TIME TO CLEAR THE AIR ONCE AGAIN
Folks, here's your warning.
What follows may be boring to many. There's not much in this issue directly about Costa Mesa, but it does attempt to once again answer some smears. I've done this before with other words, but it seems it needs to be done often.
WHY?
That's been the question I have asked since I was a little kid. And, I've never been satisfied with pat answers. (Hold this thought, and I'll return to it a little further on.)
It seems that in some quarters in Costa Mesa I'm considered to be the elephant in the room, even when I'm not in the room and have never been in the room.
The reason this is the case is not because I have special influence (I don't have such influence), but because of dirty politics. It has to do with attempts to stop the improvement of Costa Mesa by those who have financial and psychological interests in keeping our city downscale.
Because of my, as they say, 'prolific writings' that don't genuflect before some of the sacred cows of our day, and which are often misunderstood either intentionally or unintentionally by assorted low I.Q. types and haters; local bigots and those with political agendas try to use fragments of these writings out of context to try to harm politicians by linking me to them.
Here's the truth about a couple of things:
---There is no connection between me and any Costa Mesa City Council members other than the fact that I actively seek a nicer Costa Mesa and go to lots of meetings and speak out for this.
---I am not drinking buddies with any Council members. We don't go out to eat together. We don't carpool to City Council meetings together. I see them and they see me at City Council meetings and sometimes at other city meetings. I try to stay at arms length as much as possible and I criticize all of them when I think they're going in the wrong direction. A couple of them-- Linda Dixon and Katrina Foley to be precise--come in for more criticism, because they almost always seem to be going in the wrong direction.
---I was not appointed to the 3R Committee by Mayor Mansoor. The whole City Council appointed me in their usual rubber stamp manner. The committees are almost always begging for volunteers--so much so, that we even have people from Newport on our Costa Mesa committees. Like all committees in Costa Mesa, the 3R Committee is an unpaid advisory committee and has no power other than to suggest things to the City Council.
I served for three years on the 3R Committee and left when, because of Committee rules, I was time-barred from continuing on the sub-committee that interviews non-profits seeking your tax money.
When I was on the 3R Committee I tried to get non-profits receiving our tax money to not discriminate based on race or ethnicity. I believe in JFK's dictum that tax money should not be used in ways that discriminate. We all pay taxes and we should all get equal benefit of our tax payments.
And, speaking of trying to get some non-profits to stop racial/ethnic discrimination, I tried to get the Daily Pilot to run a story about a 15 year old girl in Costa Mesa who had been told that she was the wrong color and couldn't use some non-profit homework services. The Daily Pilot wouldn't touch the story, even though everything was fully documented.
Why wouldn't the Pilot run the story? It was probably because the 'wrong color' in this case was white. The non-profit in question only wanted to serve Latinas. As I've reported before, the Feds cracked down on this non-profit and it was eventually forced to stop its racial and ethnic discrimination.
I believe that other non-profits may be doing the same thing as this non-profit that got caught, but they're just more clever about their discrimination. Since there is no local newspaper that will look at the facts and get people fired up about the issue, few people know about it.
Forget the Daily Pilot in this regard. Its publisher, Thomas H. Johnson, of Newport Beach, was one of the founders of the Latino Business Council and wanted the job center to remain (in Costa Mesa, but our guess is he probably wouldn't support one where he lives in Newport Beach).
Many have heard the smears about racism.
Since many readers don't have the time nor the inclination to spend the next 3 months reading about this, I'll try to address this as briefly as possible. If you want longer expositions of my writings and thoughts, I would be most pleased, honored, and humbled if you take the time to read the many columns and essays I've written over the years as well as my books. I write to be read.
As I alluded to at the outset of this column, I've been a life long asker of the question WHY?
This is to say I've been looking for answers to the big questions of existence for as long as I can remember. Even as a young kid I was always wondering about the nature of life and existence. Why are we here? Is there meaning and purpose? Is there a God? What happens when we die? And on and on. I can't ever remember just looking at a flower and saying that's a pretty flower and then walking on. I would, and still do, look and wonder why it had this or that type of leaf or why its flower has this shape or color and why it is in existence and others aren't. When I was a little kid, my mother would tell me I think too much.
This search for answers has taken me in many directions as my understanding has evolved and grown. This search doesn't begin with race, or even with life--they're way downstream from most of the things that are at the core of my thinking. It begins at the sub-atomic level of existence--at the level where matter itself is formed and in the way the universe came into being. But, look, I won't bore you here with all of the digressions that this leads to, and it leads to many. Read my columns and books if you're interested in my thoughts on this.
Let's focus back on racism. What is racism?
Here's the opening few lines from a Wikipedia entry about racism:
Racism has many definitions, the most common and widely accepted is that members of one "race" are intrinsically superior or inferior to members of other "races."
I think that's a pretty good definition.
Unfortunately, various haters and bigots try to change the definition and use it to brow beat others. When used by these crackpots, the term takes on some of the weight of "witch" as used in 1600's Salem. It's become an all purpose smear word used to try to shut others up.
I long ago concluded that the best way to handle such smears is to never answer to the word itself, but ask for a definition and then answer to the elements of the definition. In other words, if someone asks: "Are you a racist?" You should ask that person to define the term so you know you're both talking about the same thing. Then, if you choose, you can answer the question using each element.
So, if the questioner uses the Wikipedia definition given above, he or she will say: 'Racists think that members of one "race" are intrinsically superior or inferior to members of other "races."'
In my case, as should be amply clear from my writings, the definition doesn't fit at all. In fact, I would ask: "Superior at what?"
The truth is that all living things have gone through a process of adaptation so that any living thing you can think of is superior in some things and inferior in others depending on the environment and other factors.
Who's superior, a Greyhound or a Bloodhound? Well, do you mean in running fast or in being able to track odors? Who's superior, a Polar Bear or a Black Bear? Well, in what environment? The Polar Bear is superior in the ice and snow and the Black Bear is superior in the forests.
You can see why "superior" in such general statements is absurd. And the same principles apply to humans.
There is a fear in talking about race that has reached the pathological level. A reporter once asked me if I'm a racist and I asked her if she noticed that different people have different skin colors. She tried to avoid answering, but eventually said that she did notice. Well, to some people, the very fact that she noticed that would indicate she's a racist. You can see how silly this whole thing has gotten.
Jimmy the Greek was run off the air because he said that blacks have a natural advantage in certain sports. What's the problem with saying that? Nothing, really. But, to the thought police, it was racism because he indicated that he believed there were racial differences.
A doctor in France was condemned for racism by actually saving the lives of black babies. His theory is that black babies need to be delivered sooner than white babies. When he did deliver them sooner, the black infant mortality rate dropped. Meanwhile, the "non-racist" doctors kept killing black babies by taking their "non-racist" one size fits all approach to medicine and thinking that the basic model human is a white person.
Do we live in a nutty time or what, dear friends? Examples such as the two above are why I often write that we live in a new Dark Age. It is an age where ignorance reigns and where humans are constrained from asking Why? about some aspects of existence. Our age is as ignorant in this regard as was the age when some were killed for correctly saying that the earth is not the center of the solar system. We laugh now at the ignorance back then, yet we accept the present ignorance with hardly a protest.
It goes on and on, and the cries of racism often come when one tries to write about this taboo subject in a robust manner that is readable and interesting to ordinary readers who don't want to pore though technical papers on the subject.
I'm not even particularly fond of the term "race," because it's a lumpen term. When I write about life, I mostly write in terms of DNA, genes, genotypes and phenotypes because they give a more accurate picture of what we're talking about. So, a few words about this might be appropriate to give you the flavor of some of my essays.
DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid), is made up of just 4 chemicals that are usually abbreviated A, T, C, G. That's it. All life, both animal and plant that we know about is determined by those same four chemicals. At this level of existence, all life is the same. So, why all the diversity of life? The answer to this Why? is found in the shuffle.
Think of a mile high pile of playing cards and on each card is an A or a T or a C or a G. Just one letter on each card. Shuffle the cards one way and you have a snail. Shuffle them another way and you have a man or a tree or a mouse or any other living thing.
You get the picture. But, dear reader, you are probably asking, as do I: Why? and how are they shuffled? Sorry, I'm really not trying to put a hook in this so you'll read my other stuff, but if I try to answer this Why? we're going to go on for many pages. Suffice it to say that I do attempt to answer this Why? in many of my columns.
At this point, my internal editor is yelling for me to finish this present column because he didn't order a complete book treatment of this subject.
If you do read some of my essays and books, you'll come up against some terms and concepts that you may not be familiar with, so here's a few of them:
Noblesse oblige racism--This is a term I invented to describe the racism of many white people who believe in their subconscious minds that they are superior to people who aren't white. At the heart of this racism is the belief that whites are the basic model human being and that all non-white peoples are being kept in their non-white shells by evil white racists, and that the inner white people just want to get out and show that inside the darker skins they are really white. This is the type of thinking that was behind efforts to take American Indian children and dress them up in white clothes and give them white religion and put them in white schools.
My position is that all distinct peoples have a right to self-identification and self-determination and that they have a right to be as they want to be. Accordingly, I've written many essays in support of some American Indian tribes that are now trying to regain their Indianness and I've written essays in support of the native Hawaiians, the Australian Aborigines, Gypsies and others doing the same thing.
Great White Mothers and Great White Fathers--these are terms I coined for some neurotic white people who will drive right over needy white people to help non-whites. This is a subset under Noblesse oblige racism. Such people believe in their subconscious minds that whites are better than others and that whites don't need help because, as their fellow 'superior beings,' they should be able to pick themselves up, while non-whites need the help of these GWMs and GWFs. These folks often treat non-whites as though they're little children.
Blending--This is a word I use for the intentional attempt or even the 'natural' drift toward conformity in all things. In a political context I use the term to explain what I think is behind President Bush's North American Treaty and even the war in Iraq. I see his motivation as an attempt to blend all religions, nations and peoples into one just right porridge under the center of the bell curve. It seems to me that blending is, in most cases, a soft genocide, but it's still genocide. There's much more to this, and I've written many columns about aspects of blending, but this is the basic idea.
Okay, I really must end this or this is going to be 300 pages long. As always, these are my opinions and I thank you for taking the time to read them whether you agree with all of them or not.
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