Numb. That’s what it feels like. Or doesn’t feel like, I suppose. Numb. Not depressed. Not saddened. Just no longer subject to the psychological millstone collectively hanging around the neck of the nation’s psyche. Yet it’s still hard not to fill affected in some way.
On Saturday morning, in a short span of time, I was greeted by a series of realities. The first, known to us all Friday night, was the commutation of the Stone sentence. Let me say at the outset this has nothing to do with politics for me. I’ve always viewed Presidential pardons and commutations that weren’t plainly an act of grace and decency to instead reek of corruption (such as, for instance, Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich). Let’s face it, Stone is one of the smarmiest looking guys on the planet. This whole thing stinks to high heaven.
Then I was glancing at /wsb (home of 20 year old “investors” who are absolutely obsessed, and I mean obsessed, with Tesla these days) and saw this high-ranked posting:
Now here’s the shame of it……….I only read the post about an hour ago, and it was really good (from a cynical point of view). The young man who wrote it declared that it’s altogether obvious that the rich will only get richer, companies will always have the government bail them out, and recessions are simply a burden for the poor and no one else.
I wanted to share the post with you, but reddit removed it! Why? It wasn’t obscene. It wasn’t crazy. It was an opinion. But reddit just couldn’t tolerate having that very earnest declaration of the truth linger on its site. All the same, for me it was revelatory about what 20-somethings must be thinking.
A little later, I thumbed through our little local paper and saw an article about how the KIPP school system (which is a charter school almost entirely populated by black and Latino students) had decided to kill its slogan “Work Hard. Be Nice.”
To me, that sounds like a good motto, and no one had complained about it until now. But………….
The announcement quoted a former KIPP student saying: “Asking us to ‘be nice’ puts the onus on kids to be quiet, be compliant, be controlled. It doesn’t actively challenge us to disrupt the systems that are trying to control us.” The slogan “supports the illusion of meritocracy,” the announcement said. “For example, in the words of Orpheus Williams, who leads the Foundation’s equity programming: ‘The slogan passively supports ongoing efforts to pacify and control Black and Brown bodies in order to better condition them to be compliant and further reproduce current social norms that center whiteness and meritocracy as normal.’ ”
Ya know, if someone told me a year ago that the motto of the school was to work hard and to be nice, and I would sneer and think to myself, “Bwa ha ha, now I get to control those black and brown bodies.” Jesus F. CHRIST, what the hell, people?
But here in the Bay Area, of course, white guilt is running at a fever pitch. Because on another page of the same paper was a story about how the Los Altos Town Council had approved $15,000 to paint a huge “Black Lives Matter” slogan on its Main Street. Los Altos is a very affluent suburb that is literally 99.6% white and Asian people.
Want to know how many black people live in Los Altos? Eleven. Not eleven thousand. Eleven. Which means every single one of them could claim an alphabetic letter from the “Black Lives Matter” banner and still have five left over, just in case.
But it’s all good in the hood, folks. Because Tesla.
We have collectively lost our minds. I see it everywhere I turn. And there’s a very, very big fan, and a very, very big pile of shit, that are, sooner or later, going to get acquainted with one another. In the meantime, it’s all just rot.
