Mrs. Clinton said yesterday that she could win. That "Hard working people. White people." would vote for her in the fall. Gee, thanks senator, for being a uniter, not a divider. I was appalled, but should not be, at this blatant use of race made justifiable with its endgame politics used as the justification. Just how low will she go? Bring out the bathyspheres.
Again, an oblique start to a separate question. When I was a student at Cal from 84-88, I lived in Bump City. Oakland, CA for the less streetwise. Oakland is as close as I can get to the ills of urban places. East LA gets the press, but Oakland lives it every day, decade after decade. No wonder one of the foils in Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full" is from the Bay Area, a book that very humorously addresses the race mess we live in. Oakland can be pretty rough and in the day, the days of the crack cocaine epidemic, it was a place where you watched your back. Cocaine, the club drug of the glitterati, had come home to the streets as crack, and it did a crackerjack job on the black population of Oakland. Al Capone would blush I'm sure.
A classmate living near Lake Merritt heard a particularly nasty argument being consummated in the apartment next to hers, followed by gunshots and holes appearing in her walls. A quick trip into her large cast iron bathtub saved her hide. A few weeks after I left, an incensed relative of a woman hit by a bus got on that bus and opened fire. July Fourth and New Year's Eve were peppered with the local Chinese and Mexican fireworks, but also with Mac-10's firing blindly into the night, their leaden rain falling where it may.
And the color was black. No bones about it, crack tore the black community into pieces, pieces that now are suffering from crystal meth and yet more crack, not to mention Oxycontin and other legal stuff gone to the street. Go visit a big city and see for yourself. Don't take my word for it.
So I, like many of the day, understand the inception of the drug wars. Rudy Guliani would know best. But then so would Harold Washington. The idea that fear of public spaces is OK would return us to the streets of Dickens's London, the English being at the lower levels as mean as we are. Society can't function when fear rules. Note that our president uses both sides of the fear coin. Heads, you fear terrorists, tails, I keep you safe but stoke your fears. Zero Sum.
Fast forward to 2008 and you have more people in jail here than most places in the world, right up there with China. This jail-fervor was the step-child of fear. And in the ensuing dragnet, drooling stoners who should be shuffling to the mini-mart for another beer to whet the cotton-mouth are instead behind bars. Yes, so are some folks who could outshine the characters of "No Country For Old Men." In the last days of May, I think about this, for this is a building flood that no one wants to think will happen: Someday, the prison doors will swing open. When they do, out will come drug lords and gang-bangers made even more hard by the pen, not to mention the life skills the stoners will have acquired just to survive. This flood will be large, mean, and black. No mincing of words here. Stats tell the story.
So, back to Senator Clinton. How on earth could she use her words in such a manner, a manner meant to stoke more fear and more race? There is only one reason you can logically accept; personal ambition at all costs. Everyone under the bus until there is only the bus driver left, and no one else. A bus empty of humans but full of hate and fear and ambition.
I am for Senator Obama as he has not gone down the path to finding gasoline for all fires, building tinder fires of fear and race. He has held the line quite well despite the controversies that have hit him. When the flood comes, I want this man to address its problems and find a path that is not driven with fear and hatred and race. Those three horsemen will surely try to unnerve and pull under any man or woman they can find. The horsemen have already found Senator Clinton.
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