EFFECTS ALWAYS FOLLOW CAUSES!

EFFECTS ALWAYS FOLLOW CAUSES

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 11, 2015

With every effect, there is a cause.  

People don’t behave as they do out of osmosis.  If Stephen Jay Gould and E. O. Wilson are correct, and I think they are, their theory of “sociobiology” has precedence.  

The idea of this thesis or theory is that generations carry more than their genetic DNA forward into future generations.

Someone said the other day that they couldn’t understand why Florida’s Governor Scott proposed a special award for African Americans during February, Florida’s history month for African Americans.

This person, highly intelligent, and clearly competent, said in exasperation, “Why not a special award or month for Caucasians?”

There is no point in arguing with her because she clearly sees the matter in one-directional and one-dimensional terms.  

Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his friend, Henry David Thoreau both said on several occasions something to the effect, don’t attempt to walk in another man’s shoes because you clearly cannot.

Given my natural angry disposition, I cannot imagine what I would be like if I had been born an African American.  

However, I was born into a poor white family, never forgetting that fact, working all my life with never a dime from anyone, never a soft landing anywhere should I fail, and I have failed several times, never an allegiance of people of influence to pick me up and carry me out of my difficulty or misery, indeed, never anyone but myself to march to my own drummer and take the consequences of that marching.

So, I hope that were I to have been born black, Hispanic, or some other race, given my inclinations, that I would have behaved as I have. 

Like me, I suspect that many born at some disadvantage, seeing how their parents were treated by those in authority, power, wealth, status or influence, people who gave them little or no mind and treated them as if of an inferior class, culture, breeding and circumstance, would carry that memory and disposition into adulthood and be more than a little sensitive if not angry to the point of a vengeance.  If this seems extreme, may I suggest it is a matter of temperament and attention?

One time a young executive, who had purchased a new red $60,000 automobile of some superior class, I confess to not knowing one automobile from another, said, “I thought I’d have the only red beauty of this make on the road, and in the last week I’ve seen six, count them, six bloody red new machines just like mine!”

I mention this because we are attentive to what interests or provokes us.  The attention is the same, as it is all inclusive, only how we deal with the emotions that it generates differ.

African Americans have been disadvantaged for hundreds of years, and when they are suddenly treated as human beings by the majority but not everyone, are they expected to genuflect with obedience and appreciation and know their place?

The gentrified class in Georgetown, Virginia and now New York City, the class with money, is driving blacks and Hispanics that have been in those neighborhoods for generations, out of their homes, out of the known as if they were so much riffraff.  

It has happened in Ferguson, Missouri and other places, creating a human combustible situation, waiting only for some one to pull the trigger.

Police, society’s punching bag, is expected to step into this caldron, and make everything work while the rest of society in their nice homes sitting on their large bank accounts criticize from the safety of the bleachers.  

The irony is that police and minorities are brothers given to a similar fate.

   

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This is all meant as preamble to a bigger drama, a more compelling problem on an international scene.  I am speaking of the twenty people including three terrorists killed in Paris earlier this week. 

Sociobiology is at work here as well.  

The effect has a cause, and the cause has been orchestrated by Western powers over at least the last two hundred years in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley, the Cradle of Western Civilizations.

Before WWI, as well as after, the West was manipulating the Middle East to its advantage.  That manipulation continued after WWII, putting puppet regimes on the thrones of Egypt and Syria and Iran to be manipulated at the pleasure of Western puppet masters.

While the West prospered, and became rich and enlightened from political and technological advantage, the peoples of these regions did not.  I saw this first hand in Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt and North Africa in the late 1950s. 

We always celebrate Greece for giving us democracy, drama, philosophy and architecture, but the Middle East gave us the alphabet, algebra, engineering, science, literature, religion, ethics, and governance.  Without the Middle East, the earth would be a barren intellectual planet.

After two world wars, the West became richer and the Middle East poorer.  With the Age of Information awareness of this disadvantage became punishingly and painfully visible to the people.    

Beware of the man who has nothing and therefore nothing to lose!

Again referring to that competent, intelligent lady, she could not see why African Americans deserved a special month or special recognition.  She like the WEST has failed to understand jihad or the terrorist movement’s rationale.  They are not all crazies.  

We conveniently forget there were terrorists against the British Crown before the American Revolutionary War, or that terrorist cells existed against the British pre-Israel's birth as a nation.  

When I was that boy, that very insecure, terrified freshman student at the University of Iowa, I was also a very devout Irish Roman Catholic, sensitive to any slight or offense against my faith.  

Early in that college first semester, I walked into a professor's lecture in Western Civilization, a required course whatever your major, and heard a sarcastic diatribe against Roman Catholicism.  I immediately dropped the course, and had to take it later before I graduated.

Looking back, no longer a practicing Catholic, reading David Brooks’ column about the sarcastic text and cartoons of the Paris Charlie Hebdo, I can understand better that young man that I was those many years ago.  Moreover, I can comprehend if not understand why these young terrorists would do what they did by killing innocent people who worked at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper.  

Brooks’ salient comment rings with me now remembering that much younger: 

Most grownups don’t engage in deliberately offensive humor.

The problem is we don’t live in a grownup age.

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