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I stayed home today because my balance is not yet all that good, but I mean to be involved. Today, January 21, 2017, is the day of women's marches all over the United States. There are different sets of urgencies--that of health care and the honoring of women's bodies and their/our choices, the deserving of dignity and equality of all kinds of diverse groups, including--including just about everyone.

The ringing and quasi-melodious voice of Tamika D. Mallory, the young African American activist and organizer, touched me big time when she spoke of standing up for the most marginalized among us. There are diverse motivations for those who are attending these marches of today, and those who would have wanted to. But I suppose that although most of the issues resonate, the notion of "marginal" and "marginalized" for me rings a crucial bell. And that's because I have been noticing just how easy it is for a number of people, as individuals or as groups to become marginalized.

"Marginalizing," means treating a person--a group or even concept--as insignificant or peripheral. To marginalize can mean to sideline or to trivialize. In an age where celebrity has meant importance and power to many of us, to be on the sidelines watching the strong and dominant people can feel like we have a marginal position. Any of us in families or groups where we have either not fit in, agreed not to fit in, or we have been ignored to the stronger beat of those who were louder or performed more dramatically, may know the feeling. Of course there is also marginalizing as in not rendering people important or deserving to be heard, and then there is marginalizing all the way down to making people subhuman, that is not even considering them worthy of attention or treatment that would include a modicum of dignity.

Over recent years, I have in my own way paid particular attention to American acts of torture, including the use of brutality that has yielded suicidal depressions and years of post-traumatic stress. To my regret, I have seen those victimized to be truly marginalized, in terms of their seeming not worthy of the basics of human respect, including the assumption of innocence before proven guilty. I have seen the issue marginalized, under the radar for most.

Today, however, there is the face of much fear about the Presidency of Donald Trump, in terms of his "America First" rhetoric in which he has made our Allies, our poor people--many people feel excluded, disrespected and as such marginalized. There are of course immigrants, Muslims, Mexicans; the list goes on. And as important there are the warnings that Trump has uttered to and about the press, an entity that has already been subject to exaggerated editing by financial and corporate considerations.

There are of course reasons for us to have our concerns about separate groups of marginalized people; for one reason or another we are either part of that group, or we identify personally and politically with a particular interest and a particular arena of racial injustice, as one example. At the same time, I am starting to see how this division seduces us to marginalizing certain people and even groups in our daily lives.

As someone in the mental health field, my pain over issues of torture also involves some of the planning and procedures having been empowered and led by actual psychologists. However when I read about the streets of Chicago and terrible racism--including brutality--enacted towards black citizens, I am appalled as well. And then I hear about the people in the Philippines murdered in the streets even if they are only suspected of merely using marijuana in a dictatorial terrorizing regime, and I am sickened. And then I realize how perhaps I'm becoming too limited in my focus.

Finally I question my own role in marginalizing. It's a teeny bit like noticing all the pregnant women when one is a pregnant woman, noticing all the older people when one is a baby boomer and entering into that phase. Somehow we need to become more inclusive. And by this I mean truly learn to live the connection to the notion that we are connected to all people, and that human dignity can't be limited to our own enclaves. The human climate affects us all, and affects our capacity to experience emotional flexibility and empathy, as well as the admission of scientific knowledge about physical climate that too many people in power are trying to marginalize.

I would also like to ask the organizers of today's marches to help us push ourselves to include issues and people that we sometimes, well yes--marginalize. I remember reading that Angela Davis had said that Bernie Sanders could have used a bit of coursework on blackness, the better for him to understand aspects of our population that he was perhaps less than literate enough about. She was not condemning, just right.

Perhaps we need to recognize that to focus in one area alone is to forget, to perhaps even marginalize too many other important arenas and people. This might mean, and I suggest here, a group of issues being drawn up and added to, which would commit to helping us all to become better informed. We need more literacy without being humiliated for arenas of ignorance. I have, as one small example, told a number of psychologists about the role of the American Psychological Association in acts of torture. Rather than staying in a sort of shock about how they could not know, maybe we need to be teaching each other.

Those of us, who are white, as Robin Di Angelo and Tim Wise advise us, need to learn more about our own racism, about how we have marginalized black people. The idea here is to open ourselves to the radical possibility of learning how and why we marginalize in our own lives.

The rest is here:
The Day of the Marches: On Uniting our Efforts to be more Conscious of ALL WHO ARE MARGINALIZED - Huffington Post

MTR, the Hong Kong commuter rail system, is arguably the worlds most efficient.

Heres an idea for readers to chew on while the Big Bacon is on vacation: How about privatizing the Washington Metro system? Honk Kong privatized its subway system in 2000, and it has worked out pretty well.

Writing on the Cato Institute blog, Chris Edwards quotes a report by McKinsey:

Hong Kongs MTR Corporation has defied the odds and delivered significant financial and social benefits: excellent transit, new and vibrant neighborhoods, opportunities for real-estate developers and small businesses, and the conservation of open space. The whole system operates on a self-sustaining basis, without the need for direct taxpayer subsidies.

MTRs railway system covers 221 kilometers and is used by more than five million people each weekday. It not only performs welltrains run on schedule 99.9 percent of the timebut actually makes a profit: $1.5 billion in 2014. MTR fares are also relatively low compared with those of metro systems in other developed cities. The average fare for an MTR trip in 2014 was less than $1.00, well under base fares in Tokyo (about $1.50), New York ($2.75), and Stockholm (about $4.00).

The ratio of passenger fares to operating costs is a high 185 percent, which means that fares cover not only operating costs but a share of capital costs. MTR raises other funds for capital from real estate deals under which it gains from land value increases near stations a concept known as value capture that we have touted on this blog.MTR is so highly regarded in the mass transit world that it has contracted to run commuter rail systems in cities China, the United Kingdom Sweden and Australia. Why not Washington?(Hat tip: Tim Wise.)

Bacons bottom line: It would be unrealistic to expect Hong Kong results in in the Washington Metro. For one reason, Hong Kong is far more densely populated and rail is a more attractive option compared to driving. For another, its not clear whether Washington Metro could extract the same economic benefit from putting real estate deals together that MTR could. Zoning controls and land use planning may work very differently in the U.S. than in Honk Kong. But the idea certainly appears to be worth pursuing. If MTR could do no more than bring operational efficiencies to Metro, Virginians would benefit from better service and lower subsidies.

Read the rest here:
MTR, Would You Take over Metro, Please? - Bacon's Rebellion

My colleague, a white man of the left, sympathizes with Black Lives Matter and could typically be counted upon to presume the guilt of police officers in those highly publicized instances of alleged police brutality like, say, those involving Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray, cases that BLM has exploited.

In the vast majority of these alleged instances of systemic racism and/or police brutality, and in all of the aforementioned cases, the besmirched officers were ultimately cleared of all wrongdoingyet only after much damage had been done.

My colleaguea good guy with whom I can ordinarily engage in congenial conversation over race and the plethora of other issues on which we disagreehas frequently sent me links to articles about unpleasant instances of interracial encounters involving white aggressors and black victims. They almost always have involved white antagonists are said to have subjected their black targets to hurtful words.

Though he never overtly says it, my colleague clearly expects to prove through these stories that white racism is alive and well.

Now, irrespectively of color or race and whether the offense is verbal or physical, cruelty is something that any decent person must renounce. Yet I have always found the ease with which self-avowed anti-racists wax indignant over the use by a white person of a racial epithet while remaining utterly silent when confronted by brutal racial violence visited by blacks upon non-blacks as a sight to behold, something at once incredible and maddening. They are like the Pharisees who Jesus accused of straining out the gnat while letting in the camel.

Why go ballistic over a white persons insults of a person of color while uttering not a syllable of condemnation of a black persons violent, not infrequently brutally violent, assault upon non-blacks? Especially considering that blacks are overwhelmingly more likely to engage in interracial attacks (against whites, Hispanics, and Asians) than any other group and least likely to be victimized because of their race, the question bears repeating: Why the silence?

So, in order to highlight what would strike an alien from another planet as a profound rational and moral inconsistency, I now occasionally send my colleague links to, not just articles, but video showcasing black racial violence. And since the one and only person in all of media who inexhaustibly supplies links to video of this phenomenon from around the country is the investigative journalist Colin Flaherty, it is from the latters Youtube channel that I draw.

If racism or racial cruelty is an evil to be decried from the rooftopsand it isthen decent people need to be aware of the epidemic of black violence. When I sent my colleague a link to a video from Flahertys site of a white American family that had been attacked by a mob of black teens in Ireland, he unsurprisingly condemned it (like I said, hes a decent sort).

However, he also likened Flaherty to any other race inflamer for reporting on black violence while failing to engage in outreach to the black community, to see first-hand how theyre struggling and dealing with the pain and violence. My colleague added: If he [Flaherty] wants to study black criminality, he cant do it apart from black communities or black people. A whole host of people wont take his work seriously until he does. My colleagues remarks are misplaced for the following reasons.

First, Flaherty is not an analyst or theoretician. He himself expressly eschews all theorizing about black criminality and racial hostility, refusing to trade in explanations of and solutions to the phenomenon on which he focuses. There is no point in theorizing about the problem, he repeatedly insists, until and unless people are willing to acknowledge that there is a problem.

This seems an eminently sensible approach to me.

His channel is designed to supply irrefutable proofvideoof the problem.

Second, Flaherty, while doing journalistic work, succeeded in having the wrongly convicted Kelvin Wiley released from jail. Wiley was a black man convicted of having beaten his white girlfriend and sentenced to four years in prison for battery. Wiley was innocent and Flaherty proved it.

There is no more reason for anyone to assume that Flaherty is in any sense unaware of or otherwise insensitive to the suffering that decent black folks endure because of the dysfunctionthe pain and violence, as my colleague put itthat pervades too many black communities than exists to assume that those black critics who have been sounding the alarm against it are insensitive to this dysfunction. Yet ultimately, this is not relevant, for the suffering of law-abiding blacks is largely due to the members of the black underclass among them.

Flahertys channel can be of service to them as well.

At any rate, because his focus is not black violence generally, but black-on-nonblack criminality and violence, as far as this purpose is concerned, there is no need for him to see how or even whether other blacks react to it. Thirdly, unlike, say, Tim Wise, whose name was brought up in my conversation with my colleague, Flaherty is not a racial inflamer. No one has been harmed, let alone killed, because of any of the videos that he has shared. Flaherty is trying to kill two birds with one stone. He wants to expose the evil of black-on-nonblack violence while simultaneously exposing the noxious fiction that it is blacks that are relentless victims of relentless white racism.

It seems to me that all of us who despise cruelty and racial cruelty benefit enormously from the service that Colin Flaherty provides, for there can be no progress in race relations unless decent people of all racial backgrounds acknowledge the problem to which he draws our attention.

Originally posted here:
Colin Flaherty: Racial Inflamer or Bold Truth Teller? | The Liberty ... - The Liberty Conservative

Program Vision: The Leadership and Empowerment through Athletics Principles (LEAP) Initiative leverages the reach and visibility of Athletics at Bowdoin College to positively influence campus culture, highlighting the values of teamwork, health and wellness, and personal growth through healthy competition. Embracing the invitation the Offer of the College provides for students learning and development, this initiative equips all members of Bowdoins Athletic community coaches, students, and staff - to develop as leaders in all walks of life and to cooperate with others for common ends in a manner that benefits the entire campus.

History of the Program: Beginning in the Fall of 2015 with a generous gift from a Bowdoin family, the College laid the groundwork for the LEAP Initiative as a way in which to move the Bowdoin student-athlete experience from excellent to exceptional. Drawing upon the perspectives and expertise of both internal and external sources, over the course of the 2015-16 Academic Year, the Athletic Department worked with a committee of College representatives to conduct a needs assessment; develop and implement both pilot and long-term related programming; and to review and implement corresponding program evaluation. In the process, during a year of events that mark the Colleges own transition, it became evident that the LEAP Initiative had potential for reach well beyond Athletics in providing a mechanism by which the Department could serve as an important anchor and partner for campus-wide education regarding current issues affecting the entire student body. Through this convergence of events and equipped with the financial resources necessary to do so the Bowdoin Athletics Department is in a unique position not only to better develop our education of the whole-student-athlete, but also to be a leader in shaping campus culture around related issues for the benefit of the College more broadly.

Programming:

Guest Speakers and Consultants:

Dr. Tiff Jones (ongoing Sports Psychology Consulting) Dr. Tiffany Jones is the Owner and President of X Factor Performance Consulting Group. Dr. Jones is a graduate of Hobart & William Smith Colleges and earned a MS and PhD in Sports Psychology from Springfield College. Tiff has consulted with athletic programs across Division I, II and III and began working with the Bowdoin athletic department in the spring of 2016. Tiff visits campus five times during the academic year for extended periods of time, which are spent meeting with coaches, entire teams (practices and team meetings), captains / team leaders and individual players on issues such as dealing with adversity, maintaining self-confidence, competing consistently, and setting and achieving goals, both within and outside of the athletic arena.

Joe Ehrmann Joe Ehrmann played professional football for 13 years and was the first recipient of the National Football Leagues Ed Block Courage Award. Joe is the author of Inside Out Coaching and is a nationally recognized speaker on issues related to character development and coaching. Joes approach is based upon three key questions for coaches Why do I coach, Why do I coach the way I do and How does it feel to be coached by me. Joe provided a workshop for the Bowdoin coaching staff and provided a lecture for the Bowdoin community in September 2015.

Sue Enquist In 2006, Sue Enquist concluded her storied 27-year career as head coach of the UCLA Bruins Softball program with a 887-175-1 (.835) record, making her the winningest softball coach among all active coaches. Sue articulate(s) my philosophy of life, leadership, and competition in three words: Prepare. Love. Honor. Anything worthy of your passion should be worthy of this approach, whether its achieving success in business, growing your service organization, or leading your athletic team to victory. In April 2016 Sue conducted a workshop for members of the Bowdoin coaching staff and gave a talk entitled Competitive Character Blueprints: Building sustainable & relevant leadership systems to the Bowdoin community.

Tim Wise Tim Wise is an anti-racism activist and writer who visited campus in the spring of 2016. Tim provided a workshop regarding contemporary issues of race in America to members of the Division of Student Affairs, participated in a luncheon dialogue regarding race in athletics and our campus community with our athletic department coaching staff and a presented a talk on racism in the post-Obama era to our entire campus community.

Maren Rojas Maren Rojas is the Director of Sport at Boston, MA based Edgework Consulting. With over 20 years of coaching experience, including a highly successful tenure as the Head Womens Soccer Coach at Bowdoin, and several years of higher education consulting experience, Maren was uniquely qualified to provide a workshop for the Bowdoin coaching staff in the fall of 2016 which was focused on working with student-athletes to develop confidence while dealing with adversity. In addition, Maren oversaw an afternoon Captain/Team Leader leadership development activity on the Pickard Fields.

Brett Ledbetter

Brett Ledbetter specialized in team cohesion and character development with high performers. Brett is a co-creator of a conference which is focused on engaging in conversations with championship coaches on answering the question of What Drives Winning. The conference has evolved to become a movement that transcends sports and has created a community of coaches who want to increase awareness of drivers of success beyond the Xs and Os. In the fall of 2016 Brett provided a workshop for members of the Athletic Department coaching staff which examined factors which influence character development within the context of collegiate athletics and how coaches can work with student-athletes to position themselves for success as an athlete and member of the broader community. In addition, Brett provided an evening talk for our entire campus community which focused on similar themes related to positive character development.

Here is the original post:
Leadership & Empowerment through Athletic Principles (LEAP) - Bowdoin Athletics

Hanover More than 100 people rose to their feet this weekend, applauding the hour-long speech of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speaker who characterized the election of Donald Trump as just the latest go-round in a historical pattern of backlash against progress toward racial justice in America.

Clearly historical memory is not something we do very well, when it comes to issues of racial equity and justice, said author Tim Wise, keynote speaker in Dartmouth Colleges daylong celebration of King on Saturday. As evidence, he pointed to the ubiquity of the red caps with the Make America Great Again slogan popularized by Trump during his 2016 campaign, a sentiment Wise said ignores the fact that, for people of color, earlier American eras have been characterized by oppression and violence.

As evidence, he cited statistics showing that non-white Americans are hired less, earn less, and die younger than their white counterparts, even when adjusting for factors like education.

By 2050, half the country will be people of color. ... If half the people are still twice as likely to be unemployed, thats not a recipe for economic success, he said.

Wise, a 48-year-old white Southern activist who bills himself as an antiracist, stood at a podium in the Ootik Auditorium of the Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center and blasted Trump in language that wrapped fierce antiestablishment ideals up in folksy turns of phrase.

The whole history of America is rich white men telling not-rich white people that their problems are caused by black and brown folks, Wise said.

Wise responded to a Saturday morning tweet in which Trump attacked U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Georgia, the last surviving speaker of Kings famed 1963 March on Washington.

Trump tweeted that Lewis was all talk, talk, talk no action.

As was pointed out by many supporters on social media, Lewis received a fractured skull when a 1965 civil rights protest in Alabama was violently broken up by police.

Ill leave it up to you, to decide the level of vileness it takes to attack John Lewis for being all talk at any time, Wise said, but especially on Martin Luther King weekend.

Wise was also roundly critical of the mainstream celebrations of King on the holiday, which he said paid homage to a milquetoast version of King that ignored his demands for racial justice, and embrace of democratic socialism.

On Monday, youll hear it again. Watch, Wise said. The line youll hear repeated is that one line, from the so-called I Have A Dream speech, which wasnt even called that at the time it was written. ... We just know that one line, the one about judging people on the content of their character, not on the color of their skin, as if thats the only thing the man ever said. ... Most folks only know that one line because its safe.

Wise said that the 1963 march was a march for freedom and justice. The platform of the organizers included housing as a right for all Americans, healthcare as a right for all Americans.

Attendees of the speech gave Wise rave reviews.

Etna retiree Brenda Nunally, who is black, said she wasnt surprised by the content of Wises speech, but that she was impressed by his oratory skills.

It was probably one of the best Martin Luther King Day speakers Ive heard, she said.

Ahmad Dbouk, a second-year Dartmouth medical student from South Carolina, said Wises speech gave him a complete historical context for how white-dominated culture has driven a wedge between blacks and whites.

He really drew a lot of lines to the dots that I kind of had, he said.

While Wise said that the current climate of racial tension is not new to the country, it has taken on an added dimension from a dramatic recent cultural shift toward multiculturalism and a downed economy in which many white working-class Americans are being confronted with the same types of economic challenges that blacks and Latinos have faced continuously.

It takes place at a time when white hegemony really is being challenged, Wise said. It used to be ... the idea of being white means never having to think about it. ... Increasingly, I dont think that is true anymore. I think people are being forced to confront what whiteness means.

In response to questions about how to translate good intentions about achieving racial equity into action, Wise advised area residents to reach out to organized groups like Showing Up for Racial Justice, a national organization that has two local chapters listed on its website.

It isnt hard to engage in a conversation about race in the South. ... Not so up here, even though it is the background noise of everything that happens, Wise said.

See the original post here:
Dartmouth Celebrates MLK With Justice Rally - Valley News