Here’s a comment under a recent New York Times article about trade and tariffs. It was written by a small businessman from Kansas City.

“I own and operate a small manufacturing business that produces stereo equipment. About half of my sales go overseas. Since Trump has been elected, all sales are way down and most of my sales are now exports because domestic customers are too afraid to buy.

In electronics, virtually all component parts are made overseas, mostly in China. There is no US production capability. If Trump issues a blanket tariff of 10%, my distributors will have to raise all their prices 10% plus a multiplier for overhead and profit. That means all of my parts costs will go up at least 15%. I in turn will have to raise my prices plus a multiplier to preserve margins. My prices will have to then rise 20 to 25%. This will reduce sales to domestic customers.

If these actions increase the value of the dollar my export customers will have to pay another 10 to 20% for my products. If their country retaliates and levies another 10% tariff on US goods, the cost to my foreign customers will rise even more. The price of my exports could easily end up costing 50% more after this all ripples through. Result? I go broke.

Hurray for protectionism! Everyone loses and a few thousand people in Ohio keep their jobs until they are replaced by robots in five years.”

This is one of the unintended consequences of the economic policies proposed by the Trump administration. Voters who embraced Trump thinking he will bring business back to this country and make them money in the stock market may be in for a rude awakening. His lack of knowledge on economics rivals his cluelessness on just about every other topic of importance.

The simplistic notion that we can improve the American economy by limiting trade, e.g., rejecting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a tactic proposed by both Trump and Independent turned Democrat turned Independent Bernie Sanders might ultimately do more harm than good.

Protectionism is as delusional as trickle-down economics.

For 25 years I sold Hong Kong oil paintings with Mexican wood frames for a small corporation that had art galleries in 12 states from Maine to Maryland. They were in resort towns—Newport, Rockport, Bar Harbor, Cape May, and Ocean City, to name a few. In the winter it rented space in malls in even more locations.

The canvases were painted in Hong Kong studios by female artists who painted the same scene over and over again from different angles with color variations and in different sizes. But none was reproduced and all were hand-painted, which made them “original.” That’s the way we advertised them, and it wasn’t a lie.

The loose canvases were shipped to a Brooklyn wholesaler, and they were brought back to our warehouse in Milford, MA, where the canvases were stapled to stretcher bars that would fit into our frames. The wood for the frames came from the United States and was shipped to factories in Mexico where they were carved and finished. We offered a choice of frame with each painting.

It was a very lucrative business because we sold a quality product at a very reasonable price. We made our money on volume sales. The local American artists hated us because they had 8×10 paintings in their gallery windows for $600, and we offered something just as good, at least to the average art customer, for $19.

The company employed over 150 people: salespeople who worked on commission, warehouse employees who also drove the company’s trucks to deliver paintings and frames to galleries and malls, and an office staff with bookkeepers and secretaries.

The employees made money they spent in other businesses, and that stimulated the economy. The company collected sales tax on every item sold, paid rent for their gallery spaces, paid taxes on its profits, and there was a positive snowball effect carried out by both the business and the employees.

If a Trump tariff had been placed on the Chinese paintings and the Mexican frames, we would have had to raise our prices so high we’d lose an extraordinary amount of business and would eventually have folded. All the employees would be out of work, and that revenue would be gone.

And for what? To protect American artists who couldn’t sell beer at Fenway Park, who have such an overestimated sense of self-worth they can’t compromise their art and sell paintings at affordable prices? If we weren’t in business it wouldn’t make any difference to their bottom line. They might sell a few more paintings, but the effect would be negligible. Their customers weren’t our customers. People would refuse to pay their ridiculous prices. They’d buy prints or wall hangings instead.

As the Kansas City commenter said, “Hurray for protectionism. Everyone loses.”

That sounds like a futuristic observation for this Trump presidency. Everyone loses.

I read with great interest Telegram & Gazette reporter Brian Lee’s January 18 article “Racial Remarks by Southbridge Teachers.”

Apparently the Southbridge school system, which has a large population of Hispanic students, has been taken over by the state because of low test scores and poor academic performance.

At a meeting of the Town Council and the Southbridge School Committee a week earlier, racially insensitive statements made by teachers under the cloak of anonymity (somewhat like the offensive statements made by commenters on the T&G online website) were made public.

One teacher said that “immigrant parents don’t provide structure.” Another said the “Hispanic community had a widespread drug problem.” But the comment that would have made Donald Trump proud was this one: “All the Puerto Rican families end up living together because they cannot afford their own housing and then they end up inbreeding.”

There is a great deal of ignorance here that must be addressed. Puerto Ricans are NOT immigrants any more than someone moving from New York to Massachusetts or New Orleans to Chicago is an immigrant. Puerto Rico is a United States possession and its inhabitants are United States citizens.

There are two Massachusetts towns that are noted for a high degree of incestuous inbreeding, and both are 99% white. In rural Maine there are large numbers of children whose father and grandfather is the same man, and you can’t get much whiter than Maine, unless you go to Vermont.

The Southbridge receiver/superintendent, Jessica Huizenga, is the daughter of a Puerto Rican. She was outraged by the teachers’ remarks.

But School Committee Chairman Scott S. Lazo, who has become increasingly critical of Ms. Huizenga, said, “Something doesn’t smell right,” and he wondered aloud if the receiver is trying to paint Southbridge as a racist town.”

Regarding the anonymous teacher quotes, Mr. Lazo said it was “all hearsay.” He suggested, “It’s almost like the receiver is somehow manipulating the situation against the teachers, and she wants to do a big removal of a lot of teachers.”

Mr. Lazo also accused Ms. Huizenga of “stirring the pot.” He concluded his remarks by saying, “…as long as I’ve lived in town, never have I seen this (race) card being played the way it’s being played.”

These are typical reactive defenses white people use when the subject is race, a topic that makes them very uncomfortable. His use of the word “hearsay” suggests the inbreeding remark was made up. For Ms. Huizenga to air these remarks publicly was “stirring the pot,” and what defense would be complete without an accusation of “playing the race card?”

His concern about a “big removal of teachers is for white teachers. No doubt the teaching faculties in Southbridge (like Worcester) are mostly white, while the student population is majority students of color. White folks see public sector jobs as their entitlement.

Mr. Lazo pretty much touched all the bases short of calling Ms. Huizenga a “racist race baiter.”

Nobody is saying ALL teachers are racist, but there are a significant number with serious problems regarding this issue. Denial of that fact is as bad as trying to portray all teachers, all cops, and all white people as racist.

Let me tell you some things I heard in my 34 years as a teacher in the Worcester Public Schools.

One day in the teachers’ break room a discussion took place about officers from the Worcester police department (WPD) manhandling the Puerto Rican director of the Youth Center in front of some horrified, upper class board members. There was an altercation at the site and the responding cops didn’t know who he was. I made the comment that perhaps if there were a few Puerto Rican cops on the force this wouldn’t have happened.

A 30-year-old Italian American teaching intern, with an Irish American surname, piped up, “They can’t get on the force because they all have records.”

I said, “All the Puerto Ricans who apply have records? That’s hard to believe.”

“It’s true.” she said. “My husband is a Worcester cop and that’s what he told me.”

Praise Jesus this young woman didn’t go into teaching. How could she ever have given a Puerto Rican student a fair shake? As for her husband, his comment tells you everything you need to know about how some cops view minorities.

One year my school, North High, had a good basketball team, composed mostly of Black and Latino students. I was at a city-wide education event and got into a conversation with the principal of another high school and his basketball coach.

The principal said, “You guys have a good team because your players are all on welfare so they can play, but our kids have to work so they can’t join the team.”

The coach said, “We call your team “the spics and the spooks.”

Another time a teacher was complaining to me about Puerto Rican students.

“The problem,” he said, “is that they have too easy access to get here.”

“They’re citizens,” I replied.

He frowned. “Well, that must be relatively recent.”

“1919,” I said.

He swore under his breath and stomped away.

I have a lot more stories. Some of you will insist I make them up. My answer is always the same. If I were clever enough to create these tales I’d be in Hollywood making a fortune writing screenplays.

You can’t make these up.

Let me repeat, I believe 80% of teachers would rather have a polite, attentive, studious minority kid in class than an inattentive, belligerent white kid.

That doesn’t let the 20% of the teachers with bad racial attitudes off the hook. They need training if they’re already employed, and there has to be a way to weed out prospective teachers before they ever get into a classroom.

In the immortal words of Johnnie Cochrane, “Everything is about race. The sooner we stop dancing around this issue, the better off we’ll all be.”

This blog showed up Thursday on my Facebook feed. I wrote it last year but it didn’t appear on the Telegram & Gazette blog site because I was in the Witness Protection Program at the time (insert smiley face here). I’ve been watching the complete series of The Sopranos, for about the eighth time, and whenever a character (like Big Pussy or Richie Aprile) disappears the explanation is that he’s in Witness Protection.

The blog is interesting because it encompasses two years of history and includes two of Worcester’s most amusing city councilors, the Gaffer and the Slumlord—or would “Slumlady” be a more appropriate term?

WORCESTER’S ANNUAL MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY FIASCO

by Carlo Baldino January 19, 2016

Yesterday the city of Worcester held its annual dog and pony show while celebrating the holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. There were speeches given, essays read, awards given out to deserving Black folks, and everybody came together in a kumbaya moment.

All the participants, both Black and white, exemplified the Stevie Wonder-Paul McCartney song—“ebony and ivory, living in perfect harmony.”

Older Black folks were trotted out, out-of-touch seniors who could be counted on to dance for the man, to say the right things that wouldn’t hurt the feelings of white folks, to forgive and forget, to ignore the racism that pervades the city.

Last year (2015) on this date Black Lives Matter protesters blocked traffic in Kelly Square for a horrendous four and one-half minutes, commemorating the four and one-half hours the body of Black teenager Michael Brown, who was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, lay unattended in the broiling summer sun.

That protest resulted in the arrest of four participants who were offered immunity if they promised to give up their First Amendment rights and not block traffic in subsequent protests. When they refused, charges were filed.

This caused Worcester’s white folks to act as if this less-than-five-minute action was comparable to 9/11 and the Marathon bombing. Led by the inimitable City Councilor Konnie Lukes, the council was asked to pass a motion supporting the Worcester police department. Officers showed up at the City Hall council meeting dressed in full body armor, but they said it wasn’t their intention to intimidate.

The Black Lives Matter movement was belittled and Black organizations in the city came under attack. It became part of a political movement with local politicians using the same tactics national politicians like Donald Trump used to achieve notoriety and acclaim. They used race as a weapon to appeal to voters, and they focused on incidents they could blow out of proportion to try to accomplish their goals.

North High school had a few fights and a couple of administrators were assaulted, and this was an excuse to bring police into the school system on a full-time basis. A controversy erupted over defending the antiquated term “color-blind.”

A mayoral candidate, Michael Gaffney, led the charge against a Black public service agency and demanded an audit. He was strangely silent when the city paid $100,000 in a settlement caused by a white police officer kicking a prisoner on the floor of a cell in police headquarters while simultaneously calling him a “nigger.” This was caught on video, and four other officers who watched the incident and laughed about it were also stars in the film.

This was not brought up at the Martin Luther King Day Breakfast at Quinsigamond Community College. There have been no calls from the city’s politicians for that video, which is still being held by District Attorney Joseph Early, to be released. Audits, yes. Videos, no.

There was no mention at the breakfast of the witch hunt against Worcester’s first female and first Black school superintendent, Dr. Melinda Boone. The leader of that hunting party was school committee member Dianna Biancheria, who was as obsessed with Dr. Boone as Captain Ahab was with Moby Dick.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but informed sources relate that when Melinda Boone came to town Ms. Biancheria, who does not have a college degree, had a $70,000 a year job in the school department. The new superintendent eliminated that position as superfluous, and after that Ms. Biancheria ran for and won a seat on the committee. She did get her revenge, however. Melinda Boone left Worcester and went back to sunny Virginia where she came from after being hired as superintendent in Norfolk with a salary $30,000 higher than what she was getting here.

Attention was given to the racial dialogues held in the city last summer over a seven-week period and sponsored by the Massachusetts Attorney-General and the United States Justice Department. The usual suspects in the city objected to this as a waste of time, and those who attended wanted to focus on Black on Black crime.

The dialogues, like the breakfast, were tepid at best and accomplished little. It has taken months to get a report finished, and Black folks who were the most active in the discussions were shut out of the reporting. The City Manager wanted people “he could work with.” Translation: only the “sell outs” were asked to participate.

One thing remained consistent, though. Last year (2015) four people, two white and two Black, were arrested. This year there was progress. Only one white man was arrested for passing out leaflets during the breakfast. He was tackled to the ground and injured, but because he was 71-years-old and had one arm in a sling the police officers on duty considered him armed and dangerous. He did have one arm, after all. He was charged with assaulting an officer. Who knows, maybe he reached for their guns. Maybe they felt their lives were threatened.

It was yet another wonderful lovefest in a city that is the epitome of racial harmony, and it was a harbinger of good things to come in 2016.

My friend Michelangelo the painter mildly rebuked me the other day because of my cavalier attitude about the results of the presidential election. He sent me this e-mail:

“The more I read about what an idiot Trump is, the more concerned I become about what he is going to do to this country… It’s all well and good to say we’ll just sit back and enjoy the show and let’s see what a mess he makes of things, but he really could do some damage.”

He’s right. I did say I would view the Trump presidency with amusement, and I have tuned politics out. I haven’t watched one solitary minute of MSNBC, CNN, or FOX NEWS since November 8. I keep informed by reading the New York Times and listening to National Public Radio.

That way I don’t have to look at or listen to Mr. Trump or any of his Republican supporters. I highly recommend the course of action I’ve taken. It is much more relaxing and improves one’s quality of life.

Perhaps I am guilty of taking Trump and his continuing antics too lightly, but I’m totally disgusted with the 60-plus million Americans who voted for him. The people with money voted for him thinking he’d get them more, and the poor and uneducated allowed themselves to be duped by his impossibly false promises. There’s no excuse for that level of ignorance by either group.

Republican conservatives can hate liberals, but there’s no way they can spin this hypothetical:

If New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick had retired at the end of the 2015 season and owner Bob Kraft floated the idea of replacing him with Donald Trump, a man with no coaching experience, Patriots Nation would have gone bat-bleep crazy. They’d have been rioting in the streets.

People wouldn’t trust him with a football team, but they voted for a man with no political experience to become president. They handed him the nuclear codes and the most powerful position on earth.

Obviously football is more important than our nation’s economy, foreign policy, military, criminal justice system, and a host of other issues about which the new president is completely clueless.

I’m disgusted with the 53% of white women who voted for Trump. How is it possible for them to vote Republican, a party that’s determined to overturn Roe v. Wade? Without reproductive freedom there is no economic freedom, and the GOP is also against equal pay for women. What possesses a woman to support Republicans? The only possible explanation is they’ve internalized the message that they’re inferior and belong in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. They voted for a man who bragged about grabbing them by the pussy. Incredible!

I’m disgusted with the Bernie Sanders supporters who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton out of spite, the female members of this cohort loudly proclaiming they wouldn’t vote for her “just because she has a vagina.” In retrospect, Mrs. Clinton’s biggest “flaw” was her vagina. Too many women just can’t bring themselves to vote for someone of their own gender. They are their own worst enemies.

But most of all I’m disgusted by the racial animosity Donald Trump tapped into that has been boiling over in this country during the eight years of a Black presidency.

While some Republicans use a dog whistle to appeal to white people’s racism, Trump used a bullhorn. No more “political correctness,” straight talk, no inhibitions, and it turned out a lot of whites voted for him because they shared his views.

The white working class voters from the Rust Belt were the group most notably bamboozled by Trump, and the Congressional Budget Office has just released statistics predicting that if Obamacare is repealed 18 million people will lose their health care in the first year. Who will be victimized the most by this action?

The white working class voters from the Rust Belt, of course. Many of them will die due to lack of health coverage. They committed suicide, not with a gun, but with a ballot.

Neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton was the problem. We can insist they were “flawed” candidates and the vote was between the “lesser of two evils,” but it’s not the candidate—it’s the electorate that determines the outcome of elections.

The problem was a flawed electorate.

What happens next, after the inauguration?

Who knows?

This is one of those times where you just have to shrug your shoulders and say, “What are you gonna do?”

The morning after President Obama’s farewell speech in Chicago, New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote of his “profound respect for the characteristics of the man we came to take for granted: bracingly smart, exceptionally well educated, literate in the grand tradition of the great men of letters. He was scholarly, erudite, well read and an adroit writer.

And he was an orator for the ages. We got so used to elegant, sometimes masterly speechifying, that I will admit I sometimes tuned it out. We had an abundance of riches in that regard…As the old saying goes: You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

Barack Obama was a role model for what presidents should look like, sound like, and how they should present themselves to the world. He had a great sense of humor combined with impeccable comic timing, and he even had a fine singing voice. He did Al Green better than Al Green.

He was cool and he was elegant. While other presidents have fluttered, Obama soared. We will not see his like again.

In less than a week his replacement will take the oath of office, a man who is the polar opposite in every way.

Donald Trump, our next president, is crude and boorish. He can’t get through a day, perhaps even an hour, without insulting some person or institution. Anyone who criticizes him is a loser and is subject to his vindictiveness. Instead of lofty rhetoric we’ll get 140-character tweets, posted in the wee hours of the morning, consisting mostly of ad hominem attacks.

Trump criticizes fake news, but 70% of everything that comes out of his mouth is either an outright lie or a malicious distortion.

Donald Trump is so ignorant he makes George W. Bush, who couldn’t pronounce “nuclear” after eight years (nu-cu-lar) sound like Socrates.

In his Tuesday night speech, Mr. Obama made a literary allusion: “If our democracy is to work in this increasingly diverse nation, each one of us must try to heed the advice of one of the great characters in American fiction, Atticus Finch.”

Atticus Finch is the main character in Harper Lee’s classic American novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird.”

It is high doubtful that Donald Trump ever heard of Atticus Finch or read that novel, which is taught in many high schools throughout the country.

It is even more doubtful that many Trump supporters recognized the allusion.

Donald Trump allegedly wrote a book called, “The Art of the Deal,” and he claims credit for it. But last year his ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, set the record straight, i.e., that The Donald didn’t write any of it and could hardly sit still while being interviewed.

Schwartz characterized his literary abilities in this way: “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.”

During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, “he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.”

We’ve compared the intellectual capabilities of the two men, now let’s look at their physical aspects.

Obama is fit and trim, works out every day, can still play full-court basketball, and probably has 5% body fat. He eats wholesome, healthy foods and is careful with his diet.

Donald Trump is obese, eats junk food all day, and never does any type of exercise.

We’re saying good-bye to a physically fit, classy, intellectually brilliant scholar, writer, and orator, and we’re saying hello to a fat, classless, ignorant boor who has trouble uttering one sentence without repeating himself.

As the headline above reads, “YIKES.”

My friend Pasquale needed some manual work done in a hurry that involved digging with a pick and shovel. He put an ad on Craig’s List offering $100 cash for three hours of work. For the mathematically-challenged, that’s $33 an hour.

He got a good response, about a half-dozen e-mails with phone numbers. The first guy he called was 28 years old, enthusiastic, said he’d be glad to do the job, and agreed to have Pasquale pick him up at 8:00 AM the following morning.

At 7:45 AM Pasquale called the number. No answer. He kept calling. No answer. It was a cell phone number, too. So he called the next guy who had responded to the ad.

That gentleman was also agreeable and ready to work. It was now 8:15 AM so Pasquale said he’d pick him up at 9:00 AM. At 8:30 AM Pasquale’s phone rang. It was the second guy calling to apologize. His girlfriend had something for him to do so he couldn’t work that day.

The third guy on the list said no problem, he knew where the job site was and would meet Pasquale there.

True to his word, the man showed up, but he was seriously out-of-shape for manual labor. He was 58-years-old and after swinging the pick three or four times started huffing and puffing. Pasquale, 72, ended up helping the guy out and did a lot of the work himself. What are you gonna do?

Over the holidays I went to a party in Boston. I met a small business owner who had opened a music store less than two years ago. He told me he’d had to fire 18 people in that time, and all for the same reason. Either they didn’t show up for work or they were habitually late. They never argued with him about their termination, either, so he concluded it had happened to them before. One employee was supposed to work Monday and Tuesday. She didn’t show up Monday and didn’t call. She didn’t show up Tuesday and didn’t call. She walked in Wednesday morning as if she’d done nothing wrong, and it wasn’t even her day to work. He sent her away.

Another man at the party had an ambulance business. He had five ambulances and would like to expand, but he said it was too much trouble “babysitting.” He meant babysitting his employees, who also don’t show up or are always late. He has to pay overtime because he can’t find enough responsible workers.

Regulations state there must be two Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT’s) in each ambulance. The starting salary is $26 an hour, and within a short time goes to $30 an hour. That’s $62,400 a year without overtime.

It takes four months of training to become an EMT.

Oh, just to make sure we get something racial in the column, all three of these Craig’s List respondents were white. So were most of the EMT’s and the music store employees.

Why is it necessary to bring that up? Because the mantra from conservative Republicans on illegal immigration is that these brown-skinned people from south of the border are taking jobs away from working class white folks. One wrote a comment stating that “immigrants today live off the government and don’t want to better themselves.”

Really? One of the Boston business owners said he’d hired two Brazilians to paint an entire 1200 sq. ft, high-ceiling apartment for $400 cash. They showed up at 8 AM on the dot and worked relentlessly until they finished at 5 PM. He said they even brought their lunches and ate while they were working.

A multimillionaire businessman I know needed a roof repair on a building he owns. An American contractor wanted $8000 to do the job. The businessman, a Swedish-American who happens to be fluent in Spanish, hired four Ecuadorians with a battered pickup truck to do the roof. He bought the materials, they worked like beavers for an entire weekend, and he reported they did a beautiful job. It cost $2200 cash.

The truth is that many working class white folks don’t want to do jobs that involve hard work. They don’t want to pick crops in the hot sun, do backbreaking construction or landscaping, or apply themselves to hot, dirty jobs in factories. Many don’t even want to do clean, relatively easy jobs that pay well.

If you’re looking for people with a work ethic, you might have to look for those with natural suntans.

In the immortal words of Woody Allen, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”

On Thursday, January 5, 2017, a Kwanzaa celebration was held at a venue in downtown Worcester. It was a makeup of the celebration postponed the previous Thursday because of inclement weather.

Kwanzaa is an African American and Pan-African holiday which celebrates family, community, and culture. It is celebrated every year from December 26 to January 1. The name is derived from the phrase “matunda ya kwanzaa, which means “first fruits” in Swahili, the most widely spoken African language.

There are Seven Principles to Kwanzaa; 1. Umoja (Unity) 2. Kujichagulla (Self-Determination 3. Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility 4. Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics) 5. Nia (Purpose) 6. Kuumba (Creativity) 7. Imani (Faith)

The program consisted of a “Call to the Ancestors,” a “Libation,” the Lighting of Seven Kwanzaa Candles, one for each principle, and a medley of Kwanzaa songs.

The guest speaker was Dr. Joyce McNickles, a social justice activist, college professor, and diversity consultant. The title of her speech was “Having Purpose (Nia) in the Time of Trump.”

Here are some excerpts from her speech:

“After eight years of the country’s first Black president, there’s been a “whitelash” that has resulted in Donald Trump.

A lot of people woke up on November 9 wondering how did someone like Trump get elected. But Trump is not the root of the problem; he’s a symbol and a symptom of the problems that were already there. People were asking themselves why so many Americans would vote for a man who is unapologetically racist, sexist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic.

The answer is simple. A lot of people voted for him because they share his views, and Trump did a great job normalizing these views in such a public way.

Some people have argued that most Trump supporters were motivated by their economic concerns rather than bigotry.

Honestly, I don’t buy it. It wasn’t just about their economic situation. A New York Times exit poll showed that Trump supporters identified immigration and terrorism, not the economy, as the most important issues of the campaign.

Immigration and terrorism are both about race—Mexicans and Arab Muslims.

And now some of these people feel emboldened enough to put their hatred and ignorance out on Front Street for everyone to see. No inhibitions. No filters. Straight talk, no chasers.

The Southern Poverty Law Center counted 867 cases of harassment or intimidation in the ten days after the election.

Some of you may have felt like me the first few days or weeks after the election. Even though I knew that there are people in this country who share Trump’s hateful views, I still felt like I was stuck in a really bad 3-D movie because I was feeling Disgusted, Discouraged, and Depressed…

Although Trump says he wants to make America great again, we all know what he and many of his supporters want. They want to make America WHITE again, and not just white again but make America the way it was in the 1950’s when gay people were in the closet, when women accepted sexual harassment on their jobs because they had no legal recourse, when signs in public spaces were written in English only, and when everyone said “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays…”

What should be our goals as people of African descent?

I looked to Black Lives Matter to see how they were defining their purpose in the time of Trump. They put out a statement after the election:

“The violence he will inflict in office, and the permission he gives for others to commit violence, is just beginning to emerge. Our mandate has not changed: organize and end all state-sanctioned violence until all Black Lives Matter…until black people are free, no one is free…

Show solidarity with undocumented brothers and sisters by calling your city councilor to say you want them to make Worcester a Sanctuary City…

Take to the streets. There’s a place for protests. I’m sure there will be some protests in Worcester once Trump starts his shenanigans. Join them…

White people are going to put being bolder on their lists of 2017 goals. Some of the white people who supported Trump are being bold and saying whatever they want to people of color, immigrants, and Muslims. White people who want to be part of the resistance need to be just as bold by confronting and calling out white supremacy and racism when they see it…

And the final goal for all of us is perhaps the most important.

No matter how ridiculously insane things become over the next four years we can’t normalize it. We can’t accept it.

We can’t normalize crazy.”

One of the novels I taught as an English teacher was J.D. Salinger’s “A Catcher in the Rye.” On page one the narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, talks about his older brother D.B.’s new automobile:

“He just got a Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks.”

My students would get confused by the price, and I’d have to explain the novel was published in 1951 when products cost much less than they did in the 1990’s when I was teaching it.

Salaries were low in the 1950’s and 1960’s, but you could buy a new house for $10,000 and a new car for $2000. Everything is relative.

My late friend Joe Mastroberti was a science teacher, but he had a good mind for economics. He determined 20 years after the fact that teachers like us got the most bang for our buck in 1972. We were making $15,000 a year, but high-test gasoline was 24 cents a gallon, home heating oil was 18 cents a gallon, a 6-pack of Genessee beer was $1, and you could rent a 5-room apartment in Worcester for $90 a month.

The minimum wage was $2 an hour.

Twice a week my friend Pasquale and I stop at a Dunkin’ Donuts and shoot the breeze. The ages of the people who work there are diverse. Most are teens, but some are in their 20’s, 30’s, and even 40’s.

Sources inform us that most of them earn between $8 and $9 an hour.

Now there’s a movement to legislate a $15 an hour minimum wage for all workers. Of our two political parties, the Republicans are dead set against it and the Democrats are all for the increase.

As a Democrat I’m not against it, but it’s quite possible that there will be unintended consequences and that the raise might do as much harm as good.

I would bet that some business owners who are paying $18 an hour for two employees will let one go and pay $15 to one employee who will be required to do twice as much work. They’ll be saving $3 an hour, but they’ll use the raise as an excuse to increase prices. That’s happened before, and it’s happening now. A good way to increase profits is to have fewer employees doing more than their normal amount of work.

An unintended consequence of the increased minimum wage could be loss of jobs. The employees who get a raise will benefit, but those who are terminated because of the raise will be the losers. A job at $9 an hour is better than no job at $15 an hour.

Recently I needed some measuring cups, so I went to the Dollar Store in Oxford. I bought four red plastic cups held together by a ring for $1. I also bought a serviceable broom and a sponge mop for $1 each.

How can they sell these things for a buck? The answer is the products come from China and other third-world countries where labor is extraordinarily cheap, so these foreign manufactured items can be imported and sold and still earn a profit.

What happens if President Trump makes good on his campaign promise to put a 35% tariff on imported goods?

If the products are American made, the measuring cups will cost $8, the broom or mop $10. The hooded sweatshirt that sells for $15 at Old Navy goes up to $80.

The pro-increase economists state that low-income workers spend all their money, and the increase will be put back into the economy.

But if a worker’s salary goes up by 40% and consumer goods increase by 500-800%, how does the raise help?

What could happen at Dunkin’ Donuts is that consumers might buy the coffee but eliminate the donut. Instead of stopping by every day, they’ll drive-through every other day. Less business, more layoffs.

Another campaign promise is to deport all the illegal immigrants. They’re allegedly taking jobs away from Americans. Does anyone really believe Americans will go to work as migrant laborers, bent over in the hot sun for 10 or 12 hours, even for $15 an hour? And if they do, here’s another unintended consequence:

A head of lettuce will cost $4

A quart of strawberries will cost $12

The price of food will skyrocket, i.e., the food that doesn’t rot on the vine because farmers won’t be able to find workers to pick the crops.

I don’t have the answers, but I do pose these observations and questions because simple solutions are not that simple once they’re put into effect.

After its loss in the November election, the Democratic Party finds itself divided into two camps: the “progressives,” i.e., the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren faction, and the “elites,” the establishment crowd of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, aka the “old guard” that rejected the “progressives.”

It’s time for some definitions:

ELITE: a select part of a group that is superior to the rest in terms of ability or qualities; the choice or best of anything considered collectively, as of a group or class of persons.

ELITIST: A person who believes that he is superior to others (and thus deserves favored status) because of intellect, social status, wealth, etc.

Elite used to be a positive word, but today the social construct has changed it to something negative. There is a backlash in our country against people who can be identified as having elitist attributes.

What makes someone a member of the elite? Is it a person who has graduated from college? We’ve seen all kinds of electoral post-mortems demonstrating that Donald Trump won the white non-college vote and that Hillary Clinton prevailed in the white college graduate vote. What should that statistic tell us? Could it be that the more educated you were, the less likely you’d be to vote for Mr. Trump?

Is an elitist someone who knows the difference between your and you’re, there, their, and they’re, whose and who’s, its and it’s, and to, two, and too?

Is it someone who can write more than a 140-character tweet and can construct a complete sentence or a whole paragraph?

Is it someone with reading comprehension ability greater than the average third-grader?

Is it a reporter or opinion columnist for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Worcester Telegram, or any other established newspaper?

Is it a movie buff who prefers foreign films with subtitles to American films with car chases and 2 ½ hours of ear-splitting, plotless, graphic violence? Is it someone who prefers to watch gratuitous sex instead of gratuitous violence (insert smiley face here).

Is it a dog or cat lover who pays $1000 or more for a purebred canine or feline rather than going to the pound for a rescue animal?

Is it someone who has a guard dog sleeping beside her bed rather than a Glock under her pillow?

Is it someone who would rather view a documentary on PBS than watch a reality show, who’s never seen “The Apprentice,” “American Idol,” or “Keeping Up with the Kardashians?”

Is it someone who would rather read a good novel while drinking a single malt scotch than watch a Patriots football game while guzzling a six-pack of Budweiser?

Is it a person who is more than skeptical about belief in god and all religions and agrees with Karl Marx that Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc., are “the opium of the masses?”

Is it someone who eats more fruits and vegetables than meat, who never goes to McDonald’s or KFC, and for whom “fast food” is a dish of healthy leftovers heated in a microwave?

Is it a vegan or a vegetarian?

Is it someone who doesn’t allow herself to gain more than one pound over her fighting weight? Is it someone who knows what her fighting weight is supposed to be?

Is it someone who drives a Prius rather than a pickup truck? Is that why Martha Coakley lost the senatorial election in Massachusetts to Scott Brown and his progressive vehicle?

Is it someone who pays off her credit card bill at the end of each month and escapes interest payments?

Is it someone who spends less than he earns and also puts something in savings for a rainy day?

Is it someone who gets off the couch and goes for a walk, a jog, or an hour at a gym?

Is it someone who agrees with Mark Twain that “golf is a nice walk spoiled?”

It’s rather confusing. How do you define “elite” and whom do you identify as an “elitist?”

Is it possible to be wealthy and educated and not be an elitist? Is there a net-worth number that puts you in this category? Should elitists be compelled to wear a scarlet “E” on their chests?

Perhaps members of this group could channel their inner James Brown and chant, “Say it loud, I’m elite and I’m proud?”

It’s going to be a long four years for the Democratic Party. What are you gonna do?

POSTSCRIPT: If you got the allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel, “The Scarlet Letter,” about an unmarried woman with a child who was forced to wear a scarlet “A” on her breast (A for “adultery”) you’re probably an elitist.