Jen Derr-Bender
The New York trip is looking a little less likely. My mother said she went to Lotte to buy tickets, and the tour company said they would add our names and let us know if they had enough people to embark on a tour. Below a certain threshold they cancel their tours. With the summer travel season over for a lot of people, I wonder if they won't make it to the threshold. Now a lot of households have less time (and, after back-to-school shopping, less money) for travel.
I checked out a travel guide yesterday to get other ideas for things to do. Barely an hour away from where my mother lives is Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. I've never been to West Virginia, and this particular town has some interesting historical sites. Among other things, you can see where John Brown got his abolition on and visit a lookout point where Thomas Jefferson thought the view of the Shenandoah River was particularly captivating. My mother was amenable to the idea of visiting, as long as I drive.
I watched The House I Live In this weekend. In a nutshell, it's a documentary that takes a critical look at the drug war and mass incarceration--especially in terms of their disproportionate impact on poor and minority communities. One part of the documentary that really struck me was when it talked about the new focus on meth. Anti-drug laws and their enforcement have a long history of being very clearly racist. When opium was popular among whites in the South, no one raised an eyebrow. When white laborers in the West started getting disgruntled about having to compete with cheaper immigrant laborers from China--who happened to smoke opium--opium suddenly became a horrible drug menace that had to be stopped. Anti-marijuana laws were rooted in a fear of Mexican immigrants--and a fear of a disappearing color line as white and Black people who were immersed in jazz culture began smoking it together. And I hardly need to comment on the racial element of anti-crack laws.
But then along comes an explosion of meth use, a drug that is mostly associated with white addicts. Although enforcement of other drug laws remains racially skewed (to put it mildly), the crackdown on meth has suddenly made the war on drugs a bit more inclusive. Now white communities are being subjected to the same kind of abuses that communities of color have endured since Tricky Dicky decided drugs were Public Enemy Number One.
I'm sure volumes of valid insights and conclusions could be drawn from this interesting turn in the war on drugs. What immediately came to mind for me is that this should be held up as one of the reasons white Americans, even though they benefit from the legacy and persistence of racism, nonetheless have a self-interest in fighting racism. Eventually the abusers who do their damage to the Other, to the marginalized, will want more. They will become dissatisfied dispensing their misery within the racially defined boundaries they've been granted. Countless white laborers, throughout American history, were willing to endure class warfare against them as long as the myths of racism made them feel that they shared some interests with white elites. They endured that abuse because they identified with their abusers instead of the marginalized communities that got a larger share of abuse. But when you only concern yourself with relative well-being you invite greater abuse.
I'm reminded of what Chris Hedges wrote in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt:The devastation on Pine Ridge, in Camden, in southern West Virginia, and in the Florida produce fields has worked its way upward. The corporate leviathan has migrated with the steady and ominous thud of destruction from the outer sacrifice zones to devour what remains. The vaunted American dream, the idea that life will get better, that progress is inevitable if we obey the rules and work hard, that material prosperity is assured, has been replaced by a hard and bitter truth. The American dream, we now know, is a lie. We will all be sacrificed. The virus of corporate abuse--the perverted belief that only corporate profit matters--has to spread to outsource our jobs, cut the budgets of our schools, close our libraries, and plague our communities with foreclosures and unemployment. This virus has brought with it a security and surveillance state that seeks to keep us all on a reservation. No one is immune. The suffering of the other, of the Native American, the African American in the inner city, the unemployed coal miner, or the Hispanic produce picker is universal. They went first. We are next. The indifference we showed to the plight of the underclass, in Biblical terms our neighbor, haunts us. We failed them, and in doing so we failed ourselves. We were accomplices in our own demise.
I checked out a travel guide yesterday to get other ideas for things to do. Barely an hour away from where my mother lives is Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. I've never been to West Virginia, and this particular town has some interesting historical sites. Among other things, you can see where John Brown got his abolition on and visit a lookout point where Thomas Jefferson thought the view of the Shenandoah River was particularly captivating. My mother was amenable to the idea of visiting, as long as I drive.
I watched The House I Live In this weekend. In a nutshell, it's a documentary that takes a critical look at the drug war and mass incarceration--especially in terms of their disproportionate impact on poor and minority communities. One part of the documentary that really struck me was when it talked about the new focus on meth. Anti-drug laws and their enforcement have a long history of being very clearly racist. When opium was popular among whites in the South, no one raised an eyebrow. When white laborers in the West started getting disgruntled about having to compete with cheaper immigrant laborers from China--who happened to smoke opium--opium suddenly became a horrible drug menace that had to be stopped. Anti-marijuana laws were rooted in a fear of Mexican immigrants--and a fear of a disappearing color line as white and Black people who were immersed in jazz culture began smoking it together. And I hardly need to comment on the racial element of anti-crack laws.
But then along comes an explosion of meth use, a drug that is mostly associated with white addicts. Although enforcement of other drug laws remains racially skewed (to put it mildly), the crackdown on meth has suddenly made the war on drugs a bit more inclusive. Now white communities are being subjected to the same kind of abuses that communities of color have endured since Tricky Dicky decided drugs were Public Enemy Number One.
I'm sure volumes of valid insights and conclusions could be drawn from this interesting turn in the war on drugs. What immediately came to mind for me is that this should be held up as one of the reasons white Americans, even though they benefit from the legacy and persistence of racism, nonetheless have a self-interest in fighting racism. Eventually the abusers who do their damage to the Other, to the marginalized, will want more. They will become dissatisfied dispensing their misery within the racially defined boundaries they've been granted. Countless white laborers, throughout American history, were willing to endure class warfare against them as long as the myths of racism made them feel that they shared some interests with white elites. They endured that abuse because they identified with their abusers instead of the marginalized communities that got a larger share of abuse. But when you only concern yourself with relative well-being you invite greater abuse.
I'm reminded of what Chris Hedges wrote in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt:The devastation on Pine Ridge, in Camden, in southern West Virginia, and in the Florida produce fields has worked its way upward. The corporate leviathan has migrated with the steady and ominous thud of destruction from the outer sacrifice zones to devour what remains. The vaunted American dream, the idea that life will get better, that progress is inevitable if we obey the rules and work hard, that material prosperity is assured, has been replaced by a hard and bitter truth. The American dream, we now know, is a lie. We will all be sacrificed. The virus of corporate abuse--the perverted belief that only corporate profit matters--has to spread to outsource our jobs, cut the budgets of our schools, close our libraries, and plague our communities with foreclosures and unemployment. This virus has brought with it a security and surveillance state that seeks to keep us all on a reservation. No one is immune. The suffering of the other, of the Native American, the African American in the inner city, the unemployed coal miner, or the Hispanic produce picker is universal. They went first. We are next. The indifference we showed to the plight of the underclass, in Biblical terms our neighbor, haunts us. We failed them, and in doing so we failed ourselves. We were accomplices in our own demise.