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.

An intellectual "Easy Button"

As I've said before, here in America, we're addicted to easy. Easy money, easy ideas, and simple solutions to complex problems. On the left, we've come to believe that all we have to do is write enough blogs, create enough petitions and Facebook pages, then the problem will go away. On the right, we believe that you can deny it, pray it away, or if that fails, just shoot it.

On Fox News right now, you have people blaming Obama for the cost of gasoline, even though they didn't give him credit when it was almost a 1/3 of the current price during the height of the recession. They know better, but they're counting on the ignorance of the common American when it comes to supply and demand in regards global economics, coupled with a fear of anyone or anything that could possibly be cast as "un-American".

Watch the hype surrounding the Keystone Pipeline. People are being told that this will allow our gas prices to go down, if we would just let it be laid out, all the way to the Texas coast. If we're going to be using all that oil (which we just so happen to be getting from Canada already), why does it need to go to a port in Texas? Answer is, instead of selling to some refinery in the Midwest, now Canada can sell it to the highest bidder on the world market, who can then come pick it up and ship it to China, India or Japan. This would actually cause prices to go up even more but no, let's just blame the black guy for all of our problems, that's easier.

I'm sure you've seen those cliche Facebook and other social media posts asking people "remember when a loaf of bread was a quarter, gas was 50 cents...?" you know, I'm sure you've seen it. These are people who want to pretend that nothing in America has changed since the 1960's and if we just prayed more, shot more people, pumped more oil and put a white Republican in the White House, things would suddenly revert back to a time they've idealized as somehow perfect. Maybe then, their father would get back the factory job he lost 25 years ago when it was shipped overseas, their kids would stop listening to hip-hop music and pull up their pants.

Maybe if we just cut all corporate tax rates to 0%, removed all regulations and paid to move their facilities back here, we would all have jobs again. Never mind that we would have to turn our country into a 3rd world shithole, and put our kids and grandparents to work for a dollar an hour to make that happen.

Over the last few decades, we've watched income disparity explode. The majority of the "middle class" is just a missed paycheck or two away from bankruptcy and those of us who took out student loans so we could get jobs to make money for other people are now over 1 trillion in debt with those loans. We believe that if we just privatize the schools and let a for-profit entity handle our kid's educational needs that suddenly that will fix everything that is wrong instead of spending time with our children and making sure that they make the most of their years in the public school system. Our problems aren't because of teachers, our problems are from parents more interested in making money to buy the newest cars and clothing rather than focusing on their kids.

On the left, people blame corporate greed and outsourcing as the source of our problems. The fact is our laziness, our greed and our constant desire for cheaper goods and services are what got us here. Pointing fingers and just blaming the usual suspects isn't going to fix the problem. Time for us to stop the jingoistic bumper sticker ideas, start taking responsibility, and doing things ourselves.

Confessions of a Recovering Catholic

I didn't have a choice in the whole being Catholic thing. When I was just a couple of weeks old, a priest poured some water over my head and now, 30+ years later, Catholics still claim I am one of them even though I never chose it. Some of them are rather condescending, even arrogant about it. "You know this is the only real religion" they sometimes say.

When I was 16, I stopped going to Mass despite the warnings that if I didn't go, I'd risk my soul burning in hell for eternity. The ridiculous part of this was the person who was the most vocal about this was our priest who regularly had his "friend" over for a game of "hide the salami" after Mass and allegedly solicited local gay men for sex on a regular basis.

I dabbled for a little while in other religions, trying to "find my way" as the cliche goes. Going and sitting in that church every Sunday does give one some sense of solace in a mad world, if you're willing to turn off your brain and not question anything. These days, I consider myself somewhere between an agnostic and a very liberal Jew but you're not going to find me anywhere near temple either.

I came back again for a short period of time in my early 20's, just to see if as an adult, I could be treated as one by the same judgmental lot I had previously despised as a kid. It didn't get any better and I finally called it quits a few months later. Don't get me wrong, I'll still go for special occasions like weddings or some family event but you'll never catch me there more than once a year which is just to be polite.

It took me quite some time to finally undo the years of indoctrination and sometimes, I think the embedded guilt will never be fully conquered.

For me, they don't have all of the answers, no religion does. I've learned that in life, asking someone to give you the answers is intellectually lazy and a recipe for disaster. Even somehow through the course of my experiences, I were to find that the "true faith" was Catholicism, I could never go back to a church that allowed a priest to rail against "sins" that he was committing before or after the very service in which he condemned others for the same offense. I could never forgive a church that allowed the leader of their Knights of Columbus group, someone who was considered a pillar of the community, to molest kids in his basement office while his wife chatted with the victim's parents upstairs and never try to stop him.

I'll never stop having respect for those who consider themselves to be Christians, Catholics, or whatever and actually concentrate on what the religion was originally supposed to be about. However, until the day comes when the message goes back to taking care of the poor and outcast instead of the pathological obsession with people's sexual habits and controlling their lives, count me out.

Limbaugh, the real prostitute

Ding dong, Breitbart's gone

Yesterday morning, I awoke to see Twitter blowing up about the death of Andrew Breitbart. At 0854 CST, I posted the following: " Dying of "natural causes" at 43 in this case means God decided someone needed to shut the fuck up, forever. #Breitbart"

The shitstorm erupted shortly afterwards. Now, I am not normally one to speak ill of the dead although I don't understand why kicking the bucket somehow absolves you of your transgressions and makes you off-limits to the same abuse you dished out during your lifetime. This is especially true for Breitbart. As one of my fans said "To those who gave no quarter, none shall be given."

I fully expect people to talk shit about me when I am dead, it is fair game.

I decided to post the meme here as well since I am sure enough of Breitbart's fans will report it to Facebook and get it removed.