A Startling Statistic at UCLA

[Drosselmeier]

<p>

yes i agree about the scope. But everything is always filtered through indvidual eyes as the lived center of the world. I worry that you sometimes don’t look beyond the surface of those fluffy-haired smiling white faces floating by. Scratch the surface and those shiny clueless teeth often will shatter into a thousand mummytomb curses…

Hmmm. Yeah. I think you do make a good point. In fact, I recall you making this point earlier, and I really accepted it at the time. But somehow I gave it up afterward. I got it now.</p>

<p>Yeah. I know whites are living under their own burdens, and even though the scope of them may not be as vast as those which blacks carry, they are each in their own way undoubtedly just as heavy for the individuals involved.</p>

<p>So then why is it that blacks feel so different from whites? Why are we not understanding each other? I think the fact that our experience in slavery, and the racism that continues out of it even to this day, was and is so general and focus upon us as a group, we feel a particular kind of isolation from you. I don’t think its like blacks just LONG to be with whites. I think it is that we are stuck in this country and want to be part of everything it means, and have access to everything it offers, but find ourselves perpetually shut out of it by the institutional and social structures given to us by history.</p>

<p>

Miserable in a big shiny car or on a crowded bus might not appear all that different to the cosmic eye.

In fact, I am almost sure of it. God likely sees just a big ol’ mess – since He is God and we’re not. But from my little view, I sure would prefer misery in that shiny car than on a bus. LOL.</p>

<p>

Forgive me if I seem to cast a people’s collective suffering into relative terms, but I suspect money to be so often the easy culprit and believe, from my hanging around the middleclass, that these matters are poorly understood.

Yeah. I think you are bang on here. We do think money solves everything and that the lack of it causes the problem. I may not seem like it here (because I am really focusing on one pitiful message to drum home one point), but I am a very happy guy. You can’t have a lovely wife and a pack of kids like I have and be sad. Kids don’t allow it. Once, I came home dejected about something or other, and one of my little girls, no more than two at the time, must have felt it. She came up to me, grabbed my face between her little hands, and looked at me very strangely. I mean, it was like something else was in the girl. Then she kissed me, and then suddenly went back to life as normal. I know in our modern times we don’t really believe what I am about to say, but I think God was in that kid, blessing me just when I needed Him. I in fact get this all the time in one way or another, and it makes me very much full of joy. Money can’t buy this.</p>