Rotten House

With the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, it appears that the Hollywood fantasy of a Wild West American culture is becoming the dominant nationally ideology. If the people trying to disarm Rittenhouse had simply shot him to death, logically they would have got off scott-free as well. Now you don’t have to live in Florida to engage in a gun fight without consequences. And while this theory has not proved true for people of other races, it is clear that if you are White, you can go anywhere and shoot anyone to death as long as you claim to have felt threatened.

This is a vision of America celebrated and championed by a large swath of citizens obsessed with the historically recent re-interpretation of the Second Amendment. While there can be great agreement on many things that make people feel safe or unsafe, this is a case in which some of us will feel more safe and some far less safe. I am in the far less safe category, because I do not indulge in fantasies of projecting my masculinity through firearms.

For me, the steady growth of “stand your ground” culture represents increased chaos, a retreat from the safety of shared expectations, of rules of human interaction, of civilization itself. And so, it fits neatly in with the collapse of democracy that is being engineered by the political leaders of an ethnic group desperate to cling to power. They will tear down the country in order to retain cultural, political and economic hegemony. I am certain that modern Republican leaders would be happy to rule over a system of apartheid akin to that of the old South African regime.

What all of this means is that the veneer of steadily increasing social progress that many of us took for granted was a facade. Seething underneath was the undying fear, resentment and bigotry of millions of people. It was an illusion that we had changed as a country since the pre-civil rights movement days. We dressed ourselves comfortably in the refrain of, “Yes, we’ve made progress and more needs to be done.” In reality, the “progress,” like democracy itself, was a fragile illusion.

And what hope is there for protecting any shreds of a culture of humanity and empathy if education itself is being taken over by the same mob that is gaining more and more absolute and unchallengeable control our political system?

It’s not easy for people who perceive reality as I do to accept any suggestion other than retreating into our islands of cultural isolation. Maybe we will become like the right-wingers who for years have been sleeping with their assault weapons under their mattresses, waiting for permission to take over local and national government. Maybe we just have to keep ourselves safe until the system run by hate-filled morons collapses under its own weight.

But that’s not a successful change strategy that has historical precedence. In various forms, revolution is the only thing that has brought down fascist oppression. I just hope it can be done through nonviolence. Somehow. It’s hard to be optimistic right now. For me, I have to think that though we are riding a wave that is crashing into shoreline rocks, the sea has a long-term equilibrium to it that will restore peace. Somehow.