Mother's Day orphans: When your mom's no longer here

Mother's Day is not my favorite holiday. Father's Day isn't, either. I remember being young and asking, "Why don't they have a Kids Day?"

"Because every day is 'Kids Day,'" I was told.

Yes, kids sometimes have it easy. I know I did. I have no complaints about how I was raised, and I couldn't be more grateful to my mom and dad for their patience, generosity and the hard work they did to raise a sometimes difficult boy. Especially when that boy was enduring the crucible that was (and, from what I hear, still is) middle school. It's not hyperbole to wonder whether I would have survived those years without Mom and Dad.

Which brings me to why, at least in part, Mother's Day and Father's Day aren't my favorite times of year - now, far more than when I was a kid.

First, I'll invite you to look at where the apostrophe is in those names. It's before the "s," which makes it singular, and that's how I always took it. Mother's Day was a day for me to appreciate my mother, and for you to appreciate yours. Here's the rub: I haven't had a mother for 22  years now (and, as of last August, I don't have a father anymore, either).

It's fine to say that all mothers deserve to be appreciated, and I couldn't agree more. They should be appreciated every day of every year they're on this planet.

My mom isn't on this planet anymore. Yes, I still appreciate her. But no, I can't give her a schmaltzy Hallmark greeting card to tell her oh-so-imperfectly how much - and at the moment, I wouldn't want to. I'd just want to give her a hug (even though she was chronically off-balance from the polio that left her half paralyzed as a child), and tell her I loved her so she could hear me.

Please don't tell me she can hear me from heaven or "the other side of the veil," because even believing that wouldn't make it the same. It doesn't for me, and I doubt it does for anyone else, either.

It will never be the same again.

It's not just the winter holidays

I've heard people talk about having a blue Christmas, sometimes invoking the all-too-clinical-sounding term "seasonal affective disorder." They don't enjoy the winter holidays because they bring back memories of times spent with loved ones who are no longer there. Mother's Day does the same thing to me, and if anything, it's worse, because there was only one of her, and this day is supposed to be about that one person.

For years, I've tried to shrug it off and not get too wrapped up in sorrow over it, because my mom's death remains the single most traumatic event of my life. When my father passed away last year, he'd been unconscious in a hospital bed for 10 days, and as hard as it when he died, I'd had time to prepare myself.

When my mother died, it was sudden. I was working one evening when I got a call in the back paste-up shop at the newspaper where I was working (back when they still had such things). I heard my dad sobbing on the other end. He never cried. But when he told me Mom had gone to lie down for a nap and hadn't woken up again, it just didn't compute with me. She had been ill, but not that ill. I hadn't seen her since Christmas, which had been more than two weeks earlier, and now, I never would again.

So, Mother's Day isn't a cause for celebration to me. As much as I appreciate everything mothers all over the world go through for their kids, none of them is my mom. I know the same thing will happen at Father's Day this year, and it will might even hit me harder because this will be my first year without Dad, and the day often fell right on his birthday.

None of this is to say you need to tiptoe around me Sunday. I won't take offense at others who, unlike me, have a Mom who's still here to celebrate. Just excuse me if I feel a little left out. I might not even show it on the outside, but it's there, and I wanted you to know because I doubt I'm the only person who has this kind of reaction. And as important as it is to celebrate your mom (please do!), it's important that you know there are other feelings associated with days like these. 

I still miss my mom. Even if there were 365 days to honor mothers, she'd still be the only one I'll ever have.

We let the trolls out, and now they're running the show

“Don’t feed the trolls,” they say.

Good advice, but it’s not that easy these days.

Our lives have become a Facebook group, a Twitter feed, a Reddit thread. We haven’t just immersed ourselves in those things; it’s more pervasive than that: We’ve started to rebuild our society in their image. Welcome to the social media experiment of the 21st century.

It’s an experiment we started without any clear plan to prove our hypothesis. Hell, we don’t even have a hypothesis. We’re flying by the seat of our pants into a radioactive “social laboratory.” Whether we’ll make it out in one piece is anybody’s guess.

The new reality

Mass communication has always played a huge role in defining us as a society. We’ve read our daily newspaper, gathered around the radio for fireside chats, watched newsreels and fantasies at the local theater and vegged out in front of the TV. But this is different. Those media — with the exception of the occasional letter to the editor — were all passive, and that allowed us to keep the trolls safely tucked away under their bridge, where they belonged.

Social media have changed all that because they’re, well, social. Who let the trolls out? We did, and they’re not confined to chat rooms and message boards anymore. They’re running around loose in the real world, wreaking havoc and doing their best to tear our social fabric to shreds.

Take this Milo Whatshisname, for instance. This self-described “dangerous faggot” goes around the country on a speaking tour designed to piss people off. The more outrageous he is, the more outrage he provokes. People get angry and protest, which leads to media coverage and — voila! — the attention he’s been seeking. Game over. The protesters are playing right into his hands.

But in an era when trolls are running amok, having escaped the confines of the computer screen, do they really have much choice?

The troll’s game

Imagine you run a social media group. You set some ground rules, start sharing ideas … and inevitably, a troll finds his way in.

He hasn’t been there long before he starts causing trouble. He rails against you for refusing to delete something he finds offensive. Then he accuses you of censorship when you delete one of his posts – ignoring the fact that it violates your ground rules. That just means (according to him) those rules should be changed. In fact, he says, he could do a better job of running the group, and he lets everyone there know it.

Now imagine you can’t block the guy, and members of the group can’t leave. He’s got a captive audience, and even though a lot of members tune him out, a lot of others start listening because he’s so loud and insistent he’s hard to ignore. He finds out what they’re angry about, and he tells them he’s angry too; then he takes that shared anger and directs it at you.

It isn’t long before the guy dominates the group’s discussion. Ideas don’t matter anymore. All that matters a single question: Are you for the troll or against him? The question has to be resolved, so the group decides to vote on who should be in charge, you or him.

In fact, however, the vote doesn’t really resolve anything. Whoever wins, the other side feels alienated. But remember, no one can leave. The troll doesn’t really care who wins: All that matters to him is that he’s the center of attention, and he’ll still be the same attention-seeking drama king regardless of the outcome.

The group, meanwhile, has become dysfunctional and paralyzed. As long as it’s spending all its time talking about him, it can’t be bothered to discuss actual ideas. To look for innovation. To work toward solutions.

A world without rules

“Wait a minute,” you might object. “That stuff doesn’t really happen on social media. There are safeguards. You can block people. You can leave groups.”

And you’d be right.

But this isn’t about social media anymore. It’s about what happens when you take the culture of social media and apply it in the real world, where those safeguards don’t exist.

In the real world, trolls can get elected, and you can’t leave – unless you’re wealthy enough to emigrate, and assuming you want to abandon the place you’ve called home all your life.

It’s easy to avoid feeding the trolls when they don’t have power. When they do, it’s a different matter entirely. Do we ignore them, knowing they’re just in it for the attention? Will that rob them of their power? Or do we actively oppose them, fearful that this very thirst for attention will motivate them to keep pushing the envelope … until it falls off the table into the rubbish heap?

Social media aren’t to blame for this dilemma. The fault is ours for thinking we can apply the rules of social media to real life when we can’t.

Over the past decade or so, we’ve systematically imposed the social media template on the real world. We’ve created a culture in which break room conversations sound like rhetoric from Reddit; where science and pragmatism take a back seat to ideology; where politicians decide to campaign (and govern!) via Twitter.

And where the trolls are running the show.

They’ve escaped from under the bridge and want more than anything to put us there instead. It’s a bridge we built ourselves using social media, and if we’re not careful, it’s going to come crashing down on all of our heads.

Christmas is the story of our lives

I’m going to wade into the “war on Christmas,” but it’s not what you might expect.

I like Christmas, and I always have. In fact, it’s probably my favorite holiday. That’s no earth-shattering revelation, because millions of people like Christmas, and it’s almost certainly the most popular holiday on the calendar.

What is surprising, and a bit sad, is that so many people have become so concerned with why we like (or should like) Christmas.

One person’s reasons might not be the same as another’s, and that’s perfectly okay.

For me, it’s not for any religious or spiritual reason: I actually find the whole “war on Christmas” thing pretty tedious. If you want to be offended by “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays,” all I can ask is, “Aren’t there more important things in life?” I mean, seriously. We could always emulate the British and compromise with “Happy Christmas,” but isn't the whole point to give and receive good wishes, no matter what words we use?

Should we be forced to acknowledge that the pine tree in the living room or the yule log on the fire were borrowed from European paganism? Should we worry too much about the fact that a springtime birth for Jesus was far more likely, based on biblical accounts, or that a December date was likely chosen to correspond with the winter solstice? Should we be forced to give Santa the cold shoulder because he’s become an object of cultural affection that "should" be reserved for that babe in the manger?

(I have a hunch cold shoulders don’t work too well on someone who lives at the North Pole; maybe we should all just chill instead.)

Then, there’s the gift-giving. I don’t like Christmas for any love the commercialism or any desire to brave the Mongol hordes on Black Friday and bring home a flat-screen TV for half the normal sticker price. I like a good sale as much as the next person, but I don’t like traffic jams, long lines or commercial pitches. And I don’t like that unspoken pressure to buy something of a certain value just because I’m afraid the person on the receiving end of my gift might be giving me something more expensive.

A lot of people love Christmas because they spend it with family (and a lot of people who aren't on good terms with their families don’t love it for the same reason). Me? I’m the only son of an only son who passed away a few months ago. My mom’s been gone for more than 20 years, and I’m in touch with precisely one of my extended blood relatives, whom I haven’t seen in person for years. So, the “time with family” aspect of the holiday really doesn’t apply to me – apart from the fact that I get to spend more time with my wife and that my stepson, whose company I enjoy, comes for a visit.

No, what I like about Christmas are the traditions. Some of them are no more than memories now, but those memories are sweeter than the cranberry sauce I used to eat with my turkey before the Type 2 diabetes kicked in.

Thanks for the memory

I remember when Christmas was a televised songfest, an excuse for crooners like Perry Como and Bing Crosby and Andy Williams to sing the songs that helped make them famous, or for younger talents like John Denver and Karen Carpenter to start new traditions that ended far too soon when they died far too young.

I remember Bing singing The Little Drummer Boy with Bowie, and I remember John Lennon turning an old ballad into a Christmas song with an anti-war message. I remember when Bob Hope sang Thanks for the Memory, when Dick Clark narrated the Times Square “ball drop” at midnight on New Year’s Eve and when Guy Lombardo’s orchestra played Auld Lang Syn.

I remember when I thought trolls were singing yuletide carols and “ ’round yon virgin” referred to the fact that Mary was rotund – because she was expecting a baby. And I remember wondering why old acquaintances should be forgot and what anyone would do with a gift of seven swans a-swimming if they didn’t happen to have a pond handy.

I remember Charlie Brown picking out that same forlorn little Christmas tree year after year, about the same time the residents of Whoville were making the Grinch’s tiny heart grow three times larger. And I remember Burl Ives and Jimmy Durante going all animated on us with annual TV tales of Rudolph and Frosty, respectively. (Ives’ animated character, Sam the Snowman, may have looked a little like Frosty, but he narrated Rudolph’s story.)

I remember the gift requests Santa fulfilled for me as a child, from a Slinky dog one Christmas to a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots set another year. I remember the large, wooden castle I assembled at my aunt’s house when we spent Christmas morning there, and I remember how my grandmother always got more gifts than anyone else … because she had more close relatives than anyone else!

I remember riding down Christmas Tree Lane in Fresno every year with my parents. Traveling at 5 miles per hour with the headlights off, I’d marvel at the strings of colorful lights that turned the street’s towering Deodar cedars into living Christmas trees, and I’d smile at the hundreds of decorations that transformed the houses on either side into treats for the eyes.

I remember caroling with some of my friends in high school and hanging those special family ornaments on the tree.

Christmas as chronology

But Christmas isn’t just memories. It’s the fact that the list of memories keeps growing, just like Santa’s list. There are new neighborhood decorations to explore, new gifts to wrap and open, new traditions to create. (Ever tried Irish cream in eggnog? You should. If you’ve got a sweet tooth, it puts the old rum standby to shame.)

“Wait a second,” you may be saying. “Didn’t you say you were joining the ‘war on Christmas’? Everything you’re saying seems very much in the holiday spirit.”

That’s actually my point: Christmas belongs to all of us. It’s not just a religious holiday or a reason to run up thousands of dollars in credit card debt. It’s not even merely an excuse to gather with family or drop a few dollars in the kettle by the supermarket door. It’s more than all those things. Christmas is, in a very real sense, a living chronicle of all the things that have come before, from waiting up all night as a child to spending that first Christmas with your sweetheart to spending that last one with your parents. At times, it’s joyous; at other times, it’s bittersweet, very much like life itself.

Christmas tells the story of our lives, and perhaps it’s because I’m a storyteller that it holds such appeal to me. But regardless of the reason, I know I’m not alone. I’m wading into the war on Christmas because I want to end it. Let's stop bickering about why we like Christmas and just enjoy the season, because when it comes right down to it, we don’t need an excuse for peace on earth and goodwill to men (and women, too, of course).

We just need to express it, to make it happen. That, to me, is the spirit of Christmas.

May you have a joyful one.

Social justice warriors or voyeur vigilantes?

Don’t call me a social justice warrior.

I like Warriors – as long as they’re named Stephen Curry or Klay Thompson, and they’re draining 3s in the name of Golden State. But real war (off the basketball court) is hell, as the saying goes, and it’s a warrior’s job to win. Period. Which usually involves making someone else’s life hell.

Count me out.

I’m not interested in making anyone’s life hell. But we, as a society, seem increasingly inclined to do so – and that worries me. Thanks to the internet, shaming has become a spectator sport, with self-proclaimed social justice warriors on the lookout for people to condemn.

In a way, they remind me of those highway patrol officers who hide behind billboards, waiting to take off after the next driver who’s going a few miles over the speed limit.

Except they’re worse.

Those roadside cops may be sneaky, but they have an official mandate to stop people from speeding. If you’re exceeding the posted speed limit, they’re perfectly within their rights to pull you over. In fact, they’re doing their job.

Social justice warriors don’t wear badges, haven’t gone through any training and lack any official mandate to do what they do. They are, in a sense, vigilantes, patrolling the social scene and trying to shame people into “doing the right thing” – according to their definition.

A key distinction

“Hold on,” you may object. “Don’t they speak out forcefully against racist and sexist behavior, discrimination against the LGBT community and others. Isn’t that ‘the right thing’?”

Of course it is. But speaking out is one thing, shaming is quite another.

Shaming has been used as a means of social control throughout history, often in ways that today’s social justice warriors would find offensive. People have been shamed for refusing to believe in “the one true faith” – whatever their culture determines that faith to be. They’ve been shamed for the color of their skin, for menstruating, for their sexual orientation. Even today, many people who call themselves social justice warriors decry such actions as “slut shaming” and “body shaming.”

As they should.

But if you’re so quick to condemn others for shaming – a form of bullying – should you really be so eager to use the same tactic? Do the ends truly justify (pun intended, again) the means?

Social justice or social torture?

Before answering that, perhaps we should address what those ends will actually be. People who are shamed wind up being condemned, ostracized and often dehumanized. Branded with scarlet letters, they become convenient scapegoats for public rage and symbols for “everything that’s wrong with the world.” They can lose their reputations, their jobs and worse.

Does it change their minds? It’s doubtful. Shaming is ineffective for the same reason torture is: If someone is hurt badly enough, s/he will say anything to make the pain stop. Recanting when you’re tied to a stake is meaningless; contracts signed at the point of a gun are null and void – for good reason.

Others may be bullied into remaining silent – or going into hiding – because of the example that’s set by public shaming. But is that really a good thing? If we tell them to shut up, we’ve cut off any avenue for dialogue that just might change their minds about a whole range of issues. Perhaps, heaven forbid, the people we were tempted to shame might even teach us a thing or two.

Too often, social justice warriors remind me of Patriot Act proponents: willing to curtail freedoms (in this case, freedom of expression) for the sake of, supposedly, preserving them.

That’s not to say we should start looking the other way when someone uses the “N” word, condemns someone for his/her sexual orientation or harasses another person, sexually or otherwise. What we should do, I believe, is condemn the behavior without shaming the person. None of this is, nor should it be, personal. If we make it so, we expose our own ulterior motives.

War and peace

Are we really trying to make the world a better place, or are we just voyeur vigilantes, actively seeking out people to mock and shame because we enjoy seeing a good train wreck? Or, worse, because we want to prop up our own fragile egos by claiming some sense of superiority? If it’s the latter, we’re merely sinking to the level of those we shame – or lower.

Language matters. There’s an important difference between a social justice warrior and a peaceful protester.

Saying you’re a warrior makes it sound like you’re ready to kick some ass, and to hell with anyone who stands in your way. Saying you’re a diplomat makes you sound like a wimp or, at the very least, someone who’s willing to “compromise your principles” – because compromise has become a dirty word in the modern lexicon.

And that’s too bad, because a willingness to compromise fosters trust, and trust is necessary for dialogue. That’s what I want.

So, call me a diplomat. A proponent of peace. An advocate for equality. A believer in kindness. I’ll take any of those as a high compliment. But please don’t call me a social justice warrior. I have no interest in starting a war; I want to pave the way for peace.

The economy, identity politics and the collapse of neoliberalism

Back in August of 2015, activists with the group Black Lives Matter disrupted two rallies in Seattle for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. The group succeeded in keeping Sanders from speaking about his agenda.

The surreal part of all this is that the agenda in question wasn’t some far-right attempt to marginalize African Americans. It was just the opposite: It included such proposals as free college education and a $15 minimum wage – proposals that, if implemented, would have helped poor and working class African Americans more than anything the other major candidates were suggesting.

As of 2010, the poverty rates for African Americans were 27.4 percent, the highest among any racial or ethnic group. Yet despite this, African Americans overwhelmingly preferred Hillary Clinton over Sanders in the Democratic primaries, 76 percent to 23 percent. Some of this might have been chalked up to name recognition, and Clinton certainly had a stronger ground game among black voters.

But on policy, it’s hard to argue that Sanders’ proposals wouldn’t have done more to lift African Americans out of poverty than Clinton’s.

Meanwhile, Sanders actually won a slightly greater proportion of the white vote than Clinton did, appealing to many of the same working-class white Americans whose votes Donald Trump used as the touchstone for his victory over Clinton in the general election.

Where neoliberalism went wrong

So, what happened? Why did poor and working class blacks vote so overwhelmingly for Clinton in the primary, while poor and working class whites turned out in droves for Trump in the general election.

The answer seems obvious, although it won’t be popular among some of my readers: People on both sides of the racial divide have emphasized that divide to such an extent that racial identity has become more important in defining political allegiances than actual policy - even if that policy might help both sides.

Who benefits? Anyone wishing to maintain the economic status quo … which isn’t really a status quo at all, because the wealth gap between rich and poor has continued to grow. And it’s done so with both a Republican (George W. Bush) and a Democrat (Barack Obama) in the White House.

Before anyone yells “false equivalency” – an increasingly common and often fallacious rejoinder that’s intended to shame people into shutting their mouths – I’m not equating Bush’s catastrophic economic policies with Obama’s efforts, which did succeed in bringing the unemployment rate down substantially and stimulating an economic recovery. Few people would (or should) argue that even a sluggish recovery is better than the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, but neither should anyone turn a blind eye to the increasing wage gap and unabated downturn in quality of life for poor and working class Americans of all races.

Yet that’s precisely what the party regulars on both sides did. Jobs continued to be shipped overseas. Mainstream politicians on both sides of the aisle all but ignored the economically fueled Occupy movement. Everything was business as usual.

Going on the defensive

This might not have been surprising from the right, which has long taken a pro-business, anti-labor stance. What is more surprising is that the left hung working class America out to dry. Tired of being branded “socialists,” they stopped defending unions and started to look more and more like proponents of what might be called trickle-down light.

Then, when Sanders drew a large following not just despite but because of his self-identified socialism, they ignored it. And when Trump took up a populist tone in the general election, they tried to ignore that, too. Neither candidate fit into their preconceived notions about how Americans should behave.

Those preconceived notions originated with their decision to abandon the struggle for equality in favor of a struggle for identity. In doing so, they put a premium on lip service to various racial, ethnic and other groups while putting economic concerns on the back burner – even though it was those very concerns that could have united poor and blue-collar blacks, whites, Latinos, LGBT individuals, women and anyone else struggling to make a living.

The result? Low-income black voters weren’t comfortable with Sanders because, even though his policies would have benefited them more than Clinton’s, he didn’t speak the language of identity that the Democratic Party has spoken for more than two decades now. Low-income whites, meanwhile, were turned off by Clinton’s rhetoric precisely because it did put a premium on identity, rather than addressing their concerns about how to put bread on the table.

Neoliberals aren’t entirely to blame for this. Bigotry plays a huge role. African Americans face troubling issues that most white voters don’t have to deal with: social prejudice; police profiling; unjustly harsh sentencing and disproportionately high incarceration rates. The list could go on. Where neoliberalism has failed is in reacting to bigotry defensively, through identity politics, rather than going on the offensive to improve the lives of those targeted by the bigots.

Clinton and the neoliberal Democrats have spoken to these issues – all the while ignoring the economic issues that facilitate prejudice as much as anything else by locking people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. As mentioned earlier, African Americans constitute the highest percentage of those at the bottom.

As economic status solidifies, so does social prejudice. Just look at the rigid Hindu caste system if you want to know where this process ends up.

Identity vs. behavior

Putting identity over equality is, of course, an attractive message to people who have been discriminated against based on the color of their skin, their gender, their sexual orientation. But there’s a difference between standing up for a specific group of people and standing up against bigotry, no matter how it manifests itself.

This is a crucial distinction. The former course, pursued by neoliberals, focuses on defending identity, while the latter focuses on ending bigoted behavior that targets people because of their identity, regardless of how or against whom it manifests itself. Ultimately, it’s not anyone’s identity that is – or should be – the issue, it’s the behavior of the bigot.

So, while the neoliberals have been preoccupied with defending something that shouldn’t need to be defended, guess what? The bigotry that’s been condemned for decades has become normalized. It’s still hard for me to imagine that the American people were so willing to elect a candidate such as Trump, who expressed such unapologetically prejudiced views. But even when the Democrats pointed this out, they were viewed by many as doing so not because they were against bigotry, but because they were trying to enforce the identity politics of political correctness. They came across as playing politics, rather than trying to further the cause of struggling Americans.

Voters, not candidates

Trump and Sanders had one thing in common, as pundits have frequently pointed out: They’ve branded themselves as populists, champions of ordinary, struggling, roll-up-your-sleeves Americans. Sanders lost in the primary because he was competing in a party that long ago abandoned its working-class roots for the sake of embracing identity politics. Trump won the general election precisely by repudiating this gospel of identity and focusing on the economy.

He cast himself as St. George, eager to the dragon of politics as usual, and the millions of voters believed him.

Yes, Clinton won the popular vote, but I’ve had yet to hear anyone argue that she did so by presenting a hopeful message to working-class America. The message she did spread in that regard was largely borrowed – reluctantly and less enthusiastically, it seemed – from Sanders. More likely, Clinton won the popular vote not because of her economic proposals, but because of Trump’s glaring deficiencies in experience, character and common decency.

Without these issues to contend with, it’s a fair guess that any candidate without Trump’s monumental flaws who succeeded in addressing working class concerns would have won the election in a landslide. Party be damned.

Not all Trump voters are bigots. Most of them aren’t. But they’re so concerned with an economic situation they actually share with many Democrats that they overlooked the unprecedented divisiveness of Trump’s campaign to vote for him. By the same token, not all Democrats are tone-deaf to the idea that fighting for equality is more important than clinging to the divisiveness of identity politics. If they were, more than 43 percent of the party wouldn’t have voted for Sanders, who remained in the hunt for the nomination into the summer. (This despite being a virtual unknown who lacked national recognition at the outset of the campaign, not being taken seriously by the media for months and facing active opposition from the party apparatus.)

The sad thing about all this is that bigotry and identity politics have succeeded in dividing Americans with shared economic concerns by pitting both ends against the middle. I have no doubt that, had Sanders won the Democratic nomination, he would have won many of the same voters who supported Trump in the general election, not because he and Trump are anything alike, but because so many voters who backed both men shared the same concerns.

If the 2016 election taught us anything, it’s that the candidates themselves don’t matter nearly as much as the concerns of the voters. We ignore them at our own peril.

As a nation, we can recognize that inequality is an issue that concerns us all. Or we can continue to be pawns in a game of divide-and-conquer that sustains both bigotry of the far right and the identity politics of neoliberalism while accomplishing little to address the shared concerns of those who are struggling.

The choice is ours. I hope we make the right one.

Selling our soul to the Bundys and other bullies

We’re missing the point.

When the not-guilty verdict came down against the Bundy Brigade for their takeover of a federal wildlife sanctuary in Oregon, I was outraged. What gave these self-righteous yahoos the right to appropriate my land … and get away with it?

Yes, it is my land. As a taxpayer, I own that place, and so do you. It felt as if Ammon and Ryan Bundy and their cohorts had come into my living room, plopped themselves down on my sofa, grabbed a beer out of my refrigerator (well, I don’t actually have any beer in my ’fridge, but if I did …) and spent the next 41 days violating what’s supposed to be my space. Freedom of assembly, my ass.

But, as it turns out, a lot of people were upset at the decision for a different reason. The jury had just condoned what prosecutors described as an armed seizure of property that didn’t belong to them. They’d disrupted a wildlife refuge, which is supposed to be there to protect wildlife from guys like these – goons with guns who don’t have the decency to respect other people’s (or animals’) rights.

Much of the hue and cry on social media, however, wasn’t over any of this. It was over how the Bundy Bunch had gotten off because of perceived white privilege.

There’s no doubt that deep racial inequities exist in this country, that those inequities have been reflected in court decisions, and that people have been guilty of grave – sometimes fatal – in justices as a result.

But I’ll reiterate: that’s not the point here. This case wasn’t about race. It wasn’t about someone being pulled over for “driving while black” and being beaten senseless without provocation. It wasn’t about a young man being shot for wearing a hoodie and having the audacity to purchase a bag of Skittles at a convenience store.

Those cases do have something in common with the Bundy Bunch’s outrageous acquittal, but that something isn’t race.

It’s bullying.

And that’s the point.

Glorifying the inglorious

To focus on the Bundy case as an example of white privilege is to miss the fundamental issue at play here – an issue that is ultimately more dangerous to our society than any racial divide: the tolerance for, and perversely romanticized celebration of bullying.

Like racism, this isn’t anything new.

Our culture has long been fascinated with outlaws, from the Dalton Gang to Jesse James. Los Angeles Times reporters Courtney Sherwood and Kirk Johnson wrote of the Bundy occupation: “It had a Wild West quality, with armed men in cowboy hats taking on federal agents …”

Romantic? Tell that to the people those Wild West outlaws gunned down, whose property they stole, whose rights they trampled on. There is a law west of the Pecos these days, and there’s a reason for that: The alternative is chaos.

We love it when people “stick it to the man,” even if those people lack the most basic sense of morality or decency; even if they would turn against us at the drop of a cowboy hat if it suited their own self-interest. If we think Jesse James robbed trains and stagecoaches to “stick it to the man,” we’re deluding ourselves. He did it to take something that belonged to someone else by force. That’s what bullies always do.

One of our presidential candidates is a vainglorious bully who has bragged about his ability to sexually assault women and threatened to throw his opponent in jail. Kissing women without permission. Grabbing their genitalia. All because he was a star and could do whatever the hell he wanted.

The other candidate, meanwhile, has dismissed and demeaned women who accused her own husband of sexual abuse, calling their charges a “bimbo eruption.” She said that, if given the chance, she’d “crucify” one of those accusers in front of a jury and that, regarding another, “We have to destroy her story.” Too bad for her that a stained blue dress told the kind of story that didn’t come out in the wash.

Two bullies, nominated by we the people. This is the problem, America, and it goes far deeper than racism, as entrenched and ugly as that most certainly is. It goes to the core of who we are: a people who, on the one hand, celebrate our heritage as a “nation of laws” built on a Constitution and who, on the other, cheer on and glorify those who flout those laws and that Constitution when we happen to be pissed off.

Forcing our issues

Again, this is not a matter of race. It’s a matter of using force, rather than dialogue, to resolve our differences. To take what we believe “belongs to us” without regard to anyone else’s rights.

In November 2015, Black Lives Matter protesters entered the Dartmouth College library, and started shouting things like “Fuck you, you filthy white fucks” and “Fuck you, you racists” to the students trying to study there. According to the Dartmouth Review, protesters shoved people around and even pinned one woman against a wall, calling her a “filthy white bitch.”

Is racism a legitimate grievance? Of course it is. But the Bundy Brigade thought they had a legitimate grievance, too – the point being that, no matter how righteous you think your cause might be, it doesn’t justify you taking something that belongs to someone else, whether that something be property, self-respect, equal opportunity or merely the right to live in peace. If you do that, you’re not an activist, you’re a bully, regardless of your gender, the color of your skin, your sexual orientation or your country of birth.

We don't choose things like race, gender, orientation or birthplace. They are what they are, and no one should be condemned because of them. But we do have a say over our own actions – and whom we glorify as our heroes/role models. Jesse James? The Bundy Brigade? People who push others around in college libraries? Politicians who think they can just “take what they want” or intimidate/shame their victims into shutting the hell up?

Is our country truly a nation of laws that respects civil rights and champions human dignity? Or are we just a nation of pissed-off crybabies who want what we want when we want it, and to hell with everyone else? A collection of bad neighbors who shout across the fence at one another and plot home invasions if we think that fence was placed a few inches on the wrong side of the property line? A motley crew of landlocked petty pirates – of bullies and their enablers?

These are the questions we must ask ourselves, and our futures depend on how we choose to answer them. Starting now.