Is Chicago indicative? The only thing Chicago is indicative of is what it is indicative of, that there are people capable of what these four were capable of, and that that is Human inhumanity to another human. We are always going to find, to stretch, to force fit one or another accident as a pattern. The thing most of us need to understand, if I am permitted an anachronism in my framing, is that Racism is just one of the suits the devil tailors for you to wear when Hate is the party. The irony is that when we focus only on skin color when trying to understand racism, we do not understand how race is used in the oldest game of hatred and inhumanity. But then as I have said elsewhere, we no longer have a human nature in our guiding metaphysics, in our sociology, we only have determinism. Free will has gone the way of individuality, except the latter comes up when we want to talk class or socio-economic power dynamics–then everyone is an individual, carefully circumscribed by a Media (and not a Folk) who is not just in line with Power and Monied Elites, but has become the Power and Monied Elites themselves. Finding correlations to Trump does not explain it; it certainly cannot excuse it. Black lives matter because white lives matter and vice-versa; neither can matter much if the other does not. They are human lives, and any human life matters because each is .. . well, human . . . I know why I do not ask for whom the death bell tolls.
The way we mean human when we call all Homo-Sapiens Humans, is in direct contrast to our impulse to call them animals, but then, even though it might seem that we are being just a little too generous, calling anyone like the Chicago four animals is generous and exonerating. You can’t punish an animal for being an animal if it is an animal. When any homo-sapiens in question is incapable of treating someone humanely, to call him human is from a different connotation, but our treatment must always include his potential. This is not an argument against punishment.
I have said time and again that the Homo-sapiens we are only becomes human through humane choices—without the humane proactive, one cannot become human to his fullest potential. Thus, inhumanity takes root. I don’t want to get preachy, but the irony here in all of this is found in relation to the speech Meryl Streep gave at the Golden Globes, and when she said that when Donald Trump made fun of a reporter’s disability it was a way to give license to others to make fun of others with disabilities, or in the case of Chicago, to abuse and torture a special needs student . . . yes, folks, Trump’s public mocking of the disabled reporter is part of the validation of the license the Chicago Four took with another human being. It wasn’t anti-Trump to abuse that young man; it was clearly Trump-like.
Is Chicago an anomaly? Or is this representative of something seething in America, seething for some time, or something brewing since the advent of Mr. Trump? I doubt the latter; I have suspected the former for decades. Singular events are not general rules, though; nor are they patterns. But if we are an endemically racist society, groups other than white people (a monolith more grotesquely formed in the minds of those who are either not white or anti-white than anything constructed through the rhetoric of one or another racisms). . . they would have to be Uber-menschen not to be racists or bigots. Racism, hate, inhumanity is not an endemic white trait as it is sometimes delivered in Academic discourse; and Anti-Semitism would have to include Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, for the Palestinians are Semitic, at least by older standards of linguistic groupings, an ethnology under revision? We would thus have to look at Anti-Muslim, Anti-Jewish and Anti-Christian, to name a only a few of the ways humans can group their hate–and I do not want to hear anymore how there is no Anti-Christian bias, more specifically Anti-Catholic, in America, by some groups in power, influence or authority, whether it be Power Elites or Monied Elites who are now also Media Elites–90% of all media in America is owned by 6 corporations who are cooperatively benefitting by a restraint of trade which amounts to a restraint of information and a manipulation of information to form consensus.
But in an endemicaly racist America, Chicago is less an anomaly than we would like to think, and a white person is nearly five times more likely to be killed by someone who is non-white than a black person is by someone who is non-black. But by media standards, we are an endemically racist society, and that means white people because on most college campuses in America today, when you say racism, you mean white people and only white people, and you can never mean people of color or Ashkenazi. Trump is a horror–and the chickens have come home to roost–but so is Hilary a horror (just not as stupid as Donald?), and Obama, and Bush II and Bill Clinton and Bush 1 and Regan; Ford and Carter were ineffectual; Nixon was Nixon and Johnson was Johnson. As soon as television took over campaigns and the making of Presidents, most of it has gone to shit and so have we.
If you really want to know how the Republicans became what they are, look at the Democratic party shift to the right of the eternal left/right political dividing line. Obama, Hilary and Bill are liberals? When they are liberals, you know liberal politics are gone. Tribal politics is what has been garnered by the media in a society where all Folk has been broken, where people have no connection to Folk–and we playing at tribal politics leaves the Power and the Money more monied and more powerful and more at liberty to worship Moloch and Mammon. And yes, these are connected, everything herein said is webbed.
The Falling Leaf Review 