There is a virus of disrespect and hate spreading here very rapidly. And unless one lives right here with it, day in and day out, it is unbelievable how quickly and subtly it infects reasonably intelligent persons. This is not too hard to understand only if one recognizes the unremitting, deep, bitter religious and racial prejudice existing today in this section of our land — I don’t know if any of them are similarly infected in other sections, but I know personally of what I speak as regards East Texas.The first sentence of the second paragraph confirms what I've been telling you boys in my posts about the segregated South I grew up in: millions of otherwise decent, respectable people - my own family, for example - were in serious denial about their prejudice and its roots in hatred. And completely unwilling to examine their thinking or their behavior. In fact, that, you might say, is the history of the South: ever since the first slaves were brought to Jamestown about 1614, the long, long windings of the dark river, the tragic story of master and slave, us versus them.
In fact, although nearly every one indignantly denies having any racial or religious prejudice to the point where he deceives even himself in this matter, after listening seriously to protestations of horror and shock one can almost hear a collective sigh in essence, "Too bad he had to die but after all a Catholic is no longer in the White House and this ought to set the 'niggers' back on their heels for awhile!" It is painful to some of us I know to give credence to such a condition so we blind ourselves and blame a mentally confused person — forgetting in our desire to remove the blame from ourselves that where religious and racial prejudice prevails, not just the killer but all are mentally confused.
If it had been left up to a popular vote in the Southern states in the 1960's, not a single one of them would have passed civil rights laws, and especially interracial marriage. I guarantee you. I'm not sure those things would ever have been passed at the ballot box down to this very day.
Yet this same Southern land is the most religious in the country, speckled with churches, piled up with Bibles. So proud to be Christians and Americans.
The human ability to deceive oneself, to ignore one's true motives, is powerful: and that is where the human capacity for evil begins.
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4 comments:
I wish it was just Texas, or just the South, but it isn't, although maybe it is worse there. In the Middle Atlantic states it is just plain awful. Screeds and jokes and anger prevail in many quarters, and generally good people have no self-awareness of their racism and their homophobia. The internet has helped connect the crazies and spread the rumors. Truth and ugly imaginings commingle, until many people can't separate a fact from a paranoid fantasy.
Well said, Sebastian: and they don't really care about discerning facts from fantasy either. The dark side of the human condition - and the complete antithesis of the Christian ethos, although a great many of those folks think they are "real" Christians. But they are really only the Pharisees, refried and warmed over, whom Jesus rebuked in the most scathing terms.
I don't imagine that racism and homophobia are confined to the South - I realize the blue state wonderland is not, cannot be, all that some of the big-dog liberal writers make it out to be - but I've only ever set foot out of the South a handful of times, very briefly, so I have to write about my homeland.
But unenlightened, unredeemed human nature is the same the world over, in every clime, in every century, is it not?
The segregated south really hit me between the eyes when I first went to work at Grady hospital in Atlanta and noticed two mensrooms on some of the floors and never really questioned it until I realized in the old days there was one for whites and one for coloreds. Having grown up in New Jersey this was so odd to me.
It seemed, conversely, so very normal to me, growing up in the deep South - at every gas station, there were not two, but three restrooms: women, men, and colored. Water fountains always came in pairs: white and colored.
There are still those who would like it that way: I don't feel like blogging it at the moment, but on Pams House Blend you can see clips of a KKK rally at Ole Miss this weekend. Nearly fifty years since federal marshalls were there enrolling the first black students, and still that shit goes on.
The cool thing is, the KuKluxers were outnumbered by a jeering, booing crowd. That's good.
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