calm down

What to write about? On TV. Still. Not calmed down yet. The debacle that the media somehow seem to have missed christening Fergusongate is highlighting yet one more time again the chasm that exists in our country. Largely racial. Here in White America we believe we see things reasonably and objectively: a grand jury of the peers of both the policeman and the man he shot discover that the policeman was being attacked by an enormous man who had just stolen from a store and roughed up its clerk, attacked the officer, who responded in accord with his training. In Elsewhere America an opposite objectivity exists underlain by an experiential sense of always being abused, never knowing justice, stoked by media sensationalism "white policeman who shot an unarmed black teenager" and so permanently simmering with mistrust, resentment and hatred. 

If we had a sense of history, of taking lessons from history and being -- proactive was the trendy word not many years ago -- we would see that there is no objectivity. Like beauty and ugliness, what is is in the eye and mind of the those involved, the beholders. Race relations that we like to think have improved in our generation have actually gone underground. To smoulder. Smolder.

From the FBI last evening came news that ISIS is creating very real threats right here at home, in our land, against each of us personally. Anyone with the least awareness of reality and its movement cannot possibly be surprised after 9/11. Looking into history at others who felt they have been abused by the dominant culture around them and responded violently because they saw no alternative -- American patriots of our own Revolution; peasants in Russia before the communist revolution a hundred years ago; terrorism born of hatred from abuse in Ireland during the 20th century; lately and ongoing, activists in the Arab Spring -- we might see that America has made ourselves fertile for violence, and that harvest time has come. Looking around, I am glad for having lived in a different time and America, and that I will not live into what I see ahead -- or maybe I will, it’s that imminent and breaking. I have had my generation and it was good, very good indeed. But I am unspeakably sad at what I see coming down on those I love most dearly in life, in their generation. 

This is not the America I knew, it is passing and is past, but actually never existed in the first place because I only knew its whiteness that I assumed was all of it. As an American, I don’t believe in or accept hopelessness, I believe that there is an answer or answers, solutions which we can and will find. But I have no idea what that might be, and I observe that answers are not being sought. For us in White America the answer is for everything to calm down again. For Elsewhere America, burning down buildings in rage is the start of answer, and they are ripe for recruiting into the army that will bring about our end. Instead of that violence, I wonder why, in place of simmering, smoldering rage, they don’t organize politically and vote us out. Why hadn’t they done so already in Ferguson? The problem isn’t entirely White America, it is apathy Elsewhere: apathy, hatred, and mindless rage. Why doesn’t what makes sense to me make sense Elsewhere? There’s that chasm. Like so many throughout history, they see no alternative to violence in rage.

Not profundity, just frustration and sadness.