Collective Insanity and the new paradigm

Another day, another mass shooting. I woke with a start at 2 a.m. and the dark air seemed alive with anxiety. The news rolls in via social media. White male with gun, unknown casualties, breaking, live, update. Nightclub. 

By dawn we get more detail. Body counts. Hand waving. 

It seems few of the messengers report the whole truth. 

Another. White. Male. 

We're collectively blind to this. Flip the script and imagine if mass shootings were being done by any member of any marginalized group. Think particularly about marginalized groups that have been demonized. The entire narrative would be different. Action would be taken. Would have been taken long ago. 

Few things speak to the endurance of white male privilege more loudly than the collective hypnosis that is silencing the conversation about white male terrorism. 

America is in a hell state now. On the one hand, a depraved leadership maliciously misleading and obfuscating. Aided and abetted by what has become a state run news agency. On the other hand, the beautiful advances toward true plurality that continue, in spite of the top down madness. An openly gay male governor. Unprecedented elections of women of color, including 19 black women judges in Texas. 

It's been interesting being banned from posting on Facebook for the past few weeks, with about a week to go. I have been silenced and have had to read the timelines of my friends with none of the buffering that commenting provides. The main perception that has arisen in me is that *even white men who are trying their best to be allies* right now are as annoying and tiresome as fuck. The main pattern I see is a desire to control the narrative, even from the position of performative allyship. Many instances of a lack of listening. And these are the men who are among the best. 

The rest are quite simply just fucking awful. A friend of mine posted that her grandfather used to say, "when in doubt, vote for the woman." A man instantly had to comment that that was the worst idea he ever heard, because it negates all of the hard work a male candidate may have done to get on the ballot, and if you are really that misinformed, you shouldn't be voting. Predictably, the comment had 8 likes. Every single one of them male. 

These microaggressions each are, well, micro. But the aggregate of millions of such stances in defense of a murderous, oppressive, terrorist cis-hetero patriarchy create an aggravating, toxic climate. Add to this poisoning of discourse the white male terrorist armed with a gun, and add all the rest of the death cry of the old order, and you get a hellish picture. 

My perspective on all of this taken together is that it is the terrified backlash against the gynifying and browning of public life. Or even the flat out de-gendering of public life. The very concept of whiteness erodes. I am deeply grateful for this, as I think whiteness is the fiercest and most killing poison the world faces. Second to whiteness is the idea of maleness. White maleness is the sick iconography of our time. The antidote is women in power, and people of color in public positions. 

I don't long for the mainstreaming of women of color and other marginalized groups. But for the marginalization of white men, and especially for the death of the power prejudice of old white cis male leadership, even the "benign" kind of the old white cis male Democrat. And for the emergence of a true pluralism through which the vast diversity of American experience can find power and representation. I fear that this shift, which is inevitable, will be agonizing along the way. Iconographies entrenched for thousands of years don't just stand up and applaud when the paradigm changes. 

Fuckers get psycho.