I find myself making comments on articles at FoxNews.com, a seemingly benign if not necessarily wholesome activity. Sometimes, or perhaps most of the time, the level of discourse is little above insults and name-calling, but who knows what is real or trolling, whatever that actually means. My comments undoubtedly raise the level of conversation and provide cutting and sophisticated insight (trying to be humorous here), and generally receive a moderate number of “likes,” the standard by which we judge our existences. Also I often receive replies ranging from thoughtful to pure invective. Recently (Dec. 21st) I found myself in a prolonged discussion with someone using the screen name Julieplsekbrown responding to a comment I made regarding 20-year Democrat Rep. Luis Guitierrez from Chicago. Guitierrez, who supposedly once stated, “I have only one loyalty and that's to the immigrant community,” was in the news for a 6-minute harangue of the Secretary of Homeland Security, following which he departed the hearing room without listening to her response.
My wife and I moved from NY to South Alabama in 2008,primarily for reasons related to operating our small charity project in Honduras. During our almost four years there (about half in Alabama, half in Honduras) I encountered one true died in the wool racist, a relic of about 80 who happened to be our neighbor. Chatting with him for the first time by the mailbox about lawnmowers he spontaneously declared, “I don’t care much for Afro-Americans (actually he used another word).” He continued for a bit, talking about the good times when Afro-Americans (actually he used another word) ‘knew their place,” and so on. To paraphrase Crocodile Dundee: Now That’s a Racist! My wife, who had never met a real racist,wasn’t there at the time so later I introduced her, forewarned. The old guy didn’t disappoint- it was like going to some museum of bigotry and watching a real time exhibition.
Of course that was 2008, a quaint time before countless millions were declared to be racists by progressive fiat. What exactly happened in the past 10 years to make so many millions of previously benign Americans become vile hate-filled bigots? First we need to understand what it means to be a racist in the progressive, post-modern sense, and we can do this metaphorically. Say an overtired kid has a tantrum when he’s told it’s bedtime and, as part of his personal resistance movement, yells to his mother that that she is a“poopy.” Dad also tells him it’s bedtime but, seeing a little humor, asks him exactly what is a poopy. The kid, crying more vigorously now, yells,“You are a poopy too,” but off to bed he goes off and is quickly asleep.
Obviously in this scenario the little tyke couldn’t be expected to explain himself rationally; he was fully controlled by the emotion of the moment. A “poopy” was simply the creation of an immature mind directed at someone who didn’t give him immediate gratification. Fortunately his parents didn’t have to worry that their lives would be damaged by a silly and nonsensical accusation from an upset child. It would be a worrisome world indeed if immature and self-centered beings could hurl insults and accusations they couldn’t actually define and truly injure people with them.
A couple of ideas here should be self-evident. First, if words don’t have agreed upon meanings or those meanings are constantly in flux, then language ceases to be a means of communication. Second, the term “racist” is not particularly difficult to define or understand, at least for a grown-up whose intellect is consistent with their chronological age. However, for people whose age indicates adulthood but emotional functioning is more like our cranky little guy above,then a “racist” simply means a “poopy,” which doesn’t really mean anything at all.
One might ask how did we devolve into this linguistic and emotional chaos? The answer to this is multi-faceted but certainly the absurd wealth we possess plays a major part. Never before have so many people been so totally removed from the requirements of sustenance: kids having to getup and feed the chickens or milk the cows before school, as recent as my generation, is as far away as another universe. Our wealth is such that an endless abundance of food, technology,entertainment, etc is simply “there,” and when something is redundantly ubiquitous one needn’t consider its source.
Picture, for example, our socialist antifa hero who, after an evening of smashing car windows, peels off his sweaty but stylish balaclava and takes a well-deserved Starbucks break, enjoying a $5 Serious Strawberry Frappuccino. With satisfaction of as job well done he uses his I-Phone 10 to log-on to the news and hears kudos from the college president and local progressive mayor for standing up for tolerance-another conservative speaker has been run out of town! Never once does he contemplate the enormous and complex transportation and logistical chain that brought together the components of his tasty beverage and the innovation, built on the back of decades and centuries of prior innovation, that allows for his phone, let alone the auto glass he bravely destroyed. If someone suggested it all happened because of capitalism and hard work, he’d simply yell, “you are like Hitler” and storm off.
While excessive wealth and its associated elitism is perhaps a foundational basis for the proliferation outrage, hate, and name calling,there are other significant factors as well. Broken families underlie much of our societal dysfunction but this applies largely to the non-elite, keeping in mind that feminist dogma has long rejected the necessity of fathers; feminism is an elitist phenomenon and those that can afford the nannies and parent substitutes can get by just fine.
I propose it’s the intact progressive minded families and the supporting institutions (i.e.schools and universities, celebritydom of all stripes) that have shifted the paradigm from setting limits for kids, meaningful discipline, and a sense of respect to child- centered, self-esteem driven self-absorption. Here is a blatant example- I once witnessed (for real) a boy of perhaps10 hit another child of 12 or so in the chest with a branch. The mother’s response was, “What a good boy,you could have hit him in head but you only hit him in the chest.” The mother’s overriding concern was that her child “like” her and, of course, once a parent abrogates their obligation to be a parent as compared to a friend, the chances of the kid growing up to be a respectful and successful adult greatly diminish.
When wealth is so great it ceases being primarily a means of reasonable comfort and security and becomes frivolous, and frivolity is inconsistent with a deeper or more meaningful significance to life. In this void we find guilt and indolence, a sense that there must be something more, but to find this would take actual effort, perhaps at the unacceptable expense of our material comfort. Hence we have found a work-around: Yes,there unfairness, inequality, and suffering in the world and at some level I would like to help, but doing something actually useful would take me out of my comfort zone, and perhaps cost me money, time and effort. Therefore I can assuage my own inadequacies by feeling, or at least feigning, outrage, and by projecting it at people who don’t possess the enormous compassion and empathy I know is within me. I am a wonderful and righteous person, and you are a racist, Nazi, bigot, homophobe, transgenderphobe, Islamophobe, misogynist, or Fascist. By hating you I am absolved of my guilt, now off to the wine-tasting fund raiser for Planned Parenthood, where I know everyone will be wonderful, just like me!
Calling people “racists” is so common these days that it has become meaningless, which is actually a problem because there are true racists who can cause misery for others, but the reality of their malicious beliefs becomes diluted- putting someone who doesn’t embrace illegal immigration at the same level as a Cross-burning Klan member may be satisfying on a transitory basis but at the same time it diminishes the vileness of the Klan.Whatever the reason(s) progressive leftists cannot control their self-righteous anger and angst, the recipients of their vitriol,which presently includes conservatives, Republicans, believing Christians,white males, and white females who aren’t progressive leftists (and, curiously,sometimes non-white people who reject progressivism), can take solace in the knowledge that the social justice activists, whether college students, “antifa”morons, or wealthy Ivy League professors, are simply calling you a “poopy,”which has no significance beyond the emotions of an overtired child. Unfortunately, while the four year-old kid will wake up happy and refreshed, the “woke” activist will wake up angry and offended, ready to hurl insults at people who don’t agree with them on all matters of life, politics, culture, and philosophy.
On Nov. 18, 2016 a black youth, 15 year-old Javon Wilson, was shot to death in his home in Chicago. The suspects/culprits were inside the house when apparently an argument over a pair of shoes ensued, and 17 year-old Dijae T. Banks (a female) handed a pistol to 16 year-old Tariq M. Harris (a male) who then shot Wilson. News accounts summed up his short life with a depressing “he liked basketball and rap music.”
His death was not particularly out of the ordinary, sadly. In the progressive world we’ve created, life, per se, is not of inherent or specific value, lest we sound like Pro-Life nut jobs talking about the “sanctity of life.” This especially holds true with black people, where there exists no innate value, but rather the meaning and matter of life is largely determined by the manner of death, with a few exceptions such as black sports and music figures, celebrities in general, and inaptly described civil rights leaders. Had young Javon Wilson been shot by the police his life would had found great significance and been marked by ecstatic outrage, marches, riots, and perhaps other murders. Typically, however, a black person murdered by another black person rates at best a candle light vigil, a makeshift monument of teddy bears, and a few pro-forma words from a local politician of how we have to stop the violence.
From 1982 to 1986 I worked as a Physician Assistant (PA) at a Federal Prison (FCI Ray Brook in New York). This, of course, was in the early days of AIDS and there was heightened concern of exposure to blood. One day, along with one or two other PAs, I was in the little pharmacy and one of us knocked over a bottle of Betadyne, a common surgical antiseptic with a rusty brown color. The pharmacist, who was not with us at the time of the spill, returned and was quite vocal that we had been “throwing blood around the pharmacy.” We assured him everything was okay, it wasn’t blood but Betadyne. His response to this was emblematic of certain human reactions in the face of the unexpected: “It might as well be blood!” he declared. To be fair, the pharmacist was a decent guy who had a little problem with his temper, but in many ways his denial of facts in favor of his angst of the moment has proven to be prescient of a behavior that is now largely ruling our society.
There is an undeniable temptation, when considering Melissa Click, to compose a juvenile limerick in regards to her surname. Having admitted this and successfully resisted it we can move on.
Melissa Click, in her mid-40s, first entered our consciousness in November 2015 during commotions for social justice at the University of Missouri, Columbia. These were largely the progeny of Michael Brown and all that he entailed, and spearheaded by student government President and U of M 2015 Homecoming King Peyton Head, who is worthy of a brief detour. President Head is a child of actual privilege in that (his bio suggests) his father has been present throughout his life, and the pseudo-privilege that so distresses the social justice activists in that his father obtained the level of school principal in the Chicago school system, indicating a certain financial comfort. His privilege is fully mitigated, however, by his being a young black man and apparent homosexual.
http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4542228%2Fpresident-obama-eulogy-clementa-pinckney-funeral-service President Obama at his best, drawing on 2000 years of Christian tradition, also recently demonstrated by Rwandan Christians after their 1994 genocide and by Lancaster County Amish folks after their 2006 Nickel Mines school massacre (an example of forgiveness also explicitly followed by the survivors at Emmanuel AME church). The President here has kept a tight rein on his inclination to exploit crises for political advantage (limiting it to between about 25:00 and 30:00 in this 38 minute speech). That's progress, but he is still missing that part of the Christian tradition, which some Rwandan survivors have also missed, but which the Amish understand, and which Jesus himself clearly understood and articulated: that there is a possibility for Christians to do forgiveness and reconciliation, and experience Amazing Grace, without at the same time yielding to the temptation to lay their hands on political power which amounts to violence and coercion in another form.
Several months go, when the BLM sentiment was all the rage, progressives climbed over themselves to express their heartfelt commitment to the cause, lest they be discovered as the first one to have stopped applauding. As the hapless president of Smith College ($62,000 per year to attend), Kathleen McCartney, attempted to hop on the bandwagon of compassion and outrage, the poor thing committed quite a faux paux. In her rush to be hip and stand in solidarity with the huddled masses she ejaculated an e-mail declaring, “All Lives Matter.” Much like a malodorous emission of flatulence at a Boston wine tasting, there was brief pause as the proper reaction was considered. This was followed in short order by expressions of hurt and offense so dear to our modern educated youths: “It felt like she was invalidating the experience of black lives” one Smith student was quoted as saying; “It minimizes the anti-blackness of this the current situation” opined another. Needless to say Ms. McCartney apologized profusely, sycophantically acknowledging that, “As members of the Smith community we are struggling, and we are hurting.” She promised the soothing tonics of a new Chief Diversity Officer and renewals of social justice commitments. Perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of her statement, “All Lives Matter,” was that it came precariously close to sounding like the words of some Pro-Life nut job. ...continue reading →
