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Compare and contrast the levels of outrage Americans had for these two different yet related stories: 1) Michael Phelps smokes some weed, hurting absolutely no one and 2) this:
A shootout in a border city that leaves five alleged drug traffickers sprawled dead on the street and seven police wounded. A police chief and his bodyguards gunned down outside his house in another border city. Four bridges into the United States shut down by protesters who want the military out of their towns and who officials say are backed by narcotraffickers.
The latter story would, in a sane world, be the one that matters more and generates more outrage. But it is the story that requires we Americans to actually take some fucking responsibility for the hell we unleash on countries that are supposed to be our friends and neighbors, like Mexico. The remarkable thing about the Phelps story is that most of the people viciously condemning have probably smoked weed and aren’t sorry about it. But they enjoy getting into a sanctimonious snit over the evils of drug use, so they don’t let that kind of hypocrisy bother them. Unfortunately, our national hypocrisy about drugs is super-deadly on the Mexican-American border. That is, after all, why this war is going on—to control the trade routes to get drugs to Americans using criminal methods because drugs are illegal in America. (And Mexico, too, but they appear to have more of an export issue than an import one.) To really face this story would be to face what we don’t want to—either everyone who uses drugs stops, or we give up the War On Drugs. Only one of these is realistic. And while we have plenty of drug addicts in America, we have even more sanctimony addicts who need their fix.
I want to go ahead and put it out there that I take issue with the bulk of missionary work (past and present), especially that which takes place in developing nations. It is a reminder of the power of nations who sit firmly and comfortably in their G8 seats, spectators in a game of international tennis. Only in the case of missionary work, the victory comes at a higher price, one that can mean not only renouncing one’s culture, but also one’s religion (or at least denouncing it in public) as a means of attaining vital resources.
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In light of my objection to this line of work, I find myself dealing with a mental conflict almost every day of my present job. My campaign has nothing to do with God, but in terms of international influence, the English language and American culture come pretty darn close.
Last night, I attended the Yes Means Yes reading… When I left, my mind was buzzing, and at night laying in bed with my boyfriend I must have rambled non-stop for forty-five minutes about all the things I was thinking about, the new concepts I’d been introduced to. In particular, I was sort of shocked at how common sexual assault was among this group. Every presenter, and many people who came up afterward and said “I was raped.” People who knew people. And I was thinking that talking frankly about rape is such an important part of what happens in the feminist blogosphere, and even though we’re a fairly prominent feminist blog, it’s not a part of the set of personal experiences we talk about here. I don’t know whether any of my fellow contributors have been through sexual assault, and I’m not challenging them to say so. But the fact that I consistently think of myself as someone who has not been sexually assaulted is a shining example of the way this discourse is extremely limited.
Because I have been raped.
Last night on Hardball, I watched Pat Buchanan take on Michael Eric Dyson on Eric Holder’s comments about America’s cowardice in terms of discussing race. First, what Holder said was true. Second, watching that show was like watching a ferret take on a uncovered table fan.
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Buchanan pointed out the sad statistics that plague the black community, from crime to family structure. But he did the very thing that makes an honest conversation on race so terribly difficult to have – he treated the statistics as if they simply arose out of the ether, the product of a series of conscious decisions on the part of black people to sling drugs and live in ghettos. But the history of America, even to this day, revolves around how the white majority has chosen to shape our communities, and the steps to which they’ve gone to mask the nature of their decisions.
