By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
There is a school of intellectual thought that has it that racism and other forms of bigotry – perhaps all rooted in genetic xenophobia – is Natural, even instinctual to humankind.
While there may be some logical substance to this position, the vicious, violent and virulent racism, misogynny (hatred of women), homophobia and bigotry that are so prevalent in Amerikkka can only be the product of systemic Nurture, rooted in a malignant and malevolent soil.
I am a Canadian and a Quebecer of predominantly Irish and English lineage. But I have lived and worked in five Amerikkkan cities – spread across the continental U.S. I have spent time in more than 100 Amerikkkan cities in 36 states. And I have interacted with Amerikkkans and Americans of both genders, a variety of races, numerous ethnic origins, all ages and all sexual orientations, all levels of education, all levels of income and all religious and political proclivities.
Although I have always chosen to live in mixed, downtown neighbourhoods, I have also slept in my car in shopping strip parking lots in Harlem and the South Bronx and I have frequented – numerous times – the Union Pacific railyards in downtown Las Vegas, where a large number of homeless people – mostly African-Americans, Hispanics and American Indians – secured shelter on the ledges of the concrete abutments that supported Interstate highway overpasses where cars whizzed by just six feet overhead.
And I have never experienced any of the violence, the popular paranoia of which has turned much of Amerikkka into an armed cesspool.
But no matter where I have gone in Amerikkka, I have not been able to escape the ill-concealed fear of and hatred for The Other that seems so pervasive and so overwhelming, always lurking and always ready to lunge.
I’ll never forget the first time I visited Cleveland, Ohio. It was probably in the summer of 1973, just a few years after the race riots that scorched and scarred so many Amerikkkan cities in the late Sixties. For close to an hour, I strolled Euclid Avenue, the main downtown drag, at the heart of the morning rush hour. What struck me – and kept striking me – and what I vividly remember even to this day, is how afraid everyone was to make eye contact with anyone else. I had never seen anything like it – before or since.
This is not Nature; this is Nurture.
But who would want to nurture such sick and destructive paranoia, hatred and mindless aggression in a land so blessed as Amerikkka? How would they do it? Why would they do it? Who could possibly benefit from such terrible social destruction? And what could there possibly be to gain from it?
I don’t pretend to know all the answers to all of these questions. But from the evidence I’ve seen, I can make some permissible inferences:
The only people who could possibly benefit would be the Top One Percent – the millionaires, mega-millionaires, billionaires and mega-billionaires – the gangster banksters and corporate robber barons – the corporate capitalists – and their puppet political prosititutes.
How do they do it? They do it by using such proxies as the Republican Teabaggers, the KKKristian kkkonservative jack-in-the-pulpit preachers whose coded bigotry is so simplistic that even their mostly illiterate or semi-literate flock can figure it out, Fox so-called News, a gaggle of semi-literate, hate-mongering right-wing radio talk-show turds, a compliant corporate mass media oligopoly and an equally compliant herd of puppet political prostitutes who really believe they’re part of the elite.
Why do they do it? Almost without exception, those in the Top One Percent of Amerikkkans are certifiably either sociopathic or psychopathic. It is what intensifies their insatiable greed and lust for power to the point where the compulsive pursuit of their next fix will prompt any course of action – no matter how degraded or perverse – no matter how horrific the consequences for the victims of their course of action.
And the course of action chosen by the Top One Percent is to deliberately Nurture racism, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of mindless bigotry in order to keep the Other 99 Percent divided against themselves and unable to unite against the common enemy – the Top One Percent who have already either stolen or destroyed almost everything worth stealing or destroying – and won’t be satisfied until they have it all.