Race is Just a Symptom
Race has been thrust back into the news. We focus on it but part of its seeming lack of a solution is that it is a symptom of a much larger problem.
I watched Rachel Maddow debate Patrick Buchanan on the Sonia Sotomayer nomination to the Supreme Court. Buchanan is stuck in the racial politics of fifty years ago. Rachel can’t fathom that White males particularly, have become the group to exploit. The blinders of both sides prevent them from seeing what is really wrong with our nation and its failing institutions.
What is really wrong is that we have an economic system that functions at its optimal best when some group is exploited for the economic profit of the economic elite of this nation. Capitalism is little more than the making of the human weakness of absolute greed into an economic theory.
How do you function as a nation where one of your founding and guiding principles is the idea that, ” All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among them are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” coupled with an economic theory that supports the use of fellow human beings as an exploitable commodity for profit. Property from John Locke’s original thesis was changed for some nebulous idea of the pursuit of happiness.
But the question remains, as a contradiction in the fundamental ideals of this nation in that our economic foundation functions best when you have resources including human resources to exploit for profit. That is juxtaposed against the idea of our equality as human beings in terms of the rights we should enjoy as citizens.
The whole debate on immigration is illustrative of the point I am trying to make. Corporate America recruited and employed anywhere from 12 to 20 million immigrants that they brought in to work. The initial lie was that they were taking jobs that Americans wouldn’t do?
This was proved to be a lie and in actuality they were being given jobs that Corporate America didn’t want to pay for. Corporate America was using the immigrants to jam all of America’s wages back. When you are pitting people against each other with economic survival at stake how reasonable is it to believe that people won’t react against those they perceive as placing their economic survival in jeopardy?
When you have Media figures such as Lou Dobbs, on CNN telling everyone nightly in a segment titled War on the Middle Class, that the immigrants are the problem, expecting people to see that race is just camouflage to keep everyone from seeing the truth is an unreasonable expectation as is all the stupid diversity lectures. All it proves is that your job has not been placed in jeopardy which enables you to be so magnanimous.
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