Biff!! Pow!!! But!!

Trivia notes that the predawn temperature has for weeks been 80F to 82F unchanging and threatening. Each day differs in discomfort. During yesterday’s walk the body was unbearably sticky sweaty even during breakfast in the cool breeze at Bayou Joe’s, returning home straight to the shower. Today's heat index: 115F. Discomfort? Trivia. People are dying. Hating. In a world of murderous hatred, my life is self-centered trivia. 

But political correctness is a multifaceted brilliant cut diamonique. What is seen vice what is. On this side, from my facet I sympathize, believing I understand the seven decade history that brought Gaza, Hamas and the West Bank to this bitter morning: I am millennia shortsighted, TeeComeLately. Their warring and bitter hatred are from everlasting and even the Holocaust is but a chapter. Yes, stop the slaughter, but for Israel to negotiate truce with Hamas is to trim the claws of a madman whose declared sole purpose is eradication, there is no peace with him, history is where it is, not where we might have it, his children terrorists in waiting for generations to come and blessed are the peacemakers are delusional. Hopeful, well-meaning, not to say fools, but oblivious or turning blind eye, deaf ear. Is it time for the once and for all to settle Hamas, IDK, neither do you. Am I changing sides? No, watching, contemplating, maybe seeing. Why? Why now? 

Because ISIS is precisely more of the same that makes me suddenly see Hamas/Israel as a picture-in-picture with America on the big screen. To merely stop ISIS at the dam is trimming fingernails. Bombing enemy’s soldiers on the front line, tearing down his statue and declaring victory is the warfare of fools, we have stood on the flight deck and waved that vee. To stop an enemy is only to destroy his economic support, obliterate his industrial base and wreck his logistics train. ISIS has declared permanent war on us, as Hamas on Israel. We do not need a short term solution, we will fight only the ISIS front line at our national peril, but I wonder if our leadership is that timid. Reluctance is understandable, timidity is suicidal. Martin is right, are you listening, Barry? 

Batman, come.

And Ferguson? I can and do sympathize, though with what seems to me a reasonable viewpoint; but it is not possible for me a white man to understand that reason is not the issue, being is the issue, trust is the issue, the issue is existential and I am not and have never been. I may and do despise the media for their incendiary phrase “unarmed black teenager shot down by a white policeman” and they have stirred my contempt for freedom of the press, but I am not there, no policeman ever pulled up beside me downtown shouting, “Get the f--- out of the street” as a normal, usual, accepted and acceptable way of dealing with me, I haven’t lived there, I don’t know how my quick temper might respond, though certainly not blessed are the meek, likely the scene would be ugly, not unlikely turn deadly. I may and do contemn the Missouri governor, a contemptible political hack screeching "a vigorous prosecution must now be pursued" before investigation is done. But white, I am not on the other side of being. From my pov and life I’ve deeply respected authority and the police, but my life experience is not being treated negatively by a public official only because of my color, it isn’t possible for me to understand, it just isn’t. I just have to watch.

And yet, if http://jonathanturley.org/2014/08/22/ferguson-officer-suspended-after-captured-on-video-pointing-weapon-as-protesters-and-threatening-to-kill-them/#more-82338 is the Ferguson police force, I wonder why, in a town 70% black why there is a white mayor and white police force? Whose fault is that? Who didn't care enough to vote, but only to demonstrate.

Lost and wondering where I am and where I'm headed. Johnny Nash and me.

TW+