8/15/2025

 Friday, August 15, 2025

D+280/208/-1254

1549 Jesuit Saint Francis Xavier came ashore at Kagoshima, Japan

1876 US law removed Indians from Black Hills after gold find

1917 Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon met at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh

In bed around 9:30, awake at 3:50, and up at 4:15.  65°, high of 82°, AQI=74, Moderate. Mostly sunny today. Dew point 62°.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds and Trulicity injection  at 8:30 a.m. 

A grisly reminder on the Milwaukee history page on FB this morning.   

The Nike missile site in River Hills, Wisconsin, designated as M-02, was located along Brown Deer Road. Both the control center and launch area for this site were situated in this area. It was one of eight Nike missile sites established around the Milwaukee area in the 1950s to defend against potential Soviet bomber attacks during the Cold War. The M-02 site was operational from 1957 to June 1971 and was one of the three Milwaukee-area sites upgraded from Nike Ajax to the more advanced Nike Hercules missiles in 1958, which could carry nuclear warheads. Specific coordinates or exact addresses are not always detailed in historical records, but the site is noted for being in the River Hills area along Brown Deer Road. Today, like many former Nike sites, it has been decommissioned, and remnants may be minimal or repurposed.

The site was at 20th and Brown Deer, on the north side of the street, i.e., in River Hills, Milwaukee's wealthiest suburb and next door to our village of Brown Deer.  Another site was on what is now the Summerfest grounds on the lakefront.  Only three of the sites were armed with the Hercules missiles which could carry nuclear warheads.  Quaere: did they?  Were there nuclear armaments stored in silos at 20th and Brown Deer?   

From downhearted to counting our blessings.  We have learned of so many homeowners and families who have suffered much more severe damage than we did from the Big Rain Saturday and Sunday.  Water depths in basements measured in feet, rather than our less than an inch, collapsed foundations, etc.  In Bayside, I've seen quite a bit of furniture stacked curbside outside homes, awaiting pickup.  More rain is expected over the next few days.  Keeping my fingers crossed. 

More David Brooks.  On August 1, I wrote some thoughts about David Brooks's NY Times column that morning, and introduced my thoughts with this:

 I have written in these pages before that I just can't warm up to David Brooks, in large measure because he seems so smug.  He purports to see issues from 30,000 feet, looking down with x-ray vision, seeing problems and their root causes, and offering solutions in grand, broad terms.  Although there are, as there always are, some basic truths in his analysis, like American society has many very serious problems, he writes about them at such a level of abstraction that he makes his proposed solutions useless, mere blather.

I was reminded of those words as I read Brooks's column this morning,"America's New Segregation," where he wrote:

 This experience has produced in me one central conviction about what ails America: segregation. Not just racial segregation — which at least in schools is actually getting worse — but also class segregation. I’m constantly traveling between places where college grads dominate and places where high school grads dominate, and it’s a bit like traveling between different planets.

Back in 2003, Theda Skocpol of Harvard published a book called “Diminished Democracy.” One of her arguments was that more Americans used to join cross-class community organizations like the Rotary or the Elks clubs. But gradually, highly educated people left them for professional organizations filled with others more like themselves. Skocpol wrote: “Once highly educated Americans would have been members and leaders of such cross-class voluntary federations. Now many barely know about them.”

That self-segregation was symptomatic. Many college-educated people were at the same time segregating themselves in neighborhoods where nearly everybody had college degrees into professions where everybody did, into social circles in which you can go weeks without meeting somebody from the working class. Last year a group of researchers published a study in the journal Nature in which they surveyed leaders in 30 fields, including law, media, politics and so on. They found that not only had nearly all of society’s power brokers gone to college, 54 percent of them went to the same 34 elite schools. That’s segregation on steroids.

Those of us in the college-educated class are good at segregating ourselves from others, but we’re astoundingly good at segregating our kids — simply by equipping them to join our ranks. Before kindergarten, the children of the affluent are much more likely to be in preschool. By sixth grade, students in the richest school districts are four grade levels above children in the poorest school districts. By high school, richer kids’ average reading skills are five years ahead of poorer kids’. By college, according to a 2017 study led by Raj Chetty, children from the richest 1 percent of earners were 77 times more likely to go to Ivy League schools than children from families making $30,000 a year or less. In his 2019 book, “The Meritocracy Trap,” Daniel Markovits writes that the academic gap between the affluent and less affluent is greater today than the achievement gap between white Americans and Black Americans in the final days of Jim Crow.

I’d like to let that sink in. Nearly all of us were raised on the conviction that Jim Crow was rancid. We’ve effectively recreated it on class lines.

Isn't all that pretty obvious stuff that has been going on for a very long time, maybe forever.  Pares cum paribus congregantor - birds of a feather flock together?   At least in communities where there is a great variety of housing stock available?  And where there were choices of schools?  And churches?  And social circles?  Was there a time when factory managers and assembly line workers lived in the same neighborhoods, attended the same schools and churches, drank at the same bars, etc.?  Isn't it a bit  much to call this situation a creation or recreation of Jim Crow?  Is it invidious discrimination against blue collar workers that managers and professionals who have greater wealth and income choose to buy more expensive homes in more expensive neighborhoods, or choose to send their children to the schools where they may get a better educational environment than is available at the public schools attended by children of blue collar workers?

So you may want to stand up and be part of the resistance to Trump. More power to you. I myself have called for this. But let’s be clear that resistance is treating the symptom, not the ailment. The ailment is the tide of global populism that has been rising across the developed world for years, if not decades. And the cause is that our societies have segregated into caste systems, in which almost all the opportunity, respect and power is concentrated within the educated caste and a large portion of the working class understandably wants to burn it all down.

Brooks needs to read Isabel Wilkerson's Caste.  I'm writing this at about 9 p.m., with a banana bread in the ov and a very sore back.  I want to go to bed but I need to wait until the bread is ready to be taken out of the oven.  As it is, my brain is partially-baked at this hour so I can't continue to consider Brooks's remarkable article.  Maybe tomorrow. 

 

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