On Feminism

When the feminist movement started, in the early 1970's, America was completely male dominated and a great many men treated women like not very bright children. The accepted wisdom was that women couldn't make important decisions, hold responsible jobs, or be trusted with any real measure of independence. Worse, many women were routinely abused by their spouses, or other family members: abuse that often took place openly and was considered "a man's prerogative." So there were ample reasons for women to form an equality movement.

Since that time I've always considered myself pro-feminist, but recently I've had growing reservations.

In the current zeal over feminism (sparked in part by the "Me Too Movement"), it's worth considering how feminism might be co-opted to advance a regressive agenda, thus rendering it a tool for social oppression rather than liberation, and creating a backlash against the women's movement. We should examine that possibility and interrelated issues very seriously, because when one considers the key role of women in society, what's at stake is the fate of civilization.

Along with racism, feminism has been constantly in the news for almost a decade now, and in that same decade we've witnessed a culminating effort on the part of a few wealthy, powerful, individuals, to establish oligarchy in the United States. Our democracy is now gravely imperiled. Yet we hear relatively little about that in the media. That story, the story of oligarchy itself, has been relegated to the back pages if it's mentioned at all.

The point here is that feminism and racism are being used by the media as diversions, to cloak the defining story of our times. That is the establishment of a wealthy, ruling-class, in place of our democracy, and if we the people lose our democracy it will no longer matter what we think about racism, or sexism, or any other aspect of American society, because expressing opinions is the privilege of a free people, and we will no longer be free people.

That's why the issue of class trumps that of racism and sexism in America in our era! This is particularly true in an election year, when we desperately need to unite around a candidate who can lead us out of the long nightmare of cutthroat capitalism, that has economically brought the vast majority of Americans to their knees. And that's why the corporate media (the tools of oligarchy) endlessly publish stories about racism and sexism, while saying little to nothing about the uniting and much more dangerous issue of class. They are fostering a lie by omission, the preferred method of doing so in our times.

When all Americans have prospered, tensions between the races and sexes have been greatly improved. Indeed, general prosperity may be the only really effective tool we have to promote social equality. We see this clearly from our own recent history. The widely prosperous era of the 1950's 60's and 70's, saw the greatest social gains for women and minorities in our history, the simple reason being that hate is to a great degree the outcome of fear, and people don't feel as much fear and anxiety in a prosperous era.

So if not for altruistic reasons, then out of simple expediency, those in favor of free society should remember that the numerical majority of poor and oppressed people in America are White. Indeed, it may be said that the majority of Americans are oppressed poor and lower class whites, and their grievances are very legitimate. Yet they are routinely ignored, or worse, laughed at by the supposedly liberal, corporate-owned, media; and also by the New Democrats, who've abandoned a policy to improve the lot of the great majority of Americans, of all races and sexes, thus leaving us effectively, with one pro-corporate political party that goes by two names - Democrats and the Republicans.

I'll cite an example of how feminists are being manipulated by the media, or are simply evolving in ways that may ultimately damage their own cause, taking the case of Senator Al Frankin as a example. Before being brought down by allegations of sexual misconduct, Frankin was the most popular Democrat in the Senate, winning re-election to a second term by a margin of over 60%. This, along with his name recognition as a popular comedian, made him a tremendous potential asset to the Democratic party. Then, in a shameful display of targeted rumor and innuendo he was pressured to resign to atone for vague and unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct, by fellow Democrats! My own Senator, Mazie Hirono, a colleague of Frankin's, spearheaded this effort to pressure him into resigning, without any evidence that would have stood-up in court.

(This point regarding a court of law is very important, because the extra-legal nature of actions like those against Frankin - this sort of trial by rumor and innuendo - leaves feminists open to the accusation of conducting witch hunts.)

If people are to be judged and convicted in the court of public opinion, then every sexually active man, or woman, could be smeared with such allegations and forced to resign in disgrace, if only the establishment wants to get them badly enough! Senator Hirono's excuse for subjecting Frankin to this farcical trial by allegation was that she did so to gain moral credibility, in order to then force the resignation of Brett Cavanaugh from the Supreme Court, in light of the much more serious and more substantiated charges of rape, leveled against Cavanaugh. And whether that argument, on Hirono's part, makes sense on the face of it, or not, she failed to carry it through, for Cavanaugh remained in office. All she, and her associates, managed to do was ruin the career of a colleague - a hugely popular fellow Democrat who was one of the most genuine public servants in Washington!

Along with the Me Too Movement (the motives of which I believe are sound, if not always the methods) there's a more hard-core outlook developing among certain Feminists these days, which is far more suspect in my mind, and this is to see men as the problem in the world; in that men are more aggressive, warlike and violent than women, while women are more nurturing, loving and socially responsible. Therefore women alone should rule society.

We, in America, are the victims of our own myths. Take the myth of the rugged individual who doesn't need anything from anyone, but can get by on his own, by "pulling himself up by his own boot straps." It's a myth, of course, because it's impossible in modern society. Everyone in modern society depends on the efforts of thousands of others to obtain the necessities for survival. The most remote rancher needs thousands of people, to make necessities like clothing, cooking utensils, barbed wire, medicine, transportation, communications, etc., etc. So what is the point of this myth? What is its effect on society? Does it make us stronger and more independent, or weaker by enshrining in our culture a misapprehension, in turn fostering hatred for the dependent and the social safety net? And now, just as we have the dubious myth of the rugged individual, we are developing a feminine myth. The myth of the "Earth Mother," presenting women as all-wise, all-loving and uniquely tied to the cycles of nature; whereas men are, in contrast, comparatively ignorant, violent, and loveless. In this view women are not seeking equality with men, but asserting superior to men, morally and spiritually. We have come full circle.

So, what of the claim that women are more loving, nurturing, and moral than men? First, for the sake of argument, let's assume women really are endowed to be more nurturing. Then, since the world outside the home is inherently competitive, when women enter the workforce this impulse toward self-effacing sacrifice may become counter-productive. The precipitous fall in the American standard of living coincided with women entering the workforce, in large numbers, in the 1970s, largely because the size of the workforce suddenly doubled, lowering everyone's wage earning potential, but it may also be true that women have proved less able to withstand the intimidation targeted towards employees by employers. The fall of the trade union movement (the one remaining social institution that has fairly reliably stood for workers, against management) coincided with women entering the workforce. In my own working experience I've known women who adopted a role of self-sacrifice towards their employers, and were proud of it. They felt that it made them good employees. Whereas (again, in my experience), men tend to be instinctively more adversarial with employers. Which of these stances is more likely to net collective gains for workers?

Yet to what degree is it really true that women are more inherently civilized than men? For at bottom that is the assertion here. The answer is, maybe not as much as might be supposed. What, for example, became of the high hopes for social regeneration promised by women's suffrage? Has it materialized?

As voters, women have proven little more socially conscious than men, if at all. Where is the more compassionate society we were promised as the dividend for woman's suffrage. If you asked a radical feminist that question today, she would likely find a way to blame men! I've had that conversation myself, and been told that their husbands have intimidated them into voting for the usual megalomaniacs and fools of American politics over the last 75 years, right alongside men. Well, do their husbands follow them into the voting booth and twist their arms?

And what of women in politics, here and abroad? Those who have come to prominence have stood behind the reactionary status-quo at least to the same degree as have men in comparative rolls. Indeed, since women got the vote, we've had some of the most socially regressive governments in our history, culminating with those in power right now, including Donald Trump, Mitch McConnoll and Brett Cavanaugh. Clearly something is askew here! Some gulf exists between the rhetoric of the woman's movement and the reality of women's nature.

Another problem with this vision that men are inferior because they are more aggressive, and less civilized, is the law of sexual selection. Just as the peacock gets his plumage from the choices made by the pea hen, so men get their aggression from women's choice of a partner, so if men are overly aggressive it's because women wanted them that way. And here I don't fault women overly much, for it's perfectly understandable. Women have chosen aggressive men as mates because those men have been more effective at carving out a place for themselves and their families in a hostile, competitive world. What is at fault here is the Darwinian nature of survival itself.

If men suddenly disappeared, women would be forced to become more aggressive in order to deal with the inherently dangerous and competitive nature of existence. Nevertheless, it seems a bit self-serving of women to complain about aggressive traits in men that they've fostered themselves, for the sake of their own security. Thus, the myth of the "Earth Mother" is seen to be as deluded as that of the "rugged individual."

That so many feminists are willing to overlook so many aspects of the human condition, including something as fundamental as the law of sexual selection, to promote the idea of their superiority, is a strong indication that they are no different than men when it comes to the desire for power and a willingness to abuse it. We are all human.

The simple truth is we are all very much alike. Our endless desire to push the blame for our collective natures onto some other group merely proves what we all know and won't face, that collectively, as a species, we are pathologically self-deluded and deeply flawed creatures. Human beings share an enormously high proportion of genes in common. Despite our disparate appearances, due to a past die-out that reduced our numbers to a mere 5,000 individuals, we are more closely related then even Cheetahs. Like it or not, we are very similar in our collective behavior as a species, regardless of how different we may appear on the surface, exactly because we are so genetically related. This understanding of our essential similarity is one on which progressive movements have long been based. One must make this distinction here between collective behavior and individual behavior, which among humans is very widely differing and unpredictable. Yet neither aberrant behavior, nor heroic behavior, is limited to a particular race or sex. So when people make the argument that any one group is inherently better or worse than others, they undermine the notion on which all socially progressive movements are based, that of our collective equality.

It's akin to making the argument that all people are equal, but "Some people are more equal than others," as George Orwell put it so succinctly in his novel, Animal Farm. For women and minorities to make the argument is very dangerous for the rights of women and minorities. For if it can be argued that there's a fundamental difference in people's levels of aggression, disinterestedness and evil then that argument will always, ultimately, benefit the strong. The urgent truth is that we need to move beyond this simplistic reasoning, this sort of juvenile, "he said, she said," that plays so neatly into the hands of a self-deluded ruling class who are leading us down a rabbit hole.

The truth is, we're guilty of indulging in many, many, comforting delusions, both in our personal lives and in the larger human society. We may, for example, blame war on fascism, or communism, as if those things existed in the real world, like trees. We project our flaws so routinely on other people and things, one must conclude there's actually something in us effectively blocking out the things we'd prefer not to know. In other words, there's a strong argument to be made for the idea that human beings dissociate in mass, and if one thinks about it that's a very serious problem indeed.

In the end we desperately need to look up from our lives and our own particular troubles to examine what it really is to be human! This world is consumed in misery and the key to our salvation lies within. Socrates said it 2,500 years ago, and his words are still true today. He also said, "The un-examined life is not worth living." We can now one-up that statement by saying that the un-examined life can no longer be lived.
We must stop this endless bickering, own up to the fact that we are deeply flawed, and put together some program to address that fact.

We must henceforward put our primary effort into advancing psychology, philosophy, spirituality and the humanities - into every conceivable endeavor to help us understand ourselves. In order to survive the great challenges of the 21st century we must commit as great a portion of our resources to understanding our own natures as we did, in the 20th, to understanding technology. Above all, we must stop this juvenile shame and blame game. Now is the time to get real! As Willy Lowman said in Death of a Salesman, "The woods are burning!" And if there ever was a time for Willy to get real it was in the last act, before he finally cracks-up from the weight of his own lies, and everything falls apart. But Willy couldn't get real to save his life. Can we?

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2020 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

Liliuokalani Gardens

Liliuokalani Park, in Hilo, is named after an Hawaiian queen, but it's a traditional Japanese garden, designed by a master Japanese gardener and the more I go there, the more I like it. A thing unique about the garden in my experience of such spaces in America, and a feature of the traditional Japanese garden, is that though it's a small park it feels very spacious - an effect produced by great attention to detail.

In my small understanding of Japanese culture, I must rely on first impressions and given that, I'm impressed by their architecture - particularly their landscape architecture. Wherever you stand in Liliuokalani Garden you get a number of views, each one quite different. In a particular spot you might see a pond with a bridge over it and a stand of burnished, golden bamboo. Looking another direction from that same spot, you may see a beech with ironwood trees, rock outcroppings and Native Hawaiian ferns. Again, from that same spot, you might see a completely different tableau, all blended seamlessly, so that the effect is never jarring, but quite natural. One encounters it without even being aware of it. As you walk around, you feel you've really been somewhere, in a very small space.

That is the magic of the garden. It fills you with a feeling that's soothing, contemplative and somehow emotionally restorative. Entering consciously into that effect - into that calming, centered, feeling in the mind - gives us some understanding of Zen Buddhism. To me, it's similar to that produced by mild green tea, calming, yet mildly stimulating and restorative.

I've been walking in the garden four or five times a week for exercise and have come to be enchanted by the place.

Last week, on Thursday, I walked there in the morning. It's particularly beautiful just after dawn on a sunny morning, because on the east side of the island, as the sun rises, it strikes clouds that gradually build-up against the slopes of Mauna Loa, producing rainbows and brilliant color-effects, in and around, the Garden. On that morning, as I walked toward the ocean I entered a space where a rainbow was forming in the air around me, and rain dogs (snatches of rainbow hanging freely in the air) were materializing over the bay and against the mountain. It was spectacular!

There was a particularly dazzling luminescent vibration of the air - a kind of glowing light and I was suddenly conscious of feeling really good, physically and mentally, for the first time since childhood. It was that strong a feeling - not just of feeling okay, or feeling pretty good - but of feeling an exaltation I haven't experienced in 50 years! It was as if for a few hours I were in Heaven!

If only I knew why? Why, for two hours there, did I feel so good? In adulthood, we turn to alcohol, or marijuana, because we long for that feeling we had as children. How wonderful it was to feel that again, and to know that it wasn't produced by some substance, but was real - that it was produced by just whatever was going on inside me and around me at the time! I know the Garden had everything to do with it.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2020 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

A Letter to the Hilo Herald Tribune

2 July 2019

I'm writing in regard to the opioid crisis and its effects on our medical system. My wife was diagnosed last July with cancer and underwent radiation and chemo-therapy. Subsequently, due to tissue damage from the radiation, she developed a fistula, an infection that went un-diagnosed for six weeks, was nearly fatal and has left her in excruciating pain for three months now. It is acknowledged to be one of the most painful conditions known to medicine. Yet, due to hysterical and irrational pressure on doctors from insurance companies and government we have had a terrible time trying to get effective pain medication.

Opiate drugs have been around for thousands of years. Every educated adult is aware of their drawbacks and yet still there are no more effective medicines for the worst kind of pain. Now, due to opiate hysteria, responsible adults with cancer are treated like drug fiends out trolling the streets for a fix . We are in the ludicrous position of highly trained doctors being dictated to by ignorant bureaucrats what pain medication they can prescribe, and how much.

If we can't trust doctors to administer medication who can we trust. ignorant bureaucrats with nothing better to do to justify their parasitical salaries? This is all just more evidence, if any was needed, that America under Donald Trump is descending into previously undreamed of depths of corruption, stupidity and evil. All of this must end, all of it, or it will be the end of us all.

Brent Hightower

A Letter to the Editor

Below is my December 29th letter in the Hilo Herald Tribune. I'm restoring my original title, which I liked better than the one they added. The letter reflects my frustration with the often ineffectual nature of our supposedly progressive representatives. I suppose we should feel lucky that at least they aren't actively undermining America, as do that party of patriots, the Republicans. But still, I can't say I see progress where it isn't! The letter is below.


Rudderman Fiddles While Big Island Gets Burned

Has America gone completely mad?
Looking at a few recent papers at my councilor’s office the other day, trying to stave off the stress of a meltdown of the world, I read two Tribune-Herald articles simultaneously.

One was about another enormous, unjustified increase in Matson shipping rates and even higher HELCO rates, among other outrages, further burdening already overburdened Big Islanders in the interests of, as usual, the overprivileged. And as the Big Island gets fleeced yet again, like a Third World colony, what is Sen. Russell Ruderman up to? He crafted a bill to chastise service dogs! Seriously, that’s what he’s spending his time on.

With all the terrible problems facing this island, and worse problems nationally, what is our homegrown “progressive” senator up to? He’s hot on the case, making sure that the blind and handicapped aren’t trying to get away with something during the holidays! “The nation may be getting milked dry by corruption and the meltdown of education and infrastructure, but, dammit, it’s those damned service dogs that are the problem. They really need to be reigned in! Forget the high crimes and treason in high public office and the attempted overthrow of democracy by vested interests, as well as our more serious problems. The real problem is those pernicious service dogs!”

For God’s sake, can we get some leaders who can at least see where the problems are, even if they’re too scared to do anything about them? This is just embarrassing!

Harley Brent Hightower
Copyright 2018 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

Why The Hell Don't We Like Donald Trump, Anyway?

"Give us your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."


It has become popular, to a degree I've never seen before with any president, to hate Donald Trump. Even the mainstream media now deride him, often daily, in the most explicit terms; and I agree wholeheartedly that his presidency is a disaster, but we've had disastrous presidencies before that were widely applauded.

When Lyndon Johnson took us deeper, and deeper, into the horror of Vietnam, his presidency was still respected by the media - and the majority of Americans were behind him. When the Bush Jr. administration covered up evidence that he had evaded the draft during the Vietnam War, and then deserted a plush, state-side, National Guard post, it was Dan Rather at CBS News who was pilloried and forced to resign for having the temerity to report it. Bush himself never was held to account, the way any other American citizen would have been. When that same administration lied to take us to war, and reversed a public policy of never resorting to torture in the conduct of war, Americans by and large went along. So what is really different about Trump?

To address this question we must see, among many things, a significant aspect of American society that we rarely talk about. That is, that the great majority of us are descended from the desperately poor of other nations, who sought asylum here. This fact has shaped America in many ways, but the foremost is that it has produced a nation of avid materialists. That would seem an almost inescapable result. When millions descend on a continent with nothing but the clothes on their backs, their wants and desires are tremendous. Yet they bring more than just material deprivation, they also bring spiritual and psychological deprivation; a desperation that cannot be satisfied by a chicken in every pot or two cars in every garage. Fear, insecurity and anxiety have a way of becoming chronic, something with life of its own, independent of any rational concerns.

In some strange way having to do with the makeup of our nature, and of the universe, whatever we most fear has a way of manifesting itself in our lives until we find a constructive way of dealing with it. We see this in people with paranoia, when suspicion of other people often produces the very hostility and ostracism that the paranoid individual most fears, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of destruction. Often the very thing we fear enough to run from becomes the thing we can never escape. And so we Americans, more than normally afraid of privation, at least in the first world, have come to produce a society with an unnecessary level of material and psucological privation.

The North American continent has been more than rich enough to provide for all its people. Yet our fear of poverty produces a way of looking at the world that in turn produces the social conditions in which unnecessary poverty exists. We tend to simply grab whatever we can get, without thinking of the effects of such behavior on society as a whole. Fear of scarcity produces a culture of exaggerated and vicious competition that poisons life, often even at the level of families, and we are all adversely affected by such low grade internecine warfare.

Competition within families shows how fear of deprivation produces a deprivation of spirit that is more destructive than poverty itself. Thus we come to see one another, not as human beings, but as competitors for sustenance, and for the parsimonious levels of love and approval that are only made parsimonious through our perception of a scarcity existing mostly in our minds. These things, love and acceptance, though they should exist in unlimited abundance, become things in incredibly limited supply in such a culture, and this deprivation of love and acceptance in turn produces psychological aberration that contributes to such things as mass shootings.

It must also be said that many of us in America truly believe in this approach to life, and that goes for those on the left, as well as the right. Those who live according to the expectation of reciprocated love in families, and of social responsibility in their communities, on the other hand, are quite often shunned in America. The message is everywhere the same. "We don't care!"

When Melania Trump went to an internment camp, purportedly to console immigrant children separated from their parents, wearing a jacket saying "I don't care, do you?" she spoke for a great number, if not the majority, of Americans. No, we don't care. That's the message we give to one another, and to anyone else who's willing, or forced, to listen. We don’t care how others are treated. The mean-spirited policies America has followed, through both Republican and Democratic administrations since at least 1980, have shown that message to be the modern philosophy of the nation. We Don’t care! No, what the majority in America care about, is money. Money is seen as the universal cure for want, both material and spiritual, and how a person managed to get that money is irrelevant. Whether they are Saint Francis, or Jack The Ripper, it simply doesn’t matter.

So at last we must ask ourselves, why do people hate Donald Trump? Surely Trump himself must ask this question all the time, and one can understand his perplexity. All his life he’s been treated as a demigod because he has had money. In America, to have money is everything. If you have it, you can evade military service, be a deserter, go to war on other nations, for contrived reasons, and face no consequences whatever. You can be a serial rapist. You can steal billions of dollars. You can commit murder and get away with it. All of these propositions, and more have been shown to be true, and few are any longer even ashamed of it.

A visitor to ancient Rome, once said, acidly. . . "In Rome everything is for sale!" In America we brag about it! It shames us not. We are shameless.

So what if Donald Trump inherited money from a grandfather who ran a whore house in the Canadian gold rush? Who cares if he pays to have sex with prostitutes? Who cares if his wife was a prostitute? Who cares if foreign dictators have the results on film? Who cares if he loved foreign dictators? So what if he treats his employees like sub-humans, or cheats college students out of a legitimate education? Others have done these and far worse, and been admired - nay, practically deified in America.

Yes, Donald must wonder why people are suddenly so down on him. He exemplifies everything we believe and value in the early 21st century! He’s rich! He doesn’t care how he makes money - a whore house is as good as a license to practice medicine, and why shouldn't it be? If Trump uses his money to exploit people, to sexually abuse them, to bully and intimidate those around him, why shouldn’t he? That’s the American dream! We have said so! We have striven, and strive, for a world in which anybody can rise to the top of any kind of pile and call it success!

It isn’t what Trump believes that enrages us. It’s that he isn't poised and well-mannered enough to afford those beliefs an acceptable cover, the way Barack Obama did. That is because, in essence, they both represent the same world view - one based on a contrived, and self-perpetuating, fear of scarcity. In a democracy those leaders who rise to the fore inevitably represent our real values, whether we like to admit it or not. If they didn't, they couldn't find themselves in contention for high office in the first place. So the only question is whether we are willing to confront, and reject those blighted values, or whether we merely blame Donald Trump, and through the delusion that he himself is the problem, prevent anything from changing? Unless we heal the wounds derived of poverty and abuse as discarded immigrants, and replace them with a new flowering of life in ourselves and others, then getting rid of Donald Trump can have no meaningful effect. We will merely remain trapped in fear, hatred, and misery. For the problem isn't Donald Trump himself, but that there's a Donald Trump somewhere hidden inside us all.


Brent Hightower
Copyright 2018, Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogsot.com

Young Stalin

Not long ago I read a book called 'Young Stalin,' about the early years of, you guessed it, Joseph Stalin.

I've never been more disturbed, or amazed, by a book. Stalin's capacity for evil and his daring and genius in carrying it out were simply bone chilling. It's hard to believe, let alone comprehend, how someone in their teens could put together a private spy-ring composed of the children of the ruling class of a city, (Tbilisi, in the Georgian Caucasus), and within five years crush that country's government.
In the process of carrying this out, he joined a monastery and soon took it over to use it for his own political ends! When he was briefly thrown in prison for conspiracy, he quickly took over the prison, and used it as a center for coordinating anti-government warfare. Despite what some people still claim there was nothing ever remotely idealistic about Stalin after the age of 14.

What he was, was a criminal mastermind.

Somehow, certain people do seem able to tap into a kind of evil synergy in this world and everything goes their way, while all too often the benevolent ambitions are foiled at every turn. It seems to me that this is tied to the Darwinian order, the rather appauling biological order of life. While those who reach for the higher order seem only able to attain their goals obliquly, falteringly. This book reinforced that thinking to a degree that I was left wondering, what I am doing here?

Solar Energy Came From My Hometown (I'm Proud of That)

I wonder how many people know that solar technology was pioneered in my hometown. Yes, in Placitas, New Mexico, in the 1960's, and more specifically at a former hippie commune called Dome Valley, a few miles away, you can probably still find the Solar Dome. It is (or was) a geodesic dome made of recycled sheet metal from old cars. It had a primitive solar unit at the top, and was as I recall pretty ineffective, but it was one experiment of many in solar energy in Placitas at the time - the most effective of which was then passive solar heating.

Of course solar energy is now a world-wide movement, and our best hope to fight the climate crisis.

I think the solar dome should be preserved. It has a place in history.


Brent Hightower

The Fall of the Enlightenment

"Where there is no vision, the people perish. . ."
- Proverbs 29:18

"Oh, yeah, the vision thing."
George, Bush Sr. January, 1987


My father, George W. Hightower III, who in August will have been gone 24 years, had a life threatening case of asthma from childhood until his early twenties. He was born in North Florida and raised in South Georgia, not far from Valdosta, where partly because he was stuck in bed through most of his childhood and teens, he studied widely. He graduated valedictorian from the high school he was rarely able to attend and received a scholarship to the University of Georgia, but he had to leave there and move to Colorado for his health. When arriving in Colorado, at the age of 20, he weighed just 105 pounds and had he not left the South he would have died - if not from his health then because of his public, anti-racist views, which had made him unpopular with the KKK. All in all, by the age of twenty-five, my father for his age was a man of extraordinary education and experience of the world.

I recount this bit of family lore only because, although he was the most gifted member of a successful family (one of his brothers became Director of Public Safety for Atlanta, then Director of Homeland Security for the State of Georgia and the police headquarters in Atlanta was named after him) my father himself saw little worldly success in life. The reason was that he remained true to his liberal, enlightened convictions, in an era when to remain true to such convictions was the kiss of death in America. It still is.

After receiving his degree in journalism from Colorado my father briefly became a newspaper editor in Utah. But like so many other rational people of enlightened values during the McCarthy era, he was forced to resign over the honesty of his editorials and had to go to work in a printing plant in Albuquerque.

My father's case is not even a footnote in history, but it was one small example of how the purges of the McCarthy era, in fields like journalism, in the State Department, in Hollywood, and in many other areas of society paved the way for the decline of the United States that my generation has witnessed, without abatement, throughout our entire lives. This in turn has led to the tremendous decline in respect for America globally, to the collapse of the American middle class, and along with it any meaningful measure of American prosperity. From my father I inherited the belief that we must seek the truth in any given set of circumstances, no matter how unpopular it is, because truth is the only thing we have to guide us in a world that is otherwise, utterly chaotic.

That is the fundamental tenet of The Enlightenment and we have turned our backs on it. This simple fact is the reason for our decline as a society. All the other failings of America since World War II(and they are legion), are merely symptoms of this underlying affliction. We have lost our understanding of and our adherence to the principles on which American democracy was founded - the principals of The Enlightenment.

The respect we once held for truth, for reason, for the humane treatment of others and for the kind of liberal education that makes those things possible has been in relentless decline since the purges of the McCarthy era. What he and his fellow travelers, such as J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon did to us was similar to the effect of the Cultural Revolution in China. They set our progress back for decades and even now we show no sign of recognizing our mistake or rectifying it. Until this changes nothing of significance can change for the better in America, ever again.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2018, Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

Idealism Sometimes Does Achieve Great Results

I just thought I'd post the above letter I sent to the current manager of the co-op Lauren and I used to manage. In this time of deep political crisis, let's remember that sometimes idealism does win the day!


To: Matt Gougeon,
General Manager, The Marquette Food Co-op,
Marquette Michigan, 49855


Dear Mr. Gougeon,
My name is Brent Hightower. My wife, Lauren Waters, and I managed the Marquette Food Co-op from autumn 1988 to spring 1995. When we took over, the store had virtually no inventory, was thousands of dollars in debt, and was ready to close its doors. In fact, the accountant offered to give us the business (including ownership of the building we had at that time) for free, but we decided we would rather work towards building a community co-op. It took us years to bring the co-op back from the brink of closure, but by the time we left sales were up to about $120,000. I always knew there was great potential for the co-op in Marquette, but because of various internal conflicts, that was the best we could do. Still, I believe we saved the business, and we met a lot of very fine people along the way. I consider our time there to have been a success.

Yet I was completely unprepared, when I recently read an article about the co-op in Northern magazine, for the really tremendous success the Co-op has now become. It's everything I hoped the Marquette Food Co-op might some day become, and more! I just wanted to offer you all my deep, and heartfelt, gratitude for enabling us to see that chapter in our lives as one leading to such a resounding success! There are few such successes in life, and especially for those who've supported progressive causes in this era. To read about the Co-op today was enough to make my day, and several days to come!

Sincerely,

Brent Hightower and Lauren Waters,

Hilo, Hawaii

An Open Letter to the Democratic Party

It is almost intolerable to sit by and watch while the Democratic Party prepares to lose yet another election. In spite of the polls there is a deep underlying weakness in democratic strategy that could turn November’s election from a golden opportunity to reverse the country's direction under Trump, to yet another unexpected and humiliating defeat. That weakness revolves around the party’s apparent inability to understand that right now it is, crazily enough, the Republicans who are winning the votes of the Democratic Party’s natural core constituency, working class and poor white Americans.

For all of its appalling ethical debauchery, the Trump administration knows what it’s doing when it attacks immigration, because they know it’s a divisive issue, and dividing people is the Republican’s stock in trade. The more they can focus people’s attention on race and immigration, and keep it away from the unifying issue of jobs, wealth, and class, the better off they will be in November.

It is amazing, that while the Democrats have such legitimate contempt for Trump’s intelligence, it is Trump who, through this strategy of keeping the dialogue on race and immigration, is now controlling the agenda, and in so doing will be able to claim at least a partial victory in the next election by effectively limiting the damage to his party, in what should be a decisive Democratic landslide. The results of this to the Democrats would be devastating, and might even user in a chapter of American neo-fascism.

For all of our legitimate hared of Trump’s agenda where race and immigration are concerned, the Democrats must not allow themselves to be distracted from the one essential, uniting, issue of our times – the one that will lead to inevitable victory or defeat, the issue of economic inequality.

Look at the deplorable state of the American working class. The destruction of trade unions has left millions with work that cannot support even a marginal standard of living. Medical care for all is still a far-off dream. The minimum wage hasn’t been raised in decades. We have an epidemic of opium addiction. Our standing in the world community has declined to a once inconceivable degree and all of is primarily due to the ever widening gap between the rich and poor.

The point is that we will not make progress on immigration, or racism, or sexism, or anything else unless we win back political power in America, and we can’t do that without the while middle and working class. That is stark, obvious, political reality, and the Democratic Party seems utterly blind to it.

Brent Hightower