To see the origin of this post, go here. Today, I continue to lay out a positive vision for what I would like my community and nation to become.

I envision communities in which the first responders to mental health crises are trained mental health specialists and not the police.

We can point to several inflection points in the history of policing in the US that caused it to diverge from the path of other non-military police in other nations.

The end of slavery and the advent of Jim Crow led southern lawmakers to mobilize the police to arrest black men (mostly) on a variety of non-violent charges and send them to jail and prison as labor. These police also used violent means to control black populations, first in the South and then elsewhere.

Labor actions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw industrialists mobilizing the police to crush strikes and keep factories open.

The war on drugs not only expanded the carceral state (as I wrote about here), but it also flooded local police departments with cash and materiel in quantity and lethality to wage an actual local war. SWAT teams arose in that era and the militarization of the police was nearly complete.

But a less considered historical point has bolstered that militarization all along: the many wars of choice that the US has fought since the end of the Korean War. With an annual budget now approaching a trillion dollars each year, it is safe to say that the US has made war making its chief end.

And the detritus of these wars (big and small) flows back into all of our communities in the forms of surplus military weaponry and war veterans who help populate local police departments (perhaps, especially their tactical units).

Because we have invested so heavily for so long in the police—especially to control certain bodies in certain communities—the police have become a “solution” to many community challenges.

And we have ALL been complicit. I can think of no other domain in which so-called liberals have more readily joined conservative forces to build an institution—this time in the name of “community safety.”

We give to that institution a monopoly on the use of force in local jurisdictions. We give it scant oversight. Our elected officials take its unions’ money. The police consume an ever-larger portion of local budgets. And once you have a hammer… well you know what every local problem looks like.

I have seen this in my nearby.

My vision is that we begin to chip away at the monopoly we have given our police over every aspect of civic safety—indeed over several critical public health challenges—by replacing them with trained mental health workers who will respond to mental health crises in our communities.

This is starting to happen around the country and has succeeded so far largely because the police themselves are ready and willing to cede this ground. They know that they are ill-eqipped to deal with these emergencies and bad things can happen when an armed person meets one in full crisis. We have seen it.

There are many domains that the police will not willingly give up. Power is not dispersed without a fight, and our generations-long empowerment of law enforcement has left them powerful indeed.

So, let’s take this one. Let’s stop the charade that the police are a militarized social service provider—uniquely equipped to deal with “dangerous” situations. And let’s use the knowledge and tools we have to open the door to change.

Yes, this will require shifting resources away from police departments to social services units. And, yes, the police will begin to raise the alarm about increased crime, threats to public safety, and the specter of anarchy that such shifts will entail. They have mobilized that kind of fear before and will do it again.

But our public health requires this shift. The shift from seeing force or the threat of force as the way to bring about public safety—the shift to redefining public safety first and foremost as a public health endeavor.

Installment 5

Installment 7

To see the origin of this post, go here. Today, I continue to lay out a positive vision for what I would like my community and nation to become.

I envision a country where people value the labor that goes into bringing the food they eat to their table. In this country, people know the origin of their food and perhaps grow some of their own.

This vision might seem a bit dated at this point in our history. In the early 2000s, people like Michael Pollan wrote extensively about the industrial food complex, how it destroyed the environment, produced low-quality (nutritionally) food, and was demeaning for practically all the laborers who worked within it.

And then, for the first time in many citizens’ lives, high levels of inflation, fueled by a pandemic, raised the price of food rapidly and across a broad array of products.

Cheaper food, no matter its source, is now de rigueur.

And a new pandemic—highly pathogenic avian influenza—threatens critical food industries, making some wonder if certain foodstuffs will become less available.

And yet, the warnings of Pollan et al. remain relevant. And, like many things, they start with people. I cannot remember a time when both sides of the political aisle have so demonized immigrants. It has been a literal race to the bottom to see who can be tougher on those seeking the safety and hope of our land.

But from the mushroom farms of Delaware to the packing houses of the Midwest, the strawberry and produce fields of California and Florida, and the apple orchards of the Northwest, food is literally brought to you by people like these.

The canning tomato harvest in my home county ended just a few weeks ago. The canneries are still busy turning out the tomato sauce and paste that we all use every day. From the planting to the weeding (for organic tomatoes at least), the harvest and processing , real people—many of them migrants—toil. This is going on literally in my backyard. But I spare scant attention to the value these laborers provide to me.

Perhaps the traditional family blessings over a meal should return—less as an offering of thanks to God and more as an homage to those who provide for us.

One does not have to go to a local farmers market to consider the origins of our food. We can always ask that question and learn the answer. Knowing the origin is not essentially about promoting local eating (though that has merits that I will not go into here).

Thinking about our food more broadly, considering the labor that goes into producing it, and translating that knowledge into an attitude of thanks is the heart of this vision.

Our food system employees work the hardest in the most challenging work environments for meager pay, often without health insurance. They are voiceless, faceless, and frequently live in fear.

Our casual ignorance of their plight needs to change. If not, no matter the taste of food in our mouths, it will leave only bitterness in our hearts.

Installment 4

Installment 6

To see the origin of this post, go here. Today, I continue to lay out a positive vision for what I would like my community and nation to become.

I envision a community and a nation in which leaders (at all levels and in all kinds of institutions) lead by articulating the ends they believe the institution must pursue and then leading with an unwavering focus on those ends.

It is challenging to articulate ends. In my experience, it is harder still to stay focused on and true to them day to day.

Jacques Ellul, writing in the immediate post-World War II period, noted that for humanity, all had become means—and these means—these “techniques” (as he called them)—were and are prodigious. But, sadly, we deploy these means and hurtle headlong toward… nowhere.

I think there are several reasons for this.

First, it is risky to really nail down your “raison d’être,” really laying out the main focus of why you are doing what you are doing—who benefits, who or what will be prioritized, what success will look like, etc.

Sure, many of us go through strategic planning exercises. They can help lay out ends. However, they often do not go far enough in naming the structures and the systems of inequality and inequity that will constrain and condition our work. And so we trace out lofty ends with a deep suspicion about our ability to get there.

For ends statements to truly guide us, they must carry a weight of challenge that we fear we cannot bear. So, we fudge.

Perhaps we fear failure. Perhaps we fear accountability.

It is easier to be vague.

It is easier to slap some new verbs or trendier nouns on some tried and true plan than to really step back and ask, as Ellul would, “Yeah, but where are we GOING?”

I will be circumspect here, but throughout my career and in some of the most public leadership roles I have played, I have found a genuine dislike among other leaders with whom I worked to define the ends of our work.

It has happened far too often. Each time, it has left me feeling bereft, unmoored, and dissatisfied with my attempts to rally colleagues to go deeper and take a stand on our commitments.

Ellul’s comments demonstrate a second reason why we eschew ends. The means at our disposal are so glamorous. Everyone, myself included, is interested in “best practices.” We want/need results. We do not want to “reinvent the wheel.” We need to demonstrate action.

And so we find the shiny thing that is sure to help us succeed.

This may seem too harsh. After all, best practices often flow from a strong commitment to making sure actions translate into desired ends. I know that.

However, it is a very short step from adopting them because they lead to change, and adopting them because we need “do something.”

Communications departments love the shiny things: the new program, the easily digestible soundbite about how X will lead to Y (always in a strictly linear way), and the visuals that certain shiny things produce.

In my experience too many leaders take their marching orders from Communications. Harsh? True.

Finally, a third reason why means trump ends is because of money. How many dedicated leaders have succumbed to the need to chase a new revenue stream, a new donor, a new grant to keep the lights on.

I know the pressure is great. In today’s world, CEOs and EDs are hired to bring in the money.

The pursuit of financial sustainability is the true end of far too many organizations I have known. We nod at our ends-oriented mission, even as we mobilize the entire organization to pursue cash.

Am I speaking too harshly?

Pursuing means keeps us busy, it keeps us in work, it tantalizes financial supporters. But it quickly causes us to lose track of why we even exist. In the process, the structures that destroy lives and our planet stay in place.

Perhaps this is because somewhere there ARE leaders who are doggedly pursuing ends known only to and serving only themselves.

Installment 3

Installment 5

To see the origin of this post, go here. Today, I continue to lay out a positive vision for what I would like my community and nation to become.

I envision a nation in which the jails and prisons are emptied of those who 1) are awaiting trial, 2) have untreated mental illnesses, and 3) have untreated substance use disorders. In this nation, only those who represent a risk of direct harm to others would he detained.

The facts:

• One of every five people incarcerated on this planet, are incarcerated in the United States. (About 4% of the world’s population lives in the USA).
• Of those incarcerated, half have some form of mental illness.
• Of those incarcerted, 60% suffer from a substance use disorder.
• Fully 70% of those being held in local jails are awaiting trial. They have not been convicted of a crime.

As our local Public Defender recently told a class of Masters of Public Health students: “Our jails and prisons are the largest mental health treatment centers in the world.”

And, as any 4th grader who has taken a US civics class can recite: “In our system, you are innocent until proven guilty.”

Many others have written about how this has come to be. The now generation-long war on drugs, and “reforms” that led to mandatory sentencing for drug-related crimes are high on the list. The retreat from insitutionalized treatment of mental illness, followed by decades of severe underfunding for community-based treatment is also there. Lack of access to affordable treatment for mental illness and fundamental misunderstandings about and undertreatment of substance use disorders are also high on the list.

But there is more, and much of it is insidious and, evil.

There is money to be made in incarcerating large numbers of people. From building and running jails and prisons, to providing services to them, to benefitting from cheap prison labor (see below), to the issuance of bail, incarceration means fantastic profits for far too many people (we will return to this reality later when we discuss the military).

Rural prisons are also the lifeblood of myriad small communities across our nation.

But… there’s more.

The same amendment to the US Constitution that abolished slavery permitted involuntary servitude for those convicted of a crime. Slavery by another name continues to this day.

Indeed, in the election in which I just voted, California has a ballot measure—Prop 6–that, if passed

Amends the California Constitution to remove current provision that allows jails and prisons to impose involuntary servitude to punish crime (i.e., forcing incarcerated persons to work).

This is where we are.

Unwinding all of this will be quite a task, and moneyed interests will fight it.

But beyond the money, we, the people of this nation need to examine ourselves and ask why we allow this to happen.

I have often reflected that we seem to want to hide society’s ugliness. When I was mayor, I faced many enraged (yes, that is what I would call them) citizens of my seemingly liberal community who were angry at the way I proposed handling the challenges of our unhoused community members. I often heard some variation on the comment: “Your job is to make our city unwelcoming to them so they will leave.” In other words—we don’t want solutions. We just don’t want to see the problem.

We seem unwilling to deal with our brokenness—to look directly into the challenges of mental illness and substance use disorder. We can’t seem to acknowledge how devasting pre-trial detention is for families and individuals who lose jobs, housing, and a future.

Why can’t we investigate the causes of this and attack them at their root? Why can’t we look “upstream” from jail and prison and deal with the factors that end with a locked cell?

I think we are afraid that if we look, we will realize we are gazing into a mirror.

My vision comes with a price tag—they all do. But like so much else, we are already paying a high price. The price we pay for over-incarceration is millions upon millions of destroyed lives and families, lost hope, and intergenerational trauma.

Installment 2

Installment 4

To see the origin of this post, go here. Today, I begin to lay out a positive vision for what I would like my community and nation to become.

I envision a country where every child can safely ride a bike to play, go to school, or go out with friends and family.

This may seem like a strange place to start and too pedestrian (no pun intended) to constitute a “vision.” But a lot is packed into this dream that would change many things about our lives.

First, a bikeable community is one not built around and for automobiles. It is a community that does not engineer roads to maximize vehicular throughput, with intersections designed to stack cars and travel lanes made to enhance speed.

Instead, streets are designed to reduce speeds, separate different users of public spaces, and encourage even novice cyclists to ride. This moves people out of cars for short trips and reduces greenhouse gas emissions, crashes, and noise.

Second, when children can bike safely, they will bike, and their parents will likely go with them. Daily cycling can be a public health intervention that people enjoy. With childhood obesity on the rise in the US and the concomitant increases in cardiovascular disease and Type II diabetes, biking can provide needed intervention.

(Side note: My grandson moved from a bike-unfriendly community to Davis in September. He is a generally healthy teen, but when he came here bicycling became his means to get to school, about three miles from home. He has already remarked about getting more exercise and feeling better. He competes with himself to see how quickly he can make his trips to and from school.)

Third, a child who can cycle is a child who can learn, at a strikingly early age, to make decisions and take responsibility for their and other’s safety.

If you never cycled at a young age, you may not fully grasp the experience of sheer freedom that comes from powering yourself across terrain. To bike is to begin to learn to be independent—in a good way. Learning to control a bike is a heady endeavor. You learn how efficiently your body can move from one place to another.

Fourth is the exhilaration of the wind in your face, your slightly elevated heart rate, and your somewhat higher-than-walking perch on your bike seat. These combine to make bicycling an essential mental health break.

But only when the route is designed with you, the cyclist, in mind. If your route is designed for motor vehicle throughput, your ride will be neither fun nor relaxing. Few children will attempt it, and fewer parents will even let them try.

Am I claiming that designing for and using bicycles can help heal our bodies, minds, and planet? Yes, I am. Having lived in a bikeable community for a quarter century, I can confidently say that biking is an ingredient in creating planetary and personal health.

Installment 1

Installment 3

I work hard to avoid hyperbole. I despise sensationalist headlines that hide the lack of genuine content in a news piece. So, I don’t say this lightly.

This is the most consequential election I have ever participated in.

In 2016, we knew of Donald Trump. He was a “media figure” whom it was difficult to take seriously. And whatever I felt about Hillary Clinton, I never really thought she would lose.

Until she did.

And then Trump’s presidency was a disaster. I say that as a public health practitioner who helped lead the response to COVID-19 in my local community.

It’s not simply that the president mismanaged the whole affair. At turns he minimized it or mobilized it to achieve his personal ends. Over time, he ended up leading an attack on public health institutions and leaders that risks our health every day, and leaves us nearly unprepared to face the next pandemic.

It was a disaster because so many died unnecessarily.

It was a disaster because it destroyed trust in public health structures, policies, and programs that, unfortunately, too many took and still take for granted. We are and will be sicker for it.

I am speaking about Donald Trump’s harmful impact on a single domain I know something about. He repeated that harm repeatedly, touching many institutions and people who work to make our communities nice places to live (see this for an example of what I mean).

Despite this, he might win again.

And I don’t know what I will do if he does. I am angry, sad, and confused—confused mostly, I guess. Confused that so many citizens of this nation seem to accept this man as a leader worthy of their respect.

But before I even start thinking about what will happen after November 5, 2024, if he wins, I need to figure out how to get through the days until that date.

So, I have decided to put away the news, the blogs, the social media feeds—all of it—and write instead.

But write about what?

When Mr. Trump won the first time, I was mayor of Davis, CA. In the days after his election, already knowing that his tenure would mean harms for many we loved, the people of Davis came together to prepare ourselves for this new world.

As mayor, I was asked to speak.

At the event, I tried to remind everyone who we are, what we value, and, most importantly, what our vision for our community is. It was a small speech—perhaps an inconsequential speech—but it helped me remember that without a vision, people wander. Without vision, we react. Without vision, we have no path forward.

But by articulating a vision, we can, in small and sometimes big ways, begin to move towards a future we value.

So in these days leading to November 5, 2024, I will lay out my vision for my community and my nation.

This might seem like hubris. After all, what gives me the right to lay out a vision? What does it even mean?

My response is that I do not expect my vision to prevail. But if I am to continue to contribute to a place I love. If I am to stand against the evils being let loose in our nation and world by people who care only for themselves, I must have something to offer in contrast to what I condemn: if not a plan, then at least a direction.

And I guess I would invite you to do the same.

What do you want for your community and nation? What ends do you want to pursue? What will drive you in a positive way in the days after November 5, 2024?

For, indeed, no matter who wins, it is incumbent upon all of us to know what we value and where we want to go to achieve the ends we desire for our community: to bring healing to the social, cultural, and physical world we inhabit.

See you tomorrow…

Installment 2

This is not a theological reflection on what happens after death. Though I know if my dad’s somewhat confused understanding of bodily versus soul resurrection is true, he is in a good place right now.

But this is not that.

To be truthful, this is really about the resurrection of some of my father’s cherished beliefs.

Like the locusts that emerged in the Mauritanian desert after a period of dormancy, his beliefs never really went away. And like those locusts, once they return, they quickly spread—decimating everything in their path.

A great, moving and devouring, cloud of beliefs.

And these beliefs were not just his.

It turns out that dad’s views were held by many more people than I dared imagine. I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, dad was part of Nixon’s “silent majority.” A group of aggrieved “victims” who dredged up their victimhood from the scummy ponds of racism and the brackish creeks of xenophobia.

Mom was declining fast and we needed to find a place for her to go. All she had was Social Security and whatever passed as government support for end-of-life nursing care. It wasn’t much, but we needed it—Dad needed it.

We were in the car somewhere between Akron and Lititz, PA and I waxed oh-so-eloquent about how the tattered safety net that was giving mom a room in a subpar nursing facility was a god-send.

I was digging at dad because I knew he hated “entitlements.” Yes, I was acting like an ass.

Dad came back at me like a caged beast telling me how government aid was a horrible blemish on our history and how he wished he could go back and make sure Roosevelt had never lived. He hated it.

But he needed it.

Things got hot and I asked dad whether he was pulling down any social security benefits (I knew he was and I relished the opportunity to reveal his hypocrisy).

He said

“You bet I am, but at least I earned it.”

And there it was.

The deserving poor.

Dad knew he was. He also knew that “those people” who, in his view, most ardently sucked at the teat of the federal government most definitely were not. They were mostly urban. They were mostly black. And he knew without any nuance at all that the failure of our country was because of “them.”

Dad’s views were not spoken in polite circles in those quainter times. Now, they are espoused by a vice presidential candidate who has a Yale badge to go along with his apparent Appalachian bona fides.

Dad has gone mainstream, except today “black” is “Haitian” or, more generally “immigrant.” And while it’s not polite, it is, by now somewhat of a yawner in the mainstream media precincts.

And then there is the matter of Israel.

What I need to write, I am afraid to write. And what you are going to read in the following has likely been carefully edited—out of fear.

These days to criticize the Israeli state is to run the risk of being tagged with a moniker that no self-respecting person desires.

I will have to take that risk.

Dad was Anti-Semitic.

He was so in the most casual ways and in the most conspiratorial.

Dad would regret getting “Jewed”—cheated in some financial way in a transaction (usually involving an automobile).

And, dad, in his more ardent John Bircher moments, would also bitterly decry the ways Jews ran a worldwide shadow banking system that kept people like him down (always the victim).

These were both banal and dead serious.

But Israel—what even he referred to as the “Jewish State”—was untouchable. It was unassailable. It was not to be questioned or critiqued.

The reasons, to the non-initiated, are laughable.

But to the initiated—to those steeped in the arcane ramblings of Darby and his theological spawn—they are dead serious. They are existential.

To them, and I must oversimplify here, the establishment of the State of Israel was the final piece of God’s cosmic puzzle. It would, within a “generation” usher in the rapture of the saints (a kind of UFOesque snatching away of the chosen), seven years of earth-shattering “tribulation,” Armageddon, and then, the arriaval of Christ’s kingdom on earth.

Israel was a necessity—even if Jews were NOT among the “new” chosen (that particular view has changed in recent times).

But it was not just a necessity.

Because it was a precursor to everything that must come

AND

Because Jews were/are the historically blessed people of God…

Any nation that did not support Israel would incur the wrath of God. And that would not be good.

In the end, support for Israel, was a kind of insurance plan for the United States (or any nation). During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s disdain for the state was the cause of its decline. Conversely, the US support for Israel is why we “won.”

Dad believed all this and our bitterest arguments—especially after Sabra and Shatilla in 1982—were about Israel. Dad feared for my mortal soul.

(Years later, after I returned from the “Middle East”—southwest Asia, perhaps—and I talked to dad about my Palestinian friends, our relationship almost ended. I begged him to consider his brothers and sisters in Christ who had been wronged by Israel, but he wanted nothing of it. And then later still, when I told him of standing in a Beirut mosque where the victims of the 1982 massacre were buried, he held firm.)

Dad’s beliefs were definitely not mainstream in those days.

But like the locusts, they have now swarmed the land. Who could have imagined that they would become the dominant doctrine of a Democratic administration.

Having grown up in that world, I could never have imagined that we would give Israel a pass on a massacre that is many orders of magnitude beyond Sabra and Shatilla.

But here we are.

Beliefs resurrected—or beliefs spreading like long dormant locusts, scouring the landscape of our time.

There was a time, no too many years ago, when I believed these beliefs were gone for good.

But just as I saw the reemergence of the long-dormant locusts, so too, have I seen the resurrection of his ideas. The resiliency of these beliefs is astounding and remind me that I must steel myself against that others that might come.

And, yes, there are others…

The start of my awakening to the lies and to the truth was at Pinebrook in the Poconos when I was about 21 years old. Pinebrook had inherited the mantle of an “old fashioned camp meeting” from Mispah Grove and, while there was no sawdust trail at Pinebrook, there was fiery preaching from the fundamentalist backbenchers who filled our churches in those years.

But that year, Pinebrook had a superstar: Henry Morris. Morris was an engineer who along with John Whitcomb had written the authoritative work on the young earth creation “theory.” Indeed, it was not a theory at all, but a mash-up of claims about how the world was only about 5,000 years old and evolution was a godless myth.

Not too many years before that Pinebrook awakening, I sat in the living room of our neighbors, the Kirkpatricks, and listened to my youth leader (curiously, a woman—she was at the limit of what SHE could do in that church), as she painstakingly chronicled the genealogies within the Hebrew Bible to come up with the c5,000 timeline that Morris and Whitcomb had proposed.

By the time I made my way to Pinebrook with my mom and dad and future spouse to spend a week basking in the mountain beauty and the stern reminders of why so many people were destined for hell, I was starting to doubt a whole bunch of stuff I had been raised to unquestioningly believe.

(Doubt was weaponized to question your “salvation” and place in heaven. Ergo: if you doubt “the faith”, you probably are not saved. You are damned.)

Sadly, I had no one with whom I could entrust my deepest doubts.

But a high school biology teacher, whose name I will never remember, was at Pinebrook that summer too.

And that was the beginning.

I latched onto him because he had an education outside the Bible colleges, which, we were taught were the only places committed to the truth. And one night that week when we all went bowling (an annual tradition), I sat next to him on the bus and, quite innocently, asked him what he thought of Morris’ teaching.

He lowered his voice and said something like: “I could get in trouble for this… but… it’s simply ridiculous.” He said little else except to note that none of Morris’ claims would hold up under any kind of scientific scrutiny.

But the damning thing he said, and what stuck with me forever after, was in response to a somewhat arcane argument Morris advanced about how light from starts that are millions of light years away could reach earth if the universe is only 5,000 years old. Morris claimed that God created the light to arrive at earth to make it seem like the universe was billions of years old (or something like that). My biology teacher’s response (stated in that same lowered voice) was that why would God do that? What kind of God would engage in that kind of bizarre trickery? To what end?

The teacher was profoundly offended by a God who would be so manipulative.

(Just another proof that these preachers had all created a god in their own image.)

And that was when I began to give myself permission to wake up. Permission to question. Permission to walk away. Permission to doubt the whole project. Permission to call BS on the entire package of lies meant to keep me in line.

But even though I gave myself permission, the actual escape, the actual liberation, the actual exit from that world took a long, long time. In some ways it is ongoing.

It’s hard for people who were not raised within a cult (take that term for what it typically means—a system that controls all aspects of one’s life and allows no questioning) to understand how hard it is to fully escape.

Believe it or not, Donald Trump has been a blessing in this regard. Imagine me saying that Donald Trump is a blessing—but he has been. As a truly apocalyptic figure (a figure who reveals), Trump has removed the veil from what the true project of Morris et al has always been.

Morris wanted control. He wanted control of a narrative. He wanted control of the explanation for how the world works. He wanted us to swallow the vision of a God who is unpredictable, punitive, and wholly lacking in grace. He wanted us to be afraid of that God because he wanted us to stay in line.

And though Morris is gone now, those who follow in his tradition want the same thing. That is why they attach themselves to a vile human being whom they believe will offer them the control they desire.

The biology teacher was, perhaps, the first truth teller I had ever engaged on questions of deep importance to me. And while he did not know it, he was granting me a key—a key to unlock the door to a world that transcended hate and control.

I wish I could thank him. I wish we could discuss the journey he set me on.

I know where I do not want to end up. It gets harder to avoid it as the years go by.

I think of certain things I want to avoid as I age: meanness, stubbornness, aversion to change… I work hard to stymie them and, to date, I have kept them at bay.

Cynicism is another; perhaps less visible than the others, it is, nonetheless, more corrosive to the psyche. I don’t know what I will do if I end up there, but I struggle with it more every day.

I have been to the “killing fields.” There are lots of them and I have seen many—almost always after the fact; though Afghanistan was in real time.

I have seen what warlords do. The havoc that death squads—paid for with my tax money—wreak on a people. I know what happens when an occupying army lets local ethnic hatred turn to bloodbaths. I have stood above the crypts hollowed out in the floors of mosques where the school children are stacked like wood. I have seen what Made-in-the-US big guns look like perched on a hillside pointed at a neighboring village. I have walked the streets where the war on drugs breeds social cleansing.

Most Americans have not seen these things. Nor have they been to Southern Lebanon, Beirut, the refugee camps of Jordan and Syria, Peshawar, San Salvador, the country-side outside Managua, or Mazar-Esh Sharif (as the Taliban—whom the US created—drew near). I have walked among the blowbacks of US foreign policy and met people who were “cleansed” by its “democracy-loving” allies.

My descent, in other words, has causes born of seeing the devastation of what the power brokers in a powerful nation can and will do. Have done.

(Post 9-11 I listened to the fear of my Mauritanian friends who were sure they were next in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). I assured them they were not, then left the country on a flight deep into the Sahel with an American who clearly was there to scout out the potential targets.)

I think the long trip down may have started at Sabra and Shatila (which I visited many years later). It was hastened in the first Iraq war, and accelerated when, despite our marches, the US went back to war in Iraq after the WMD lies.

I want to be clear about something right here. I will do everything I legally can to ensure that Donald Trump never enters the White House again. He is a brutal thug with a taste only for himself. Narcissus must soon yield to what someday will be renamed trumpist/trumpism—a pathology about which Christoper Lasch, were he still with us, would certainly write.

However.

However. Just as I withheld my allegiance from Clinton over the “acceptable” deaths in the Balkans; just as I withheld my support when Obama failed to close Guantanamo and extrajudicially murdered Americans with drone strikes (carried out by good American boys sitting in a mountainside in Colorado); so, too, must I withhold my loyalty to the current candidate who supports (take your pick): a pogrom, ethnic cleansing, genocide—in Palestine.

(And I am NOT just talking about Gaza.)

And the contradictions contained in the prior two paragraphs only speeds my downward spiral into what I fear will entrap me—very soon, perhaps within the year.

Because I want, I desire, I yearn for a leader who will shepherd us beyond the hyper violence of the military industrial wasteland that our country has become. We are destruction and if I accept their terms, I will join the tacit confirmation that death dealing is my birthright. My obligation. My sacred duty.

And so I sink.

I have never worked as an election inspector (poll worker), but I have known several in the various places I have lived. They were/are my neighbors. I know the local Elections Clerk and Registrar of Voters. He lives in a nearby community.

I have sat on juries—one a horrific murder trial years ago in Baltimore and another in Yolo County, where I live now—that case was too bizarre to summarize in a sentence or two. Everyone on both juries lived not far from my home—they held a variety of jobs, and in a few cases, I got to know them personally in other ways after the trials were over. They, too, were/are my neighbors.

The “neighbor” part is important here. These people, be they election inspectors or jurors, are people pretty much like me. People who live, work, raise kids, and contribute in many ways to the well-being of the community of which I am part.

They are not members of a faceless bureaucracy or political operatives. They are citizens roughly committed to the same ideals I have. They want a safe place to raise their kids. They want to be fair. They want the best for their communities.

So, when I see Republicans (and let’s not dance around this one—they are, at least at this point in our history, all Republicans), when I see them attacking jurors because of where they live or the decisions they make when I see them attacking elections as rigged and suggesting that those whose job it is to ensure fair elections are corrupt or involved in some ill-defined conspiracy, I take offense.

And I am not alone.

Conservative (using perhaps an outdated meaning of the word) political theorist Patrick Deneen argues that the failure of liberalism (not political liberalism but the “western liberal project), is a function of a too great focus on individual autonomy at the expense of commitment to local community.

Wendell Berry, who I would also argue espouses essentially traditional conservative views (he writes exhaustively about “conserving”), emphasizes in nearly all his writing the importance of place-making, of sinking deep roots in a locality, and of fostering the deep interconnectedness that can only take place in a defined community.

An attack on election integrity—because all our elections are managed locally by people who live in the communities where elections occur—is an attack on our neighbors. It is an attack on the value of the local. It is an attack on the conservative values of place and the people who collectively inhabit it for the common good.

An attack on jurors (or their decisions) is an attack on my neighbors. Juries are tricky things, but having sat on two (cases that lasted over one month each), I can say that there is a sacredness to the process that transforms participants into deeply serious and committed community members (whatever they were before they were selected for that role). I have seen jurors cry out of fear that they would make the wrong decision. I have seen them agonize over the profound implications of the decisions we would collectively make.

(I remember an older white male juror in the murder case—the accused was a young black gang member—balk at making a finding of “guilty” because he did not want to be the one who altered a young person’s life forever.)

The point I want to make is simple: people who claim the moniker of “conservative” but attack elections and juries are not conservative. In their defense of a soulless man, they have abandoned the basic tenets of conservatism. In attacking the base of the local, they have revealed their commitment to attaining power by any means necessary. Whatever that commitment is, it is not a commitment to community, to the local, to the neighbor. And it is time that we articulate the truth that they are attacking the foundations of what creates resilience and meaning in our lives.

They are attacking us.