ONCE MORE, WAKING A GIANT
James
R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
©
July 3, 2020
Klaus
writes,
Jim,
Did you get the article from the
WSJ? Racism is still an issue as well anti-Semitism. I read Eric Hoffer a long
time ago and still have his book.
I do think all the confederate
monuments should be taken down as well as the bases named after confederates
should be changed. Those people were traitors, and they were lucky at the end
they were not hanged.
The statues and the bases were
erected and named during the Jim Crow era. When the mayor of Washington DC
painted black lives matter in front of White House Trump did not complain, but
when it was going to be painted on street where Trump tower is located, he
complained. All police are not evil either, but when they do something bad like
kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for over 8 minutes even though he had his hands
handcuffed behind his back they should be punished.
As I have said before when I first
came from Germany at the age of nine, I played with black kids. At one point a
bunch of white kids our age started throwing rocks at us, and shouting I assume
racial words at us even though my understanding of English was not that great
at the time. I was also a teacher when they first integrated the schools. The
first year we had about a hundred white kids at Young Junior High and the rest
were black. Trump also tweeted that video where the man was shouting white
power. Also, I think that the people who were doing the looting used the
demonstrations as a back drop.
Klaus
Jim Responds:
Yes, I read this, piece and, sadly,
I know it is only too true.
I also agree criminals were at the
ready to exploit the situation.
Your view is legitimate. Mine
may differ a bit with yours, but it is respectfully submitted, not to refute
yours, but to explain mine.
During the 1970s, when I was a
police consultant, I witnessed this bias with some police organizations in
terms of failure to promote deserving African American and Jewish police
officers. While traveling over a thousand hours with police officer
in patrol, I never witnessed anything approaching what happened to George
Floyd.
That said, I did, however, write my
Master's thesis on my nine months while embedded in the Fairfax County Police Department, an affluent county just outside
Washington, DC. What brought me to be so situated was a white police
officers emptied his revolver on a 27 year old black man in a 7-11 Store in
Herndon, killing him, after the man took the police officer’s nightstick, and
began to beat the police officer on his head and shoulders. A riot followed (re: A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of
a Riot, University of South Florida, 1976).
Unlike you, I grew up in a community
of 33,000 in Iowa without a single African American in my high school class,
although when I was a junior, there was one on my high school football team.
Less than one-tenth of one percent
African Americans lived in Clinton, Iowa in the 1950s, or less than 300. I never saw them at the Clinton swimming
pool, the stores downtown, at the baseball ballpark, or in the neighborhood.
It was not until I was at the University
of Iowa that I had classes and made friends with them. Throughout my life, I have always had African
American friends, and have a granddaughter whose late mother was African
American. Her father, my son, has a
tennis club in Jupiter, Florida. The
great African American tennis professional, Venus William, a friend of my son’s,
while visiting him, met my six-year old granddaughter, who appears to be white,
but who declared to Venus proudly, “I am an African American like you are.”
I had Jewish classmates in high
school and at university, and during Christmas vacations, I would hang out at
the Clinton County Library every
day, studying. My mother once asked me, “Jimmy, do you see any of your friends at the library?” I
answered, “Only my Jewish friends.” My
mother was quite enamored of the Jewish ethnicity, I think, because Jewish parents
in her experience motivated their children to study. She once said,
“If I were not an Irish Catholic, I would prefer being Jewish.”
ONCE AGAIN, WAKING THE GIANT
Comparing the history of the United
States to what you remember from Europe, and especially Germany may not be a
reliable gauge.
It is not in most history books, but
the Thirteen Colonies that fought the Revolutionary
War of Independence from Great Britain, were not all interested in being
part of the United States of America.
Tiny Rhode Island held out before
finally abandoning its independence as a “separate country” within the confines
of the United States.
Southern states, of the 13 colonies,
also demonstrated similar reluctance (see “The Quartet:
Orchestrating the Second American Revolution: 1788 – 1789” by John J.
Ellis, 2015, profiling George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and
John Jay, and their respective roles in The Federalist
Papers and the American
Constitution).
Another source, which demonstrates
the ambivalence of the 13 colonies, was the War of 1812, in
which Great Britain attempted to step into the American chaos of the time and
regain control of its original colonies (See “Union1812: The
Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence” by A. J. Langguth,
2006, and “Andrew
Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans: The Battle that shaped America’s
Destiny” by Brian Kilmeade, 2017).
We have always been a violent
society according to sociologist David Riesman informs us in “The Lonely
Crowd,” (1950). See Chapter One: The American
Character & Society.
The irony is that American society,
while seemingly to be individualistic, at one level, and has always been a
contentiously conforming society at another, with resistance to that conformity
always percolating just below the surface.
Force harmony, which is compliance,
is not the glue that holds a people to a common purpose but managed conflict,
which sponsors cooperation. This is a major theme in itself and can
only be mentioned here.
My point is that Southerners did not
see themselves as traitors, but as patriots defending States’ Rights in which
slavery became the burning issue supplanting this original complaint. Ken
Burns did a television series on the American
Civil War with Southern historian Shelby Foote eloquently presenting the
States’ Rights justification for the rebellion of the South.
Closer to our own time, Texas and
California have threatened to succeed from these United States.
That said, slavery cannot now, then or
ever be justified.
In this era of the pandemic, we
might just be awakening the sleeping giant in the American electorate. Andrew
Jackson did it in his presidency, which changed the presidency forever (See “America in the Age
of Jackson” by David S. Reynolds, 2008) and Japan did it once again on
December 7, 1941 bombing the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbor in the
Hawaiian Islands.
Jim
PS I am using Eric Hoffer quotations
from his books to illustrate The Fisher Paradigm©™ in a new way vis-à-vis the
Pandemic. Stay tuned.
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