Category Archives: Repression

06/13/2026
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Hope, Protest, Repression

966 Words: Is Hope Enough?

I was fourteen years old when four Kent State University student protesters were gunned down by Ohio National Guard riflemen in 1970. Not two weeks later, a college student and a high schooler were killed by local police and Mississippi Highway Patrol officers who shot wildly at dorm windows on the Jackson State University campus during an antiwar, civil rights protest.

Kent State, May 4, 1970.

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Phillip Lafayette Gibbs (L) & James Earl Green, Jackson State Shooting Victims, May 12, 1970.

In the days between those killings, a mob of 1200 construction workers and well-dressed Wall Street hoods went on a rampage in New York City, stopping traffic, smashing windows, and beating the hell out of anti-war protesters and any passersby who appeared to them to be long-haired peaceniks. The incident was called the Hard Hat Riot.

A Hard Hat Pummels a Bystander, May 8, 1970.

I was 69, just a few weeks shy of 70, this year when protesters Renee Goode and Alex Pretti were summarily executed by federal ICE agents.

In October, a US Border Patrol agent who’d been helping round up people in the president’s Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, shot Marimar Martinez five times after the vehicle she was driving collided with the agent’s. Somehow she survived.

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Fifty six years have elapsed between the first and last of these incidents. I’d have bet, back when I was an idealistic, hopeful teenager that even though America’s Vietnam War was a colossal fiasco and this nation’s race relations were a miserable mess and armed and dangerous authoritarian thugs, both deputized and ad hoc, were visiting violence upon dissenters, that a half century hence we’d be living in a better place.

The year 2026 in America, I’d have been certain, would be a utopia of peace and harmony, with whatever technology that’d been invented making our lives a whirl of leisure, pleasure, and discovery.

Last I checked, things haven’t turned out quite that way.

That’s one of the beauties of youth. The young can dream. They can hope. The future is a world of infinite possibilities. Young people possess a certainty that they, unlike their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, can fix this world.

Well, that was one of the beauties of youth. It seems young people today are lonely, alienated, pessimistic, even hopeless. Too bad. A person without hope is the walking dead.

What got me thinking about all this was an interview I did this week for a Bloom magazine article. It’ll be about a new development at the Stone Age Institute, that world-renowned center of inquiry into human evolution just northwest of Bloomington. Founders Kath y Schick and Nick Toth are building a new wing on their facility to house a huge gift of materials and fossils that recently came their way. The wing and the stuff it’ll hold will  turn their academic operation into the world capital of research into early human history. It’s already one of the top places on the planet to come to for academics who are nosy about our species origins.

The Stone Age Institute.

If you’re curious about what’s going on there, you’ll just have to wait for my story to appear in the August/September issue of Bloom.

Anyway, I spent an afternoon with Kathy and Nick, who’ve been married for 49 years, for pete’s sake, and who attribute at least some of the success of their half century-long relationship to the fact that they spent countless nights in tiny tents at archeological digs in the Serengeti and other proto-human birthplaces. If the couple was heading toward one of those typical blowouts that young marrieds experience, they’d have to make amends fast because they’d be cooped up with each other all night long.

“You just can’t slam a tent door,” Kathy Schick says, laughing. “And there’s no place to go!”

Toth (L) & Schick in Kenya, 1977.

Kathy wasn’t laughing on May 4, 1970. That day, when four anti-war protesters were killed by National Guardsmen on the Kent State University campus, she dodged a metaphorical bullet.

You see, Kathy Schick had been standing at almost precisely the spot you can see in the top photo, the iconic snapshot of the young woman, Mary Ann Vecchio, screaming in grief and terror over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller, a Kent State student she’d just met moments before. That photo is sometimes referred to as the Kent State Pieta, after Michelangelo’s La Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City.

Kathy was protesting the Vietnam War that day. She was an undergrad at Kent State at the time, studying to become, eventually, a paleoanthropologist and archeologist. She’d earn her doctorate years later at the University of California-Berkeley.

She was damned lucky to be able to become a renowned scientist. That Monday, she was part of a small group of geology students and their professor among the larger mass of protesters. At one point the professor, in  tears, began imploring her students to leave the protest. The professor could sense that the confrontation was about to swirl out of control. “There are gonna be deaths if you guys stay here,” the professor said.

Kathy found herself in tears, too. Hers were caused by the clouds of teargas hanging over the grassy knoll Commons, a big open space on campus where the protesters and Guardsmen faced off against each other. Her eyes burning, Kathy rushed into a nearby campus building to wash the chemicals out. She could barely see. “I was just inside,” she says, “and the shots rang out.”

Some young people who dare to protest never make it to old age. Some do. It doesn’t matter if they’re optimistic or pessimistic. And that utopia of peace and harmony is forever tantalizingly out of reach. Maybe today’s jaded youth have a more realistic outlook than I had way back in 1970. But I had hope.

08/14/2023
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Freedom of the Press, Repression

1000 Words: Enemy of the People

Lucky you, for I’m about to add to the list of things you ought to be scared to death about.

In this year of somebody’s lord, 2023, each of us on this planet has plenty of things that keep our eyes saucer-like as we lie in bed at night. And here I am with more news, as if you needed to be reminded, that we’re living in an era when authoritarianism and neo-fascism are becoming seductive to a growing swath of the American populace.

To wit: armed police busting in on newsrooms. Y’know, the kind of thing they do in Putin‘s Russia, Orban‘s Hungary, or any other locale ruled iron-fisted-ly. It happened again this past week, right here in the Land of the Free, and it wasn’t a one-off. Punishing the press has happened too often of late within this great democratic republic whose Constitution’s very First Amendment calls, unambiguously, for Freedom of the Press.

I stress the word unambiguously because, over the last 50 or so years, an entire major political party on these shores has built a foundation upon the mistaken belief that the Constitution guarantees plainly, obviously, and explicitly that every citizen herein ought to be able to pack as much heat — handguns, shotguns, rifles, automatic firearms, military-grade assault guns; in short everything and anything that can fire metal projectiles either into you or through you — as his/her budget and storeroom can allow. It doesn’t, of course. The Second amendment contains the qualifier “well-regulated,” although the gun fondlers of this nation blink when their eyes pass over that phrase.

Here, we’ve been fighting like cats and dogs for a half century over the existence of that hyphenate. We haven’t needed to fight all that much about the contents of amendment No. 1 because it’s clear. Freedom of the press, along with the other liberties guaranteed by the amendment, is a given.

So sacred is the Freedom of the Press idea that the US government, for chrissakes, even dropped a lawsuit against several publications in 1979 that wanted to print a step-by-step guide to making a thermonuclear weapon. Now, we’re not taking about possessing a thermonuclear weapon, a putative right that, I’d guess, any number of Second Amendment fetishists might say every American was born with. The Progressive magazine and the University of California at Berkeley’s The Daily Californian student newspaper both published the info, both were hauled into court and, ultimately, both were allowed to publish the stuff.

Not that it would make any difference in your or my everyday life inasmuch as building a hydrogen bomb entails the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars to employ countless physicists, metallurgists, chemists, mathematicians and other assorted technicians as well as the building and maintenance of sprawling laboratories, uranium refinement reactors, huge gas centrifuge factories, vast tracts of land on which to test explosives, and all the restrooms, cafeterias, and HVAC facilities needed by the aforementioned employees.

Nevertheless, the US Gov’t got jittery when it found its most cherished secrets were about to be disclosed and then stood on its head to prevent it from happening. The US Supreme Court said, in effect, Well, let us think about this for a bit, until events and the understanding that Freedom of the Press is largely absolute caused the Feds to back off.

But that was all more than 40 years ago. This is a new day and age.

It’s a day and age, though, when the leading Republican candidate for the presidency has already told his followers that the news media is the “enemy of the American people.” Hitler’s Joseph Goebbels and Stalin’s Lavrentiy Beria would have slapped him on the back. And he’d have said, Thanks, guys.

Police in a tiny Kansas town raided the newsroom of the local newspaper this past Friday, seizing computers, cell phones, and other materials, the result of a spat between the paper and a local restaurant owner. The restaurateur carries a lot of sway in the town, especially with its police force. The police chief of the town — Marion, pop. 1922 — says the raid was carried out because the paper had violated the restaurant owner’s privacy. The paper, The Marion County Record, was investigating the politically active restaurant owner’s past drunk driving citation. The paper already had decided against running a story about the incident.

The Record‘s publisher and editor, Eric Meyer — whose home also was raided for materials — said:

This is the type of stuff that, you know, that Vladimar Putin does, that Third World dictators do. This is Gestapo tactics from World War II.

Meyer and his staff of a half dozen are trying to figure out how to publish The Record‘s next edition without their computer files and notes. The raid, by the way, may have contributed to the death of the paper’s co-owner. A story published yesterday on the paper’s website says the co-owner, whose home also was raided, was unable to eat or sleep after the raid. “Stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief after illegal police raids on her home and [the newspaper’s] office,” the owner collapsed and died Saturday afternoon.

Nothing new here. The publisher of a small weekly newspaper in Concord, New Hampshire was arrested a year ago this month for failing to clearly mark political advertisements as such. The law requires such markings and the publisher was obviously wrong in failing to do so. Cuffing and booking the publisher, though, seems a tad…, well, fascist.

A Clark County (Nevada) official who was being investigated by a Las Vegas newspaper stabbed to death the paper’s reporter assigned to the investigation last September.

In the last half decade, newspapers in Colorado, North Carolina, New Jersey, California, and New York have been financially punished by local governments for what elected officials deemed to be less than fawning coverage. In all of the cases, the papers were denied local announcement ad placements, usually a key element in a newspaper’s yearly revenue. “Such retaliation is not new, but it appears to be occurring more frequently now, when terms like ‘fake news’ have become part of the popular lexicon,” writes New York Times reporter Emily Flitter.

Fake news. One of the former president’s favorite ejaculations.

Enemy of the people indeed.

03/07/2023
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Paranoia, Repression, Transgender

1000 Words: I Don’t Want To Know

Try as I might I can’t quite figure out all this transgender blowback that’s going on across this benighted countryt.

That Tennessee law banning most public displays of transgenderism would seem to be the last straw, the most egregious crackdown on people’s personal liberties imaginable. Then I remind myself that when radical, reactionary, neo- and crypt0-fascists get up a head of steam, the sky’s the limit. So Tennessee likely won’t have the last word in criminalizing gender expression.

While most of the nation seems okay with people deciding their genders assigned at birth don’t fit them anymore and, subsequently, acting upon that realization, antediluvian legislatures are falling all over themselves to enact laws designed to stop them. It’s as though a loud minority has taken over.

I suppose that explanation is as good as any.

Statehouse senators and representatives, as well as a passel of higher-ups — including Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Arkansas’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and Colorado’s Lauren Boebert — have positioned themselves as modern-day saviors, proclaiming themselves to be defenders of righteousness and good while cracking down viciously on rights and expressions.

Their chief crackdown right now is men dressing as women. Of course, it isn’t all as simple as that. Men dressing as women implies there are only two gender paths, both imposed on us all at birth and never to be trifled with. Reality and scientific explanation have demonstrated that gender is not binary but a fluid, too often societally warped spectrum. XXs and XYs are but one deciding factor in a person’s self-identification. People are born with a wide range of genital structures. Their minds and hearts, too, encompass an equally vast scale of sex and gender identifiers.

This has been true for all of human history. Men dressing as women, for lack of a better term, has been part of every human culture and society ever studied.

Women dressing as men, too. Yet, somehow, these modern day protectors of children and virtue don’t seem to care much about that aspect of things. Perhaps because women wearing men’s clothing signifies an aspiration to a higher state. To be sure, these anti-cross-gender display laws are written and championed by people who, no doubt, see men as superior beings and why in the hell wouldn’t any thinking woman want ascend to that holy state?

But men dressing as women? By god, that’s sick and evil. It’d be like blacks calling for a return to slavery or Jews loading themselves into the trains headed for Dachau. Crazy!

You see? I’m tying myself into knots trying to figure these people out. With a world entering a climate crisis stage, ongoing wars, the epidemic spread of automatic firearms and random shootings, men still physically abusing their domestic partners, the widening wealth gap, and countless other immediate and long-term threats to humanity, the DeSantis/Huckabee Sanders/Greene/Boebert gang see men on stage wearing spectacular gowns, multi-colored wigs, and dazzling makeup as something, by golly, we have to act on right now!

Of course, the drag-show-ban gang is using The Children as their most potent weapon. I’ve been to many a drag show and I’ve yet to see any crowd therein populated by tots. The Tennessee law specifically refers to The Children. It’s the same canard people used over the past few decades to fight against legal protections for gays and lesbians. What about The Children? they shriek.

It makes me wonder why The Children always pop into their minds when the issue of sex arises. I don’t want to make any unsupported claims here but…, well, use your imagination.

Problem is they’re using their imaginations and, for pity’s sake, thank heavens mine doesn’t go to those places.

Here’s another stab at trying to figure this all out. America — and much of the world — has become this tribal battlefield where each side sees everything the other thinks and says as The Worst Thing Imaginable. To be sure, my side does it too but, sheesh, the Trumpists, the Hard Right, the Fox News-consuming couch monsters have become expert practitioners at it. If the Liberals and the Democrats think drag shows are cool and lesbians can be teachers and gays cops, then these automatically become mortal sins. How many Fox folks even thought about drag shows before the echo chambers they live in brought them up? How many considered RuPaul — remember her? — a threat to children’s safety?

But as my side hollered for more tolerance and embracing of those Others, the other side reflexively dug in their heels. You’re okay with transgender people? In that case, they must be stopped!

As I say, I’m trying here. I’m casting about for answers.

Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon played women in “Some Like It Hot.” Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari did the same in “Bosom Buddies.” Hell, let’s go back hundreds of years to Shakespeare’s original productions in the Globe Theatre where every single solitary female role was played by a man. You’ve heard of Shakespeare, right? The fellow that every high school English teacher in anybody’s memory has assigned their students to read, to study, to embrace. As far as I know, high school students are mostly children.

No wonder there are so many gays and lesbians and drag show performances — The Children have been mesmerized by a playwright who dressed men in women’s clothing! Shakespeare was a groomer!

Am I coming any closer to an understanding here?

I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever know. There are some things I don’t want to know. And I sure as hell don’t want to go delving into the minds and imaginations of the likes of Ron DeSantis, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and the Tennessee legislature.