When Censorship Backfires and the Toll of Opiates

I have reflected here and elsewhere about my recent-ish turn away from social media. I didn’t like the way it was warping my brain; I didn’t like how much time I spent on it; I didn’t like how often it made me angry about the state of the world. Algorithmic social media feeds are designed to keep you (doom-)scrolling. At some point I had enough: first of FB, then of Insta, and most recently of Twitter. If you care to hear more, I talked about this with Alyson Klein in a recent pair of pieces from Education Week, here and here.

Instead, I have subscribed to a handful of blogs by writers I trust. In some ways, I have gone back in time and am now experiencing the internet 2013 style, largely via RSS feeds on Feedly (RIP Google reader). I feel more in control of what I'm consuming and less like I'm being manipulated algorithmically.

Today, I wanted to share a few things that I think are worth reading. I may do this on a regular basis, I may not. One thing I like about this period of my life is that I am genuinely doing what I want and creating new habits and patterns. It’s like a good midlife crisis. Instead of buying a dumb sportscar or motorcycle, I am changing my information and news consumption habits.

Clive Thompson on how a Chinese streamer was censored for showing a cupcake that looked kinda like a tank. I’ve always been fascinated by how much Americans are obsessed with China’s censorship of discussions of the Tiananmen Square protests (and state suppression that followed). What China did was clearly terrible. It’s also morally indistinguishable from the National Guard’s murder of students at Kent State or the assault on Black Wall Street in Tulsa. Notably, the discussion of these and other incidents of state violence (like the Wilmington Coup) are often suppressed or unwelcome in US schools. It’s obviously not the same level of censorship as China but the intention of the regime in both cases is the same. The Tiananmen Square massacre is just out of living memory for Chinese millennials but the state’s dramatic efforts to suppress knowledge of the events has led to people accidentally discovering the protests, the so-called Streisand Effect. I hope that recent teacher censorship laws passed in many US states will backfire in the same way. 

The scope of the opiate crisis is insane and it has killed an unfathomable amount of people over my adult lifetime. I am in the final pages of Beth Macy’s Dopesick. It is a Michael Lewis-esque work of narrative nonfiction about the US opiate crisis and the extent to which it was foreseeable, preventable, and driven by corporate greed. The data Macy brings to the table is staggering: 

• Over 100,000 people per year overdose in the US; that’s over 2,700 people (or a 9/11 every day);

• We are less than 5% of the global population and consume over 30% of the world’s opioids; 

• In 2010, enough opioids were prescribed in the US to medicate every man, woman, and child in America—24 hours a day—for a month;

• As early as the year 2000, pharmaceutical companies were spending $4,000,000,000 on direct marketing to doctors to induce the doctors to write more prescriptions for drugs, in particular opioids.

Like gun violence, for reasons of general dysfunction, campaign contributions by industry, and regulatory capture, the US is largely alone in struggling with this issue. These are self-inflicted societal wounds. The book is enraging because warnings from clinicians and advocates as early as the 1990s were ignored by regulators and pharmaceutical companies.

Lastly, Melissa Santos on the State Democratic Party Chair bullying State House members for supporting a more experienced and progressive candidate. For my people in Washington, in the aftermath of the recent midterms the tea is coming out about the State Democratic Party Chair, Tina Podlodowski. The short of it is that Podlodowski is deeply pissed that some progressives were supporting non-partisan candidate Julie Anderson for Secretary of State. We discussed this issue on a recent episode of my podcast and Santos covered it in Axios, including screenshots of texts where Podlodowski threatened to cut off house members who didn’t toe the line.  Saying to one, "this is bullshit — apparently the House thinks so little of the Democratic Party … we can spend our resources elsewhere." We all understand the nature of political parties but it’s really dumb to see someone go to the mattresses against fellow progressives, especially in defense of Steve Hobbs, who is less progressive than Anderson and was basically the Joe Manchin of the State Senate.

On a more personal note, we are well over here. This weekend Hope and I are in Al Ain visiting her sister Faith. We stumbled on a local Emirati handicraft festival, had some great Ethiopian and Moroccan food, and I’m looking forward to the opening of the World Cup this weekend. 

See you next week.

A Little Solidarity

Colin Kaepernick is no longer playing in the NFL because wealthy team owners decided collectively to silence his protest. Merrick Garland remains on the DC Circuit Court because millions of Republicans, who can't stand Donald Trump, voted for him anyway to get tax cuts and more conservative federal judges.

A little solidarity goes a long way.

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, unchanged since 2009, largely because middle-class folks won't fight for low-wage workers. As Michelle Alexander laid out in The New Jim Crow, one of the reasons mass incarceration became national policy is because leaders of legacy civil rights groups were focused on issues that impacted their children, like affirmative action in college admissions. Police killings continue unabated, at over 1000 per year, because polite white folks don't think it's their problem.

A little solidarity goes a long way.

I tend to avoid Wiemar Germany comparisons, but if you want to sell to me that we're living through pre-Franco Madrid or pre-Mussolini Rome, you'll have my attention. What is happening today is not normal. Separating kids from their parents as a form of political brinkmanship is not normal. Revoking citizenship from naturalized citizens is not normal. Equivocating between violent white-supremacists and the people who rally to oppose them is not normal. Ethnic paramilitary forces euphemistically calling themselves “Western chauvinists” and holding rallies is not normal. We can't become numb to it.

Earlier this week, my dude James Ford shared a video of Latinx factory workers walking off the job en masse in support of two colleagues. They shut their entire factory down because they were united, in solidarity. I often think about the Spanish Civil War. When Franco rose to power, he did so largely because the political left in Spain was divided over how to oppose him, until it was too late.

The aforementioned video, there’s some NSFW language here, just warning you

It's easy for us to get tunnel vision around our own issues. It would frankly be easier for me to stick to class size, teacher salaries, and school funding. But now more than ever, people who desire a more just and equitable society must show solidarity. I'm not a Marxist, but I speak the language. Capital and power seek to distract and divide us, but we're often too willing to do that work for them. Our lives are all improved by the contributions of immigrants to the cultural milieu. We were all birthed by mothers who deserve equal rights, pay, and treatment. We're all threatened when law enforcement operates unchecked in our communities. We're all harmed when the LGBTQ+ population has their humanity questioned or lives threatened. We're all worse off when Black lives don't matter. But, none of these struggles is more important than the other.

A little solidarity goes a long way.

Our Rightward March into Oblivion on Guns

I’m a gun owner. I bought my first gun in 2011, when I became a homeowner, after reading about one-too-many black folks being mistaken for burglars and killed by police in their own homes. I own a 12-gauge shotgun and a .40 S&W carbine. I enjoy going to the range and going away for my semi-annual dude trip, where we go trap and target shooting. Obviously, I’m not a gun abolitionist, but I think our current gun policy conversation borders on the preposterous.

NRA Spokesman Wayne LaPierre’s “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun” might be the dumbest piece of propagandistic claptrappery to penetrate common parlance in my lifetime and is one of the clearest indicators of the drift into absurdity of the US gun debate.  

Like most Americans, I’ve watched in horror, the recent spate of mass shootings. Pulse Nightclub in Orlando: 49 dead, 58 wounded; the Route 91 Festival in Las Vegas: 58 dead, 851(!) injured; Stoneman Douglas HS in Florida: 17 dead, 14 of them children. Sadly and predictably, there will be more.    

This is a uniquely American problem. We are an outlier. We choose to let this happen.

A contributing factor to our current situation is the insular nature of American politics. Too few Americans travel abroad, consume international news, or have friends who live abroad. We don’t understand how preposterous and atypical our levels of gun violence are. We are literally the only developed nation where people are murdered with regularity using weapons of war. We are literally the only developed nation where the open carrying of guns is viewed as acceptable behavior. We are literally the only developed country in the world where the idea of arming teachers is being treated as a serious policy proposal (it isn't).  

One of my colleagues, Ms. Bockus, does a lesson in her AP Language class about the syntax of the Second Amendment (quoted in full for those unfamiliar): “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.” It is a complex sentence: several subordinate clauses and one independent. Certain folks in the gun debate focus on the “shall not be infringed” clause, while conveniently disregarding the “well regulated” portion of the Amendment. But, under any reasonable reading of the entire amendment it is clear: Americans have a right to bear arms and the government has the right to put reasonable limits on said right.  

But, reasonable policies that were passed on a bipartisan basis a generation ago are somehow considered radioactive in our modern politics:

• In 1967, under the leadership of Governor Ronald Reagan, California passed the Mulford Act, banning open carrying of firearms in the state

• In 1994, in a bipartisan vote, Congress banned the sale of new assault weapons. This ten year ban was allowed to sunset by Congressional Republicans in 2004

• In 1999, following the shooting in Columbine, Wayne LaPierre came out in support of gun free zones in schools stating, "We believe in absolutely gun-free, zero-tolerance, totally safe schools. That means no guns in America’s schools. Period."

Our current gun policy debate, with the president proposing the arming of teachers, is a fundamental departure from common sense and historical trends and precedents. This is a recipe for more mass shootings. More extensive background checks, red flag laws, magazine capacity limits, and an assault weapons ban (grandfathering-in existing weapons) are examples of sensible policies that can save lives and make more sense than arming teachers.

We need to learn lessons from abroad and locales with lower rates of gun violence. We need our politicians to show courage in the face of the gun lobby. We need reasonable gun owners to speak out for sensible policy.  None of this is Earth-shattering, but it requires putting aside pride and getting out our political bubbles. The mass shootings are becoming more lethal; five of the ten most deadly US mass shootings have occurred since 2015. Our children deserve better than to inherit a broke, hyper-violent, dystopian Wild West. We can do better.