Saturday, May 27, 2017

So...Who's the Dangerous One Again?

I have a couple of posts in the embryonic state, which I hope to develop and publish within the next few weeks.  But something happened that demands a response.  At around 4:30 yesterday afternoon, a male white supremacist began screaming racist and anti-Muslim insults at two young women on a MAX train in Portland, Oregon.  I think it was probably the same line that I often rode home from work at around that time for many weekdays over the last several years.  When some male passengers tried to calm this man down and de-escalate his behavior, he viciously attacked them with a knife, killing two of them and wounding a third.  Then he fled the train.

I wonder what was going through the accursed head of Jeremy Joseph Christian when he started his screaming and shouting, and when he began to kill.  Did he think he was being some kind of hero?  Was this his way of trying to get one last shot of narcissistic glory to compensate for a life wasted as a felon and a loser?  Some prominent politicians and community leaders have called on Donald Trump to publicly condemn the bigotry embodied in Jeremy Joseph Christian, but if I were them, I wouldn't hold my breath, because Trump, like Jeremy, is a loser and a felon who is trying to get one last shot of narcissistic glory before being thrown into an incinerator.  Trump and Jeremy, moreover, are symptoms of a larger national and ethnic narcissism which seems to have permanently taken hold of a certain sector of the American public - a sector which can easily be egged on to re-enact the myth of redemptive violence (see this also) at the slightest provocation because the enactment of this myth enables them to project the shame of their own lives onto convenient targets, even if the choosing of those targets makes no sense, as was the case with Pizzagate.  This is the sector which doesn't believe it actually exists unless it can prove its existence by terrorizing people who don't belong to it.  But it is inescapably - bit by bit - losing its ability to terrorize.  For its members, the future contains only a yawning abyss, because this sector is good for nothing.

I am a Christian and not a Muslim.  But when Muslims are actively performing deeds of reconciliation and healing in a nation and society that is being polarized and torn apart by knuckleheads for the benefit of its wealthiest members, what does that say about America as a "Christian" nation?  Only that "the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you."

1 comment:

  1. As Bob marley sung,one love,we should love one another regardless of our different skin colours,or the different believes that most people come from different backgrounds and continents but we are all ONE PEOPLE AND ONE NATION.Say no to RACISM

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