#there's no doubt lingering religious trauma there surrounding it and he still might feel a small bit of shame at the beginning

[derelictdumbass]

Thinking about how the Seeds relationships with Dean could be taken as an act of defiance against how they were raised and a way for them to break out of that restraint and accept the trauma they went through and move forward from it.

[douglasford123]

White Anger, National Anger - Dec 3, 2017

Until Donald Trump assumed the Presidency, I had never given the “white anger” phenomenon serious thought.  As portrayed in the film Falling Down, white anger in America appeared stylized, almost comical.  It limited itself to certain individuals with outstanding personal problems, people who couldn’t relate.  I’ve had my own share of rage and frustration, but I’ve always considered myself an outlier with advantages.

So, after a very unconventional man won the highest office and we were bombarded with phrases like “opioid crisis,” “decimated rural and industrial areas,” and “white nationalism,” it gave me pause to think more seriously about these things.  I’ve known people addicted to narcotics obtained legally.  I’ve spent time in Northern Ohio, Central Kansas, South Georgia, and I’ve seen how people live there.  Fortunately, I do not need to associate with any hard right-wingers, although I’ve encountered a few.  My area of Atlanta is fairly progressive.

Racial conflict has never seemed to be the root problem in this country. The American Civil War was fought over black slavery but not really for blacks – it was a white man’s war.  As a result of that conflict, the Peculiar Institution, and Southern insurgency, were destroyed – as they should have been.  Most importantly, and this opinion may roil some folks, I believe that, in spite of lingering resentment, in spite of Jim Crow, in spite of the L.A. Riots and Ferguson, most people by 2017 have atoned and forgiven.  Granted, racial tensions remain, but American greatness has overcome so many problems which would have torn apart a lesser people.  And, rhetoric aside, once our local citizens come off that brutal racetrack around modern Atlanta known as Interstate 285 and interact in person, they are generally kind and respectful to each other, regardless of race.  At least, that is my perception.

Before racism I would select other problems to be most directly fueling our national distress – the agitation and aggression of the lower classes in the face of unprecedented wealth on the far end of the spectrum, the oddly impersonal and even dehumanizing effect of communications technology, the bloat and endless division in the seat of power of Washington.  Our nation is the victim of its own success, above all things.  9/11 and the Recession caused mass loss of life and property, concepts sacred to Americans, but those events also revealed an unaccustomed vulnerability, a reminder that, although we may be the greatest nation in history, we are still beholden to the forces of history – fanaticism, greed - human flaws.

So, if racial conflict is not the root problem, then why does it feature so prominently these days?  And why are white people even angry?  They above all have benefited from American greatness.

By analogy, I think back upon the turmoil of my own earlier life – does it provide useful guidance?  I grew up in privilege, a doctor’s son, on the southside of the city, in a quiet suburb on the edge of farmland.  My large urban private school was predominantly white in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, although my immediate friends there were not – we fretted together, white, black, Asian, over calculus and college admission.  I attended a well-known private university in Nashville on a full-tuition scholarship – at 18 years old, I could read French and play classical piano.  I had been to Europe and Asia.  None of these accomplishments seemed remarkable to me at that time, although I now perceive how extraordinary it all was, especially when compared with the early opportunities of my father or his father.

In retrospect, the vicissitudes of life and our reactions to them came to my group more as a result of personal circumstance than ethnicity – most of our parents came from humble backgrounds, mostly conservative ones.  We had grandparents in East Tennessee, South India, Seoul, but education was universally important, as it had been the key to progress for our forebears.  Problems typically developed when that path proved insufficient to address deeper human issues – I know my mother’s sudden death from cancer in my sophomore year disrupted the success narrative.  For better or for worse, I was never the same after that.  And, looking back, that is perfectly understandable, a perfectly human response to change.

Still, the idealistic narrative played on.  I am a commercial lawyer today, admittedly the result of more education, and a stabilizing result for me and my family.  However, I wandered lost for several years following the trauma of college, unable or unwilling to take root, without a good job but wary of further education, and filled with anxiety and shame.  I experienced first-hand the loss of bliss, of direction, of home, of rationality.  I even thought this discomfort was particular to me alone – of course, that is how anxiety and shame work.

As I recall my distress, I remark that no one else really caused it but myself – it was a reaction to changes, changed acquaintances, changed surroundings, when I left the quiet suburb.  Shallow anger is the most dangerous, because it attaches untempered to the closest stimulus.  I well recall the sensation of trying in vain, at 19 years of age, to fit into an impossible variety of situations at my university, a forward-thinking yet essentially conservative school.  In a world of wealth and opportunity, among future optimates, I was frustrated and without purpose.  Not that the school didn’t try to help – I count a former dean there, as well as several of the brightest people I ever met, as friends to this day.  I followed some of them to Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and I gained a more rounded view of the country.  Still, there was a time when, lost in a world of philosophy, bourbon whiskey, and paralyzing doubt, it was all I could do to get to class – when I have stress dreams today, they usually involve that period of time.

So it may be with so many white people now.  Observe the changes of the last century – there has not been time to take a breath.  We Americans mass produced the car, the airplane, industry itself, and we used them to assist in destroying far-flung enemies in World War II.  We jumped from a backwater to the world’s foremost power in decades, with the resources of a new continent behind us.  We revolutionized how information spreads using mass communication – radio, television, computer.  We vaulted past the nations of the world – we, black, Jewish, Asian, all races, but mostly white in number, the descendants of ambitious Europeans seeking opportunity and refuge away from the limitations of Europe.

Now we live together in a country approaching capacity.  The population has roughly doubled since 1960.  Atlanta, a metro area without natural boundaries, appears unable to grow any further due to vehicle volume, crushed of its own weight – and yet it keeps adding people.  On a recent trip to L.A., a town that always amazes, I was amazed on a weekend afternoon to remark the sheer number of vehicles parked by the side of the Pacific Coast Highway – miles of them, it seemed, luxury models, beaters, all parked bumper to bumper.  Even middle-aged people remember when it was not this way.

Never have we felt so connected and alienated at once.  The seemingly immediate ability to reach out to anyone in the civilized world using technology, to see everything “as it happens,” also fosters the worst in us – rudeness, shallow judgment.  Sometimes subversion of the old order not only refreshes but electrifies – observe the period of Enlightenment before the French Revolution, when the ideals of discovery and progress also led to bloody turmoil.

As a civilization, perhaps America, child of the Enlightenment, has reached critical mass.  Its white population, the largest in percentage, the “default setting,” has finally come to realize the dilemma – we as a Nation cannot progress this way, and we cannot turn back.  No one is insulated.  White anger is, then, the entirety finally, inevitably shaking, warping in the intense heat of change.

When we cannot hold onto the past, when Sears or Macy’s might be sold to a hedge fund at any moment, when a stalwart company lays off 1,000 people just before Christmas, when half the people in a town are not working, when religious houses become clubs and even scenes of slaughter, when even upper-middle-class people cannot afford a home and the taxes on it, when people witness the unabashed arrogance of D.C. and Silicon Valley toward the plebiscite, i.e., the rest of us, then some people gravitate to “Make America Great Again.”  Fear is the natural companion of anger, after all.  It is Solomon’s conundrum – wealthier than all his predecessors in Jerusalem, he perceived that all his pleasure was without comfort.

Whether white people feel responsible for the current state of affairs is not a sensible question – of course, it depends on many things.  Like any group - black, Jewish, Asian - white people in America are divided against each other, and their anger and fear is only human.  Some may have voted for Trump out of base emotion, some Trump voters are fanatics whom I try to avoid, but I am still not that cynical about the American people as a whole – people have thought about things after all.  They are angry at the “ruling class” in this country, for the very reason that the country is not supposed to have one – no amount of technological benefit or central government protection can change that.  Whether Trump is a Catiline or a Caesar, there will be a turning point.

When I visit my Colombian-born wife’s country, greatly enjoying a tamal and a simpler way of living, with my daughter speaking fluent Spanish to her abuelos on a patio under open sky, and I hopelessly white but understanding most of it, I often reflect on the United States.  Colombians still think America is at the center of the world – and it is.  They, like so many foreign nationals I know, cannot grasp what is happening to us – it is disconcerting.  Why do Americans, in possession of so much, always want and need so much more?  Colombia may be flawed in other ways, but people there tend to accept their position in life more readily, for better or for worse.

If we are fragmenting, I am glad my daughter is a Southern girl who knows Spanish – she stands as good a chance as anyone.