Another Approach (The Nike Ad Campaign)

Recently, the shoe company (amongst their other products) Nike featured Colin Kaepernick in an ad campaign with one of its tag lines being “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”

Mr. Kaepernick is famous for protesting police brutality against people of color by kneeling during the playing of the national anthem at NFL football games. (Kneeling is a form of respect and submission, but not the form that Mr. Kaepernick’s detractors want.) He paid a price of many millions of dollars in that he lost his job as an NFL quarterback.

Several police organizations have protested this ad campaign as being a fallacious smear against the police who risk their lives daily. This is a bit much but also ignores the many, many incidents in which police officers have shot and or killed people of color with no repercussions other than occasionally an officer losing his job. The idea of a police officer being prosecuted for excessive force is almost ludicrous in this country.

Interestingly, police officers and their organizations, supposedly taught how to diffuse tense situations have instead poured fuel on the flames. There is available to them another approach.

They could have, without agreeing to anything, stated that a police officer using excessive force is unacceptable. They could go on to state that while the vast majority of officers do their jobs safely and with respect, even one bad officer is unacceptable. Consequently, the XYZ Police Association asks for more training funds and … blah, blah, blah. They could even have asked Mr. Kaepernick to sit with them and discuss options to move forward to a safer future. All of these things would defuse some of the issues involved.

Several things that come to my mind are the removal of the feeling of fear as a justification for a policeman to use deadly force. According to the police organizations, policemen face death daily, which just has to be associated with fear (and courage) which means that deadly force is always a reasonable approach for these officers … on a daily basis. This is unacceptable. I suggest that the level of force should never exceed the penalty for the infraction involved. If pulled over for a traffic violation, the worst thing to happen is a ticket and a fine. If somebody, once stopped, speeds away, there is another ticket and another fine, not an excuse to shoot at the miscreant or the miscreant’s car.

Allowing the feeling of fear to be the justification for the application of deadly force is ludicrous. We cannot verify such a fear, we can only sympathize. And even if the fear exists, we are asking officers to lower the fear level, not extinguish it. (Note The same thing goes for stand your ground laws.)

Why Are We So Afraid?

On Quora, this question was posed: Why are so many Americans “tough on crime”?

One of the answers started this way:

“Americans are terrified.

“The United States of America is a nation of the coward, by the coward, and for the coward. Americans are the most frightened people you will find anywhere in the world.

“We are scared of everything. We’re scared of terrorists. We’re scared of immigrants. We’re scared of criminals. We’re scared of GM food. We’re scared of Muslims. We’re scared of brown people. If you come from any other industrialized country, and you’ve never lived in the US, it’s hard to understand the pervasive sense of fear that Americans live in.

“Americans are frightened, and this fear makes us cruel and mean.”

I immediately thought of the campaign to criminalize being a Black male (not just “driving while Black,” but existing while Black). As Jim Crow laws lost their footing in this country, some way had to be created to control Black people, especially Black men (just had to). After emancipation, one strategy was to criminalize the state Black people found themselves in. Vagrancy laws alone caused a great many Black men to be incarcerated and because they were poor and couldn’t pay their fine, they had to work off their fine … and room and board in the county jail. Voila, de facto slavery all over again. When these laws because unacceptable to society at large, the approach became “lock them up” on a much larger scale. Crimes that Blacks might commit had much longer penalties than if whites committed them. (Remember the crack cocaine sentences that were ten times longer than if powdered cocaine were involved? Guess which “possession crime” Blacks were more likely to be caught for.)

It has become our habit, through long exposure, to motivate ourselves to do anything politically by using fear. The message is “we must change because, if we don’t, something really bad will happen.”

Consider education: the report A Nation at Risk, claimed (erroneously) that our poor education system was dooming our country to second tier status … gasp, or worse! Also in education, the fear that girls were falling behind boys in math was promoted heavily at the exact moment at which girl’s math test scores had become equal to those of boy’s. (No mention was made of boy’s English language scores being much lower than girls, that was just “boys being boys.”)

The early environmental movement went to inflated extremes to gain attention. We were told we needed to “save the planet” as if it were at risk and not us.

Our “news media” haven’t helped one bit. They are not in the business of putting things in perspective, rather they are in the business of selling their wares. And the wares that sell are often the most alarming, most lurid, and most outlandish of stories.

Fear mongering is a booming business in this country.

And we are all paying for this by having fear dominate our lives. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was based solely upon fear. The slogan “Make America Great Again” implies we were great once, but are no longer …. but we could be again, just vote for me. Was there any analysis of this opinion? If a survey of world citizens were to ask the question “Which nation is the most powerful currently?” do you not think the USA would be voted to the top? (And if you didn’t so vote, would you expect to be invaded?)

When was the last time something was done politically because it was the right thing to do, rather than via a fear mongering campaign? Obamacare? The opposition to it was loaded with fear mongering, e.g. Death Panels! The national debt will skyrocket! The “safety net” will become a hammock! If not that, what?

If we insist that we will not do anything unless we are terrified, then all we are doing is waging a terror campaign upon ourselves. We are also letting the fear mongers and those who control the message in our news media to lead us around by the nose.

Welcome to the Twenty-first Century!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Cultural Heritage: Witches

I see witches in the conversation stream … not actual witches, but discussions of said. There are cultures in existence that still “believe” in witches. (Isn’t belief wonderful! Imagine a life with no boundaries!) It is clear to me, though, that the idea of a “witch” is clearly a male invention.

My logic is simple: women are weak, weak of body and weak of mind, consequently any woman exerting power (real or imagined) must be doing it with supernatural (aka unnatural) help. And since “God is good” and wouldn’t really do anything to harm a man(!), that supernatural help must be in the form of help from evil spirits … ergo, witches.

How do you recognize a witch? No, it is not a pointed hat or green face as school children think. Look for sources of power, like beauty or a royal title or high political office or even just a “wife” who seem to dominate her poor husband.

All you have to do to understand this is think like a man … ? WTF?

(It Is About Control) Fear is the Mind Killer

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total
obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.”
(Frank Herbert, “Dune”)

In my previous blog “It Is About Control,” I promised I would address the role of fear being used to control our behavior.

The tools of the controllers are few but powerful. The most powerful is fear. For example, fear has been the primary power behind Christianity. I know, I know, the spirituality people are going to have kittens over this one. Fortunately, most of our people no longer live on the edge of life and death as we have over the vast majority of our history. Unfortunately, we have forgotten what it was like to live that way. (We have forgotten intellectually what it is like to live on the ragged edge of life and death but we haven’t forgotten emotionally.) Spirituality was not a factor in controlling people’s behavior then, and not so much now either. Spirituality meant very little when you spent most of your time worrying where your next meal would come from (or how to pay the rent, or afford the new baby, or, or. . . .) Now fear, that’s a tool.

Consider the fact that the Christian religion grants everybody immortality. Yes, everybody. The only difference for people is whether “eternity” will be spent in Heaven or in Hell. Consider this question: what do you know about Heaven? The answer is: very little. If you count up the words used to describe Heaven in their holy scriptures and related writings and preacher/prophet pronouncements and compare that number with the number of words used to describe Hell, it is no contest. Hell wins hands down. Why? Fear of Hell is a more powerful controlling lever than Lust for Heaven.

Political fear is the major controlling mechanism used to control political behavior. (All they want is your vote; they will take care of the rest.) Most politicians learn to use the lever of fear or they cease to be politicians. Consider the 9-11 incident. Even before we knew what had happened, the words “terror,” “terrorists,” and “terrorism” had been spoken thousands of times on our communication media. I was in California at the time. Was I afraid? No. Politicians use the media to amplify the message of fear. Yes, this was in New York, but it could happen to you in . . . rural California!

But, how great a threat was al-Qaeda? We are talking here about a few hundreds of people with a great deal of wealth behind them. A threat? Yes, possibly. A great threat? No, in no way. Oops, Code Orange, there is a Code Orange Terrorism Threat! Danger! Danger!

There are people steeped in fear who hoard rifles and pistols and ammunition, just in case . . . in case our government becomes tyrannical and we have to take it back by force (a Second Amendment solution, that). Really? A handful of tyranny buffs against the 5th Cavalry? No contest. Fear makes us do strange things.

Our own Pentagon considers the current economic situation a significant threat to the existence of the U.S. Is any attention paid to this? No, because that threat has no leverage and does not work in the direction that is desired . . . by the controllers.

Consider what happened when we elected our first black President. A great many Americans don’t know any Black people. Sure, they have met them and they have worked with them but they haven’t taken the time to really know them. So, black people are “others” to those folks. Psst, Barack Obama isn’t even a U.S. Citizen! Psst, he was born in Kenya! Psst, his birth certificate is a fake. (Message: He is not one of us. He is to be feared.) He was “a socialist;” he “hated white people;” he was “a radical liberal,” “a communist.” All of these outlandish claims (Barack Obama isn’t even a liberal, for Pete’s sake!) were attempts to paint our new President as something “other,” something to be feared. Psst, he and Eric Holder are trying to take away your guns and the fact they haven’t done anything to do that is evidence that we are closer and closer to when they will!

Fear is the mind killer.

Fear is the slayer of rationality.

Have you noticed that political discourse has very little use for facts at the moment?

Facts are needed for rational decision making . . . but not emotional decision making and when decisions are based on emotion, fear trumps most of the rest put together.

So, whenever you feel fearful, ask yourself: “Is that fear real or hypothetical/made up? (“We need to take back our country! From whom?) If it is made up, you have to ask yourself: “Who benefits if I am fearful?”

I will try to answer that question in my next blog.