Choosing black dispensers of violence ed 3/4/16

Voluntarily take the sign post "to a civic people.”

     This essay was motivated by the news of murders in Reference 4, below.

Physics motivates a people to join together for survival. For example, after a tornado passes, people leave their shelter to find persons whose lives are threatened. We are at a Y in the road for human goodwill, and the choices are “under a god” or under “a civic people.” My understanding points to a civic people, because each person’s god is different from the next: use of a personal god is a road to civic division. Each person’s liberty must be split between personal privacy and civic collaboration so as to provide real-no-harm personal-liberty-with-civic-morality well-being (PLwCM). It’s like not ever running red lights so that you can trust green lights. In other words, civic security enables personal privacy. Mention of collaboration may draw frowns, especially if followed by "with the enemy", but work by inhabitants to establish PLwCM motivates contagious smiles. I know: I’ve been there and felt the glow.

Seeing and feeling that concert of smiles convinces me that the only thing holding a civic people back is distribution of the idea--civic collaboration to enable personal privacy, after millennia of division under impositions of other personal gods. I encourage anyone who grasps the theory of A Civic People of the United States: clarify understanding and share the theory as soon as possible. (Google “A Civic People of the United States” to read the theory.) Livable lives are at stake, so I am working as fast as I can, on many fronts. My favorite proposal is to involve children in American capitalism: Influence children to perceive that each is a person the USA wants to emerge a civic adult.
I want to share a detail now, respecting 560 years of racism. On February 19, 2015, I attended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s speech at Southern University in order to circumvent the media’s monopoly on freedom of speech such as the blinding sensationalism in 2008 respecting Wright's 2003 sermon. Inhabitants just cannot depend on the media to report events as they happened. American goodwill is still at bay--imprisoned by--media mendacity. I think that “flag burning” sermon,[1] in Rev Wright’s vernacular, for his flock in 2003, is patriotic. But I thought the February 19 speech was divisive respecting a civic people. I would not have known that from The Advocate's coverage of The event. Apparently, it is neither prudent nor accepted propriety for The Advocate writers to report the-indisputable-facts-of-reality.

Since then, I am trying to understand the culture of “black church.” Other than Wright saying, I recall, "If you don't like separated black church, take note that white church divided us." What? I worshiped with my wife in totally integrated St. Jude Catholic Church for twenty years. It was always integrated, and now when I attend with her it is still many-colored.  Trying to understand "black church" is like hearing a strange noise in a nighttime fog and everyone claiming they did not hear a noise. The impression I get from Anthony B. Bradley[2] (2010) is surreal; yet Wright is a prominent representative throughout the book.  I could never influence Wright, because of my whiteness: it’s not a matter of skin color but of culture. My whiteness binds me, in Wright's statements, to white church even though my faith is in the objective truth of which much is undiscovered and some is understood. But my skin color makes all the difference in Wright's culture.

  
Usually, when I try to discuss black culture with a person I am tacitly rebuked; maybe for my ignorance or impudence or fear or something I don’t fear such as someone's requirements respecting propriety. I think "black culture" that way is unfair to all other skin-colored people. I would like to live securely in the same hometown. This entire section is to say that I am not writing with “whiteness” but rather with a desire to establish a civic culture throughout Baton Rouge: the culture practiced by a civic people. The two murders that were reported today tear at my existence. Last evening, for the first time, a person encouraged me to share my thoughts. [Note, today, 3/4/16, I learned about www.blackliberationcollective.org/  upon reading www.libertylawsite.org/2016/03/04/the-ultras-and-their-ultimatums/. I also commented on today's post.]

I think upon reading the news, I understood that North Baton Rouge (NBR) perhaps is plagued with so many crimes of passion because of a divided culture within NBR—not the usually expected cultural division—a culture of two-tiered violence control. While I grew up on western movies that taught me that guns establish lawlessness rather than law, black contemporaries were cultivating cultural schemes that avoid the police until the violence is unavoidably overt--vigilantism. Specifically, because of isolation due to the whiteness of civics over the last two centuries, a faction in black culture embraces an alternative force for settlement of domestic disputes. When a dispute is personal, part of the black community protects the perpetrator, because two-hundred years of history shows that white justice is merciless toward blacks. (Let me say, “duh, Phil,” before you do, assuming it is true that the black community is divided by vigilante violence.) Here’s anecdotal evidence.

At about 3 minutes into NPR interview, Ta-Nehisi Coates, born in 1975 in West Baltimore, comments about knowing when to call in what dispenser of violence. When asked how, as a boy, he had viewed the police, he answered, ”. . . with no real moral difference from the crews and the gangs and the packs of folks who dispensed violence throughout the neighborhood. The police were another force to be negotiated, that could dispense violence.”[3] Coates’s word choices seem other-worldly to me: not inferior to mine, but different; for example “moral difference from [street agents] who dispensed violence.” In my civics, only the police may apply violence. In other words, when police control is needed on my property or anywhere else, my response to them is “Yes, Madam or yes, Sir” with full cooperation. That does not seem to be the relationship in NBR, where police requests may be met with silence or violence.

If Coates’s optional dispensers of violence is institutional, it is no wonder that black-on-black violence is commonplace and the police wait until they are called in yet are prohibited because the community refuses to bear witness to the violence. It’s like the police function in the black community is to pick up the body and spent bullets, collect other physical evidence, and exit. If this is the situation, 1) it’s like Sharia law demanding precedence in competition with US law, which I think a civic people would never accept, 2) black church should know about vigilantism and influence reform for the black community to support a police monopoly as dispensers of force, and 3) it is wrongful to claim the police have not responded to black culture, because the police have no power to end secretive black violence.

Quoting the news article[4] regarding the subject NBR incident, “Da’Rel Oscar Brown . . . expressed his frustration to [District Attorney Hillar] Moore about what he called “black on black” crime, saying he had lost both brothers and friends to gunfire. Moore agreed with Brown’s lamentation, saying the city needed help from the community to turn the neighborhood around.

A civic people do not leave problems like this to the police and DA; they contribute to their own safety through iterative collaboration. And what about justice at the next level: justice in support of police action? Are the courts fair to both blacks and police? Is there black-favoring-racism among lawyers, judges, and legislators? Does protection of street-rule enforcement in competition with law enforcement reach into the courtroom and legislature and on up to the federal administration and courts?  Are the police actually in the middle? Has the obsolete 2^nd Amendment focus on militia falsely influenced the black community to own hand guns for vigilante enforcement rather than self protection? A civic people want answers and do not feel the media are pursuing the answers, because the media does not perceive an overarching culture of a civic people. The media seems to thrive on and promote division of the people. Division seems good for the media's business plan.

I think the USA is at an era-breaking, Yogi-Berra “Y” in the road. After the civil rights acts in the mid sixties, my family celebrated relief from racial injustice we had submitted to (not cooperated with) under bad civic leadership--faulty civilization. Descendants of plantation-slave owners who became big land owners may have been guilty of institutional racism, but we were too busy trying to survive against our own fears and financial insecurity. Also, we thought most people felt as we did that the master-slave passages in the Bible were negated by physics-based ethics: one person cannot own another. We believed in scripture but did not believe the scripture. Those five decades ago, we would have called it “common sense.” In 1968, we perceived this nation was on its way to Abraham Lincoln’s dream, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall [emerge on] the earth.” False hopes fogged our minds to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s check cashing part of his dream speech, 1963. We were blind to check-cashing developments like what became Congressional Black Caucus, and totally unaware of James H. Cone, 1969 and Saul Alinsky, 1971.

 There emerged, unknown to us, James Cone with “Black Liberation Theology,” based on a misbegotten economic “Marxism”[5] emerging from Latin America in the 1950s. And the Congressional Black Caucus formed, with its idea of retribution for 200 years of white caucus. Then came Alinky's force by disruption that may turn violent, thanks to passionate recruits. These three developments have had half a century to show their consequences, and the results seem like drastic regression. The affected black individual is enslaved to black church, black caucus and and Marxist-Alinsky organizers (AMO). He or she is blinded against the achievable: PLwCM. Black culture versus white culture seems less promising than South culture versus North culture in the struggle to establish a civic people. However, the nature of the struggle differs.
Mitochondrial DNA, mtDNA, informs it is still kin against kin. Instead of whites against whites over Bible interpretation and an unresolved Constitution for the USA, it's blacks against whites over divided Christianity, a culture rather than a civic compact. And black non-Catholics represent only 12% of the USA population. A recent Pew report gives me the impression black church represents only 6.5% of the population; see www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/, perhaps 21 million people among 320 million. And they are divided Baptist vs Methodist. Dedication to black theology does not seem promising for the individual with perhaps sixty years adult life, whereas PLwCM is for everyone during their lives. And that is the difference between religion vs civics: salvation of souls vs salvation of lives.

So what do I mean by “a civic people?” I mean a people who leave their hopes for their afterdeath inside the church door, inside their family door, and inside their closet, keeping religious morality out of the determination of civic morality. A civic people mutually work for their lives, respecting willing connectivity--to establish and maintain both real-no-harm personal liberty and domestic goodwill. To put it another way, each person pursues the personal thoughts they have, taking responsibility that those thoughts will not cause action that interferes with another person’s life. Thus, religion is not even a civic issue: religion addresses a beyond-life pursuit.

And what do I mean by “willing connectivity?” I mean leadership on all fronts—state, church, the media, a civic people, and each civic person—leadership that promotes understanding based on the fact that everyone alive is kin and there is no excuse for domestic alienation: domestic alienation is a willful act. Leadership requires consideration if not acceptance of evolution, not as competition with religion, but as the basis for advancement of a civic people in Baton Rouge; then Louisiana; then the USA; then the world. 
No one questions DNA, an understanding from the study of evolution. No one questions DNA's power to identify either parenthood or a rapist or other criminal. However, few people are even aware of mitochondrial DNA, which informs us that everyone alive descended from one woman who lived 140,000 to 200,000 years ago. She and the other women during that time evolved from the earliest homo species, at least 2.8 million years ago. Blood lines of her contemporaries did not make the biological and cultural changes needed to survive changes in their environments or cultures. Since everyone alive is kin, racism is not supported by physics, from which everything emerges. It takes a while for a new idea to take hold of our awareness: Everyone alive is kin.

Physics--not a study, but energy, mass and space-time--emerged at the big bang, about 13.7 billion years ago (bya). I do not know if physics emerged from anything or if that is a valid question. Cosmic chemistry was next underway; hydrogen and helium emerged. Then inorganic chemistry: Galaxies and super-galaxies evolved. Lower temperature inorganic chemistry was underway. The earth formed about 4.5 bya; the first living cell 4 bya, and soon after, differentiation through photosynthesis; 2 bya cellular adaptation to oxygen; 1 bya cellular meiotic sex; 700 million years ago (mya) the first multicellular animal, later vertebrates, but species were, successively, 65%-90% wiped out in catastrophic extinctions—Cambrian, Ordovician, Devonian, Permian; 235 mya dinosaurs appeared but were caught in Cretaceous extinction 65 mya; 70 mya primates emerged to suffer Eocene and Miocene catastrophes; 3.3 mya the current ice age began; 2.6 mya first humans homo habilis with 700 cc brain; 1.5 mya homo erectus with 1000 cc brain, suffered  Pleistocene catastrophe; 300 thousand years ago (tya) Archaic humans with 1500 cc brain; 100 tya ritual burials-cultures evolving; 40 tya language then occupation of the Americas; 32 tya musical instruments, then spears, bows and arrows; 18 tya cave paintings; 12 tya dogs tamed; 8 tya irrigation in the Middle East; 7.5 tya Sumerian civilization; 4.8 tya Indus Valley civilization; 3.7 tya alphabet in Palestinian region; 2.6 tya beginning of Greek philosophy followed soon by Confucius and Buddha; 2 tya Jesus then many empires rise and fall; 560 years ago (ya) papal bull authorizing Portugal to discover and claim lands not claimed for Christianity, enslave natives and import African slaves; 400 ya English settlement in Virginia under the Doctrine of Discovery, which authorizes enslavement of natives and importation of African slaves; 224 ya the Constitution for the USA was completed; 154 ya the American civil war was underway; 50 ya the Civil Rights act; 2015 A Civic People of the United States is proposed in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA.

It seems safe to say that political evolution could not have begun before language, about 40,000 years ago. Political evolution has led to today’s opportunity for collaboration of by and for a civic people. Today, I added “republic” to a list[6] of thirty-eight forms of government. As Benjamin Franklin feared, the people have not kept what they had. “Democratic republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people for their continued good [civic] health.” [7] I think the USA’s formal government is not anarchy, aristocracy, autocracy, communist state, demarchy, epistemocracy,exilarchy, fascism, geniocracy, gerontocracy, meritocracy, minarchy, monarchy, panarchracy, republic, socialist republic, sociocracy, stratocracy, technocracy, theocracy, theodemocracy, or timocracy. In 2015 USA practical government seems like anarchism, corporatocracy, mobocracy type of democracy, ethnocracy (Judeo-Christianity), futarchy, kakistocracy, kleptocracy, kratocracy, kritocracy, kritarchy, logocracy, noocracy, oligarchy, plutocracy, republic, tetrarchy (federal branches pus the media), and Chapter XI Machiavellianism wherein state and church partner to abuse the people—similar to theodemocracy. I advocate a civic culture; a system of individual collaboration using stated civic goals like in the preamble to the constitution for the USA, consent-based decision making among candid inhabitants, fidelity to physics-based ethics in other words the-indisputable-facts-of-civic-reality, and independent voting to supervise all levels of governance in a democratic-republic. Unlike past regimes that assumed 100% commitment to “We the People of the United States,” we feel a super-majority of 65% of inhabitants can establish an example that will attract the 35% uninformed, dissidents, criminals, and evils to reform to a civic people. Otherwise, they must be limited by law, as now.

      Unlike socialism, Marxism, the rule of law, democracy, and other forms of oppression, collaboration by a civic people can establish real-no-harm personal-liberty-with-civic-morality. Our generation can establish A Civic People of the United States. In 2016, persons can 1) establish personal understanding of the theory and 2) share the message, so that a civic people can organize and start practicing as soon as possible. Please volunteer to help.

Copyright©2015 by Phillip R. Beaver. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the publication of all or portions of this paper as long as this complete copyright notice is included. Revised August 29, 2016.

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[1] Phil Beaver, “Not hung up on Rev Wright’s flag burning, rev”, February 3, 2015, online at promotethepreamble.blogspot.com.

[2] Anthony B. Bradley, Liberating Black Theology, 2010.

[3] Fresh Air, online at  www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=3&islist=true&id=13&d=07-13-2015 .

[4] Danielle Maddox, “Baton Rouge police respond to double homicide off Government Street,” July 19, 2015, the Advocate, online at theadvocate.com/news/12950728-123/baton-rouge-police-respond-to .

[5] Anthony B. Bradley. Liberating Black Theology. 2010.

[6] Online at http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_forms_of_government .

[7] Online at constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/historical-documents/perspectives-on-the-constitution-a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it .