The Circle of Life

Metaphysically, it’s really more of a wheel.

Regarding the Super Bowl 50 Halftime Show:

Heaven forbid the Black community ever have a national stage and a famous figurehead to express how they feel. :P How un-American. And how dare they disagree about what issues are big problems in America.

Heaven forbid a group of dissidents ever try to overthrow “the way it’s done, y’all.”

I have mixed feelings on the actual situations between Blacks and Whites, and “pro-love” and “pro-marriage” groups. But I have considered this, which is a rough paraphrase of a quote that I’ve heard mainly attributed to Steven King and occasionally to a few other people.

History is a wheel. You spend enough time on top, it’s going to roll over and then you’ll be on the bottom again.

White protestant moral conservatives have been on top for over two hundred years. Abortion activists/businesspeople have been entitled for over forty years. Now the wheel looks like it’s rolling over again, and they’re freaking out at their security and entitlements slipping away. All that is normal; no ideological class in this multi-faceted fight is behaving uniquely reprehensibly or shockingly towards each other (because some people from all parts of the spectrum are being jerks to each other and some people aren’t).

That’s why both NARAL and Rudy Giuliani come across as desperate and unfounded; the former, over that painful Doritos ad (did that one make anyone else clench up a bit?) and the latter, over the halftime show. And at the end of the day, both of those complainers show what they really want — their way, or the highway. It’s ironic, though, that the two groups with the loudest complaints about principles are the ones with rather lengthy histories of oppression.

Try to deny that the centuries of American history haven’t been marked by a strong and effective racial caste system, with blacks the largest group nearest the bottom. Try to deny that NARAL hasn’t lobbied and profited off the political and social economics of abortion, and milked the insecurities of pregnant women for greed and power. Now that both of those respective securities are thinning and evaporating, the language changes from confidence to anger, bitterness, and character assaults. Which leads me to postulate:

Those who talk the loudest about principles are usually the ones dealing with the biggest insecurities. But the wheel keeps rolling; the wheel doesn’t care, and the wheel will take everyone down eventually.