from the Columbian:
People who don't understand the rage that many black youths must have for
white Americans just don't understand the individual human heart. Even Pitt's, himself black, misses something. That one of
the attackers has a white mother is one more reason why he'd feel so
conflicted and enraged by his condition. His behavior is no mystery at all.
Until we begin to look at each
individual as a novelist or poet or psychologist looks at human beings, we will fail to
see them correctly. Generalizations driven by labels won't get at the truth. We must view
each other as individuals and try to fathom our behaviors as novelists
and poets think about our emotion-driven behaviors, with an effort to understand how the individual's emotions drive his actions. We don't have to agree with a novelist's presentations, but we do need to approach one another as novelists or poets think about them—imaginatively. Then, we'll all at least be in the same ballpark, watching the same baseball game. It's emotions that drive
all our behaviors. Not ideas. Until we understand one another as
emotional beings, we'll remain lost in labels and generalizations. Ironic as hell, but true: read good fiction
if you want to understand reality as it must be understood.
Scenario at 2:30 am:
I'm in a strange town, visiting. I don't know anybody in the town
except my Dad, and I'm walking home to my Dad's house down a strange
street in this strange town when some crazy guy comes after me and shows
me a gun in his pants belt and seems to be inappropriately crazy-acting
angry. I've got three choices...fight or flight or freeze.
If I freeze
the dude could easily shoot me. If I run he might
shoot me in the back. I know the dude must be crazy to be confronting
me when all I'm doing is walking home. Paranoid crazy people do that
sometimes, attack others for no sensible reason. So, my only choice, faced with this armed madman, is attack so
fast that he doesn't have time to pull his weapon and quickly do enough
damage to the dude so that he won't be able to pull his gun and kill
me. That's what any sensible male, acting on instinct, would do when
confronted by what seems to be an armed maniac in a strange town.
The only error I make is I don't beat the guy senseless. I let up a
minute because I'm a human being, and I don't like to kill people.
That's my mistake...I don't knock the guy completely unconscious, so,
because I'm a human being with a conscience, I'm dead, and a shyster
lawyer makes sure that the paranoid racist, nut job gets off by making sure that
nobody gets a chance to really understand the dynamics of the
situation. The prosecutor began by reading the very clear racist remarks
of that nut job when he reported "suspicious" [walking down the
street?] behavior. Zimmerman made clearly racist comments at the time. What he
committed was a clear hate attack that he instigated, and only in the
deep South would he get away with it. We all know that, anybody my age
of 75 with a bit of brain in his head knows it, anybody who saw McCain
defeated by the race card in South Carolina during his first run at the
presidency knows it...the South is full of prejudice. Hell...it's the
whole reason the South went from Democrat to Republican after Johnson
signed the Civil Rights Act.
Now...will I be able to sleep?
