Introduction
Greetings USED KARMA readers - and those of you who access this column through John Derrickson's PsyPlan(tm) site (www.psyplan.com)! The publicity surrounding the aftermath of the school shootings in Littleton, Colorado are getting more and more surreal. This month's column reflects upon the REAL dialogues that should be generated from this incident.
The Deception of Affluence
There is a strong tendency on the part of the media's talking head mind-controlled commentators to assume that wealth equals health. That is, the widespread assumption is that if someone comes from a wealthy home, that person comes from a "good" home. The shootings at Columbine High School in Columbine, an affluent, mostly white upper-middle class community, are a perfect example of the fallacy in this reasoning.
When Amy Grossberg killed her infant baby, the judge admonished her that she was a monster to do this because she came from a "good" (read "affluent") home. In fact Amy Grossberg did not come from a "good" home. She came from a very dysfunctional home. She was raised by parents who were so demanding and perfectionistic that Amy Grossberg felt she had to kill her child, because if her parents found out she had "made a mistake" they would not longer love and respect her. In functional homes parental love is unconditional. In dysfunctional homes, parental love is conditioned on conforming to a certain code of expectations and behavior. Clearly Amy Grossberg did not come from a good or functional home. Yet because her parents were affluent and successful, the judge assumed they were "good" parents who provided Amy with a "good" home, and judged Amy to be "bad."
The residents of Littleton were shocked that such an occurrence could happen in their community. Again, the widespread assumption is that affluent white people are "good" people, because in our dysfunctional and insane society wealth is equated with worth. Our leaders and legislators rant and rave against the poor, as if poverty itself were some sort of moral crime against nature and humanity. They assume wealthy people are good because wealthy people contribute to their campaigns and get them elected.
For example, doesn't it strike you as strange that Jerrold Nadler, supposedly the most "liberal" member of the U.S. Congress, sucked up shamelessly to Bill Clinton during the impeachment debacle and is now one of the loudest voices not only supporting the NATO action in Kosovo, but is calling for ground troops? Would it surprise you to discover that Mr. Nadler has received a large amount of drug money from the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army)? The KLA is touted in the Government-controlled US Media as "the Albanian people's army." In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. The KLA is a terrorist organization financed by dealing heroin worldwide (and supplying a great deal to the United States).
The KLA has for years been terrorizing Albanian pacifists and ordinary Albanian people who do not agree with their terroristic approach. These terrorists have been targeting people like Jerrold Nadler and his fellow New Yorker, Senator Charles Schumer, for bribes to alter US foreign policy. These bribes are euphemistically referred to as "campaign contributions," but they are bribes nonetheless. And this behavior illustrates the basic thesis that in the insane climate of US society, wealth is widely perceived to equal worth, even among people who are clearly intelligent enough to know better.
This insanity is coming from and being perpetuated by the dominant white wealthy culture. I grew up in an upper-middle class, mostly white, affluent community. Although we are Jewish, my parents were trying to pretend we were white people. My parents are classically brainwashed by the "wealth equals worth" rhetoric so popular, as well as being terrified of the effects of anti-semitism. At the age of ten I asked my father what it meant to be Jewish. He got very angry and told be that being Jewish means the knock on the door in the middle of the night and someone saying they were going to kill you because you were a Jew. I remember being very disgusted by his response and feeling sorry for him that he was so ashamed of his own heritage that he didn't even want to pass it along to his children except in the form of fear. My parents not only wanted us to pass for white people, they wanted us to think we were white people, because they so desperately wanted to be.
At the age of 23 I finally realized that, although walking around in a white skin, as a Jew I am not a white person. White people were persecuting Jews for hundreds (indeed, thousands!) of years before they had even heard of blacks or Asians or Native Americans or Hawaiians or any of the other folks white people have exploited, robbed of their ancestral homelands and destroyed culturally. This realization was a revelation for me, and a grand relief. It always struck me as odd that the white people I grew up around actually believe they have a right to exploit the poor and destroy the planet. They believe that their way of living is the only "civilized" way, and that their culture is more worthy than other cultures.
Having grown up observing affluent white culture so closely without really feeling that I was a part of it, I have some insights into the basic dysfunctionality of this culture. First of all, the vast majority of wealthy white people I have observed are sexually and emotionally repressed and deeply racist. Even white people who don't believe themselves to be racist are racist.
When I was in college I was friends with a young man of German extraction. He had no idea I was Jewish. One day we were having lunch and I made an offhand comment about my Jewish grandmother. ("As my Jewish grandmother would say...") My friend dropped his fork and said "Your whaaat?" And I said "My Jewish grandmother. I have two of them." This man then went on to tell me that his family had raised him to believe that Jews were evil incarnate, and that he should bear great hatred for them. I smiled and told him that if he didn't want to be my friend anymore I would understand. I frankly thought the whole thing was rather silly.
This man was not a stupid human being. Quite to the contrary, he was a student at one of the finest academic institutions in the world, Swarthmore College. Ironically, Swarthmore was founded by the Quakers, a religious group that values respect, tolerance and acceptance of all people. The Quakers were active in the women's rights movement of the 1860s. They were very involved in the underground railroad during the Civil War. They have been active in human rights and peace causes of every kind imaginable. Yet here was this German-American at this Quaker-founded school struggling to reconcile how he should view this woman he considered a friend and for whom he had enormous respect and affection now that he knew her ethnic heritage was one he had been taught since childhood to hate and despise.
It took this highly intelligent and sensitive young man two days of tortured contemplation to conclude that his parents teachings were wrong, and that Jews were not to be blindly hated. While he clearly reached the right conclusion (which I knew he would, which was why I smiled at him when I told him I understood if he no longer wanted to be my friend), it clearly cost him a great deal emotionally. He began to question everything his parents had taught him. While this kind of family critique is painful and difficult, it is ultimately necessary to a functional existence. People must evaluate each other as individuals and not on the basis of racial, cultural and ethnic stereotypes.
One of the things the Littleton massacre is telling our society is that the enormous conformity pressure of affluent white society is not only dangerous, it is literally killing our children. Unfortunately this message, though clearly sent, has not been uniformly received. While some high schools have gotten the message and educators and students are focusing on increased tolerance of those whose tastes differ from the masses, many other schools have seen a backlash against Goth kids and people wearing black trench coats.
One good thing about the Littleton massacre is that there is finally a public dialogue on media violence and violent video games. Vice President Al Gore appeared on television a few weeks after the Littleton massacre talking about how shocked he was that children are using video games that are similar to what the military uses to teach soldiers to kill. He said use of these games by the military is acceptable because "that's their job," but use by children is horrifying. Being a product of dysfunctional, affluent white culture, the Vice President seems to be wholly clueless that killing is not right for the military either. In fact, by giving children toy weapons and video games where they are acting out killing people from the shooter's perspective we are telling children that killing is acceptable behavior, that killing is behavior that should be emotionless and commonplace to them.
We live in a society that condemns murder while committing it daily in the form of capital punishment (which meets the legal definition of murder in every state in the union), to dropping bombs on unarmed civilians in Yugoslavia to providing half - HALF! -- of the world's arms. Murderous consciousness leads to murderous acts. We need to stop giving our children access to weapons (fake and real) and stop giving them games which act out murder and killing. We need to pressure our legislators to sign the global ban on land mines, sign the global ban on capital punishment (while changing applicable state and federal laws to abolish it here at home), convert our weapons manufacturing facilities to peacetime uses and maintain a peaceful consciousness.
The only way to stop youth violence is to stop adult violence. How many more Littleton-like schoolhouse shootings will we have to endure before we wake up to the profoundly dysfunctional nature of the dominant white affluent culture?
That the messages being received is the opposite of the messages that were sent may perhaps be attributed to three outer planets in fixed signs (Saturn in Taurus, Uranus and Neptune in Aquarius). Energy that should be moving is getting stuck. In addition, four planets are retrograde (Mars, Pluto, Neptune and Uranus), interfering with the external expression of the areas of life ruled by these planets.
Copyright 1999 Marcy J. Gordon. All rights reserved. The author wants you to know you are free to copy and distribute this article for noncommercial purposes, provided you reproduce it in its entirety and credit the author. For quotation permission, please contact the author at mgordon@pipeline.com.
This article represents the author's personal views and in no way shape or form reflects upon the author's employer, although the author's employer is very cool. See http://www.ericmarder.com.
Psychicbabble is a service mark of Marcy J. Gordon Copyright © 1999 Marcy J. Gordon Webmaster - John G. Derrickson PsyPlan is a trademark of Psychic Planner, Inc.
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