Roger O Green

Getting REAL ID, as opposed to a fake one

I had blocked out four hours for the task of getting a REAL ID.

I have known about the REAL ID program for some time. Passed by Congress in 2005, it requires that “the Federal Government ‘set standards for the issuance of sources of identification, such as driver’s licenses'” in the wake of 9/11.

“The Act established minimum security standards for state-issued driver’s licenses and identification cards and prohibits Federal agencies from accepting for official purposes licenses and identification cards from states that do not meet these standards.”

With my card expiring on my last birthday, I looked on the NYS DMV page. Boy, they wanted a LOT for a REAL ID!

*Proof of identity, such as valid license, birth certificate or passport…
*Proof of Social Security Number (or Social Security Number ineligibility)
*Proof of your date of birth
*Proof of U.S. citizenship, lawful permanent residency or temporary lawful status in the U.S.
*Two different proofs of New York State residence such as utility bill, bank statement or mortgage statement

I brought all sorts of documents, including my phone bill, my bank statement, a credit card bill, and who knows what else that was lying around, but it took me an hour to gather it all because so much of what I pay is online and automatic.

Terrible stories about the DMV abound, so I had blocked out four hours for the task. I went to the first person, who was the gatekeeper. She sent me to a counter, and the clerk looked at all my documents but decided she needed only three: my current DMV card, my passport (still current), and my most recent W-2 tax form.

She sent me to another counter where that clerk verified the info. I got the picture taken, she wished me “Happy birthday,” and I was out of there in about 20 minutes total. Way too easy, for a change.

Doesn’t REAL ID, all in CAPS, seem vaguely Freudian?

The card came two weeks later. An odd thing is that it’s black and white, which is more difficult to forge, I take it? Moreover, my glasses look as though someone drew them in with a Sharpie. And I’ll have it for eight years.

I got the ENHANCED version, which cost $30 more, so when I get deported to Mexico, I can come back. Seriously, it DOES allow one to “cross a U.S. border coming from Canada, Mexico, and some Caribbean countries.”

The ZIP Code 12345, as shown in this sample, BTW, is the actual code for General Electric in Schenectady, NY.

50 years ago: the MLK Jr assassination

The Lorraine Motel, where MLK was killed. It is now a civil rights museum.

If I were a believer in conspiracy theories, I would wonder about this coincidence: on April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech against the US involvement in Vietnam, an address that most civil rights leaders opposed because it could threaten his relationship with President Lyndon Johnson. And on April 4, 1968, he was dead.

It was that speech, which I read only after the assassination, that really fueled my own antiwar sentiment, that U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia was imperialistic and that the war diverted resources from domestic programs created to aid the black poor. Further, “we were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

One could note that the struggle in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968 wasn’t the mere bigotry in public accommodations, which prompted the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott of 1955/56, but about government injustice that provided sanitation workers, all black men, with substandard wages and unsafe working conditions. And that was the city in which MLK died.

I vividly remember the I AM A MAN signs on the nightly news. The strike began on February 12, but it was King’s presence starting on March 18 that really attracted attention. The labor action didn’t end until April 16, 12 days after MLK’s murder.

I was home when I heard the awful news, and almost immediately my father, the late Les Green, went downtown to try to “keep the peace.” He had been involved with something called the Interracial Center at 45 Carroll Street in Binghamton.

In answer to a Facebook query I posted, someone wrote that my dad “was very involved with the kids who hung out there, talking to them, and a little counseling if needed.” Whatever his role might have been, Binghamton did NOT have any “rioting” that night, as many US cities did in that painful period.

In 1970, I got to go by the Lorraine Motel where MLK was killed. It is now a civil rights museum.

While the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. had an effect on me, his death may have had the greater impact.
***
Fort Wayne, IN tribute to MLK, April 7, 1968

M is for the US marijuana laws

Jeff Sessions is doing the bidding of an out-of-date law enforcement establishment that wants to wage a perpetual weed war.

Those of you not living in the United States may not understand the odd complexity of the marijuana laws across the country.

Several states have legalized the use of medical marijuana. A growing number of jurisdictions have made it available for recreational use.

The states have been serving as laboratories of democracy. It is “a phrase popularized by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis…to describe how a ‘state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.'”

Though marijuana remained on the federal books as a controlled substance, the US Justice Department had agreed not to go after users and sellers who were operating legally in their states. That is, until early 2018, when the Justice Department rescinded that policy.

The Rockefeller Institute of Government released a policy brief on how U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recent actions put the Justice Department on a collision course with states. Know what to do and can marijuana actually help for PTSD treatment?

Even members of the GOP have blasted the new policy. US Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said, “By attacking the will of the American people, who overwhelmingly favor marijuana legalization, Jeff Sessions has shown a preference for allowing all commerce in marijuana to take place in the black market, which will inevitably bring the spike in violence he mistakenly attributes to marijuana itself.

“He is doing the bidding of an out-of-date law enforcement establishment that wants to wage a perpetual weed war and seize private citizens’ property in order to finance its backward ambitions.”

This issue has affected my job. Even before the Sessions ruling, but since January 20, 2017, the SBDCs have cautiously determined that they cannot knowingly serve a business associated with marijuana, even in states where it’s legal.

Moreover, there is a very real fear that if centers were to go after alternative funding to serve those businesses, they could lose their SBA (federal) funding. So I can’t answer a reference question on the topic, or even refer them to NORML or another organization.

US Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) wrote: “For decades, the failed war on drugs has locked up millions of nonviolent drug offenders, especially for marijuana-related offenses. This has wasted human potential, torn apart families and communities, and squandered massive sums of taxpayer dollars.”

He has introduced the Marijuana Justice Act, which will remove marijuana from the list of federally controlled substances. I’m personally agnostic about marijuana use, but am vehemently opposed to its recriminalization.

For ABC Wednesday

Heller ruling on 2nd Amendment: legerdemain

“To the leaders, skeptics and cynics who told us to sit down, stay silent and wait your turn, welcome to the revolution.”

I finished reading The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 by Joseph J. Ellis (2015). The title refers to George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. More about the book in the future.

In reading the footnotes – what a nerd! -one jumped out at me. “…for judicial devotees of the ‘original intent’ doctrine” – what DID the Founders mean? – “Madison’s motives” in crafting what became the Second Amendment to the Constitution “are clear beyond any doubt.”

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

“To wit, the right to bear arms derived from the needs to make state militias the core pillar of national defense” rather than a professional, federal army, which skeptics of federalism feared as threats to small-r republican values. .

“To avoid reaching that conclusion, the [Supreme Court] majority opinion in Heller [v. District of Columbia, 2008], written by Justice Antonin Scalia, is an elegant example of legalistic legerdemain masquerading as erudition. Madison is rolling over in his grave.”

Those not familiar with the fancy noun, it means 1. sleight of hand 2. trickery; deception 3. any artful trick.

In other words, the suggestion that Scalia’s argument is originalist is pure hokum. The Supreme Court had made only a couple rulings over two centuries on that amendment and, it would seem, got it wrong the second time.

In making this ruling, SCOTUS has empowered folks, including some in the powerful National Rifle Association, to argue that ANY limitation on gun ownership is unconstitutional. If the First Amendment can be proscribed – no yelling “fire” in a crowded theater unless there are actually flames – surely the Second can be also.

My wife and I were watching NBC Nightly News on March 24, the day of March for Our Lives rallies all over the world. One of the early stories was Museums across the nation work to archive mementos of grief left after shootings. There is actually a protocol for collecting those items left after mass murders! “Jeff Schwartz of the Parkland [Florida] Historical Society is relying on advice from… curators across the country — from Columbine, Colorado, to Charleston, South Carolina — who have all faced such situations.” We both wept.

So I’m not all that concerned about the “crass ageism” of some of the survivors. The Parkland kids, as of March 24, had been in the media spotlight 39 days, still grieving. I cut them a LOT of slack. “To the leaders, skeptics and cynics who told us to sit down, stay silent and wait your turn, welcome to the revolution,” Marjory Stoneman Douglas student Cameron Kasky told the throngs in DC. “Either represent the people or get out. Stand for us or beware.”

I don’t know what the change in the gun culture will be, but I remain cautiously optimistic, because I have to be.

From The Doors:
The old get old
And the young get stronger
May take a week
And it may take longer
They got the guns
But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah
We’re takin’ over
Come on!

Easter AND April Fool’s Day

One-in-five express an opposition to organized religion in general.

There’s probably some sort of theological joke I should make here, how, after Easter, when most of the disciples saw Jesus, doubting Thomas, who was not present, said, “You’re kidding me!”

The last time Easter was on April 1 was in 1956; no wonder I don’t remember it. But before that, it was in 1945, 1934, and 1923, each eleven years apart. There was another wave in the 19th century: 1888, 1877, 1866, eleven years apart.

After 2018, it’ll happen again in 2029 and 2040. Yup, 11 years. This kind of thing fascinates me.

So why is it that modern Christianity isn’t appealing to more people? Is it that secularism is “winning”?

Or is it that some folks, purporting to lift the Christian banner, foolishly embrace concepts that do not seem to be consistent with Jesus’ teachings of feeding the hungry and welcoming the outcast? Those looking from the outside may think, understandably, “If THAT is Christianity, to hell what that!”

Interesting results of some Pew Research polling in the last couple years:

The term “spiritual but not religious” label applies to a growing share of Americans. And the methodology was fascinating – The survey “asked two separate questions: ‘Do you think of yourself as a religious person, or not?’ and ‘Do you think of yourself as a spiritual person, or not?’ The results presented here are the product of combining responses to those two questions.”

A growing share of Americans say it’s not necessary to believe in God to be moral. Interestingly, “attitudes about the necessity of belief in God for morality have also changed among those who do identify with a religion.”

And the vast majority of these religious “nones” (78%) say they were raised as a member of a particular religion before shedding their religious identity in adulthood. “One-in-five express an opposition to organized religion in general. This share includes some who do not like the hierarchical nature of religious groups, several people who think religion is too much like a business and others who mention clergy sexual abuse scandals as reasons for their stance.”

Having gone about 360 degrees in my own religious quest – no, that’s not correct, since I didn’t end up in the same place as I started – I understand more than most the feelings of those who believe in God and those who don’t.

I DO wish each side could find a way to hear the other’s point of view. But perhaps that’s my own foolishness.