RUMPOLE SAVES THE WORLD

Let's see what is going on that needs our attention.
Item: July was the hottest month on record from the time humans have been recording temperatures.
Item: India has taken a bold, aggressive move to remove any protective status from the disputed Kashmir region of the border with Pakistan. All communications have been cut off.  Soldiers have been mobilized and a conflict with its nuclear armed neighbor Pakistan seems likely.
Item: Protestors continue to increase their activity in Hong Kong, challenging direct rule from China and setting up the most serious threat to the Communist Party since Tienamen Square.
Item: There were two White Nationalist shootings within the US within twenty-four hours. In the last years places of worship in Pittsburgh, San Diego, and South Carolina were attached by gun-wielding, white young men who are terrorists. 1,300 people were killed in the US since January 1 of this year in mass shootings. 

In the absence of any real leadership in Washington, we boldly step into the void. Rolling up our proverbial sleeves, we get down to work:


Domestic Terrorism: 
We have some experience with hate speech on our own blog. It is shocking what a truly anonymous platform for speech will bring out in otherwise decent people. On a daily basis we receive and do not publish multiple comments spewing vicious hate against other lawyers/judges/REGJB figures. "So and so is fat and ugly and dumb"; "this one cheats on his wife"; "that one steals from her clients".   The anonymity of the platform touches a dark spot in the human psyche. It frees the id to release the anger which rises from the jealousy and frustration from the less successful among us. 

We therefore are not surprised that uneducated, unsuccessful and mariginalzed white males who are failures turn to the internet to release their anger and frustration against a world they cannot compete in. They hate immigrants not because of the poor wretched souls fleeing gang violence in Central America that flood the Texas borders. They hate the prior generation of immigrants who worked their way up from menial jobs to become shop and business owners. They resent having to buy items from stores run by immigrants, and they become furious when they are hired and work at menial jobs supervised by more talented people of color. Somehwere in their upbringing they lost the message this country guarantees only the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of success; not success. The right wing message of "American Exceptionalism" peverted their ideas and ideals. 
We are exceptional not because a generation of men and women saved Europe twice in the last century. We are exceptional because we tried. These disaffected and failing white males refuse to try; they think they owed because of what their fathers did. They are wrong. 
Now for the first time in history we have an instantaneous method of communication that allows smarter hate filled  terrorists in the US to manipulate white male loners into doing their deeds. Just like jihadists who use social media to get disaffected young men to strap on bombs and below themselves up in crowded markets. 

This is nothing less than a challenege to the first amendment. Do we monitor and suppress hate filled speech that can trigger a disaffected young white man from taking an automatic rifle to a shopping mall to kill immigrant shoppers or to a  temple to kill  Jews or Muslims worshiping?  Or do we stand fast and not let the thin edge of a large wedge of government approval of speech take hold? 

We now know words kill. When some misguided misanthrope calls developing countries "shitholes" and decries their people as "swarms" and "hordes", the less intelligent and disaffected respond. They did so in Germany in 1930-1940, and they are doing so now as the president is one who used those terms.

Are our strengths in tolerance? As Dr. King said :"Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can drive out darkness." 
Or do we allow talk of "money grubbing jews"; "shifty, lazy negroes"; "sick homosexuals"; and "hordes of dirty breeding immigrants"?

We've regulated obscenity in the past. But do we really want politicians who support our president regulating our speech now? They could shut down the Washington Post or NY Times, or even this blog on the basis of condemning these widely read outlets as "fake news". 

India: Send George W Bush to Pakistan. Barak Obama to India, and William Clinton to mediate between the two sides. 

Global Warming. Plant a million trees a day across the world for two years. Follow the Paris accords. Shut down coal plants and build a new generation of nuclear power plants. Wind turbines...wind turbines..wind turbines. 

China: Let the process play out and report on the protestors and the  government's effort to silence them. 

We can solve the easy problems. But an unregulated internet spewing hateful ideas that spur on disaffected, barely literate white males to get guns and start shooting may well be the problem of our generation. How do we regulate hate speech with the First Amendment. Who decides? 

And the Dolphins defy logic. They just keep getting worse. Not even we can fix them.