Mindless and Scared Shitless

When people get scared, they do stupid things.
They scream, run like mindless rabbits in circles,
lash out like lizards, stop listening to common sense,
hit someone or something, run over their own kids,
say the craziest things, and shit in their pants.

What could possibly scare Americans like that?

How about realizing that, while we are a curiously
religious nation, we are not necessarily a Christian one?
We used to pretend we were a nation of Episcopalians
and Presbyterians, even while there were Baptists
and Lutherans and Methodists and heathens
and Jews and Catholics in almost every town.

Once we thought we were an European nation,
rather like the scorned and most ambitious son
who left home, went to America, and made good.
We were the third or fourth sons, following the inheritor
of the property, the son in the military, and the priest
in the family. We came here with nothing,
and made good, sweating and saving.

We were a white nation, even if we did not belong
to the Ku Klux Klan. We owned Black people
and bought Asians. We cheated and scorned and stole
everything we could from the people who were here before us.
Mexicans were the people who overran the Alamo,
who spoke Spanish or something, who had no morals.

We were men, real men, white men,speaking-only-English men.
We did not allow women to vote. We gave our daughters
to promising young men in marriage. "Who gives this woman
to be wedded to this man?" "I do! I transfer her as property!"

Now Barack Obama is our President, and he is Black.
Now Hispanics are the largest and fastest-growing minority.
All the interesting restaurants and fascinating food
are owned by Thais, and Japanese, and Koreans, and Mexicans
and Vietnamese, and other Uncaucasians {sic}.

You used to have to be a Christian to be moral.
Too many of the Christians are screwing the pianist
{who might or might not be of the same sex),
but who plays in a minor key, nevertheless.
Not being religious is quietly and sediciously becoming
the fast-growing religion in the country.

What to do?

There is nothing to do but lash out!
Maybe go to a Democratic Town Hall meeting and scream.
Say that that god-damned Black man was born in Kenya.
If that god-damned Black man wants health care reform,
say that it is a Nazi, or maybe a Communist, plot.
It doesn't matter which. Pretend it is about health care.

It isn't about health care. It is about being white,
being Baptist or Catholic, about gonads, about talkin' good English,
about not having a job, or being afraid that you won't have one, soon.
It is about being scared shitless.

It is mindless.

Comments

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

SmokeSound

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