"A Place Where There is No Darkness"

"We shall meet in a place where there is no darkness," is a quote from George Orwell's futuristic novel, "1984." Besides being a warning never to name a book after a year, it was a vision of a dystopia not totally unlike what we may be seeing today. "Freedom is slavery," "Ignorance is strength," seem Trumpian now. The place where there is no darkness, which all believe in a state beyond state repression, turns out to be a prison cell where the lights are never turned off.

Maybe I am being alarmist but it's better than passivity. I am inclined toward worse case scenarios perhaps because I'm a Jew. The fact that some Jews still exist is partially attributable to Darwinism.  We are descended from folks who, for whatever reason, foresight, or twist of fate got out before it was too late.

I have been running around to planning and brainstorming meetings of all stripes trying to find a place work from when the attacks start coming and, unless we can overturn this election, they will. Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare may be first on the chopping block if Tom Price is confirmed as head of Health and Human Services.

Many Trump voters, including Sarah, Russia from my backyard, Palin, are already regretting their presidential choice. Yes, we are a divided nation. Racial and gender identity politics without class analysis are a dead end but so are class politics that don't include an analysis of other types of oppression that compound socioeconomic struggle.

In 1993 I was a librarian at the San Francisco Chronicle when we all went on strike. There were Teamsters from the printing plant, reporters from the Newspaper Guild and some AFL-CIO members as well. We were picketing at a printing plant in Richmond when some of the Teamster guys started calling some outside strike-breakers crossing the picket line, "faggots." Later at a meeting we explained to them how, because many of us were gay (that was the word then before all the initials), that divides us. They got it.

Maybe the rural heartland Trumpers can get it too. Maybe not. We don't need to wait for realization to dawn. We need to organize and come together with whoever wants to fight back. Time to put up hurricane shutters and brace ourselves for the coming storm.

Indigenous Identity and Elizabeth Warren

Cherokee NC--West of Asheville

One of the big controversies now circling around this upcoming election is from Massachussets where Scott Brown is trying to smear working people's financial advocate and Harvard Law School professor, Elizabeth Warren. The big reveal is simply the fact that she has listed her racial identiy as Native American and claims a grandmother of Cherokee/Delaware descent. Warren was born in Oklahoma, a place with a very large indigenous population.

Native American ancestry is pervasive in this country and is, probably more than other ethnicities, a complicated business. Tribes, who sometimes share profits from gambling enterprises and other financial stipends, have a convoluted system of "enrollment" which involves things like percentage of native blood and other markers for inclusion.

As a full-blooded, not quite passing, member of the Russian-Jewish tribe, I have attended many pow-wows and other indigenous gatherings. At these events it is impossible not to notice the large number of people of all colors who identify themselves as having native ancestry. While some folks resemble relatives of the chief with the feathered headdress on the US nickel, many more do not.

When I was a young person in the feminist movement, we talked a lot about race. Ther was one woman, my age, who identified herself as Native American. She had pale skin and light brown hair and looked like any other WASP to me. I asked her about her identity one day after a meeting. She said simply, "I grew up on a reservation in North Dakota." I realized then that when it comes to racial identity, visual perception is only a small piece of a much larger story.

The toll of passing should not be underestimated. In accounts of Jews in Europe during the Nazi era, many who later suffered the greatest amount of psychological damage were those who "successfully" passed for Aryan. With the definition of Jewish descent consisting of only grandparent, I'm sure that Jewish faces were not readily apparent. The entire concept of "race" in modern society is no more than a social construct, albeit an extremely powerful one.

Elizabeth Warren's work in setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Agency has been dedicated to helping families decimated by foreclosures and unemployment has been absolutely stellar. She stands up to the hegemony of big business with a clearly populist voice. As far as her ethnic ancestry is concerned I need only to quote Rhett Butler, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."