| Number 70 | May 12, 2000 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, This week I get a little philosophical in item #3, stimulated by the fears of a friend. It occurred to me that lots of us are afraid of lots of things. This week I try to help people think clearly about the things that really threaten them. And the things that do not. Next week I plan to take a “break” (well, for me it’s a break) and do nothing but respond to some of the things that have been in the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) in recent weeks. This is usually pretty entertaining, but there are lessons to be learned along the way, as well. Of course, regular readers know that it is possible that I will do nothing of the sort, since sometimes other things just come up and have to be said. But a media potpourri is the current plan for next week. Should be fun. More new readers this week! I’m happy to have you, and I’m looking forward to hearing your comments. Send ‘em along. OK, I’m outta room; gotta go. See ya next week, Nygaard |
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“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.” - Hannah Arendt |
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To deepen your understanding of racism and the theoretical basis - or, rather, lack of basis - for it, visit the website of RACE TRAITOR, whose motto is “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” They are at www.postfun.com/racetraitor/welcome.html. Also visit the website of the companion organization called the New Abolitionist Society at www.alliswell.com/newabolition/index.html. |
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I talked a little bit last week about propaganda. According to my dictionary, propaganda is “any systematic, widespread, or deliberate indoctrination.” So let me tell you about the E-Mail I recently received from Minnesota Senator Rod Grams. He informs us that he was busy on May 3rd recognizing something that the right wing calls “Tax Freedom Day.” This ridiculous idea, promulgated originally by the conservative Tax Foundation, claims that in the year 2000, every penny the “average” American earns until May 3rd goes to pay taxes. Consequently, it is not until that date that you are “free” from the burden of paying taxes. The Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) published an article on April 18th (the day after “Tax Day” this year) that mindlessly parroted the same Tax Foundation line. I don’t have room to go into the details, but I couldn’t let this pass. Suffice it to say that this “Tax Freedom” idea is wrong both in concept and in the data. First of all, the underlying premise is that every penny you spend in taxes is like throwing money down a rathole, which is the premise being promoted by people of wealth who resent paying their fair share. And the average American actually works only until January 20th - or about 26 minutes of an eight-hour day - to pay her or his federal income tax. There’s a million other problems with this “Tax Freedom Day” junk, and I talked about a lot of them last year in an article entitled “Taxes, American-style,” and that information is still current. If you want to read it, go on over to the Nygaard Notes website at http://www.freespeech.org/nygaard_notes/ and check out issue number 31. |
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Two weeks ago a 17-year-old boy was shot as he was riding his bicycle near his home in St. Paul. It was a random killing by three young guys who did not know him. This has been all over the front pages in Minnesota. Last week I was having a conversation with a good friend who said that she is now worried about getting shot when she goes for a bike ride. There are a lot of things that we might legitimately fear, but being a victim of a random shooting is not one of them. Nationally, the odds of being killed in a random murder - 1 in 1.6 million - are just about the same as that of being struck by lightning, which is about 1 in two million. In Minnesota, the chance of being shot in a random killing in Minnesota is about 1 in 8 million, four times less likely than being struck by lightning. Yet, although my friend is not worried about being struck by lightning, she is now worried about being shot at random. I don’t recommend it, actually, but if you insist on worrying about being killed, there are lots of things that pose a higher risk than random murders. Auto accidents, for example, kill people at a rate about 259 times higher than random murder. Suicide is 110 times more likely to kill a person in this country. We are ninety-one times as likely to die by falling off of something as we are to be shot by a stranger for no reason. And even though you are more than 4 times as likely to die from inhaling poison gas as from a random murder, I really don’t think it’s worth worrying about. The Irony of “News” Our for-profit media system tends to highlight the unusual, the extraordinary, and the unexpected, since that’s what sells papers. That’s the way the“news” works. Important but routine things, such as another case of cancer caused by exposure to X-rays or asbestos, or the details of yet another American suicide (we average about 80 per day in this country) are not as likely to get on the news as a man who loses his life when he gets run over by his riding lawnmower. That’s understandable. But the result, on a personal level, is that we end up talking and thinking a lot about all these unusual things. The irony is that in many cases we end up being afraid of precisely the things that are the least likely to happen. That’s bad enough, since it causes so much needless anxiety and wasted money spent on security systems and anti-depressants. But there is a political aspect as well. The vast majority of Americans do not intentionally seek out “alternative” sources of news and information but, rather, passively receive the information that is generally provided to the “average” citizen by our corporate media. Since you are reading Nygaard Notes, you are apparently not in this group (Unbelievable, but true: the majority of Americans still do not subscribe to the Notes). And what is of concern to me is that the political action - or inaction - of this unknown number of citizens shapes the world we live in. Non- critical consumers of “news” will usually mindlessly support or ignore the things that our institutions do in our name or for our “benefit.” This week’s “Quote” of the Week succinctly addresses this point. We all have to make a living, after all. Most of the evil committed by the large institutions in our culture are committed not as a result of evil intentions on the part of the people in charge of them. These institutions develop a momentum - an unthinking propulsion - that is the cumulative result of the actions of all of us as we attempt to protect ourselves from perceived threats to ourselves and our families, or as we simply go about our jobs. Often we turn our heads and feign ignorance while evil is committed with our labor or our consumer dollars (in the case of corporations) or with our tax dollars (in the case of government). That’s not news, it’s just business as usual. The Politics of Fear Just yesterday an acquaintance from the suburbs asked if it was safe to park her car in our neighborhood. Her fear is in part the result of the corporate media’s incessant focus on lurid and sensational crime. I have recently had people ask me if I was concerned about drive-by shootings in my neighborhood. They didn’t ask me if I was worried about the more likely danger of being struck by lightning! This would be funny if it did not have political consequences. It is reasonable to take small precautions to protect oneself from the mundane dangers involved in living. But our elected officials increasingly manipulate or manufacture irrational fears and prejudices in the public mind in order to build support for policies that are more dangerous than the threats they supposedly address. Examples are numerous. I have been writing for the last several weeks about the phenomenal size and astonishing racism of our prison-industrial complex, the existence of which is itself a vast crime. That complex has been built and is maintained by the paranoid fears of the majority white population; here, fear produces crime. The right-wing plan to privatize the Social Security system has come to the fore as a result of irrational fears that the government’s most important anti-poverty program is falling apart (it’s not); here, fear is threatening one of our most popular government programs. There is a great fear of the government taking away our money, even though U.S. tax rates are among the lowest in the industrial world; here, fear is eroding our already- inadequate welfare and education systems. We fear “big government;” here, fear is depriving 45 million people of needed health care, among other things. Franklin Roosevelt said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” I don’t know what the heck he was talking about, but the increasing tendency to base public policy on fear is truly scary. A fear response is usually reactive and suppressive. If we are afraid, we want to strike out, we want to blame, we want to lock ‘em up, we want to STOP THEM. A visionary response, based on love and solidarity rather than fear, would focus on developing the good in people rather than punishing the bad. Vision vs Fear Not only is our political culture strongly influenced by fears, but they are specific kinds of fears. Since we have such a spectacularly unequal distribution of wealth and power in this society, the influential fears are the fears of the owning classes, who are a relatively small number of us. Almost all of the things that are under political attack in this country right now are things that are feared by the mostly white, mostly male, mostly healthy, and entirely wealthy people at the top. Think of taxes (which threaten their wealth), unions (which threaten their power), government (which has the power to regulate them), and poor people in this country and around the world (who are always a threat to demand their share of the wealth). Imagine a public policy that is based on a vision for the majority rather than on the fears of the minority. Such a public policy might produce more schools and fewer prisons, might give us higher taxes on those who can pay to help those who cannot, might create a system that provides housing for people rather than real estate for profit, might guarantee health care for all, and on and on. In the early 1960s philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” She was talking about the grand evils of Nazism being carried out in the small, routine tasks performed by people who were simply doing their jobs. Her point was that life is not like a Schwartzenegger movie, in which there is a huge and obvious Evil and a huge and obvious Good. She was saying that it is in the unthinking everyday routines - the banal - that most evil occurs, and that we must become conscious and intentional about our everyday actions in order to do good. This doesn’t make for a good movie - or sell a lot of papers - but it seems right to me. I feel terribly for the family whose son was shot while riding his bike in St. Paul. There is no sense to such a crime, and the killers should be brought to justice. But the fact is that we can’t really protect ourselves against random evil, or random bad luck. What I am talking about this week is what I call the “banality of danger.” I’m trying to say that the greatest threats to our survival and to our social well-being are not the maniacs with guns shooting us down in the street, as spectacular and terrifying as these incidents are. We can count on the media to continue to show us the pictures of this kind of thing. What we can’t count on the media to show us, since it is so banal, is the daily, “normal” functioning of a system that has put the value of property above the value of people - indeed, above the value of the earth itself. This mundane reality is not “news.” It’s so “normal” that most of us can’t even see it, let alone imagine a more humane alternative to it. And once we lose our ability to imagine an alternative, then we lose our ability to build it. That, far more than random shootings or lightning bolts, is the real danger facing us. |