Month: August 2019

There have been 255 mass shootings in the United States so far this year (August 2019).  It is an epidemic!  Most mass shooters are young, white men.  But according to Ramani Durvasula, Ph.D. professor of psychology California State University, Los Angles in Insecurity, Narcissism and the Culture of Victimhood, (psychologytoday.com 8/6/2019), there are other commonalities of mass shooters including “…anger, resentment, their victimhood, entitlement, the vilification of the ‘other,’ contempt, alienation, disenchantment, the inability to manage or appropriately articulate their feelings, frustration, and utter rage.”

The author continues that we are experiencing “…scourges of narcissism.”  She calls it a “…covert, vulnerable narcissism… that is less showy and grandiose, and more sullen and resentful.”   She further states that “These are men who are contemptuous of working in jobs they perceive as being beneath them, who are prone to hostile sexism, who spend hours on laptops and devices surfing the back alleys of hate, who are incapable of tolerating frustration, disappointment, or responsibility, who deride intimacy, who bristle at the ideas of having to be adults, but expect the perks of adulthood.”

We live in a culture of unrealistic examples of adult manhood that are portrayed on TV, in movies, video games, novels and graphic novels.  Additionally, we live in a culture where working class jobs are devalued.  So these young men are faced with not being able to live up to these unrealistic examples of adult manhood or working at jobs that are undervalued by the culture.  The larger culture makes it impossible for them to succeed and the micro culture is not teaching them the true meaning of a real and productive life.

Durvasula states that as a culture we need to teach and enforce “…teaching children self-regulation, getting kids off devices, adults modeling healthy communication, building empathy, fostering discussions about meaning and purpose, integrating emotional awareness and self-regulation into K-12 curricula, de-stigmatizing mental health services, ceasing the glamorization of violence and dominance, and moderating a media environment that glorifies incivility and polarizing discourse.”

We need to return to civility and to value all people in order to stop creating mass shooters!

How does this happen? Apparently, some teenage boys and young men are vulnerable to racist ideology. According to author and former white supremacist Christian Picciolini, white supremacists groups offer these impressionable and disconnected young people identity, community and purpose. Somehow this was not provided by family, school, community and church.

Single parent families and parents forced to work extended hours or more than one job to make ends meet, huge schools and overcrowded classrooms, increased tendencies to engage in individual activities rather than group activities and decreased church attendance, have left huge gaps in some young people’s sense of identity, community and purpose. Bullying, exclusion from some groups and social skills deficits may also be factors.

What can we do? This is a huge question that requires putting people before money and investing in family. At this time, I don’t have any specific solutions, but I know that initially it will require stating loudly that there is no place in the United States of America for racism and it needs to start at the top!

America has been multicultural from day one.  Native, indigenous people have populated the Americas for 10,000 years.  The first European explorers included people of African descent and African conquistadors who worked the land side by side with their white European counterparts to develop permanent living conditions in this new land.

The first British colonists would not have survived without the help of the Powhatan tribe for food and the Africans enslaved to work the tobacco fields.  Tobacco was the cash crop that was essential to the survival of the colony.

Then slavery became the building block of American economic success.  According to How Slavery Became America’s First Big Business by P.D. Lockhart (8/16/19 vox.com),  “The profits from cotton propelled the US into a position as one of the leading economies in the world.”  The American economy was built on the backs of slaves for 250 years until it ended with the American Civil War.  Then it took another 100 years for civil rights to be legislated.

America has always been ethnically and culturally pluralistic, even though some believe that America should be a single homogenized culture, it has never ever been.  Sadly, America’s white population’s success was based on exploitation.  According to vocabulary.com, “…an exploiter is a user, someone who takes advantage of other people or things for their own gain.  Being an exploiter is selfish and unethical, to exploit someone is to use them in a way that’s wrong, like an employer who pays low wages but demands long hours.”

I believed that our society had evolved socially and morally in regards to ethnicity, culture and exploitation as a result of time, study and civil rights laws.  However, it is difficult for some to relinquish their white privilege.  We live in an ever shrinking world in which we are becoming evermore interdependent.  We need to learn how to work together for the betterment of the world.  We need to stop exploiting others like the immigrant food workers in America and the Pacific Rim garment workers who are both greatly underpaid and forced to work under horrid conditions.  And we need to protect the rights of all American citizens regardless of their heritage and all those who work in our country.

Now we have a white nationalist president who has given permission for those with racist inclinations to act out in dangerous and deadly ways.  True knowledge of our national beginnings needs to be known by all.  America is and always has been a multicultural nation!

 

Russia wants us divided!  A divided America is weakened leaving Russia to wield greater power in the world, a world that would be ruled by ruthless oligarchs.  They find our divisions online and then magnify them to the nth degree fueling greater division causing each side to dig in deeper and become highly susceptible to fake memes that deride the other.

The extent of this created division became flagrantly apparent when a reader sent me a Wikipedia link, with no other discussion, to “antifa” (an extreme left group) in response to my blog called “Why do Conservatives Hate Liberals?”  That would be like me saying that all conservatives are like Timothy McVeigh or David Duke!  This response leaves no middle ground for productive discourse.  Pushing perceptions of all liberals and all conservatives to the radical ends offers no hope of resolution and compromise.

According to Hidden Tribes by More in Common, the far left is made up of about 8% of Americans while the far right is about 6%.  However, “…a less ridged still dogmatic right…” make up about 19%.  That leaves the moderates at about 67% which Hidden Tribes refers to as the “exhausted majority.”  So the reader mentioned above is grouping 67% of Americans with the radical left 8%.

Conservative media is perpetuating this binary thinking for those on the right.  They’re led to believe you’re either a conservative like them or a left-wing violent radical.  And anything that counters this belief is fake news created by the liberal media and the deep state.  The sixty-seven percent are waiting to have reality-based discussions.  We are not radical or violent.  We are just stuck in the middle between extremist opposing views.  The good news is that between anarchy (left) and tyranny (right) is democracy.  Democracy requires that we come together and stop pointing to the small extreme minorities on either end of the political spectrum as excuses for not engaging in rational discourse.  We need to embrace and save our democracy from Russian intervention.  We do this by working together!  Meet in the middle.  We have more in common than we are led to believe in these divisive times.  Let’s talk!

Trump’s character on “The Apprentice” does not reflect who he really is.  He is not some clever businessman, he’s a spoiled rich kid who inherited a lot of money.  He wasted his time and his family’s money as he seemingly got nothing from his Ivy League education (his “fixer” worked to keep his transcripts secret).  It is documented that he lost his fortune several times and his father bailed him out at every turn.  Trump declared bankruptcy six times.  Some think this is a smart business technique, but it is shown that the bankruptcies were caused my impulsivity and overpaying.  He was not a good deal maker.  In order to keep his head above water, he stiffed contractors and used the courts to delay or deny restitution.  He lacks decency, morality and integrity.

Yet, he has adorning fans who think he’s the best president ever.  They cite tax cuts, deregulation, tariffs, and the appointment of conservative judges as evidence.  They believe the Mueller report is a hoax and accept the idea of a deep state undermining Trump’s presidency.  They dress up in Trump gear and go to rallies chanting in unison with their fellow true believers.  Their minds are made up and they refuse to discuss anything slightly contradictory to their beliefs.

They can’t see the threats to democracy, the rule of law and our standing in the world.  They can’t see the ineptness, the dismantling of expertise in government and the dangerous impulsivity.  They welcome authoritarianism and are blind to its unAmerican nature.  They are fearful of a changing America and want an authoritarian father-figure to protect or restore their way of life.

Trump fans seemingly only consume news that supports their views whether these are based in fact or not.  They are caught up in an information bubble or echo chamber that does not allow in new or correcting facts.  I am baffled by this blind allegiance.  What supporters see as plain talking, I see as word salad meant to distract attention from the truth.  The truth of inexperience, inability and wrongdoing.  We have become a laughing stock in the liberal democracy world and a useful idiot in the authoritarian world.

We need to come together and invest in America.  We need to invest in infrastructure, healthcare, education and innovation to maintain our number one standing in the world.  Divided we fall, united we rise!  If we’re filled with fear and hatred of others, we are diminished and unable to reach our full potential.  This president isn’t as great as you think, and I hope is not as bad and dangerous as I think.  Fact check and search for the truth.  Our status and survival depends on an informed citizenry.