Religious War 4

A friend suggested that I look on the sunny side. Here goes:

If it walks like a duck, and so on. If we are constantly in the business of accumulating the corpses of dark people, decade after decade, we are ducks.

Well, then, if not ducks, what are we? How about mass murderers? I can't think of another post-WW11 country -- I don't know enough about all the previous ones -- with our mass killing credentials.

Mao and the Cultural Revolution? Nope; close, but not enough bodies and, really, too short a time to really count. Cambodia? A trifling 3 million total. Don't forget; we've gotten up to a million in just the last decade, easily. Vietnam? Well, 5.4 million total; I'll give us credit for maybe 4 million. We had all the things that made the big bangs, and used them joyfully. We really did love dropping stuff on those little brown folks.

I listed a bunch more over the last blogs. Maybe I've missed one or two; Alert Readers should remind me. Low-balling the numbers is very easy. Seeing your own country as the most murderous entity in the world is very difficult. Nonetheless. No one else is near the top -- hell, no one else made the playoffs. The numbers are the numbers. That duck thing. You are what your record says you are. Oh, nooooo! No more sports metaphors. Please.

I find myself just letting the numbers slip from my mind most times. Onward to the less awful.

We are only #24 in the world murder rate; not much to say there. Of the first world countries, we are edged out by Russia, and, surprise, Poland. Who knew the Poles were so bloodthirsty? Perhaps the alcohol use in both of those countries has something to do with the murder rates. Perhaps our own use of alcohol has something to do with our murder rate. Naw. Lots of other countries drink just as much.

On to jail rates. In 2008, the US imprisoned about 1500 of every 100,000 men, with a trivial rate of 62 per 100,000 women. Better numbers. A little more than one out of every hundred men lives in jail. By race: one in twenty African American men sits in jail right now, today. Overall, we have, far and away, the top imprisonment rate in the world. We are followed (about 20% fewer) by Russia, using numbers for both genders. No other country is on the map, as it were. Heh. A remnant of the cold war, maybe?

If I were going to look at this sensibly, I would say that we are now the world's greatest mass murderers and that we are now the world's greatest self-imprisoners. Well, of course. How else could we be? American exceptionalism.

A few years ago, at the height of the Iraq thing, a couple of connections forced themselves into my usually unreflective mind. Take the first Earth Day in 1974. I remember thinking at the time, and saying to others, that I thought trying to clean up the Earth was a response to the collective guilt over Vietnam. I was laughed out of the room.

Now, though, not so funny. The environmental movement has picked up steam at roughly the same pace as our mass killings -- and mass imprisonments. We are counting on all the Greenies to wash the blood off our hands, and, when they fail, we put a lot of folks, notably folks of color, in jail. Then we know for sure who the bad people are, and we smother them in our guilt.

When I started graduate school in psychology, there were two jokes: one was that when we read about some pathology, we would instantly see it in ourselves. The second, though, was less amusing: we were in psychology to continually reassure ourselves which side of the line we were on; after all, we knew who the patients were. Ugly, and more true than we would admit. Didn't take me long to see the pathology in my colleagues.

Now, I can look at piles of dead, dark people, and I know two things for sure. One is that I didn't pull any triggers or drop any bombs; the other, that all the bad folks are in jail. I am doubly reassured. Triply reassured, really: the bad folks aren't even the same color I am. Guess I need a lot of reassurance. Strangely enough, this kind of talk doesn't startle African Americans. Perhaps their perception is that jail is better than being murdered.

I will stick to my previous blogs. We do the killing thing to insure our social stability. We don't even bother to pretend that our victims are a threat; we aren't afraid of them at all. Nope. Hey, there is just no other way to look at the data; the only other theory is that we suddenly started these massive killings on a whim. My perception works better.

Now, though, we're also talking about what happens after the killings. The locker room showers and self-congratulations include putting huge numbers of people in prison. Slippery ideas, hard to hold on to.

I am not a Marxist. We certainly make a good buck by all the killing/cleaning cycle. I've nothing against a good buck; fortunes are made. But I don't think we get into the killing for the bucks. Nope, I'll stick to my guns: We kill because of our terror of instability. A felicitous metaphor.

Terror over instability is no small thing. My TLE has left me with a sweet sense of how easily I can be brought low by a very small blip in brain functioning. I am tricked by my struggles for normalcy, and by my own hiding of the humiliations that TLE episodes bring. I know the terror that I might shatter. Nothing unique; a lot of people know that terror. Usually it comes to them when they are children; mine came at 65. I think they have it worse; I have a strong internal life, and strong family and friends. They don't have any of that.

I don't think much about the shattering times; I just suddenly begin acting or talking in ways strange to me, which at once exhibit and hide my terror. Nothing so extreme as mass murder and mass imprisonment, but I do know the path to those places. When we are terrified, most times we don't act terrified or even feel terrified; what we do is desperately find ways to not be terrified. We mass murder, and mass imprison, without the least hint of our fear of social shattering.

Surprise! I have made it all come together. Nice job, blogger guy. Fear and killing and humiliation and terror, all in one festering ball. When our descendants look back, a thousand years from now, they will be stunned. These people, with so much.....and they did THAT?

And, still, I can't look, and I can't look away.