The Problem With Us

Hey there, fellow U.S. Caucasians. It's time for some straight talk.

It seems like everytime there is an act of violence involving (however peripherally) a person of color in the US, voices ring out about how members of that particular race or ethnic group need to get together and get their house in order. Such claims are ludicrous, of course, based in arrogance and self-righteous superiority.

But I'm a guy who gets a lot of things wrong. So just in case, let's run that drill. It's time for us to get OUR house in order. The first step is admitting that we have a problem, and make no mistake, white folks, we have a problem.

I have a theory as to why the media is so eager to name violent people of color "terrorists" while white shooters are named "mentally-ill." Terrorism is systemic, a symptom of a larger problem that will not simply go away just because a single perpetrator, or even a group of perpetrators, is put away. For a society to consistently create terrorists there must be something in that society that is very, very wrong.

Wait! Do NOT run to the comments board just yet to tell me about how you've been saying that there is something wrong with Islamic culture blah, blah, blah. We're running YOUR drill, remember? But we're talking about US. About white people, and our own society.

If we were to call the white perpetrators of the past few years "terrorists," then we would be forced to acknowledge that there was something systemically wrong with US. Instead, we talk about mental illness, which is individual, unique. A mentally ill person is not contagious, so once they are contained, matter over, nothing to mess with.

But there IS something systemically wrong. With US... white people.

Just look at us. We're addicted to violence. It permeates every facet of our society. Our movies, our games, our sports. We worship our soldiers when they are in the field, and abandon them when they come home. We glorify the concept of "one man making justice" with a gun even as we watch hundreds use that mind set to destroy lives.

And we're afraid. Deeply, nearly pathologically afraid. And it's the fear of the bully. Bullies are often those who find themselves with power over others and then become afraid of losing it. We grew up fast, did White America, and quickly (on a historical scale) became the big boys on the playground. But we see that slipping. The world doesn't necessarily want to do what white America tells it to do anymore and that has us terrified.

So what do we do? We turn to what we know, and what we know is violence. To the image of the lone gunman, or the cavalry coming over the hill, or the good ol' boys marching back in World War 2, a time when we KNEW we were being heroic. So we go to war with nations that could never face us in a straight fight, bomb them from afar with drones. Or we take out our guns, and go to set things RIGHT... regardless of what, precisely, we decided was wrong.

Possibly the worst thing is that I think we know we have a problem, and I see that not in the think pieces or interviews that say "we have a problem..." but in the pieces that deny it. They are desperate, nearly hysterical with the need to deny our problem. Facts and history seem not to mean anything, demanding that we claim, over and over again, that nothing is wrong, when something is clearly wrong.

In such behavior I do not see the behavior of someone evil, or someone stupid. Instead, I see the behavior of an addict. Have you ever confronted an addict who didn't want to admit their problem? Their response gets hysterical, denies plainly obvious facts, or gets very, very angry... all to cover a truth as plain to them as anyone else. They have a problem.

We deny it because we don't want to stop. We take comfort in the knowledge that no one in the world could take us on and come away from it unscathed. That we hold the power of ultimate violent settlement both in overseas policy and in domestic dispute. We LIKE knowing that if those folks who don't look like us get out of line, we can roll in the tanks and the armed soldiers, either in the gear of our armed forces or of our police forces. And we have lived that way for so long that we can't imagine life without it.

And so we justify it. We point to human rights violations overseas while ignoring the state of our own migrant workers and our treatment of minorities. We point to acts of military violence while ignoring that we are the only country in the world to ever detonate a nuclear weapon in an act of war.  We point to systems of fear and oppression in other cultures while ignoring that, ever since World War 2, most of those systems were, either directly or indirectly, constructed at least with our encouragement.

We want to believe that when it is one of our own who commits an atrocity, that their actions do not reflect on the rest of us, all the while holding the rest of the world accountable for the actions of their outliers. But that is the critical difference... others cannot influence our actions unless we allow them to. WE have the power to influence everybody.

I don't think that it is hopeless. There have been voices of sanity from all over our spectrum. Even as Fox and Friends called this an attack on religion (much like how the Lincoln Assassination was an attack on live theater) Bill O'Reilly named it an act of racism and terrorism. Good on him. As voice after voice clamored to defend the Confederate flag, a member of the board of the Southern Baptist Church called for it to finally be retired.

This is progress. We aren't hopeless. We CAN learn. We can allow ourselves to listen to those who aren't quite us... we can even elect one president. We can, if we work on it, deal with our addiction to violence, channel that energy into other, safer things. (I don't actually think it is an accident that violent crime has decreased with the advent of video games, for instance.) And maybe we can learn even from our hunting and target shooting culture, where we can place our gun mythology safely in realm of sport, rather than the realm of justice or defense.

I have to hope so. Because as it stands now, improved or not, there is a lot of work to be done. Because we are violent. We are scared. And we are very, very powerful.