Balanced bias and doubt

In the struggle to establish credibility as social justice warriors, half the battle is showing up, barking and flashing righteous indignation, while hiding tell-tale signs of the unowned hypocrisy of fiercely defended personal privilege, and joining in collective tunes and chants of liberation and solidarity under blazing strobe lights as hot mics memorialize one's activism for future recollection at upscale exclusive parties.

Afterwards, one can return home, feel good about oneself, and take in a show or steakhouse, where a baked potato costs more than the weekly wages of single parents, some of whom are forced into seasonal hiatus and don't get an extra penny from the Department of Labor, because of budgetary banditry that favors the new breed of entrepreneurs called scammers.

The brouhaha about Native American logos has settled down, as its bounty to politicians has played out. The bandwagon passengers have retreated to their free speech parapets and unshared university safe spaces.

By focusing on the alleged misuse of words like "braves," "chiefs" and "redskins," we are missing the "elephant in the room," which is that rich, varied and complex cultures of Native Americans are  being allowed to vanish from memory. The mortal threat to their preservation is not misappropriation of imagery, but willful government neglect.

Even the ancient languages of these sovereign people are expiring, and nothing is being done to revive them, as has been done for Gaelic, Welsh and Basque.

Most people can identify a few tribes, but other than their names, know nothing about them, and assume there were no differences among them. In old movies and television shows, they have been depicted as one-dimensional stock figures of savages and sidekicks. Tonto and, more recently, casinos.

According to ProPublica, Congress has been "underfunding tribal colleges by a quarter billion dollars per year," and President Trump "wants to cut college funding by nearly 90 percent, putting them at risk of closing."

The Bureau of Indian Education has reportedly failed to secure, or even seek from legislators, the full funding needed to operate vital institutions. By eviscerating funding, the federal government is betraying its treaty obligations. Ignoring them amounts to reneging on them.

Their unarticulated default reason is that the government can get away with anything it wants these days. Unchecked and imbalanced. The multi-generational, low-grade fever of cultural genocide persists apace. And out bemoaning the use of mascots in feathered headdress is not deterring the extinction.

There's been no public outcry or demonstrations and practically no media coverage.

Native American communities are in desperate need of social services to address educational, health and opportunities deficits that have impacted them most critically among minorities. Their assets are being depleted and their rights denied. Their colleges are not merely strapped, they're starving. 

Perhaps some of that Harvard largesse can be diverted to the tribal colleges, for research, scholarships, Pell and other grants, job-training and professional pathways.

Instead of freaking out when Native Americans are called Indians, and pantomiming empathy and luxuriating in make-believe civil rights activism, let's do something practical and real to help heal this singularly American botched legacy.

And let's admit that our most entrenched and egregious national sins have, at one time or other, enjoyed bipartisan support. That includes deportations.

And let's concede that there are times when deportations are not only technically legal, but morally imperative. What constitutes due process varies upon the legal status of the subject, and some convicted violent felons who have already exhausted all recourses should be expeditiously removed pursuant to immigration law.

But terrifying abuses are taking place, and the liberties the government is taking should haunt the conscience of the nation. 

Schools are no place for Immigration and Customs Enforcement dragnets, no matter the case or circumstance. Students in New York City and Detroit have been arrested. One of them had just appeared voluntarily with his mother at an immigration court on Broadway, where a judge had dismissed his deportation case. Before they got to the elevator, ICE agents in plainclothes ambushed them in the name of the law.

This was enabled by an executive diktat from the Oval Office but invalidated by common decency.

A friend of my parents was an expert on "restitution law." His clients were all Holocaust survivors. One of them survived World War II without any apparent long-term damage, and became a prosperous industrialist,  having recovered his health as he lived happily on Park Avenue with his family.

Forty years later, he suddenly jumped from a window to his death in an attempt to escape the Nazi secret state police (Gestapo). There were no prior hints of instability. The hallucination had embedded his subconscious.

The trauma of being arrested at school may eventually seem to fade in the memories of these students, but it may in the future explode in their minds with a vengeance. Maybe in the year 2065.

The spectacle of presidential power evokes a maddening quandary. It is either fettered when it should be unleashed, or turned loose when it should be reined in. Any single federal district judge, among more than 600 nationwide, many of whose rulings can be predicted along ideological lines, can stop an executive order that may inarguably be in the purview of presidential authority.

Yet that same authority permits any president to supersede and make a mockery of the foundations of our constitutional protections. Or at least pause them. 

The recently inflicted travel ban is lawfully vindicable but morally execrable. Deployment of the National Guard to quell disturbances such as occurred in Los Angeles during the recent ICE raids, may have been properly within presidential prerogative, but that doesn't make it proper, despite provocation.

It's been argued that in many cases involving controversial issues and political polarization, the "fix is in," no less with the Supreme Court than with presidents. Regardless of the core legal tenets at stake, and who is presenting them, one needn't be a clairvoyant to know how Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson will vote and that they will be on opposite sides.

But not always.

By a 9-0 unanimous vote, the Supreme Court recently ruled that members of majority groups in "reverse discrimination" suits are not required to show "background circumstances" beyond what minority groups must provide as evidence of discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

True believers in fairness applaud this. Fairness is notoriously in the eyes of the beholder, and when they are sporting blinders, anything goes.

New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie has nixed a bipartisan bill that would have commemorated the October 7 attacks in Israel that killed the equivalent, adjusting for proportion of population, of 40,000 Americans. According to the New York Post, he "went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the measure would not make it to the Assembly floor for a vote." 

Hopefully he had his reasons, and the best-case scenario is that they were strictly political in nature. Perhaps he feared opening the proverbial "can of worms" of a fruitless, divisive and hot-blooded debate about the Middle East. He deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Doubt must be deserved but first found.