Racism

I get it. The turmoil of shifting from Industrial Age to Information Age has many people frightened. Oil tycoons, for example. Good ol’ boys. Pretty much anyone who believes white-picket-fence America (and Britain, Germany, et al) was a Golden Age. Classists. Racists. White males who hate pronouns. Anyone who doesn’t get it that you can’t have a $10 pack of cotton socks and 80-inch flat screen TVs for $300 without globalization.

And I’m trying to wait out that frightened turmoil with some equanimity. Doing what I can to nudge things along, letting go of tension about things I can’t affect. Happy that individuals have an expiration date, so as the young can move forward.

But it’s tough to maintain equanimity in the face of today’s Supreme Court decision about Affirmative Action in college admissions. It’s certainly good news for white guys whose daddies paid for a new wing on a university library, but not so much for human civilization in general.

God help us if the rich ever acquire the means for immortality.

Here’s to aging and death!

About exposing 2nd graders to our history of white brutality:

Hearing that worry from Florida parents, my 1st thought was, “You have a point. It’s an awfully young age to face horrors.”

My 2nd thought was, “WTF, Lester? What about all the 2nd graders who aren’t white? Who live with that history daily?”

I like to think of myself as a woke ally. But that 1st thought reveals how deeply racism and classism are embedded in our society.

Last year, when I started monthly donations to Equal Justice Initiative, I also became aware of PushBlack, and subscribed to their Messenger updates.

My resultant awareness of unending cruelty toward American minorities is almost unbearable. I flinch with each new story. But once aware, how can you look away?

That we’ve gone more than 3 centuries without that brutality erupting into a race war and ethnic genocide says much about how carefully our government, often through the FBI, has managed to suppress or destroy minority leaders.

“Mene, mene, tekel upharsin.” The handwriting is on the wall.

Woke is about simple human decency.

But a byproduct, for those not yet ready to care about total strangers, is stability and peace.

Late one night, years ago, too sick with worry about my family to sleep, I turned on PBS, thinking, “Maybe there’s some Monte Python or something to lift my spirits.” But what fate handed me instead was historical Allied footage of GI’s discovering and opening Nazi concentration camps.

Yeah.

One thing that has stuck with me ever since is the outraged GI’s marching the townspeople of Dachau through the typhoid-infested hellhole outside their town, forcing them to confront the open pits of dead bodies, the stick-thin survivors.

The townspeople weren’t even aware! In fact, they had been donating food and clothing for the prisoners, supplies diverted by the camp staff to the Nazi cause.

Fast forward to today.

Recently, I subscribed to PushBlack on Messenger. Often the headlines are a horror to read, difficult to stomach. The events they introduce are stunningly evil.

And here you and I are, like the townsfolk of Dachau, ignorant of what’s happening. Thinking we’re helping by not being bigoted ourselves, or by donating to causes here and there.

It isn’t enough.