From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Re: Jack's Racist Nonsense (was Re: Social Democracy)
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 92 11:27:41 GMT


In article <1992Nov7.034051.13286@wam.umd.edu>
lovegod@wam.umd.edu (Donald Andrew Agarrat) writes:

>Jess, how can you worry about the opinions of someone who hides  
>behind a false name?

If you mean Jack, as I assume you do, my guess is the name in
his sig is genuine.  Putting something cutesy in the personal name
field is a time-honored (if often rather silly) tradition, so
I wouldn't usually hold that too much against a person, as long
as they identify themselves properly somewhere.  I don't find
it so easy to overlook when it seems, as you say, cowardly.

>To me, it shows either a certain amount of cowardice or at least  
>an unwillingness to stand behind your words ... How can I  
>respect that enough to offer my comments?

I guess that's pretty much an individual call.  I think each of
us copes in whatever way works best for us.  I think a lot of
the time, people are not very aware of what's going on; after
all, we all spend some time in a dream-world.

>For most people here, race relations is typical coffee table  
>conversation ... I can usually tell who really gives a damn.

I'm sure you're not alone in thinking that.  I guess we end
up using some kind of default assumptions (by the very
nature of things, they might be very different from one
person to the next), waiting to see if something a person
says eventually gives us a clue, whether for good or for
ill.

I don't know how far I would buy into your coffee-table
conversation image, though I'm sure it's entirely accurate
for some fraction of this group.  But it seems to me there
are a lot of genuinely concerned people who find themselves
somewhat at sea; isolated not so much by intention from
really thinking about these things as by circumstance.

So many things are structured so as to *keep* people from
questioning, from finding out.  The dominant society has a
huge vested interest in ignorance and an almost limitless
set of images and tools for maintaining its illusions.  In
fact, the more a person finds out about just that one thing,
the more disturbed they're likely to become, I think with
very good reason.  We don't have to dig very deep beneath
the surface of the deceptions surrounding us to start
getting good and scared.  I expect for a lot of people here,
as elsewhere, it's something like Pandora's box: you take
one look in there and what you see is so scary you slam the
lid right down before the true scale of our inhumanity can
jump out and grab you by the neck.

Thing is, what's in that box, and keeping it in there,
that's what's killing us.  Opening it up may be scary (I
don't know about anyone else, but it frightens me half to
death), but *not* doing so is even worse.  Of course
"keeping the lid on" is the time-honored way of controlling
the masses.

Well, I dunno what to do about any of it.  Somewhere along
time line -- I should tell the story of how that happened,
someday, 30 years ago -- I decided what *I* would do, which
is start finding out what I could, taking the risks
associated with that (like being massively, disastrously
wrong a fair amount of the time), and starting to talk aloud
about what I think.

Of course, I'm still doing it.  Whether it works at all, I
really have no idea; I kind of stumble along, hoping it's
all of use to someone, somewhere.  In particular, I no
longer have the kind of strength and stamina it takes to be
a flat-out activist, going to meetings five nights a week,
running around like mad trying to galvanize people into
action.  Younger folks have got to do that or it isn't going
to get done.  I sure as hell couldn't take tear gas and
truncheons and armored cars and bleeding skulls and all of
that again.

About all I can manage is to be a kind of cheerleader and
amateur historian.  I don't know if it does any good at all,
apart from the fact that once in a while people tell me it
does.  Now and then somebody I find pretty hateful denounces
me, which signals at least a little success, I guess.

-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
Internet: anderson@macc.wisc.edu <-best, UUCP:{}!uwvax!macc.wisc.edu!anderson
Room 3130 <> 1210 West Dayton Street / Madison WI 53706 <> Phone 608/262-5888
<>  <>  <> Discrimination, Bigotry, and Hate are not Family Values <>  <>  <>
Xref: sparky soc.motss:47331 alt.politics.homosexuality:7135 co.politics:1905