Being Consumed - Catholic Stuff You Should Know

Being Consumed - Catholic Stuff You Should Know

In one of the occasional examples of synchronicity that pops up, the other day I posted on National Small Business Saturday and mentioned Distributism, the economic theory applying the principal of subsidiarity in my post. Then I ran across this podcast entry on Consumerism.

This is posted on Catholic Stuff You Should Know, and therefore it does address some religious themes, but only barely really, mostly focusing on Consumerism through a Distributist lens.  To a slightly aggravating degree, early in the podcast the speakers excuse of their comments by noting Communism when in fact those comments that they feel might be controversial aren't Communist or Socialist at all, but rather purely Distributist.  That they'd discuss Distributism isn't too surprising on one hand, as the economic philosophy was developed by Catholic thinkers, but to hear it discussed is fairly surprising as so few people know what it is.

Anyhow, for a really Distributist discussion of Consumerism, here's one.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 3 Updated

Today In Wyoming's History: December 3:

2014  Colorado's Governor Hickenlooper apologized to the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes for Colorado's actions leading to the November 29, 1864 Sand Creek Massacre.

Rail Transportation

Very early locomotive, on display on the back of a railroad flat car.

Recently we've been posting a lot about transportation. We've done horses and mule, walking, water transportation and bicycles so far.  Here we're considering trains.

 

Late oil fired steam engine, on display in Douglas Wyoming.

Locomotives, or at least steam engines, are so associated with the second half of the 19th Century that it's a shock to realize that the first steam locomotive was built in 1784 and the first railway model was built in the US in 1794.  Amazingly early.  The first actual working railway was built just a few years later, in 1804, in the United Kingdom.  That early line was an industrial ore hauler, so at least from the US prospective, trains have ended up where they started, hauling things, rather than people, for the most part.  Sort of a case of the past being prologue to the future, really.  The first working railroad in the US came on in 1830, with Baltimore and Ohio.  It was a hopeless crude thing, but it was a start, and from there on trains developed rapidly.

The first locomotives basically looked like a boiler, with gears, on a platform, because that's what they were. They soon began, however, to more closely resemble things we'd recognize as trains.

 

Really early train on display on the flatcars of a train in 1900.  Note that the passenger cars on the old train are coaches with wheels altered for rails.

 

Locomotive, 1850.  In the twenty years between the top photograph and this one, locomotives started to take on a more familiar form, and they'd grown larger.

By 1860, in North America, they'd not only taken on a familiar form, but their rails now stretched throughout the settled East.  In just 20 years the United States and Canada had gone from all roads and water ways to having an interconnected rail transportation system in the East.  Railways had already become an inseparable part of North American life.

 

Locomotive in California, 1865.

And not only that, but a major undertaking in the United States would, as is well known, link the West and East by rail, in the Transcontinental Railway, where the two sections of the rail would join on May 10, 1869.  Indeed, that accomplishment came in the context of an early example of the government sponsoring a business, something that we rarely think of occurring in the 19th Century, but which the Lincoln Administration, which got it started, recognized as a national need, or at least laudatory goal, that was beyond the means of private enterprise for a wide variety of reasons. The inducement in that 19th Century context involved the Federal government giving to the two building railroads what it had a lot of, land, with the railroad acquiring a swath of sections (square miles) across the path of their lines, which allowed them to have a certain economic payoff in the future, and which also accordingly encouraged the railroads to sponsor development.  The railroads descendants today still retain much of that original grant along what had been the Transcontinental line.

 Massive Union Pacific railyard in Laramie Wyoming, a town built on the Union Pacific.

As monumental achievement as that was, it was only the beginning in a seemingly ceaseless and relentless expansion of rail lines that would see rail penetrate nearly every section of the West by the mid 1880s.  What had taken days to achieve before the rail lines came in, accordingly shrunk in time, sometimes to just hours. And rail continued to be put down relentlessly in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century in the U.S.

North of the border, in Canada, the Canadians would have a trans Canadian railway completed by 1885, linking the two coasts of a nation that still had not yet taken its full continental form, and which struggled with a national identity that really started to fully form about that time.  Railways were being built all over Europe at the same time, of course, with national and trans European lines put down everywhere.  The Russians achieved a monumental chore with the completion of the Trans Siberian in 1916, achieving what is arguably the greatest railroad in the world, but doing so only one year before the fall of the government that backed it.  Railroad penetrated into China from Russia, and into Arabia from Turkey.  The British built them in Africa and Australia.  The trans Australia railway was completed in the midst of World War One, being completed in 1917, and bringing yet another example of continental expanses being closed by rail.

Railroads were the long distance land transportation of their era, and they dominated everything about it.  By the 1860s they'd revolutionized the transportation of people and goods.  Americans and Canadians were made into a continental people by the railroads, or at least more completely so, and the Russians could aspire to be the same.  Australia, a nation whose unification was completed by World War One found its coasts united during it.

 

Former Union Pacific Depot in Cheyenne Wyoming, on the line of the original Transcontinental Railroad.

In the U.S, and Canada, an economy that was mostly local prior to 1860s ceased being so by the end of the Civil War, when railroads penetrated into Kansas, and for the first time goods, and perhaps more significantly beef, could be transported across the nation by rail car.  A nation that had been principally a local pork consumer prior to 1865 in short order became a beef consuming nation, particularly as refrigerator rail cars came in about  the same time.  The great cattle drives that followed the Civil War, inspired in part by a huge increase in cattle in Texas during the war, were only made economically possible as the railheads had penetrated as far west as Kansas.

Refrigeration and rail also allowed the nation to have its first really national beverage company, Anhauser Busch, which made use of rail and refrigeration to ship beer all over the United States by the 1870s.  A nation which before had tended to look for everything to be local, now became accustom to every sort of good being shipped across the nation, even something as routine as something to drink.

And rail was glamorous, and would in some ways always remain so. Certain trains, and even railroad men, became famous, and were celebrated in song.  Casey Jones, a real railroad engineer, was for example celebrated in song for his dramatic effort to stop his train to stop his train to avoid a collision, and thereby save lives.  Working on the railroad was celebrated by a song dedicated under that title.

Rail occupied and dominated long distance travel, and even intrastate travel, for decades and decades. Rails continued to expand in the country throughout the first half of the 20th Century and rail transportation was the critical national means of transportation throughout the first half of the 20th Century.  When people traveled any distance at all, they normally traveled by rail.   My father, for example, traveled from Casper Wyoming to Lincoln Nebraska, where he was attending university, by rail, not by car, in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  U.S. troops were moved from coast to coat during World War One and World War Two by rail, not by truck as a rule, and not by plane.  Railroad labor troubles during World War One were so disruptive to the war effort that the Federal government took over the rail lines during the war.

And the situation was largely the same in other nations.  In Germany, the military was in control of the rail lines prior to World War One, and German mobilization was based on strict railroad timetables.  The rail lines themselves became lines of combat in World War One, and to a certain extent World War Two, inside of Russia and the Russian civil war saw the odd use of armored trains, which made a reappearance in Soviet use during World War Two.

Rail came to not only serve towns and cities, of course, but to impact their features and even their locations. This is well known in the West, as towns competed to be railheads, which could spell the difference between economic isolation and elimination and prosperity.  Locally, for example, Casper Wyoming beat out Bessemer Wyoming in these regards, meaning that Casper, which was established literally just days prior to the railroad entering Natrona County Wyoming would go on to become one of the largest cities in Wyoming and the county seat, while Bessemer passed away and is now a farm field.

 

Burlington Northern Depot, Casper Wyoming.

This meant that any significant town, and even many insignificant ones, had rail lines and features associated with them, such as depots. But now often missed, and often now neglected, it also mean that a towns hotels, including its best hotels, were typically within walking distance of a railroad depot. The same was true of anything requiring shipping of anything heavy.

 

 Parco Hotel, in Sinclair Wyoming.  Just a block or two from the main line of the Union Pacific Railroad.  This hotel is no longer an operating hotel.

 

 Union Station in Delver Colorado, photo taken from the front of the Oxford Hotel.

 

Virginian Hotel in Medicine Bow, Wyoming and Union Pacific station.

Consider then the state of the railroads in relation to nearly every society, just after World War Two.  Troops who had gone to training stations by rail and then to points of embarkation by rail, came home largely by rail.  All materials of any significant nature, except for short hauls as a rule, were moved by rail, with perhaps the only exceptions being intrastate hauling and oil and gas pipelines.  People traveling from one city to another traveled by rail.

World War Two era poster urging people not to travel if it wasn't necessary. This photo shows the inside of a packed train car.

But then, something began to happen to rail, and that something was two things really. The Interstate Highways and Air Travel.

Air travel changed everything about how Americans, and ultimately everyone else in the developed world, thought about traveling long distances. Acclimated to long trips by train as a rule, planes became an option. Expensive at first, as time went on traveling by air became more and more affordable, particularly when the time element was considered.  Even by the early 1950s air travel was displacing train travel. Businessmen started traveling by air.  The military switched from shipping men locally from their duty station to another duty station by train, to air.  Ultimately air became so efficient, that it displaced the train as a fast mail carrier for letters and small packages, with that becoming so efficient that large sections of that business were wholly privatized.

 Western Airlines airliner, Casper Wyoming, early 1950s.  Sailor is boarding aircraft.  This scene says a lot about the change after World War Two, as this airport was built as an Army Air Corps training base during World War Two, with enormous runways.  Post war, it became an international airport, replacing the much smaller local airport that had existed up until that time.

This didn't happen all at once, of course, and in this late era, there were a series of efficient locomotives designed just for fast passenger service. Streamlined steam engines yielded to streamlined diesels, as the internal combustion engine began to take over the rails. But for most of the country, the 1950s and 60s would see the end of passenger train service. The only exceptions were in densely populated sections of the country were commuter rail hung on.

And, also in the 1950s, a new threat to rail arrived in the form of greatly improved highways, particularly the Interstate Highway system.  With Federal funding for highways, under the guise of defense spending for highways designed to speed military mobilization, supposedly, tax funded highways provided a means for trucking companies to compete with privately owned raillines, albeit rail lines that had in some instances been put in with incentives, particularly land incentives, in the 19th Century.  The new Interstates boosted the commercial trucking fleet enormously, and over the road trucks took over quite a bit of commercial hauling.  Without having to pay for their "rails", and able to go anywhere there was pavement, the trucks were liberated from steel rails and could deliver more easily  from port to port.

So, slowly in this same period freighting saw major inroads from trucking, with some sectors of shipping, such as livestock shipping, going over to trucks entirely.  By the 1970s trains were no longer hauling, for the most part, mail, people, and livestock, as well as many other items.  By the late 1990s tracks were being abandoned in some locations, and the old rail lines converted to walkways under "rails to trails" programs.

Pedestrian path in Casper Wyoming, converted from the line of the Great Northwestern Railroad.  Old depot on the right, now an office building.

But rail is persistent, and in spite of the inroads it remains important to us today, even if its faded into a the background to such an extent we can hardly recognize it.  It remains the heavy hauler for the nation, transporting good far more cheaply, and far more environmentally benign, to the extent that anything is, today, carrying more pounds per gallon of feul cheaply than any of its competitors.  And in the expensive fuel world in which we've been recently living (but which seems to be potentially fading back out today), its seen a bit of a revival.  New lines have been put in, in the West, where it remains vital for heavy hauling.  Major coal hauling lines have been built, and even here locally a major petroleum loading hub was just constructed.  In Denver, as in many other cities, a local light rail service for passengers has dramatically expanded, and it will soon run from Union Station to the Denver airport.  Rail hasn't yielded easily, and even in North America, the domain of the automobile, it has kept on.

Lex Anteinternet: Distributist of the world unite! National Small B...

Lex Anteinternet: Distributist of the world unite! National Small B...: Saturday, November 29, is National Small Business Saturday, a holiday, of sorts, oddly enough thought up American Express.  This follow...

Since posting this I've been impressed by the seemingly endless series of days that follow Thanksgiving, dedicated or observed in some informal fashion.  The sales frenzy following Thanksgiving is, of course, Black Friday. Then we have now National Small Business Saturday.  I'd forgotten that the following Monday is Cyber Monday, but saw reporting on it, on the news, yesterday.  And today is apparently something like C heritable Tuesday.  An interesting series of competing, or perhaps compatible, forces at work there.

The Raging Debate, looking back on Lex Anteinternet: Standards of Dress: Office, city and town wear ov...

Some time ago I posted this item on daily dress of, I suppose, yore:

Lex Anteinternet: Standards of Dress: Office, city and town wear ov...:  A motivational poster from the 1920s.  By modern standards, nearly any city worker would "look the part", even if they didn&#...

Since that time I've read an interesting debate, often quite heated, about modern "standards of dress".  This particular debate was centered on what people should wear, or do wear, to church.  It was interesting in that some people strongly argue for a heightened standard, and others maintain that it doesn't matter at all.

One of the most interesting comments I saw was from an engineer, who in the debate maintained that there was no need to dress in any special way to attend church, and that a person was better off not attempting to do so if their clothes were in any way older or ill fitting, but then admitted he'd recently testified as an expert witness in a trial and of course had dressed the part. He wanted to look professional, while maintaining in his daily profession, he of course didn't dress that way.

That's sort of interesting in that it shows a retained concept that in certain places there's a standard of dress we must meet, even if there's no formal enforcement of it.  However, at the same time, it suggests that we can skip the standard in places were otherwise fully acclimated and comfortable with, while perhaps in an earlier era, the standard was the standard.

Now, I'll note that I don't wear a suit, to be sure, most days and I'm really only commenting in general.  I don't wear a coat and tie to Mass either. But I do think that suggests that even now there actually is a standard in people's minds. 

It's also interesting to read where people think that standard is enforced, which is usually somewhere else.  In reading the comments, many people think that "only lawyers" dress that way, which of course isn't true any way you look at it.  Others have other occupations they believe dress in a certain fashion.  Everyone, somehow, is acclimated to broadcast newsmen dressing in that fashion, which is curious as originally they were only dressing to the standard of the day.  One person believed only Hipsters dressed in that fashion, which is really curious.  I don't know if Hipsters dress in ties or not, I meet so few, but its interesting that in the minds of at least some, the trendy wear ties.

Another interesting thing about this is how deeply some people feel about this topic. I suspect most don't, but some really do. Those who feel that a certain standard of dress should be met in various settings, or the equivalent for females, are really adamant about it. Oddly, those who feel strongly the opposite are also really adamant about that too.  Some feel that anyone arguing for a standard of any kind, any where, is some sort of fascist, and others who feel the opposite feel just as strongly about their views.  Those who argue for no standard are steadfast in their refusal to recognize that society in general is going to recognize a standard, like it or not, even if they themselves do in fact recognize it in their own conduct.

All of which means nothing in particular, really.  Just interesting to see how this is viewed.

Water Transportation

After walking, but only barely, and before the horse, there were the rivers and streams.  And the oceans.

And they were the highways.

Recently, I posted a thread on equine transportation.  Sometimes it will be claimed that, before the train, nothing moved faster than the horse. That is very true, but with qualifiers.  Horses can cross streams, and they can swim too, but they're limited in these regards. Beyond that, even with a horse, the rider is working more than non riders suppose.  Indeed, riding a horse, particularly riding a horse the way working riders ride them, is pretty good exercise.  One old infantry general of the 20th Century noted that cavalry officers outlived infantry officers, which he attributed to their constant riding.

And of course one horse can only carry so much.

But water is different.  One boat, even one canoe, can carry quite a bit, and for efficient transportation, water courses are hard to beat, as long as the water goes where you also want to go.

In our paved and engineered world of today, water transportation isn't really appreciated.  People who want to go from North Platte Nebraska to St. Louis would not think of trying that by canoe, and people who wanted to go from St. Louis to the Pacific would look at the Interstate Highway routes, not the watercourses.  But that wasn't always so.

I'll confess that, unlike walking, which I like to do, and unlike horses, which I like, I'm not a huge fan of watercraft, and for that reason, even though I know that rivers were the highways of antiquity, this is a historical topic I'm not really that familiar with, or even interested in.  But the purpose of this blog is to explore the past as it really was, not as we'd have it, and therefore this matters in this context.  And, while the only boat I own is a canoe, and that's the only boat I want to own, perhaps this is more interesting that I figure it is.  So let's take a look.

The boats of antiquity were undoubtedly canoes or boats that we can regard as canoes. Crude compared to the Old Town canoe that you would look at over at the sporting goods store, their efficiency and utility is demonstrated by the fact that they're still with us, and like the horse, even though most of us don't require them for the outback, a lot of us like them.  I like mine for that matter.

Canoes are fun, and apparently the temptation to take a photograph from one has been around for a long time.

Canoes have existed pretty much in every culture, everywhere.  Whether they were burnt out or dug out logs, or manufactured with hide and frame, the canoe is basically boat 1.0, and it's hard to replace.  Whether made of wood, fiberglass, or aluminum, the basic canoe is still pretty much the basic canoe.  And that applies to what are basically canoes 2.0, the kayak, as well.

Canoes in antiquity served to move people over long distances.  Whole tribes of people moved hundreds of miles on rivers via canoes, and really bold folks took ocean going varieties distances that would scare most of us, for good reason.  In our country, the canoe was the basic vehicle of the fur market for a long time.  Indian tribes had them and used them, and so did fur trappers.  It's popular to imagine the trapper riding from St. Louis, or Quebec, to the Rocky Mountains, but they didn't do that.  They rowed upstream, hard work, but efficient, and traded for horses when they got where they were going.  When they turned around to go the other direction, they traded the horse away and floated downstream.

 

 Outrigger canoe on Maui, the early variants of which took the Polynesians clean across the Pacific.

As technology improved, boats did too of course, and all manners of boats were developed over time.  It was a long time before rivers ceased to be highways.  In Medieval England the rivers were the highways, and while the well to do had horses, they were very limited by the vast quantity of water that Great Britain features. To really get somewhere, for a long time, you took the boat.  Chances are that you leased a boat from somebody whose occupation that was. The water taxi, has a long origin.

And if you were taking goods to market, you probably took them by boat, at least if they were substantial in quantity.  Packing goods in no doubt occurred, but floating them in is easier.  And so it was in our own country for much of its history.  River ports were very important means of transporting every manner of goods, and to some extent, on truly major rivers, they still are.

But not like they once were.  Consider that in 1876, when the Army engaged in its famous summer (stretching into fall) campaign on the Northern Plains, part of the Army went by boat.  We don't think of it that way, but the River boat The Far West went all the way up the Yellowstone River.  It was, indeed, a specially designed shallow bottom river boat made for traveling the shallow rivers of the west, with a gin pole that allowed it to muscle its way past or over shallow shoals.  Cavalrymen charging into the Little Big Horn valley that summer were attired in part in straw boaters, brought upstream and sold by a trader on the Yellowstone.  Nothing plies the Yellowstone commercially today.

And so efficient was inland travel by water that artificial watercourses were created everywhere. They were the highways of their day.  Interior canals for transportation were created right up to the railroad days in Europe, when the railroads suddenly made them obsolete.  In this US, this was done to some extent as well, with some still in use.  The most famous of all American canals, and one of the most important in our history, amazingly remains in use, having been enlarged and improved over, time.  That canal inspired a song that remains in The American Songbook.

The Erie Canal crossing the Genosee River, by bridge.  1900.

I've got an old mule and her name is Sal
Fifteen years on the Erie Canal
She's a good old worker and a good old pal
Fifteen years on the Erie Canal
We've hauled some barges in our day
Filled with lumber, coal, and hay
And every inch of the way we know
From Albany to Buffalo

Chorus:
Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for we're coming to a town
And you'll always know your neighbor
And you'll always know your pal
If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal

We'd better look 'round for a job old gal
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
'Cause you bet your life I'd never part with Sal
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
Git up there mule, here comes a lock
We'll make Rome 'bout six o'clock
One more trip and back we'll go
Right back home to Buffalo

Chorus

Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for we're coming to a town
And you'll always know your neighbor
And you'll always know your pal
If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal

Oh, where would I be if I lost my pal?
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
Oh, I'd like to see a mule as good as Sal
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
A friend of mine once got her sore
Now he's got a busted jaw,
'Cause she let fly with her iron toe,
And kicked him in to Buffalo.

Chorus

Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for we're coming to a town
And you'll always know your neighbor
And you'll always know your pal
If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal

Don't have to call when I want my Sal
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
She trots from her stall like a good old gal
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal
I eat my meals with Sal each day
I eat beef and she eats hay
And she ain't so slow if you want to know
She put the "Buff" in Buffalo

Chorus

Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for we're coming to a town
And you'll always know your neighbor
And you'll always know your pal
If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal

This all deals, of course, with interior transport, where waterways were once incredibly important.  They still are, of course, and barges and even ships still run everyday on the nation's most significant rivers.  But this hasn't dealt with external transport, i.e., ocean going ships.

Ocean going ships remain the most important factor, rather obviously, in international trade.  Anything of any significance, except people, tends to nearly always go by ship if it has any size to it at all.  Prior to transoceanic air travel, everything in international commerce went by ship, including people.  The importance of the oceans to commerce has been so vast that it's formed a primary focus of international law and national diplomacy.  Being a seafaring nation, whether we think of ourselves that way or not, we've been in the forefront of keeping sea lanes open from day one.  We may like to think that we stayed out of other countries affairs up until World War Two forced us on t the international stage, but this isn't so.  We went to war when the country was in its infancy against local forces out of Algiers over the issue of freedom of the seas.  We fought a naval small scale spat with the Japanese while we were fighting each other in the Civil War.  We indeed "opened" Japan, and as is being explored in the 1870 to 1918 blog we dabbled in Hawaiian affairs pretty darned early.  So, even as an infant nation, we plied the seas internationally and would fight over the right to do so when we felt we had a right to do so.  We did just that in World War One, when we were horrified by German unrestricted submarine warfare, the German decision that may have resulted in the loss of the war for the Germans, and the downfall of the German Empire.

Troop ship, World War One. This ship is an ocean liner, at one time the basic means, and in fact the only means, of getting across the Atlantic or Pacific.  Now, they're really a thing of the past, replaced by "cruise ships" which are similar, but which are taken in part for the experience itself.

The importance of the oceans to commerce, while still vast, didn't diminish at all until after World War Two, when for the very first time commercial air travel started up.  Moving at first people and mail, commercial air travel expanded into packages and even larger items, and now occupies the field in transporting people, who would rather endure a flight of hours rather than weeks or days.  Who could blame them?  But what's interesting about that, while it is a huge change, it also means that on the oceans, less has been changed by technology, no matter how advanced it may have become, than perhaps in other areas that we've discussed.  Certainly modern transportation has cut down on continental port to port shipping, but on the high seas, ships still dominate over anything else. 

The technology has certainly changed, and massively.  And quickly as well. Sailing vessels remained a viable commercial ship, with augmented coal fired steam engines, well into the 20th Century.  The largest of these ships ever built, the massive six masted schooner Wyoming, was launched in 1909, not even a century ago.  It tragically broke up in heavy seas in 1924.  As late as the 1940s some vessels of this type, although smaller, still sailed.

The Wyoming.

By that time, and indeed for quite some time prior, big ocean going steam powered ships had become common, so ships like the Wyoming and other fast clipper ships seem to be an anachronism, even if they were not. But the big ship era had really taken over, and had been a strong presence for quite some time by then.  For commercial shipping, they've grown even larger, with current commercial ships being unbelievably large.  As noted, they don't move very many people, however, and indeed a modern ocean going ship has a crew so small its almost unbelievable.  Oil tankers, for example, just have a handful of crewmen.  Only fighting ships and cruise ships have significant numbers of crewmen.

So, here we have the second oldest means of getting around still being one of the most important.  As an average person, you aren't too likely to take a boat somewhere because you need to, unless its a ferry to cross a river, or something of the kind.  But they're still hugely significant commercially, and as present as ever.  And like horses, our association with them is so strong, we still cling to them, naturally, for enjoyment.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Related Threads.

Horsepower

Riding Bicycles

Walking

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, Casper Wyoming...

Churches of the West: Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, Casper Wyoming...:

Distributist of the world unite! National Small Business Saturday.

Saturday, November 29, is National Small Business Saturday, a holiday, of sorts, oddly enough thought up American Express.  This follows what's come to be known as "Black Friday", the huge shopping day that sees many businesses go into "the black" for the first time all year, which is a bit of a scary thought really.  The calendar year is almost up, which is the average businesses fiscal year, so it's spooky to think that a lot of businesses don't see a profit until now.

Black Friday is pretty recent in origin.  Not all that long ago the Friday after Thanksgiving was just the Friday after Thanksgiving, and indeed a lot of people who weren't in retail would take it off, just like they take off Boxing Day, the day following Christmas.  Now, however, that's no longer true and all sorts of sales and whatnot occur on that day, for both big business and small.  That likely got started because retail establishments were aiming for the many people who took the day off, and apparently had nothing else to do.  Now some stores even open at midnight of Thanksgiving Day, which is a bit of a sad thought.

American Express, in a move recognizing that even now a tremendous number of businesses are small businesses, decided that the day after Black Friday was a good day to focus on small businesses.  They wisely chose to avoid focusing on that Friday itself, which is already dominated by sales euphoria, and which is also the focus of some philosophical backlash by people who note that perhaps that's taking consumerism a bit too far.  A "stay at home" movement has existed for quite some time in reaction to Black Friday.  As for me, if I'm not actually at work on that day (which I often am) I'm usually using it to try to catch up on elk hunting, or perhaps on goose hunting.

What I'm often doing on Black Friday.

Or where I otherwise am on Black Friday, if not. . . .

here.

That is, I figure, probably much more in keeping, I'd note, with where most generations of Thanksgiving Day celebrants were following Thanksgiving Day.

Anyhow, the interesting thing about this is that while we often hear that small businesses are the backbone of the American economy, and that they really do employ more Americans than anyone else, they really don't get very much attention from anyone. They aren't the focus of big retail frenzies, and they are pretty much ignored in real terms by society and our governmental institutions.  It shows how acclimated we are to the big retail, and big industrial, economy that we have. American Express, which isn't a midget by any means, deserves some praise for focusing the spotlight on them

I'm not going to go big into a detailed economic and legal discussion of our economy, but it is important to note that we've adopted an economic model that favors consolidation.  Indeed, one of the ironies of our economic system is that even though we adopted this partially by accident, we've adopted it so completely that any discussion o fit usually brings in shouts of "Socialist", when in fact our system requires government maintenance and support to even exist.  That's because, in spite of what we think, we don't have a capitalist free market economy, but a corporatist free market economy.

Now right away, I can see the hackles raise on the back row, but this is simply a fact.  While we no longer have a managed economy, as we did from the 1930s through the 1970s, we don't have a true free market economy either, and our economy is state supported in a way we're so used to, we don't recognize it.

What we fail to recognize is that our economy is corporate capitalist, as we think of corporations as natural.  Of course, they were not.  Corporations are creatures of the state.  We're used to the because they've been around so very long.

The essence of corporations is to take what would be naturally a partnership, business combinations of more than one person (although we now even recognize one person corporations) and treat them as a legal entity unto itself. By this means, the partners become shareholders and those shareholders are insulated against personal liability for the actions of the entity.  That's radically different from partnerships, where in their conventional form each partner is liable for the actions of the corporation.  The corporation, in turn, is regarded as a "person" under the law.

This system strongly favors consolidation, as it favors the growth of business entities by shielding the owners of those entities from liability. It'd be extremely doubtful, for example, that Walmart would have grown to its present massive size if the owners of that company were each individually exposed to liability.  I very much doubt it.  But because of that liability shield, corporations can grow massive, distribute their profits to their shareholders, and except where the shareholders work for the entity and commit a tort or breach within it and for it, their own assets are never exposed.

Corporations aren't new by any means, but their role in the local economy is relatively new, and well within the time frame of this blog's focus.  Indeed, determining exactly when corporations arose is really difficult, as there are various competing claims to that title, but they've been around for a long time.  At least in the Western world, those early corporations were different from the current ones, however, as they typically had royal charters which either simply licensed them to operate, or in some instances conferred upon them a monopoly on certain activities. So, in the mercantilist economy that preceded the American Revolution, corporations were basically anti competitive.

No matter who may be the oldest, it's pretty clear that the oldest ones that mattered early in our history were those organized in the United Kingdom basically for monopolistic or trading purposes.  One such entity, that still survives, was the Hudson's Bay Company, a giant in its era that owned darned near half of North America north of Spanish America.  That company's reach was so vast and so long that when The Corps of Discovery went to look for a route to the Pacific, what it was really doing was covering a vast stretch of ground that the Hudson's Bay Company was already managing as part of its corporate empire. Really, HBC was a pretty darned good sport about it.  Another giant was the East India Company, which controlled much of the trade in the English speaking world that plied the seas, and of course controlled the tea market to American displeasure.  Even colonial enterprises, early on, were often a sort of chartered merchanilist enterprise, so none of this was regarded as odd or unusual at the time.

By the time of the Revolution Americans were displeased with this sort of thing and we didn't have any real big corporations for a while, but those that did arise were basically big fur trading enterprises that were in competition with the Hudson's Bay Company.  HBC was already a model, so organization for corporate enterprises into the vast West were already established as a successful  model. Today we tend to look back on the trappers and mountain men as wild aboriginal free agents, and to some extent that's true, but in reality they were also the working end of vast corporate enterprises.

None the less, corporations as a major factor in the American economy didn't really get rolling until the Industrial Revolution hit our shores.  Before that, most people were some sort of yeoman really.

The Industrial Revolution changed all of that, and by necessity.  After all, large scale manufacturing isn't really well suited for privately owned enterprise, even though you can find rare, and they are rare, exceptions.  It took the corporate form to build big foundries, big smelters, big factories, and the like.  So with the Industrial Revolution, came in the corporation.

With that, came a whole host of other concerns and problems, including the separation of workers from their employer, and all that goes with that.  It also gave us monopolistic behavior, which previously had been encouraged by governments but which was now seen as a threat.  This gave us an entire era of struggle of one kind or another, with the government, in the Theodore Roosevelt era, stepping into control Capitol, and workers forming unions and even radial political movements in some places.  Marx wouldn't have appealed much to a bunch of farmers (and indeed, he sure didn't to Russian farmers), but he did to workers on the European factory floor.

Still, what this really meant is that industrialization and industrial products came in, replacing smaller artisans to some extent, or even to a large extent in some industries, but also spreading material wealth, albeit highly unevenly.  What it didn't do, at first, was to do much to how and where people bought things.

That came in slowly, as chain stores first popped up in the late 19th Century.  But as communications and transportation improved in the late 19th Century, new chain retail stores and mail catalog stores came in. Golden Rule, J. C. Penny's, Woolworths', Montgomery Wards, and the like, all became staples of American life.

These stores were always in competition with local businesses, but for some reason, perhaps mostly just self restraint, or perhaps due to local laws, or perhaps simply due to other factors, they didn't entirely displace them.  A big store like K Mart, for example, might sell a lot of the same items that local appliance store did, but they'd both still be there.

This too has changed over time, somewhat replicating the process that happened with manufacturing.  Manufacturing reached a point where it formed trusts and combines that were anti competitive, and then the government had to step in and bust them up.  Somehow, retail outlets have grown and grown to where now certain ones are such giants that they too have tended to squeeze out competition in many instances. Wal Mart is the classic example, which is such a giant that in recent years its been able to influence prices on the whole sale supply end as well as the retail end, and according to its critics its influenced the quality of some items, negatively, as well.

This is not to say that the slow erosion of small business is all due to Wal Mart or is all a recent phenomenon. But it has definitely occurred.  By the mid to late 19th Century it was already well the case that certain items were manufactured industrially and remotely.  Wagons and coaches, for example, weren't local builds, but made by national firms, like Studebaker.  Home spun clothing gave way, although not fully, to manufactured clothing by the turn of the prior century.  Horseshoes were made by large industrial firms.  Firearms, which saw the first assembly line manufacturing in the United States in the 18the Century were largely made by large industries by the mid 19th Century.  The trend, while not overnight, was definitely real.  Including in retail. Grocery stores, which had all been local affairs, started to become less and less local by the mid 20th Century.

Colorado Bakery and Grocery, a local store of the past in Ft. Collins Colorado.  It's now a brew pub.

For the most part, while the disappearance of small local enterprises may have been locally lamented, its' only been recently in the United States when this has sparked real concern.  Perhaps this is just because its gone so far, and now is stretching into areas that nobody ever considered possible, and perhaps also because we live at a time when it seems that an era when no local business at all is actually possible.  It probably won't happen, but local business do have to constantly worry about a big national or international concern coming in and squeezing them out.  A concern like that must have gave rise to the American Express campaign.

That campaign is sort of Distributist in its philosophical content, whether it realizes it or not.  It's interesting to see that advanced by a national outfit however, particularly one that's a as big as American Express.  Its uniquely American in some ways.

Distributism has been mentioned here before, but basically its a philosophy based on the principal of subsidiarity that holds everything should be centered on the smallest economic unit possible, down to the family if possible.  First really advanced by European Catholic writers of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries as an alternative to Socialism and Capitalism, both of which seemed set to destroy the lives of the average man at the time, and later on which seemed doomed to expire in the crisis of European politics of the early to mid 20th Century, it has been used to some extent, and often by accident, in various countries here and there. It also varies from adherents to back a government sponsored variety, and who would probably ultimately attack the necessity of corporations being as broad as they currently are, to radicals who would espouse a variant backed by Theodore Roosevelt in his later years that would have seen large corporations be regulated as public utilities with state ownership of a certain percentage of shares, to those who take a softer approach and just urge that people should act with Distributist hearts in their marketplace choices. That latter variant is the most widespread in actual practice, if not in philosophical discourse, and its the approach that American Express, probably ignorant of that fact, urges.

Front piece from a book by G.K. Chesterton, who together with Hillaire Belloc, was one of the two primary champions of European Distributist thought. Belloc's and Chesteron's Distributism was focused on agrarianism, which isn't universally the case for all Distributist, and was focused on the very small scale indeed.

Well, its interesting to see this now become an established American movement.  In that fashion, maybe it really is entering American public thought. Indeed, this seems to be how a lot of public thought enters to the American discourse, at least at first.  There are "shop local" movements everywhere, which now even extent do people who "get to know your farmer".  And there are anti big box adherents everywhere as well, indeed, I've met quite a few here and there.  It's not like a revolution, by any means.  Nor is it dominant in American thought at the present time, but it's surprisingly widespread.

Well, no matter what a person thinks of it one way or another, American Express deserves a little applause for its efforts, even from a cynic like me.

Lex Anteinternet: Thanksgiving

Lex Anteinternet: Thanksgiving: Today, November 22, is the Thanksgiving Holiday for 2012.  Thanksgiving remains one of the two really big holidays in the United States, ...

Concepts of Race

 

 The way that things ought to be, and at that age typically are.  But beyond that, chances are these two young girls are actually of the same culture, which generally, but not always, is what people are actually talking about when they talk about "race".  Front piece to Holscher's Laws of Behavior.

Some of the thread that appear on this blog were started as drafts a long time ago. This is one such instance.  It's been more or less ready to publish as a text for months and months.  I just didn't get around to it.

A couple of events recently, however, caused me to rethink posting it.  For one, we've had the riots in Ferguson Missouri, which have brought race to the forefront of the national mind, in a probably unfair and skewed say. We also had the Presidents unilateral actions on immigration, which tends to bring race to mind as its generally presumed that most new immigrants and illegal immigrants are of some minority race.  And then a lawyer I know had sort of an odd experience at court the other day that had something to do with race.  So I took another look at this old thread.

Growing up in the Rocky Mountain West, I frankly thought very little about "race" as a kid.  To us growing up here, racism seemed a legacy of the distant past, or a weird relic in the South.  It didn't have much to do with us.  We were not really naive in these regards, it simply reflected where we lived.

Of course, a kids perception of reality doesn't match that which might be real, but for one reason or another, all that racial stuff that some regions of the country were, and still are, all tied up with just didn't have that much relevance here.  To a large degree, it still doesn't.  To those of us born and raised here, that people harbor deep fear or animosity towards American blacks, or other groups, seems bizarre.  Even with minor varieties of that we tend to find that people here are caught generally off guard.  I've occasionally met people who just moved here, for example, who will use some racial overtone that the rest of us have no frame of reference for and don't even know what they mean.  When it dawns on them that we don't get it, and aren't interested in learning to get it, they usually look embarrassed and if they stick around, they knock it off.  This isn't to say that there is no racism here, that wouldn't be true, but its certainly not like in some other regions of the country.

Which leads me to the American fascination with race, which is largely not shared by residents here.  On the national level, we're constantly treated to stories on race, and demographic trends on race.  It never seems to dawn on the commentators that race is a very fluid human construct, and indeed doesn't reflect anything in nature at all.

What is race?  People tend to define it by skin color, when there's really no basis to do that.  What they actually mean is culture, usually, which they erroneously conflate with skin color. What people really mean by a "race" is a culture, not a skin coloration, but they seem not to know that, so the categories they speak of are not only often not even real, but confusing at best.

Indeed, in physical morphology, while there are all sorts of physical attributes which are, or perhaps more accurately were, genetic adaptions to the environment, the actual genetic differences between one group of humans and another is inconsequential, if interesting.  Skin coloration, eye color and even height, are all genetic adaptations to specific environments. But morphological differences in humans, while apparent to us, really have very little significance in terms of variety in the human genome.  It is perhaps natural that people sort of instinctively fear a group of people not looking exactly like themselves, as that probably goes back to our ancient tribal structure in which any group of people not part of the immediate tribe was a potential danger, but people can and always have gotten over that pretty quickly.

When we look at how race has really been treated in the US, what it shows us is that its really based on something else entirely, or at least for the most part, and that's very revealing in terms of current news and analysis.

In the United States, blacks have always been regarded as a separate race.  No surprise there, as surely a group of people couldn't enslave another group in the conditions in which American slavery existed and not rationalize that away.  And blacks remain the freakish exception to what we will see is the rule, as they are still regarded as a separate race today.  Right away, I'm sure, some will be thinking "well of course they're a separate race", but they aren't so regarded everywhere in other cultures.  In Brazil, or  Cuba, for example, where there are many people of black genetic heritage, they're not regarded as a separate race.  In the US, on the other hand, the concept of black being a seperate race is so strong that it even applies to people whose genetic heritage if 50%, or less, black. That's really odd.

 Jack Johnson with this first wife, Etta Terry Duryea.  She was a Brooklyn socialite.  Their relationship was turbulent, and she killed herself in 1912.  All three of Johnson's three wives were white, and he was massively controversial at the time.  Upon the occasion of his second marriage, at least two southern ministers urged that he be lynched.  In a sign of progress, today three marriages might be slightly noted, but that they were interracial probably wouldn't cause much notice. As evidence of that, a certain family of half Armenian extraction, notable for being notable, and members of what was once regarded as its own race, have interracial marriages and nobody ever notes that, nor do they regard Armenians as a separate race either.

It's particularly odd in a cultural context, as we will see, as the majority of American blacks have ancestors who arrived in this country, or in the proceeding colonies, well before most whites, and they are steeped in the American culture.  In spite of the occasional shout outs to African cultures, by and large the African heritage of American blacks is very muted, if there, and therefore they're amongst the most American of Americans, which in most instances would wipe out the cultural distinctions.  Indeed, for those not from certain areas, that seems pretty evident when you are in a region that you are not from, as whites and blacks pretty clearly are part of the same regional culture in those locations.

But, its even so strong that it attaches to blacks whose family history doesn't go back very far in the US, which is a minority of American blacks.  President Obama, for example, is regarded as black, when of course he's half white, and his father, absent from his life while he was growing up, was a Kenyan.  That means that he doesn't really share in the African American experience very much, and yet he's regarded as black.

Indians were also regarded as another race from the onset, and like blacks, they remain so regarded, and perhaps for similar reasons.  Contrary to what is generally supposed, they were often widely admired by their conquerors, but at the same time they were regarded, by and large, as a separate race deserving to be conquered.  And their categorization as a separate race continues on, which we will see is definitely an exception to the rule.  As they do maintain separate cultures, perhaps that is the reason.

 Crow Indians, Crow Agency, 1940.  People have persisted in regarding Native Americans as a separate race, adn they are a separate series of cultures.  None the less, as a culture they fit into the rural Western culture as well, as this photo demonstrates.

So turning to race in general once again, consider that up until probably World War One or so Italians and the Irish were regarded as separate races, and as much so as American Indians or blacks.  Jews were very much a separate race.

Indeed, so were the "Anglo-Saxons".

And that tells us a lot about how "race" categorizations are false.

The early colonist in this country were largely from Great Britain. They were also almost all Protestant, if not all the same type of Protestants. And their view of the world was that they were the vanguards of Protestant Christianity against Catholicism and Heathenism.  They were English and Scots pioneers, and they viewed themselves as right thinking.  People could come around to their way of thinking, or get out of the way. Those who didn't, even if it was King George III, would be pushed out of the way.

Looking at the world that way, they came to view themselves as a special people, culturally.  And with that, they came to view most other peoples as a bit inferior.  Not just blacks and Indians (and often there was a begrudging admiration of Indians) but other Europeans as well. This was particularly the case with Catholic Europeans, although people of Jewish extraction were also very much regarded as a separate race.

The Irish in particular, who were a difficult British people who just wouldn't get with the Protestant plan, in their view, were a separate inferior "race". The "Irish Race" was tricky, lazy, and diminutive, and distressingly Catholic, in the English view.  The French were a swarthy Catholic group which seemed distressingly willing to mix their DNA with the native population.  The Spanish were a traditional enemy. As the late 19th Century came on, the Italians were another "dark skinned" "race". These views were held very seriously.  So seriously that those of English extraction came to self identify as being a separate race as well, the "Anglo Saxon Race".

 Political cartoon from the 1860s, depicting the fear that the United States would be consumed by Irish and Chinese immigrants, who are both depicted as odd looking races.  In the cartoon, the Irish and Chinese immigrants swallow the US, and the Chinese immigrants swallows the Irish one.  Today, nobody would regard the Irish as a separate race, and by and large Asians tend not to be either.

The defining nature of these views, which were often characterized in terms of physical appearance, had nothing to really do with how people looked, but what they believed.  Americans of strongly English descent began to regard themselves, as the English also did, as Anglo Saxons, a super charged colonizing enlightened race, with these other people being members of lesser races.

Well, nobody today regards Italians as a separate race.  What happened?

 Italian immigrants in Eastern city, at a time when Italians were considered a separate race.

Well, time happened in part.  The immigrant populations blended in and rose up economically. As that happened, their alien nature seemed less alien, and it eventually came to disappear entirely. And, of course, strongly ethnic aspects of their cultures did diminish.  And inevitably, in spite of the nature of human self segregation, there's always the case of some English heritage young lad suddenly finding some dark skinned Italian lass fascinating, with a marriage ensuing, usually, when that first occurs, to the mutual horror of the two separate ethnic groups.  Over time, however, people refocus and the concern becomes one on actual cultural and philosophical differences; i.e, shared local culture, shared economic status, shared religion, etc. 

This is what has happened to nearly every "race" in the US, with the exception of blacks and Indians to some degree, although both of these populations are much more mixed and part of the general American culture than imagined.  None the less, it's notable today that Asian Americans, for example, are largely regarded as being the same race as the "white" majority, whether or not the Census Bureau regards it that way.  In large patches of the country, various groups that still have some racial identity in some places also no longer have any in most places.  Most Americans wouldn't regard East Indians as a separate race, but a separate culture.  Most also wouldn't regard Armenians, or North Africans, as separate races, but rather separate cultures.

With blacks and Indians, the story is oddly different.  The reasons are hard to discern, but it probably has a great deal to do with poverty and also with their unique histories.  With blacks having the legacy of slavery attached to their history, and being burdened with ongoing poverty, perhaps a strong national concept of race has been hard to eliminate.  Slavery, it seems, is the national burden that just won't go away.  Something similar might be the case with Indians, who are also an impoverished group, and who lost the continent.  Poverty in particular always produces its own problems, one of which is a prejudice against the poor.  Being a conquered people may also stick. And, of course, the United States entered into a peculiar relationship with those people in conquered in later years, in undertaking to maintain them somewhat, while attacking their culture at the same time, thereby preserving them in place and reducing them to poverty.

This brings me to Hispanics and other new groups.  I'm constantly reading that the country is becoming more "diverse".  Maybe it is, but I suspect that Hispanics are a group that's going to be regarded as its own race, now that they are a significant demographic, about as long as Italians were, and for the same reasons.  Fifty years from now, to be Hispanic will be to claim a certain ethnic heritage, and that will probably be about it.

Indeed, it's already the case that I read piles of wedding announcements in the newspaper every week between people with Spanish surnames and English, or other, names. These cultures are already mixing at an extremely rapid rate, and not just in terms of marriage, but culture.  Some time ago I attended something at Mass where a person self identified as Hispanic, but who would have been impossible to identify that way by appearance, and this is becoming the absolute norm.  Hispanic last names are rapidly only indicating ethnic heritage and not race, and usually mixed American ethnic heritage, the same way Irish, German or Italian last names do.  Hispanics may have been a strongly identifiable minority in many places, and indeed they still are, but they're rapidly entering the mainstream and vice versa, the latter being an interesting process we rarely think of.  Just as minority cultures pick up and adopt large parts of the majority culture, the majority culture adopts parts of the minority culture as well.  Across the street from my office, for example, there's a Mexican restaurants that's really Mexican.  It's very popular with local Hispanics, but most days at noon, any more, it's swamped with everyone else.  An establishment that started off being patronized mostly by members of its own culture now no longer is, even though it hasn't changed a bit.  Restaurants are, of course, a superficial example, but it's also interesting how many people now celebrate Cinqo De Mayo in some fashion, and Our Lady of Guadalupe is celebrated at Catholic parishes everywhere.

This doesn't mean that any one ethnic group doesn't have its own unique cultural aspects to it, of course. But the differences in culture do decline over time. St. Patrick's Day, for example, is still a serious day with strongly Catholic Irish Americans, but it's also a national party for those looking for one.  Cinqo De Mayo has already gone from being a date somewhat remembered in Mexico as the anniversary of a battle against the French, to being an excuse to have Mexican food.  Columbus Day still brings out Italian Americans in some parts of the country, but in most regions they ignore it like everyone else.  And of course the American habit of intermarriage means that after awhile everyone is pretty much everything.

This doesn't mean that we've now entered racial bliss, where nobody is a racist. That's obviously not true. And cultural differences between different groups of Americans still exist, with most being harmless.  But what it probably means is that the country ought to really focus on persistent poverty in some of the ethnic groups long burdened with it, as that poverty is a principal source of remaining racism.  Taking that on won't be easy, but it has to be done.  Included with that, are some pretty hard and difficult decisions, which the country generally hasn't been too willing to undertake recently.

The Native American Side Of The Thanksgiving Menu : The Salt : NPR

The Native American Side Of The Thanksgiving Menu : The Salt : NPR

For Native Alaskans, Holiday Menu Looks To The Wild : The Salt : NPR

For Native Alaskans, Holiday Menu Looks To The Wild : The Salt : NPR

Random Snippets

Just under 18% of Americans report that they smoke cigarettes.

In the 1944, 41% of Americans smoked.  Up through the 1980s, it was still 38%.  Quite a decline.

Lex Anteinternet: Contempt of Court

For the second time in a little over a  year, we've been treated, or perhaps mistreated, to examples of large sections of the American population rejecting the rule of law, for the concept of mob rule.  This is, to say the least, disturbing in the extreme.I commented on the last instance in July 2013 here, in this post, Lex Anteinternet: Contempt of Court: As I noted there, I don't follow criminal trials as a rule, but the case of Florida v. Zimmerman proved impossible not to follow.  In that case, the jury found the accused, Zimmerman, innocent by way of an application of the traditional doctrines of self defense, but which resulted in widespread public outcry, including a comment by President Obama.

Now the nation, and indeed the world, has been witness to the degree to which quite a few Americans resort to the old concept of lynching crowds over the jury system, to which we supposedly all claim happy allegiance.  Americans are fond of saying that we have the best justice system in the world, but we're pretty quick any more to demonstrate that we'd really rather return to the old, old days of trial by local majority or even economic result.  To anyone who actually believes in any sort of justice system, this should be disturbing in the extreme.

This arises, of course, in the context of Ferguson Missouri man Michael Brown being shot by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.  

Worth noting, the way that this has been framed in the public mind seems to have been in error from the very onset.  Brown, in the public mind, is often portrayed as a child, but he was an adult man of 18 years old. For those who think that's a child, we should keep in mind that at 18 you are old enough to vote, old enough to serve in the armed forces, old enough to be treated as an adult in every fashion except for the purchase of a handgun, and of the age where if you are charged with a crime, you are charged as an adult.  Officer Wilson wasn't really much older, only being 28 years old at the time, a difference which seems large when  you are 28, but not so much later.

Nobody will ever really know what happened that night, but what seems to be the case by way of credible evidence is that Wilson stopped Brown, who had just stolen cigars from a convenience store.  That Brown wasn't a saint is really glossed over in this, but by the same token the theft of cigars is a misdemeanor and not of the crime which, under the common law of old, entitled an officer to use deadly force by its simple existence.  Felonies, for what its worth, did fit into that classification at one time.  But theft is theft and to be detained by an officer following a theft is always something of concern to the thief, which at that point, Brown was.

This resulted in some sort of a scuffle.  We'll never know what happened, but by the end of it, Wilson had drown his sidearm, after having been hit at least several times by Brown, and shot him.  Wilson fired something like 12 rounds from his sidearm, hitting Brown six times. 

Now, generally a person would focus on the number of rounds expended, which seems high, but quite frankly its been the police norm for several decades.  At one time police officers carried revolvers of small caliber, and generally they operated in a world in which simply hitting a suspect usually meant he'd give up. The exception for decades was the FBI, which operated in a world in which suspects were usually extremely dangerous and would fight it out, sometimes with some surprisingly heavy weapons.  In turn, FBI agents usually carried .45 ACP handguns, a heavy handgun that did big damage if you hit a person, anywhere.

Staring in the 1970s, however, police forces switched to semi automatic handguns which was coincident with the rise of drug use. Drug use made a lot of suspects really dangerous, as they'd lost all reason as a result, and so they'd keep on keeping on.  Most police handguns are anemic, however, and so the training that has come up over the years, starting first with the training in New York City, has been to have officers keep on firing until a suspect goes down.  Frankly, in my view, most forces might be better off with a bigger handgun that required a single shot, but that's not what most departments use, save for some specialist within large departments, and in some sheriff's offices.

So, was the use of force excessive?  Well, we weren't there.  So the matter was sent to a grand jury.  The answer isn't clear from these facts alone.  We can't say its excessive based on number of rounds fired alone, and we can't say that Wilson didn't act excessively either. After all, Brown is dead.

Here's where the disturbing trend comes in.

Grand juries deliberate in secret.  Not all states use them, but Missouri must.  They can take in all kinds of evidence, nearly without restraint. At the end, they have the call on whether to charge or not.

Here, they decided not to.

The mob isn't accepting it. But the mob didn't hear the evidence. And the protest has spread around the nation, and there are calls to charge Officer Wilson with Civil Rights violations.

This is no different than the lynch mob of old.  The mob has decided what is right and wrong and it wants its decision carried out. But, should we heed the mob, we have no justice system.  A justice system which cannot render an unpopular decision isn't a justice system, it's a farce.  People protesting this decision are arguing for a type of jurisprudence found in Fascism, or Communism.  They should be ashamed.

This would be different if we had any reason to believe that the grand jury ignored the law.  But on the contrary, it appears they did not.  They had a difficult decision to make but they appear to have made it properly.  Nobody who wasn't in the grand jury really knows what the evidence in this matter even is.

This entire trend has become increasingly common in the United States in recent years.  We already have seen people charged with crimes that are really economic class crimes, or even simply political crimes, as the population feels good about them.  Those trends are hugely disturbing as they suggest that success in business or in politics risks being criminal.  Now we're seeing the old, old concept of revenge revived as a basis for judicial action, and it should never be.  People who feel strongly that we need a just system of justice should be disturbed.