There are moments when I simply have to put a story down and come back to it at another time. It seems in the estimation of our illustrious governor that I and my colleagues are regularly committing crimes against humanity. At least that was the implication of his latest letter.

I have to suspend disbelief for a moment and dedicate mental bandwidth to something that doesn’t deserve it. Essentially, the thought process is that children do not have the mental capacity to determine that they want to become a boy or girl. Therefore, a parent has to consent to any procedures that they may have.

If we further suspend disbelief we would have to come out and say what all of this means. It means that being transgender is a crime. So, what the governor expects us to do is to call Child Protective Services and tell them about the transgender students in our school.

This includes students that have nearly completed their transition and students in the beginning of the transitioning process. It assumes a world view where kids (or parents) wake up one day and just think, “I’d like to be a girl today.” Maybe dad was tired of watching John come in seventh at his track meet every week, so we’ll make John Jennifer and she will win the blue ribbons we’ve been expecting.

It ignores the truth about the transgender experience. It trivializes the transgender experience. I wouldn’t even begin to speak for anyone on this regard, but I can’t imagine it would be easy. It certainly isn’t something you dream up on a Tuesday and then go have the surgery on Thursday. It’s a difficult and painful process.

You spend more than ten years developing an identity of your child in your own mind and experience. You see them as a boy or girl. That identity comes with certain assumed experiences and they tell you they don’t see themselves the way you see them. It ignores the grief that must come when a parent comes to grips with the fact that their child needs to go through this transition to be happy. Your conception of them must die and rise up out of the ashes as something different.

So, what the governor and his cronies want us to do is to tell a government agency that what they’ve just done is a crime. We are supposed to report that student because their parents obviously don’t know what’s best for their child. We are calling another human being a crime. In case that didn’t sink in, it needs to be repeated. We are calling another human being a crime.

I hope I don’t have to spell this out, but I’m not doing that. Even if I for one second believed that being transgender was wrong or even somehow a sin against God, I wouldn’t dream of telling a kid that. Doing so would be absolutely cruel and would be antithetical to everything we should be about as human beings.

Of course, when we stop suspending disbelief we start to understand what this is really about. It’s about scoring cheap political points with a base that doesn’t need it. They don’t need their ego massaged. They don’t need to feel better about their bigotry. These kids deserve the love, respect, and kindness that Abbott is showing to his base. I’m sorry that they feel uncomfortable with the idea of transgender people. I don’t say this lightly, but they can go to hell if they think I’m about rat out a transgender kid just to make them feel better.

We naturally assume we would know when evil exists amongst us. We’ve spent an entire lifetime watching crime drama and law procedurals on television. We watch as master criminals and intuitive investigators battle it out in 42 minutes (not counting the commercials).

We pride ourselves in figuring it out before the actors reciting a script. Occasionally even we are fooled and we chalk it up as another great show and another lesson learned. The clown is never the guilty party. The red herring is exactly that. It can’t be the red herring. That would be too easy.

Except someone has spent their entire life as the red herring. He struck again and told you just enough to land himself in hot water. He disqualified himself again. He openly admitted to crimes in his business and crimes against humanity. He couldn’t be guilty. We’re missing something. It can’t be that easy. It doesn’t follow the right story arc.

In many ways, Mitch McConnell represents the evil we readily relate to. He makes you work a little harder. You have to go back into the recesses of your memory to prove it. In this case, McConnell used the reflexive “blame Biden” approach. It was his fault we left Afghanistan. Except it really wasn’t. We all know that, but we have to work a little harder to get there.

Unfortunately, not all of us know it. Some have the memory of a gold fish. They just keep swimming. There is always a subset that never will remember these things. Trump made the deal that Biden executed. He even openly bragged at the time that Biden wasn’t going to be able to get out of the deal. Just keep swimming.

Maybe these things are just too easy to track. Maybe our minds are just too trained to follow the 42 minute story arc. Maybe we are just too used to working at finding evil that we just ignore it when it is standing in front of us. Maybe we are just trained not to trust the words of our leaders.

It is more likely that it is the story of the frog in a boiling pot. The idea is fairly simple. Throw a frog into a boiling pot and it immediately jumps out. Slowly turn up the heat and it will comfortably cook. While some debate the analogy, there is some thought that humans are no better than the common frog. It goes back to the theory of sunken costs. If I bail now then I somehow have to explain to everyone and myself that all of the stuff before was apparently okay.

So, either I am somewhat deplorable or I’m all in. I have a pair of fours in my hand, but I’ve already thrown twenty bucks into the pot, so what the hell? When you are all in you never have to admit the obvious. You can claim it was all fake news anyway. So, when the evil that tempts all mankind announces himself again you just keep whistling by the graveyard.

Okay, we got us some weird going-ons in Dan Crenshaw’s back pocket of campaign funds.

It’s not enough that he spends caboodles of money on election law lawyers, and by caboodles I mean close to $100,000 just this reporting cycle alone …

There’s $16,000 more but I was running out of patience to clip them so just trust me.  Plus, he’s also paying two other law firms.

Then he hired a general purpose law firm in Houston and gave them $4,551 for God only knows what. This particular firm does not show up with any disbursements from any candidate for the past 8 years. I mean, it could be perfectly legit – having a spitting match with a vendor or an employment law issue. It could also be something perfectly weird.

And this last thing probably has nothing to do with Crenshaw but it does have something to do with the GOP’s new motto: Money, Guns, and Lawyers. Out of the clear blue, this person shows up in the Republican National Committee filings.  This is a small practice lawyer (her husband designed her website and there is no possible way he’s a professional in website design) in Austin.

 

Late last month Austin solo practitioner Donna Jean Davidson was paid $15,000 by the RNC. Why, you ask?

I dunno.

Hummm … here’s a clue. On 12/30/20, she was paid $26,550 by the Republican Party of Texas. She did “recount” work for them. Did she work with Paxton on his idiot Supreme Court case as part of the Insurrection?

Maybe this is about the January 6^th Select Committee investigation and not a case before the Texas Ethics Commission.  The RNC may be paying her to fight the Committee’s subpoena to Texas AG Ken Paxton.

Or maybe this. The Travis County DA is sniffing around the Paxton stench.

Whatever it is, it looks like Paxton.

 

It started innocently enough. Someone on Astros twitter innocently enough claimed that it cost them 75 dollars to fill up their tank with gas. They apparently drive a larger vehicle with a larger tank. In the end, they thanked Joe Biden.

Some people continue to blame Biden for expensive gas. Others defend Biden’s moves and assert that things will get better. The third group simply point out that presidents don’t have as much control over market forces as people would like to think they could.

Then, the author of the opening tweet chimes in with the money line. I’m not going to torpedo the person here, so I’ll paraphrase. Essentially they said that 75 dollars seemed to be the price some are willing to pay not to have mean tweets.

Naturally, the hounds of war descended on that person. I’m somewhat ashamed that I was one of them. I’m ashamed because I know the person likely wasn’t completely serious and was just fishing for a reaction.

Still, a larger point needs to be made. To put things very simply, there is a minimum bottom level of humanity necessary for leadership. It isn’t about mean tweets. It isn’t about insulting of women, minorities, disadvantaged, handicapped, or struggling nations. It isn’t about a craven disregard for the suffering of others. It isn’t about personal discretions so depraved that all sense of shame has escaped.

One could almost look past those things. Except those things become markers for all of the other stuff. How could someone gleefully lock kids in cages? How could someone skimp on hurricane relief and insult those that need it? How could someone demagogue entire groups of people and compare them with racists and xenophobes as if they are the same? Finally, how could someone gaslight an entire pandemic and spread misinformation until a million Americans wind up dead?

Well, it takes someone with such a deficiency in character on those first things that they become capable of doing those other things. One of the things we used to collectively understand is that whether we are miserly or generous, conservative or liberal, religious or not religious, there was a foundation of humanity necessary to lead. No one that fails to meet that bar need apply. Except this last time someone did apply and they won.

No political victory big or small is worth human depravity. No economic or social plank is worth it. Gas may cost an extra 20 or 30 bucks a tank. There could be a hike in income tax or maybe supply chains are slower. Those things may be under the president’s control, but usually they aren’t. The president is usually just a piece of the machinery that makes the world turn and life to run smoothly. He or she can’t do it alone.

Even if we were to disregard all of that, there is a minimum measure of humanity needed for the job. We have certainly elected men with character flaws before. We’ve had huge battles over which flaws were worse and which ones were acceptable. Those are usually worthwhile discussions until we happened on a man without character flaws. He didn’t have any character flaws because he has no character. No one has ever successfully put a price tag on character, but I’m positive it is worth more than 20 bucks in gas.

People often want to trace the origin of things. It may just be the full extent of my personal timeline, but I vividly remember the 1980s. Lifestyles of the rich and famous was always lingering in the background. Lotteries started popping up around the country. The Ronald Reagan revolution was in full force. It’s difficult to fully appreciate all the impact that it had on society. So, I’ll try one little corner of the world.

Baseball players have one of the more vibrant unions in professional sports. The first work stoppages actually began in the early 1970s with some minor skirmishes here and there before then. Everyone knows the Curt Flood story and the story of his sacrifice is told and retold to the point of folklore.

Somehow, in the intervening decade, athletes and the union went from being the little guy fighting for their rights to being greedy cry babies that weren’t satisfied with all they have. People started siding with ownership. People would exclaim that they’d be willing to do anything for a million dollars. Those players are just too greedy.

No one bothered to question how or why our outlook on these things changed so dramatically. Players are well compensated and there is no getting around that, but they are employees. One of the things we used to believe as a country is that when businesses make money then everyone should grow with that business. Yes, the business owner (or stock holders) should benefit, but so should the people that did the work to help the business grow.

Between World War II and 1980 we saw a virtual renaissance for the middle class. The GI Bill helped millions go to college. You heard all kinds of tales about people being the first in the family to graduate from high school and go to college. A progressive income tax helped build perhaps the most vibrant middle class in the entire world.

That was then. The Reagan years and in the intervening decades have taken that all back. Just remember, 2020 is the same distance from 1980 as 1940. A look at baseball salaries is an interesting place to start. In 2015, the average big leaguer was making 4.25 million per season. In 2021, the average big leaguer was making 4.17 million per season.

More than 60 percent of players at the big league level were making under a million dollars last season. Fans somehow see Mike Trout, Alex Rodriguez, and Albert Pujols and assume they represent the union. They represent the union about as much as the typical owner represents society at large. No one begrudges them their right to earn huge dollars. I’m sure the union members just wish a few dollars would trickle down to them at some point.

Obviously, MLB is big business and their big business operates about like all big businesses operate. The biggest problem in every single labor negotiation is in how to share revenues. The devil is in how they couch it. They want large market teams to curtail their spending so smaller market teams can compete.

Owners have never opened their books to the public. Yet, in a sport where revenues are exploding (with the obvious exception of 2020) and have been exploding fairly regularly for the past 30 years, baseball owners want you to believe they are somehow hurting financially. This is supposed to be true while average salaries have actually declined since 2015. They are losing money and the players want to bleed them dry.

It’s a bunch of bullshit. Yet, while they are shoveling this nonsense, fans are usually siding with the owners. Remember, more than 60 percent of players are earning a million dollars and that’s just in the big leagues. The tale of what happens to minor leaguers is much more stark. Yet, most owners today are worth north of a billion dollars. Franchises grow in value by more than 500 percent annually. If you stop and think about it, none of this adds up.

I know it gets hard to force yourself to care about millionaires fighting with billionaires over huge profits. That’s especially true if you aren’t a fan. Yet, this battle is essentially the same battle as the battle over minimum wage and wages in other industries. The rhetoric is the same. If they raised wages then the costs would swallow them whole or make the cost of a burger outrageous. Neither is true. That’s just what they want you to believe.

February is Black History Month with some wondering why we spend so little time on diversity. Others wonder why we are spending any time at all. Racism exists or doesn’t exist in the eye of the beholder.

Situations always come up that make us wonder and we had another one crop up in New Jersey. Obviously, news organizations cover these events in their own way and it can vary some depending on the source. As you might imagine, social media responses run the gamut. At the very least, it demonstrates the need for a continuance of the national conversation.

For those that don’t care to go down the rabbit hole, two teenage boys got into a fight at a shopping mall in New Jersey. Police appeared to respond very differently to the two boys. The white participant is allowed to sit on a sofa until the confrontation was over. The black participant didn’t get nearly the same treatment.

Obviously, such videos create just as many questions as they do answers. What happened before the video began? Is one boy more responsible than the other for the fight starting? Did witnesses provide the police with their own perceptions that might have impacted how both boys were dealt with? Were they harder on the black boy because he appeared to be winning the fight? The coup de grace is the question of what happened immediately after the video abruptly ended?

These are all pertinent questions and I’m sure they will come up in an investigation. In many ways that will be unfortunate. I seriously doubt we will hear the results of said investigation. That’s especially true if they find other mitigating factors that can explain why the two boys were treated so differently.

The social media reaction is very telling. Those outside the country don’t necessarily understand the baggage that comes with another event like this. For what it’s worth, the white participant told authorities he didn’t understand why they were treated differently. Maybe that was a moment of honesty. Maybe just maybe there is a little hope for the future.

As for the here and now, it is another very visible example that we aren’t where we need to be. Whether those two officers were wrong or right, the video is proof that we are not equal. If Critical Race Theory can be defined as “systems laced with racism embedded in laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes by race” then we could credibly argue that this video is proof that these systems are real and need to be studied and debated.

Of course, many states (including Texas) don’t want that to happen. At least, they don’t want it to happen in school. We aren’t racist anymore. We can all gather around the camp fire and sing “Kumbaya” and hold hands. Whether something makes our kids feel bad is not the standard we should be using. We know it exists. The video above is proof enough for most people.

The funny thing is that those two particular officers can credibly claim that they are not racist. They may even be able to prove that they reacted appropriately in that situation. That’s not really the point. The point is outcomes. If the outcome in situations like that seem to consistently create unequal treatment then that would be evidence of the very thing that CRT opponents want to sweep under the rug. Welcome to Black History Month. May these conversations not cease once the calendar strikes March 1st.