They speak of it like the coming race war, not the race war we're already in. And it is not a race war really -- it is a racially divided class war. What is coming is a revolution -- the haves and have-nots, the police state and the state of the union. As French as the Statue of Liberty, riots and murder -- "Off with their heads!" has become easier to watch on television then Dancing With the Stars.
It is overdue, like that Cascadia subduction zone earthquake waiting to flood the Pacific Northwest. And it is going to rip us apart just the same if we don't flash a light on it and face some cold hard facts. We are a nation armed to the tits -- and we will throw citizens under a bus for one more platinum drone with laser trim.
This civil war and news cycle tragedy are our final entertainment. I want to drive to Ferguson. I asked my sister if I could borrow her Nikon D90?
Ferguson is Newark, St. Louis -- Detroit similarly, it's a class divide, now we're in 1968 all over again. When you have nothing -- you'll take anything and everything -- what are you suppose to do? Sit still? We're hunters and gatherers, looters and thieves -- all of us when we need so much and we're shot at instead, when we're traumatized in a corporate world you strike a fist through a plate glass window and pull the stuffing out of the bear.
I can't eat -- so I'll take HiDef televisions, smartphones and iTVs. That is the majority perception and sometimes the reality.
But is this person a looter? Or is this comrade a patriot? I wish the Clipper's billionaire got sentenced to Ferguson, Missouri for a week. The person in this picture on the cover of Time magazine seems to be flipping the bird at McDonalds too.
We have given no one the skills to subsist or live without the man. And the system is collapsing for lack of work. The nation is armed, and every minute one city burns is a chance for another city to up the ante, small towns too. The way we live, and the systems we have created, these are anxiety inducing and unhealthy -- too much connectivity, the destruction of individualism, corporate hegemony and supervision, a government shredding the constitution based on a single national trauma, 9/11.
We must stop punishing ourselves for 9/11 in every way. These long-term effects are kerosene and a match to America. It is time we collectively grieved, forgave us, put down our arms, and helped our own citizens and the world recover and live peacefully.
The militarization of America is not helping. Cue Ferguson, but my town of Milford, PA has a population of 1,007 at the last census, and we have a bomb truck. Do you know the cost of a bomb truck?
With very little shifting we could accomplish a lot more to close the class divide -- and we need to understand America's multicultural society as a Monet landscape, a major advantage, and our collective future. I am SO FUCKING PROUD that my two gorgeous nieces, one by birth and one by marriage, have become mothers to an African-American child and included the name Ebert after my lineage. He is my first great nephew to be named Ebert -- to a huge family of Americans that has significant meaning.
Rather than a doomsday machine, racial interaction is our heritage, so too is preserving culture and embracing it. Uplift all races -- all people are created equal, because all people are equal, and we all deserve equal protection under the law and that is not happening in America today.
I want to link to the National Georaphic magazine a while back -- this wonderful article on the face of America in fifty years. I need to hitch a ride to Ferguson, MO and take pictures. I need a Nikon first. I asked my sister, I said: "I'll trade you for my canon XL -- or I'll use the canon as collateral because I know I'm butterfingered -- genetically speaking. " We always think of family, but no two Americans will ever look the same, not even the same family.
As a nation -- we have never dealt with the long term generational effects of slavery -- an aftermath that smothered the 20th Century, then exploded like Ferguson on and off (mostly on) for the last 50 years. Until we compensate every family who's history included slavery -- a program of national reparation through employment, education, housing and health care -- that white hot sin will stain our national soul and force us to bleach the white's of Betsy's flag for another 250 years.
SLAVERY REPARATION, THIS GENERATION. We compensate through giving, not repeating.
It's not so much to ask, like those groovy meetings in Africa where tribes gather to heal from old wounds -- we could celebrate people who's human rights we violated, then we could all help heal the multigenerational effects I know nothing about -- what it might be like being born from slavery, forced to go someplace you might never have wanted for the sake of industry, free labor, rape, torture, punishment, terror, murder, and to uphold the warped values of another class and race.
I have no idea what that might do to me -- except maybe make me want to put my fist through a plate glass window. Not for nothing but the color of my skin -- there but for that history go I.