Robbing Peter...

It is gratifying for me to see the hit the ol’Confederacy is taking nationally in the wake of the Charleston killings.  As a Virginia resident for 34 years I’m tired of seeing that war continued to be fought, not just in race relations, but also against the notion of achieving most any kind of improvement on a national scale.

Such things as healthcare, infrastructure, poverty, safety, environment, or education (to name a few) are somehow viewed as an assault on individual freedom and states’ rights to the Rebel faithful.  Reality plays no part. The Johnny Reb of today would never believe a Confederate States of America would ever have any socialist mechanisms such as, say…taxes.

That said, I am dismayed to see such media debate at this time and with this tragedy.  The major problem that surrounds this shooting is not racism or hate, it is the tools with which people can act out their unhinged fears and the acceptability we, as a culture, tacitly give to their actions.

 The way the Charleston shooting is playing out feels like a script written by the NRA.  At this point the Confederate battle flag will be partially vilified, removed from some (maybe all) public places and folks will walk away saying ‘job well done’. It may feel good, but frankly, nothing substantive will have been accomplished.  We will have robbed a starving Peter and fed a growing Paul.

There is nothing illegal about racism, prejudice, or hate in the United States.  We can, do, and should create laws to restrict how people act on those attitudes, just as our social ethics (laws) seek to protect us one from another for any reason.  Those laws create trends like social antibiotics in a sick nation. We actually begin to change.

The great defeat for the dilatory effects of racism occurred in the late 1950s to early 1970s.  Manifested racism, especially for African Americans, was given a mortal blow and has been dying ever since. That may not be comforting to those blacks that still feel the effect, but it is true. 

We won’t see racism fully replaced by essentially an historical aberration until the baby boomer generation has finally died off.  The reason is that the boomers are the last generation to have lived in and been influenced by people who lived (their entire lives) in an era when racism and the segregationist realities that came with it was more than okay, it was normal.

The Millennials (those born between 1981 and 2000) will take over this country with the knowledge and attitude that no matter how they feel about racism, they know it is ethically wrong.  It will change everything.  The same is playing out with the discrimination of homosexuals.  Women are finally now starting to feel the effects of being unchained.

What’s not happening is even the beginning of an attitude adjustment toward the use of guns in the US. That is not to say that a majority of American citizens don’t want these guns (more specifically handguns) under serious control uniformly across the country.  They do.  It does say that the nation as a whole does not have the political will to begin to take the first steps to change the future. Given the same political will applied to those aforementioned issues, all aspects of this nation would today be exclusively run by straight, white guys. Mad Men wouldn’t have made it past the first season it would have been so mundane.

The major problem to deal with is not the racism of the 21 year old perpetrator of the Charleston church shooting, or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Muslim religion, or James Eagan Holme’s psychosis, or Adam Lanza’s undiagnosed behavioral problems, or Seung-Hui Cho’s being bullied, or any other reason why the deranged run amok.  The problem is that our American society feels it is okay to give them the means to act out their shocking unbalanced mania. 

This doesn’t even address the over 6000 lives taken each year in the US by the use of handguns. All this carnage is because this nation and its leaders lack the political will to find it abnormal and unacceptable.

Okay, stick a fork in the Confederacy, it’s done and way overcooked.  But in the process don’t close your eyes to the war that actually rages around you.  Don’t let Peter be a victim, just to feel good about Paul.