You need to watch this. You need to hear what CNN's Don Lemon has to say.
You do that -- I'll wait. Then I have something I need to say. In advance, I ask that you pardon my French.
Have you finished with that Don Lemon video? Good.
Now, you know what the problem is here, right? It's this: Way too many white folk are just
like Donald Trump -- narcissists who lack empathy, only in their case
that deficit only applies to those whom they've been raised to disdain.
Guess what, people. Those who raised you in such a manner were just as
fucked up as you are. They taught you wrong, and you just aren't
introspective enough to question your assumptions and conditioning.
LISTEN, the bad news is we're all fucked up. The good news is you're
not alone. The better news is you have the power to fix your
fucked-upitude. You have an imagination -- use it. Put yourself in the
other guy's shoes for just a minute.
Until I got to Baton Rouge Magnet High, due to life in the public schools of Redneckistan and thanks to my own
family dynamics . . . well, let's just say it's easy for me to
understand the sort of rage we're seeing tonight. At age 59, I consider
it, as Bobby Kennedy related in 1968 after Martin Luther King, Jr., was
assassinated, "the awful grace of God."
It's not terribly
difficult for me to imagine just wanting to "burn the motherfucker
down." It's not terribly difficult for me to understand internalized
rage and humiliation.
Of course, it's not right to just "burn the
motherfucker down," but it's certainly understandable as hell. At least
if you get a hold of your self-absorbed self and imagine what it's like
to have a cop with his knee on your neck . . . just because he can,
figuring the consequences for that will be minimal.
WELL, we're seeing the consequences now, ain't we, Cap?
The problem here is that this sort of riotous anarchy has to be
quelled, but the ones whose job that is have zero moral standing
to do it. Not anymore. That doesn't make a violent mob any less a
violent mob; it just makes us well and truly fucked right now.
Really, we're in an awful place when the tripolar dynamic in any society
is, first, the lawless, enraged mob. Then, second, there are the
jackbooted thugs, as embodied by Donald Trump and his cultists.
Finally, third, there is what appears to be the feckless liberal
authorities -- in this case in Minneapolis -- who believe in relevance
and self-abasement (self-abasement which isn't unmerited, I hasten to
add), but are powerless to do much else but validate the feelings of the
unthinking, enraged Id indiscriminately destroying everything in its
path.
Welcome to the Revolution, folks. Chances are, it won't end well.