White America In Crisis Mode

From hallowed? heritage to a hollowing out resulting in anger, fear and panic.  Much of this blog is based Charles Blow's recent op-ed in the NYT titled "White America's 'Broken Heart'"  At times, I felt like I was reading a modern version of the prophet Amos as I read Blow's remarkable essay.  Blow discusses what's behind our weird and chaotic political season characterized by a brash, bigoted billionaire's rise to the top of the polls. Blow uses words such as disappointment, dislocation, disillusionment, demographic change, drugs and death to describe the state of white America.

Blow is black and very perceptive; he has been following the campaign trail so his observations are first-hand; he contrasts black and white America as only an American Afro American can.  Blow quotes Chris Hayes: "This campaign is starting to feel more and more like a long, national nervous breakdown."

Blow describes this white breakdown with phrases such as these:

     "profound disappointment with America and its institutions."
     "dislocation of white supremacy" due to rapid demographic change.
     "disillusionment that the economic game is rigged."
     "death rates rising among middle aged white Americans caused by suicide, alcoholism and drug overdoses."

For many of these white Americans, our first black president is a high profile, visual symbol of their increasing loss of white supremacy and white privilege.

M. Crozier, a French sociologist who has visited America many times beginning in 1946 and ending in 1980.  From 1946-1970, he noted a vitality and dynamic much greater than in France.  But in a 1980 visit, Crozier observed a profound loss of vitality and meaning.

In my opinion, during the 1980s the American trinity of hyperindividualism, hypermaterialism and hyperethnocentrism exploded; this contributed to the hollowing out of America in 2016.  White Americans are technological and production geniuses, but we are social and ethical morons.

Recently, I heard this stat over NPR; with only 5 percent of America's population, we use 80 percent of the world's pain killers.  A few years earlier, we were using 50 percent of the illegal drugs.  Why this enormous consumption of both legal and illegal drugs?

Two more quotations from the pen of Charles Blow:

     White Americans "a people dying of sadness and vice were simply the leading edge of a tragic, morbid expression of a disappointment and fear shadowing much of white America."

      Some "white Americans are coming to live an experience that many minorities have long lived---structural [economic] inequity has leapt the racial barrier."

The Bible asserts that whatever we sow, we also reap.  The chickens are coming home to roost.  But few white Americans are repenting.  Instead, they are blaming, pointing to everyone else---Mexicans, Muslims and Obama---not themselves.  They don't remember that when you point a finger at another people, you are pointing three fingers at yourself.