Motivations

 

 Meiji Period (1868–1912) / Yamamura Toyonari/ Parakeet on Table

I guess that it has always been about motivations.  Michael wrote that yesterday and it brought me to the conclusion that motivation is a kind of bridge term.  We look at motivations as the bridge between initial conditions and the actions that lie on the far side of the initial conditions, it is the actions that we are usually interested in, whether it be the rioting here in Stumptown or the rioting in DC.  Those actions were motivated by initial conditions.

Let’s start out with Portland.  The riots here were motivated by police violence elsewhere.  Now, I am not saying this as a streak of meanness, but rather as an observation, Portland is/was a deeply racist city with a set of cops that tend to shoot first when the putative perp was black.  Having lived with a young black man for a couple of years, this kind of thing was brought forcefully to my notice.  Oregon has a checkered history of racial problems.  Their initial constitutional response was simply to hang out a “not-welcome” sign nailed onto the constitution.   Even now, the black population hangs around 2-3% of the population.  I am pretty sure the white folk like it that way.  Hell, the daily mug shots of the riots here during the BLM riots were nearly all white folk.

The riots in DC were nearly all white folk too.  The difference is that they travelled from hither and yon to gather are the bequest of fuckwad the first as an early valentine present for those who worked diligently to blockade his few good ideas and the greater number of his bad ideas.

Now, you might wonder why I brought race into the whole issue.  Well, as it stands, race and economics are at the core of all these riots. Let’s start this next section of the piece with two simple statements:

1. Blacks have a shit time of it here in the US due to long-standing institutional racism.

2. The US economy is in a long term decline with grievous income disparity.

So these two antecedent conditions are at the core of the problem and are going to be there for quite a while yet.  Condition one is the most positive one.  The fact that the Portland riots were primarily attended by white folk holds great promise.  That means that there is a segment of the white population who worry about the idea of equality.  So we got that going for us. 

The second problem is the hard nut.  There is a pretty damn huge and very multiracial population here in the US that has been screwed hard over the past forty years.  Living wage jobs are in desperately short supply and there are really only limited jobs for the >50% of folks who don’t have a high enough SAT or enough $$ to go through the barely masked job-training programs for the cushy jobs worth having.

So rock and hard place here.  What is happening is that the elite, whose ticket is punched and are doing quite well, are working hard through the magic of the twin pressures of immigration and automation to drive down wages and minimize the working class employee headcount.  This means that there will be fewer jobs available.  

We have always tried to solve problems like this by raising all boats.  A bigger economic pie translates into more jobs and more opportunity.  But in a process of economic decline, there are fewer jobs and less opportunity.

Here is where things are getting way hinkey my friends.  Politicians can promise all they want.  But there is less to hand out and the system is designed to make things even worse.  The riots on the opposite sides of the country each show one side of the issue.  

All I want to say here is that both sides are more like each other than the powers that are using them as pawns.  The two riots in Portland and DC are mirror images of each other, told from the point of view of the two segments of the population who are going to be forced to remain or to join the ranks of the underclass.