Warzones

By Mickey Friedman
June 16, 2018

Once it was fairly easy for white people. The native-Americans were forced to ever-dwindling, degrading reservations. Our foreign enemies were oceans away. The folks to fear were the blacks, but they were outnumbered and segregated into ghettos. I hope it’s OK to say ghetto because I remember the separate slums for the Irish and the Italians, the Chinese and the Jews.

Even so, despite the inconveniences of religion and national origin, Jews, Italians, and the Irish, are white. And in a land built on slavery and predisposed to racism, fear of colored people always trumps religious bias.

Recently, things haven’t gone so well for white people. In 1940, of 132.2 million Americans, 89.8% were white, and only 9.8% black. By 2010 without that big Paid By Mexico Border Wall, somehow 16.3% of 308.7 million Americans were Latino or Hispanic. Add your black people and others and you’ve got a minority population of 36.3%.

When you fear people of color and there are more of them, there’s more to fear. Witness those people of color shot while reaching for phones or wallets or driving or walking somewhere some white person thinks is suspicious. Starbucks for you and me but not for them.

You want a look at fear, Youtube the National Rifle Association’s TV commercials. A guidebook for hate and divisiveness.

Charlie Daniels tells “the ayatollahs of Iran and every terrorist they enable that while they may have met our fresh-face flower child President and his weak-kneed Ivy League friends, they haven’t met America.”

Charlie’s talking about “the people who defend this nation with their bloodied callous bare hands … the steelworkers … or the swampfolks in Cajun land who can wrestle a full-grown gator out of the water … the good cops who fight the fight in the urban warzones …” I think he’s talking white people.

There’s Dana Loesch who, when not peddling beet juice, identifies those who threaten America and want to take away guns: the critics of President Trump, “the saboteurs slashing away with their leaks and smears hoping to build their utopia from the ashes of what they burn down” which turns out to be demonstrators, news reporters, and football players who take a knee. Thank God for the NRA and beet juice.

We’re told in the South Side of Chicago the law doesn’t matter because the authorities want to attack the gun rights of the good people rather than the drug dealers. So law-abiding folks put their kids to bed to the sound of gun fire with no hope …

Speaking of threats, and reasons to fear, President Trump confuses the terror of the street-gang MS-13 with the caravan of women who made their way north to escape from those very Central American gangs and despots. In Trumpworld, these exhausted women, determined to apply for asylum for themselves and their children, are equated with criminals. Fact is most are willing to work their asses off in our restaurants and on our farms while their kids go to school.

In Trumpworld they are threats. Threats, as the NRA advocates, require even more guns.

Once you could link gun ownership to hunting. In 1977, 31.6% of adults were either hunters or married to hunters. By 2014, only 15.4% of adults lived in hunting households. Today, there might be a stronger connection between gun ownership and fear. In 2014, while 22.4% of U.S. adults owned guns, more whites than blacks owned guns: 39% of white households versus 18.1% of black and Hispanic households. And more rich than poor: 18.2% of households with incomes under $25,000 versus 44% of households with incomes above $90,000. And rural households – 55,9% in households with no town over 10,000 people versus 14.8% of households in metropolitan areas. Meanwhile, ownership among women has varied between 9% and 14% in recent decades. As for age, 14% of those under 35 owned guns versus 30.4% of those 65 and older.

Anybody want to speculate about the nexus between fear and hate and racism and violence. Add to it, the extraordinary ease with which mostly white men/boys filled with anger and fear and suffering from mental distress can find the handguns, shotguns, semi-automatic rifles can exercise their right to bear arms. Then go out to kill kids, churchgoers, concert-goers, family members, and strangers.

Today our deep-seated fear of the other, our ghastly preoccupation with guns, the ease with which even the mentally ill can get them has created so many new warzones for white children as well. Like the young victims of South Central LA, Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York, West Englewood in Chicago, they now suffer unpredictable, ever-present gun violence. How profoundly sad to hear the mostly white kids of Santa Fe, Texas say they expected a school shooting. Weren’t surprised that one of their fellow students would start killing. For our children, death and destruction is a schoolbus away.

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“Warzones” was first published in the June 7, 2018 edition of the Berkshire Record.