Social Justice - A Conversation

Unknown Speaker 0:00
The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and more the University of Nevada, Las Vegas or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

Unknown Speaker 0:13
Hi, I'm Charles Stanton. I'm on the faculty of the Honors College of UNLV. And the Boyd School of Law.

Unknown Speaker 0:19
Hi, I'm Gabriella Tam. I'm a fourth year accounting student.

Unknown Speaker 0:23
And welcome to social justice, social justice, our conversation

Unknown Speaker 0:28
a conversation.

Unknown Speaker 0:31
Well, good evening, everybody. We're back. Me and Gabriela Tam, we have we have a huge plate load of goodies for you today. And hopefully you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving feast. And we have just so many things to talk about. I wish more of them were pleasant. But I guess if everything was perfect, she wouldn't be here. And I wouldn't be here either. We have a whole meal. Oh meal, a whole meal of mayhem. Yes. So we're going to try to start out this week with I say a disturbing, disturbing article. But nothing that's been hidden from public view is the Exodus Out of Congress, of so many people, people in the House of Representatives, people in the Senate, who are leaving. And it's really interesting, and Gabriella can can get into this after after I say a couple of words, it was always the ideal that you would want to be in the Congress, it was a huge thing to be held in the House of Representatives or to be in the Senate. And the place, the social water of the place has so disintegrated. It's common courtesy, and respect all the things that people strive to work for. So they can produce, you know, successful outcomes is gone. You know, you can't get bills passed. You have urgencies about the budget, and people just leave Washington, they don't show up for meetings. I mean, it's I don't know what to say anymore. It's like, it's

Unknown Speaker 2:09
it makes us feel hopeless, like the public. You know, like, if the people in the Senate and the House of Representatives are feeling so hopeless that nothing's gonna get done. And they're leaving, because how do they expect to like that? How do they expect that will make us feel, you know, like, we're not getting bills passed out? Our country isn't adapting, you know, like, we're not seeing any changes. And like, we've like talked about on the podcast before we're going back in time. Yeah. And that's so crazy. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 2:41
Well, I think I think that the crisis of confidence in our country has to do with the loss of faith in the institution. Yeah, I think it's directly related. Certainly, politically, certainly, industrial, industrial evil corporations, you know, people who, you know, you believe that a certain company or you believe in a certain product, you find out that the product is unsafe, you find out that they covered it up for years. So so so so that's part of it. That was very interesting to listen to. It was I guess, it was an interview with Pope Francis. And it was kind of shocking to me, because, you know, Pope Francis is the Pope. So, you know, he has to deal with different churches in different countries. And he said, he said, the church in America is all about money. He says not about it's not about Christ, Islam on any of those things. Isn't that That's so sad. I'm listening to that. So well,

Unknown Speaker 3:48
that's it's like, specifically America, too. It's not like his other churches. Yes. To like, take care of it. No, the like, Catholic Church in America is about money. Yeah. All about money. And

Unknown Speaker 4:00
it's interesting how he's, he's dismissed or, or put it put out to pasture, basically a couple of the cardinals who were in major cities. But it's interesting, you know, you know, when you go to church today, it's interesting that like, in this city, of course, we get a lot of the tourist population. Yeah, who got who go to Mass. But what's interesting is, how few regular people in that community still go to church. Yeah, and, you know, I'm sure it's I'm sure it's not just in the Catholic faith, it's I'm sure it's in the Jewish faith, I'm sure it's an all faiths. Um,

Unknown Speaker 4:45
I was we were I was actually talking about this in one of my other classes on Monday, where it was like, you there's so many, like, kids or people my age who don't want to be involved with religion anymore. And we think it's because like, we didn't really have a choice. And so, but we still, you know, formed our own opinion about it. And we didn't like what we saw. So that's why I think people my age are kind of avoiding going to church or avoid going to mass or avoiding, like going to like synagogue, you know?

Unknown Speaker 5:23
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's true. I mean, the thing, of course, is that in life, you have to maintain your ethics, and you have to maintain your morality. Yeah, and all those things. So a lot of what you see is against that, but you have to have the strength of character to do the right thing and pray and all the rest of those things. Apart from the institution, yeah, even though the institution has failed, you can let the institution bring you down. Yeah, exactly, you know, to things that are wrong, because, you know, you've seen all their misdeeds. It's interesting, you know, that. We're seeing, we talk about politics, and we talk about the church. Yeah. But you talk about the Boy Scouts, that's another one you talk about, you know, the Gymnastics Federation, ya know, and all these things. And I think people are very disillusioned. Yeah. You know, and now like, if you're, if you're a parent, and your daughter or son wants to go into sports, it's really something to think about. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 6:41
You have to really be careful now. Yeah, yeah, who the coaches

Unknown Speaker 6:45
are. And they had a guy who was very successful. This was a few weeks ago, he was the coach of the University of Utah, the gymnastics women's gymnastics team. He listened to all kinds of stuff. I mean, like very, like verbally abusive, all kinds of stuff. I'm saying to myself, like, how did this go on for so long? Yeah. And nothing was done about it. Where was the university? Where was the where's the athletic director, the administration? And its people are different. Yeah, you know, we've talked about that before, but all people care about his money. Yeah. But I remember when I coach, I coached, you know, junior high, high school, boys and girls. You would never get into anything like that, to me abusive to somebody to be abusive to a student or abusive to a child, are

Unknown Speaker 7:44
you how do you get to that point, right? Well, you

Unknown Speaker 7:47
get to that point, basically, because that's always the way you've been, and nothing checked you from not doing it. So you went in there, and you figured, well, I did this and all these other places. I'm gonna do it anyway. I'm gonna do it with this with this team now. You know, it's, it's crazy. Actually. It's crazy. Yeah, you know. But anyway, so So that's one part of it. And then the other thing that's, that's really interesting, that also is very disturbing. Topping off, what we were just talking about, is like, now all these cases of discrimination and racism against people who are Muslim or people who are Jewish. And, you know, obviously, you know, there's tons of examples. But the one of the prominent ones is, of course, the shooting of these Palestinian young men in Vermont. Okay. And again, there's a couple of things going on there. prejudice and racism, ultimately comes down to miss categorizing a group of people. Yeah. And so, you know, if a Jewish person does something wrong, or Palestinian persons or something, if they're all bad, yeah, this is this, this

Unknown Speaker 9:06
guided philosophy. Yeah, for some reason, it only takes one one person to change your whole view on a certain race.

Unknown Speaker 9:13
Exactly. Exactly. So anyway, these these young men who were visiting the United States, and, you know, we're in Vermont, so you figured Vermont's you know, quiet state. Too much crime or whatever it is. And this guy, just, you know, he had, he had some animus toward them. And he shot three people and looks like two of them were going to recover. The other person, of course, has had a bone in his spine. So that's kind of problematic, but it's really interesting. And then of course, you have with with the Jewish population in our country, a huge increase in anti semitism. Yeah, but but the like, why? Like the Palestinian men who had nothing to do with Hamas, or the people who live here had nothing to do with what was going on and in the Middle East. But I think, I think ultimately, I think those the things that happened in the Middle East were just an excuse for the feelings that a lot of people always felt. Yeah. And that's an abuse these what's going on there as a as a justification, you know, for that kind of behavior. And of course, the other thing, that's interesting, too, and there was a great article by Mike Bloomberg, in the in, in his magazine about about gardens. And again, we see another example of some obviously, profoundly disturbed person, and they're able to get a hold of a firearm. And that ties into that ties into a study that was released a few days ago, having to do with suicide. And we had the biggest amount of people commit suicide and 2022 than it's ever been recorded. Okay, so that so that's one interesting thing. We had a huge jump in suicide among women 25 to 34. And teen suicide. Yeah. But the really, really interesting thing beside all those other things was the vast majority of suicide was suicide by gun. So, again, the availability of these weapons, yeah, you have a person who's disturbed or depressed, what have you. And it's become normalized, in a sense.

Unknown Speaker 11:52
Yeah, I want to see, like, I guess what the excuse would be to keep these guns, you know, because you know, how they're, they're always like, the government always like, oh, like, or, like, the right wing parties are like, oh, we need the guns to like, protect ourselves. Okay. But these guns are like killing your kids. Your kids get a hold of these guns, and they end up shooting themselves. Like, how does that make you feel? Yeah, you know, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 12:19
yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, there's a movie. There's a movie, and I wasn't able to show it in this semester. But I would like to show it in the future called the sun. Oh. And it addresses what your IP addresses what you're saying that, you know, as, as Mike Bloomberg says in his article, there is no purpose for a lot of these guns. Yeah, they're not they're not guns to protect the house. They're not guns to Hans, Dad guns, basically, military style guns, to kill as many people and name as many people. And as short a time as possible. Yeah. So what is the societal? What is the societal benefit? Of that? I think I think that the Democratic Party, to a large extent, has not been as aggressive about opposing this. I think that's that's one of the problems. I think it should be something that comes up repeatedly in Congress. Yeah. About, you know, what's going on. But it is, there's an indifference to there is an indifference to the human suffering of all these families, who have to deal with, you know, suicide in the family. And then there's an indifference also to the families who, like in Uvalde, in El Paso, and Pittsburgh with a synagogue, we could be here till next week. But but there's that indifference, there's a societal and difference. Yeah. And that really ties into a story that I came that I never knew about, which we discussed previously, having to deal with the military. So the military, you know, has all these weapons of mass destruction. But one of the one of the weapons that's been a common weapon for many, many years is the rocket launcher. It's a shoulder fired rocket launcher that the soldiers use. And they did a study about the impact on the soldiers who were using the rocket launcher. And the unequivocal conclusion that they raged was it was very, very dangerous, that it was it was harmful to the brain. It caused all kinds There's a brain abnormalities, CTE and depression and all the rest of it. This was quite a while ago. And then they I guess they had done another study. And the other study confirmed the first study that was endangering our men and women in the military. Okay. So the natural question would be, well, if that's the case, then what? What is the military doing about trying to create something that would be safer for our soldiers? And the answer basically, is nothing. They don't care for the soldiers. They're still using. They're still using the same rocket launchers. Yeah. And I'm saying to myself, that's the problem. See, that's the problem. It's the problem in the military. It's the problem in throughout our society, that people are just indifferent. Like people, people just don't care.

Unknown Speaker 16:01
People don't care until it happens to them. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 16:04
yeah. Yeah. And of course, it makes it even more egregious is it's the military. Yeah, it's the people

Unknown Speaker 16:13
who are supposed to be protecting us. Yeah, they're

Unknown Speaker 16:16
our protectors, the men and women who are in the military and all different, you know, branches of the military. And then you have a situation where it's clearly been scientifically proven, tentative and harmed. And you figure well, it would certainly be a priority of the, of the government of the Defense Department to try to take care of that care for them. And they don't do anything. You know, I remember when my father was alive. And my father was a vet. And he had been in the military for a number of years. And I had to get some supplies from my dad at one of the VA hospitals. This was in New York City. It blew my mind. It blew my mind. I couldn't believe I could not believe in our country out of wallow service people that served our country. The conditions that the hospital was it was existing on there. And how, repeatedly time after time after time, the veterans groups have protested against the inferior medical care of the of the Veterans Administration. And this is something that there's no Jewish Muslim woman, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, it's against all these people who served our country. Yeah. And they have like, no. Just no inclination to help them. And I and this is where we get back against the institutions, that people that people are indifferent. And I think another thing that's really interesting about it, too, is you have basically a volunteer army in this country. Yeah. So that seems in some ways for people to release their obligation to care about those men and women who volunteered to serve, that they're even more remote from what the military is doing. It's a very bizarre thing, because, you know, it used to be when, when I was growing up, that you had a draft. Yeah. And, you know, the people were drafted, and you went into the service. But isn't it? Isn't it even an even greater compliment to those people? Who would volunteer to serve in our military? That don't have to, but they want to make that a career in the various forces of our military. And it doesn't seem like people have any connection to it. You know, who do they think is protecting them? Exactly.

Unknown Speaker 19:05
You know? Yeah, what happens until I like protection is gone. Wow. You know,

Unknown Speaker 19:11
yeah, well, yeah, of course, of course. You know, and I, and I think that in one of the movies that we saw, I think it was, I think it was the Ides of March, where you know, he's the main character sits down with a woman who's the reporter and he's lauding this man Mike Morrison saying he's great and he's gonna make change and you know, etc, etc. And the woman like dismisses them, the woman says, like, you you must be choking. Yeah, that, you know, these people. They don't believe in anything they believe in just, you know, in their own power, own power. I mean, for every for every Bernie Sanders or Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney. Knee. There's 100 People that don't care. But oh, yeah. You know. And it's interesting because there used to be people who were very I don't have it put it dedicated. And people who were who really believed in certain principles. Yeah, you know, and through through their belief in the principles, they were able to enact legislation for voting and, and civil rights, and then you know, women's rights and all the rest of these things. And now, it's like, when you observe what's going on, there you sit, what is this about? It's just like, it's almost like a like a reality show? Yeah, actually, yeah. You know, they're all threatening one another, and they gotta fight with one another. You know, and I guess, I guess, that's become normalized somehow. I mean, it's not normal. But it's,

Unknown Speaker 20:55
it's really sad that it's normal. Not like normal and quotation work. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 21:00
But but, you know, Liz Cheney, her book came out. And it's interesting, it's interesting, because she was always a very conservative person this may have obviously, your father was the vice president. And, you know, he was very conservative. But, I mean, she just turned against it, though. She just, she said, you know, what's, what's happening in the country, particularly the Republican Party, she, she just, she just walked away from it. She said, I can't, I can't, you know, what shall we say? Go, we'll go along with it. But one of the one of the things now, we're talking about all these different things in the country, is the justice system. And the complete inequality of the justice system, nominally, I'm an attorney, and I, you know, went to law school and all that. And, you know, you're, you're, you're gonna go into the professional world, as an accountant and everything. It was only really, it was only really, till I got into academia, despite all the, you know, experience I had in these different things. I never realized that was this bad, though. And I knew it was bad. I knew, you know, from being in, you know, doing work in the justice system and everything. I knew that there was inequality. But it's gotten real bad. It's gotten so bad that you have people now we're basically criminal. And they're walking around campaigning. I mean, how is that possible? How is that possible? How is it possible? For someone? How was it possible for there's a great movie, if you ever, if our listeners want to see great movies called reality, the name of the movies reality, and it's about this woman whose name was reality winner? Oh, and she worked for the government. And she, she, I guess what she considered herself a whistleblower. And she transmitted one document, one document to this, this media organization. She went to prison for five years. What? Yeah, she went to prison for five years for one document document. And you have and you have a situation now where were the FBI and the Justice Department, you know, go into a home. And there's documents all over the place. All over the place, secret documents, a DOD, Id mark, secret, highly secret top secret, and nothing is done. Nothing is done so that people see that. The danger of that is that people see that the law is a joke. Yeah, basically. And it's the same thing. It's the same thing in the criminal law. It's the same thing in the criminal law, you can see people who are a, you know, minority people, black people, Hispanic people, Asian people, what have you, and indigenous American people who get arrested for something and they can't make bail. And they're, they're in jail for who knows how long those how long? And

Unknown Speaker 24:15
then on top of that, if they do get, like, declared like guilty, then it's like, even more of a show. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 24:21
So they're actually serving the longer sentence, then then

Unknown Speaker 24:24
they what they might be like, given for Yeah, ordinarily

Unknown Speaker 24:27
would, of course, yes. That's the other crazy thing, though. That's going on. But I think that I think that we're going to be our conscious is going to be tested when these trials actually come to fruition. Because there's going to there has to be at some point, a statements by the society and by the justice system, that certain things are wrong. Yeah. You know, which doesn't seem to be You know, and I don't I don't understand. I don't understand the support of a lot of people for this kind of behavior when they know this wrong, though. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 25:13
I can't understand you there. Yeah, I

Unknown Speaker 25:15
can't believe I can't believe that any right minded person would have seen what happened on January 6, and thought that was correct. I mean, that can't be because there clearly was something that happened that day. Yeah. Not

Unknown Speaker 25:27
only that, but how can you stand for a guy that's like, actually a criminal of fraud, basically, because I know that there's a lot of people were like, oh, like, we like him. Because He's different. He's not a politician. He's a businessman. But his business is fake. His financials are fake.

Unknown Speaker 25:49
My thought my thought, my thought on this. Politics brings forth a lot of different people. Yeah, we get into politics. And, you know, my problem is, though, my problem is, though, you can't, you can't have an office, someone who basically believes that the Constitution and the right of elect election is not to be obeyed. And that a person could just go out and say, Well, you know, I believe that, you know, is fake and where my stuff, the system of justice and 2000, and the 2020 election was, was fulfilled, because in many, many courts unanimously, both Republican and Democratic courts, in numerous states, in federal and federal courts, as well, unanimously found unanimously found that there was no election fraud. Okay, then you have the whole situation where people are having this riot. And even if you gave, even if you gave the ex president the the benefit of the doubt, which is pushing it, but I would be willing to extend some of his supporters say he didn't know what was going to happen. Okay, maybe maybe that was possible. But once it happened, then you have to use the full resources of the government and the military. Yeah, to bring water. And what's very fascinating to me on that day was that it was Mike Pence. It was it was Nancy Pelosi, it was Mitch McConnell, and all these people who were really the ones who got the who started the impetus to get military support and all the rest of that, to get to the Capitol. To add police officers who were there who heroic, yeah, who are heroic. So you know, anytime somebody talks to me about color, or any of the rest of those things, my thing is, yeah, okay. The vast majority of those officers were were black or Latino. Today, they saved our democracy. Yeah, for sure. And they saved the lives of all these peoples. So don't tell me about the color of their skin. Because that's, that's insulting. But we're going to, we're going to face these issues relatively soon. And it's going to be a tremendous strain on the fabric of the country. If if all these people would still support someone who might even be convicted. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 28:48
And now full on criminal. Yeah. Well, you know, what a what a what a joke, honestly.

Unknown Speaker 28:53
Well, if the system of justice has to work, though, yeah. You know, if the system of justice works, I mean, even if he was found innocent if Yeah, I mean, even if he was found innocent, the system of justice is working, because it was brought before the court. Yeah. And the jury decided, but you get the feeling with a lot of these people that they don't respect the justice system at all. So you know, they would they would not abide by that either. Well, listen, we've, we've enjoyed talking to all of you out there. And we look forward to speaking to you again, next week.

Unknown Speaker 29:33
Goodnight. Goodnight. Thank you for listening to our show. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at tangi one that is T A N, G, one at UNLV thought nevada.edu. Or to contact Professor Charles satin at charles.stanton@unlv.edu See you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai