We’ve Got 45 Problems and…

01 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion

Tags

"99 Problems" (2004), "Extreme Vetting", #Muslim Ban, 45, Alexandre Bissonnette, Donald Trump, Executive Order, Human Rights, Immigration, Institutionalized Terrorism, Jay-Z, Laurence Fishburne, Terrorism, White Males, White Man's Country

President Donald Trump prior to his 2016 presidential run, holding up a replica flintlock rifle awarded by cadets at the Republican Society Patriot Dinner, The Citadel, Charleston, SC, February 22, 2015. (Richard Ellis/Getty Images).

To quote from Jay-Z is hard for me. The only song I like with him rappin’ is Foxy Brown’s “I’ll Be” (1996), which should tell any Jay-Z fan that I’ve never gotten him or his hold on the rap world. Still, here I am, sort-of-quoting from a Jay-Z production from 2004, “99 Problems.” Except, the real problem number is 45, and the millions of other 45s he represents (hat tip to Laurence Fishburne via The Daily Show for what to call the orange turd-ball). Donald J. Trump and his followers are the epitome of all that ails the US.

Trump’s recent executive order to ban Arab Muslims and Africans with Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Sudanese, Yemeni, Somali, and Libyan citizenship is one of the worst attempts to roll back human rights in the US in recent years. But there were complementary responses as well. The burning down of the Islamic Center of Victoria in Texas a day after Trump issued his unconstitutional order. The French-Canadian Alexandre Bissonnette’s terrorist attack on praying Muslims, killing six and wounding eight at their mosque in Quebec City within 72 hours of Trump’s ill-conceived, remorseless, unlawful Muslim ban.

All prove one of the truisms of American (and Canadian) society. The terrorists Americans should worry about the most historically, indirectly through policy, and directly through bullying trolls and violent actions are heterosexual White males. No border wall, no Muslim Ban, no immigration quotas, no guest worker policy, no War on Terror, no War on Drugs, no stop and frisk, no abortion ban, no gerrymandering, no EPA gag order, no TPP withdrawal, no NAFTA renegotiation, will protect us from this mob of not-so-random terror. Their leader is 45. And like a man with a Colt .45, Trump is intent on asserting his and their superiority, through institutional policies and our deaths, if necessary.

If someone reading is a heterosexual White male, please note that if you are offended, you should be. Not because of my words. You should only be offended if you recognize the lethal privilege that many White males enjoy. That as police officers, they (and, with greater frequency, officers of color) get to arrest, beat, maim, and murder, and with few or no consequences to face. As vigilantes, often with lesser charges and less jail time. It helps these White males that the media attempts to give a full retrospective on the life of a Dylann Roof, a Michael Dunn, a George Zimmerman, a James Holmes, a Jared Lee Loughner, and so many others. Their terrorism becomes an issue of their alleged mental illness, or a “young man” somehow “losing his way.” Americans are always supposed to understand why the archetype of the master race glitches, as if their psychological and racial privilege isn’t the real culprit. As rapists, White males can expect the media to treat them with kid gloves, to the point of calling a rapist like Brock Turner the “ex-Stanford swimmer.” His rape act was “very objectionable,” but of course, the Brock Turners of America are also completely redeemable. At least, that’s what White males (and many White females) would say.

Racist jugate ribbon promoting the 1868 Democratic ticket of Horatio Seymour and Francis Blair (losers to Gen. Ulysses Grant), under the motto, “This is a White Man’s Country.” (http://oldpoliticals.com).

Please recognize that for Native American tribes from coastal Virginia to Athabascan central Alaska, White males have been the ultimate terrorists. White males led the charge to spill Native American blood on every acre that is the US. Black African sweat and blood runs deep in the red clay soils of Georgia and the deep brown dirt of Mississippi. The crimes within slavery are too numerous to list here, but the reduction of Native American numbers from at least 10 million in 1600 to about 250,000 by 1900 is evidence by itself. White men reduced wild buffalo populations from 30 million to 300 in 30 years to starve American Indians, end their ways of life, and force them onto the marginal lands that are for many their reservations today.

Policies to provide oligarchic power to White males is all part of this history. Andrew Jackson’s “Age” did more than give non-propertied adult White males the right to vote. It gave ordinary, non-slave-owning White males the right to oppress others, legally. The Hayes-Tilden compromise of 1876 allowed treasonous Confederate White males back into power, despite their anti-Black equality and lynching ways. All in the name of unifying the country. Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal civil service in 1913, to all but exclude Blacks from serving as no more than street sweepers, domestic servants, and doormen. White men led race riots to burn down Black homes and businesses in Memphis, East St. Louis, Houston, Harlem, Washington, DC, Chicago, Detroit, Tulsa, Rosewood, Florida, and so many other places between 1866 and 1943. Congress passed the 1917, 1921, and 1924 immigration laws to set up quotes to exclude all but White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) from large-scale immigration to the US.

In more recent times, the mass shootings and bombings also belong to White males. Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Shooter, killed 16 (14 during his University of Texas at Austin rampage) and wounded 31 (one of whom died from his injuries in 2001) before police killed him in August 1966. Need I even go into detail about Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995? Or about Columbine? What about the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, or Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012?

But hey, 45 wants to protect Americans from potential terrorist threats, no? If 45 and his White male supporters and like-minded sycophants want to protect all Americans, they need to look in the mirror. They should consider doing “extreme vetting” on any White male whose Twitter avatar is a trolling egg, or whose Facebook page includes swastikas, or any White male whom voted for Trump. This is a “White man’s country,” after all. At least, that’s what these people keep saying.

Shalom Milhama, Where Do My Sympathies Lie?

21 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Arab-Israeli Wars, Colonialism, Conflict, Gaza, Gaza City, Hamas, IDF, Intifada, Invasion, Israel, Jewishness, Judaism, Oppression, Palestine, Palestinians, Police State, Rebellion, Revolution, Settler Colonialism, Terrorism, Two-State Solution, Zionism

“Israel-Palestine peace,” July 29, 2013. (Wickey-nl – Own work via Wikipedia). Licensed under CC-SA- 3.0 (converted from .svg to .jpg file).

As a Hebrew-Israelite between ’81 and ’84, I was taught in temple that we as the members of the Ten Lost Tribes of ancient Israel shared a spiritual and physical bond with the descendants of the tribes of Judah and Levi. As a Hebrew-Israelite, I was also taught that Arab, African and Black Muslims were my spiritual cousins, due respect because of the whole Abraham, Isaac and Ishmael story from the Torah. We, Black Jews, Arab Muslims and European-Jewish-Israelis, were related by blood, history, and Yahweh, and so should support each other.

There were to be no contradictions in supporting the right of Israel to exist as a nation-state, this despite the fact that the Arab states of Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan had fought “to push Israel into the Mediterranean Sea” in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973. Israel had a Jehovah-given right to the land between the cedar forests of Lebanon and the Sinai Desert, between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean, at least, that’s what the Torah said. It was a covenant right that couldn’t be undone by anyone or anything except by El Shaddai himself.

So naturally, despite my growing knowledge of history, I supported Israel in everything it did in defense of itself. So if Mossad or an Israeli commando unit assassinated a foreign minister, it was fine. When Israel launched an air strike and destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in June ’81, I was all for it. Golda Meir was among my group of female heroes as a preteen and teenager. Somehow in those three years as a Hebrew-Israelite, my political perspective on Israel merged with my religious perspective on Judaism and my understanding of the oppression that Blacks, Africans and Jews have all faced in recent centuries.

My understanding of all this, though, began to change even before I converted to Christianity in ’84. It started with an exodus of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in ’84 and ’85, during the government-imposed famine that killed nearly half a million Ethiopians. Unlike the claims of Hebrew-Israelites in the US, the claims of Ethiopian Jews could be clearly traced back to 1000 BCE, the time of King Solomon. Yet for months, Israel held up the immigration process, and then created policies that would make it even more difficult for this groups and the country’s other 120,000 Ethiopian Jews to assimilate. No doubt the fact that it took Israel until ’75 to officially recognize these Ethiopian Jews as Jews has played a role in their somewhat segregated existence in the country.

Faris Odeh throws a stone at an Israeli tank near the Israel-Gaza border, October 29, 2000, during the 2nd Palestinian Intifada (ten days before the IDF gunned him down in Gaza). (http://socialistworker.org).

Then came the First Palestinian Intifada of ’87 that ran well into the ’90s, when the setting up of Palestinian self-governance zones in Gaza, the West Bank and Jericho gradually began to take shape, leading ultimately to the current state of invasion and chaos between Israel and Gaza. The Intifada began just as I was beginning to understand the full nature of oppression beyond slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. For years, it seemed like I saw the same images of Palestinian youth throwing rocks and marching in the streets while the Israeli Defense Forces responded with tanks, machine guns, tear gas and bulldozers, taking land to build new Israeli settlements in the process.

By that point, I’d become interested in South African history, or apartheid in another part of the world. Comparing and contrasting student movements against Jim Crow in the US and against apartheid in South Africa led me to one simple conclusion beyond that undergraduate research paper. That settlement for one group of people was removal, segregation and loss of rights and lands for another group. This was a process that was particularly horrible in South Africa. It led to protests nonviolent and violent, terrorist activities, extreme and ruthless counter-terrorist activities, and international outrage, protests and divestment before the Afrikaner leadership in South Africa finally moved to dismantle their ugly system.

It made me realize that what was going on in Israel wasn’t all that different from what had been going on in South Africa for nearly a century. Only, it involved a population of Palestinians only slightly larger that the population of European-born Israeli Jews and their descendants, not a nine-to-one advantage in favor of Black South Africans. Only the form of nationalism in Israel grew out of a mix of Torah-based birthright, European-based ethnocentrism (the first two otherwise known as Zionism) and post-World War I imperialism the British imposed on the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and not out of Boer nationalism and anti-Black African racism.

A Palestinian boy rests on a mattress next to the rubble of a house destroyed in an Israeli airstrike, Gaza City, July 9, 2014. (Reuters; http://www.dailymail.co.uk).

Aside from these unique features, the theme was the same. A democracy for a select and easily identifiable us (read race and religion here, or at least, skin color and not obviously Muslim). A refugee existence and well-policed apartheid state for those who aren’t us, an assumed group of radical terrorists, even from birth.

It’s a bit too late to be on any side that supports the dissolution of Israel as a nation-state. But to support this Israeli government, a right-wing one that responses to any act of violence toward Israelis — whether random or deliberately terrorist in nature — as if Egypt, Jordan and Syria are invading again. It strains my almost boundless imagination. To say that it’s okay to respond to homemade rockets with a military airstrike and ground invasion in an area as densely population as the island of Manhattan is ridiculous. To suggest that the demolition of Gaza isn’t about resources or is a both-sides-are-equally-guilty scenario is to either live in denial or to see Palestinians as less human than Israelis. Last I checked, Hamas doesn’t have an air force or Russian T-72 tanks.

So here’s what I see. A one-state solution, forcing Israelis and Palestinians to live together, forcing Israel to end its version of an apartheid system, and forcing both groups regardless of politics to come up with a path to full citizenship rights for Palestinians. Period. The two-state solution is a mirage, and some Israelis seem to only want one state, for Israelis only. Of course, this means that those Palestinians who support an armed struggle will eventually have to follow the path that Nelson Mandela and the ANC and Yasser Arafat and the PLO followed decades ago. Just not today, not while the IDF is destroying a city. At least not until the world and especially the US divests from the state of Israel and embargoes all arms shipments.

I wish sometimes that I could go back to that simpler time, when Israel seemed to represent what was right in this world, and the US in supporting them. But I can’t. Those Hebrew-Israelite days were my most oppressed ones as well.

Unbearable Being Of Whiteness

24 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Cliven Bundy, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, DSM-IV, Education, Ethan Couch, Frazier Glenn Miller, Hate Crimes, Hypocrisy, Injustice, Racism, Terrorism, Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Wade Michael Page, Wages of Whiteness, White Supremacy, Whiteness

White supremacist and deadbeat grazing fee payer Cliven Bundy at his ranch, Bunkerville, Nevada, April 11, 2014. (Jim Urquhart/Reuters via http://www.newsweek.com).

There have been few things more disappointing than seeing how frequently the structures, institutions and individuals in this country cut Whites slack for things that would have me out of work, in jail or long dead. If I were a human rights attorney specializing in racial justice, I’d want to take a sledgehammer to my head at least five days a week, every single week, given the ridiculous things that occur and how the mainstream media reports them.

Cliven Bundy is the latest in a long, long, long line of White supremacists whom the media have turned into heroes. Bundy has the distinction of refusing to pay over $1 million in grazing fees for his cattle over a tw0-decade period, even though his cattle grazed on federally-owned land in Nevada. When federal agents came to his ranch to seize his cattle, instead of paying his fees, Bundy and his neo-Nazi/militia buddies brazenly displayed their guns and rifles for the whole world to see. Bundy and company complained that the government had violated their rights as ranchers — rights to an endless free lunch for their cattle, apparently.

The sad truth is, all one would have to do to change the perception here would be to make Bundy and the rest of his master-race-band Black. There would’ve been a shootout, and not necessarily with law enforcement, either. The mainstream media would’ve called them terrorists, militants, anarchists and Black Panther-wannabes. And that would be the end of the story.

Then there’s Ethan Couch, the now seventeen-year-old who ran over and killed four people on a road outside of Fort Worth, Texas, not to mention permanently disabling one of his teenage passengers. A judge sentenced Couch to ten years’ probation, in no small part because a psychologist testified that Couch suffered from affluenza. Affluenza, of course, is the inability to link bad behavior with consequences due to parents inadvertently teaching the lesson that wealth buys the privilege of not having to suffer any consequences. Last I checked, affluenza appears nowhere in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders.

Affluenza Awareness Poster Child (of character King Joffrey from Game of Thrones), April 24, 2014. (Roflbot via http://disinfo.s3.amazonaws.com/).

If I did this, even at the age of ten, my Black ass would be in juvenile detention, especially in Texas, and likely transferred to a high-security prison as soon as I started puberty. It wouldn’t have mattered if Dr. Phil himself had testified that I suffered from the poverty pox. I would’ve been treated as close to an adult in the Texas criminal justice system as the system would’ve allowed. The media wouldn’t have whispered a protest, much less bought the poverty pox defense or tried to treat it as a plausible psychological disorder (of course, grinding poverty does result in PTSD for millions, but let’s not tell that to the mainstream loonies).

So I’m tired. I’m tired of employers making excuses for lazy twenty-three year-olds whom happen to be White, saying that “they’re young.” As if someone incompetent and lazy in their work deserves more consideration than a Black man or woman in their mid-twenties because they are White and have a college degree? Ridiculous!

I’m tired of teachers and professors who explain away inconsistencies in someone’s academic record, saying “thery’re brilliant” or “he’s a genius.” Is boredom really an excuse for not working hard or completing assignments? Is a higher SAT score really a justification for ignoring borderline personality disorder or the potential for violent behavior? It is the epitome of arrogance to excuse immoral or criminal behavior on the basis of high analytical intelligence, but I’ve seen it enough times to know that it’s a normal part of Whiteness’ wages.

I’m tired of the mainstream media reporting the ludicrous as normal and the normal as ludicrous as they ignore their own complicity in upholding Whiteness’ wages. Frazier Glenn Miller (Overland Park, Kansas shooting, Jewish community center) and Wade Michael Page (Oak Creek, Wisconsin shooting, Sikh temple) committed acts of domestic terrorism, hate crimes based on Whiteness. But whenever these shootings occur, the mainstream theme talks about mental illness, about whether racism is an illness. Maybe in a couple hundred years, individual racism will be in DSM-XV. What about the structural and institutional racism that ensures the privileges of Whiteness, though?

Frazier Glenn Miller mugshot, April 14, 2014. (European Pressphoto Agency via http://nymag.com).

I’m tired of injustice being called justice. How can a kid in the back of a squad car in Arkansas shoot himself in the head with his hands handcuffed and his arms behind his back (that kind of contortionist act would be a highlight of Cirque de Soleil!)? Seriously? Marissa Alexander shoots a warning shot to ward off her abusive husband and protect her kids, but she can’t use self-defense as her defense? Come on!

I’m really am tired of the bullshit. It’s a wonder sometimes that I don’t have high-blood pressure (except when I’m dealing with incompetent nurses). But hey, the forces of Whiteness still have time to drive me there if I let them.

All The Media’s Stereotypes

21 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

"Dirty Laundry" (1982), 9/11. Jingoism, Boston, Boston Marathon Bombing, Branch Davidian Compound, Breaking News, Centrism, Chechnya, CNN, Cultural Stereotypes, Don Henley, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, FOX News, Immigrants, Immigration, Islam, Jihadists, John King, Jonathan Capehart, Lockdown, Media Bias, New York Post, Oklahoma City Bombing, Police Chase, Racial Stereotypes, Racism, Stereotypes, Tamerlane Tsarnaev, Terrorism, Terrorized, Waco, Washington Post, West Texas Fertilizer Plant Explosion, Xenophobia

Dzhokhar & Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Boston Marathon crowd moments before bomb blasts, April 15, 2013. (http://www.mirror.co.uk)

The mainstream American media was just one big, almost unbelievable fail this past week. Between the Boston Marathon bombing and the subsequent hunt for brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the ricin letters to Mississippi GOP politicians and President Obama and the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas. In the last case, the one that killed and injured more people than two dumb asses in Boston. Yet, somehow, in a world in which the best answer should be “I don’t know” or “We don’t know yet,” media folks and their experts have been tweeting and reporting at the level of gossip for the past five or six days.

Usually a fairly careful journalist/columnist, Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post tweeting three hours after the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, “April 19: Anniversary of storming of Branch Davidian compound & the Okla. City bombing.” At that point, we didn’t even know the number of people killed, maimed or injured. Nor did we know the number of bombs that had exploded in Copley Square. Think, man, think!

The more famous comments of the week came out of CNN’s shop, though. John King had breaking news Wednesday afternoon that law enforcement officials had identified a “dark-skinned male” suspect. Being a White guy working in mainstream media means that you never have to say “I’m sorry,” apparently. Especially when all of his “breaking news” reporting turned out to be completely wrong.

Let’s not really analyze the so-called reporting of FOX News or the New York Post. You’d get more truth from a psychic doing a Vulcan mind-meld with Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s brain right now than you could from Murdoch’s news media world in a year.

Let’s also not forget many of the so-called terrorism experts whom guessed wrong about race, immigrant status and so many other details this past week. Not to mention reports whom apparently couldn’t find Chechnya on a map if the republic were blown up to 100x normal map size and they put a floodlight on it.

But the most disturbing — yet not very surprising — thing about the past seven days has been how the US media has engaged in a near-endless campaign of racial stereotypes, immigrant stereotypes, terrorism stereotypes, religious stereotypes, patriotism stereotypes, and hyperbole that attempts to defy history. A simple list should help:

Terrorist(s) = Arab Muslims
Males from the Caucasus = Caucasians, but not White
Muslims who commit a violent act = terrorists
Violent criminals = anyone not White (especially Blacks & Latinos)
Violent mass-murdering Whites = mentally disturbed (i.e., NOT terrorists)
Arab Muslims = immigrants, NOT US citizens
Indo-Europeans who are White (phenotypically) & citizens but not born in US = Immigrants
Boston = city terrorized like no city ever before

On this last one, I must put on my academic historian hat. As in — are you kidding me? Anyone ever hear of Boston in the years before and during the American Revolution? Or, in more recent times, the Oklahoma City bombing in ’95, 9/11 and Lower Manhattan, the DC sniper rampage in ’02? Or, if the idea here is that terrorism should only be viewed through the prism of those who feel terrorized, what about poor Blacks on the South Side of Chicago, in SE Washington, DC, or poor Latinos in cities like Albuquerque and Phoenix? Or, for that matter, innocent civilians in Yemen and Pakistan attempting to avoid being among the “collateral damage” caused by our drone wars for terrorist scalps?

And then, there was the need for release, for yelps of relief and cheers of joy over the successful capture of Dzhokhar Tsarneav late Friday evening, with chants of “USA! USA! USA!” included. Of course people should feel relief for the end of a tense situation. But let’s not get carried away with the tide here.

Stereotype quote taken from Annie Murphy Paul article (May 1998) in Psychology Today, January 16, 2011. (http://nwso.net/). In public domain.

We know nothing of motive, but we do know that the police will return to its regularly scheduled racial and socioeconomic profiling in the coming days. We can’t wrap our collective heads around the idea that two assimilated White American immigrants decided to kill runners at the Boston Marathon. Yet we also somehow decided to culturally and legally un-Americanize them — something we didn’t do with Timothy McVeigh. Chants patriotic might be a way to show solidarity, but we refuse to come to grips with the racial/xenophobic and anti-Muslim psychology that comes with these impromptu outbreaks of so-called unity.

Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry” remains just as relevant now as his tune about the American news media was three decades ago. Still, the completely centrist and biased, always-concerned-about-the-bottom-line media is a mere reflection of our narcissistic and imperialistic selves.

Jeremy Spoke In Class Today (updated)

19 Sunday Apr 2009

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, music, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

"Jeremy" (1992), Bowling for Columbine (2004), Columbine, Dylan Klebold, Gun Violence, OAH Conference 1999, Oklahoma City Bombing, Pearl Jam, Terrorism, The Culture of Fear (1999), Timothy McVeigh, Toronto, Violence, White Angst, White Male Angst

Helena Garrett, right, mother of bombing victim Tevin Garrett, breaks down as she speaks during a ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Oklahoma City National Memorial, April 19, 2015. (Sue Ogrocki/AP via http://sfchronicle.com).

~~Sometimes as~~ Americans we can be so stupid. It’s been ~~fourteen~~ twenty years since Timothy McVeigh left a Ryder van in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building building in Oklahoma City filled with two and a half tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel to blow a tragic hole into it, leaving 168 women, men and children dead. It’s been ~~ten~~ sixteen years since two White male teens decided to lock and load at their high school in Columbine, Colorado, leaving 12 students and a teacher dead, 25 others wounded, all before killing themselves in a blaze of White male angst glory. Yet we’re still up in arms over any significant legislation to keep assault guns out of the hands of folks who may do their neighbors harm, as if the Second Amendment doesn’t itself provide limitations on the use of firearms in our society.

Right now, without any abatement, some idiotic father or mother is so depressed about their financial situation and the future of their family that they’re willing to go into their garage, pull out the 9mm pistol or .45 caliber rifle and take out their children, their spouse and themselves in a public display of psychotic-ness. It’s happened in recent months in Chicago, in Maryland, in California, in Florida, and in so many other places that the public only barely pays attention to it anymore. Then there are the folks who are literally clinging to their guns — if not their religion — because the nuts on Fox News Channel and on the conservative talk radio shows have stirred them up about President Barack Obama. That the Obama Administration had any plans to take people’s guns away from them is about as ludicrous as blaming the grunge group Pearl Jam for the Columbine massacre in ’99.

Cover art of Pearl Jam’s single “Jeremy” (1992), September 25, 2005. (Tempuser123456 via Wikipedia).

To think that it’s been more than a decade since Columbine and that we as a nation have learned next to nothing from it is just a sad commentary on how fearful we as a nation are. I remember as I packed my bags for my presentation at the Organization for American Historians conference in Toronto how the events of Columbine unfolded. One of the first things that came out of the media was that songs like Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” was to blame for stirring the minds of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold into killing and maiming their unaccepting, cliquish classmates. Except that “Jeremy” killed himself in front of his classmates. He imploded — he didn’t take his rage and angst out on the rest of the world.

Harris and Klebold’s disproportionate response had little to do with Pearl Jam or grunge, and more to do with our culture of fear, as explained by Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine (2004) through Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear (1999). When combined with easy access to guns and other weapons, it’s no wonder why events like Columbine and Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech and more recent ones in Binghamton, New York, Tennessee, Alabama, Pittsburgh, Oakland, Newtown, Connecticut, Aurora, Colorado and so many other places across the country are happening regularly. Kind of like the bombings and shootouts that have taken many a life of American soldiers while keeping Iraq safe for democracy since ’03. In our case, all it took was a severe economic downturn and the election of President Obama to produce disproportionate fear and rage, implosion and explosion, family annihilators and gun-hoarding psychopaths.

I would’ve thought ten years ago that Columbine would take the Brady Bill passed by Clinton and Congress in ’94 a step further, but it didn’t. I would’ve thought that Americans might become more willing to be introspective in considering the reasons for all of our senseless democracy-based violence. But we haven’t been. We haven’t even conducted national townhalls on these issues. We’ve allowed the NRA, gun-makers and others who benefit from the proliferation of assault weapons to dictate how we exercise our Second Amendment rights.

Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado, April 17, 2008. (Ed Andrieski/AP via http://nytimes.com).

There were the kinds of things I thought about during my five days in Toronto, which seemed as far away from the violence and fear of the US as Rome at the time. I also thought about my experiences in middle school and in high school. I wasn’t bullied, at least in not any physical way. But I felt ostracized at times, and I was certainly made fun of more times than I could count. I didn’t have access to guns, and it never would’ve occurred to me to shoot the folks who were clownin’ me. In later years, in seeing signs of the US melting down economically and culturally, it wouldn’t have been in my thought process to blow up a federal building, threaten the president or another public official, or otherwise arm myself for a coming race war or war against the federal government.

No, what I thought about while in Canada was how peaceful and settled it seemed compared to anywhere I’d been in the US. I didn’t feel my skin color or race the way I usually felt it as an American citizen in America. I loved the multicultural atmosphere and the fact that folks truly embraced it there, and not just by serving hummus and falafel at parties and by taking yoga classes. If I could, I’d move all of us up there to live a less fearful and more accepting lifestyle than the one that we can live here.

Ryder truck that Timothy McVeigh drove caught on camera minutes before explosion, Alfred Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995. (http://murderpedia.org/).

Somehow, some way, we as a country need to find ways to deal with our fear of each other, of failure, of the loss of power and dominance as a nation among nations, as Whites over everyone else. Confronting these fears as part of a public display of transparency and openness will allow for angst without implosion or explosion, and dissent without a turn to ridiculously senseless violence. This is the reason why we have so many dead and wounded every year from gun use (though not usually bombs), in everything from homegrown terrorism to everyday acts of community annihilation. If not, we will continue to serve as a model of first-world dreams and third-world chaos, offering the world not much more than our hypocrisy in the process.