As I write this, the nation is trying to heal from (and taking sides about) what happened in Charlottesville, VA. A White Supremacist (let's call a spade a spade) rally was scheduled to be held there because they are taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee, and the WS/KKK/Nazi/Asshole (sorry, Mom) crowd are hopping mad about it.
As one person on the internet said (sorry, I can't remember whom, but I am presuming it was someone on Twitter whose post I saw reblogged, ostensibly by Louise Mensch or Claude Taylor): take the statue down, Lee is dead and he doesn't care. Lee wouldn't have wanted the statue in the first place.
This tragedy--a woman is dead for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and two police officers are dead from a helicopter crash--highlights a problem that I started hearing about a few years ago back in Upstate.
Reality is this: white people are scared.
No, really.
They're scared because they feel that Donald Trump's lies regarding the people, objects, and ideas he's labeled "other" are true. And that fear is the basis for the anger. The anger also is fueled by these notions of entitlement that some white men seem to have regarding their status because they are white and male.
To hear them talk, they are entitled to gather because they are white and male, apparently. That is fundamentally false: they are granted the legal cover to gather because this nation protects free, peaceful assembly. However, the minute literal fire is added to the mix, and no longer can one discuss "peaceful," because fire? IS A HAZARD. If you want to have an assembly with fire, you get permits and clear it with the Fire Department in that area (and you better be having the kind of assembly with fire that invites people to bring along s'mores ingredients while people get out guitars and sing). That crap would NEVER HAPPENED in Northern California because, well, fire is a major public hazard here. Someone in the Fire Department would have literally gone and dowsed the torches (and people) en masse, citing about 75 public codes in the process.
See, these people are idiots.
Had they chosen to assemble just on Saturday? Without the Home Depot Tiki Torches from Friday night? I wonder if events would have played out the same, because more people came out to counterprotest after Friday night's demonstration. I imagine that made the WS crowd pleased, because they assumed (possibly accurately) that these people came out of the fear engendered by their antics Friday night, and they really want people to be scared because it makes them feel more powerful.
I want to say that counterprotesting isn't the answer right now. I want to say instead that the answer is to, safely, from the privacy of our homes, collectively point at these people AND LAUGH OUR ASSES OFF AT THEM.
I mean this, people.
Start mocking them. Don't endanger yourself, but mock them. Openly. Freely. Point out the logical fallacies, but do it in such a way that the characters from Deliverance over there get the point: you don't want to be one of these knotheads, because we will laugh at you and mock you and point out that this is one of the stupidest ideas in history.
I do think that we need to also address the fears of the people who think that their country is being taken away from them because they live in an area (like, say, the Rust Belt) where they understand the principle of scarcity of resources. This is one major reason that people voted Trump into the White House--he promised them that fewer people would come to take their resources. Someone (obviously not Trump, and I might argue not anyone in this administration save perhaps Gen. Mattis) needs to start addressing how we are going to shore up the resources we have in such a way that we can abolish this scarcity mindset--something that, incidentally, is highly correlated with poor self-esteem and with other mental health issues.
Just like the mental health issues we saw on display Friday night.
