Skip to main content

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

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. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more