Desensitzed

“Desensitized”

March 19, 2017

So I got up this morning way too early as usual (it seems that since I passed the age of 40 sleeping in late is simply no longer in my DNA) and as is my norm (especially those days that I have to get up and have to deal with the confused, entitled American public) I picked up my phone to see what was going on in the world. 

Stopping to look at one of the biggest social networks (wasn’t that a movie?) in the world as usual, an old friend (who I made out with once; great kisser, much better friend) posted an article about some local students, some Mexican, some African-American, who recently won a robotics competition.  Instead of reveling in their victory, they instead became news fodder when some fine Hoosiers told the Latin students to “Go Back to Mexico.”

Yup, that happened.

Now I should be partially grateful that for once the black kids weren’t told to go “pick some cotton” or some ignorant shit like that.  However, since one of my best friends is of Latino descent (not Mexican, but doesn’t matter) and a spent a good deal of my childhood with folks like this, this did not amuse me much.

But it gets better.

My sister posted a video of a black woman being taken to the ground and placed in a chokehold by a store owner who felt she was shoplifting eyelashes from his establishment.  She started to say that she couldn’t breathe but he wouldn’t let her go.

Sound familiar?

Oh wait, probably not because that’s “old news.” 

Sort of goes along with the whole “Fake News” deelio POTUS 45 keeps either blaming the media for…or makes up himself (see “wiretapping”).

So as I watched the video (and the accompanying video of black leaders in her community confronting the shop owner, reminding him that African Americans make up a good chunk of his business) as well as thought back to those poor kids (and these were LITTLE kids as far as I can tell), I realized something…

…I’ve become desensitized to this stuff.

Holy shit that saddened me.

As I mentioned above, I moved to Indiana 22 years ago last month.  When I got here gas was about .89 cents a gallon, and I remember as I woke up (my girlfriend at the time got a promotion here from NY and I was helping her get settled) we arrived in a town called Ellettsville, a few miles away from Bloomington (a town that a lot of Hoosiers know quite well, even though they have a problem accepting that those glory days are LONG gone). 

The very first thing I said to my former amour was, “Holy shit, I am in Mayberry.”

Now anyone over the age of 40 knows that is the fictional town from the classic show “The Andy Griffith Show.”  It’s funny that comes back to me now; my mom (God Bless her) LOVED that show.  Before her mind started to go bad, she would hunt that sucker down on cable, and even though she watched every episode of that show at least 100 times, she still laughed. 

That show right now reminds me of what the current state of America (namely, its current leadership) is trying to go back to.  A simpler time where you left your doors unlocked, everyone was friendly, you had family meals…

…and white was right.

That bugs me a tad. 

I don’t get where some (operative word, SOME) folks of the majority continue to think it is OK that they are so perfect and everyone else is so flawed.  They cannot accept that other folks from other cultures or persuasions can accomplish great things…and sometimes do it better than they can.  Because of this psychological block (or a lesson taught over and over again), they can’t deal…so they do what they can to make sure that some of us (race, religion, sexual choice or whatever doesn’t fit into their idea of the “round hole”) believe what they think of them.

Kids won a robotics completion, fair and square.  Instead of being proud of them because they were children, they tried to remind them that they will never be viewed as such.

If the black woman did steal, call the cops.  What I saw when that shop owner tackled that woman (true man there; his penis must be HUUUUUGE and BIGLY) was “WrestleMania”, except there was no script involved. 

Oh, wait a minute…she was black.  Perhaps she got off lucky being slammed to the ground. 

It explains how we ended up with a guy who thinks that feeding poor people doesn’t work, that having 60 degree days in January is not unusual, and why only folks like him (not like YOU folks, don’t think because you have the same melanin content you are “down”) and that same “white is right” mentality isn’t gonna butt-bend-us-over-and-insert-here us all.

241 years of the same thinking, despite the fact that we as a country put a black guy in the White House…twice.

We are a true oxymoron.