Good Morning.
I'll take a crack at it. I'll try to come up with an explanation for why Roseanne Barr uttered the terrible remark about Valerie Jarrett. Ms. Barr eventually blamed it on Ambien, a sleep aid, and the company that manufactures the drug quickly issued a statement that racism is not a known side effect. ABC cancelled its highest-rated show, but the real question is why it aired the show in the first place. Barr is known for her insensitive and often crude commentary, but her new show was supposed to make buckets of money by appealing to the segment of society that apparently feels misunderstood and neglected among the weirdo softies. If they don't like the food, it should be okay to scream an obscenity at the waitress. If they don't like someone's driving, it should be okay to run the guy off the road. If they don't like Valerie Jarrett, it should be okay to call her an ape on social media. It's all part of an angry mob mindset that has been building for decades.
Until the civil rights movement, everyone stayed in their cubby holes for the most part. In the major cities in the north, the Italians lived in a certain area, the Irish lived ten blocks away, the Polish were a mile or two south of them, and those folks were just the Catholics. The Anglo-Saxons resided as far away from all of them as they could, and the Jews, many of whom were successful because they're smarter than most of us, had their own nice neighborhoods but nicely removed from
all of the above and not by choice. The Puerto Ricans, who migrated north before the Cubans and Mexicans, lived in the inner cities in terrible conditions, and the blacks who fled from the south settled into areas that were a mix of marginally decent and just plain crummy. In the northern rural areas, particularly throughout the Midwest, virtually any kind of diversity was non-existent, with the Native Americans relegated to the most desolate areas of the country, hopefully never to be heard from again.
In the south that had gone to war to preserve the practice of slavery, the living arrangements were even more sharply defined. Black people were assigned to neighborhoods of shacks lining dirt roads that went nowhere. Then along came Martin Luther King who said enough of the white folks telling the good Lord that a lot of his creativity wasn't to their liking and the country was thrown into a tailspin because a whole bunch of people wasn't one bit interested in the attitude adjustment Dr. King had in mind. Meanwhile the Ku Klux Klan was busy lynching anyone who rubbed them the wrong way and lighting crosses on the front lawns of those who thought King might have a couple of ideas worth considering. We forget that the Klan considered itself and still considers itself to be a Christian organization and so do the Neo-Nazis. Jesus was a bronze-skinned Jew, of course, and he told people to be nice - in his first language, Aramaic - but nevermind about all that.
In the north things were slightly better. The schools were already desegregated and anyone could ride around on public transportation, not that every passenger was comfortable with it. Dr. King started a trend, however, that empowered people who felt oppressed to say something about it. Women burned their bras, clearly a dumb move in my view, and demanded better pay for better jobs and better men who didn't think of them as just barefoot and pregnant but as astronauts and cardiologists. The Native Americans founded the AIM organization that staged several protests about their treatment, with some of the demonstrations unfortunately leading to violence. The gay community began, quietly at first, to step out into the light of day and eventually held parades that were probably not as effective in changing public opinion as they wished. The armed forces were integrated in terms of color, and during the late twentieth century, a policy was put in place to accept gay service members as long as nobody talked about it, but now some of those people are married and adopting kids and buying the house down the street. The neighborhood boundaries are clearly more blurred, some of them anyway, and the houses of worship are at least pondering the idea of human equality, some of them anyway.
The problem is that a certain percentage of the American population just doesn't like change, any kind of change but particularly as it effects the demographics of the country. These folks were somehow able to switch over from rotary phones to touch tones and adapted quite well to the tech age after they found out they could air their views without ever leaving home, but these people are mad as hell. They never thought a bi-racial man could be elected president and then it happened and they've been in a giant snit ever since. Many of them are still convinced that 44 was planted by a foreign government - not sure which one - to overthrow the country and turn it into an Islamic state, and it just doesn't seem to register that 44 sang Amazing Grace at a funeral in Charleston and that he didn't learn it on the flight down from Washington, he learned it as a child. Then again, most of them didn't watch the funeral in Charleston.
It's not just the issue of mixing everyone up in the proverbial melting pot that has them in a dither. The anti-change crowd doesn't want to be responsible for anyone except those in their limited circle of family and friends. They're unmoved by the fact that there are kids of every creed and color who are living in poverty and certainly not by the fact that the children of undocumented immigrants are being ripped from their parents. They're unconcerned that some of their fellow citizens cannot get medical care and are dying before their time. And who gives a rip about the planet. It's all part of that weirdo, softie stuff.
Anger has become the prevalent American emotion, always with terrible consequences that don't seem to matter anymore. And by the way, in the past twenty-four hours we've had a young woman named Samantha Bee who spit out a vulgar slur against the president's daughter on her TV show, unfortunately titled Full Frontal. She, unlike Ms. Barr, did not lose her show after her display of bad taste. She should have.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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