The redundancy of racial empathy
As I listen and read about America's systemic racism embedded in all the assorted fabrics of American life, I am numb. William Buckley in his book, Rumbles Left and Right, makes the point that in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, "bereavement becomes redundant." Similarly, empathy in the quest for racial justice has become redundant. Born in 1952, I still slog through the same racial justice narratives: peaceful protests, violent protests, violently peaceful protests, calls for national dialogues, compensatory wails for reparations, the left's Great Societies with their endless political children — integration, busing, affirmative action, and now CRT, not to mention the apotheosis of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd. Six decades of activist media cranking out rote messages on white injustice, and still, white elites take the stage at awards shows waxing eloquent about their unbearably heavy white guilt and get tearful awards for doing so.
I'm 69. The Great Societies, as of now, apparently show less than nothing for six decades of effort except for video of BLM big-city chaos. By rights, Baltimore should be a shining city on a hill. The media in all their forms along with the political class make essentially the case that their decades-long march was, well, worthless. Is America really as racist as we stand accused of being? Ponder it. The only people who relentlessly pontificate about race are talking heads from leftist redoubts of the wannabe famous to the actually famous. Are these people with assumed superior moral wisdom really ordained to dispense it? Are they not merely people with P.R. representation and activist funding?
I submit that you and I, Americans without P.R. reps, regular people getting on with their lives, navigating the government's potholed aftermath of COVID, are listening to people with press agents and activist funding tell us what terrible people we are. I'm sorry, but are we just so unsure of our self-worth that over the many months of masked lockdown, we can let the media and political personalities dump all over us to the point where we look at our reflection and say, "I sure do suck!"?
In 1990, presidential candidate Ross Perot introduced the catchphrase "that giant sucking sound" to describe the draining of American jobs to Mexico. In 2021, that giant sucking sound is the fatiguing white noise of racial agonizers strutting the stage of social media ephemera. America, you don't suck. Never forget it.
Spruce Fontaine is the pen name of an artist and retired college art instructor.
Image: Andy Witchger via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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