To Be Fair, Everybody Must Get Stoned

     Recently I blogged about mental health and how we all possess some form of "offness". I mean come on, you know you do. And when Melissa Harris-Perry began leading a panel on the discussions of the morning--young black men in our society, obesity as a disease--I harkened back to that posting. Everyone has a problem, just not necessarily of their own making. Not everyone in our wealthy society has access to the things I take for granted: good cheap fresh food (well, setting aside Monsanto's monied influence), low risk of being shot at, sidewalks. Too many good people among us do not begin to have enough to arrive at nor survive with the level of day-to-day health many of us sustain. Everything from prejudice to lack of education to a society overgrown with corporate interests has doomed the days of our brethren.

     We have a lot of questions to answer: Why I am advantaged because I'm a white, middle-class (yes it still exists, but only barely) person with nothing else to recommend me but that? I'm "educated" but I do not draw on that knowledge to contribute to society. I make no money. I do not fill my everyday with the wishes of any particular group of people. And why do I not do these things? Simply put, I'm not able. I still have nightmares about the days when I did go to jobs and do "work". Serious nightmares. For a big, strong girl, I am very fragile in that way. I don't handle being a captive audience very well. And along the same line of questioning, why is a young man disadvantaged because he is walking around in a city while being black? If just 14% of black youth make up drug users in total, why are they nearly 38% of the incarcerated drug offense population? That's nearly three-times the rate of other drug using demographics. That's not on them, that's on us. That's on a profiling, prejudiced society that stalks young black men.

     Nearly half of us are poor and nearly half of us are obese. We don't do much better with the second group than we do with the first. We blame the victim for being victimized. We take away the
conscience of a society to do the bidding of ADM, Monsanto, the Koch Brothers and others and let the processed potato chips fall where they may. We do not hold the makers of our food and energy to the example to which we hold our ill-equipped population. Our Supreme Court gives personhood to businesses and those businesses give the business to the people. And we blame the people for what we have caused to be wrought upon them.

     Melissa and her panelists put it well, and I paraphrase: No one on Wall Street has gone to jail for defrauding people out of their homes and their pensions, but you can go to jail for life in Georgia for stealing a beer. We did that. We let that happen. Everyone who is overweight doesn't choose to be overweight any more than everyone caught stealing chooses to steal. We create an environment of--pick your poison--poverty, lack of mental health care, negative messaging, fear and loathing. We take money away from cities and states and schools, we have a holy shit-fit about Obamacare and pass out guns like candy. We let George Zimmerman be afraid of a very accomplished student who happened to deign to go out for some candy one night, his last night on this earth...while he happened to dare to be black.

     None of this is a white-people's problem, it's a society's problem. It's what happens after generations of trickle-down-I-trust-big business-but-not-big government nonsense among other factors. It's not up to white people to do the honorable thing. Who the hell died and put white people in charge of the moral compass in the first place?! It's up to people to see a wrong and help right it. It's up to people to look out for each other's needs. It's up to people to speak up when some asshat says or does something vile. We don't need to count the number of this kind of person or that kind of person on television shows to decide we can sleep well that night. We'd do better to count the profiled victims in the CCA-privatized jails that make up our Prison Industrial Complex, or the number of children who ate three meals that day, or the number of funerals that didn't happen in Chicago or Connecticut.

     We all suffer from something. Some of us simply have a more acceptable "illness" than others. And some of us weren't hurting a soul when someone somewhere, uniformed or not, decided they needed to be stopped from what they were doing. From being themselves. From not being like you or me or some idea we got from a place we don't even remember.

     I've done good things in my time on this experimental planet we share and I've done things I'm damned glad no one knows about. It isn't about who's caught, it's about who's hunted. And a kid in a rural classroom or an immigrant without papers or a child living on the streets by his wits all have some bruised version of love and light to shed on us all. Damn us for not accepting their faults AND their gifts. Damn us for causing them pain we don't see for looking at ourselves in the mirror too rarely.