Blog 325 – 06.27.2016

Today’s title comes from a speech that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave just before a white guy denied him his Constitutional right to free speech by shooting him. There have been too many shootings in this country beginning with the early European attempt at genocide of the native population.

There is awful lot of talk about the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
Hey, if you don’t want to wear long sleeve shirts that is fine with me. In fact some women want the right to bare breasts (men get to go topless in public) women should have the same rights as men including the right to equal pay for equal work. I hope our next President will help resolve that inequity.

Why do you want a gun? Is it for hunting or target shooting, fine, I can see that but if it is because you think as I heard the President of the NRA say “They are coming for us.” I suggest some serious therapy to deal with your phobia and paranoia. You do know the NRA is a wholly owned lobby of the gun manufacturers and is helping them sell a product. That is what lobbies do – try to convince John or Jane Q. Public and our elected representatives that we need their product or service. “L.S.M.F.T. Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco – Sold to American.” That little ditty was from one of the more powerful lobbies of days past, the Tobacco Lobby.

The American Dream so popular with especially older white males has not always been so dreamy to some groups, i.e. Native Americans, the black slaves brought to this country against their will and even after being freed kept marginalized by Jim Crow laws and outward and subtle prejudice, Japanese Americans put in containment camps during WWII (No German Americans were so treated in either World War), poor people of every color, class, and religious orientation, the LBTG & Q community, Mexicans, Latinos in general, and now the new group to persecute, Muslims. And I left out so many, the Jews, the Irish, the Italians and on and on. We have been equal opportunity haters in this country.

This my friends is not revisionist history. This is the way it has been and continues to be because some people think they are better, more entitled, more American than – fill in the blank. A popular political slogan Let’s Make America Great Again could more accurately read Let’s Make America White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Male Again. Some people actually believe God is a WASP male and that WASP males founded and built the United States of America by themselves.

This country was occupied by Native American tribes, the original “We the People” for at least a thousand years before white Europeans arrived. And I must say they were far better stewards of the natural resources than we with our profit no matter business model. We have built one if not the strongest economies in the world. But fewer and fewer seem to reap the greatest rewards from that economy. And they are for the most part you guessed it WASP males.

In the early days shortly after we ran the British out of the colonies a popular slogan was “The Only Good Indian Is A Dead Indian”. Over the years the same “Us against Them” people substituted, Black, Irish. Italian, Jew etc. One of the more prominent White Supremacy groups the KKK used to joke that the three K’s stood for the K sound of derogative names for the three groups they feared and hated most, Catholics, Jews, and Blacks.

When I was a boy Raid insect pesticide had a slogan “The Only Good Bug Is A Dead Bug” As a WASP is a bug do you suppose that is perhaps the root cause of their paranoia and phobia? Well, that and a long history of mistreating minorities. If you or any one else believes in Making America White Anglo-Saxon Male again, I am here to tell you that ship has sailed and even Great Britain getting out of the EU won’t bring it back again but it may lose them Scotland and Northern Ireland for their trouble.

I have been to the mountain top and seen a world united as one where everyone is judged by the content of his or her character not the color of their skin. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream for his children and all children and many of us hope that it will yet come true.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White