Completed my virtual presentation for the annual conference of the International Association of Emergency Managers on Wednesday. The talk went pretty well, though doing it virtually was a little strange. Apparently, the internet service we have at home provides us with fairly low bandwidth and we were operating right on the edge of connectivity. But we shut off everything else in the house that was drawing bandwidth – plus all the lights and the washing machine, just to be sure – and we managed to squeak by.
The conference was supposed to be in Long Beach, CA, but was conducted virtually as a result of the ongoing pandemic. When it was originally scheduled, I seriously considered taking the train from Ohio to California, just to do it. I am not afraid of flying – though no power on Earth could have gotten me into a Coast Guard helicopter back in those golden days when I served in that perpetually cash-strapped organization – but a couple of days on a train, with nothing to do but sit around, read, and watch America’s post-industrial landscape roll by through the large unwashed windows, sounded pretty good.
The title of my talk was ‘Same Planet, Different Worlds: Bridging the Gap Between Law Enforcement and Emergency Management.’ Since I have worked in both fields, it was a topic that I was quite familiar with. The main point of the talk was that although law enforcement and emergency management may seem similar, they are in fact virtually opposites in several fundamental ways.
Except for the handful of people who actually do it, no one in this country knows anything at all about emergency management, but most people – having seen a million episodes of ‘Cops’ – think they understand American law enforcement. Most people, of course, are mistaken.
Here’s a quick introduction to law enforcement in America:
American police departments use an organizational model and administrative practices developed in the period just after the civil war. That is, the Abraham Lincoln/Robert E. Lee civil war, not the impending civil war that will be starting any day now. If you look at the organization chart from virtually any large police department from 1930 and compare it to the same department’s organization chart today, you will not see a significant difference. You might not see any difference at all. The highly bureaucratic and severely hierarchical organization of police agencies makes them virtually impervious to innovation. Good thing the nation hasn’t changed much since 1870.
The last great technological innovation in American law enforcement was when they put two-way radios in police cars – around 1935. If you need a police officer today, the process is exactly the same as it was during Franklin Roosevelt’s first term. You call a central dispatch center on a telephone, someone answers, and they use a radio to send a police officer to your location. There have been lots of technological advances since then – computer-assisted dispatch, DNA analysis, COMPSTAT, automated license plate readers, and so on – but these are process improvements on the margins. The fundamental concept of operations of American law enforcement hasn’t changed in nearly a century.
Police are the only government employees – you know, deep state bureaucrats – who are empowered to kill Americans, with the possible exception of executioners at state and federal prisons. Of course, since most states refuse to reveal who actually performs lethal injections, we don’t really know who most executioners are. But, in any case, executions are rare – 22 in 2019 – while police kill about 1,000 of their neighbors and fellow citizens each year. That might not sound like many, and in a country of 330 million maybe it isn’t, but every police extrajudicial killing is a failure of the criminal justice system. And American police kill far more citizens than do police in any other modern industrialized nation. American police have a lot of assigned responsibilities, but they are not supposed to be juries, judges, and executioners. But while police are empowered to take your life – and their actions may or may not be seriously reviewed if they do – entry requirements for law enforcement jobs in America are frequently the same as entry requirements for minimum wage retail or food service jobs. Given the enormous authority and discretion we bestow on police, you might be pleased to know that in Ohio police officers must complete 737 hours of state-mandated training to be certified. That might sound impressive, until you learn that barbers in Ohio must complete 1,800 hours of training to be certified, and cosmetologists must complete 1,500 hours. But that’s probably not something they mentioned on ‘Cops.’
So now we hear that 21,000 dead people in Pennsylvania remain on the voter rolls. That’s bigly news that means, well, something bad, I guess. So sad. While there is no actual evidence that any of these persons actually voted, I am certain that this changes everything.
A more cynical person than I might ask if there is any actual proof of any actual wrongdoing anywhere in this story, but that would be ungracious to the many millions of people who are overjoyed to hear this latest example of electoral malfeasance. And I am no cynic. I live my life according to a few bedrock principles, one of which is, “if it’s on the internet, it must be true.”
So, thanks to the upstanding citizens at Breitbart and Rudy Giuliani for bringing this to our attention.
But as a county precinct official in the recent election, responsible for ensuring that all voters at our polling place were properly registered and were properly identified, I was horrified to realize that we actually had no protocol in place to process dead voters.
We had detailed and extensively-documented procedures for voters with expired ID, or with no ID, or who were not registered, or who had just moved, or who provided signatures that didn’t match the signature on file, for voters who couldn’t speak English, voters at the wrong precinct, voters with disabilities, voters who wanted to vote from their cars, voters who mis-marked their ballots, and half a dozen other contingencies. But there was nothing in the hours and hours of training or in the 37-page voting official’s flip chart that explained what we were to do if a dead voter appeared and requested a ballot.
More disturbingly, I realized that we didn’t even have a reliable way to identify dead voters. Voters had to have a current form of identification, they had to state their name and address, they had to sign the pollbook, and they needed to look like the person pictured on their ID. But we never checked or even asked if they were still alive.
It is not even clear that being dead makes a person ineligible to vote.
And if we couldn’t identify dead voters at the polling places, how could election officials who receive mail-in ballots identify votes cast by dead persons? Well sure, they could check signatures. Dead people tend to have scratchy handwriting. At least that’s what I’ve heard. Lots of people say it.
And they could rely on the fact that the dead voter had to first request a ballot, vote, and then return the ballot. That’s a lot of work – and signatures – for a dead person. And most Election Boards cross-reference their voter lists with other public records, including death certificates and social security databases that identify dead persons.
Of course, it has happened that a bereaved spouse or close relative of a recently deceased person has returned a ballot that had been requested by a living person but which had been received sometime after the unfortunate voter passed away. Typically, those ballots are identified by election officials due to mismatched signatures or other checks and are not counted.
As numerous articles and papers explain, “The consensus from credible research and investigation is that the rate of illegal voting is extremely rare, and the incidence of certain types of fraud — such as impersonating another voter — is virtually nonexistent,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan but liberal-leaning law and policy institute.
So, it seems the dead don’t vote very often. Which is not really surprising. Even in this election, with record turnout, 33 percent of America’s eligible voters didn’t bother to vote. Maybe someone should check them for a pulse.
Whatever the outcome of Tuesdays’ election, the way we as Americans respond, the steps we take to protect each other and preserve our future, do not depend on the selfish whims, dark fantasies, and conspiratorial delusions of Donald Trump.
It will be up to us.
We know how Trump will respond. Win or lose, he will lie, threaten, and cruelly demean other, better Americans. He will tear at the very foundation of our democracy, and he will attack the invisible chords that bind us together as Americans. He will place his personal interests above the well-being of the nation and of individual Americans. We know this, of course, because it is the way he has behaved every single day of his tragic presidency.
As Marine General James Mattis, Donald Trump’s first secretary of defense, wrote recently, “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.”
But we don’t have to follow.
Our politics might be dysfunctional right now, and the threat of politically-inspired violence is growing every day. We are swaying on the very lip of the abyss, and once we topple into the void there will be no climbing back.
So, we – each of us, all of us – need to think about where we are and where we are going. We need to rethink our shorthand description of America as a collection of Red and Blue states and any notion we might hold that the third of the country that disagrees with us politically is somehow our enemy. No state is red, no state is blue. That’s not how we really live, and we all know it. No matter where you stand on important issues, no matter which party you support, you share your community with people who disagree with you. They are not your enemy. They are your neighbors, your co-workers, members of your church, and more. Even today, the things that connect us are stronger than the forces trying to separate us.
We need to reject the politics of fear, and we need to focus on the things we can do as a people to ensure that all Americans can share equally in the promise of American life. The idea that millions and millions of our neighbors somehow want to see our nation destroyed is absurd and is incredibly damaging to our national well-being.
Tomorrow I will be working at a polling place to help ensure that every American’s voice can be counted. As a precinct official I can assure you that the foundations of our democracy are protected. Careful procedures and processes are in place and will be followed to ensure that the election is conducted fairly and openly. We do not expect widespread interference with voting, although we have plans to respond if necessary.
While I have no role in the vote counting that will occur once the polls are closed, I am certain that election officials are prepared to conduct the count honestly and openly. Keep in mind that actual vote counts are never completed on election night, and, in fact, no state is required to do so. The true deadline for states to complete and certify their voting results is December 14, 2020. (US Code: 3 U.S.C. §6). For details see the Congressional Research Service paper “The Electoral College: A 2020 Presidential Election Timeline” at https://crsreports.congress.gov Archivist.
We are in a dark place, and it is up to us to find our way back into the light.
In his first inaugural address, delivered in the terrifying days between secession and civil war, Abraham Lincoln pleaded with his countrymen, north and south, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
We are not on the brink of civil war. The issues that divide us today pale in comparison to those that broke the nation in 1860. But Lincoln’s words can still guide us. Let us hope that they do.
Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s election, political violence encouraged and abetted by Donald Trump may be the longest-lasting legacy of his tragic presidency. We may already have passed the last exit ramp where we could have changed direction.
The signs of coming disaster are everywhere. At least four Americans have been killed during political protests during Trump’s presidency. ABC News has identified 54 instances of violence or threats of violence since 2017 that police reports or court documents say were motivated by the offender’s political beliefs. ABC News was unable to find even a single instance of court-documented violence or threats committed in the name of presidents Bush or Obama. Political polarization continues to climb, and research finds that partisans on both sides are increasingly likely to view their political opponents as enemies and traitors. When the stress of the pandemic, continued job losses, deteriorating race relations, and an unprecedented level of corruption are combined with skyrocketing gun sales, openly acknowledged efforts at voter suppression, and the increasing activities of armed “militias,” the likelihood of politically-motivated violence increases dramatically.
“The bases are loaded and all the components are there. It really only takes a spark to set off a significant amount of violence and once you have that violence, it becomes self-sustaining,” said David Kilcullen, the former counter-insurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq and the author of five books on counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.
The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and others concerned with domestic security and safeguarding elections have spelled out the danger. For more than a decade, the FBI has considered right-wing extremists to be the most serious domestic threat facing the United States. Yet it is difficult for federal law enforcement officials to act without top-level direction, or at least approval, and they are receiving no support whatsoever from Trump and his administration.
Trump, of course, is not solely or even mainly responsible for right-wing extremism, left-wing extremism, political polarization, racism, structural weaknesses in America’s economy, and other ills that beset us. Nor is all political violence caused by his supporters. But Trump is unique in his refusal to offer a steadying or calming influence. Not only does he not act to reduce enmity and discord, he believes that his political survival requires him to drive Americans apart, encourage hate, and threaten violence.
Marine General James Mattis, Trump’s first Secretary of Defense wrote that, “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.”
From his early campaign rallies, where he openly encouraged his supporters to beat protestors, to his calls for police to handle arrested persons roughly, to his repeated demands that the government imprison his political opponents, to his oft-expressed admiration for “tough guys,” to his suggestion that “second amendment people,” take care of his political opponents, to his bragging about federal agents committing extra-judicial murder, to his constant demonization of the press as “enemies of the people,” to his retweeting of memes that encourage violence, to his support for accused vigilante killer Kyle Rittenhouse, and to his contemptible refusal to condemn far-right racism and violence, Trump has actively worked to make America a more dangerous, more fractured, and more hateful nation. He and his enablers throughout the Republican Party remain cruelly indifferent to the long-term destruction his open support of violence will inflict on the nation.
Remarkably, in the context of the slime-fest that has been the Trump presidency, the growing threat of political violence is scarcely acknowledged. But while much of the Trump-inflicted damage might be reversed, politically-motivated violence may not be.
“I don’t know how you pull back from the brink here,” Kilcullen said. “At the end of the day, the least you’ve got right now is in the low tens of millions of people who’ve actively prepared to murder their countrymen and in many were looking forward to it. How does a Joe Biden electoral victory change that?”
“Probably the biggest issue is the president of the United States right now, who has portrayed himself as somebody who, you know, is not necessarily interested in calming the waters,” said Stephen Pomper, senior director for policy at the International Crisis Group. Pomper said that Trump “might actually court unrest in order to serve his political and personal goals.”
Kilcullen and other researchers agree that a critical first step would be action by the president to lower the political temperature.
“The only way you can avoid violence, and perhaps a constitutional crisis, is if the political leadership of both parties moves to de-escalate things and demobilize their bases,” said Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky. “Trump is doing precisely the opposite of that.”
Earlier this week, Joe Biden told an audience in Pittsburgh that violence was unacceptable. “I’m going to be very clear about all of this,” the former Vice-President said, “Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting. It’s lawlessness. Plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted. Violence will not bring change.”
But neither Trump nor other Republican leaders will make similar statements. “The most influential figures in the conservative movement—the commentators on Fox News and the Republican Party leaders—must come out and renounce this violence,” Levitsky said. “If they don’t, we are in terrible trouble.”
Most frighteningly, Trump is actively readying his supporters to reject the results of the election if he loses. Russ Travers, who served as acting director of the National Counter-Terrorism Centre (NCTC) until March this year, fears Trump’s incendiary rhetoric about the potential for a “rigged” election could lead to mass casualties if the President loses.
Like Kilcullen and others, Travers see no easy path that will lead us away from the precipice. “We’re going to have to grapple with this for years to come,” he said.
It was 1957, three years after the United States Supreme Court ruled that ‘separate but equal’ public schools were inherently unequal. The court’s Brown versus Board of Education decision meant that America’s public-school systems had to stop segregating schools by race.
Racially segregated schools were a cornerstone of the brutal Jim Crow system of government-sanctioned discrimination and segregation that was disfiguring America’s southern states. Racial discrimination was rife in the rest of the country, too, but outside the south it lacked the full-throated support of state and local government.
Opposition to school desegregation was widespread throughout the south. Segregationists – a euphemistic term for virulent racists – bitterly opposed any attempts to put black and white children in the same classroom. But the law was the law, and many school districts were making at least token efforts to comply.
The Little Rock, Arkansas school district was one such district. Though their half-hearted desegregation plan was designed to delay the process as long as possible and to severely limit the number of black children who would actually sit in class with white children, it did allow for a handful of black students to attend Little Rock’s Central High School in the fall of 1957.
So, on the evening of September 3, 1957, after three years of resistance and delay, nine black teenagers, handpicked by the Board of Education, freshly scrubbed and almost comically naive about the reception that awaited them, readied themselves to enter Little Rock’s Central High School for their first day of classes. Later, they would become known as the Little Rock Nine, but as they waited anxiously that night, they were simply nine nervous students. They were Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Melba Patillo, Minniejean Brown, Thelma Mothershed, Gloria Ray, Carlotta Walls, Terrence Roberts, and Jefferson Thomas.
The Little Rock Nine
Minniejean Brown, then sixteen, recalled their anticipation during an interview years later. “The nine of us were not especially political,” said Brown. “We thought, we can walk to Central, it’s a huge, beautiful school, this is gonna be great.”
It wasn’t great.
The black students’ first attempt at entering the school was turned back by a jeering mob of hundreds of white supremacists and nearly 300 hostile Arkansas National Guardsmen. The Guardsmen had been posted to the school by Arkansas governor Orval Faubus not to protect the black students from the mob, although opposition to desegregation of the high school had been building for weeks, but to physically prevent the students from entering the building. A week later, with the Guardsmen replaced by city and state police, a second attempt was thwarted when a larger mob of more than 1,000 howling racists, many armed, broke through police lines and threatened to drag the students out of the building, after the nine students had been spirited in through a side door.
That fiasco prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send 1,000 highly-disciplined paratroopers of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to enforce the federal court order that Little Rock’s schools must be desegregated.
Thus, as history records, on September 25, 1957, escorted by U.S. Army soldiers, the nine black students attended classes at Central High School for the first time. In many accounts, that’s the end of the story. A federal court ordered desegregation. Segregationists defied the court’s orders. Eisenhower sent federal troops. Black students went to school. Crisis averted. High-fives all around.
U.S. Army soldiers lead black students into Central High School. (US Army photo)
Except that wasn’t the end of the story. For the nine black students, it was just the beginning. What followed was eight months of unceasing harassment, threats, verbal abuse and physical attacks by white students in a vicious campaign that was coordinated by their parents and other adults and was tolerated – and in some cases encouraged – by school officials.
Despite soldiers stationed inside the school – 101st Airborne paratroopers for two months, then federalized National Guardsmen for the remainder of the school year – the black students faced daily assaults and harassment. They were continually tripped, kicked, slapped, shoved, insulted, and threatened by white students. Flaming wads of paper were tossed on the black girls. Melba Patillo had acid thrown in her face and only quick action by her soldier escort saved her eyesight. Elizabeth Eckford was stabbed by sharpened pencils. Minniejean Brown had food dumped on her in the cafeteria at least three times.
Soldier escorts were forbidden to touch harassing students and school officials refused to take action unless an assault occurred within their immediate view. The most aggressive students quickly realized that they could terrorize the black students with impunity. While some teachers stopped verbal and physical assaults in class, others did not.
It was a terrifying experience that shocked the nine students, even though they had been warned that there would be opposition. “I figured, I’m a nice person. Once they get to know me, they’ll see I’m okay. We’ll be friends,” said Brown.
In fact, the campaign of intimidation had begun months before the school year started. In 1956, aware that the school board was creating a plan for integration, Little Rock residents formed the Capital Citizens Council (CCC), a local offshoot of the White Citizens Council that was resisting desegregation in Mississippi. The CCC launched an anti-integration media campaign, organized rallies, and tried to pressure the school board to drop the desegregation plan. CCC statements charged that the NAACP, which supported integration, was an agent of international communism, as if only communists might want their children to receive a decent education. In August, 1957, less than a month before school was to begin, Little Rock segregationists formed the Central High Mother’s League in an attempt to present a less-threatening image than the CCC and its White Citizen’s Council model. In truth, fewer than 25 percent of Women’s League members were actually the mothers of Central High students, but all of the group’s members were adamantly opposed to desegregation of the public schools. The Mother’s League filed anti-integration lawsuits, pressured pubic officials, held public rallies, and organized a school walkout.
As the reality of court-ordered desegregation grew nearer and as public opposition increased, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus saw an opportunity to resurrect his fading political career. Until then considered a moderate Southern politician on race – though moderate is a relative term, as he was in no way an advocate of anything remotely resembling social, political, or economic equality for blacks – Faubus quickly assumed a leading role in opposition to school desegregation. His actions would prompt federal intervention and would prolong the crisis for many months, damaging the city’s reputation and leading to the closure of all Little Rock high schools for a year, but in the end, it would also result in his re-election to a record six terms as Arkansas governor.
In the weeks before the new school year was to start, segregationists targeted the families of the black students who were planning to attend Central High School. Families received threatening phone calls and visits at their homes from members of the Capital Citizen’s Council hinting darkly of trouble if their children attempted to enter Central. Other calls were made to black community leaders, to encourage them to dissuade any black children from attending Central, warning of dire consequences for the entire black community if desegregation succeeded. While more than 500 black students lived in Central High’s attendance area, just eighty expressed a desire to attend the school. After interviewing all of the volunteers, the school board selected 17 to be the first group to integrate the school. But when they were told that they would not be able to participate in any extracurricular activities, and their parents were threatened with loss of their jobs, eight of the 17 elected to remain at the local black high school, leaving nine to be the first blacks in a school with nearly 2,000 white students.
None of the nine black students saw themselves as pioneers at the start of their ordeal. They had volunteered to go to Central for the same reasons white students might have volunteered: it was close to home, it was well-equipped, it had a sterling reputation. They only wanted a chance for a better education. None of the nine had any special desire to attend school with white students. Having lived all their lives in the oppressive atmosphere of the segregated south, they knew virtually nothing about white people. “I really thought that if we went to school together, the white kids are going to be like me, curious and thoughtful, and we can just cut all this segregation stuff out,” Brown recalled.
At the time, Central High School was the most prestigious high school in Arkansas. In addition to local funding, the school received $1.5 million each year from the state to maintain programs. Meanwhile, Horace Mann – the nearby high school that had been built for black students – received no state funding. Its programs were paid for by donations. Horace Mann was actually a good school, with an outstanding faculty and a fine reputation. The school was a source of pride in Little Rock’s black community. But the black high school offered fewer classes than Central, had fewer activities, had less laboratory equipment, and relied on the white school’s hand-me-downs for textbooks, equipment, and athletic uniforms. Of course, this was the pattern throughout the south, and in much of the north as well, and it was one of the reasons that the Supreme Court had ruled that separate was not equal.
Each of the nine black students had been selected based on a careful review of their academic record, their temperament, and an interview with the school superintendent. They all came from stable, middle class families. Their parents were professionals – teachers, preachers, nurses, business owners. The students themselves were studious and well-mannered, regular churchgoers who planned to go to college. Most of all, they were unlikely to lash out violently at harassment or abuse.
And for the most part, they didn’t.
For the first two months of the school year, the 101st Airborne remained in Little Rock. Soldiers were stationed in the school and each black student was assigned an escort. While the presence of troops deterred some violence against the blacks, bolder, more committed segregationists soon recognized that troops would not protect the black students from verbal and physical harassment.
U.S. Army soldiers escort nine black students to Central High School. (US Army photo)
As a result, threats, assaults and harassment against the nine started immediately and slowly increased as community anger at the dispatch of federal troops rose. Eisenhower himself wanted the paratroopers withdrawn as soon as possible, and school and military officials quickly began reducing the visibility and numbers of soldiers in the building.
For the beleaguered nine, each reduction in troops meant an increase in harassment and attacks. At Thanksgiving, the 101st was withdrawn completely, and the disciplined paratroopers were replaced with barely trained and mostly indifferent Arkansas National Guardsmen. Attacks against the nine quickly spiked.
Not all of the white students participated in the campaign of harassment and assaults. It is likely that no more than 200 white students actually carried out attacks. A few white students made friendly gestures, but most had been intimidated by hardcore segregationist warnings not to show any kindness to the nine black students.
Week after week, the nine black students faced the abuse and hostility of hundreds of openly racist students and the cold indifference of many hundreds more. Teachers and administrators who could have controlled the offenders looked the other way. Segregationists interpreted each reduction in security as a victory, and a dizzying pattern emerged: as security measures were slowly reduced, attacks against the nine correspondingly rose. In February, Minniejean Brown was expelled after several confrontations with white students, all of which were started by whites. This “victory” further incited the segregationist fringe, as they taunted the others with the chant, “One down, eight to go.”
Yet the remaining eight soldiered on. Whatever hopes or dreams they had once entertained about being accepted had been long forgotten. Now, they were warriors. They fought back – not with kicks or pushes or hate-filled rants – but with courage and a steely determination to prevail. They drew strength from their families and their community as they now fully recognized the importance of what they were doing.
But the price they paid was harrowing. Their families were constantly harassed. Each night, their phones rang with threatening calls and all-too-often rocks were thrown through their windows. The police were no help. After decades of brutality at the hands of law enforcement, southern blacks knew never to call on police for assistance. At least two of the parents were fired from their jobs because of their children’s involvement in desegregation and at least one parent had to leave town to find work as a brick mason. As desegregation continued, some whites took out their frustrations on other blacks, and some in the black community blamed the nine and their families for the loss of their jobs and the loss of social services that they had relied on.
Eventually, the year came to an end. Though many traditional senior activities were cancelled because of the continued threat of violence, a graduation ceremony was held, and Ernest Green, one of the nine, became the first black graduate of Central High School.
But even the end of the school year wasn’t the end of the story. Lawsuits hoping to halt the desegregation effort continued through the summer and into the next year. When the courts refused to halt desegregation, Governor Faubus closed all three public high schools in the city. The schools remained closed for the entire 1958-1959 academic year. In September 1958, a special election was held in Little Rock asking voters if integration should continue. Voters overwhelmingly opposed integration, 129,470 against, 7,561 for.
With all public high schools closed, more than 3,600 students were left to find their own education. More than 750 white students enrolled at a newly established private school. Many other students left town to live with relatives or friends to continue their eduction. Because of the unrelenting stream of death threats against the Nine, the NAACP arranged for several of the students to find temporary homes in other cities.
When public schools reopened for the 1959-1960 school year, only two of the Little Rock Nine returned to Central High School. The rest had graduated from other schools or had moved away. In the end, all of the Nine left the south, and though all were scarred by their experiences, all went on to successful careers.
Little Rock’s public schools were not fully integrated until 1972.
Today, the results of the Brown decision are mixed. The outrageous resource disparity between black and white schools has been largely eliminated and black academic performance has greatly improved. But white performance has also improved, so a large racial achievement gap remains. Meanwhile, white flight and segregationist housing policies have reversed early gains in school integration.
October 24, 2020
“Somewhere along the line, [staying at Central High] became an obligation. I realized that what we were doing was not for ourselves”
–Elizabeth Eckford, one of the “Little Rock Nine”
“Black folks aren’t born expecting segregation, prepared from day one to follow its confining rules. Nobody presents you with a handbook when you’re teething and says, ‘Here’s how you must behave as a second-class citizen.’ Instead, the humiliating expectations and traditions of segregation creep over you, slowly stealing a teaspoonful of your self-esteem each day.”
– Melba Patillo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry, Simon Pulse, New York, 1995.
Sources:
Beals, Melba Patillo; Warriors Don’t Cry, Washington Square Press; New York, 1994.
Beals, Melba Patillo; I Will Not Fear; Revell; Grand Rapids, MI; 2018.
Honey, Michael K.; Little Rock at Fifty; HistoryNet.com; originally published in the October 2007 issue of American History; https://www.historynet.com/little-rock-50.htm Retrieved 5.27.2020.
BAY VILLAGE, Ohio — It didn’t have to be this way.
More than 220,000 dead. More than 12 million unemployed. The death toll rising. Retail workers murdered for asking people to wear masks. Death threats made against public health officials. Damage to the economy so severe that it will take years to recover. And now, the Trump administration has given up even the pretense of containing the virus.
Previously unknown, highly contagious, with no known treatment or vaccine, COVID-19 would have killed thousands of Americans no matter how smartly we responded. But we could have mitigated the economic impact, drastically reduced the death toll, and preserved millions of jobs had we responded differently.
We knew how to do it. The federal government, state governments, and thousands of local governments had spent decades preparing. Plans had been written. Surveillance systems were in place. Supplies had been stockpiled. Public health, emergency management, and public safety personnel had been trained. No nation on earth was better prepared to manage COVID-19 than the United States.
We know what could have happened.
Imagine an America led by a president who did not squander years of preparation and precious months of warning in a callous attempt to save his reelection bid. Imagine an administration that followed the pandemic response playbook they had been given. Imagine an America where officials carefully tracked early cases, tested aggressively, and took forceful steps to reduce transmission. Where the administration coordinated a nationwide response and provided critical resources to state and local agencies while providing timely and accurate information about the threat to the nation. Most importantly, imagine a U.S. government that valued data, respected science, and was focused on saving lives and minimizing social and economic disruption.
It was all possible. We were prepared to do it. Other nations did it. But Donald Trump chose a different path, and today our employment and health outcomes are worse than virtually all other high-income nations. Under Mr. Trump, our response has been uncoordinated, ineffective, and dishonest. The president’s mishandling of the COVID pandemic has produced the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression and has directly led to the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.
Paradoxically, a competent response would have boosted Mr. Trump’s electoral fortunes far higher than anything else he could have done this year. Every politician knows that nothing brings the country together more quickly than an external threat. Managing the pandemic properly would have boosted the president’s approval ratings and today he would be cruising along, ten points ahead in the polls, his reelection assured.
Now we face a grim future. The federal government has surrendered. There is no plan to reduce transmission rates to a level that supports full economic recovery. Instead, there is talk of relying on “herd immunity” and letting the virus burn through the population. Meanwhile, deaths continue to mount.
Yet, in spite of Trump’s cruel determination to ignore the ongoing disaster, we have made progress. Better treatments and widespread use of protective measures – even if openly derided by the president – have enabled us to avoid worst-case projections. Vaccines are being developed. But we remain trapped on a perpetual roller coaster, where infections and deaths rise and fall, but never fall far enough to stop the spread.
We are wearily waiting for a vaccine that is many months away. Even after an effective vaccine is developed, the logistics of producing it in quantity, transporting it, distributing it, and inoculating many millions of Americans will be brutally complicated. Tens of thousands more Americans will die.
We can still contain it. We can still save many thousands of lives. We know that masks, social distancing, careful hygiene, testing, concern for one another, and capable leadership will work. We need only to do it. If only someone could explain why we will not.
October 23, 2020
This post appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and on Cleveland.com on October 23, 2020.
In the upcoming election, you can vote for whoever you want. But as a certified emergency manager and a former county emergency management agency director, I want to share with you my perspective on the US response to COVID-19.
In emergency management we work side by side with the public health community. We plan together, we train together, we exercise together. When I was a county director, our agency and the county public health department managed a joint response to the Ebola event. We were very lucky then, but sadly, we have not been lucky with COVID-19.
The tragic thing about the US response to COVID is that the United States was actually well-prepared. In fact, no nation was better prepared. Even under the current president, the plans, the pharmaceutical and medical equipment stockpiles, the training, and the preparation for an effective response which had been carefully developed under previous administrations of both parties, remained in place. Plus, we had two months actual warning! Two months! If there is a gift from God in this whole sorry spectacle, it was that priceless warning.
Which we squandered.
Because it was inconvenient for the president’s re-election narrative, the federal government took no action. Worse, the president actually took steps to hinder the response of state and local governments. The measures that worked in June to halt the exponential spread of the virus – testing, social distancing, masks, personal hygiene, travel restrictions, self-quarantine, isolation of infected persons, bans on large gatherings – would have worked in February to greatly reduce the spread. They would work today, too, to reduce the level of infections to a point where we could avoid a disastrous cold weather spike and lay the groundwork for a sustained economic recovery. But we didn’t do those things effectively in the spring and we aren’t going to do them now, because it remains inconvenient for the president’s re-election effort.
We hear a lot about Mr. Trump’s travel ban. Here’s the deal on that. The bogus ban was ten days too late and full of holes. It did virtually nothing. By the time it was enacted, community transmission was already occurring in the United States, so the ban was too late to prevent the spread of the virus. By exempting US passport holders and not requiring arriving travelers to quarantine, the ban was rendered almost totally ineffective. 40,000 people flew from China to the US after the so-called ban was enacted. Virtually none of them were actually quarantined. Most weren’t monitored by public health agencies.
And that farcical ban, we are told by the president, saved “millions of lives.”
Under the National Response Framework, the primary responsibility for emergency management resides at the local government level. State governments and the federal government stand ready to assist as needed.
But pandemics have always been recognized as events that would far exceed the capacity of local, or even state governments, to manage. Only the federal government has the resources to organize and conduct an effective nationwide response to a global pandemic. That’s why the federal government maintains the strategic national stockpile. That’s why federal agencies (the CDC, FEMA, the Public Health Service, HHS, and others) plan, train, exercise, and equip their staffs to respond to pandemics. And everybody involved in planning for pandemic response understands the critical requirement to act fast, before cases and deaths begin to rise exponentially. That’s why plans are written in advance; drugs, ventilators, masks and other items are stockpiled; and all those other preparations are made.
But this administration refused to act. It’s going to go away, they said. Nothing to see here. Their latest hoax. And now 210,000 Americans are dead.
Many thousands – if not millions – of Americans in the medical community, public health, first responders, emergency management, and other fields have worked heroically to save lives. And many have lost their own lives in the effort.
But the reality is that an honest and effective response in the beginning, bolstered by a commitment from the administration to prioritize the health and well-being of Americans over the re-election campaign of the president, would have saved many, many thousands of lives.
COVID-19 is a very difficult public health problem. Unknown before the end of last year, highly contagious, no known treatment or vaccine, the virus was going to kill a lot of Americans no matter how quickly or aggressively we acted. But the failure of the administration to act in a timely manner – when everything they needed was already in place – is perhaps the most egregious failure of government in the history of the United States.
It is not Trump Derangement Syndrome or partisan tomfoolery to look at what happened and say the president is responsible. And denying that reality is a disservice to the Americans who have struggled so mightily against this virus, and especially to those who have lost their lives.
For the past couple of months, I have been working as a Census Field Supervisor, supporting a team of enumerators who are doing the heavy lifting of door-to-door census-taking for the U.S. Census Bureau.
The census, of course, is explicitly required by the United States Constitution, so it is obviously an important project. Every employee took an oath to support the constitution and to protect the confidentiality of any information collected.
While none of the enumerators I support have been assaulted, pretty much all of them have been insulted, harassed, yelled at, ignored, and treated with undeserved discourtesy by their fellow Americans.
And really, not just by their fellow Americans, but by their actual neighbors. During this phase of the census – called the non-response follow-up operation – enumerators are assigned to visit residences in their own neighborhoods. This increases the comfort level for enumerators, and, theoretically, encourages residents to cooperate. That’s important, because the folks the enumerators are visiting now are people who have already declined to respond by mail, telephone, or online.
While many residents are courteous and some are helpful, a distressing percentage are not. While some people are just rude, and others are justifiably frustrated because they already provided the information – or they believe they did – a fraction overreact wildly, becoming highly agitated at the mere presence of a census enumerator at their door.
It might take ten minutes to answer all the questions on the survey – two minutes if you simply provide the minimum information the Census Bureau needs. But that’s apparently too much to ask of some Americans. Instead, they are happy to harangue an enumerator for ten minutes about the evils of government or they feel compelled to yell, make a scene, and slam the door in their neighbors’ face.
For enumerators it can seem like a masters class in bad behavior.
Well, this is America, and if people don’t want to provide basic demographic information to the Census Bureau to help the nation, no one is going to force them. But, if you don’t want to answer, can’t you at least be civil about it? Do you think your neighbor standing out there, sweating under their mask, is responsible for the things that have gone wrong in your life? Do you think they personally added the census requirement to the constitution to irritate you? Does being discourteous to them put a few extra bucks in your pay envelope this week?
I have no idea if Americans are more discourteous and disturbed now than they were years ago, so you won’t hear me blustering about the decline of America. But regardless of how things were in the past, we can do better now. Its past time we started.
We are currently wading through yet another slimy Trump episode, this time prompted by reporting in the Atlantic that Mr. Trump repeatedly disparaged veterans – including those killed in action – as ‘suckers’ and ‘losers.’
At this time the sources of the information remain unnamed, though several major outlets (including Fox News, the Associated Press, CNN, and the Washington Post) have reported that their sources have confirmed at least parts of the original story. Those sources, however, also remain unnamed.
So, naturally, supporters of the president have been quick to accuse the Atlantic of fabricating the entire story, even though Mr. Trump has in the past very publicly defamed prisoners of war, the parents of servicemembers killed in action, and the retired and active military personnel that served in his administration.
This type of knee-jerk support of a political figure is something we have come to expect, and no one should be surprised when partisans attack the reporter rather than address the substance of the report. But I do feel sad when I hear military officers rush to publicly defend Mr. Trump.
The US military places a very high value on effective leadership. The military services – all of them – teach leadership, train for leadership, mentor young leaders, and evaluate personnel based on their effectiveness as leaders. Service in the US military is perhaps the finest leadership training opportunity available on this planet.
So, it is disappointing that military leaders are so eager to praise and support Mr. Trump, who represents the complete antithesis of leadership as it is practiced in the American military.
The military values of courage, commitment, self-sacrifice, honor, truthfulness, comradeship, and placing the well-being of others before your own mean nothing to Mr. Trump. He demands fealty, yet offers nothing but contempt in return. He spurns advice, refuses to learn anything at all about his job, and refuses to take responsibility for his actions.
He boasts about his support for the military, yet when he lists his own accomplishments he mentions a Veteran’s Administration reform bill signed by his predecessor in 2014 (though Mr. Trump did sign an expansion of it), pay raises which he falsely claimed were the first in ten years but which, in fact, are set by Congress and which have been included in every federal budget for many decades; and an undefined improvement in the Veteran’s Administration which he neither documents nor explains. He did sign budgets that increased defense spending, continuing a trend that began under his predecessor, but it is hardly conceivable that any other Republican president wouldn’t have signed those same budgets and they were passed in Congress with bipartisan support.
Based on his disregard for the well-being of others, his untruthfulness, his refusal to learn the rudiments of his job, his disregard for professional ethics, his disdain for advice from experienced members of the military, his willingness to publicly excoriate anyone who disagrees with him, and his willingness to shift the blame for any misstep to his subordinates, Mr. Trump would almost certainly be removed from any position of leadership within the U.S. military.
If members of the military want to vote for Mr. Trump, that is certainly their right. But it is still jarring to see military leaders heap praise on someone who so completely rejects the values that are the bedrock of our military institutions.
September 7. 2020
“When you are commanding, leading [soldiers] under conditions where physical exhaustion and privations must be ignored, where the lives of [soldiers] may be sacrificed, then, the efficiency of your leadership will depend only to a minor degree on your tactical ability. It will primarily be determined by your character, your reputation, not much for courage—which will be accepted as a matter of course—but by the previous reputation you have established for fairness, for that high-minded patriotic purpose, that quality of unswerving determination to carry through any military task assigned to you.”
This is a Twitter thread from an Army veteran named Charlotte Clymer. It is extremely powerful throughout, and if you are a diehard partisan you can skip the final paragraph and still be moved. Late in my military career I was trained as a Casualty Assistance Officer, which meant that I would have provided direct support to the families of deceased service members. I was never called on to actually provide the service, but the training itself was affecting and if I had performed the task it would have been the most important and honorable event in my career.
Here is Ms. Clymer’s post:
“The straight line distance between Washington, D.C. and Dover, Delaware is less than 85 miles. It takes a helicopter about 40-45 minutes to make the trip. I was 19 years-old, and it was my first time riding a helicopter. I barely remember any of it. I was distracted.
I was more nervous than I’ve ever been in my life about what was to come next, and so, as this Black Hawk floated above the earth with my casket team–me being the youngest and most junior–I could only think: “What if I mess this up? What if I fail? How will I live with myself?”
That’s how it should be in a moment like this. You should be nervous. You should let that sharpen your focus. Because there is no room for error when handling the remains of a service member returning to the U.S. after being killed in combat. You should strive for perfection.
The helicopter landed, and my anxiety spiked. In retrospect, I recall noticing the silence of the rest of the casket team. These were young men, mostly early 20s, loud and boisterous and chests puffed. Now, they were quiet. It was unnerving.
When you’re a new enlisted soldier in an infantry unit–the FNG–you’re treated like you know nothing. Because you don’t. Everyone around you is older and vastly more competent and confident. Yet, in this moment, despite having done this before, they were all nervous, too. Scary.
We were brought into a holding area near the tarmac on Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the remains of service members who have died in a theater of operations arrive on a C-17 transport plane. We rehearsed our steps. And did it again. And then again. No room for error.
The plane arrived. The ramp was lowered. The transfer vehicle that would complete the next leg of the journey was parked. Our casket team was positioned. We were now each wearing ceremonial white cotton gloves we had held under the bathroom faucet. Damp gloves have a better grip.
We’re a casket team, but these are not caskets. They’re transfer cases: rectangular aluminum boxes that bear a resemblance to a crate for production equipment. Yet, the dimensions are obvious. Any given civilian would take only a few moments to realize that’s for carrying bodies.
It’s called a “dignified transfer”, not a “ceremony”, because officials don’t want loved ones to feel obligated to be there while in mourning, but it is as highly choreographed as any ceremony, probably more so. It is done as close to perfection as anything the military does.
I was positioned in formation with my casket team, and I could see the transfer cases precisely laid out, dress right dress, in the cavernous space of the C-17, each draped with an American flag that had been fastened perfectly. I remember my stomach dropping.
There is simply no space for other thoughts. Your full brain capacity is focused on not screwing up. The casket team steps off in crisp, exact steps toward the plane, up the ramp (please, oh god, don’t slip), aside the case, lift up ceremonially, face back and down the ramp.
During movement, everyone else is saluting: the plane personnel, the OIC (officer-in-charge), any senior NCOS and generals, and occasionally, the president. The family is sometimes there. No ceremonial music or talking. All silent, save for the steps of the casket team.
You don’t see the family during this. You’re too focused. There are other distractions. Maybe they forgot, but no one told me there’d be 40-60 lbs. of ice in the transfer case to prevent decomposition over the 10-hour plane ride. You can sometimes feel it sloshing around a bit.
Some of the transfer cases feel slightly heavier, some slightly lighter. The weight is distributed among six bearers, so it’s not a big difference. But then you carry a case that’s significantly lighter, and you realize those are the only remains they were able to recover.
It probably takes all of 30-40 seconds to carry the transfer case from the plane to the mortuary vehicle, but it felt like the longest walk ever each time. The case is carefully placed in the back of the mortuary vehicle, and the casket team moves away in formation.
I don’t know how to describe the feeling after you’re done and on your way back to D.C., but it’s a mixture of intense relief that you didn’t screw up and profound sobriety over what you’ve just done and witnessed. I wouldn’t call it a good feeling. Maybe a numbed pain.
From the outside, the most egalitarian place in America is a military transfer case. They all look exactly the same: an aluminum box covered with the American flag. We didn’t know their names, rank, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation–none of it. All the same.
Whatever cruel and unfathomable politics had brought all of us to that moment–from the killed service member in the box to those of us carrying it to the occasional elected official who attends to pay respects–there were no politics to be found during a dignified transfer.
The fallen service members I helped receive and carry during this part of the journey to their final resting place were not “losers” or “suckers”. They were selfless and heroic, and I had the honor of being among the first to hold them when they returned home.
There are service members around the world involved in caring for our war fatalities. The mortuary specialists, the casket teams, the family liaisons–so many people who work to ensure that this final act is done with the greatest amount of dignity and honor, seeking perfection.
I suppose the one thing we all took for granted is that dignity would always be affirmed by all our civilian leaders to those service members who gave everything. I never would have predicted any official, let alone a sitting president, would insult fallen service members.
I cannot adequately describe my anger at Donald Trump for being so willing to send service members halfway around the world to die on his own behalf and then call them “losers” for doing so. This coward is unfit for his office and the power it holds. He needs to go.”
