We just have to stop being crazy. We have to stop. It is becoming very clear that a lot of people have lost their minds. I don't mean the people protesting last night. They were exercising their civil liberties. You remember civil liberties. It's what all those protesters who stormed state capitals with guns were yelling about. How we are all free to live our lives however we see fit. You do you, I'll do me. I mean the police who think killing black people is ok. I mean the nuts jobs who chased down and killed a man who jogged through their neighborhood. I mean the President, who was fine with the gun toting nut jobs when they were protesting the shut down, threatening to shoot people with his tweet "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." I don't think that is going to calm people down. We have a country full of angry, confused, lost people. I think a lot of the anger comes from economic disparity, from the feeling that a very small amount of people control most of the money and all of the power. From being told we live in the Land of the Free where if you do the right thing and work hard, you will succeed, but actually live in a country where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And it's been that way for a long time. Maybe forever. Certainly since the 1980s. I think, during the Great Depression, there were some things done that gave the working class a chance. Laws that made sense, that reined in out of control banks, set up social safety nets, and slightly evened the playing field. I think World War Two brought about even more equalization, wth things like the GI Bill, and a common feeling of everyone working for the same thing. The middle class grew, the super rich and the super poor shrunk. Things still weren't perfect. Lots of unjustice and racism and basic dickishness abounded. But there seemed to to a slow march towards progress. So the super rich organized, got some good speech writers, and some smart lawyers, and started taking over the government on all levels. We got fake stories about welfare mothers driving Cadillacs, and the lionization of quotes like "greed is good". We got the modern GOP, which seems to have been infected with avarice and assholes.
And what do you need, if you are taking peoples money, hopes, dreams, and world? A good scapegoat. Someone to blame who isn't you. And here in America, we have the black community. You know, the people we stole and enslaved? The ones who make folks uncomfortable because they remind them of a part of our history that doesn't jibe with the idea of American Exceptionalism. Subtly by some, overtly by others, a lot of people in powerful positions try to paint this picture of African Americans that is just a bunch of bullshit. Look at our movies and tv shows, the places where we tell our myths. How often is the bad guy, the criminal, the evil one, a person of color? It's a little better now than when I was a kid. But only a little. We have created this bizarre portrait of America that doesn't reflect reality. And a lot of people buy into it. Because it's easier to be mad at someone who lives near you than to be mad at rich folks up on the hill. I think maybe part of the reason that is so is because we have also made being poor and/or not rich feel like a sin, something to be ashamed of, and something that is completely your fault, not the result of a rigged system designed to keep people in their places by the few who have it good. So, instead of addressing that aching shame at something a lot of folks feel deep in their bones, we are fed a line of garbage in subtle and not so subtle ways that the culprit is other poor people! I think some people in power know this is a bunch of crap, and just don't care. I think the President buys into it because he is a fool with a weak mind, and feels his own personal shame at his iniquities, so he too needs a scapegoat.
Scapegoat. What a fucking awful thing. We have had them in each society, it seems. A subset of a culture that the masses blame for all their ills, while those who are the true cause of those ills sit in their mansions counting their money while the ghettos burn. And there have always been others who see that. I think of 1 Timothy 6:10, which is the one that goes "For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows". So, you have a country with huge economic disparity. You have a police force filled with working class people, mostly white men, who have bought into the scapegoating, racist line of thinking. And you have a long, long, long list of innocent people getting killed by angry, stupid, and well-armed people who have lost all sense of their morality.
Anyone who thinks we have gotten better with our racist myths needs to wake up.
We need to throw those cops in jail. We need to change our system. We need to change.
Here's a song. It's Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday, which is as fucking pertinent now as when she recorded it years ago.
1 comment:
"Strange Fruit" was a popular song, in spite of the dark truth it told. Maybe white people didn't object to it because they couldn't crack the code. It's about lynching, specifically lynching black people. These days, we Americans, who are famous for inventing the cell phone and the personal computer, are now using a new invention from Officer Derek Michael Chauvin, the knee lynching. For decades now, we've known that when the police commit a crime against an unarmed black man, riots follow until the police involved are charged with the crime they committed. And yet, after Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck until he stopped breathing, without even trying to hide the murder from the cell phones recording video of the crime, the authorities in Minnesota sat on their hands while people protested. Only after a police station was torched in a riot did they finally arrest Chauvin. Why? Because these authorities are part of a system that is accustomed to burying such crimes in order to keep control of the poor and downtrodden, the people of color and others who might threaten their wealth and power. This can't be what America is about. This can't be what makes us exceptional.
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