The Rag Blog

By Alice Embree | The Rag Blog | July 2, 2024

This article originally appeared in Alice Embree’s Substack and was cross-posted to The Rag Blog.

AUSTIN — It was 8:30 a.m., June 24, at the Texas Capitol when the Swole Patrol, began to walk toward the south sidewalk.  The intrepid exercise group associated with Austin’s Indivisible planned to “work out their anger” and urge everyone to “exercise their right to vote.”  They began to set up their makeshift sidewalk gym.

They were marking the second anniversary of the Dobbs v Jackson ruling by the Supreme Court that overturned 50 years of life under Roe v Wade.  Fifty years of rights my daughter doesn’t have and my granddaughter won’t be able to rely upon.

As the Swole Patrol began to set up their makeshift sidewalk gym, a Texas DPS trooper walked up.  I wasn’t in earshot, but he left after talking to some of the women.  He must have determined that the hula-hoops didn’t constitute a public threat.

I was there with the elders.  I had been asked by one of the organizers to show up with “We Fought For Roe” signs.  The Texas Alliance for Retired Americans (TARA) had endorsed the event as well.

Continue reading →

Donald Trump caricature by DonkeyHotey / Flickr / Public Domain.

By Lamar Hankins | The Rag Blog | June 13, 2024

[Listen to Thorne Dreyer’s interview with Lamar Hankins on Rag Radio, Friday, June 14, 2024, 2-3 p.m., on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed at KOOP.org.]

I followed Trump’s trial in New York half-heartedly. I am not drawn to spectacles as I once might have been. For good or bad, I vacillate on the matter of electoral politics. I find them particularly tedious, especially the presidential sweepstakes. This is not because of old age having turned me cynical — even though I will be 80 later this year. I am as involved with political issues as I was 60 years ago during the civil rights and Vietnam War era. Human rights, colonialism, war, political hypocrisy, equal rights under law, the Bill of Rights, and many other social and political issues concern me deeply.

I began turning against electoral politics at the national level in 1992 because of the hypocrisy and callousness of Bill Clinton. I became unwilling to give myself over to the level of dishonesty required of many mass movements, including political ones. I have friends who are active in political parties, and I admire their tenacity and character. I gravitate instead toward organizations that focus on specific ills I would like to eliminate or ameliorate.

While political parties are not to my liking, I have never lost faith in democracy.

While political parties are not to my liking, I have never lost faith in democracy and the compromises that are necessary conditions of living together in community or, at least, proximity. But I never believed in what Hubert Humphrey would have called “the fundamental goodness of America” (in the words of journalist James Traub’s biography of Humphrey). I believe we should be honest about our history. We should feel shame when we accuse others of being colonizers because that is exactly what we did to the indigenous people we found on the North American continent when we “discovered” it. We continue to try to control political outcomes in other countries, usually to satisfy the desires of economic elites. And the internment of Japanese-Americans is difficult to forgive, as is our historic antisemitism and ethnocentrism, along with the several inexcusable wars we have spawned during my lifetime.

Continue reading →