Confederate Spartans
So this, I think, is the actual question. “What does helping you get me?”
You know, that Christian teaching of helping others only if it somehow benefits you? You know that passage in Ezekiel… or was it Psalms… I get a little lost sometimes.
Republicans love the movie 300. It’s not super accurate or anything, but it is definitely a very entertaining movie. And the events that inspired it are real. Conservative white men love the Spartans. Including the Spartan practice of reeeeally late-term abortions (that whole inspecting a child for its “flaws and fitness” and throwing it off a cliff if it was found wanting – also allowing their children to be killed in training if they couldn’t hack it… those conservative ideals). They love Leonidas. They love that last stand of great warriors, holding off the hordes of brown… er, Persian invaders.
If your spidey senses are tingling, they should be. Spartans had to be good warriors because they maintained a subjugated class of people, slaves. And they treated them terribly. So there were uprisings all the time. Which meant that the Spartans were constantly fighting uprisings.
One could argue that if Spartans hadn’t been such assholes, they might not have been ready to repel the attack from the Persians.
Of course, if the Spartans hadn’t been such assholes, they might have realized that the Persians actually had a better economic and political system that didn’t require religious conversion or enslavement of their people. The Spartans would very likely have come out ahead with a little conversation with the Persians.
The Confederate Army during the Civil War was also a very effective fighting force, even despite working with less manpower and fewer resources. Sound familiar? Any idea why they might have needed to keep up with their soldiering skills? Yep, the constant risk of slave revolt by the people that they oppressed and enslaved. If they hadn’t been such assholes, they might have realized that the Union had the right of it, with a system that would have benefited not only black people, but poor and middle class white people who couldn’t get work outside of plantation support staff because wealthy planters had cornered every market.
What about the Nazis? Someone always brings up the Nazis. I never get to bring up the Nazis. Let’s talk about the Nazis! The Nazis were also really good soldiers…
Picking up on a pattern? What’s interesting is that all of these great warrior cultures ended. Violently. Which brings us to…
“You ain’t getting reparations out of me! Try to come to my house to get it and I’ll kill ya! I got guns all over the place! I ain’t paying for your crack!”
I hear the artificially amplified southern accent in the same way that I hear artificially enhanced valley girl speak or black street speak. You’re trying to sound poor so that you can sound like you’re part of that gang. But you can afford to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on guns to thwart a threat that will never come to your home.
Which is to say, you have a lot of money to spend on a hobby. A fine hobby, but still a hobby. If you can afford to spend thousands of dollars on a hobby (guns, sports, cars, crafting, or whathaveyou), you ain’t poor. You’re fine. Everything else you’ve built on that notion is so riddled with fissures that I’m just going to leave that here and move on. Go watch you some Trae Crowder and get back to me.
We know that you’d kill us if we came to your house. And you’d probably get away with it. Watch the news. That’s the rule. Does that make you feel good? And if you came to my house and I killed you, I’d probably go to jail or die mysteriously. Still feel good?
Yours is also a culture in fear. In fear that black people will rise up and fight. But you have the support of law enforcement and I… kinda do sometimes it depends… Which is why you can walk down the street confidently and protest with assault rifles and military gear while a child that looks like me can be killed for running around with a BB gun.
Unless you like convincing yourself that you need an armory in your cellar, help fix the system.
Why War is Lucrative – The Fraction
We all know that economic growth and technological innovation happen during war time. But do you know why? I have a theory.
The economy booms during wars. It’s been booming these last 20 years because we’ve been at war longer than some voters have been alive. The reason the economy booms during war… no, the reason the economy doesn’t boom during peacetime is that there is no incentive to listen to anyone outside of the in-group. The in-group, the gang in power (white heterosexual men born into positions of privilege, even when they don’t realize it or flat out refuse to acknowledge it), are the only people in the country permitted to contribute thought labor during peacetime.
That is not a significant proportion of the population. Think about that: There are 330 million people in this country (watch this and try to sleep tonight) and only a small fraction of them are allowed to direct, innovate, challenge… and this is assumed of them since birth, like a breed of golden children. During wartime, we are more desperate for ideas, for innovation, and thus are willing to accept some input from poorer white men and maybe occasionally white women or black people.
We routinely use a fraction of our nation’s intellectual potential. Which is bonkers to me. Power is often inherited, as is disadvantage. That means that if a privileged kid is an idiot or an asshole, he (almost certainly “he”) has a much higher chance of being in a position to damage the country than someone’s brilliant and decent kid who was born out of privilege has to help the country. If that’s the way you want the country to work, then congratulations. You’ve won.
Inheriting opportunity assumes that your kid is capable of the same things that you are. You build bridges over all of the pits and show them where all the coins are hidden, and declare them to be champions at Super Mario. Is that how you learned? Is that good for their problem-solving skills? Their ability to work through failure? Their creativity? News from the future: Chad will be an idiot with an artificially-inflated sense of his own worth, will find himself with a title that matches his CV but not his actual capability, and will break something that will endanger actual clever, hard-working people.
We need to use the full intellectual potential of the nation. And we are not. Remember the Netflix/Hulu/HBO example from a bit ago? Remember whose voices predominate at important functions? This is a crippling waste of potential that directly affects what you get.
Renaissances happen when the majority of a population can engage, innovate, create, and influence the path of their society. Dark ages happen when just a few can. We’re kind of in the middle. It is a Renaissance for white men of nearly every economic level except the most abject poor. They can live pretty comfortably and expect to be heard no matter what they say. It is a dark age for black people, with only a few of us managing to make it past the innumerable obstacles in the way.
What You Get
What do you get if black people get reparations. Let’s call it “getting their debt paid” or “equity” or “equality.”
You cannot be happy with the way the country works. You may direct that angst and anger at one group or another, but we are all to blame in some part, though some of us more than others. But alright, let’s answer that.
What you get with equality (and it is absurd that I have to explain this) is better goods and services, better prices, more advancement, better schools and hospitals for everyone, not just for the people who can afford to avoid the shitty infrastructures. We get policies that are genuinely sensible. People who only have a shot at success through crime have paths to options that are healthy for them and society.
It has been expressed to me that we should be concerned that we would owe you. Would the bank owe you if you paid back your loan? Would you owe the guy who robbed you if the court ordered him to give you back your tv? No. You wouldn’t even be obligated to say thank you. We do not owe you. You owe us. That is where this tension comes from. Pay your debt and the tension goes away.
And you can stop being terrified of a slave… I mean urban… uprising.
-CG