Being Conscious of Divisiveness

Being concerned with what seemed like an incitement to war (culturally and physically, nationally and internationally), I have written here more than a few times about the tone of the Republican leadership at their convention and the tone being engendered at the McCain/Palin rallies. Such incitement of raw emotions has various reactions, physical and psychological. I feared something was forthcoming.

So, when after a very long night of preparation for a meeting I awoke to the story of the McCain/Palin volunteer who was supposedly robbed and sexually and physically assaulted by a 6' 4" black man who carved a backwards "B" into her jaw with a pocketknife, I was not surprised. I called my brother in Houston exclaiming foul play. Absolutely nothing rang true about this young woman's story.

Firstly, by all polls Obama is winning. The winner's team or supporters are not in a defensive state. Why would a supporter then go out and commit such violence? Immediately, I told my brother that it had to be a crazed McCain/Palin rally supporter. It turned out to be a crazed McCain/Palin volunteer.

Secondly, it sounded like another unstable white woman claiming that a black man had either deflowered her or caused harm to her loved ones. This psychosis is rooted in century-old prejudices and fears engendered by the oppressor that are perpetuated again and again generation after generation and are acted out by both the lineages of the oppressed and the oppressor. This we must change and only we can do it.

Remember the young white mother, Susan Smith, who strapped her young kids into car seats, drowning them by releasing the brakes and allowing the car to go into the river? After killing them, she later claimed that a black man had hijacked her car and took her kids. For days, this lie was believed. I withheld judgment, praying for the safe return of the kids. But this McCain/Palin supporter seemed unbelievable immediately.

As I watched this McCain/Palin supporter, my heart sincerely went out to her. It is obvious that she is not stable. But as I thought about it further, her actions correlated with the hate that I sensed at the Republican Convention, the McCain/Palin rallies, and the robocalls, especially those of Rudy Guiliani that claim that Barack Obama would release prisoners into your neighborhoods, perhaps not the likes of mine. We know, of course, that these prisoners are of the darker hue.

Here is the text of Guiliani's robocall:

Hi, this is Rudy Giuliani, and I'm calling for John McCain and the Republican National Committee because you need to know that Barack Obama opposes mandatory prison sentences for sex offenders, drug dealers, and murderers.

It's true, I read Obama's words myself. And recently, Congressional liberals introduced a bill to eliminate mandatory prison sentences for violent criminals -- trying to give liberal judges the power to decide whether criminals are sent to jail or set free. With priorities like these, we just can't trust the inexperience and judgment of Barack Obama and his liberal allies.

Do you sense that Guiliani is aligning Senator Barack Obama with "sex offenders, drug dealers, and murderers?" This is shameful fear mongering of the most despicable kind.

In recent posts, I have written about being incited to war, being deceived, being un-Amerian, and being patriotic. I have written about the anger incited by leaders and the divide that seemed to incite cultural outrage. It is the consistent call of otherness and anti-Americanism juxtaposed with wholesome familiarity that engendered such outrageous cries as "kill him" and "terrorist."

The cries at the McCain/Palin rallies seem akin to the same psychotic emotions that went into the young McCain/Palin volunteer who claimed that a big black man had assaulted her, hoping obviously to tie such hatred to the Obama campaign and to the U.S Senator himself. What this young lady did can be summed up to fear-driven psychosis and irrationality, perhaps the same kind that is often heard in the cries at many McCain/Palin rallies. The subtext is clear. Barack Obama is not one of us.