When I was a kid my mother was always saying, "Why can't you boys get along?" I have two younger brothers and I just assumed we couldn't get along because we were boys and we were brothers.
These days, with our country going to hell in a hand basket, I hear it over and over. Why can't the Republicans get along with the Democrats? Why can't the white folk get along with the black folk? Why can't the Muslim get along with the non-Muslim?
If you really want to know why we don't get along read the article below. It's written by a guy named "Sultan Knish" who's got a pretty good grasp of the situation. But...
DON'T READ THIS...if you don't like to read.
DON'T READ THIS...if you're half asleep and need a good night's sleep.
DON'T READ THIS...if you're not committed to reading the whole article.
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Last Wednesday, Lashawn Marten was playing chess when he announced, "I hate white people". Then he began hitting random white people who were walking by. By the time he was done, several were wounded and one lay dying.
I have walked by countless times and seen the chess players
sitting near the overhang of the Union Square subway entrance; mostly black men
daring white passerby into a money game. At the fountain to the left, Moonies squat on
a blanket and sing their sonorous chants. To the right, the remnants of Occupy Wall
Street set up tables to collect money and dispense buttons.
In warmer weather, break dancers perform on the stairs and
office workers sit beneath the statue of George Washington expelling the
British and eat lunch. NYU students
mingle with Whole Foods shoppers. Elderly Puerto Rican men push makeshift wooden
carts piled with unlabeled bottles of homebrewed soda pop and dog owners head
for the run underneath the towering edifice of the Barnes and Noble superstore.
On Wednesdays, the farmers' market shows up and if not for
Rosh Hashana, I might have been passing by the chess tables, maneuvering
between the Moonies, the protestors and the chess players. Jeffrey Babbitt, the man Lashawn beat to death
looks familiar to me if only because he has that kind of New York face that you
pass on the street. You see it worn by
plumbers and high school teachers. It's the badge of the vanishing New York
City working class.
No conclusions will be drawn from the murder. Lashawn Marten was obviously mentally ill. And if his mental illness took the form of
violent racism toward white people, that is an incidental fact. The murder is
an incident. The details are incidental.
Even if Lashawn is actually prosecuted on hate crimes charges, no conclusions
will be drawn from what happened between the chess tables.
Incidents take place all around us, but patterns have to be
articulated. The incident is
insignificant. It's the pattern that
counts.
Our minds are not trained to hold incidents. They are trained to grasp patterns. The patterns and incidents float all around us
like bits of data. They are formed out
of the firsthand experience of our memories and the secondhand experiences of
the news items that we pick up. They are
the chess game that goes on in our minds between our subconscious processing
the events of the day and the outside forces seeking to shape our minds. The pieces that they move around are our
thoughts.
The patterns that we absorb from reality we call common
sense, but the patterns imposed on us are propaganda.
A man can live in a building where a dozen murders have taken
place and still believe that he is in a low-risk area as long as he is told hat
there is no pattern to these murders. That each single incident does not form any
greater whole. And a man can be
compelled to believe that he is living in the deadliest place on earth by
convincing him that two local murders in one year form a pattern.
The incident is anecdotal, but the pattern is scientific. The incident is something we have to learn to
get over so we can get back to shopping in downtown Manhattan or walking
through Union Square. The pattern is a
social problem that we must dedicate ourselves to fighting. The incident isn't supposed to define our
lives. The pattern is.
The murder of Chris Lane was an incident. The murder of Jeffrey Babbitt was an incident.
To be a New Yorker is to grow up under
the shadow of such incidents that can never be officially talked about. To know the shadow pattern and understand its
implications without discussing it.
The Boston Marathon bombing was an incident. So was the Fort Hood Massacre. So was 9/11. No conclusions can be drawn from them and no
pattern can be used to tie them together. They are to be processed separately and
discarded. Lone bits. Ragged ends of experience with no further
meaning than the private pain of their victims.
One incident is an isolated dot. A stop on a train that goes nowhere. Connect enough of them together and you form a
route and a map. And now you're going
someplace.
The media is not that concerned with suppressing incidents. It is concerned with suppressing pattern
awareness. No one can deny that the
occasional racial murder takes place and that the perpetrators look like
Obama's sons. And no one can deny that
Muslims sometimes set off bombs or fly planes into buildings. They deny only that these incidents form a
pattern.
Real patterns are replaced with false patterns. Every Muslim terrorist attack is met with
media chatter about an Islamophobic backlash. The backlash never materializes, but it
doesn't need to. The mere repetition of
it does the trick and sets the pattern. It tells readers that the attack is the
incident, but the backlash is the pattern.
The attack is only an incident and not characteristic of
Muslims while the backlash is a pattern and characteristic of our bigotry and
intolerance.
White racism is a pattern. Black racism is an incident. Racism is characteristic of white people, but
not of black people. The crowds passing
through Union Square are subdivided into the oppressors and the oppressed. Their lives are color coded for morality and
justice. Jeffrey Babbitt, who dreamed of
being a motorman, loved comics and took care of his elderly mother, was an
oppressor. His death is an incident that
in no way detracts from the pervasive pattern of white racism.
Jeffrey Babbitt was an oppressor and Lashawn Marten was one
of the oppressed. Why else announce that
he hates white people? This social
dynamic was imposed on them at birth and cannot be altered by any act of
violence. The acts of violence only
affirm the pattern as the oppressed lash out blindly against their oppressors. The occasional death of an oppressor in no way
alters the fixed pattern that it is the oppressors who kill the oppressed. It is an incident. Nothing more.
The deaths of a million white men in their sixties who love
comic books and dream of driving trains will be no more than an incident. Their lost lives will never congeal into a
pattern, their blood will never outweigh that of an Emmett Till. The pattern is set in stone and embedded
through endless indoctrination. It is
immune to human realities. The passing
of a Chris Lane or Jeffrey Babbit moves it not at all. No more than the Zebra murders did.
The pattern of American intolerance is likewise unmoved by
September 11 or by two Chechens who set off a bomb near an 8-year-old. The blood and ashes of 3,000 dead is nothing
but a stain on the liberal pattern. The blood and ashes of three million would
make just as little impression. More
people die of cancer or in car accidents, the liberal can always answer. Numbers alone do not make a pattern. And if the pattern is not recognized, then it
does not exist.
We live in this world of unreal patterns and real lives where
inexplicable things happen all the time.
Overhead, I see two beams of pale light piercing the sky and
reflecting at an angle. The towers of
light remind us of an incident. Not a pattern.
After over a decade of war, no one in
authority will admit what we are fighting or why. All that ash and rubble, the twisted steel and
the falling bodies, are not part of a pattern. But when a Muslim cabbie is stabbed by a
sloppy drunk, that is a pattern.
Most of us see the real patterns, even if only hazily, like
the beams of light cutting across the sky. And we see that the unreal patterns, the
obsessions with Muslim backlashes and the martyrdom of Trayvon Martin, are
unreal things. Not true patterns, but
false patterns that reflect at an angle from the true light.
We do not speak of these true patterns. But we know them. They stir in us when the right moment appears.
They keep us alive.
Millions walk through life with this double vision, the
lenses of their minds blurring the real and the unreal, paying lip service to
the grave threat that someone will spray paint a mosque while nervously
studying the Muslim sitting in front of them on the trip out of Logan Airport
or voting for Obama but moving out to the suburbs.
Those who fail to develop that double vision, who mistake the
false patterns for the true patterns, often come to bad ends because they are
unequipped to recognize danger when they see it. They see incidents where they should see
patterns and patterns where they should see incidents. And finally one of those invisible patterns
that they can't see swallows them whole.
We deal with problems as incidents or patterns. An incident is resolved once, but a problem
requires a more enduring answer.
Patterns are power. The pattern-makers and pattern-dealers derive
theirs from being able to dictate the problem and the solution. They are determined to educate us, to explain
us to ourselves, to understand things for us and explain them to us so that we
will see the same patterns that they do. They know all too well that if we stop seeing
their patterns, their cause and their power will die.
For now it is men like
Jeffrey Babbitt or the spectators in the Boston Marathon and the
soldiers at Fort Hood who die. They die
caught in an invisible pattern that they cannot see. The pattern is no great
mystery. It can be seen by anyone with
their eyes open. It does not need to be
manufactured or spun. It is simply common sense.
Meanwhile their governments attend to false patterns, chase
moderates and promote democracy in the Middle East. In the Ivy League or any European NGO these
patterns seem very real. But the
patterns are manufactured to promote ideas about who should run things. The patterns themselves do not run things. They cannot change reality, only our
perceptions of it.
The gathered pattern, like the lives of men, tells a story. The story has many themes and characters, but
it is always mainly about two things; who should run things and what should be
done about it.
We live in a world of phony patterns, of global environmental
apocalypses made to order, of shadows and illusions, of phantom fears, panics
and doubts. But beneath the illusions of
ideas that clothe the false world is a world of real patterns and real
observations. This world is the one
where problems can be solved as long as we learn to see the pattern.
But even in the liberal world of ghosts and shadows, where
rogue air conditioners and cow flatulence are a greater threat to the planet
than the nuclear bomb, where Lashawn Marten was oppressed by the unconscious
white privilege of Jeffrey Babbitt who died for what he did not even know he
had, where every social problem can be solved by destroying the patterns of the
past and replacing them with the terrible blank slate of the future, where
Muslim terrorism is a phantom fear of bigots, these true patterns intrude.
Terrible acts of violence momentarily tear apart the world of
illusion with blood and fire and reveal the terrible truth lurking inside the
lies.
On September 11, thousands of New Yorkers standing at Union
Square looked downtown to see a plume of smoke rising over Broadway. I was one of them. Some fell to making anti-war
posters on the spot. Others enlisted in a long war. On another distant September, some New Yorkers
came to the defense of a 62-year-old man being beaten to death for the color of
his skin. Others walked on to the
farmers' market, bought their organic peaches while the liberal memes in their
heads told them to see no evil.
Our lives are sharpest and clearest when we see the pattern. In moments of revelation, the comforting
illusions are torn away and the true pattern of our world stands revealed
waiting for us to act.
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