I guess what I'm trying to convey is a kind of equivalent of a principle we learned in high school chemistry, "Matter is neither created or destroyed." Of course the exception to the principle is nuclear fission where matter can be converted to energy, but in the non-nuclear world, when you burn a pile of leaves, nothing is really destroyed, the leaves turn to ashes, smoke, water vapor, other gases, etc. etc. and if you could capture them all the by-products and weigh them, they'd weigh the same as the original pile of leaves.
The spiritual equivalent of all that is, "where did the racism of America go to?" This was a country of, as I pointed out, slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, poll taxes and voting tests and suddenly we are told, "Well, we ain't like that no more." Well, I just don't think this is possible. All that hatred goes somewhere from one heart to another. Racist parents raise racist kids. Laws are passed that you can't ask a voter in Mississippi to qualify to vote by reciting the 10th amendment or naming the 18th President of the U.S.A. or the capital of Idaho. But those laws can't change what the racist parents felt or what they passed on to their kids. There was a huge amount of racism, and IMHO, it just must have gone underground. Some of it we can still see in the Republican Party, in Trent Lott for example, and others like him and their legions of supporters. You'll see it on Confederate Flag bumper stickers, hear it on talk show radio - - it didn't go away, it's just waiting. Kinda like anti-Semitism in Germany during the Weimar Republic. It wasn't the law of the land, the political leaders of the day had no use for it, but it rested there in the hearts of the people, and one day a different party came to power and woke it all up again. It had not vanished, it was just resting. Biding its time.
Everyone likes to ignore history. Especially our own history, especially if it's ugly and violent and brutal. Another history has to be invented to replace it, a history of America the Good, the Saviour of the World, the Free, the Benevolent. This is the history of sirs, and Kramer and plane and others. They take it seriously. They believe it. It shows their country (and, by extension, themselves) as decent, honourable, pure. The bad stuff would be a threat, especially if it continues into the present day, as it obviously does. How can hundreds of thousands of Iraqis be killed in the name of a phony "democracy" that will never take root, while American and British oil companies cut themselves in for a huge slice of oil revenues of that unfortunate country? I say, only becuase the victims can't speak English, can't get their individual stories out, and are largely unknown aliens who dress different, talk different, look different and pray different. This is pure racism. It's what ENABLES the rape of Iraq.
I'm sorry. I can't finish the thought I started. Our son is coming up with our daughter-in-law and their little baby. I am gonna quit at this point. Hope it's not too garbled.
