Racial Anger 2011

Focus on the ills of our society through the prism of anger, payback and get even, cannot change the past or fill the need to achieve greatness.  Our country is in need of cohesiveness and what we have is divisiveness.  

My viewpoints on life have always been colored by the educational lens of Sociology and Psychology.  My belief that a society is merely an oversized persona made up of individual beliefs and attitudes in constant flux, seems truer as my time goes by.  Today’s American society is similar to an individual with a slow acting virus in which the illness (although progressing slowly at first) gains its dominance in the body.  Eventually without adequate treatment the body is prone to weakness and eventually death.  Today our society is infected with anger, hatred, selfishness, greed and idolatry.  Most feel that they deserve more than they have, feel anger toward those that have more, feel hatred toward those whose ancestors did their ancestors wrong, and their form of idolatry is whatever ideology to which they adhere.

Those who migrated to our nation originally, (other than those who were indigenous), came because of a need for religious freedom, they worked hard and suffered to achieve a better state of life for their children.  They achieved this not through hatred, but through a strong sense of hope, faith and a belief that things could be better if an effort were made.  

Mistakes were made in the course of our country’s advance in its place in World History.  Those mistakes were generally a result of the same failures that we as individuals make.  Fear, hatred and greed caused the genocide of the indigenous people (although not completely) greed and a need for cheap labor brought the sad practice of slavery.  It was bad enough that those sicknesses invaded our national soul at that time, but to let those things take away from the healing process is as large a crime.