A tale of two Americas

They would have you believe that there are only two Americas. One is the gleaming Emerald City on the hill where everyone is shiny, bright, white and "right". The other is the slums, the steamy alley ways of the ghetto, the people of color, the malcontents who think they deserve a slice of the pie they never had a shot at.

It is the elites and the wannabe elites, the temporarily embarrassed millionaires against everyone else. If you are poor, you must have done something to deserve it. If you're rich, you should be a shining example of American success and pulling yourself up by your boot straps even if the only way you came into that money is by inheritance, or letting someone cum in you.

Class warfare, divide and conquer. When you're outnumbered 99 to 1, your only chance of surviving is by pitting your enemy against each other. For a long time, this was successful in America. It worked in France as well, for awhile. Eventually, people saw past the farce despite the media saying "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain". Eventually, people lost their heads, literally.

It is the 1% against the rest of us, whether you consider yourself a temporarily embarrassed millionaire or a member of the working class. Whether you choose to believe it or not, there is class warfare going on. It is being waged by the rich who get the media to convince the shrinking middle class that the working class and the poor are to blame for their situation. Never mind the fact that the rich are constantly asking for more and more tax cuts which are already at their lowest point in history, or that the whole idea of "trickle-down" economics is being used over and over again to justify these cuts, even though they've been shown to be bullshit.

They want to cut the safety nets of Social Security, Medicare and other social programs, why? Because without a safety net, people become more desperate. They'll vote to repeal minimum wage if it means they can eat from the Dollar Menu even if it means working for 2 dollars an hour, 80 hours a week. It means that companies like Walmart can employ us as cashiers 30 years from now because there's no retirement options left for those of us who couldn't save $500 dollars from every paycheck to go into a 401k plan managed by shysters who made millions by making risky bets with our savings.

It means we will be more willing overturn labor and safety laws if it means the difference between starvation or not. The line in the sand has been drawn, which side are you on?

Trayvon Martin and the death of white privilege

Whether or not Trayvon Martin was an angel, which some members of the left-leaning press would have you believe, or a budding criminal, which you would hear over and over again on Fox, no one deserves to be gunned down because they look suspicious. Yet, they'll have you believe "he had it coming" and it must have been that reefer madness. You know the old film which would have you believe pot makes people violent and turns your daughter into a psychotic nymphomaniac.

The rush to demonize anyone of color with accusations of drug use, being foreign, etc is the death rattles of a system that is owned by mostly older, rich white men who realize that over 200 years of white privilege in this company is starting to slip away. As the last census report showed, non-white births have surpassed white births and this trend will continue to grow. Most people of Generation X, myself included, and younger, care little to nothing about race. We really couldn't give a shit less about whether you love someone of another race or the same gender. We don't care if you worship God, Allah, Yahweh, or no god at all. We don't tend to associate with people of our same skin tone alone and this scares the hell out of an older generation that still remembers the days before desegregation.

Barack Obama is the face of the era when bi-racial marriage first became legal and I think that explains some of the hatred. The older generation hates him for the things he represents, in addition to the things they think he is. You're looking at a man with a white mother and a black father, something that was (and still is) the fear of many white parents, that their pure as snow daughter would be corrupted by a black man.

Many of them can't comprehend how he could be more successful and smarter than them, and as the old joke that is still whispered around by old men in smokey Mississippi bars at 3pm goes "What do you call a black man with a PhD? A n****r". These are people who believe that solely by the color of their skin, they are automatically superior to everyone else and the thought of anyone of any other ethnicity being more successful or educated than they are is negated instantly because well, "goddamit, I'm white". I think of it as the racial game of rock, paper, scissors.

If a black man is murdered, it is blamed on gang violence. In the case of Trayvon Martin, media like Fox or The New York Post instantly dug up everything they could to portray him as the usual "scary black thug" which then meant "he had it coming".

If a black man becomes President, it was all part of some giant Communist/Fascist/Gay/George Soros/liberal media/atheist/Muslim jihad conspiracy because there couldn't be any way the man they think should be shining their wingtips and calling them "sir" would end up with the nuclear codes.

So, as the years come and go, the notion of "white privilege" and superiority will become more and more muted. Once the current population of The Villages in Florida is under the ground instead of at the polls, I think this will pretty much die with them.

A timeline of hate

After posting the photo my friend Deanna took in the Orlando area, hundreds of people shared the photo, many people learned something new, and as usual, some people tried to play the whole "well, what about if it mean Black Power?"

First of all, that is the timeless, cliche counterpoint of any instance race is brought up on Fox News. The Trayvon Martin case brought out the foaming bigots and of course they all said "well, what if Trayvon was white and the shooter was black?" This is always the tactic used to divert the subject from centuries of violence towards minorities by whites of European descent. Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counter-accusations.

I'll admit, I've been harassed about being white from a black person, and I've been called a "dirty kike" by white power idiots. The difference is, there hasn't been a history of black people targeting, attacking, and killing people of other races. Has it happened on occasions? Of course, but not with the organization, persistence and overall ferocity that we have seen from the likes of the KKK, Aryan Nations, NSM and so on.

You don't see Asians, Blacks or Hispanics holing up in mountain compounds in Idaho or Montana preparing for a "racial holy war". You don't hear of black people setting burning Stars of David in a Jewish family's yard, and Asians didn't participate in lynch mobs in Mississippi.

There is hatred across all melanin tone levels, there are people of every ethnicity who believe that because of the color of their skin or national heritage, they are somehow superior to all others on that basis alone. There are bigots of all ethnic backgrounds but only in the "white power" movement have we seen them so well organized. Last time I checked, Hitler was a white, European male.

It can also be argued that prejudice against white people is the cumulative result of everything we've done to others over the centuries. Certainly doesn't make it right, but from a historical perspective, it makes sense. People of European descent have, for the most part, called the shots in world history for two millenniums now and now that this power has started to slip a little, they're scared. Don't believe me, just spend an hour or so watching Fox News.