Speaking of import restrictions…

Are there some gringos who are so upset by the Varela administration’s decision to prolong the ban on private importation of firearms into Panama that they have decided to leave? For all of the economic hit that this could mean to the national economy, we should consider that a blessing.

There are a few other import restrictions that ought to be considered at the same time.

Panama rarely admits it, but we do have race relations problems here. What we don’t have in any substantial supply is the US obsession about race. Racial hatreds of any sort and the practice, preaching or preparation for racial violence are worse than any drug that might come into our territory.

The Panamanian government should take more care to exclude these things. Isn’t “Wild Bill” a former vendor of white supremacist materials who took his crime spree to our shores? Isn’t there a strong racial component to the “sovereign citizen” pretension about how the US Constitution is invalid because the amendments passed after the Civil War — banning slavery, establishing US citizenship for everyone born in the USA and so on — and haven’t we had people who preach that stuff colonizing here for years? Isn’t there a section of Panama’s gringo community that considers George Zimmerman’s vigilante patrols and killing of Trayvon Martin to be proper models of conduct in society? Panama already has laws against foreigners preaching intolerance, and while these could be twisted into something quite oppressive, we should at least bar entry to members of known racial hate groups that are clearly identifiable as such.

Panama has freedom of expression, which is a good thing. However, we tolerate too much in the way of false advertising — how else could fraud be a national sport? Gun sellers’ propaganda, quite often spread as undisclosed advertisements embedded within Hollywood entertainment shows, aims to convince people that having a gun in the home or on the person makes a person safer. This is demonstrably untrue, and until recently we had this stuff repeated by a member of President Varela’s cabinet. That wiser heads in the government prevailed is a relief, but that there was little argument against gun seller’s advertising in high places coming from the general public ought to be a matter of concern. That easy acceptance of a fraudulent pitch was in part the influence of imported culture.

Certainly we should do more to promote Panamanian culture and encourage a wider selection of international culture to reduce the saturation of such messages. We should also think about what we might do to limit the exposure of children to such stuff. A US ratings system that approves sadism for the whole family surely does not serve Panama very well, but then the subjectivity, biases, prudishness and opportunities for political censorship or ordinary corruption implicit in any ratings system ought to caution us about any effort to develop one of our own. However, short of setting themselves up as censors there are things that opinion leader can do. Media critics, politicians, educators and clergy ought to be in the forefront of those calling out works that would introduce weapons fetishes and the glorification of violence into our culture.

The gun sellers’ systemic failure

It won’t look like a failure when the week’s sales figures are in. A wannabe hero who was kicked out of the US Army killed five Dallas cops who were doing their jobs in honorable and exemplary fashion, and now hordes of frightened white folks will descend upon gun shops to tool up just in case there is a race war that brings some black kid armed with iced tea and skittles walking through their neighborhood. Massacres are sales bonanzas for the firearms industry.

Can we just drop the pretenses about what the NRA and its mouthpieces in government are? They are advertising proxies for weapons merchants and their arguments should always be evaluated in that light.

But what did the recent spate of racially charged killings tell us?

That racism thrives in the USA, such that black lives don’t matter as much as other people’s lives as far as the practical effect of the law’s application goes, is an ugly fact. Yeah, yeah — the GOP talking points say that it’s racist to say that. In November we shall see how emphatic non-white voters, and a lot of white ones too, can be in the face of a race-baiting major party candidate for president.

But take climate of fear and hatred that as a momentary given, and focus on the “historical” arguments made in favor of an unrestricted and enhanced arms race in the homes and stores and on the streets of the USA. Is it, as the gun sellers’ front groups say, that people need to have guns so that they can rise up against an oppressive government?

The original Constitutional Convention happened in large part because those who had led the United States to independence from the British Empire were terrified and appalled by the prospect of that sort of thing. With the just-ended Shays’ Rebellion in their minds, they gathered in Philadelphia not to celebrate but to suppress such insurrections.

So did somebody object to that effort to restrict the possibility of armed uprisings? Indeed, many did. Their most outspoken leader was Patrick Henry, who objected that the state and local militias would be suppressed under the new constitutional order. And what was the militia in his home state of Virginia, and in other southern states? It was patrols by white men, known to blacks as the patterollers, to keep black people off of the roads so as to inhibit slaves from escapíng to freedom or going from plantation to plantation to organize revolts. On the western frontier the militia was about white people being ready to resolve land disputes with established native communities at the point of a gun. Thus the Second Amendment: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

What is a “militia,” who or what are “the People,” what is the meaning of “well regulated” and what “a free State” is are all questions whose answers might be surmised by reference to what existed at the time. Back when the US constitutional order began, states could and did ban private possession of cannons or possession of any sort of firearms by black people whether enslaved or emancipated. But now the arms merchants have convinced a lot of Americans and some members of the Supreme Court that the Second Amendment references to anything beyond a notion that anyone gets to have any weapon she or he can afford to acquire are words to be ignored as if they were not there. And the gun nut shills for the firearms industry assure us that this is because we may need to violate Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, that bit about how “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”

So how well did the Bundy family’s war against the United States go? How successful was Micah Johnson’s war against the Dallas Police and the DART transit cops? Do we hear tales of a hideous government conspiracy to kill one of the Bundys’ armed acolytes in flight after the raid? Do we see YouTube videos about how the slaying of five police officers by a fanatic was a hoax by the mayor of Dallas? Do we hear the police criticized for ending the armed standoff with Johnson by sending in a robot with an improvised bomb.

In the real world governments and their officers sometimes do abusive things, but taking up arms against governments is usually a good way to get crushed like a bug and left in a pool of blood. But hey, Nancy Lanza was a good customer when she was making her doomsday preparations, and if her particular doomsday came at the hands of her equally crazed son Adam, that’s just business for the arms merchants. We can also be sure that Micah Johnson was somebody’s profitable customer.

The sales pitch used on Nancy Lanza got a bunch of little kids and some of their school’s teachers and its principal and psychologist killed. The sales pitch used on Micah Johnson got five police officers killed. The fallacies made the sale, but while the atrocities that were sparked boosted gun sales, now those sorts of pitches annoy rather than convince most Americans. They still do a brisk business, but the gun merchants’ propaganda campaign has failed.

What any society’s weapons laws ought to be is a complex matrix of considerations. Delusions and fake history are properly excluded from the factors that are taken into account.

Bear in mind…

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STOP THE VIOLENCE!

by Rabbi Michael Lerner — Tikkun

We mourn all the victims of violence, including the large volume of violence against people that goes unreported and underreported, including poor people and people of color, but also we mourn for the very few police officers who have been hurt or killed by those outraged at the way police have been harassing or murdering members of their community, their people, their race, etc. EVERY HUMAN LIFE IS PRECIOUS. None of the violence is OK. Not black on black violence, not white on black violence or black on white violence, not police violence, not acts of violent retribution. A hard message to get across in a society that responded to the horrendous killing of 3,000 plus Americans on 9/11 by engaging in assaults (both military and economic) on Afghanistan and Iraq that caused the loss of lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Yet violence continues to produce more violence. So the violence we delivered in the Middle East engendered ISIS/ISIL, and so it goes throughout history, and today in our own country. But for us in the religious world, the ongoing violence normally ignored by the media and genuinely not known or understood by most Americans is a spiritual, religious, and ethical emergency that deserves the attention of all people in every country of the world.

We at Tikkun call for an end to the violence in our society. Both the violence manifested in physical assaults and police assassinations of African Americans and the few acts of violent response by outraged African Americans at the ways their community members are being slaughtered. Also the violence caused by an economic system that denies people adequate food, shelter, health care, and other survival needs (both in the US and around the world).

Stop the violence of US wars and drone strikes.

Stop the violence of incarcerating more people than any other society on earth.

Stop the violence of rounding up and deporting refugees.

Stop the violence inherent in US trade deals that have the effect of dumping produce and other goods into foreign markets that undercut the ability of small farmers in those countries to sell their products at a price sufficient to give them enough money to make a subsistence living, thereby forcing them to either move to the slums in big cities where they face starvation or selling themselves or their children into slavery or sexual slavery, or to move El Norte (to the north) to find a way to make a living in the United States or other northern countries (where the good President Obama has them rounded up and deported, though he could instead offer blanket pardons to them all, as was argued in a persuasive op-ed in The New York Times). First step: implement the Global Marshall Plan.

Stop the violence of people against each other, by making illegal the manufacture, sale, or possession of semi-automatic weapons, assault weapons, and other conveyers of death (including new methods of killing people like bombs, robots equipped to carry lethal weapons, grenades, and whatever next comes down the pike) — if necessary through a Constitutional Amendment aimed at ending this epidemic of violence.

And while all violence is deplorable, we as a society have a special obligation to repair the damage done to Native Americans and African Americans who have faced hundreds of years of violence inflicted upon them by the white majority of this country. The psychic wounds of the American genocide against Native Americans and the enslavement and then subsequent segregation of African Americans, daily reenforced not only by an economy that disproportionately disadvantages people of color, and a police force and criminal justice system that tends to arrest and imprison people of color, and paritcularly African Americans, often for crimes that whites commit but are rarely punished for or for which they receive far less harsh punishment, give us at Tikkun special commitment to calling for reparations for these communities, and for our passionate endorsement of the notion that Black Lives Matter.

Stop the violence by legally empowering the African-American community in each major urban area, the major target of police violence, to create an independent police review commission with the power to indict police who have engaged in harassment, racist behavior, arrest without cause, or actual physical assaults on people of color, and then those indictments must be tried before juries that have been given a mini course on racism, classism, and other forms of discrimination and oppressive behaviors that have long existed in our society and which may still be a factor in the way that juries in the past have exonerated police for violent or murderous behavior.

Stop the violence by refusing to allow participation in otherwise peaceful demonstrations of anarchists who believe that violence is OK. And send to prison undercover agents of the US government or any other branch of government or the military that use undercover agents to incite violence or engage in violence.

Violence, whether physical or built into the economic and political structures of our society, is usually the product of “othering,” in which we fail to see the humanity of an individual or more frequently of everyone who belongs to a certain group. While the most frequent form of othering in the US is racism toward people of color, sexism, homophobia, classism, Islamophobia and antiSemitism, it also in some liberal and progressive circles manifests in the demeaning of all people who are into religion (I call that religiophobia), all people who are part of the 1% (ignoring the many — though just a small minority — who align themselves with social justice and environmental movements), and the police (many of whom try to do a conscientious job of enforcing the laws of our society without bias, even though the dominant ethos in many police forces does in fact validate violence and many such forces do have a culture of racism, sexism and homophobia — but still that doesn’t justify generalizing to everyone in those police forces much less all police everywhere).

Stop the violence by creating not a minimum wage but a Living Wage as defined by the MIT organization that determines what that amount is city by city and region by region. And by creating a guaranteed annual income at a level high enough to make it possible for every family living on that income to live with all the basic necessities and without fear that they must cut back on food to have money for health care or cut back on health care to have money for lodging, or cut back on lodging to have money for some basic clothes for themselves and their children.

Stop the violence by transforming education so that compassion, empathy, caring for each other and caring for the earth gets at least as much emphasis as reading, writing, and math, and these are given priority in entrance to college or university and entrance to graduate or professional training. And stop the violence by adopting a New Bottom Line.

Stop the violence by ending racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and all other forms of hatred. Have every school system require courses at every grade level from kindergarten through graduate or professional schools, and every television network, tv and radio station, as a condition of continuing to use the public airwaves, provide prime time programming aimed at achieving this goal.

Unfortunately, the likely consequences of the murder of the police in Dallas will be an increase in the militarization of local police forces, increased repression, and only token acknowledgment of the systemic racism and belief in the efficacy of violence that has permeated American history and its institutions. Few of the systemic changes that are needed are likely to even be discussed much less implemented. All the more reason to mourn for all the victims of violence both in the United States and around the world.

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These announcements are interactive. Click on them for more information.