We need to understand and let them go . . .
I think you have identified the infected cyst that has sickened America. As a much older product of the Heartland I appreciate your observation of the source and addiction to white rage. When I was growing up in the 1950s it wasn’t yet white rage but only the nature of being white. The early examples of white rage were there and usually showed up as virulent evangelicals that that were a bit of an embarrassment to their fellow church members. Something that has stuck in my mind for almost sixty years is my father’s, very slight, friendship with a black farmer who would come to visit occasionally. I didn’t know where he came from because there were no black people in our township, I thought. They would set on the back step of our old farmhouse and talk. Then, after one visit I asked my father why they didn’t go in the house and have coffee like everyone else who came. My father told me quietly that my mother wouldn’t allow any of “those” people in her house. That was normal too but I just hadn’t learned it yet. These were my parents and good evangelical christian folks who made sure no black people who came to church ever came back. They needed to be kept in their place.
This whiteness and religion is, I think, a very old and slow congenital disease in American culture. It has erupted into an active sickness every fifty years or so and nearly killed this place once. It is now finishing the job of killing America. When it erupts the boils are lanced and drained but the disease is endemic. The world has changed in too many ways and all of the old forms of government, economics, and political systems loosely linked to the American experiment of the 18th century are no longer viable on a virtual and digital planet. We have ruined it badly enough that we need to change completely or risk death. Evolution is on us first socially and intellectually and then physically and electronically. The failed forms cannot survive. That is the way of evolutionary change. Give up on the those infected with white rage.
