{"id":403190,"date":"2013-07-14T10:24:36","date_gmt":"2013-07-14T16:24:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/?p=403190"},"modified":"2013-09-30T19:59:07","modified_gmt":"2013-10-01T01:59:07","slug":"the-current-american-struggle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/?p=403190","title":{"rendered":"The Current American Struggle"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here to learn about my mind-bending epic mythological novel A Conspiracy of Wizards<\/em>!!!<\/strong><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Obviously, I think that it is a sad commentary on our country when a man can leave his home armed looking for “bad guys” to “defend” himself against and, guided by his own poor judgment and bigotry, identify an unarmed black teen walking home from the store as a likely prospect, stalk that teen, wind up shooting and killing that teen, and not only be found not guilty even of manslaughter, but be perceived as perfectly justified by a large faction (almost all white) of the American population.<\/div>\n

If you look at the public debates over the George Zimmerman\/Trayvon\u00a0 Martin\u00a0case, one thing leaps out, something that is more broadly relevant, something that distinguishes\u00a0the mental\u00a0modality of the right from the left in one very precise way. This is an issue of cognitive framing, with the narrower frame permitting a conclusion of justifiable self-defense (assuming the facts most favorable to the defense), and the broader frame precluding it.<\/p>\n

For instance, if you ask, \u201cdoes one have the right to defend himself, with a firearm, against someone about to clobber him over the head with a heavy object,\u201d most people would answer, \u201cof course.\u201d But what if the \u201cdefender\u201d were a mugger who had attacked the guy with the heavy object, the heavy object were his cane that he needed due to an infirmity, and the moment being referred to were the mugging victim\u2019s response to being mugged by an armed assailant? Does the mugger then have the right to claim self-defense, for shooting his victim as his victim tried to defend himself? Of course not.<\/p>\n

Let’s come up with an analogy that more closely parallels the Zimmerman case, emphasizing and playing on the stereotypes involved (and other stereotypes as well). Consider this scenario: A young, white middle class woman is walking through a residential neighborhood at night to return home from the nearby convenience store. She notices a big, black guy following her. She continues to walk, and confirms that he is definitely following her. Terrified, she slips off the path and finds an object to arm herself with, a plywood board. As her stalker approaches, she comes out behind him, swings the board, screaming. Her stalker, who, as it turns out, was an armed stalker, pulls out his gun and shoots her to death. (I am using the word “stalker” to refer to any stranger following around another person with some kind of unfriendly intent, including thinking that the other person is a “punk” who you don’t want to let “get away with” some imaginary infraction that their race induced you to believe they must be committing.)<\/p>\n

Tell me, right-wing apologists, is your big black stalker innocent, because he was just defending himself? Are you as indifferent to this innocent white woman’s violent death at the hands of an armed stalker as you are of an unarmed black teen’s violent death at the hands of an armed stalker?<\/p>\n

Here is the complete list of differences between this scenario and the Zimmerman-Martin scenario: 1) the races of the stalker and the person stalked; 2) the gender of the person stalked; 3)\u00a0right-wing ASSUMPTION of the intentions of the stalker in each scenario and the different degrees to which\u00a0they (right-wingers)\u00a0identify with the stalker and the person stalked in each scenario; 4) the woman having armed herself (to make her at least as threatening as unarmed Martin was); and 4) the generous assumption for my alternative scenario that all of the facts best favoring the Zimmerman defense are true.<\/p>\n

So, why, exactly, is that white-woman-stalking-victim an innocent victim of the criminal-black-stalker, while the unarmed black victim of our real stalker (Hispanic, white, I don’t care) is just the unlucky person who was killed by an innocent person’s discharged bullet? The answer is very simple: The combination of\u00a0the right-wing\u00a0need to defend the absurd belief that we are a safer society if people go out with guns looking for trouble and\u00a0their (right-wingers’)\u00a0racism. a combination that is as horrifying and offensive to rational and humane people today as all similar past chapters of our national history have been.<\/p>\n

Right-wing arguments (and particularly gun culture arguments) frequently rely on this narrowing of the frame, filtering out the contextual information which completely changes the analysis. Those who see in this case no guilt on Zimmerman\u2019s part have chosen a very narrow frame, which excludes much relevant information; those who see guilt on Zimmerman\u2019s part choose a broader and more inclusive one.<\/p>\n

There are many other issues in which this difference in framing is central to the ideological differences found in regard to them. The right relies on a reduced frame, hyper-individualistic rather than social systemic, static and instantaneous rather than dynamical and over time. And that is not just a difference in personal taste, but a reduction in cogency.<\/p>\n

The Zimmerman trial is over, the verdict is in, but the public issue over what kind of a people we want to choose to be continues. The right insists that it is good for society for people to have the right to arm themselves and stalk people they are suspicious of, for whatever reason they are suspicious of them, incite a violent encounter by doing so, and shoot to death the person they chose to stalk in the process of that violent encounter. I want to believe that the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t agree.<\/p>\n

We’ve had Columbine. We’ve had Virginia Tech. We’ve had the Gabby Giffords shooting. We’ve had the Aurora Theater shooting. We’ve had Sandy Hook Elementary School. We have, on average, ten times the homicide rate of any other developed nation on Earth. We have half the privately owned firearms on Earth. And we have people who are so blithely indifferent to the death and suffering that their idolatry of instruments of deadly violence cause that they won’t let us, as a people, even implement universal background checks or limit the magazine capacity of their military grade weapons. The degree of insanity –vicious, destructive insanity– involved in this right-wing ideology is simply mindboggling.<\/p>\n

At the same time, they want voter suppression laws (and have been assisted in being able to pass and implement them in a recent Court decision that disabled the Voting Rights Act), they want to dismantle Affirmative Action, they want to disregard the injustices and inequities of our society, they want to blame the poor for being poor, they want to disregard our responsibilities to one another as members of a society, they want to erase our humanity and promote only selfish disregard for the rights and welfare of anyone who doesn’t look just like them. And they are uncompromising in their commitment to these “ideals.”<\/p>\n

(The examples mentioned here, of course, only scratch the surface. See Why The Far-Right Is On The Wrong Side Of Reason, Morality, Humanity and History<\/a>\u00a0for a more in-depth treatment.)<\/p>\n

This is not a country divided by two opposing reasonable views, that we need to find some reasonable ground between. This is a country divided by, on the one hand, reason in service to humanity and, on the other, irrationality in service to inhumanity. It is time, America, to reduce the latter to a sad footnote of our history, and promote the former to the status of the shared foundation on which we all build. It’s time to allow our disagreements to be defined by the limits of our wisdom and decency rather than by the extent of our bigotries.<\/p>\n

(See also Debunking The Arguments of the American Gun Culture<\/a>\u00a0for a cogent discussion of the competing narratives informing the right and the left, and how they fit into this struggle between reason in service to humanity and irrationality in service to inhumanity, a perennial struggle of human history, and one from which we are not, as it turns out, at all exempt.)<\/p>\n

Click here to buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards<\/em> for just $2.99!!!<\/strong><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to learn about my mind-bending epic mythological novel A Conspiracy of Wizards!!! Obviously, I think that it is a sad commentary on our country when a man can leave his home armed looking for “bad guys” to “defend” himself against and, guided by his own poor judgment and bigotry, identify an unarmed black […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[14,13,33,4,22],"tags":[664,1048,149,31749,1319,110,522,31756,31748,31764,31747],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403190"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=403190"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":404746,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403190\/revisions\/404746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=403190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=403190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=403190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}