Several months ago I returned to the US from a five year life experience in Greece. Though I have no visible submissions to the Huffington Post during my re-acclimation time to the American experience, my personal blog file has a four-part review canvasing the media orchestrated dissension that is successfully tearing our nation apart. The media's obsession with two colors has become a feast fest of constant visceral spew--and well, for you technical individuals, I am not speaking of the exact definitions of the colors at hand. Sadly, in devouring this feast, it seems we are NOT resolving or rectifying anything. We are simply regurgitating cud at the expense of others and, yet, ourselves. The media coverage is often so awful that I have to think, hundreds of years from now, if any anthropologist began uncovering our remains and relied upon media reel findings to define who we were, they might conclude that only two types of individuals lived in this location of land that we continued to call the United States of America.
In using Spike Lee's version of the word, I'd say we've been Bamboozled to believe that our President is under attack. However, it is our entire nation that is being held hostage by a fearful fragment of people who have yet to realize that this land has, indeed, been collectively built by every color of individual who exist here today and by other media personalities who exploit the experiences of victims and unabashedly advance their public careers with each misfortune that we experience as a nation.
Furthermore, in repetitively chewing our cud, we complacently believe that what is happening to one group is a 'Civil Rights' issue. The term Civil Rights has become synonymous with the terms "them" and "it's their problem." But all the while, it is our collective problem: What is happening in our nation--daily--in prisons, in our streets and in our schools are all examples of HUMAN Rights issues. Ironically, if our foul behavior belonged to any other nation, as journalist Henry Potter so eloquently outlined, we might be up in arms, citing them for violating human rights and we'd subsequently host families from those cruel nations.
As Americans, it appears that we have become accustomed to accepting that 'others' are seen as 'others.' Our job security and social acceptability often relies upon us being what we haughtily refer to as 'Good Germans' and agreeing with the extremities of our limited dual-colored status quo rainbow. I thought I was imagining things--but in my efforts to readjust to America, I watched a program I had never seen, South Park. Though their take on the characters Token, Cartman and our national paranoia of a zombie apocalypse was hilarious, the perceived view of 'others' by many Americans is too accurate. Our fellow tribesmen on both sides of our muted color scale may have not gotten the memo, but we are not zombies. We are a nation of varied peoples--many with good hearts to boot!
In my life time of a near fifty years, I can count three historical phases where we as Americans were actually beginning to heal as a nation and we were coming to our Thanksgiving table with more acceptance and more human understanding. But very much like the former Yugoslavia that I traversed in the late 80's, what I am witnessing now--in a land that once held such great hope--is the successful and callous disintegration of unity.
And if all the other colors within our American spectrum remain silently invisible and choose to not unite under the shared banner of human rights--which is all-inclusive--I have to say, I agree with David Bowie's old hit, this is not America.
(Moved by the intentional media play for national divisiveness around the Dunn case, but written in honor of all our children being needlessly taken from our grace.)