I grew up in a very racist family. For all I know, some of them still are that way. I never really understood it, even when I was young, largely because there weren’t any people of color in my neighborhood and few families of color lived in my school district either.
Yet, I was still very aware of the problems going on in the south with segregation, the riots in Watts and the civil unrest going on throughout the nation, not only about civil rights and equality, but about the war. Walter Cronkite made sure I never missed a moment, delivering all the details to our homes personally every evening at six o’ clock.
I guess the war shaped my views on color and race to some extent. I quickly learned that anyone can die from a bullet – white, black, Hispanic, Asian, male, female – death didn’t discriminate.
Neither did I. My brothers and father would regularly use racial slurs to poke fun of others, but it didn’t stick with me for some reason. It would have been easy for me to jump right in, I guess, making fun of others because of something as stupid as the color of their skin, but it just wasn’t me.
As the years passed, I thought all this nonsense about race had passed us by. I thought we had moved on, become more civil as a society, judging people by their character, not the color of their skin. The Civil Rights Act had been passed, the signs in the south came down and everyone seemed to have discovered a new level of tolerance and acceptance nationwide.
But as one of my southern friends said, only the signs came down. People still knew their place, where it was safe to go and where it wasn’t, and they knew that being caught in the wrong place could get you lynched.
Sad. I have learned over the years that there are only two types of people in this world: Those who are assholes and those who aren’t assholes. Either way, they come in every color, creed, gender and orientation imaginable. I have met white assholes as well as black assholes. And I treat all assholes the same. Even then I don’t discriminate. 🙂
Then I see the tragedy that unfolded in Charleston and I can no longer hold my tongue. We are not a civilized nation. We have made no progress as a people in the years since Selma. Yes, the signs came down, but the discrimination has remained, simmering, finally boiling over into open hatred and divisive division one so multiple fronts
Now I’m not going to sit here and take the easy route, pointing to our gun loving, violent culture as the reason for all this strife. However, I will say that the call to arm everyone plays right into the hands of those who have most to gain from our state of panic and fear – the 1% who would love it if we all just shot ourselves dead, what an easy way to rid the nation of all those cockroaches – the lower and middle class. And I’m not going to cheapen things by claiming that mental illness is the root cause of all this calamity, because, quite frankly, anyone who kills another person has to be off his or her rocker, at least a bit.
I do think, however, that this all has something to do with us being a nation of ones. We are no longer united as a nation. We have subdivided and subdivided into smaller groups to the point where it’s all about us, not everyone else. Instead of reaching out to others, we retreat into our smartphones, which only reinforce our stereotypes, feed our egos (a selfie stick, really?), and allow us to readily tune out others who may have a fresh perspective on the world around us, one that can even change our own deeply rooted mindsets. We retreat into a world of madness where everything we say, do and believe is correct and everyone else is suspect. We self validate even the craziest of beliefs without checking a single fact against reality.
All the while, we support those in power who readily fuel our fears, who call for a return to the simpler days (which ones, the ones with slavery or signage), and beat the drum of fear about terrorists abroad while terrorists right here on our own turf shoot up churches and kill innocent children (anyone remember Oklahoma City?). We point our fingers at trigger-happy cops because the media plays the same out-of-context video over and over on 24 hour news so we believe the world is what they say it is, not the way we believe it should be. We eventually tire and give in, becoming mindless, manipulated puppets who are more interested in sharing cute pictures of cats with our friends than engaging in a meaningful dialogue about our country’s deepest problems.
We are becoming an Ununited States, one where our neighbor is feared because he might be different than us. We obsess about the few differences between each other rather than the many similarities. We demonize others, sometimes entire cultures, because we are too lazy to educate ourselves about them, to find the truth and not live off a second- or third-hand myth. We pass on faux news as if it is the Gospel and we repeat and recycle their vitriol. We are mimes and mimics, not free thinkers. We hold onto convenient stereotypes because they insulate us and reinforce who we are, even if they are woefully mistaken.
And we argue about non-issues. We are quick to say that the evil doer was mentally disturbed or came from an abusive family but never question why a symbol of racism and dominance is allowed to continue to fly in a state’s capital in this day and age. We take two steps forward and three or four back, retreating to mediocrity rather than soaring to greatness because it just takes too much work.
The truth is, we are not all that different. We only choose to be different. We hide willingly behind our own ethnocentrisms because it’s far easier, far safer to blame others for our own failures than to look honestly in the mirror and realize that just perhaps, we are to blame for our pitiful, luckless life, not some convenient stereotype.
Ultimately, each of us must answer for the walk we take in this world. Every day we can choose to move closer to people than away. We can step out of our own world of selfishness and reach out to others. We can close the divides that our destroying our nation and make our country the envy of the world. Or, as we are right now, we can turn our backs, retreat into our shells, and destroy a nation through fear-mongering and hatred. It’s our choice, each of us. And ultimately, we are responsible for the outcome.
In the Emerald City, embracing the world around me (except those assholes).
– Robb