Beans and Rice

The great leap backward is being fully implemented in North Carolina, with pools and schools, as always, the first items of concern for the privileged white people of the South. These were the most urgent issues after desegregation, for visceral reasons.

Pools were never a problem. You close the public ones and send your kids to private ones. Similarly the push for privatization everywhere now is not about efficiency but exclusion. Schools weren't as easy to get in hand but the necessary forces are now in place.

It's turn-back-the-clock time for the schools and it will simply have to play out. Nothing can be done to stop it, and I have other things on my mind following the violence in France. The terror is something we have to begin to take seriously and to really comprehend.

We should be preventive and not only reactive and responsive in relation to terrorism, and understand it deeply and at the molecular and atomic levels, initially with some soul searching and the owning of our own inner terrorist, whatever that may entail.

The problem is that it feels good to be part of a group with a mission, and to believe that you are unequivocally right and that you are justified by God and will be redeemed and sit at the right hand and all that shit. It has to be an incredibly powerful experience.

To get people to blow themselves up, I mean. And to overcome the misgivings that must be there because they are, in fact, wrong in their understanding of their own religious precepts, as we are rightly reassured by respected and informed authorities.

Are we really so far removed from this ourselves, I wonder. The Klan was a terrorist organization. I think that is beyond arguing, which means that a third of the US was ruled by a group in no way functionally different from the Taliban, as late as the 1960's.

And of course before that the slave states were in even worse shape, though the terror was institutionalized and so there was no need for the underground, guerrilla aspect of the thing. So to this day there are memorials all over the South honoring terrorists.

What a thought, but it's indisputably true that defending the South meant defending slavery and therefore the terrorism which sustained slavery and segregation. Man, that's sobering, because it's so close to home and recent and so much a part of our history.

It does mean that all those Confederate memorials should be destroyed and that the South should finally own its shit, if we are to have a consistent and credible stance in opposition to terror. We could use the Stone Mountain memorial for bombing practice.

If we don't how can we really condemn the people who practice terrorism. They have a thing for schools, too, I remember now, and are all about remaking education in their own countries so that it's in line with their religion and the will of God, as they see it.

Just like the guys in charge in North Carolina. Damn, it's so discouraging to think that, but my friends who encouraged me to write told me this would happen, that writing things down would force you to think things through and sometimes take you to unforeseen places.

It's time--I decree it--to decompress from this unpleasantness with a beer and some savory Southern food, spicy beans and rice. May we all eat well tonight, it's my wish for you, and survive this insanity our country is going through, with the help of God.