Intercept [[Link]; and "'Disinformation' Label Serves to Marginalize Crucial Ukraine Facts," by Luca GoldMansour, Fairness and Accuracy in the Media [FAIR] [May 18, 2022] [Link].
The State of the Union
Where are the Men? No More Bystander Boys in the Post-Roe Era
---- For 50 years now, people have told desperate, heart-breaking stories about what it was like to search for an abortion in the days before Roe v. Wade. These were invariably narratives of women in crisis. They sometimes involved brief discussions about economic inequality, police-state intrigue, and unwanted children, but for the most part men were invisible in them, missing in action. Where were they? And where are they now that a wall of fundamental rights seems to be crumbling away not just for women, but for all of us? This is another example of what I used to call the Bystander Boys. … Forget about moral responsibility — what about the jeopardy our lives are in as the possibility of a Trumpian-style authoritarian future closes in around us? Sixty years ago, it already seemed remarkably clear to me how crucial it was that men stop leaving women to face this nightmare essentially alone — and it still does. … There are more of us than them and, if we stand together and fight, we can still win. No place for bystanders now. [Read More]
The Democratic Party's Leadership Is Trying to Destroy Progressives
By David Sirota, Jacobin Magazine [May 2022]
---- Progressive candidates have established a few tenuous footholds in recent years. Democratic leadership and their corporate donors are now doing everything they can to destroy those progressives. Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) sounded an important alarm about all this, slamming billionaires and conservative advocacy groups blanketing the airwaves with television ads supporting corporate candidates in this week's pivotal Democratic congressional primaries. But the Vermont senator understated the situation. The perpetrators rigging these elections aren't just meddling oligarchs operating on their own. This call is coming from inside the Democratic house from party leaders, who are at minimum passively condoning the trend, and in many cases actively fueling it with endorsements and its machine. [Read More]
Israel/Palestine
Shireen Abu Akleh: Two Assassinations, Four Funerals
---- This is not a lament for Shireen, nor is it a political article. It is not a press report, nor is it a study. It is not a tribute or condolence, because Shireen Abu Akleh deserves more than all of these. … I do not write this to praise her virtues, everyone has done so already, although she deserves a lot, and a lot from us…. The assassination of Shireen, turning her into news, is an Israeli attempt to hide the truth; and to discipline, intimidate, and deter those who seek to show it. However, the reaction to her murder exceeded all expectations, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets to express their anger, not only in solidarity with Shireen's small family, but because to most of them Shireen is family. [Read More] Also of interest on Israel's response to Shireen's murder is (Video) "Israel's disinformation playbook: Delay, deflect, deny," from The Listening Post, Aljazeer English [May 21, 2022] [Link].
Our History
The Many Moods: Rachel Carson's sea.
By Hannah Gold, The Nation [May 17, 2022]
----Rachel Carson was a passionate and poetic writer, but she was not a particularly subtle one. When she set out to write a book, it did not end until the mountains had crumpled into the sea, all organisms dead or alive had vanished therein, and the form of life itself on Earth had been radically altered. Before Carson wrote her most influential book, Silent Spring, she wrote three thrilling books on the ocean's creative power over all of life's forms, each of them ending just this way…. For so many writers, the sea has been a beautiful, convenient image for evoking the mystery of human interiority. The sea that the narrators of countless novels have gazed out upon is like the surface of a vast, twinkling unconscious from which fathomless stories are trawled, then lowered once more. But for Carson, the sea connects rather than isolates, reveals rather than obscures. It is the substance of every story she tells. The earth's ecological systems, which she often refers to in her oceanic writings as "life itself," provided her with a menagerie of fascinating terms by which to better understand the boundless energy and imagination of the sea and everything under its domain—the human and nonhuman life it sustained, punished, and inspired. Carson devoted her life to the sea as a scientist, but also for the same reasons that most serious writers commit to their subjects: because to her it was inescapable. [Read More]
