Race and Consciousness Conversations on a hot topic du jour
In the early part of autumn last year, I was taking a morning walk on a pathway through our decidedly working-class condominium complex in SE Michigan. Reaching the turnaround point, I noticed a younger family—father, mother, one of each gender children, maybe 5 and 6—walking to their minivan, with some urgency. It was clear someone (or two) had to get to work, and
the kids needed to be dropped off at school. Despite the time pressure revealed
by their movements, friendly conversation
and even gentle laughter filled the air. I thought to myself, wow this is great to see: such nice, industrious starter-families being
a visible part of the neighborhood. Launching my day with a spark of appreciation for common
forward-moving humanity.
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What most everyone wants
"Lord (or Yahweh or Allah or Mother Nature), let me grow up in a community where fear is alien, where my neighbors are as interested as I am in living their own lives free from the coercive intrusion of others; where I can decide for myself how to make my living, who I want to hang out with, which religion I want to observe (or be completely free from), whether I prefer drink or herbal refreshment; where if I decide to think and work extra hard I get to accept the risks and keep the rewards, and walk on this planet, in this galaxy, neither forcing myself on anyone else nor having anyone else force themselves[1] on me... or our families."
So if that's what most people of all textures, colors, and flavors want —seriously, if you took a door-to-door poll of adults living anywhere in the world, I'll wager 95% agree with the above 'Brian's Creed'—what happened?
Why are we living in a world saturated with expropriation, coercion, war, and slaughter? Well, I have some ideas on that subject, and I've done some development of a prescription under the concept of the Sacred Nonaggression Principle. And as a large channel feeding the river of aggression, I think we find something a lot of people call "race."
Race—or more precisely, racial conflict—is mainly what I want to talk about today, especially the black/white American issue, which has become a much warmer button with the emergence of
Barack Obama as a potential presidential nominee. The media has lately made much of Bama's associations: e.g. harangues of former preacher man, Jeremiah Wright and an unsolicited endorsement some months back by Nation of Islam mental case Louis Farrakhan—both of whose more strident perspectives Obama firmly opposes. Candidly, I find the selected assertions of these preacher-men logically "out to lunch," but what disturbs me most is the anger-bordering-on-hysteria behind them... in concert with the obligatory congregational Hallelujahs and Amens. It's like watching 1984 or taking part in Koolaid Day at the Promise Keepers.
The Black American Pain Body
Again, being frank, as I watch the Reverend Jeremiah videos that have been making the rounds, my emotional-perceptual mechanism as a white man of European ancestry recoils in scary visions out of some old Tarzan movies... or, more recently, say, Hotel Rwanda. This is what I feel (on an instantaneous psychological and biological level). And if this is what I feel, then a whole lotta people in my socioeconomic sphere—of any color—are going to feel similarly. Rightly or wrongly, but in any case they're the kinds of feelings that are not conducive to racial harmony.
We mustn't let our feelings get the better of us. Let's think about what the Jeremiah Wrights, the Louis Farrakhans, or even collective-guilt opportunists like Al Sharpton are saying. What is the fundamental message? Clearly their anger toward the "white man" (or the white man's institutions) is genuine and partly caused by reflecting on slavery: the coercion, mayhem, murder, and all the injustices that accompany the wholesale aggression that slavery represented. Most of the white community that I experience on a regular basis has two responses to these imprecations of rage seemingly targeted against it: 1) "We feel your pain," and (2) "That ain't here, that ain't us, and that ain't now."
Eckhart Tolle talks about the psychological "pain body," a collection of memories of wrongs that threaten to take over consciousness
and inhibit appreciation of the 'reality of now.' Let's acknowledge that certain peoples—blacks, Jews, American Indians, Armenians, ethnic Germans (!) (and, now that I think of it, virtually every other ethnic group at one time or another in history)—have an understandable basis for relinquishing their 'present living being' in whole or part to the pain body, this negative bundle of truth-blocking energy. The pain body is a problem, a limitation, a siphoning of vitality that misdirects one's energy toward continued lack of presence in the Now, i.e. consciousness.
This peculiar "Black American Pain Body" (BAPB) seems to have a dreadful power to make one feel one's limitations or problems are caused by the actions of outside agents... i.e. the slave owners, their modern allies, the big corporations—maybe a grain of truth in that one, eh?—, or "blue-eyed devils" and their soul brothers going about their business in a market economy. Which then too often becomes an excuse for inaction, a rationalization for seeking special treatment, a pretext for rudeness or incivility, or most perversely, an incentive to magnify the slightest perceived affront into a grievance on the order of the/a Holocaust.[2]
Fortunately, the
BAPB, though a potent addiction (and overemphasized routinely in the Plutocratic media)[3], is embraced by a dwindling number of black people... despite the ministrations of its celebrated pushers like Reverend Al and, possibly, Reverend Jeremiah[4]. This is because black people, despite the malignant forces of the Plutocracy arrayed against them, are becoming increasingly accomplished in every field, which is no more evident than in the campaign of Barack Obama. (I'll end with that.)
The Warfare-Welfare State (White Pain Body)
To be sure on the white-community side of the American black/white racial harmony equation, much work remains to be done.
My perspective is increasingly that a wealthy-powerful-occult set of hypercontrolling elites—for convenience let's call them the "power people"... vs. the "freedom people" (the real, normal individuals like you and me who go along with the 'Brian's Creed')—glommed on to the higher echelons of human speciedom eons ago. [Think of that introductory scene in Alien, where the pod ejects this crablike mass that envelopes the head of Crewman X, which can't be dislodged... now imagine this alien glob as invisible.] Anyway, in the West, the freedom people have known these power people as the Pharoahs, the Elders of Zion, the Church of Rome, the European monarchies, and more recently the Trilateral Commission, the Wall Street/CIA cabal, the international banking cartel/corpocracy, etc.[5] [They are practically all white.]
The power people in the West exist in an advanced state of domination, especially with their control of media and academia. But because of the Internet and the ideology of freedom—spurred through the modern libertarian movement (especially the 'reason-peace-spiritual-humanist' branch)—the truth about the power people is being widely disseminated. (And truth to the power monolith is as brandishing a cross to Dracula.) The critical foundation of the power people is war. According to the Rothschild Formula, the money power has financed both sides in all military conflicts in modern history... and thereby expropriates unconscionable wealth, universally, from normal freedom people.
Bringing these observations to bear on the modern American political context, the power people have created a constituency for war and empire. The constituency is mostly white and in the United States wraps itself in the Flag and the Cross—icons extolled by the controlling elites to represent America's manifest destiny to conquer and rule in the name of all things, "freedom." The conquer and rule thing is nothing more than slavery of a worldwide hue, and blatantly racist. [You'll note at least one of Reverend Jeremiah's tirades concerned the inherent racism of this administration's imperial wars.]
Accordingly, we have the
crux of what we may call the White American Pain Body WAPB, though this pain body has a slightly different construction than the BAPB. The WAPB tries to take us out of the Now by engendering images or symbols of American Greatness, almost a deification not unlike the fascist Nazis and their occult iconography that proselytized the Master Race... it's oriented toward both past and future, and deceptively coopts as many valid American symbols of liberty—such the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty, or the Declaration of Independence—as it feels it can get away with. [e.g. "the Decider" invading a nonthreat country, killing and displacing hundreds of thousands of people, in the name of 'Freedom and Democracy.'] (The WAPB tends to be a pain exporter.)
Warfare statist =~ John McCain
The other side of the same white pain-body/power-elitist coin is the welfare state, which is the "We're from the government and we're here to help you" phenomenon exhibited by those we often label leftists —predominantly white. The welfare state is implicitly racist in its assumption that poor black people want the government to confiscate the wealth of others on their behalf. In fact, the majority want the same things we all want per the 'Brian's Creed' to live in peace with our neighbors and be allowed to keep what we earn in honest labor. But the 'conceited anointed' come in and tell us what to do; the only difference between a welfare-statist and a thief is 1) eventually the thief goes away, and 2) the thief isn't sanctimonious.
Welfare statist =~ Hillary Clinton
Needless to say the majority of the black community responds to this projection of the warfare/welfare pain-body (which of course promotes the murderous ends of the (mainly white) power people) with, "That ain't here, that ain't us, and that ain't now." Meaning, "Hey, Jack, get out of town and leave us the hell alone." Unfortunately, such rejection by the black community of the ministrations of the white power people is flagrantly ignored by the white power people. [And when you look at the race issue in the light of continued power-people oppression of normal black freedom people, you can see why some preacher-men and their minions tend to go a little berserko.]
Let's try a little rationality (and reading) for a change
A couple of days ago while visiting friends in the Lansing area (Michigan), I attended a book signing and presentation by Susan Jacoby. Her book is The Age of American Unreason, and it's been on the NY Times bestseller list for the past several weeks. The message in Unreason intersects what Neil Postman was trying to tell us in Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: namely, reading and writing (books or integrated written presentations of conceptual knowledge) and reasoning are fundamental to liberty, psychological health, and civilization itself.
"Junk thought" is what we get when we let down our mental standards. Junk thought is what brings us unconstitutional wars and tyranny, what makes the Plutomedia propaganda ministry so powerful and dangerous, and what threatens to unravel any sort of benevolent social order based on the rights of the individual... the sort of social system the 'Brian's Creed' speaks of.
Along those lines, the fundamental issues we face as people are about consciousness, whether we can raise the level of our game to the threshold of critical thinking that enables us to survive and hopefully flourish. I think we can and will, even, as we move forward to the era of the Singularity, but that's a subject for another day. In terms of racial problems, though, I think we all have to take a step back and encourage consciousness on all sides. It really isn't a political problem as such, rather a general social and psychological one.
It's far too much to ask a political candidate to work out these psychological problems for the whole country. I think we have to give Barack Obama a lot of credit for doing the best he can to wrestle with the BAPB and the WAPB at the same time. He's only a man, and he's a good man. Sure he's tinged with some intellectual baggage from welfare-state idealism, but he's a hard worker, smart, and shows signs of being willing to learn his way out of it. Plus, he's the only remaining candidate who's spot on when it comes to going toe to toe against the warfare state—something a majority of American voters thought they were going to undo via the elections of 2006.
And regarding the pain bodies, I feel Obama's in the best position to effectively rebuke these deficiencies of consciousness on both sides... to get the ball rolling toward racial accommodation if not harmony.
The Plutomedia is a powerful force and all these images that people (especially white people)—if they do not engage in critical thinking—will associate with
Barack Obama may represent a deathblow to his candidacy. I hate to say that, but asking American voters to rise above their emotional perceptions is a bit like asking them to consider the government is lying about the attacks of 9/11... or the success of the Iraq occupation. But who knows? A lot can happen between now and the end of the primaries, and between now and election day.
Today I just watched Part 1 of a miniseries, John Adams, on HBO, that may be to the average American as Roots was to the average African-American.
Earthshakingly hopeful!
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On the personal level I'm happy that I've made positive steps. That family I talked about at the beginning, you know, the one I want to see so many more of in the neighborhood: it wasn't until several moments after I had had that immediate feeling of welcome that I realized they were black. I'm also dead sure 95% of my white friends—at least in the North (and according to one of my Southern white readers even moreso in the South)[6]—would step through the exact same sequence of emotions. The implication is direct emotional confirmation, at least to me, that racism (of whites toward blacks) no longer plays a significant role in limiting the success of black families in America... and now we can all get busy doing the real humanitarian economics that will make such success more commonplace.
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[1] I realize the construction should be singular, but I'm giving up on that particular distinction.
[2] This faux grievance issue came into play with the Imus incident a few months back, which I commented on here.
[3] I keep trying to come up with suitable terms for the elite power types who rule a large part of our political and economic lives. I've used Cartel Pathocracy before widely, but Plutocracy (which means rule by the self-chosen wealthy) seems to have a lot going for it.
Hence Plutocratic media (Plutomedia).
[4] Does anyone feel maybe this meltdown by the Reverend Jeremiah was brought on by simple senility?
[5] A modern view is found in this revealing 1974 monograph by "The Transcriber," entitled The Occult Technology of Power.
[6] One of my loyal Southern Libertarian readers informs me race relations are better in the South, at least from the perspective of whites regarding blacks. Further,
a lot of whites don't appreciate how frequently blacks are prejudiced against whites to the point..."when we [white libertarians] talk about freedom and self-governance, we are talking in some kind of code directed against them." Obviously, libertarians need to be cognizant of this prejudice and do what we can to effectively counter it... which will take time, mostly.
