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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AMERICAN INTOLERANCE

I'm not interested in the gun rights argument the same as I'm not interested in capital punishment issues. Capital punishment is set and gun laws are set. It is a truth that the American passion for guns is a bit out of balance, but then so is everything else. Now the guy in the movie theater playing dress-up in a SWAT outfit walks into the movie theater and blows away as many people as he can in a given time. How American is that? It happens here so frequently, it has become a particularly American "crime." Who is surprised anymore? If the American populace were aware that there is a valid world beyond American borders, we'd be collectively ashamed. But who is? A lone gunman who doesn't represent anybody but himself. Whatever. I can't argue with the availability of guns and ammo. Guns are American as Barbie.


I've wondered for a long list of years about American collective karma, like what is the return on the wholesale slaughter of a continent of people? What about the return on the slaughter of the buffalo? What about the return on willful ignorance? What about the return on the collective attitude---if it's living, kill it? What about the indifference of the corporate world in the well being of the peasantry? What is the karmic return on white people keeping black people down? These random public shootings by frustrated people strike me a return so particularly American as to have a great deal to do with our collective karma. I'm thinking these particularly American crimes against humanity have their collective return, like identifying the natural world with the devil, looking at everything living a target. The return would be particularly American too. And the arrogance of the white man? What kind of return does that bring to the white man? Contempt from other races, for sure.


In 1972, I was riding a train through (then) Yugoslavia, (now) Bulgaria, the only American, and behind the Iron Curtain. Pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone. Sometimes, people in clusters talking a language I didn't know would sometimes say to me, "President Nixon," and everybody laughed with derision at the American stooge. They were not friendly. Not hostile either. I realized they were subject to propaganda through news media just like we are. It would not have done me any good to say, and have translated, that I dislike him more than they do, for what he's doing to my democracy. If it were an American train and a Russian who didn't know English, I've an idea he would have been outside his comfort zone too. Such experiences are memorable. There is nothing like being looked at with suspicion by two Eastern European men in dark olive green coats to the floor, black boots, green hats and a red star on the forehead, black gloves. Kinda intimidating. They meant no intimidation. I was an outsider passing through.


It was inwardly exciting to me riding a train across a corner of the Iron Curtain that was once the Ottoman Empire, the only trace I was aware of being the scent of Turkish tobacco in the air from Trieste east. From Trieste west, the scent in the air was Virginia tobacco. I knew very few people who had been behind the Iron Curtain. In the time of the Cold War, it was not a fashionable place to go. It was a part of the world with a history I knew nothing about. The signs were in both Yugoslav and Russian. It was the most foreign environment I believe I've been in. Mexico is awfully foreign, but in a familiar way. Those people were not allowed guns and they lived in a police state. We are allowed guns and we live in a police state. What's the difference?


Americans are held in contempt all over the world now. In the Fifties, we were the Ugly American. Since then, we've gone through the hideous American, through the Reagan era of starting civil wars in 3rd world countries to keep them under control. CIA ops all over the world have grown into what we now call "terrorism." Poor countries with minimal resources and no defense are reduced to the civilian population becoming militarized. We drop bombs from the sky and that's called a good thing. They make IEDs, plant roadside bombs and that's a bad thing. What do we do? We go on watching television and wanting more things. A war on the evening news is essential for keeping the right wing pacified, has been throughout my lifetime. Our passion for guns is turned inward on ourselves. In Michael Moore's film, Bowling For Columbine, he asked some Canadian teenagers why they supposed the murder rate by firearm is so incredibly much higher than Canada's. One boy said, "Americans must not like each other." That rang a bell.


I'm recalling a visit with someone I've known a few years. His living room window overlooks Main St and a big parking lot. Periodically, he'll complain about people making noise at 6am or some odd time. He makes a mock gesture like with a high-powered rifle, a sniper to take care of the problem. I mentioned a couple of good Tom Berringer Sniper films. He said, "No, man, I'm not into violence!" I had to laugh. I said, "Every time I'm here, you talk about sniping people making noises at odd hours. I thought you were ok with violence." I don't think he's seen himself get into a minor emotional passion acting like he's sniping offenders. He's not the only one. It's become commonplace to exhibit intolerance toward anyone not self. How quickly we call somebody an idiot or stupid for something so minor as to be unworthy of notice. In America, the right wing has been so provocative over the last 30+ years and so divisive, so intolerant of anybody not a Limbaugh devotee, they're activating the people they hate into hating them in return. Karl Rove's Alice's Tea Party is division for the sake of division. The right wing is so aggressively fascist that sometimes it looks like civil war is where we're headed. Why? It makes good tv.  


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