Wuxy, you are in South Ontario? Is it true that:
"There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind
I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us

Helpless, helpless, helpless

Baby can you hear me now?
The chains are locked
and tied across the door,
Baby, sing with me somehow.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us

Helpless, helpless, helpless."

To be honest, I don't quite understand the meaning of the song, I am sure, but I assure you there IS a place like this, most definitely, in Northern Ontario, as there is millions and millions of places exactly like this all over the globe.

The birds might be different; maybe bigger, or smaller, or same size but with different plumeage. But the shadow they cast on our eyes is the memory of places you left -- places, souls, or souls of places, don't matter. People you left, places you left, and people and old times that left you here, with crap on your head, in your mind and in your eyes (I think that's what the chain locked on the floor metaphor means.)

That's it, but there is no crap in our hearts becasue the singer and the song sucks the shet out of there via poetic/musical liberation, by emptying our hearts of sorrow.

Sometimes the more sorrow we feel, the more we get liberated from it, until it actually gives us pleasure to experience that sorrow, and a different name is given, "nostalgia" to the feeling as associated with a memory of a mood.

I used to get this feeling as early as age 5. I kid you not. Then I could not feel it from age 17 to 57-58. It (the ability to experience nostalgia) sometimes comes back, but only in the last six months it started to.

Yeah. There IS a place like that in Northern Ontario.

What I meant to say is that there are White Americans and Black Americans, and we call each other and ourselves colours, because we are undeniably of different colour.

But the problem is not that we are coloured differently; the problem is that too many people (even one person who did this would be one too many) associate immediately, irrevokably and irrefutably, different attitudes, abilities, characters, and talents to people, automatically, and because of the colour of their skins, without looking at the facts of reality first.

This is a lame behaviour, the behaviour of the lazy thinker. We need to train our minds, because this feeling is – shocking as it may be – is based on evolutionary advantage.

We are tribalists, all people. When there is plenty of food, drinks, and other bling-blings, we, as humans, welcome strangers into our tribe. They enrich our diversity of DNA, and therefore increase the survival chances of our DNA, by getting married to our tribal members.

When food, drinks, and other shiny stuff are in scarce availability, then we don’t like others to take a share of our food. We chase them away, or kill them.

We have this in our minds, I am sure, but to truly accept its truth, you must first become a Darwinist and accept the superiority of evolutionary psychology.

So in areas of land in times of need, a select group that’s different; visibly or culturally, will be selected to be the object of hate.

This happened most obviously in Nazi Germany. The Germans decided to hate the Jews (and the Gypsies) to alleviate their psychological need to behave tribally. For the Gypsies and the Jews this became a problem mostly, for the Gypsies because they were all killed very early on after Hitler came to power, and for the Jews, because parallel to the increasing anti-Semitism, the nation's economy grew and improved, independently from the concurrent growing social hatred of the Jews, but nobody was sane enough to see that the two were independent and Jew-hate and sanctions against Jews was NOT the real reason that made the economy grow and prosper.

So somewhat superstitiously, the nation believed that the reason their economy got better was totally due to squeezing Jews, and their effect, out of their economy and culture.

Come peace, harmony, and incredible wealth that grew out of the economies of post-war Europe, esp. in Germany, the question of the Jew is more of a string of never ending jokes about the Holocaust, and this is going on mostly among the Jews.

In north America the Blacks are not hated because of a hardship in economy. It is a distorted, skewed, misplaced hatred that blacks suffer. It is tribal, nevertheless, but not based on the racial hatred due to the economy. Mostly because America, in its 200-year or so history, has never had really bad economic problems. For instance, during the Great Depression many Europeans starved to death in Europe. Their only hope to survive was to go to America, where nobody perished due to death by hunger.

Blacks are therefore singled out patterned on a tribal psychology, but based on a different angle: they are considered, have been considered, by the nation, lesser than whites. No reason by fact to support this, but the rather logically inconsequential fact that Blacks were slaves. The slaves were uneducated, so the white called them “uneducated”. The blacks stole, because they were hungry, and they were jealous of the wealth of the whites; they wanted to get their share, and theft was the only way to accomplish that. The whites therefore called the blacks “ganefs” or “thieves”. There were probably more, many more negative names that were attached to blacks: Gluttons (because they were always kept to be hungry, and on the occasion that they could get full, they ate as if there were no tomorrow); or “heathens” (bad name in those days; all blacks fresh off the ships were not Christians, and there was even a saying in those days, “a Christian Black Slave is worth ten heathen Black slaves.” Oh, and the work ethic, of course. No man or woman likes to work and not see or enjoy the fruit of their labour. So they tried to avoid work and steal themselves out of their duties. "Lazy bunch", would the white slave keeper say.

This has reformed itself in leaps and bounds, during the Civil war and during the Civil Rights Movement, which happened mainly in the fifties, sixties, and the early part of the seventies.

Then the seventies brought unprecedented personal wealth into the lives of most americans. Practically only those did not acquire wealth who were vagrants due to schizophrenia or drug addictions. Now that the civil rights were enacted by the congress, Blacks could become wage earners, at harder efforts and in lower levels for their personal abilities, when compared to whites, but still, they could establish a comparable life to some whites.

Now then the media started to display blacks not as hapless and helpless singletons, but as leaders, scientists and managers. The freedom of speech was curtailed a bit to include a restriction, which was to eradicate hate speech. The schools and the media did their utmost to give justice to blacks. There were discrimination laws drawn up.

They helped, very much. But not enough. At school kids can’t call a black kid a “ni”, but at home the same white kid can use the word. Or his dad would say, “kid, you are stupid, you are bringing home nggr grades. Smarten up or else. Or else... I sell you down the river.” Or people protest at work, to refuse to do a task. “Hey, I’m a bookkeper, I won’t do plugged-up toilets. Get a nggr to do that, off the street, for five bucks; or any of the blonde and dumb nail-painting secretaries. I am a highly qualified employee in a technical field, my maleness must not automatically qualify me to be the only one in the office to catch the mouse in the lunch room or dive head first into the clugged-up toilet bowl. If you insist on a male to do the job, get some n from the sludge-slumping department.”

These are examples only, impersonal examples, but they occur and happen very frequently.

I call American racism against Blacks a cultural remnant, but it has other roots: human roots, put in the heads of each of us. We are BORN, as humans, to be racist and prejudiced. We are BORN with the capacity to be racist, and it can be triggered any time to enact itself.

For instance, I was a big racist, against blacks, yes, I admit to that. I fought this tooth and nail, and I tried to educate myself in any way to get rid of this unwanted value judgement.

I took every opportunity to see the point of view of the non-prejudiced.

You see, in your intellectual world, in your own, private, personal intellectual world, it is easy, very, very easy, to accept that blacks are different from whites only in colours of their skins; otherwise they are reasonably the same. This can be seen by your intellect very easily.

But by your emotional hard-wired evolutionary survival value system, which is inborn with you, this is not easily possible.

I won’t bore you what and how many trials, self-reflections, speculations it took me to try to turn myself away from my own racial prejudice against blacks. I was finally convinced by a man, whom I saw in a restaurant, smile at the waitress. He was a black man, and he smiled like a white, at least it so seemed to me. To that point I hardly ever saw a black man smile in public. Fair enough. But this man’s smile was honest, not pretended, it was a smile that reflected joy, human joy, the human spirit, of being happy to have the waitress there. The smile was raceless, to me. Mainly because of its sweetness and honesty and guilelessness. I remember that happened five years ago, and that was a huge and major help for me to get through the last hurdle of ridding me of racism.

The step before that was a series of comedies, called "Scary Movie", and the humour in it was superb. It played greatly on humorizing and satirizing black and white stereotypes, and male and female sterotypes. Some of the jokes were so dumb, that you could see the brilliant minds behind them. Yes, humour is the only humour endeavour in which intellect is not commensurate to effect. The smartest person can make me laugh as much as the dumbest person, and to write humour for a movie script, a person who can write smart and dumb jokes alike is a genius, no doubt. That movie, or series, was written by I think four blacks (two males, one female) and one white female. And it was one of the most enjoyable movies in the comedy genre I saw. (A black girl in one of the series, who woudl f anyone and she was sex-crazed with no inhibitions (a white stereotype about black chicks) screws an alien, and the other alien (they don't even look like humans, at all) says to him, "Hope you are not infected with some bad HIV", to which the sexed alien says, "Oh, I am sure I am not. She said she was a virgin." I still laugh when I think of this scene.)

Most people are careless, or unmotivated, to educate themselves not to give in to the primal urge of racism. Most people watch their words and actions in public, but they are faking it. I am faking it, too; but one level deeper. Most others fake it on the surface. My faking is in cheating Mother Nature, when I tell the old wench, “social order and human fellowship comes before devaluing another human for the reason of his birth, and for no other reason.”

This will last, I am sure, until I get very hungry for several days, and there is no hope for plenty of food anytime soon, for me, or for anyone else.

Further to the above: the creator was not an Intelligent Designer, at all. It made me spend all that energy to turn my back on the old ways, and look at blacks the way as it ought to have been obvious to do from moment one: as they are humans, with no other significant differences as a group.

If someone comes up to me, and says he or she believes that the world was made by an intelligent designer, I want to kick him or her in the f eyes for saying that, exactly because of the question of American racism, and for many other reasons as well, of course.

interesting

Maybe we should discuss Xenophobia?

Oopsie, double post.

go for it doc ,,,lol

Why must you taunt me with that smile? Oh no, Ladies first...

I don't know what Xenophobia means.

The fear of Xeno, the ancient Greek god of paradoxes?

I know, however, what phobophobia means. The fear of being afraid.

"You have nothing to fear, but fear itself." The guy who said it first is the guy who understands me.

^ and I am not a f lady.

xenophobia - : fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign


,,,there ya have it,,,


although, when it comes to your chosen field TB, I do wonder who and how the distinction is made that soemone is feeling fear, as opposed to just disliking or disapproving

Fear is more of an emotion; something your gut tells you. I recommend Gavin De
Becker's The Gift of Fear. Dislike is more of a cognition, like knowing that I do not want hot peppers in my food.

interesting,,

Ok. So....hypothetical situation. You are on a subway. You are white male, alone, and you are minding your business. Then, coming through the door and into your train car is a group of guys, all African American, who are dressed as if they are in a gang. Now. You, the white male, believe you are not a racist. But you feel this fear inside for your safety. Even though the group of black men is not threatening you at all, you still feel as if the chance for them to "start something" is high. Why you feel this way? You can't seem to rationalize why. You just know you feel scared. You feel they will see your nice clothes, watch, etc...and will bother you or may hurt you to get it. Oh, and you are the only person in this car (aside from the gang that walked in that put fear in you).

Now. Is this just fear for your safety? Would a white male not feel threatened if it were a white gang? Would the white male treat a Mexican gang the same? Or is racism involved here? Profiling? Is it all these things?

The answer would depend on the background of the white dude. If I were him, I might find a nice way to start a conversation with the others.

I would tell them I'm a rap porno promoter. I'd say they get a part in my next feature, if they show me how they can form a human chain of fornicating buddies. I tell them how they have to improve on the lean-toward the camera and clicking their fingers, in unison. I also tell them that they may be required to wear white tuxes during the show, and they usually ask if it contains peanuts coz they are allergic to that, and to lactose.

Once the chain is formed, I give each of them my card, and tell them to wait for an email from my production company.

That's what I usually do every such time.

--------------

Edit: hypothetical questions deserve hypothetical answers.

In reality, I would apply my patent-pending Xiou-Fu-jeng self-defence technique, which is to poo my pants from fright, and then they are guaranteed to stay away from me.

The Tashkent school of Xiao-Foo-jeng method, however, recommends to feign a heart attack as a finale, to make escaping violence mandatory.

It is a well-known part of human character and human nature, that people who live in countries where killing is illegal and called murder, would never rob a corpse which is full of shoot or his pants are full of it. Especially if it highly likely that he carries his wallet in the back pocket of his pants.

This is just one of those unwritten human laws that everyone, even thugs, respect.

Wux....that is EXACTLY the answer I was looking for.

Thanks... you made me blush. I can't stand the highlight when it's on me, although all my expressions are made to get the highlight to search me out.

It's the tragedy of my life. I fear what I want most. I want most what I fear. And both, both forward and backward, too, at the same time and in the same respect.

Life is a terrible thing for some of us.