I came upon this quote from Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural address in Jill Lepore’s work These Truths; it’s a very painful reminder of how far we have descended. “Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values on which our success depends – honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded, then, is a return to these truths.“

“If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States – that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition.” Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in Democracy in America, published in 1835.

In 1855, Tocqueville wrote the following text, published by Maria Weston Chapman in the Liberty Bell: Testimony against Slavery:

“I do not think it is for me, a foreigner, to indicate to the United States the time, the measures, or the men by whom Slavery shall be abolished. Still, as the persevering enemy of despotism everywhere, and under all its forms, I am pained and astonished by the fact that the freest people in the world is, at the present time, almost the only one among civilized and Christian nations which yet maintains personal servitude; and this while serfdom itself is about disappearing, where it has not already disappeared, from the most degraded nations of Europe.

An old and sincere friend of America, I am uneasy at seeing Slavery retard her progress, tarnish her glory, furnish arms to her detractors, compromise the future career of the Union which is the guaranty of her safety and greatness, and point out beforehand to her, to all her enemies, the spot where they are to strike. As a man, too, I am moved at the spectacle of man’s degradation by man, and I hope to see the day when the law will grant equal civil liberty to all the inhabitants of the same empire, as God accords the freedom of the will, without distinction, to the dwellers upon earth.”

#BlackLivesMatter

I wonder when (if ever) we will see some action taken on the massive, persistent obstruction of justice undertaken by this administration and its apparently co-opted ally, the DOJ. Replacement of Agency heads by “temporary” partisan flacks in order to bypass senate confirmation, firings of multiple inspectors general who were pursuing/pursued investigations as was their charge, and now news of yet another “Friday Night Massacre” where AG Barr tries to fire the Republican (and administration-appointed) US Attorney conducting multiple active investigations of T**** and his associates.
See Heather Cox Richardson’s June 19 Letters from an American: here.
When will enough be enough?

Re. the insult from a President who, incredibly enough, thinks he has “done more for the black community than any President since Abraham Lincoln,” Texas congressman and Congressional Black Caucus member Al Green tweeted: “Trump rally with rebel flags (a symbol of slavery and racism) in Tulsa, OK (the place of #TulsaMassacre) on Juneteenth (a day of emancipation recognition) is more than a slap in the face to African Americans; it is overt racism from the highest office in the land. #RejectRacism.”

This is worth reading if you feel a need to take some practical action to help remedy racial inequality, but don’t really know what you can do: 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice

Though these are discouraging times in the US, I believe it is important to persevere in the struggle for justice. I offer 3 quotes from James Baldwin:
“I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.// Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.// It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

Let’s keep working to make America a better place for everyone.

• For anyone interested, the data scientist Guyang Yu ( Twitter | LinkedIn ) has created a remarkably accurate adaptive model of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can view projections by country or state-by-state. It’s based on the SEIR/SEIS model using the daily death total provided by Johns Hopkins’ CSSE to simulate the COVID-19 epidemic in each region. The parameters/inputs of this simulator are then incorporated using machine learning techniques that attempt to minimize the error between the projected outputs and the actual results. It’s one of the models the CDC now uses, and a terrific solo effort worth following.