The Nation that Cried Wolf

We have become a nation that caters to people’s individual feelings rather than what is best for society as a whole. Television shows have been removed because someone didn’t like what the writers had to say. Songs have been removed from the radio because someone dared say God's name in their lyrics. A cross was torn down. A monument removed. Millions of people were robbed of an experience because a few objected. This nation has come to use words like rape, racist, fascist, supremacy, and injustice with such frequency that the words and their meaning have lost their bite. I am ALWAYS on the side of a rape victim. A real rape victim. The trouble is, if a woman is yelling rape in today’s society, nobody even turns around. I, like many other people in this world, assume someone is trying to get attention at the cost of someone else. Retaliation is often the cause, a spurned lover that didn’t fully comprehend the meaning of the words “side chick.” He declines to carry on the relationship. She is going to make sure he pays for it. This entire populous is out for self, and it seems everyone wants to be famous, if only for two fleeting minutes. What people fail to realize is that when you get your two minutes of fame, nobody really cares. Honestly, you are simply the cause of the day, the latest meme or a video that makes it to viral status. If anyone remembers your name, it will be when an old YouTube video comes on and something like, “I remember this idiot” will be what is said in households across America. These stories are the impetus for this piece.

One article that stands out from recent past is the story of Dobby, the gorilla statue. Dobby sat, until recently, for twenty years in the same spot inside a circus-themed park. Dobby was created to stand alone and inside the cage to protect the children they were sure would climb on it. Dobby brought joy to the residents of small Texas Town of Corsicana. Last week, the Mayor of Corsicana, Don Denbow, announced in a letter that after 45 complaints from the public in a city of just under 24,000 people, Dobby the gorilla statue was being removed. The complaint? A 500-pound gorilla statue inside a cage in a circus themed children’s park was “deemed to be potentially racially sensitive.” Wait. What?

Did that man say a caged gorilla was racially insensitive? I researched it folks. He said it. He meant it. He explained that he could understand why Dobby would be offensive to black people (again, WHAT???) because (ready for this one???), “it was reminiscent of the slavery black people were exposed to." I swear, my friends, I didn’t make any of that up. Look for yourselves.

Isn’t the thought that a caged gorilla can bring about thoughts of enslaved black people in and of itself racially insensitive? That is the key here. The racism is coming from within. White people try so hard to not be racially insensitive that they become the harbingers of racial hate. We need to rethink this entire situation. Some understanding of what, exactly, has happened to us is in order.

I want to start by introducing you to the words “social stratification” and name the entity responsible for it. Any idea what social stratification is? Briefly, it’s classes of people, sectioned by socioeconomic status. To make a long story short, it’s the government that decides which lives are worth the most. You don’t decide. I don’t decide. They have decided for you what you are worth and more to the point, what they’re willing to invest in you.

What do I mean when I say “invest” in you? The government has taken certain liberties with our lives that I’m sure most never think about. Stick with me, and I will explain, in detail, just how similar to a marionette we really are. How have the powers that be decided your worth? Location, location, location! Now, before we go any further, I’m going to ask you to remove all thoughts of color, religion, political affiliation, and personal opinion about your fellow man and set it aside for the moment. Those things are not relevant to the facts, and they take away from the focus.

Any person born into poverty has a struggle from the beginning. The government has decided that the poor isn’t worth quite as much. You may think I’m handing you my opinion, but that is cold hard fact. I’m going to give you something to think about. Something that can unite us as a country against the real purveyor of some of the strife we deal with daily.

Let’s start with housing. Poor people need a place to live, right? Housing projects were erected by the government with the sinister goal in mind, all wrapped up in the name of good will and tied with a beautiful bowl of hope for a future. Low income housing offered at little to no financial loss to an already destitute and struggling family seems divinely inspired! The homes they built were identical in shape and floor plan and placed within an area of the city they suspected would cost them the least amount of money. These housing complexes were tucked out of any traffic that local commerce brought to the area. The housing complexes were erected with concrete blocks and steel. The paint scheme consisted of drab greens and greys and offered very little natural light. Buildings were placed along the perimeter of the chosen property and held neat rows of identical buildings in the middle. These designs and placements of the homes, it was explained, would foster a strong sense of community, its structure safe and secure. Sounds amazing, but what if I told you the intended purpose was the opposite? What if I told you the entire project was intended to imprison? No? I’m crazy? Go back and read what the homes were built with, how they were placed, and the design itself. Sounds like jail to me!

Grocery stores were opened within easy walking distance of the housing complexes on the premise of bringing low cost food to starving people in their own neighborhoods. Two-day old bread and almost expired vegetables, fruit, and meat filled the stores. Shelves were stocked with high sugar, high sodium, over processed foods. It was cheap, and it was convenient, so people ate it.

Education was next. Going to school was important and being born poor shouldn’t preclude a person from knowledge, so they built the communities their very own schools. The children in the communities were in walking distance of an education and parents sent them faithfully to receive it. Classrooms were constructed of concrete and steel with very little in the way of ventilation and natural light. Classrooms were painted in the same drab greys and greens seen in penal institutions (and housing complexes) throughout the world. Desks were placed in perfectly aligned rows and schedule and repetition were the order of the day. Schools were designed with factory work in mind. Training future generations to mass produce the items that run our lives and not education, as was claimed, was made abundantly clear in the classrooms. “Assembly line” education was offered across the board. Everyone was held to the same standard, regardless of ability, and was taught that anything better or worse than what the curriculum required was different. Most of the time “different” was punished or all together forgotten in the quest to produce the perfect future factory employee. It is at this point that kids from every walk of life begin to notice and point out differences in other people. Until they were put in a situation where they now had to compete with their playmate for the best grade, attention, and accolades from every adult in their lives, they didn’t notice the fault in others. Self-preservation was the catalyst for this. They don’t quite measure up to the “one size fits all” ideology of the education system, and they are told as much. Albert Einstein said, “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Public education in these poor areas is often below standard because there exists an enormous amount of fish trying to climb trees where none exist. Schools in these communities were often staffed with teachers that were inexperienced or had been in some kind of trouble. The training the leaders in the schools received was geared more towards “just getting by” because “just getting by” was the best they had to offer. Teachers in these communities were paid significantly less than those lucky enough to work in a public school in the suburbs.

We are all searching for the same thing. We all want success, and someone has decided for us whether we should be successful. The plan is working. We are self-destructing as a nation and as a people. Our morals and values have become twisted and often unrecognizable from just a generation before mine. I’m tired, y’all. I’m tired of all the ugly in the world. I’m tired of human beings lacking any type of empathy for the next person or exhibiting one shred of decency or morality. I’m tired. So tired of everyone being a victim. Everyone has a story and wants to shout it from the rooftops because the payoff is people will feel sorry for you and give you what you want. Listen to me friends, they don’t feel sorry for you. They just want you to shut up and their neighbor to think they care. Everyone is out for self, and nobody wants to shut up and make it in the world through their actions. Everyone is dealing with something. There is a crisis in everyone’s family right this second. You aren’t special in hardship and heartache. God isn’t singling you out. We are all dealing with it. Instead of whining about fake gorillas and statues depicting real-life history, how about we do what we can to keep in mind that fact before we open our mouths to speak?

What is the worst thing going on in your life right now? Guess what? Mine is JUST as important. It may not be the same thing at all, or even in the same ballpark, but just as scared and lonely and lost as you are, so am I. So is he and so is she. Let’s try talking to our neighbor instead of forming picket lines and screaming at the top of our lungs. You will find you have more in common with your neighbor than you could have possibly fathomed.

One last thing, if I may. For the love of all things Trump, American, and bacon enhanced, PLEASE stop running from yourselves. No matter where you go, there you are. My Granny used to say that all the time when I was a child and I didn’t understand what it meant. I do now, and I hope you will get it too.