XENOPHOBIA ERUPTING

On top of everything else, a shameful, xenophobic, infestation is spreading throughout our country, and through much of the world. On May 8, 2020, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, recognizing a festering problem, said that "the [Covid-19] pandemic continues to unleash a tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering." He urged governments to "act now to strengthen the immunity of our societies against the virus of hate." Since he issued that statement, xenophobic reactions targeting Asian-Americans have proliferated exponentially. The organization "Stop Asian American Pacific Islander Hate" began collecting reports of racism and discrimination from the time the Covid-19 virus began spreading in the U.S.. Between March 19, 2020 and December 31 of last year, it received 2,808 first hand reports of anti-Asian hate across 47 states and Washington D.C.. Roughly 71% were cases of verbal harassment, shunning or avoidance made up about 21%, 9% involved physical assaults, and 6% included being purposely coughed or spit on. (Spectrum News, Feb. 21, 2021). Eruptions of xenophobia, the fear of others who are different from us, have historically followed closely on the heals of pandemics. Some, like David Ley, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, argue that this trend is actually normal. He refers to it as an evolutionary form of protection. Early on, even U.C. Berkeley listed xenophobia under "common reactions" to coronavirus, a statement for which they later apologized. Throughout history, people have assigned the blame for a contagious disease on outsiders. Especially when viral outbreaks are deadly, fear often drives those at risk to place blame on some group external to their own national, religious or ethnic identity. During the 1300s, people thought that the bubonic plague came from the Jewish community. People had little scientific understanding of the disease, and were looking for an explanation. The Jews were an easily identifiable target. They were massacred in numerous European cities. Hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed. Increased immigration from Ireland during that country's potato famine, mid-19th century, coincided with the outbreak of cholera in several U.S. cities. For Protestant elites who hated Catholics, it was only natural to assume that the alien newcomers must have brought what became known as the "Irish disease" with them. The influenza pandemic in the the 1900s was blamed on Germans, polio on Italians, Jewish immigrants were blamed for consumption (tuberculosis), Haitians for HIV, Chinese-Americans for SARS, and so on. The "Age of Sail" imposed a natural restraint on the spread of epidemics originating in Europe, Africa or Asia. It took as long as a month to cross the Atlantic. Many infections had already burned themselves out by the time port was reached. Steamships and, ultimately, air travel changed all that. The coronavirus spread like wildfire across the world. By the time former president Donald Trump began referring to it as the "China virus" or "Kung-Flu," it had already become convenient for some to assume that Asian-Americans were most likely to be to blame. As the virus spread all over, so did the eruption of xenophobia. For the Asian-American community, recent vitriol has just become the latest chapter in a long history of anti-Asian racism in the U.S., from the "Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, to the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Perpetrators of xenophobic assaults, many of which appear to be unable to distinguish between different ethnicities of Asian-Americans, need to be identified and persecuted. A sampling of some of the horrendous offenses will illustrate the point: - An 89 year-old Chinese-American woman was set on fire by two assailants in Bensonhurst, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. - Japanese jazz pianist Tadataka Unno was assaulted on the New York subway system, resulting in a complex fracture of his shoulder and arm, requiring surgery and leading him to comment that he may not ever be able to play piano professionally again. - A 19-year old McDonald's worker in Oakland was assaulted for asking a customer to wear a mask. The man in the drive-thru used racial slurs, threatened to kill her, then broke her arm. - An elderly Thai-American man was assaulted in San Francisco, later dying from his injuries. - At a Sam's Club in Midland, Texas, a man attacked a family from Myanmar, stabbing 3 victims, including a 2 year-old girl and a 6 year-old boy. He feared they were Chinese and infecting others. Throughout multiple jurisdictions, prosecution of these crimes has been grossly inconsistent. It appears obvious that all of these ought to be litigated as hate crimes. We should throw the book at the scum perpetrating these, and put a stop to it. Ignorance is no excuse. Theo Wierdsma

RECONSIDER CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

The run-up to the January 20 swearing in of our new administration appears to have included a determined effort by the outgoing administration to expedite the execution of federal death row inmates. 5 Death row inmates were executed during Mr. Trump's final weeks in office, 13 between July 2020 and January 2021. The most since 1896. Some cynics believe that the rush to execute was prompted by then President-Elect Biden signaling his opposition to capital punishment. The U.S. is the only remaining westernized democracy, and one of the few democracies world-wide, that still supports the death penalty. All European countries, except Belarus and Russia, abolished the practice on moral grounds. Abolition of capital punishment is a precondition for membership in the E.U. Twenty-eight U.S. states, the federal government and the military continue to authorize death sentences for extreme crimes. The twenty-two states that have abolished the practice thus far will soon be joined by Virginia, which is scheduled to be the first southern state to do so. A 2017 Gallup poll indicated that 55% of U.S. citizens still favor the death penalty. Although significant, this is a substantial decrease from 1994 when 80% declared favoring capital punishment. Since 1976. we have executed almost 1,500 people - 569 in Texas alone. Since 2017, we executed 87 inmates. Currently, 52 people are incarcerated on federal death row, and 2,500 nation wide. Conceptually, arguments in favor or against the application of the death penalty have probably changed very little. However, the emphasis has shifted over time. At the top of the list of arguments sits the question of morality. Proponents believe that in cases of the most heinous murders, to do less than death would fail to do justice and would be grossly disproportionate to the heinousness of the crime. They suggest that it promotes belief in and respect for "the majesty of the moral order." Opponents counter that "life is either hallowed or it is not." "We should no longer accept that capital punishment plays any constructive role in our criminal justice system." Apparently, most of the developed world agrees with that viewpoint. The recurring constitutional argument focuses on the 8th Amendment of our Constitution's provision of "cruel and unusual punishment." Former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refused to apply that provision to the death penalty, advising: "I would not presume to tell parents whose life has been forever altered by the brutal murderer of a child that life imprisonment is punishment enough." Justice Steven Breyer retorted that today's administration of the death penalty involves three fundamental defects: (1) Serious unreliability; (2) Arbitrariness in application, and (3) Unconsciously long delays, undermining the death penalty's penological purpose. The last defect Justice Breyer identifies relates to the argument that capital punishment deters or reduces the rate of homicide. Many would agree that it does not. Back in 1990 the average time between sentencing and execution was 95 months - 8 years. Since then. this time span has grown to an average of 238 months or 19 years. Nearly one quarter of inmates on death row in the U.S. die of natural causes while awaiting execution. The likelihood is incredibly remote that some small chance of execution many years after committing a crime will influence the behavior of a sociopathic deviant who would otherwise be willing to kill if his only punishment was life imprisonment. (John Donohue, JD, Phd, Stanford). Proponents tend to dismiss the suggestion that sometimes reversible but often irrevocable mistakes show up after judicial decisions have been rendered. Nevertheless, during the last few years, DNA analyses have resulted in more that 150 inmates being removed from death row because they were declared innocent. And, since 1973, more that 170 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death were exonerated. However, sadly, 18 executions of people who were strongly believed to have been innocent actually did take place. ("Death Penalty Information Center", 2021). There does seem to be some agreement that intellectually disabled inmates should not be executed. In fact, in "Atkins v Virginia," the U.S. Supreme Court, in June of 2002, held that doing so violated the 8th Amendment's cruel and unusual punishment clause. Nevertheless, the issue remains problematic because of definitional issues. Some states insist on simply using a hard IQ of 70 and below as the cut-off point. "Mental Health America," a community based non-profit, estimates that 5-10% of all death row inmates suffer from a severe mental illness. Other arguments focus on retribution, the cost of death vs. life, closure for victims' families and the quality of representation provided by the state to those unable to afford attorneys themselves. Ultimately, we need to question the purpose of continuing to embrace capital punishment. Is it: To remove from society someone who would cause more harm? To remove someone who is incapable of rehabilitation? To deter others from committing murder? To punish the criminal? To take retribution on behalf of the victim? Most of the answers to these questions ought to make us want to join the rest of the civilized world, and abolish it all together. Theo Wierdsma