On The Holocaust Museum Shooting

I'm still wrapping my head around everything that is going on in our country and the way it is covered in the media. 

A white supremacist man murders a Black man in a national museum and again the chattering class has turned it into a partisan slugfest.  We are living through what will probably be looked upon as the Second Reconstruction and there is no serious dialogue around the problems that plague our nation. 

It's so overwhelming and demoralizing.  I too feel powerless.  I turn on the news and I get endless reams of nonsense from the endless boxes of random no-names dissecting every. little. thing. on CNN to Rachel Maddow's latest "i'm the smartest know-it-all" schtick to the ranting, teary-eyed wingnuts lamenting a perceived loss of White male power on Fox News.

I. can't.  Just. can't.

Who cares if its leftwing or rightwing?  I do think that the rightwing bully pulpit of Fox News has contributed to a sickeningly racist fury by stoking racial, religious and class-based fears.  But the Left has responded by creating its own bully pulpit around self-important condescending liberal hacks like Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann.

What does it really even matter, ultimately?  We are so polarized that each side is pretty much preaching to the choir.  It's a recipe for inertia.  Because the rest of us are just checking out.

To me, this new "identity politics" – wherein all Americans are divided between slightly amorphous, chattering class-defined "real Americans" and "the underserving"  — is the real problem because it distracts us from the real problems and the real solutions that we ought to be discussing and grappling with.

What happened yesterday was hate manifest.  My heart goes out to the family and friends of Stephen Tyrone Johns, the Black guard who was killed yesterday.  It's a tragedy.

About tlewisisdope

I write. I live in DC.
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