Author: Peter Yeager

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“Are we safe here?” Remembering 9/11 in a College Classroom

It was a beautiful Tuesday morning, sunny and warm, when I reached my faculty office at 7:45 to complete preparations for my first lecture of the new semester.  As always, I was excited for a new year of teaching:  who would my students be, how would they surprise and inform me, how would my teaching evolve as I learned their personalities and levels of engagement.  Having introduced the course and myself to the class at our first meeting a few days earlier, I felt ready for my initial lecture at 9:30 that morning.

It was September 11, 2001, and I was in Boston.  Less than five miles away, planes were leaving Boston Logan International Airport on their routine schedules, many of them heading as usual to New York City.  As they lifted off the runway, these planes would fly low over my son’s new school, where he was in his first week as a high school freshman.

Classical music played on the radio as I focused on reviewing and making small changes to my lecture notes.  I became only vaguely aware at some point that the music had stopped, and that some news–of a crash or an explosion somewhere?–was being reported.  I worked on. Continue reading ““Are we safe here?” Remembering 9/11 in a College Classroom”

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Will Freedom Kill Liberty?

You may recall the now-iconic phrase that emerged during the Tea Party rise in our national politics around the 2010 elections:  “Take your government hands off my Medicare!”   Now there was a valid point to it–Republicans in Congress were threatening to pass a budget that would end “Medicare as we know it.”

But the directive also betrayed a deep confusion about the role of the national government in citizens’ lives, suggesting that a major social safety net program was not a program of government.  Indeed, political science research published in 2010 found that 40 percent of Medicare recipients surveyed denied that they had ever benefitted from a government social program.

Laughable as this level of civic ignorance struck many of us at the time, in fact it poses a significant threat to the stability and security of American society.  If citizens badly misunderstand their basic relationships with government, then they are more vulnerable to the distortions and appeals of demagogues. Continue reading “Will Freedom Kill Liberty?”

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High School Homeroom

We were sitting around the family dinner table that night in late September when my father called for our attention.  Then, as easily as he might announce a family outing to a movie theater next week, he told his children that we were moving from Indiana.  To another state.  In mid-December.

I was horrified.  This could not be happening.

Dad explained that he had taken a new job at a major architectural firm in Minneapolis, starting in only a few weeks, and that Mom and the kids would follow him to Minnesota at the Christmas school break in three months.  In the interim, he would shop for a house for the family.

I was 15 and I had just begun my junior year in high school. Continue reading “High School Homeroom”

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A Note on Language and Politics

Many of us may recall a subtle shift in political language that began during the last decade, maybe longer ago now.  Prominent members of the Republican Party began to refer to the opposing party as the “Democrat” Party.  We had all grown up knowing it as the “Democratic” party, and its candidates as the “Democratic” candidates.  Now, to the GOP, they are the “Democrat” candidates . . . or it is the “Democrat” position, and etc.  From Republican mouths, the word often sounds as if an epithet is being spit out.  For them, it has come to be a term of derision if not of disgust, much more (and less) than the name of an opposition party.  No matter: some even in the mainstream media appear to have adopted the term. Continue reading “A Note on Language and Politics”

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Whither Racism in the Land of the Free

He enrolled in my seminar on law and society as a graduate student.  Being in his 50s, he was an unusual enrollee, but his experiences could not have been more relevant to such a course.  He was a long-serving, full-time police officer in the oldest police department in the nation, the Boston Police Department, and he had patrolled some of the city’s highest crime rate districts.  He was also African American, serving in a city long troubled by racial animus.  This animus wasstranger-fruit especially evident in the 1970s hostilities around the effort to use busing to integrate students in the city’s public schools, and later appeared in the Charles Stuart murder case in 1989-90, in which Stuart–who was white–framed a black man for the murder of Stuart’s wife, whom he himself had killed.

I will call the police officer “Hal,” not his real name.  Because the seminar combined undergraduate students with graduate students, every week I asked the grad students to come to my office after class to further discuss the day’s assigned topics with me.  Walking to my office after one seminar meeting, Hal offered that he really loved the reading we had been discussing in class.  The reading by an eminent sociologist of law had argued convincingly that, everywhere and always, law enforcement has come down more punitively on members of lower status groups than on those of higher status groups, even if the offenses were the same.

As we entered the office I asked Hal why he loved the reading.  He answered, “Because (the author) is right,” he replied.  That alone was very interesting to hear from an experienced police officer.  But I wanted to delve further, so I presented Hal with a scenario.  I said, “So if you confronted a young black male who had committed a minor crime (a misdemeanor), and later a young white male who had done the same thing, would you be more likely to arrest the black male and take him in, and more likely to take the white male home to his parents or give him a warning and let him go?”  And Hal said, “Yes.”  I asked why so, and he replied, “Because that is what the community wants.” Continue reading “Whither Racism in the Land of the Free”

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An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Common Sense is Not Yet Dead in America, So Don’t Kill Truth and Civility

Dear Mark (if I may):

Recently in a Fox News interview, you said that your company, Facebook, would not fact-check any of the President’s lies, as Twitter has begun to do. You said that, “I believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. I think in general private companies shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”

Many–likely many millions–of Facebook users are upset, even outraged, at your position, including many of your own employees, especially in the face of the President’s posts inciting law enforcement and other violence against the current nationwide protests of police murders of African-Americans. And it’s not only politicians’ speech that you are allowing to run rampant over the truth and divisiveness. Since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week, Facebook and other social media have disseminated nonsensical conspiracy theories that Floyd is not dead, that the police assault on him was faked, and that George Soros was funding the protests around the nation. Continue reading “An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Common Sense is Not Yet Dead in America, So Don’t Kill Truth and Civility”

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The Impeachment Trial and the Assault on American Democracy

If the impeachment trial of Donald Trump for the charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress continues on the path set for it on the first day by Senate Republicans and the President’s defense team, it will constitute the greatest assault on American democracy since the Civil War.  More so than the President’s campaign’s efforts to coordinate with the Russians to favor his election.  Even more so than the behavior in the impeachment’s own charges against the president:  that for his personal political benefit he used the power of his presidency to withhold funds mandated by Congress for Ukraine’s military defense against Russian aggression, in order to extort that country to announce an investigation of a political rival (Joe Biden), and that in unprecedented fashion he obstructed the Congress’s investigation of those events.  As such, it will either portend the end of our democracy or so diminish it that it will take generations to repair. Continue reading “The Impeachment Trial and the Assault on American Democracy”

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The Pyramid of Hate and Violence: On Race, Bigotry, and the American President

That is why Obama stays on the tip of Trump’s tongue. The invocation of him is a hot-wire shorthand that gives an emotional charge to his statements that his audience receives intuitively. The racism is coded, received, without the burden of delivery.    Charles M. Blow, Oct. 13, 2019

[Dear Reader:  While this is not a short essay, there is a 90-second version embedded in it.  For that version, just follow the bold-faced portions of the essay. –PCY]

Told by a new friend, several weeks after I had entered a new public high school in a new state my junior year, that the first friend I had made there was Jewish, I was shocked.  He couldn’t be Jewish, I said.  Then an even more shocking thoughtRacismGraphic(2) occurred to me:  Where did the first thought come from?  To that point in my life, I had never, to my knowledge, met a Jew, having attended only Catholic schools and lived only among Christians before our family moved to the new state.  Yet I clearly had imported into my subconscious some ugly stereotypes against which I had unwittingly measured the normalcy of my friend Alan.

Continue reading “The Pyramid of Hate and Violence: On Race, Bigotry, and the American President”

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Father’s Day Fever

I was passing through the kitchen one night when my father, alone there, called me over.  Then he did something very unusual.  Well past the time when I thought such a thing could happen, he pickb5418bedbd5b9978cd81176259a0ddfa--fist-bump-newborn-photographyed me off the ground as if I was still a toddler and hugged me close.  Then, lips to ear, he asked me a secret.  “Tell me,” he said softly, so as not to be overheard elsewhere in the house, “that you will love me no matter what I do.”

I found his words more mystifying even than his lifting me off the floor.  I didn’t understand them as foreboding.  After all, he was my dad.  I remember pausing to try to figure out what he was talking about before I answered him.  Nothing came to me, and all I could think of to say was, “Sure I will, Dad.”

I was 10 years old. Continue reading “Father’s Day Fever”

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Sense and Nonsense in the Climate Change ‘Debate’

In a recent email conversation with friends and acquaintances, two conservative correspondents sought to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change and its impacts by citing facts they believed undermined the accuracy of that consensus.

One tried to debunk the issue with a recent Wall Street Journal reprint of a 1989 news article in which a U.N. environmental official said that rising sea levels could eliminate whole nations if the global warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000.  Another raised a familiar ‘challenge’ by asking how we can explain major weather changes hundreds of years ago before industrialization and the invention of the internal combustion engine.

More substantially they also pointed to the NASA finding in 2015 that the ice sheet in Antarctica is growing rather than shrinking, contradicting other studies that found a loss of ice mass in that region as they have also found in Arctic ice. Continue reading “Sense and Nonsense in the Climate Change ‘Debate’”

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