Hey, now this is just me thinking out loud, OK? So don't no one go popping a blood vessel and start mashing keys to yell at me.
The rioting, it's easy to say- "Oh, look at all those idiots!" and pass judgement. Heck, I basically agree, but it's not the rioting that's the problem here.
We are bombarded constantly about "American Freedom", of how wealthy we are, of how we've turned it around from the near crash and it's bullshit.
We see this stuff on the TV and we ask "How can these people do this?" It's the wrong question. The right question is "Were all these people just waiting for an excuse?"
The government think tanks have been thinking long and hard about that latter question. It's why our police are now well militarized. It's why the department of education needs to buy hundreds of small arms and millions of rounds of ammunition. It's why homeland security is moving programs to get military APC's to as many police districts as they can. It's why we passed things like the NDAA, have a nation wide meta data gathering program spying on virtually every American on the planet.
I could go on and on, but what you all should be wondering about is what is brewing under the surface in our society. There are people, I have no way of knowing how many, possibly millions, who are just waiting for something. Waiting for a chance to release all the pent up anger, all that frustration.
Sure, one can say they shouldn't have that anger and frustration, but that's easier said than done. Sure we can lay blame, it's the government's fault, it's republican's fault, it's democrat's fault, whatever and whomever one would like to blame, but it doesn't just magically make what it is that is boiling underneath our society go away.
I don't know how to fix it and I don't even know what to call what it is that I'm talking about or how to explain it correctly. But it's there, it manifested itself in Ferguson and it'll manifest again soon enough somewhere else. It's not just about race, or creed, or economic standing, or missed opportunities, or lost opportunities, or discrimination, or bigotry, or class warfare, or political divides. Those all those things contribute. I don't know exactly what it is, but there are other things that contribute that one may not consider, like boredom. Respect, apathy, lack of empathy, toss that into the mix as well.
It's a sickness is the best way I can describe it, but even that isn't right either. I dunno, but I can't see a way to reverse whatever this is. Ferguson is just a little place of maybe 20,000 people. Imagine an LA or NYC going nuts like this. When millions of people one day say "f*ck the police, f*ck the system, f*ck you" and then just let loose all that pent up what-ever-it-is inside them.
We can have the police crack down. We can get harsher with these people, but it only increases whatever this thing is, infects more people.
We like to boil it all down to "racism" and make it a black vs white thing or a rich vs poor thing, but it goes much deeper than that I think. And by trying to simplify whatever this is only feeds whatever this is. I am really starting to think that for all the talk about how free and how great and how bless the US is, deep down we are a very sick nation and I have no idea what the cure is.
I dunno, I'm just musing is all. If it all burns down, it's OK, I got plenty of marshmallows. But it saddens me to see how we've squandered the blessings we've had. Such is human nature I suppose. Maybe some of you who are more eloquent can explain it better.
But those think tanks I mentioned earlier? They understand what I'm trying to say here, and they are preparing the only way they know how. Will it matter? I guess time will tell and when that time comes, it'll be very hard to tell who are the "good guys" and who are the "bad guys". IMO. As in, tell me, who is the "good guys" and who is the "bad guys" in this picture-
