The America I Want

I saw something on my daily walk today around my apartment complex that my heart, brain and soul really needed to see. Every day around a quarter to four in the afternoon the school bus pulls up and unloads all of the neighborhood kids. Shortly after the kids arrived today I was walking by one of the many ponds on the golf course that surrounds the apartment complex and witnessed two black kids, one white kid and one Hispanic kid – all probably middle school aged – throwing rocks into a pond and laughing and having a good time.

That's the America I want.

That’s the America we would live in today if all of us retained our beliefs of adolescence where race, religion, sexual preference and such don’t seem to matter or come into play.

However, the America we do live in will likely have these kids hating each other – or at the very least having nothing to do with each other – by the time they're done with high school.

There seems to be something between adolescence and adulthood where humans realized the differences in others and something about those differences bother them, oftentimes to the point of hate.

Maybe those days will come to an end before these young boys grow up and they won’t have to live in a world that’s deemed the “Land of the Free,” but remains far from equal.

But, the chances of that frankly seem unlikely when you realize the reason why things continue to be vastly unequal in this country are because of the generations before us passing down prejudices and racism to their children.

Sure, there are fewer prejudices and less racism today than say 50 or 60 years ago, but it won’t completely disappear because there are enough people who continue to pass it down and at times – like today in this country – it seems to bubble over.

In Tom T. Hall’s great 1972 song “(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine” he wrote the line “God bless little children while they’re still too young to hate.” Hopefully the children I saw playing today and not caring one bit about their differences or the way they looked will maintain that innocence into adulthood. Hopefully the generation before them will allow that to happen.  

Could Malcolm X's 'Ballot or the Bullet' Apply to America's Gun Epidemic

In 1964 Malcolm X gave a historic speech that would become known as "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech in the fight for civil rights, named the seventh most important speech in the American 20^th century by a panel of 137 scholars.

He said: "It’s time now for you and me to become more politically mature and realize what the ballot is for; what we’re supposed to get when we cast a ballot; and that if we don’t cast a ballot, it’s going to end up in a situation where we’re going to have to cast a bullet.  It’s either a ballot or a bullet.”

It was a revolutionary idea, but one that the country was headed toward without important legislation and change.

We might get to a point in this country where “Ballot or the Bullet” becomes a relevant statement for the gun epidemic. Of course, that would mean anti-gun people would have to throw away their beliefs, at least for the time being to prove their point.

Malcolm X said "it's either a ballot or a bullet" and when it comes to this particular issue in America it doesn't seem the ballot is working.

Dammit

“Dammit.”

That’s what I said aloud to myself when I found out that one of the shooters names in the mass shooting that claimed the lives of 14 people and injured more than 10 others in San Bernardino, Calif. on Wednesday (Dec. 2) was Syed Farook.

This might sound horrible, but every time there is a mass shooting in this country – and it’s become such an occurrence that there have been more mass shootings (shootings with at least four persons shot) in this country this year than there have been days (351 mass shootings to only 336 days) – I quietly hoped to myself that the shooter wasn’t Middle Eastern (or really any minority for that matter). It’s not because I fear ISIS and believe an attack by Middle Easterners on Americans would signal the beginning of a full scale ISIS attack in this country, but I believe that Middle Easterner shooters give more fodder for the racists who have run amuck about all things Muslim in this country since the tragic France attacks last month.

Syed Farook was an American citizen. We don’t seem to know anything else about him in the short amount of time since he was named the shooter, except for that and that he was a county health inspector. We don’t know that he was a Muslim, despite his name. We don’t know that he was targeting anybody on the basis of either religion or race – but that’s not stopping people from going on an all-out assault against Muslims or even people who they may view as Muslims.

And, that’s one of the problems with this country. The country is blind to its own racism in that many feel Muslims are synonymous with terrorism. The bigots of this country don’t trust an entire religion or race of people simply because of the actions of others.

And, yet when a white Christian perpetrates terrorism for a cause as Robert Dear did at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, Colo. just last week, that resulted in the deaths of four people and injuries to almost 10 more, people don’t go off in a racist tangent about either Christians or white people.

This is a nation built by white Christians and still run by a majority of white Christians. Because of this it seems many in this country give a pass to killers who are white (as most mass shooters tend to be) and Christian. Some lunatics even build a terrorist (which Dear absolutely is no matter how many want to define him as a “lone wolf” instead) as a hero because of his “stand” against Planned Parenthood due to their beliefs against abortion.

This is America’s blatant racism on stage for everyone to see and yet we still ignore it, because for some reason we aren’t scared of white guys with guns the same way we are about Middle Easterners with guns, despite having every reason to be with the majority of this country’s mass shootings perpetrated by white men.

That’s why I cringe at the fact of a Middle Easterner shooter. It will lead to not only more racism, but will become a religious/race issue when it should remain a gun and gun control issue all along.

“Dammit.”