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Some of the best writing I've come across regarding this issue.
This is just one section of this beautifully heart-wrenching polemic ...
As everyone not living in a Klavern knows, he was an unarmed 17-year-old named Trayvon Martin. George Zimmerman, a Neighborhood Watch patroller jittery from a series of break-ins in the neighborhood, deemed Martin suspicious, and trailed him in his car. “Just walking around, looking about,” the hoodie-wearing youth was clearly “up to no good,” Zimmerman told a police dispatcher, on the evening of February 26, 2012. (Martin, we learned too late, was visiting his father’s fiancée, as he had done many times.) As the world also knows, a confrontation ensued; it ended with a shot in the dark—Zimmerman firing his semi-automatic pistol into Martin’s chest.
The neighborhood in question was a gated community in Sanford, Florida, aptly called The Retreat—aptly, because digging in, hunkering down in our safe rooms and our doomsday bunkers, hollering damn the torpedoes and bring it on is what we do. Circling the wagons. Making a Last Stand. Remembering the Alamo. Living the frontier dream of lighting out for the territories, far from federal meddling, where every man—every white man, at least—is a law unto himself, meting out justice with a Peacemaker and a hanging rope, a mob of upstanding citizens at his back.
For a would-be democracy, it’s a paradoxical fantasy, one that exposes the fault line in our national psyche, between our founding doctrine of “We, the People” and E Pluribus Unum and our folk religion of self-reliance and rugged individualism—phrases usually appended, in elementary-school textbooks, to pictures of Jeffersonian yeomen and Little House on the Prairie pioneers, but which also attach, in the American imagination, to public enemies like Jesse James and Bonnie and Clyde. (Passing through Saint Joseph, Missouri on his 1882 lecture tour of the States, mere weeks after James had been shot dead there, Oscar Wilde took note of the “fabulous prices” paid at auction for such holy relics as the outlaw’s hearth-brush and door-knocker, observing, “The Americans are certainly great hero-worshippers, and always take heroes from the criminal classes.”)
Amid disheartening news of American decline—joblessness, a widening income gap, deteriorating infrastructure, dysfunctional government, the gutting of the public sector by the sequestration—the anomic-loner side of our split self is gaining the upper hand, in some quarters. We see it in the sociopathy of shooting sprees, the fusion paranoia of doomsday preppers, the antigovernment secessionism of far-right militias. Gnawed by economic anxiety, rubbed raw by political impotence, too alienated (or just too American?) for class consciousness, too historically illiterate to grasp how we got here, there are those who imagine a gun in the hand will give them back their lost dignity, restore some sense of power over their lives.
An uglier subset are looking for a scapegoat, someone to put a face on the societal forces, so maddeningly abstract, closing off the avenues of escape from their dead-end jobs and underwater mortgages and moribund main streets. Consider the Tea Party, most of whose members are white, male, over 45, and self-identified as conservative. According to a 2010 poll by the Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society at the University of Arkansas, Tea Partiers are haunted by premonitions of white decline: “46.1% of Tea Party members think the future for White people will be worse or much worse, as opposed to 24.5% of Non-Tea Party members. When the sample is restricted to only White respondents, Tea Party distinctions on racial issues are clearer. … Nearly two-thirds (62.8%) of White Tea Party members think ‘we have gone too far in pushing equal rights in this country.’” By curious coincidence, 69.3% of White Tea Party Members “strongly disapprove” of America’s first black president, with another 22.8% merely “disapproving.”
Although the Tea Party constituted only 10.6% of the U.S. population as of 2010, their activism and voting-day turnout has made them the tail that wags the dog, in many districts. Then, too, the Tea Party is only one example of Angry White Guys of a Certain Age, yet varying classes, taking arms against what they perceive as a sea of troubles: on the economic front, the financial pain and social dislocation inflicted by outsourcing and the decline of the manufacturing; on the cultural front, by the demographic browning of America, compounded by the graying of white America. Obama, a man of mixed race with family ties to Kenya and Indonesia who identifies as black (and whom Tea Partiers are more than twice as likely as the general population to identify as a Muslim) is a lightning rod for free-floating anxieties and anger—as are all people of color, especially that centuries-old bogeyman, the young black male. In this charged atmosphere, the Niagara of guns flooding our nation, together with laws like the ubiquitous conceal-carry and Florida’s Stand Your Ground law (whose very name reverberates with echoes of John Wayne), threaten to turn back the historical page to the torch-lit terrors of Reconstruction and the lawlessness of the frontier.
Fill your hand, stranger.
Read more at http://thoughtcatalog.com/2013/skin-in-the-game-an-american-gothic-in-black-and-white/#567qyD5AHxjkzTLz.99
This is just one section of this beautifully heart-wrenching polemic ...
As everyone not living in a Klavern knows, he was an unarmed 17-year-old named Trayvon Martin. George Zimmerman, a Neighborhood Watch patroller jittery from a series of break-ins in the neighborhood, deemed Martin suspicious, and trailed him in his car. “Just walking around, looking about,” the hoodie-wearing youth was clearly “up to no good,” Zimmerman told a police dispatcher, on the evening of February 26, 2012. (Martin, we learned too late, was visiting his father’s fiancée, as he had done many times.) As the world also knows, a confrontation ensued; it ended with a shot in the dark—Zimmerman firing his semi-automatic pistol into Martin’s chest.
The neighborhood in question was a gated community in Sanford, Florida, aptly called The Retreat—aptly, because digging in, hunkering down in our safe rooms and our doomsday bunkers, hollering damn the torpedoes and bring it on is what we do. Circling the wagons. Making a Last Stand. Remembering the Alamo. Living the frontier dream of lighting out for the territories, far from federal meddling, where every man—every white man, at least—is a law unto himself, meting out justice with a Peacemaker and a hanging rope, a mob of upstanding citizens at his back.
For a would-be democracy, it’s a paradoxical fantasy, one that exposes the fault line in our national psyche, between our founding doctrine of “We, the People” and E Pluribus Unum and our folk religion of self-reliance and rugged individualism—phrases usually appended, in elementary-school textbooks, to pictures of Jeffersonian yeomen and Little House on the Prairie pioneers, but which also attach, in the American imagination, to public enemies like Jesse James and Bonnie and Clyde. (Passing through Saint Joseph, Missouri on his 1882 lecture tour of the States, mere weeks after James had been shot dead there, Oscar Wilde took note of the “fabulous prices” paid at auction for such holy relics as the outlaw’s hearth-brush and door-knocker, observing, “The Americans are certainly great hero-worshippers, and always take heroes from the criminal classes.”)
Amid disheartening news of American decline—joblessness, a widening income gap, deteriorating infrastructure, dysfunctional government, the gutting of the public sector by the sequestration—the anomic-loner side of our split self is gaining the upper hand, in some quarters. We see it in the sociopathy of shooting sprees, the fusion paranoia of doomsday preppers, the antigovernment secessionism of far-right militias. Gnawed by economic anxiety, rubbed raw by political impotence, too alienated (or just too American?) for class consciousness, too historically illiterate to grasp how we got here, there are those who imagine a gun in the hand will give them back their lost dignity, restore some sense of power over their lives.
An uglier subset are looking for a scapegoat, someone to put a face on the societal forces, so maddeningly abstract, closing off the avenues of escape from their dead-end jobs and underwater mortgages and moribund main streets. Consider the Tea Party, most of whose members are white, male, over 45, and self-identified as conservative. According to a 2010 poll by the Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society at the University of Arkansas, Tea Partiers are haunted by premonitions of white decline: “46.1% of Tea Party members think the future for White people will be worse or much worse, as opposed to 24.5% of Non-Tea Party members. When the sample is restricted to only White respondents, Tea Party distinctions on racial issues are clearer. … Nearly two-thirds (62.8%) of White Tea Party members think ‘we have gone too far in pushing equal rights in this country.’” By curious coincidence, 69.3% of White Tea Party Members “strongly disapprove” of America’s first black president, with another 22.8% merely “disapproving.”
Although the Tea Party constituted only 10.6% of the U.S. population as of 2010, their activism and voting-day turnout has made them the tail that wags the dog, in many districts. Then, too, the Tea Party is only one example of Angry White Guys of a Certain Age, yet varying classes, taking arms against what they perceive as a sea of troubles: on the economic front, the financial pain and social dislocation inflicted by outsourcing and the decline of the manufacturing; on the cultural front, by the demographic browning of America, compounded by the graying of white America. Obama, a man of mixed race with family ties to Kenya and Indonesia who identifies as black (and whom Tea Partiers are more than twice as likely as the general population to identify as a Muslim) is a lightning rod for free-floating anxieties and anger—as are all people of color, especially that centuries-old bogeyman, the young black male. In this charged atmosphere, the Niagara of guns flooding our nation, together with laws like the ubiquitous conceal-carry and Florida’s Stand Your Ground law (whose very name reverberates with echoes of John Wayne), threaten to turn back the historical page to the torch-lit terrors of Reconstruction and the lawlessness of the frontier.
Fill your hand, stranger.
Read more at http://thoughtcatalog.com/2013/skin-in-the-game-an-american-gothic-in-black-and-white/#567qyD5AHxjkzTLz.99
