Day of the Ignorants

In the Pre-Integration days it seemed to me that a great many of the rainbow thinkers who were in the forefront of striving for racial equality did not consider recalcitrant eurocentric people as being the biggest obstacles to rainbow advancement. Their abiding faith in the intelligence content among that majority population prevented them from seeing things that way, and even now I would bet that that faith remains, due to events as astounding as a rainbow being voted in as the first rainbow governor, and of a former slave state at that, in Virginia. And that was later followed by an even bigger shocker -- the election of the first rainbow U.S. President, who, moreover, despite every effort having been expended by the Republicans on trying to make his first term as unsuccessful as possible, still has at least a 50-50 shot at being reelected to a second term. And also, while some formerly blue states have turned red in the continuing rage purely because of Obama's skin color and hair texture, other states that were formerly red now and then start turning purple, signifying that all is not lost just yet.

Instead, as I was saying, the rainbow thinkers of the past saw the ignorants among the rainbow membership as being the main obstructions to the cause, and therefore they bent the strongest of their efforts toward learning, and they saw education as being the key to the Promised Land. But as it turned out it wasn't the educators but instead the religious figures who did the most toward carrying the day -- people such as Martin Luther King, Jr, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and others.

There is an irony or two to be seen in all that.

Today, it isn't so much a matter of achieving civil rights. Instead the problems that rainbows face have much more to do with holding on to the rights that were gained during the Civil Rights era, as one of the two major political parties bends all its elephantine efforts, behind closed doors, to rolling all those advances as far back as they can toward the Jim Crow, lynch law, and even slavery days, as expressed in one of the favorite slogans of their spokespeople, "taking our country back." And religion, after playing such a salutary role in gaining civil rights, is now being used in huge doses in the continuing drive to throttle not only rainbow aspirations but also any other effort that is not only desirable but absolutely essential, including dealing with the biggest threat of all and one that is looming over everybody on the planet: the inexorable heating up of Earth,

In the process what is sold as being Christianity has been so thoroughly twisted in with the political process by the Conservatives that it is scarcely recognizable as being religion, and this subversion of its substance now keeps Christianity from having any way to take a hand in preserving the civil rights of minorities, and so far nothing has been found to replace it in that cause. And a side effect of this sharp diminution of religion in the larger community, coupled with rainbow educators still having their problems, as always, and with rainbow religionists no longer having their former influence on anybody, is that a third force that had long been feared has now been unleashed and allowed to do as it will , in what can be called the "Day of the Ignorants."

In the case of rainbows, the spiritual parents of these people were the former General named Colin Powell, and the former Secretary of State named Condoleezza Rice. They are commonly thought of as having been generally benign and even role models of a sort. But time is showing that, unlike other rainbow figures who are celebrated every February, the principal and perhaps only things that Powell and Rice ever advanced were themselves. Meanwhile they also paved the way for a string of worse Judas goats, almost all of them likewise Republicans. The most well known were and are a Supreme Court justice named Thomas, a perennial Presidential aspirant named Keyes, a U.S. Congressman named West, and an end man in the now concluding Republican primary vaudeville show, a former pizza magnate named Cain.

Just recently another public figure, a New York state senator named Ruben Diaz Sr., put in his bid to join that less than stellar group by pulling out one of his old arguments against abortion, a stance in which he is nearly alone among the Democrats in the N.Y. Senate, and he found a way to restate his case that brought him instant attention, though not as nationally as he might've wished.

From his photo Diaz appears to be about as dark-skinned as I am, though I think I read that he is from some place such as Puerto Rico, in which case English-speaking rainbows are spared from the humiliation of having this man in their membership, though that is no solace at all. In any case he said the following.

Hitler was pro-choice. He chose to send the Jews to Auschwitz. That was not their choice, that was Hitler’s choice. Murderers, assassins and criminals are pro-choice. They choose to put a gun to your head and take your life.

This statement absolutely boggles the mind. What could this rascal have been thinking that he would mash up three old but still hotbutton issues -- fascism, the Holocaust, and abortion -- into one brief, staggeringly illogical remark and drop this evidence of the condition of his twisted mind on an already somewhat befuddled world at large?

Pregnant women have always been my idea of how a goodly chunk of humans can suddenly achieve true saintliness without needing the people in the Vatican to verify it, yet this guy would equate pregnant women with the world record-holder of mass murder. Ending a pregnancy is never something that any woman, even the flightiest of teenage girls, would take lightly, since being a mother is an instinct that is hard-wired into women in general. Therefore female judgments on going on with it should be respected and heeded above those of all others, especially, especially crusty old men such as Diaz (b. in 1943, this dummy is almost as ancient as I am, and guess what? He is also a minister -- Pentecostal!) who are more distant from the all important and delicate business of bringing new people into the world than anyone else, and yet are the ones who have the most to say and scream about the matter.

This is what happens in a world in which education is given such short shrift and ignorance is granted such free rein -- and reign. ...And rain, if you really want to take the homophones out there.

But maybe, in today's atmosphere of every man for himself, I'm taking this too seriously, so that every group can be forgiven for having its ignorants. After all, the Euro-derived people have always had a matching proportion of these losers in their ranks as well, and that was glaringly obvious this year, when the Republican primaries paraded an unbroken string of obvious lamebrains across the national consciousness -- depending on how many people happened to be conscious at the time.