Tuesday, September 01, 2020

The Next Kyle

There's at least one of these assholes in every town:
A Black girl was beaten and harassed by a boy in an apparently racially motivated attack in Kansas.

Brandi Stewart said her 11-year-old daughter, Nevaeh Thomas, was playing with friends outside an apartment complex Friday evening near her Shawnee school when an older boy began taunting her with racial slurs, reported WDAF-TV.

....

The girl responded by telling the 12-year-old boy that “my Black is beautiful” — and that’s when he allegedly knocked her unconscious with a pole.
His parents must be proud. The kid will get some slap on the wrist, just enough to piss him off more at the injustice of it all, and then....well, you just wait until he hits eighteen or twenty-one. The trajectory of losers like that is as predictable as a drop of rain. He'll last just long enough to inflict real damage to someone else someday. That's all people like that do, and these days, they are overtly encouraged to do so as they please.

This nation, like most, has deep, ugly pathologies that it has tried to alleviate and/or remove, with varying levels of effort and success. That kid was taught by someone to treat other people like that. It gets passed down from generation to generation like some evil family heirloom, sweating, pulsating, sentient.

I don't know what you do to end it. I used to think that simply leveling the playing field for these sorts would at least put their "economic anxieties" on the back burner, and I still think economic justice is a necessary precursor to real social justice. But it's also likely that many of them would still be hateful assholes, just with more money.

I do hope that this poor girl grows and gains the understanding that not everyone is like the thing that attacked her, that most people really are not like that (though a distressing number of them really are like that). It's just the vocal zombie contingent that gets the most attention, who distract us all from the basic fact that there's still a slight majority of us who just want to live a life unencumbered by doubt and debt and hate and fear.

That is not to say that "love conquers hate" or "non-violence overcomes violence" or any of that nonsense. History should clarify that for you with a quickness. It is to say that, whatever else, a life lived immersed in hate and lies tends to be nasty, short, and brutish. It cannot be pleasant or peaceful or contemplative, bereft of anything resembling an inner life or an appreciation for anything worth appreciating.

There is no joy in the life of a person who treats other people like garbage, only the temporary escape from an ugly existence. The lies of the ad hoc heroic myth fade away quickly, and the person quickly realizes that people who live in the real world -- employers, friends, even relatives -- want nothing to do with him, that the only people who will associate with him are all awful.

Imagine, for a second, being someone like Laura Ingraham or Tucker Carlson, being just smart enough to know that what you do is disgusting and scummy, but being just dumb enough to believe that there is some amount of money that will fill the hole where your soul once was.

This is the life Kyle Rittenhouse has ahead of him, whether or not he goes to prison [Narrator: He won't.]. There will only be thirsty opportunists and hangers-on, and generational racists who will want to further indoctrinate him. It's a vicious, self-reinforcing dynamic, and we've seen it all before.

(All that said, I am not convinced that Rittenhouse is a racist per se. He seems more like an impressionable, not-terribly-bright kid who went looking for trouble and found some. Whether the white-power-adjacent influences in his information system take a more influential role as his life progresses along its new path obviously remains to be seen. It seems likely, though.)

All you can really do is shun them, but completely. That goes even more so for the enablers and handlers and media shitheads who use their platforms to push this evil nonsense just to put a few more bucks in their pockets. Many of them appear to be in their mid-twenties or early thirties. These people should never be able to feel comfortable around decent people again.

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