Showing posts with label LB 547. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LB 547. Show all posts

Thursday, May 25, 2023

3 Chords & the Truth: Something stupid


Something unusual happened. The world has noticed Nebraska . . . and its politics.
 
Nebraskans long have lamented being overlooked by the world. They long have wanted a little attention. They long have wanted their props, dammit!
 
You know that old saying, "Be careful what you wish for"? Bingo.
 
This week's installment of 3 Chords & the Truth notes that we finally got some attention from the folks in the Big Apple -- a long examination of this year's dominant legislative shenanigans by New York magazine. It wasn't pretty.
 
And Omaha Sen. Christy Armendariz didn't come off so well.
 
One day, a freshman senator named Christy Armendariz led me to a bench in an empty hallway. She found it puzzling that a reporter from New York would come all the way to Nebraska to cover this affair. "I don’t watch the news or get the newspaper," she said. "Is there anything going on I should be aware of?" I mentioned that other states had passed similar bills and that a federal appeals court in the same circuit as Nebraska had ruled one of them unconstitutional. "So is it a big widespread thing?" she asked. As far as she could tell, ordinary Nebraskans did not know about the issue. "I knocked doors for a year, and nobody brought this up." She said she wished the bill had never been introduced.
 
Yet, she voted for it.
 
THE BILL was LB574 which, in its original iteration, banned all "gender-affirming" medical care and surgery for transgender minors. It ended up being amended to regulate the medical care while still banning surgeries.
 
And senators tacked a 12-week gestational-age abortion ban (about 10 weeks from conception) onto the bill after a six-week ban failed earlier.
 
You'd like to think legislators knew that all this was a big Republican Party push nationwide this year. You'd like to think that even someone as as negligent and clueless as Armendariz would've known her party was pushing all that as a grand culture-war political strategy.
 
You'd also like to think that readers nationwide might not believe all Nebraskans are that @#*$%+! dumb. Not all legislators here are, though many probably are. And, to be fair, ordinary Nebraskans elected these clods, so there's that.
 
But this is not a political column in the newspaper. This is a music show. On the other hand, the political stuff certainly informed the music show . . . and now you know that's the name of that tune on the Big Show this go around.

FRANKLY, that's why I love doing an old-school, beatnik-adjacent, freeform kind of a thing here on the Internets. One, you don't much see this kind of thing on the radio anymore. Two, when folks on the radio give you the impression they think at all, what they want to you to think they think might not be what they actually think. They just pander to what they think you think.

And those folks don't even have any good tunes. 3 Chords & the Truth, though. . . .

Anyway, perhaps the real value of the New York magazine piece is something akin to Robert Burns’ poetic wisdom:
 
O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!
 
It’s a hard pill to swallow when what “ithers” see ain’t so flattering. But at least you know, and knowing gives you the chance to evaluate, and evaluating gives you the opportunity to change.

Just as long as you don't change that Internet dial!

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Friday, May 19, 2023

3 Chords & the Truth: The Ironic Curtain

Greetings from the wrong side of the Ironic Curtain.

The what?

The Ironic Curtain. Let me explain. What we’re seeing in America these days is the building of an Iron Curtain in this country, dividing red and blue states -- and dividing Americans into first- and second-class citizens.

In America . . . again.

The irony, of course, is that we now have an Iron Curtain -- much like the one that divided democratic Western Europe from the communist east after World War II -- in a country that styles itself as a beacon of freedom and democracy for the world. This is the second time that's happened here.

The first time, it was the line separating the Jim Crow South from the rest of the United States. Back then, there were definite similarities between the repression found in the Eastern Bloc countries and the repression found in the American South. Before that, the South's Jim Crow regimes served as inspiration for the policies of Adolf Hitler's Germany.

TODAY, those of us stuck behind the modern-day Ironic Curtain are starting to see certain similarities between ourselves and Vladimir Putin's fascist dictatorship in Russia and, much more closely, Viktor Orban's fascist, authoritarian regime in Hungary.

It's not a good place to be, especially if you're an official "Other." That's what this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth is all about, which is pretty much what last week's show was about, too.

As a Nebraskan by choice who sees what is happening to this state, I have been on the razor’s edge of rage for a while now. But it’s not really rage, fundamentally. What it is, is grief.

What I have witnessed during this session of the Nebraska Legislature -- and I have watched hours upon hours of it on television the past few weeks — is incipient fascism. The content of LB 547, and the chicanery employed to pass it, looked familiar to me; I was born in 1961 into Jim Crow era Louisiana.

I attended legally segregated public schools in Baton Rouge . . . until 1970. When my school was desegregated under a “neighborhood school” plan, I had a teacher tell me not to play with a Black classmate. I saw that Black classmate demeaned and discriminated against by our fourth-grade teacher.

As a Southerner of a certain age, I know what fascism and official “othering” looks like. And it has followed me here after all these years.

In Nebraska today, the Others are vulnerable pregnant women and transgender youth. Next year, the legislator behind today's othering intends to target drag shows.

I AM a 62-year-old man who has been married for almost 40 years. I do not understand transgenderism because, well, how the hell could I?

But I do understand that trans individuals are citizens of the United States and children of God, and they deserve to live in peace. The parents of trans youth have the right to seek the best care possible for their children. Medical science has no solution that will perfectly reconcile mind and body, but it should not be illegal to do the best one can -- especially when that might be what keeps your child alive.

As a Catholic, I would be inclined to proceed cautiously if I had a transgender child. But make no mistake, I would do what I had to do to keep my kid, first, alive and, second, happy and healthy.

But how parents raise -- or choose to medically treat -- their trans children is, fundamentally, none of my damned business. It is not the unicameral’s business. It isn’t even the church’s business. It’s just not.

Likewise, concerning abortion, I have to say I consider myself pro-life. However, LB 547, enacted by the legislature Friday, is no fitting way to reduce the instance of abortion as much as humanly possible. It also will endanger the lives of women with catastrophic pregnancies.

If legislators want to “save babies,” they should -- pardon my French -- give a shit about vulnerable women. They should give a shit about struggling families. They should give a shit about the outrageous expense of giving birth.

They should give a shit about the oppressive cost of decent daycare. They should give a shit about creating an effective social safety net. And they should give a shit about the jobs they’re about to drive away from Nebraska.

That said, this is the week Nebraska died. It’s over. And that's what informs this week's Big Show.

That is all. That is enough.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.