WHAT I SEE

 



The news of the attack of police in Dallas by at least one admitted Black racist does not surprise me. Unlike many White Americans, I have lived in White neighborhoods, Black neighborhoods, a Latino neighborhood, an Asian neighborhood, gay-lesbian neighborhoods. As a median-income worker and often a single person, I have had to live where I could afford to in the urban environment. I currently reside in a diverse neighborhood on the edge of a large predominantly Black portion of my city. My city has a long tradition of self-selected ghettos.

I am not harassed or intimidated by the many Black people I see on a daily basis. I frequent stores staffed mostly by Black workers. I have cordial, even congenial, relationships with many of these staffers. Frankly, the implied racism of Black Lives Matter has not seemed to have polluted the relationships in my daily life. I'm an old White gay man. Perhaps I offer no threat. Perhaps I am just friendlier than many. I tend to attribute the pleasant relationships I have with any strangers to their kindness and graciousness. There are plenty of people who are just rude and anti-social in all races and age groups.

Here in the city, I see overpopulation. The density of residents has doubled in the past decades due to high rents, high demand for housing and immigration of people who are comfortable living in high-density situations. Two-bedroom apartments which once housed two single adults or a couple with a child now house four adult roommates or families with multiple children and extended family members. My neighborhood has too many cars and too few parking spaces. My neighbors display frequent fits of anger and frustration over daily events related to this. Some of my neighbors use their parked cars as private space at the curb. Cars, like teenagers' bedrooms, are littered with personal stuff. The driver sits with music blaring into the environment while fixated on a smartphone screen.

 

I am a scientist by education and a registered nurse by vocation. I don't obsess upon or react to symptoms without looking at causes from the perspective of prevention. This makes me an oddball in today's social environment of renewed conformity, religion and anti-science. I am used to being an oddball.

 

The content of social media is largely garbage, just a digital version of the micro-plastics that now pollute all the oceans on Earth. Social media garbage is polluting our minds unless we make an effort to maintain independent thought and analysis with skepticism. This is, of course, condemned as 'judgmental' on social media. I agree. It is judgmental. I would rather be a judgmental thinker than a conformist dolt. My choice.

 

Dallas cop shootings will be sanitized. Despite the shooter's involvement with a Black terrorist group which has aspired to 'protect' a Dallas-area neighborhood from legitimate policing with assault weapons, he is already being painted as a lone wolf. This has happened before. Radical groups in the 1970's were allowed to blossom into overt terrorist cults before the government summoned the courage to confront them. The belated cure was inevitably harsher than prevention would have been. The roots of this phenomenon are now spreading throughout Europe. Mass illegal migration of culturally dissonant young men will inevitably yield this evil fruit. 

 

Politicians put their lives on hold to win elections or to grasp power less democratically. A human world in a population and environmental crisis state, like a suffocating patient, cannot be told to hold its breath while those with wealth and power dither in competition with each other. So it will go, until it can go no further. Then the true nature of the majority of humans will show itself, as it always has, with disastrous results.