Friday, March 15, 2013
RACIAL PROFILING WHITE MEN
A question that is lurking in the minds of about everybody I know, a varied pie slice of the social spectrum, is basically, why are we humans so mean to one another? That question is universal and goes all the way back. The question now has more to do with why do so many people dislike other people in America the land of the free. Random shootings that happen somewhere in the US every day are rather poignant expressions of contempt for others. That the shooter is satisfied with random kills, nobody in particular in mind, says the shooter is killing "people." He hates people. There is a lot of that going around, and it looks like the problem is a very real one with white men. White men are freaking out. The rush on AKs by white men all over the country after a school shooting is so alarming that it ought to be setting off alarms. If this is a picture of contemporary white man thinking, I repeat, white men are freaking out. None of our corporate news sources, including NPR, have noticed anything to do with racial profiling these surprise random slayings in public. In a time when war is characterized by terrorism, random slayings of women, children, old people, anybody, dogs, camels, collateral damage, it's looking like white men are mad at the world and everybody in it. If you're in the wrong place at the wrong time then it's your time to go or get a leg or arm blown off, blinded or deaf for life.
American borders are tightly monitored keeping terrorists out. It's looking like we have homeland terrorists. In law enforcement they say they don't know where it will happen next, but they know it will happen. Little towns, big cities. I have friends with children who are anxious for their kids in case a random school killing happens in the classroom with their kids. All the kids are somebody's kids. White men are now a racial profile for terrorism. This will require bringing home all the troops from around the world to shut down armed white men, and they're already traditionally set against the black men and the Latin men. Police state will create more crime and that will lead to something like they do in Africa, armed rebels vs the police and army. I hesitate to go to that extreme in visioning, but it looks more and more inevitable every day. It's got to where seeing it any other way amounts to denial. But that's just looking at it from how it appears now. Everything changes. It may change for the worse or the better. The momentum at present looks like it's toward the worse. My question is what has happened to make white men freak out so incredibly. It doesn't help to say that these are men with mental issues and they snapped. In the whole collective of white men, it would be the mentally weak ones to snap first. That's where the chain breaks, the weakest link.
How long have we had hate radio? Thirty years or almost? It started as a kind of trend that sold ads, sometimes they went too far, and when they did step way over the line of decency, they sold more ads, got call-ins for ads. Reagan kicked off the right wing contempt for liberals, which Limbaugh and the whole Faux News team ran with and got working class white men frothing at the mouth with drama of hate for whatever sensible person it might be at the moment, the "black" president and the educated woman, Hilary. Elizabeth Warren is setting herself up to be the next intelligent woman target from the white male hate machine. It's looking like she has what it takes. These two women are like WW2 bombers flying into enemy territory; they need a lot of fighter escorts, bodyguards, a staff of strategists, ball-turret gunners, fund-raisers and what have you. I believe the Dalai Lama was onto something when he said Western women will be the ones to save us from ourselves. Who knows Western men better than Western women? Western men got us onto this race course to our collective undoing. I suppose what the Dalai Lama said means the women have what we need now. Good. Hilary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren look like a pretty strong front line. The first influential women have to be able to stand up to the men with power, like Warren has exhibited what she can do and does very well, and Hilary has shown her feet on the ground too. And the women don't have so much hate in them. That's a refreshing aspect of women. Women don't carry so much hate, unless for particular reasons that can't be forgiven.
Considering that everybody watches tv daily, uses it for source of information like what flu medicine is the BEST and which car is the BEST and which tire is the BEST and what detergent, what burger, what false eyelashes, an endless list. The news we hear every day is the worst things happening in the world that day. Sometimes on NPR you'll get a day-in-the-life 5 minutes of somebody's real life that isn't anything like on tv, an uplifting moment of people as we are, not as we're falsely represented by MAD Ave. If it bleeds, it leads, the journalist's pocket fortune cookie that works a hundred percent. Syrian army is destroying entire neighborhoods, targeting children, has gone to war on its own people. In Egypt Spring they're finding Mubarak wasn't all that bad. Every day we get our heads filled with these images and sounds of killing from everywhere in the world. That's the "news." If it doesn't bleed, it doesn't lead. Back pages or no room for it. Random assassinations going on all over the country. Hollywood movies are about shutting down the mind. They're lullabies with explosions and guns going off and gun threats, killing like it's the latest hot thing to do. They're hypnotic in the way they put the viewer to sleep and show the story like a dream by hypnotic suggestion. That's the nature of our pop culture in everyone's homes, some more than others.
Seeing what television is doing to the American people makes me really glad, I mean really glad that I do not watch one. I like to see one every once in awhile to see what the people I live among are believing at the moment. I learned long ago that when "everybody" is doing something, like dressing alike, using the same slang terms, like when there is a copy-cat trend to get featured on the evening news killing several people then oneself, the one thing "everybody" is doing is watching television. It's the mind that is coming through the television. It is breaking down all the beliefs in our belief systems. It evidently has enraged white men, the racists among white men. Just because we have laws about equal this and that, and black people are everywhere on tv and acceptable, and gay people are all over the tv and the latest new thing this year, it doesn't mean the racists among the white people have changed. They just don't watch those tv shows and they grimace during the commercials. Something to gripe about. Like Michael Moore said, "If guns keep us safe, America would be the safest country on earth." And Frank Zappa has said, "If pop music influenced people's behavior, we would all love one another."
We're in a time where we like such generalizations about "people," because people are stupid, people are idiots. We're quick to call somebody stupid or an idiot or an asshole in this time. A little too quick for my comfort. We're not allowed to say any of those working class slang terms that are politically incorrect. It's all right, however, to say, He's an idiot, or He's an asshole or He's stupid. It's in the middle class I hear these assessments according to intelligence levels. Working class is more interested in the physical than the mind. The working class talk in anti-political correctness language all the more because the middle class has made a taboo of the long list of forbidden PC words. It's funny for me that one set of people I spend time with get all prune-faced over certain words and another set of people I spend time with use those words to where they make chances to say them. They're hilarious. They're comedy. When I'm with the people that get old-baptist-pious-disapproval over certain key words, I have to laugh inside, because when I'm with my other friends we use all those words as much as we can, laughing like crazy, watching the race on the Faux channel. When it comes to gettin-er-done, them boys know how to do it. My thinking about those cars went way high up when I heard that a racing motorbike doesn't have a chance against one of the nascar racers. I can see it now, but never thought of it before.
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