Catholic and Enjoying It!
Here’s an absolutely typical story about a Dad and his two kids who were arrested and humiliate for Shopping While Black.
This daily reality in Trump’s Amerikkka is steadfastly met, every single day, by conservatives who whinge that seeing that reality every single day is “playing the race card” and who then complain that they are the victims because they did not personally lynch or falsely arrest or shoot or vandalize the property of a person of color. Because every story of false arrest or police shooting or brutality against People of Color is really about the sufferings of narcissistic white people, who have to hear such stories. And that hurts their feels. Diagnosis: Severe narcissism.
Or take gun violence. The first, last, and only response of the Gun Cult to every mass shooting or to the yearly harvest of 35,000 dead (a figure ISIS could on dream of) is always “Don’t blame me! I didn’t shoot them! Don’t touch my guns.”
The thought never enters their head to ask, “What can we do to change our current laws so that our gun slaughter rate begins to approach that of the rest of the civilized world?” The idea of thinking of somebody else and their good first never occurs to them because they are massively selfish. Their sole response is to indulge in a fantasy starring themselves as the heroic Good Guy with a Gun, taking out the the Bad Guy in an action/adventure flick.
What the Gun Cult refuses to recognize is that this country only allows white people to be Good Guys with guns as Philando Castile, Jemel Roberson, and Emantic Bradford, Jr. would all tell you if they had not been murdered in cold blood by the cops for exercising their perfectly legal 2nd amendment rights. Roberson is a particularly egregious case since he was, in fact, a security guard doing his job and stopping an active shooter. But he’s still dead.
Here’s why: The NRA is not and never has been about second amendment rights. It’s about a white racist organization that exploits white fears of armed brown people. In the 60s, it was all about gun control for black people.
When the Brown Guy was president, the Gun Cult endlessly stoked white fears that the Kenyan Muslim was coming to take our guns. The NRA supported the monsters who harrassed the parents of Sandy Hook, claiming that they had their own children slaughtered so Obama could Take Our Guns. And the Gun Cult wasted time and resources forcing the governor of Texas to send out troopers to monitor a perfectly ordinary military exercise called Jade Helm since the white racist paranoid gun nuts managed to convince themselves that the Brown Guy was going to declare martial law, take their guns and put “their” white women in shariah re-education breeder camps. The endless rebel yell from these champions of the New Confederacy was that the 2nd amendment exists because the Founders wanted citizens to be able to make war on the constitutional order they were founding if they didn’t like it.
It’s a lie, of course. Obama took nobody’s gun. George Washington crushed armed rebellions and spat on the idea that guns were for making war on the government. Abraham Lincoln smashed that lie even harder in 1865. And, as the racist behavior of the NRA illustrates, the main purpose of the 2nd amendment was so that slave states could hold on to their slaves. The rhetoric of the Gun Cult was all about the race of the President the Gun Cult feared. All that stuff about “needing guns to fight state tyranny”? It was all code for “We are afraid of the brown guy being president and doing to us what we long to do to him and the rest of the brown.” Because with the Cult of Trump, accusation is always a form of confession.
Proof: When Trump made it easier for police to acquire military grade hardware, the Gun Cult was ecstatic. Why should they be ecstatic? Just a year before they had been talking about the need for guns so that the highly realistic scenario of portly Texan and Montana gun nuts making war against the 101st Airborne in a Second American Revolution at an Oregon Bird Sanctuary could unfold. Now these brave allies in the struggle for freedom are cheering because the government is giving cops the power to crush them with overwhelming force?
The answer to the riddle, of course, is simple: The government holding the guns is now perceived by the Gun Cult as the friend of these guys:
You know, the guys Trump called “very fine people” while he called peaceful black protesters “sons of bitches” for kneeling to protest things like the murder of Castile, Roberson, and Bradford or the false arrest of a black dad and his kids.
Because, for the Gun Cult, guns are really there, not to protect citizens from the state, but to protect paranoid white racists from brown people.
“Ohhhh! The race card! He’s playing the race card!” You can hear the cry go up again from the real victims: white people who have to hear about this again. And then the whole cycle starts again. “I, personally, have never falsely arrested anybody or shot anybody or lynched anybody. So when I spend the next few days in comboxes here vehemently denying the obvious patterns documented in this post, it’s not because I am a supporter and excuser of racism. It’s because your Tone is mean and hurts my feels and I thought this was supposed to be a Catholic blog and O the humanity!”
Ahem:
We cannot truly call on God, the Father of all, if we refuse to treat in a brotherly way any man, created as he is in the image of God. Man’s relation to God the Father and his relation to men his brothers are so linked together that Scripture says: “He who does not love does not know God” (1 John 4:8).
No foundation therefore remains for any theory or practice that leads to discrimination between man and man or people and people, so far as their human dignity and the rights flowing from it are concerned.
The Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion. On the contrary, following in the footsteps of the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, this sacred synod ardently implores the Christian faithful to “maintain good fellowship among the nations” (1 Peter 2:12), and, if possible, to live for their part in peace with all men, so that they may truly be sons of the Father who is in heaven
Then there is the final wheeze from the Cult: Antifa! We need guns to protect ourselves from the epidemic of Leftist Violence!
Remember that thing about how, for the Cult of Trump, accusation is always a form of confessi0n?
Yeah. So here’s reality. There is no epidemic of leftist violence. That’s a lie. The reality is that, since 9/11, 73% of domestic terror has come from far right/white supremacist goons. The rest is Islamicist. “Leftist violence” is statisically negligible. It is not a thing. It does not, for all practical purposes, partake of existence. Stop lying.
Which bring me to our basic rule of thumb: If your first, last, and only response to the unjust sufferings of others is not “What can we do to change this?” but “DON’T BLAME ME!” you are part of the problem because you are imprisoned in selfishness. Repent and bring that to God to change your heart. Stop pretending that your Tone Police schtick is anything other than denial.
This, by the way, is especially true if you voted for Donald Trump. The issue is not what you did on 11/8/16. The issue is what you have done every single day since then to rationalize instead of taking responsibility for your vote. If you are not protesting the evils and the rest of his Cult have done, especially to fan the flames of racism and violence, you are complicit, not innocent. Stop thinking only of yourself and start putting others, especially the least of these, first. It’s not All About You.
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