On the internets, it rages. Even on blogs generally noted for a higher percentage of reading and thinking participants, anti-Otherism causes dialogue to degrade into schoolyard insults, non-sequiturs to posts expressing unpopular view.
And the gap between its mainstream and what the US has instead of a left is shrinking. Blind, mindless rage and hatred have spread across the cyberworld like crab lice at a Daytona Beach party hotel during Spring Break.
And if it would stay there, if it could be confined to the typing of invectives and slurs and “flames,” lives could be saved.
But sadly, that is not the case. In Atlanta, a company that donated buses to a recent human rights march finds half his fleet torched. The police know about it a day or so before he does. They don’t bother telling him.
Latin American politicians receive death threats. In Houston, a 16 year old boy clings to life after an attack so brutal that the networks dare not even detail it, out of consideration for the more sensitive viewers. For once, this is probably just as well, the copy-cat bug being what it is.
On the streets, the hatred is palpable. Others who are obliged to venture out of our ghettos are met with glares more menacing as those we endured in the wake of the 911 events. One makes every effort not to venture out of one’s ghetto. No one wants to be next. Most hate crimes are not even reported. It is too dangerous, say the victims, I have family, whose side are the police on? Yeah, like I am going to go give them names and have people who know where my family is even angrier at me.
It’s a tough call. Whether to venture one’s decidedly mortal head out into the range of missiles in the hands of the gangplankers and anti-Otherists who never imagined they had so much in common with the skinheads they had previously decried, whether to continue to post to blogs where it no longer matters what one says, only that it is the Other, the Biblical stranger among them, who dares to say it.
If one could only be sure of keeping them there at their computers calling one names usually reserved for precoccious warring eight year olds, and away from patio umbrellas…
There are, however, no guarantees of that, and the possibility that absorbing cyber-hatred could prevent its real life incarnation must be balanced against the undeniable fact that one’s cyber-presence inflames normally peaceful folk caught up in the frenzy, and grim visions of where that rage might go once they push the power button come unheeded to one’s mind and stay there.
So shoulders sagging with the weight of all this, the reality of what it means to be that Enemy that those crusaders, those torturers and melters of flesh suddenly catapulted into near-divine status even by what the US has instead of an anti-war contingent, the Enemy from which they are told they are being protected from, sinks in. They want you dead. There is no polite way to say it, no euphemistic cloud of frame in which to cloak it. They want you dead, and they want your family dead too, and as the rage intensifies, as the flames of hatred rise ever higher, they want it enough to risk their own lives, their own freedom, to make it happen.
They love to talk of the heat of war, its hell, and what their heroes imposing America’s will, spreading Democracy there in the Ghraib, are “forced to do.” Those poor boys are not, they argue, capable of making their own decisions. Helpless moral cripples, they are mere automatons, puppets caught in the strings of the villains in Washington. They are only doing it to receive a financial benefit, they are not bad boys.
Madness is seldom associated with consistency or logic. Those villains’ strings apparently have a longer reach than anyone suspected, as their words are eagerly parroted even by those who insist that they are refuting them. People defending their homes and families from a brutal horde of invaders are called insurgents from the Pentagon and the self-styled “progressives” alike.
Bush and his political rivals speak with one voice about the danger of “allowing” Iran to have the same weapons everyone agrees Israel must have, the US must have.
The moist and impenetrable ideological agar of Exceptionalism is the perfect medium for hate, for the surrendering of values, reason, thought. In these abandoned minds, we, the Others, are transmorgified into savage beasts, subhumans, Unpeople.
And that precious and incredibly shrinking few who remain Those Opposed?
They bravely cast their lot with us, with US or with the terrorists. they too become Others. Unpeople by choice, Enemy by choice, by blessed conscience, Enemy by reason of Reason. Despised and reviled by their own countrymen, their own tribes, forsaking the yellow ribbon for the yellow star, forcing us who do not have a choice to examine our ownselves: Would we have such courage?
On the eve of the Armageddon successfully sold even to all but the most rejectionist customers, the hate, the rage, morphs itself into an unspeakable miasma, a formless, mindless bestial thing.
Our words, our thoughts, our pleadings cannot reach they who want us gone. Get out. They want us dead. Watch out. And time is running out. As even they, at least some of them, understood at one time, the World Can’t Wait.
Today, their understanding is no longer necessary.
The World Won’t Wait.
