MLK....

"When we look at modern man, we have to face the fact that modern man suffers from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast with a scientific and technological abundance. We've learned to fly the air as birds, we've learned to swim the seas as fish, yet we haven't learned to walk the Earth as brothers and sisters."


For us, to be ignored by God is a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger.”
― "Perils of Indifference"

If we blame crime on crack, our politicians are off the hook. Forgotten are the failed schools, the maligned welfare programs, the desolate neighborhoods, the wasted years. Only crack is to blame. One is tempted to think that if crack did not exist, someone somewhere would have received a Federal grant to develop it.

Michele Alexander




Martin Luther King, Jr. argued that is was racial indifference – not racial hostility – that supported slavery and Jim Crow

---Michele Alexander

I agree, the quotes are awesome. you know, Ms.Harmony, that I don't take anything philosophical lightly at all, so this will keep me busy for quite some time now. Is indifference evil, not part of evil but worse, not part of evil and bad but not worse; is indifference itself an identifiable cause of racial prejudice? or is it caused by racial prejudice? and either way, is it significant?

I think the operative question is: if we turned racial indifference around, would it chagne the current situation drastically?

I say yes, I agree with your posts.

Is turing indifference around easier than turning hatred around? Meaning making hatred into acceptance, and indifference into caring. I think the first step is to make indefference disappear and get it replaced with caring.

But that is not easy either. Especially in America. Indifference is cheap, easy, and effortless. And people everywhere, not just in America, have a huge amount of resistence to change, especially to social change and to emotional change. They have to want to change first, willingly, light those light bulbs in the ole' jokes.

To change indifference, one has to be jolted out of the comfy ethical stupor they rest in. This can be done with invoking their empathy... but that's where America as a nation comes in in my first opinion, as a nation especially hard to change.

To have empathy with the disadvantaged is what all and every American has to battle in his mind all his life, or at least in the beginning of his moral development. Communism, sharing, seeing everyone happy is a social trait, a trait we all have at the outset; much like we have other natural states of emotions and values, that are not social environment driven, and yet the opposite: greed, hoarding, getting ahead at the expense of others.

I hold that both these sets (communist values and capitalist values) are naturally inborn in every human. In my childhood in socialist Hungary we laughed at ourselves, and clamored the west, with its opportunities to get rich and fabolously rich. Here, in America, we have to battle our inner need to help others and not feel guilt at our incredible fabolous wealth when the guy next door is selling his sister down the river in need of a liver transplant. We have to fight to stay rich, not with others who want to take it away, but with our inner selves, who want to give it away. This greed, this "yourself and your family, nobody else" is the American spirit, and this is what does not allow empathy.

These observations have been made by other Americans, like Kurt Vonnegut in "God Bless You Mr. Rosewater", and by some leftist main stream cartoonists in papers, like Berke Breathed who drew "Bloom County" in the eighties. Another cartoonist, forgot his name, was also big on this, he was a newspaper cartoon strip man, he could not draw, he hired artists, and he supplied the story, the wording and the scenes. Forgot his name. Trudeau of some sort? Not the dead Canadian prime minister, yet the cartoonist's name was also Trudeau, I seem to remember.

We don't have to be leftist to realize that the inn er fight to push away empathetic feelings is real, the rightists know that feeling all too well, too; it's just that leftists are a bit more inclined to talk about it.

---------

So here is the problem. America lacks empathy, and the less empathy, the more it aids the system. "Ask not what the country will do for you, instead, ask what you can do for your country." Essentially this is a non-sensical oxymoron, but taken a certain way, it tells you: Do what supports the system, do what aides the country to continue its values, its operational parameters.

This is what makes race problems to disappear such a hard problem. MLK was absolutely right. It is not hatred; it is indifference that breeds hatred; and as I see it, indifference is an integral part of the American spirit. To solve the race issue America must abandon indifference, but it can't. It is hinged to too many American values and social institutions. To unhinge the American Indifference is the same as to unhinge values other than racist ones, and to try that would be horribly risky and fraught with danger. So, in my opinion, sadly, America will not do that. Not in my lifetime, anyway.

BTW, this is reflected not only in the internal race situation in America, but also in the foreign policy... "as long as the government says we have a grave reason to hate a nation even on the other side of the world, then it's morally okay to bomb them and shoot the people there."

America... it's huge, and its ideology is robust. America, its values and culture, is said to be that of the people: Hollywood, Hamburgers, and most popular American social icons are populist, they cater to the everyman, the one which is the greatest in number in the demographics. This is supported by the spirit of the constitution, and this supports the world's foremost economy, since the fight is to cater to the everyman's hard earned dollar, because the everyman's spending is the largest spending in America. The jobs for the everymen are designed to be filled by everymen, who can do these jobs and have enough job satisfaction to do them. And surprise, the greatest number of people in the work force are everymen.

So the tastes are run for the everyman, in simplistic Hollywood movies, in simplistically declared wars, in simplistically explained economy, in simplistically presented nightly newscasts, in simplistically performed public education, in simplistically plain taste in food. Yet the simpleness is its immense strength. Simple means not fancy; the simpler a thing, the more structurally sound it is. It is easier to break a computer than to break a rock.

So the simplisticity has immense immobility inherent in itself; and hence the immense ideological strength of America.

--------


How the f did I get to this.