Search Results for: civil rights

(Disclaimer: There are many good and wonderful people on the Internet, if you choose to write online, you have to look for them, invite them into your world, treat them well, and hang onto them for dear life. Odds are they will need you as much as you need them.Nobody needs protection from them. You will know instantly who they are.  It’s taken me 30 years, but I have an awful lot of good and thoughtful people reading my work, a miracle in many ways. They have brought me into a safe and wonderful world. Surround yourself with positive people, throw the others out, instantly.)

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It is true in our time that many of us who venture out of our ostrich holes and cubbyholes and into the wider world will most likely find themselves under seige at times, not from foreign armies with guns but from  fellow Americans –  conspiracy-minded lunatics, anti-vaccers, the gullible and weak-minded- Facebook,  Twitter,  and dark web users, Christian White Nationalists, Republican congresswomen (and men) Marjorie Taylor Greene, hysterical Democratic Party Fund Raisers, lonely people with computers.

The weapons of these people are rage, grievance, victimization, they hate for its own sake and have no love of facts or reason.

Did I leave out trolls and busy-bodies and pompous windbags drawn to social media like bears to bee hives? People who nobody would ever listen to for any reason roam the wild planes of the Internet like Kings and Queens.

Sharing one’s life is not the quiet and soft process pioneered by E.B. White when he wrote about his farm in Maine for the New Yorker eons ago. Were the rude people hiding or did that have no way to be nasty?

We are no longer a civil society but nation of rude, angry and in a literary sense, violent people, divided and addicted to mistrust.

On social media, there are no rules, no leaders, no police. The corporate titans who run the digital empire and make obscene amounts of money care only aboout their profits none of them take any responsibility for what they have unleashed, or do much to curb the darkening side of it. They are bloated and unaccountable.

They have created a world that is at times rephrehensible, dangerous and ugly. Yet for people like me and millions of others, it is also indispenable. We are stuck with it, our elected leaders are too busy on the phone sucking up to lobbyists to worry about the death and rape threats, hate mail and vicious messages that are now considered routine. Social media has been lifesaver for me, and I also love it and need it.

As the country gets nastier by the day, I want to be more compassionate and positive, and respond in that way. I want to share the things I have learned that might be helpful. I believe it is urgently important for sane, compassionate and honest people to go online and fight for their space, as I have fought for mine.

America is a sick puppy right now.  Politics can’t help us, we have to go and help ourselves.

Nobody needs advice on dealing with the good people. Here’s my five step plan for dealing with the others, they do seem to grow in numbers.

1. The Delete Button. The best way to deal with online insantity and hostility is to simply delete it These people have no legal or moral right to post their feces on your blog or to rain on your parade. Don’t give them any sunshine. Don’t honor their cruelty by sharing it, or invading your space. I hope you won’t hide from it, as so many good people have.

The good news is that this world is much better than it seems. What some people want is to hurt you, and if they can’t, they either go somewhere else or wither. They are upsetting and sometimes painful, they are not really dangerous.

Don’t let them hurt you. Delete them. Social media needs a Delete movement. That would shake the corporations up.

You are not, contrary to some, obligated to post criticism of you and your work, hateful or otherwise. My blog was created as a monologue, not a dialogue, but it has expanded to the presence of so many people on digital media. I appreciate civil disagreement, I won’t put up with hate messages or eternal arguments.

I am not interested in what three billion strangers on Facebook think of what I write.

My blog has changed, it is a dialogue often now, but only to people who are civil and who have something interesting or thoughtful to say.  Only the people I let in can be in.

The miracle of the blog is that it its founders have blessedly seen fit to keep offensive comments out of our blogs and head space. The hackers who built the Internet (odd to say, but I was there, knew how obnoxious and combative they could be. They built in protections against themselves and their successors.

2. Use the attacks, grow them for good. I have found that personal attacks over the years have made me stronger. They force me to think about myself, to strengthen my resolve and identity.  I have learned how to speak up for myself, and call out the cruel or the mindless. When I attack now, I instinctively ask myself these questons: what can I learn? How can I better? Strangely enough, that has made me better.

Although there are many people out there who get off on trying to harm people, I can say over these years that these assaults have, in fact, made me more confident, forced me to respect my own identity, and taught me as well how to protect, love and defend myself. Hate, when all is said and done, does the opposite of what the hater wants. It does make us stronger. It does make us better. It keeps love alive.

3. Agree Sometimes. You can have fun. I have fun with trolls and jerks sometimes. One man said I was lying cheating self-absorbed failure. I wrote back: “thank you, this is painful, but I needed to hear it.” He ran for his life. I still laugh about it. I call it my asshole-thumper approach. You can’t use it all the time, but when you do, it stops them cold. I told another that every bad thing people say about me is true, and he didn’t know what to say.

Another called me a pervert and a thief. I asked if I was still on his Christmas card list. He vanished and was never heard from again. These people have no sense of humor, but most of you do. Have some fun with it. Trolls hate to be ridiculed or minimized, it drives them bonkers. The whole point of hate is to gain power. Without it, there is no point.

5. Formulate some rules.  Stick To Them. The most import is:  Never argue with a hostile, demented conservative or progressive or troll strangers online.  The left can be just as obnoxious as the right, and they both are consumed over money.

Very few Americans ever change their mind any longer, they have their labels stuck to their foreheads. The art of civil debate and persuasion is dying out, nobody can be persuased by anyone.  Nobody can ever change their mind or anybody else’s. The election was rigged. Vaccines don’t work. Bill Gates is trying to insert microchips in all of our heads. Period. Sure.

In any disagreement online – and some are valuable – I insist that the discussions remain civil and thoughtful. People are free to express themselves, but not to argue with others.

Nothing other than civil comments about a blog post gets published  or stays published, critical or not. Arguing accomplishes nothing. I don’t owe anybody anything. It’s my blog, my Faceook page and the only reason I  need to delete or ban something is that I don’t like it.

Most American are gathering dust on the brain. But I’ve found a lot of real thinkers and they have found me. And that is rewarding and affirming.

The highest praise I get is when people thank me for making them think, whether they agree with me or not. And I thank them for making me think when they do, which is every day.

The haters aren’t interested in arguing or learning or changing. The evolution of red-white thinking is killing off the American Mind just the way Harold Bloom the famed literary critics and Yale Professor predicted that it would. It is something of a blessing that he died before he could see the mess our democracy is in right now.

We don’t think any more, we just paste a label on our heads – red, blue, progressive, conservative, extremist, racist – stop thinking for ourselves. The end result is our now completely complicated and increasingly useless political system.

An alleged feminist wrote on my blog that I should be banned forever from writing about women because I wrote about how interesting my Amish neighbors are to me and how much I was learning from them.

And she is supposedly a progressive. More and more, I can’t see the differnce between us and them.

If you go online  and argue, you will vanish into a dark sinkhole and never return. I see my blog as a place to share my life, expand my mind, state my beliefs. I owe it my life in many ways. I love it dearly.  It is not for anything else but authenticity and openness. I do not argue my beliefs online with strangers ever, that is an express train to hell.

4. Don’t take it personally. These people don’t know you, care about you, or understand you. If you listen to them, they will creep inside of your head like worms do. That image helpls me to fend them off.

5. Challenge, Don’t Argue. Last month, I followed the path of a friend with a potty mouth and a very tough disposition. When somebody writes something nasty about her, her basic response is:”blow if out your ass!”

I grew up in New England in a prudish household and I scolded her several time about not using dirty words online, being the prude I often am. A few weeks later, somebody posted an especially vicious comment about something I wrote, and I went for it: “Blow it out your ass,” I wrote. She vanished and never came back. It felt great.

6. When you make a mistake, Admit It. I often have trouble admitting or correcting mistakes, it’s not a positive trait, although I’m getting much better at it and recognize the importance of changing. I’ve corrected six mistakes in the past two weeks. Everybody who points out a mistake is not a troll or a creep.

It’s important to acknowledge a mistake quickly and openly. I’ve learned this the hard way, but I’ve learned it. It feels better than fighting, as does almost anything. Social media, for all its flaws, can function as a valuable editing tool.

7. Be proud of yourself. Insist on your dignity. Post your own bill of rights. I have the right to speak my mind freely on the website and social media sites where my work appears without being belittled or lied about.

People who are cruel to me and anyone else and are arrogant or unknowing are not welcome, and will be asked to leave.

The only reason I need is that I don’t like them or want them around. I’m not running for mayor, I don’t need them to agree with me or like what I wrote.

This is what I mean about becoming stronger. As I have written and grown, so has my blog. People do want reasoned discussions. They do want to think. They do want to move in a positive and compassionate world. They are the new silent majority, they are also the future. I believe that strongly.

The people who read my work and post on my websites are entitled to safety and to be treated with respect and dignity. I do my best to protect them from hostility or cruelty.

A number of readers patrol my pages looking for rudeness, cruelty or hostility. They have the tools to remove the offender or to reach me and ask me to do it. I love to do it.

This doesn’t take a lot of work, it takes a lot of thought. The corporations that created this mess and profit from it could change it in a minute. But it would cost them money and they won’t spend it voluntarily.

I am a passionate believer in blogs, they are an ultimate expression of individual freedome, something that is always under assault in the Corporation Nation.

Corporations hate nothing more than individualism. It is the greatest threat to them.

Online writing does not need to be about argument and conflict. It ought to be about you and your life and your thoughts, as my blog is about me. It ought to be the high point for the world’s oldest and biggest democracy.

This is our war against the peckerheads and toothless ducks. It is a war of indiviuduals against the cruel and the immoral.

Those are my most basic do’s and don’ts.

I hope they are helpful. Don’t get pulled into the bit. You are worth more.

8. Media Gone Mad. Someone needs to step back and take a look at things. Be careful choosing your media form. It should be calm, analytic and straightforward. I wish I had a list of names to offer you. I scan the New York Times online site sometime in the morning. I find it calm, analystic and straightforward.

Despite the yowling about it’s liberal bent, serious conservatives read the paper every day.

Once I looked it, I don’t look at or listen to media until the late afternoon or the next morning. Do not listen to the news in any form after 8 p.m. unless the Martians are finally landing, and good luck to them.

9. Oh yes, one more: learn how to block and ban. Be quick on the trigger. Everybody gets one shot at being nasty, then they get a warning. The second time they get blocked or banned. People who come to my site to argue are not welcome. If they don’t go away, they are banned.

In a decade I’ve banned 34 people from my Facebook Page and blocked a half dozen from my blog.

That’s not bad really, given the volume. The media distorts almost everything.

It’s like the old adage: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I can testify to that. I used to tremble with fear and suffer from panic attacks.

Today, I would challenge a Tyrannosaurus Rex to a hand-wrestle in a barroom.

 

 

 

Small communities – where life is stable and simple and intensely human – are disappearing from America and much of the world.

Some have vanished completely; some are dying slowly, all are grappling with what the sociologists call the machine civilization. It’s hard for any smaller community to survive and the rapacious juggernaut of corporatism.

The Amish seem to have figured out how.

I don’t really care about their hats and horses, I am transfixed by the way they live their lives. They are not tourist attractions, in many ways they are models for us poor souls hoping to figure out how to survive our own kind.

All over the world, diverse peoples are merging into a common mass, sparking tension, resentment, and confusion for minorities and majorities.

In my writing about the Amish, I want to be personal – I love writing about our road trips – but also step back and try to understand what I am seeing and what we could be learning from them.

They are not curiosities to me, they are far ahead of most of the rest of our world.

In his classic work Amish Society, Amish Scholar John Hostetler writes about how the Amish arrived in the United States during colonial times.

Today, the Amish are perhaps the most successful minority or small community  (or communities) to survive the chaos and conflict, and ravaging growth of the modern world.

Their communities are distinctive and viable.

They have resisted the assimilation and homogenization process more successfully than any other. They center their culture on small farms, which Western society has largely abandoned to corporate agriculture.

Although the Amish are often perceived as relics of the past who live an austere and unyielding life, people seem to admire them for doing things the old-fashioned way.

As we become more and more disenchanted with our divisive and disconnected culture, the status of the Amish in the minds of most Americans has become more and more favorable.

I find myself admiring my Amish neighbors and wondering how they stay so grounded and peacefully content in a world of so much violence,  disconnection and anger.

I want to understand how they did it. That’s something worth sharing.

The media continues to portray the Amish as quaint and primitive. The Animal Rights Movement sees nothing but puppy mills and skinny horses.

But the Amish society I see is anything but quaint or primitive. They are, in many ways, wiser, more spiritual, and far more innovative than the “English” who line up to buy their pies and sheds.

In part, I realized right away, this is because the Amish keep their distance from us and from our wastefulness, greed, faithlessness,  soulless work, violence, and competitions.

We are polluters of nature and the human soul, the Amish saw that in humans five hundred years ago and keep their distance.

We are a pandemic all of our own.

Here’s what my Amish neighbors and friends are teaching me so far:

The Amish are a church, a community, a spiritual union,  a conservative branch of Christianity, a religion, a community whose members practice simple and austere living.

They are also, says Hostetler, a familistic entrepreneuring system, a highly adaptive human community willing to change, move and evolve as is necessary for them to survive.

Moise and his family are leading a significant migration from their community in the north to Southeastern New York State because there is less development, more population and potential customers, and lots of available farmland.

It didn’t take decades of study, argument, data surveys, and arguments for Moise’s community to start moving. All it took was him to come and visit and pay cash for his farm.

The rest of his community are on their way.

The move is more entrepreneurial than spiritual, more practical than visionary. Every couple of weeks another family arrives to support the families that are here, help them to build barns and homes, and to plow and plant fields. and attend church together and speak German to.

There are many more customers down here for wood products, inexpensive and tasty baked goods, and farm produce than up near the Canadian border.

There is also more available farmland.

They make all of those things and sell them. For the Amish, smart marketing is spiritual, despite them as ghosts of a lost world.

Ever since they were driven from the cities of Europe centuries ago,  farms have been the center of the Amish’s spirituality and tradition. In a way, each one is a church of its own.

As the dairy farms in my county fail, the Amish come and succeed. You can’t tell me there aren’t lessons here, and it isn’t just that they have a lot of kids.

In Amish Society, Hostetler offers us several models that can help us understand Amish society and figure out what we can learn from them. It is already clear: we have a lot more to learn from them than they have from us.

I want to skip over the sociology and find answers to these questions: What is the meaning of the Amish system? What, if anything, is the Amish trying to say to us, to tell us?

First, Commonwealth: In some ways, the Amish are a small commonwealth; their members claim to be ruled by the law of love and redemption. The bonds that unite them are many and strong. But they do not occupy and defend any particular territory; they will move to other places when circumstances pressure them to do so.

The radicalism of the Amish suggests that their respect for locality, place, custom, and spiritual idealism can go a long way in checking the monstrous and uncontrolled growth of modern society. They can also help teach us how to preserve human freedom, and especially, human dignity.

Secondly, sociologists classify the Amish as a sectarian society.

The Anabaptists were founded when the established church was seen as anarchic and conservative, much as the Catholic Church is seen by some today.

The “sects” like the Amish were seen as egalitarian; the Amish rejected the authority of the established religious leaders and their leaders. They separated from all other religious institutions and remain separated five hundred years later.

The British sociologist Bryan Wilson believes that the sects like the Amish are the self-conscious attempts by people to construct their own societies. Thus the Amish recognize the evil traits and circumstances of humanity, moderate that influence upon themselves,  and retreat into a community to experience, cultivate, and preserve the true beliefs of God in their ethical relationships with one another.

Isolation and a self-contained culture are walls against the depravations, spiritual bankruptcy,  violence, and greed of the outside world.

In our culture, we worship greed and money. In Amish society there is no greed and little money in daily life. Nobody has to worry about hospital bills or retirement – it comes with the community. The church takes care of all, just as Jesus suggested.

The Amish do not attempt to send the world their message.

Yet the Amish message is as clear as it is powerful. They tell us that a way of living is more important than communicating it or preaching it to others.  They don’t even try to defend it.

The ultimate message is the life itself, not the words that describe it.

I’m learning that the Amish I know do not agonize about their beliefs or seek approval from others. They do not doubt their basic convictions.; they are sure of their beliefs and cannot or will not explain them except through the teachings of Jesus, and the example and conduct of their lives.

That is true humility, and humility is incompatible with Western society.

Are the Amish A Folk a society? Anthropologists use the term “folk societies” for semi-isolated people. They call them “folk societies,” “primitives,” or merely “simple societies.”

The folk society is a small, isolated, traditional, simple, homogeneous society in which oral communication and traditional ways come together and form what the Amish call “the integration of life.”

More important than science, the custom is valued more than critical knowledge, and interactions with people are personal and emotional rather than abstract and transactional.

In the “English” world, life is rarely seen as something to integrate. We lurch from one phase of life to another,  hoping that somehow we can make enough money to be safe and sheltered.

Folk societies resist change.

Young people do what the older adults did when they were young. Members communicate intimately with one another – not in texts or e-mails –  and not only by word of mouth but by through customs and symbols – straw hats, bonnets, horse carts –  that reflect and reinforce a strong sense of community, what the scholars call “we-ness.”

When you see an Amish person riding in a horse and carriage dressed in straw hats and bonnets, you know exactly who they are. Their lives may be simple, but their instincts for presenting themselves are sharp and contemporary.

The folk model, says Hostetler, helps to understand the tradition-directed nature of Amish society. The Amish, for example, have retained many of the customs and small-scale technologies that were common in rural society in the nineteenth century.

Amish beliefs – this is so visible to me on their farms – have fused with an earlier period of simple country living when everyone farmed with horses, not machines, and on a scale where family members could work together and remain connected another.

I see in Amish lives many balms for our angry and raw society – smaller communities, less technology, natural and continuous interaction with one another.

So the Amish exist as folk or “little” communities in a rural subculture within the modern state.

But they should never be confused with peasants or primitives. Their farms may not be battery-powered, but they are extremely sophisticated. If they didn’t wish to be seen, why drive in horse-pulled carriages and wear clothes that set them aside from everyone else.

The Amish are humble but distinctive, small in scale, homogeneous in culture, and self-sufficient. These are, in my mind, all potential lessons for us.

Amish life is distinctive.

The Amish people are highly and consciously visible. They are instantly recognizable by their clothing, farms, homes, furnishings, fields, and even their language.

Although they speak perfect English to people like me, they speak a dialect of German among themselves.

They profess to be private and humble, yet they make sure we can spot them instantly. Amish life, then, is distinctive in that religion and custom blend into a way of life.

Outside of their culture, and as Wendell Berry writes so eloquently, corporatism is stripping us of both our religion and our customs and our farms.

We are losing the communities we need to be able to turn to and offer and receive support from.

The Amish are not losing their communities; they are growing stronger.  They have been spared some of the worst deprivations of modern life – inescapable debt, joblessness, homelessness, health care terror, panic attacks, loss of faith.

Rather than be curious about them, or see them as quaint (they are not quaint) I  want to know how they do it.

By living in closed communities where custom and a strong sense of togetherness prevail, the Amish have formed an integrated way of life and a folklife culture. The needs of the individual from birth to death are met within an integrated and shared system of values and meanings.

Tradition and custom keep the group functioning as a whole.

It doesn’t take a sociologist to figure out that our culture does not meet the needs of the individual, not in birth, work, life, or death. Surely, this is one reason for so much of the political turmoil in America, a country where millions of people feel no allegiance at all to their government.

That may be one of the most important messages I am taking from the Amish I am getting to know.

They revere the sanctity of the individual, even as their community is centered around a common faith. And so the individuals in their community revere them.

The Amish farm of my neighbor Moise is a miracle blending of human labor, stewardship, and cooperation with nature.

Most of the American farms I see failing are nothing like that, and that is yet another lesson to be taken from this so-called “simple” way of life, which is not very simple but remarkably successful and effective.

It is possible to keep those farms alive and producing food. There are many people willing to do it.

While the animal rights people obsess about the puppy mills in Lancaster, the growing Amish community can show us several ways to live in a better, healthier, and more connected way.

I used to see the Amish as a curiosity, a tourist attraction, an oddity. The Amish smile whenever I mentioned the Lancaster Amish. They call them the “upper class.” That is, the fancy people.

The idea of the Amish as a tourist culture is a grotesque underestimation of people who have learned to survive in a better and healthier way- in many ways –  than the rest of us.

I’m looking forward to learning a lot more.

 

 

The Amish are “terrible” to their animals. The Amish are “horrible” to their horses. They work them until they drop. The Amish horses are not like “family,” said one message, “they treat their horses like they are equipment. The Amish all run puppy mills and abuse their dogs.

-Messages from my readers today and yesterday.

I get messages like this every time I put up a photograph of an Amish horse and cart. I’m already sick of these messages, and these families just got here.

I wake up to the new and daily sight of an Amish horse and cart. Maria and I are grateful for this, a beautiful and iconic start to our morning.

Even in the country, we rarely get to see beautiful and happy animals like this every day.

We live in a time of great orthodoxy, the mass conforming to beliefs, attitudes, or modes of conduct we are led to believe are both sacred and universal.

Think of the “right” and the “left.” Independent thinking in politics is now seen as treasonous, on the left and the right.

In this vast and complex world, we are told there are only two ways to think.

Today, we discovered an Amish family living less than a mile to the north of us. We learned of another a few miles north of that and others in the nearby town of Argyle.

They are coming to our town in substantial numbers, and they are most welcome. I see they need some support and defending.

As a journalist and a photographer in Pennsylvania and New York, and other places, I have been blessed to meet a number of Amish families, Old Amish and New Amish, and many Native-Americans.

Orthodoxy and generalizations are a disservice to everyone, another symptom of the closing of the American mind to dogma, propaganda, and conspiracy.

Millions of Americans now believe that Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci have conspired to implant computer chips in the bodies and brains of people who get the Covid vaccine.

And if you mention “Amish,” you are certain to get one or more messages telling you that they mistreat their horses, run puppy mills, and see animals as work tools, not furbabies.

I hear and see these thoughts daily now that I am writing about my new Amish neighbors.

I’m doing to have to deal with this, so this is a good start. I have little patience and no respect for people who slander people while hiding behind their computer screens. I hope I never forget how wrong that is.

I tell the people who post these messages that if they have not come to my community and visited them and seen their animals and how they are treated, they need not post such hateful messages on my blog or social media pages.

Again and again, we are taught not to tar millions of people with the same brush, not to generalize, not to demonize.  We are taught, but that doesn’t mean we learn.

I’m sure some Amish mistreat their animals.

Some of your neighbors mistreat their animals.  Some farmers mistreat their animals. The SPCA shelters are full of white and black and Christian and Jewish people, poor people and rich people,  who mistreat their animals.

Because some people do it, that doesn’t mean everybody does it.

To assume my new neighbors must mistreat their horses because they are Amish is the very essence of bigotry. Shame on the people who do it.

To be Amish is not to be just one thing, but many things.

Some people see the cruelty in a horse or cow napping in the sun –  the animal must be abused. Farmers see it as peaceful napping.

Yet many farmers tell me they only permit their animals to lie down out of sight of the road, they are so tired of tourists and animal rights people calling the police on them.

The farmers and Amish people I see love their animals, but in a different way from pet people. Yes, they are tools, they are not members of the family. But they know the importance of caring for them and treating them well. Their own well-being depends on it. It is a different kind of love.

These arguments about it being cruel for working horses to work, or not to be “family,” drew me to write for several years about the New York Carriage Horses, for years the victim of a vicious, dishonest,  and sustained attack against the carriage trade by the very well-funded Animal Rights Movement.

In a perfect world, such a movement to work to bring us closer to animals and work to keep them in our lives.

The Animal Rights Dogma has it just the opposite: people can’t be trusted to take care of animals, they must all be hidden away in preserves or just be allowed to vanish.

The Amish horses bring the horse carriage wars back to me. My e-mails remind me of the righteous mail I get about the Amish every time I take a photo of a horse and cart.

Horses were once the tractors of Western Civilization; they built our world. Work is not cruel for them. What is cruel for them is to sit around “rescue” preserves their whole lives doing nothing but dropping manure.

What is cruel is a movement that deprives children of the chance to see the animals who helped us build civilization close-up, rather than just as memories YouTube, like old TV shows.

The Amish are extremely knowledgeable and careful breeders. Their workhorses are hardy, busy and well-fed, and cared for. To do otherwise would be to harm their farms and diminish their work.

Many horse people told me the New York Carriage Horses are the luckiest in the world. They get to work every day. The animal rights movement insisted this is cruel.

I don’t doubt some Amish farmers or carriage drivers don’t treat their horses well. Welcome to our world. Find them and punish them; there are plenty of laws to invoke.

But don’t smear people you have never seen or met, whose animals you have never seen.

People who own pets as opposed to animals have in some measure lost touch with the natural world.

To the ideologues of the animal rights movement, no animal should ever work or entertain or even be around people. They should all go on those mythic and mostly non-existent “preserves” to languish for the rest of their lives.

This is not humane; this is the very essence of cruelty. Like the carriage drivers in New York, the Amish keep these strong and proud working horses in our word. Speaking only for me, I am grateful to them for that.

If not for the carriage trade and cultures like the Amish, these magnificent working animals would have already vanished from our world, like the elephants slaughtered by the scores after the animal rights movement “saved” them from the circuses.

In an era of climate change, overdevelopment, bulldozed habitats, work with people means survival to many animals like the big and strong horses of the Amish. It’s too late to save the elephants. Their lives were upended, and in so many cases, ended by the movement that claims to be protected them.

Where are all of those preserves that they were supposed to go to? How many non-profit organizations do you know that can afford the estimated $133,000 for a single elephant to receive food and care?

I honor the Amish for keeping these animals in our lives; they are an inspiration, not a controversy, they symbolize the most basic animal right – to live and be protected in our world.

Work with responsible humans is the best way for many working animals to survive in a culture that has otherwise abandoned them.

Animals need an animal rights movement that fights for animals’ true rights, not for the right of people to project their needs and orthodoxies onto them.

My work with the carriage horses brought me into contact with many horses and many veterinarians, horse trainers. And too many animal rights people that remind me of conspiracy theorists: in New York, they were not on good terms with the truth.

I know how to spot an unhealthy horse – when they stand with their head or ears low, lay down more than normal. Excess drinking, erratic urination, drooling or dropping food from the mouth, limping, skittishness, stiffness, lethargy, poor appetite, etc.

I’ve seen some Amish horses on their farms, and their horses now trot by our farm a dozen times a day.

I’ve yet to see one whose ears and the tail weren’t up, whose heads are not held high, whose rib bones show on the outside, who balk or whinny or struggle to pull their carts. They all brushes, their shoes and hooves brushed and cleaned.

They are strong, healthy, spirited, and engaged, not like the vast numbers of horses kept in captivity with nothing to do. If the Amish horses were not in great shape, they could never do the work they do every day. They don’t need to sleep in our beds.

So if you haven’t come here to see these horses for yourself, don’t tell me they are mistreated or abused. That is nothing but slander. Don’t post hurtful garbage on my blog, slandering people you don’t know. I’ll delete them.

There are plenty of horses and other animals who need some advocacy. Take care of them.

I’ve already seen enough of my Amish neighbors to be grateful for their presence, to like and respect them, to admire the health and vigor of their animals.

Pets are pets, and livestock is livestock. One is no better or luckier than the other. Both deserve to live and remain in our world.

P.S. Please don’t send me messages about Amish and indigenous people’s refusal to be photographed. I always take photos from a distance; no one is recognizable. I always ask permission and honor the responses.

And as a reporter and photographer, I have a nice file of photos of indigenous people.  I love taking their photos. All you have to do to do the right thing is ask. I always do.

Some Amish are comfortable being photographed, some are not (the same is true of indigenous people). Carts on pubic roads are fair game, legal and moral.

I prefer people to stop telling me what I can see for myself.

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. – Abraham Lincoln, The River Of Winged Dreams.
____

“Thank you, Jon.” wrote MW after I wrote about Mary Trump’s book about her Uncle Donald. “It does help those of us who need to understand why we don’t like him. But I am afraid that her book would not convince the MAGA people of his problems. They will just see it as bitter grapes. Someone needs to do that.”

I receive many messages from people like MW, who like what I write but worry that I will not change any Trumpian minds.

This tells me how divided and partisan we have come, and how naive.

Political writing today is seen as just another tool in the left-right killing of the American Mind, just another way to argue or persuade, to tell people what to do, and convince them to do what I do.

It has lost its authenticity and credibility. People like me are instantly tagged and labeled and easily discarded for committing heresy. People assume if I’m not praising the President, I must be on the team.

If I’m not persuading people to agree with me, then my  failing in some critical way. When I was a political writer, no one ever told me my writing would not convince people about how to vote. This is new.

In our country, there are only two ways to look at the world now, the left and the right, and if you don’t belong to the one, you belong to the other.

Good political writing informs. It doesn’t pontificate or manipulate or ask people to choose sides. Everyone has the right to make up their minds if democracy is to mean a thing.

The people who so fervently support Trump have many needs and grievances; this division will begin to end when people in government listen to what they say and tend to their needs.

If you listened to every presidential debate, you would not know they even exist. Everyone is talking about race, which is good and long overdue. No one is talking about them.

The messages also tell me something else.

Few people seem to accept that there will be no fast and straightforward end to our ugly civil conflict, which has traumatized much of our nation, confounded the world, and threatens to make Congress irrelevant to our form of government.

We are already neck-deep in America’s 2nd civil war; so far, this one is mostly cultural and political, but no less divisive or complicated.

I admire what Mark Mark Twain wrote in The Bible. According to Mark Twain, when our country was also bitterly divided. This inspires me and guides me and my writing.

“Each of you, for himself or herself, by himself or herself, and on his or her own responsibility, must speak. It is a solemn and weighty responsibility and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or politician. Each must decide for himself or herself alone what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man, to decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor. It is traitorous both against yourself and your country.
Let men label you as they may if you alone of all the nation decide one way, and that way be the right way by your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country, hold up your head for you have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Civil War 2.0 is very similar to the first one, except for one very big difference: the staggering bloodshed and violence of the first. Otherwise, each conflict echoes the other in surprising ways.

John Wilkes Booth did the South no favor when he killed Lincoln.

Andrew Johnson, his successor, was no match for the Radical Republicans in Congress who refused to permit any elected Southern political leaders who supported the Confederacy to take office.

The Congress established blacks as American Citizens, appointed them to public positions, and forbade discrimination against them.

When he was killed, Lincoln was preparing for a massive and expensive reconciliation program meant to unify the country after more than 750,000 soldiers had died, much as Mandela did for South Africa.

He wanted the North to treat the South gently and to heal the country.

He wanted the South to elect its leaders, be financially supported in establishing new businesses apart from slavery. And he meant to tread gently with racial issues, moving towards equality carefully.

That did not happen. Congress wasn’t interested in reconciliation, but revenge.

Instead of reaching out to the South, the Congress undermined President Johnson and sought to punish the Confederacy and its leaders. They insisted on full equality in the South while it was still bitter, bleeding,  and humiliated, and without any preparation.

Equality was a noble idea, but it was done in such a heavy-handed way that it backfired. Without protection, compromise or planning, blacks suffered from persecution, even death, police brutality, lynchings, labor exploitation and false imprisonment.

The newly freed slaves were left to the mercy of a population that still fiercely believed in slavery. Lincoln’s reconciliation became Jim Crow.

Elected leaders were forced out of office, and troops were sent to enforce numerous and various punishments. Congress treated the South as a conquered nation, not an equal part of the Union.

Southerners turned their anger on their former slaves, sparking violent persecution, two bloody race riots, and brutal cruelty and discrimination, including the almost complete segregation of the races.

The slaves were legally free but also tragically enslaved again in a different way.

In the culture and geography of Civil War 1.0,  many of the same geographic and cultural conflicts of the Civil War now still haunt the country and shape the vast rural and urban divide that powered Donald Trump’s election.

Trump’s strongholds are not exclusively Southern, they are mostly Southern and rural (and some in the industrial heartland). What these groups have in common are racial resentments, anger at being dominated or ignored, and deep suspicions about media and government, especially Washington government.

African-American scholars tell us that while whites have mostly forgotten what African-Americans have been through before and after the Civil War, African-Americans have not.

Many see incidents of police brutality, even murder, as a continuation of slavery, not isolated incidents.

This helps explains to whites who are listening  why the protests are so intense and sometimes even violent. There’s a lot of blood and history and mistrust in those demonstrations.

But to Trump and his supporters, these protests are grossly unfair to white people who weren’t even alive when slavery was legal.  And who suffer themselves today.

They see the spectrum of African-American history in America very differently. The past is the past, and it’s time to move on.

Trumpists in some Southern states doesn’t argue in defense of slavery anymore. Instead, they argue against full voter rights for African-Americans, and they fight for the preservation of monuments to confederate generals and leaders.

“This isn’t to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each created a common national narrative (which happened to be the victors’ narrative): both wars were about the country’s survival and the expansion of the freedoms on which it was founded. Nothing like this consensus has formed around September 11… Indeed, the decade since the attacks has destroyed the very possibility of a common national narrative in this country.”
―  Author and novelist George Packer

Trumpist communities resent what they see as elitist and arrogant Northerners and journalists, scientists, and Washington bureaucrats telling them what to do and how to live.

They have resented this for generations.

There are deep and angry feelings all over Trump Country, which is rural and Southern country, about domination from government, liberals, and lately, democrats who supported Civil Rights and foreign trade legislation.

People in my town feel like politicians in Congress know as about them and their needs as Martians. They revere a President who has finally told the system to stuff it and has chosen to blow it up rather than fix it.

This divide, this new civil war,  presents itself every day in the struggle to contain the coronavirus, and the many issues of constitutionality, freedom and individual rights that were a core ethos of the Confederacy and are still alive in much of rural America.

Beyond that, thoughtless trade agreements further devastated rural and Southern states, who lost almost all of their manufacturing and mill jobs to Mexico and China.

Very few Northern states suffered a widespread mask and shut- down rebellion. These outbursts have broken out all over the West and the former Confederate states. Some people beat up store clerks when asked to wear a mask.

In the North, the government is still seen as a positive and necessary force. People do as they were told.

In Trump’s land, these restrictions are seen as oppressive, unnecessary, out of touch, and dangerous. It’s another kind of rebellion, another kind of recession from the union.

In a pandemic and an election,  trust of government is critical.

Donald Trump has openly promoted the distrust of both scientists and state-run elections, and there is still a broad audience for those messages. He favors distrust. Many people listen to what the President says, even if he lies much of the time.

In the case of the pandemic, people are paying for this civil war with their lives, just as they did in the 1850s and the years after what we call The American Civil War.

I think this one may end up being called the Coronavirus Civil War.

Donald Trump did not create these divisions; he just sensed them and exploited them, and rode them to victory.

If there is a hero in all this for me, it would be Abraham Lincoln, he was a large man in spirit and heart.

Lincoln was almost alone in seeing the war’s suffering as a verdict on both sides. Perhaps it might be deemed an act of God’s justice, he argued, even if all the wealth piled up by 250 years of “unrequited toil” by the enslaved should be sunk into the war, and even if “every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

Lincoln’s most resonant line was his plea to Americans to finish the war and seek lasting peace, “With malice toward none, with charity for all.” His refusal to condemn the South alone gave that phrase great resonance, particularly after his assassination, when he became a hallowed martyr to the cause of healing the nation.

If there is a God, there is another Lincoln out there, coming to lead us out of the desert.

Democrats and Progressives can’t fathom why so many people support Donald Trump. Southerners and Westerners, especially white ones, cannot comprehend why so many people dislike him. Many say the same thing: he’s doing a lot of good things, they just won’t stop picking on him.

Civil wars happen when there are two different countries within one. We fought the first one with guns and canons. We’re fighting this one on Facebook and Twitter and digital media and in our paralyzed Congress.

The conservative moment – websites, broadcasts, talk radio – has become a fierce opponent of the government and a loyal support system for the President.

Almost in unison, these new media compete to trash “the Deep State,” any political opposition, and the elitists and professors and politicians of the old industrial North,  now the “Democratic” cities. How sweet the vengeance, even if served cold.

The idea is to fight the government at every turn, not support it.

There is plenty of extreme left rhetoric, but there is a quasi-fascistic quality to the extreme right-wing media, home of boundless conspiracy theories. This week’s conspiracy theory, reported CNN, was that Joe Biden was actually in a nursing home, pretending to be living in a house in Delaware.

There is little contrarian opinion or tolerance for other points of view. Democrats and “liberals,” “leftists” and “anarchists,” and God forbid, “socialists” are always the enemy, no matter what they think, do, or propose.

America is a dark place, surrounded by enemies from without and within.

If you look at the pre-Civil war rhetoric from the South and the rage of Fox News Commentators and conservative websites, it is startling to see how closely they match with one another.

The looming conflict over slavery triggered massive discourse and commentary in the confederate states, just as Trump and the new and more extreme conservative movement has triggered books, websites, blogs, think tanks, books, videos, and countless opportunities for opinion and commentary.

This vibrant media far outweighs anything on the left. It is a powerful and growing system of opinion and information.

Most talk radio is deeply conservative, so is the leading cable news channel in America, Fox News. They are fervent in their views.

Confederate thinkers also responded fervently to the assault on slavery coming from the North, orators, scholars, professors, and journalists embraced their antebellum roles as spokesmen for lecture societies, holidays, graduations, and elections, just as right-wing “orators” do now.

Confederate politicians like Howell Cobb, who helped write the Confederate Constitution, traveled all over the South, demonizing the federal government, its motives, leaders, and decisions.

By the end of the war, wrote Karen E. Fritz in her book Voices In The Storm, Confederate Rhetoric, 1861-1865, speakers described their nation in savage terms, applying to it expressions and characteristics once reserved only for Lincoln’s North.

The outbreak of the war wrote Drake Smith of Campbell University, “led to incredibly nationalist propaganda on both sides.” Religious rhetoric, he wrote, was ever-present in Confederate propaganda.

Evangelical Christianity was closely tied to the formation and revival of the Confederate Armies,  Christian theology was used to motivate Confederate soldiers, to keep up morale and to color perceptions of the war even after it ended.

God, it was said, was on the side of slavery, and the Confederacy.

In the rhetoric of the South, it was impossible not to recognize the heated rhetoric of Donald Trump and Evangelical Christianity today, and what seems like a particularly unholy alliance.

That’s why Trump was waving that Bible around in Lafayette Square across from the White House.

Earlier this week, Trump told a press conference that Joe Biden, a devout Catholic who carries a rosary with him at all times, would “hurt God” if he were elected.

To people who don’t know the history, it seemed a bizarre accusation in an American political campaign. It is quite recognizable in Confederate history, where it was widely believed – and pronounced – that Providence guided history as He saw fit.

God’s support was an idea that permeated pre and post-war Confederate rhetoric, just as Evangelical Christians today believe God sent Donald Trump to protect them from liberals and secular politicians by giving them complete access to power.

The North, like the Democrats of today, was pilloried continuously as Godless and evil, bringing only destruction and ruin. Lincoln, much like Biden, also evoked God, but in a much more cautious way.

He asked for God’s blessing; he never assumed it was a given. Confederate leaders assured the South that God was on their side.

This rhetoric then and now never seems to explain why Trump or the Confederacy could lose if God were really on their side.

Why would they even need to campaign?

This is a new civil war in America, or perhaps a continuation of the first one..

Most Trump supporters don’t see government as a friend of theirs; to them, it’s a danger and enemy, which is just how most of the people reading this see them.

Progressives see the supporters of Donald Trump as dishonest, corrupt, and beyond comprehension. The more he is attacked, the more they cling to him and defend him.

The problem with seeing things that way is that if something is unfathomable or beyond comprehension, it can’t be comprehended or understand. Thus, there is no rational or effective way of responding other than emotion and argument.

As the Confederacy learned, the incomprehensible can triumph even over God if it is not seen or understand. The leaders of the Confederacy never did understand the power that was arrayed against them. They, too, thought God would intervene at the last minute and bring them victory.

Like Trump, they could not imagine defeat until it was much too late. They could not live in reality.

Donald Trump’s defeat will just add more grievance to the fire, depending on how daring Biden is willing to be to reunite the country, and not just talk about it.

But nobody on either side is changing their vote because of what people like me write.

They may re-think politics and responsibility when they have something to lose, and their Main Streets fill up again with merchants, and their children can see doctors and find work.

The media, as always, can’t seem to grasp the big picture, it isn’t considered news like the latest Trump lie is.

They are hypnotized by the small, the boxing match that our civic life has become. It’s easy to miss the truth when you are too close to it.

I believe that Donald Trump is finished as a single entity, but Trumpism – the movement this sad man has launched – will live on way beyond this election, the divisions he symbolizes are not new and will be here for a long, long time.

Are you a communist?”
“No, I am an anti-fascist.”
“For a long time?”
“Since I have understood fascism.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls.

It will be a shame if the people who defeat Trump in November wake up the next morning thinking everything has returned to normal. That is far too simplistic an idea for the mess America is in.

And that would be depressing. The election offers a beginning, not an end or resolution.

That idea is the magic miracle tonic of summer soldiers.

Trump was a warning, a warm-up. The real conflict begins on November 4 as Joe Biden presents a new administration, and hopefully, a gentler and kinder one.

Trump’s supporters will begin to respect democracy again when our leaders help them to find good work still, re-build their communities, help them to stop losing their sons and daughters to drugs, lower their suicide rates, provide free health care, offer them real jobs with living wages,  and live as long as people in those dread socialist countries.

Everybody who cares about their country will have some thinking to do, some work to do if they wish.

There are no magic wands from a community as torn and battered and split as ours.

God is not going to wave a magic wand. As Twain wrote so eloquently, we will have to speak up and do something.

From Ta-Nehisi Coates

When it comes to the Civil War, all of our popular understanding, our popular history, and culture, our great films, the subtext of our arguments are in defiance of its painful truths. It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most-read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which 750,000 American soldiers were killed, more than all American soldiers killed in all other American wars combined, in a war declared for the cause of expanding “African slavery.” That war was inaugurated not reluctantly, but lustily, by men who believed property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilization, to be an edict of God, and so delivered their own children to his maw. And when that war was done, the now-defeated God lived on, honored through the human sacrifice of lynching and racist pogroms. The history breaks the myth. And so the history is ignored, and fictions are weaved into our art and politics that dress villainy in martyrdom and transform banditry into chivalry. So strong are these fictions that their emblem, the stars, and bars, darkens front porches and state capitol buildings across the land to this day.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates: We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.