The Hole in the Bucket
UNENDING
“What we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness but is love, and wisdom and compassion toward one another and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”
Not the words of President Obama after another mass shooting or another white policeman killing a black man in the streets. Not the words of a southern Governor or a northern Senator, or a leading churchman or a grieving parent.
The words of Robert F. Kennedy on April 4, 1968 speaking from the back of a flatbed truck in Indianapolis, Indiana announcing the death of Martin Luther King while campaigning for the Democratic nomination for President.
Words spoken 48 years ago.
Truer today… but further from reality than ever.
What is wrong in America that never seems to get right? Why can’t we stop this endless racial violence. We worry about ISIS and a secret attack; about jihadists planning to murder us. But what’s true is that we are murdering each other. And the racial
fears and hatreds continue without ever seeming to fade away no matter what ‘progress’ we think we have made.
Is this fear and hatred within our DNA? It seems to be passed from generation to the next as eye color and height is. It is simply impossible to change these feelings no matter what we say and try to do.
After all is said and done, after Brown v The United States Board of Education in 1954 which declared our public schools must be desegregated, the fact is that New York City has the most segregated school system in America. New York City has the most segregated school system in America.
Never mind the reasons. You can figure them out…it’s the same old story…neighborhood schools count most…remember??? Sounds familiar because we’ve been talking that way forever…Supreme Court or not. But are America’s schools desegregated? No. Are our churches? Don’t people flock together because they want to be with others like them?
Yes, if that is their choice. But if they are forced by economic circumstances to live together that is a different story.
History repeating itself? No …history continuing without end…only the incidents are current…the reasons for them going back to the growth of our nation in violence, slavery, the Civil War, murderous segregation and the KKK…all of it…found in the history books in one way and in the streets of our country today in other ways.
The impossibility of genuine change at the roots of our national tree is the hole in the bucket which continues to leak away the good that we can do. Maybe that hole is smaller than in 1954 or in 1968 but it still exists.
We are able to elect a man of color as President and then sit in stunned silence as a national political party pledges to stop him from doing anything he wants to do for the country for as long as he holds office. Was the election progress? Or was the stunned silence more of the same and business as usual? If we still think Barack Obama’s election was progress, we are just part of what’s leaking out of that bucket and continuing to poison the roots of that national tree.
Remember recently the words of Joe Biden when first describing Barack Obama…something about being a different kind of man…someone ‘clean’. The media jumped all over poor Joe who often seemed to speak without thinking…and yet, yet wasn’t that an impression that so many Americans had so quickly and found so positive?
Remember way back the Vice President of the Los Angeles Dodgers, some years removed from Brooklyn, NY. He was asked why there weren’t more black managers in the Major Leagues. And he said that despite their Hall of Fame baseball performances, too many eligible for a management position didn’t have the ‘particulars’. He was summarily fired. But wasn’t that the prevailing attitude in baseball…and other professional sports as well where black athletes reigned supreme but never became the ‘guy in charge’?
This sense of generational superiority has never, ever gone away. It fires the fears and hatreds which drive our actions: “Whites are ‘more’, Blacks are ‘less’.
Are we passing this ‘attitude’ on to our children? Maybe our great, great grandparents had more obvious prejudices…but certainly our parents, and we, as parents, don’t speak the same way. But certainly words don’t always have the same meaning and we have no real idea what we are passing on.
The same way that none of what is happening ever really involves us. It’s what we see on TV. It’s what we argue when we argue about guns not race.
The voices of reason, hope and engagement seem only to come from people in public after horrific events are shown to us all in the media. We expect to hear them. And when we do, we clearly we are not listening.
We live in what we think of as a classless America. We like to think that hard work and education makes any dream possible in America. We feel good when we believe that.
Our children know nothing but the best that we can do…and that’s pretty damn good. Why should they care about what is happening to anyone else? We’re not personally involved in something that might make this gruesome racial situation go away…so why should our children ever imagine they can… or should?
NOT DNA YOU SEE. Nothing scientific here. JUST ATTITUDES THAT NEVER CHANGE.
Our church community comes together in an ecumenical way when they respond to these present-day disasters. Once they marched against racism; against wars that seemed to have no meaning…but always in response to situations…never as a regular course of action.
But what have they done one by one to bring communities together? Never mind black and white…now we have Muslims vs the rest of America. Where are the national voices of religious freedom speaking with outrage about what is happening?
What have black churches done to focus not only on their growth and success but on the needs for racial equality once and for all? Nothing. They rant wonderfully against inequality wonderfully but what do they do to foster equality on a day to day basis?
THE FUTURE
There are those who believe this: that one day far off in the future, America will implode because we became a nation through violence led by a powerful elite capable of knowing how to use the goodness and decency in people for their own greed, success and power. And that we will continue on this path until an internal revolt destroys what we have become.
We cringe at that possibility and hope that the freedoms being won by minorities will coalesce someday in an effort that frees all Americans from the fear which breeds the hatred; from the superior attitudes which breed the fear and hate.
Yes we can better train our police to handle difficult situations. But what are these young men and women by the time they join a police force. How well educated? How free from the prejudices they have grown up with. Does the training adjust those learned beliefs? Doesn’t seem to.
The dope-fueled misery of poverty still affects too many people of color…far too many. Schools fail them for sure. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has too many residents living without a lot of hope for themselves and their children. (Another first for New York City..the largest slum in America). But all big cities have slums still. So do small towns.
What will finally seal the ‘hole in the bucket’?
An America that outgrows its past…the past that keeps on repeating itself without end.
Maybe not our children or grandchildren. Maybe their children. The sooner the better. Nothing lasts like hate and fear, the twin feelings that feed on each other like vampires.
The attitudes of ‘superiority’ must change before those vampires are extinguished.
When the foundation of a building cracks trouble begins. When the crack comes at the very laying of that foundation, the building is doomed…maybe not right away but certainly someday.
What is at the root of this awful situation is the lure of white privilege.
It is a delusion but it has worked in a way that I can equate with the brainwashing of blacks who have been taught to hate themselves and feel their own sense of worthlessness. The job has been successfully done on both blacks of all classes but for the very few who have worked their way out, and on poor and middle-class whites.
The joke is especially on poor and middle-class whites. The elite calling the shots cares nothing for them. They use them as a buffer between themselves and people of color, especially blacks. They take their money, their votes and give them nothing but the illusion of power, ie white privilege.
That apparently is all it takes to win their loyalty. As household incomes shrink, our school systems on their knees with inadequate education of our children, our health system in the hands of the healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, our criminal justice system and police departments rife with racism, we find ourselves still victims of the wealthy elite.
With but 1% of the 10% of the wealthiest population finding a way using guns, germs, stealth and theft of valuable minerals from the Earth in countries other than their own, the elite run us all in perpetual circles. We chase money to survive, money to save and have no time to research and learn the way things work to improve our lives.
A maniacal game run by the most evil, degenerate minds and souls in history.
That’s what’s really going on in our country today.
ZSun-nee Matema is a retired World History teacher, a Diversity Consultant to government agencies and Founding Director of AFRIAsia.
“Is this fear and hatred within our DNA? It seems to be passed from generation to the next as eye color and height is. It is simply impossible to change these feelings no matter what we say and try to do.”
As much we’d like to deny it, something like it may well be the case.