The First to Fall

Boston harbor on a summer evening

Crispus Attucks has been on my mind lately. Considering the long-view context of his death at the hands of British soldiers in 1770 has been helping me find my footing in light of recent events.

Given that my home is in the mountains, it’s no surprise that when I try to make sense of the world around me and the people in it, I shift my gaze to high altitude to gain valuable context, stepping back and climbing up to get a better view. In the case of our recent Presidential election, I’ve had to step very, very far back in order to regain my balance and have a sense of what is happening. I stand by my conclusions though they have brought me no satisfaction. In essence, my view is that the arc of our American society and political history alternates between three steps forward and two steps back, and three steps forward four steps back (or five, or six).

Crispus Attucks was the first casualty of the American Revolution; the first person to die in the cause of American liberty. In an interesting historical wrinkle, he was of Wampanoag Nation and African descent, and it is unclear whether he was an escaped slave or had been freed by his owners. In Boston, he was well-known in his community as a free man and a working sailor. He was shot and killed by uniformed British troops outside the Customs House at the Boston Massacre. Though his race was happenstance to the means of his death, it does lend interesting punctuation to the timeline of the relationship between African Americans and the nation Attucks's ultimate sacrifice helped create.

In 1783, slavery was abolished in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on the basis that it was inconsistent with and repugnant to the state's new constitution. In 1833, slavery was abolished in the United Kingdom. In 1848, slavery was abolished in France and its colonies. In 1858, the United States Supreme Court declared in the Dred Scott decision that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States of America, and that would have applied to Crispus Attucks's descendants despite his place in history. Dred Scott was decided 88 years after Attucks’s killing.

The 13^th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolishing slavery was ratified in 1865, 95 years after Crispus Attucks’s death; the 14^th Amendment providing equal protection of the laws was ratified in 1868, 98 years after his death; and the 15^th Amendment prohibiting discrimination with respect to the voting rights of citizens on the basis of race was ratified in 1870, 100 years after Crispus Attucks was gunned-down by British soldiers. Plessy vs. Ferguson, in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregating on the basis of the race was constitutional, was decided in 1896. 126 years after Attucks was killed, his descendants would have been segregated in every aspect of their life as Americans.

Shall I continue? Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson in a stirring, succinct, and unanimous decision declaring that racial segregation was unconstitutional was decided in 1956; 176 years after Crispus Attucks’s death and 60 years after Plessy was decided. 176 years after so famously dying in the cause of liberty, Crispus Attucks’s descendants finally could attend school, drink out of a water fountain or sit at a lunch counter without a “whites only” sign – at least according to the United States Supreme Court. The March on Washington when Dr. Martin Luther King etched the words “I have a dream” into the American psyche wasn’t until 1963, and John Lewis had his head cracked open by the Alabama State Police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge while marching to secure voting rights for all Americans in 1965. Those seminal events were 193 and 195 years respectively after Crispus Attucks was killed at the start of the American Revolution.

To be clear, the British regulars who fired on a crowd of unarmed protesters in Boston on that March day in 1770 did not care about and did not discriminate against Crispus Attucks on the basis of race. Bullets and musket balls, of course, are race blind. In 2023, the State of Florida provided a new curriculum for the public schools there that speaks glowingly of the skills and self-improvement provided to African Americans while enslaved; and today numerous leading figures in the political life of our nation openly express their view that America does not have a racist history while they openly consort with White Supremacists. Crispus Attucks died 254 years ago, and the constant and ongoing struggle and painful history of his people, our nation, have been white-washed in Florida. Pun intended.

Of course, the same pattern applies to women’s rights, reproductive rights, civil rights and voting rights. It certainly applies to blatant antisemitism in our society including in my own professional life.

Two steps forward, four steps back.

I have friends and family, people I respect and who are very dear to me, who clearly and regularly vote to move us backward. I have vowed not to spend time or expend energy disavowing them of their beliefs or the rationales they use when in a voting booth. I do reserve the right, however, to acknowledge whether they are moving our society backwards rather than forwards. If and when they start to see and understand the larger ramifications of their myopic political choices, I will listen. In the meantime, I’ll continue to search and prepare for every opportunity to inch our society forward along the path to a better future for all Americans - whether it’s on the Edmund Pettus bridge, on a segregated bus, inside a women’s health clinic, on the grounds of a public school, at a polling place, or otherwise. Crispus Attucks, so many others and many more to come will have died in the cause of liberty, and we’ll only know whether their sacrifice will have been in vain after a very, very, very long time. And many more hard-fought steps forward and the inevitable numerous steps back.

Time will tell. Until then: patience, peace, and love for us all.

"Out of My Way, Alexis!"

The true seat of real power in America.

I have been trying to remain positive during this election season. By “remain positive” I mean try to understand how it is that Americans can ignore abject hypocrisy and dishonesty by immoral people whose strategy is to accuse their political opponents of hypocrisy, dishonesty and immorality. I do not believe it is a constructive use of time or energy to try to disavow anyone of what they believe to be true despite a mountain of actual evidence that they are not (or to prove a negative by the complete absence of evidence). I do consider directing people to the nearest Flat Earth Society meeting, where I feel they are most likely to find kindred spirits.

For my own sanity and blood pressure, I often turn to the work of some of the early writers about our nation to find clarity. Alexis de Tocqueville’s seminal book Democracy in America published in 1835 is always a welcome source of wisdom and remarkable prescience. De Tocqueville wrote after having been dispatched to the fledgling United States by the French government to study our people, our democracy and how it all was working. Blah, blah, blah; I get it – not exactly a ‘made for prime time’ analysis for our sound-bite driven, short-attention-span times. Still, de Tocqueville has been on my mind lately for another reason altogether. I’ve concluded that if good old Alexis had experienced the phenomenon of the increasing numbers of Tesla Cybertrucks parked in suburban strip malls while on his travels throughout the country, his conclusions about the viability of our democracy would have been very different.

Certainly, the Cybertruck is an interesting experiment in consumerism. If you aren’t sure what it is, have a look around the parking lot of the most expensive shopping areas where you live. The vehicle looks like a cross between a giant stainless-steel doorstop and a truck of the future designed by an eight-year-old. It’s appearance itself is really very striking, even show stopping – the Cybertruck simply looks like nothing else on the road. What makes it interesting as a sociological phenomenon, however, is not its appearance – it is that the thing is very expensive, horribly engineered, challenging to drive, not functional as a truck, not even remotely reliable, and has been subject to at least five significant factory recalls in the past year. And it costs more than $100,000. And it is selling; quickly.

Why on earth would anyone buy such a vehicle? Two very good reasons: it is very, very fast; the fastest and quickest accelerating truck ever made. And it commands lots and lots of attention wherever it goes. I therefore believe it to be an example of two very important psychological characteristics of Americans: (1) the dearth of available Freudian analysis for people who really need help with their overwhelming desire to prove their, uh, similarity with Arnold Palmer; and (2) why so many Americans vote against their self-interest.

Snarky, sarcastic not-so-subtle partisan digs aside, one of the truly vexing dynamics of modern American politics is that significant numbers of Americans vote in ways that are clearly contrary to their best interests – economic, civil liberties, physical health and wellbeing, environmental, belief systems, etc. The differences between polling results that ask Americans about their preferences on a policy-by-policy basis without mentioning political party or candidates and those that do demonstrate this effect with remarkable clarity. This certainly is not a new phenomenon though it has become far more pronounced in recent election cycles.

I am fearful of completing any analysis of this electoral contrariness – I am a true patriot on a deep and meaningful level and I have no wish to denigrate my fellow Americans. I just want them to make better decisions because, ultimately, the well-being of our Republic and ourselves is in the mix. Hence the entertaining and yet frightening dichotomy of the Cybertruck and Alexis De Tocqueville.

Alexis De Tocqueville spent significant portions of his writings on the uniquely American combination of the role of individual beliefs, the separation of church and state, the political philosophies underlining the Constitution, and the work ethic of a people not encumbered by institutionalized aristocracy and its constituent limits on participation in civic and economic life. The basic premise was and is that when everyone acts and votes in their own self-interest in a democracy a society achieves a successful and balanced consensus. That’s quite a mouthful to be sure, but it stands in stark contrast to the success of a $100,000 jalopy sold by a thrice married multi-billionaire with eleven children and a long list of bizarre and destructive core beliefs that directly run counter to the original guiding egalitarian principles of our Republic. I believe that one look at the Cybertruck and the giddiness of those who buy them and Alexis would turn around and put his money in Euro Bonds concluding that the American people are not what they once were and that there is a high risk of the failure for our nation.

On good days, I do not agree with that fictional yet plausible assertion by my buddy Alexis. On bad days, I do wonder how we moved so quickly from the sublime to the ridiculous. On really bad days, I wonder whether the list of the “enemies within” that one of our Presidential candidates has vowed to prepare and pursue will have my name on it.

We’ll know how all this shakes out next week and in the two months that follow Election Day. In the meantime, thankfully, the number of Cybertrucks that I see every day in traffic on Colorado Highway 82 is far fewer than the conventional vehicles that do not send me into existential and philosophical fits. And there is snow across the peaks, which means that we can all look forward to enjoying another winter together in the mountains in a way that would provide Alexis de Tocqueville some validation that his conclusions about us all remain correct.  #morethanavote #rockthevote