Why I write

 

This is my 2,000^th post, which at least for me means that if only half of them are any good, that means there is still 1,000 that I don’t have the fear of cringing at reading again. This thing started after I had taken to posting comments on Thom Hartmann’s (the “number one” progressive voice in America) website. Another commenter suggested that I should have my own blog, since I didn’t always toe the line with the dogma being pushed. I didn’t take that suggestion seriously until I found myself being blocked after accusing Hartmann and some of the comments as being racist against Hispanics, the usual “working class” scapegoating.

What to call my blog? I have a degree in journalism from a university people at least heard of, but it hasn’t been of much use to me. People see what they see, and most—judging by the paranoid and prejudicial way some act when they “see” me—assume I’m some “migrant” who might be an “illegal” at best, or a car prowler or drug dealer (as I pointed out a few posts ago). So I picked a blog title that was basically a middle finger to all those who only saw me as such or didn’t believe I was “qualified” to be a journalist who was worth paying real money to. And no, I have never made a red cent from doing this; I do “regular” work that I don’t have to take home with me at least, because most of the “free” time I have is spent doing what I consider to be the “real” work I went to school to do.

What to write about? It is easy to write about the “usual” topics—politics and society—because nothing changes, really. You can talk about the same things over and over again because people never really learn from their mistakes, and the next generation keeps repeating them. I was watching the Smothers Brothers documentary Smothered where it showed a clip of Pat Paulsen doing one of his “editorials,” this one on gun control: “If you are old enough to commit a crime, you are old enough to own a gun”; he starts shaking as if he has cerebral palsy and accidentally “shoots” a member of the crew.

 

Then there were those Crying Indian “Keep America Beautiful” commercials. The problems of yesterday are still the problems of today, and just getting worse, as this image of plastics in the oceans attest—and that is only what you can see, not plastics that do not float, and “microplastics” that endanger plankton:

 

 

Hypocrisy is one thing that just drives me nuts, whether it is of the political, racial, “ethnic,” religious or gender variety. John Oliver’s recent show on critical race theory (CRT) is an example of how many white people—who themselves cannot even “define” what CRT is except that its “purpose” is to make their kids “feel bad”—say that they are this when they are actually that.  Oliver noted how the far-right misused MLK’s “content of character” quote from his “I Have a Dream” speech to twist into “confirming” their own racist stereotypes.

They tell us that “proof” that white Americans can’t be racist is because Barack Obama was elected twice for president. Yes, but Republicans led by Mitch McConnell said that once they gained control of Congress, every policy proposal Obama sent to them would be “dead on arrival,” which was the case for six years. The day Obama was elected, the Tea Party “movement” was “founded,” but it was just a new name for the ongoing white nationalist, nativist core of far-right voters, this time energized by the election of a black man in their white country—and those same people are the ones who make up the fascist “fringe” that elected Donald Trump to set a path of destruction through democracy in this country.

Oliver noted the MLK himself saw his “dream” speech as “aspirational” and that it had become a “nightmare.” He would later write that “while the majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the negro and they believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class utopia embodying racial harmony, unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”

As we saw in the governor’s election in Virginia, white voters who consider themselves “not racist” still allow themselves to become fearful of a non-existent racial “threat” and voted for the Republican candidate by a narrow margin. We saw scenes in school board meetings of white parents losing their minds over critical race theory being taught in schools when in fact it wasn’t. One of the leaders of the anti-CRT movement in Loudoun country, a white woman, told a reporter that “nobody” in the county was “racist,” and that if you only “don’t talk about it,” racism will “go away,” using the “content of character” mendacity.

But when the reporter asked her about what might be the perspective of, say, young black males, the conversation took a hard-right turn and the white woman launched into the usual racial paranoia and stereotypes, such as about “dress” and showing “respect” for abusive police. The problem was not whether or not that was "true," but that it was the first thing that came out of her mouth, instead of even acknowledging another point of view that could very well be a valid one. Oliver noted that an assessment of Loudoun county schools showed that the use of racial slurs by white “kids” was “shocking”—and of course they learn this from their parents who don’t want their “kids” made to feel “bad” about this.

For me personally, the problem is that virtually everything that comes out of virtually everyone’s mouth when discussing Hispanics is prejudicial, stereotypical and stupid, so that I am always made aware of my “place” in the world; any illusions I had since I left college disappeared long ago. But through the miracle of the Internet and Google’s free blogger program, I can say what I want, about whatever I want, when I want. No one can keep me "silent" on the Internet, like even the "liberal" mass media tries to keep "ethnic" people like me silent or "invisible," since it would expose the way they perpetuate bigotry, which exposes their hypocrisies.

So what if hardly anybody “visits”; at least I have the say that other people would have denied me in the past. Besides, a post I wrote concerning the attempted snub of the late Laura Nyro’s son at her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction (1) has by far the most “hits,” which of course says more about the order of importance of “celebrity” news in some people’s worldview.