Martin, Mississippi and Morons

Progress is a funny thing, isn't it?

You think you've taken ten steps forward only to realize you've hardly gone anywhere because after taking three steps, you expected the other seven to follow automatically. Hopeful and as optimistic as we may be, we all know it hardly ever happens that way.

Exhibit A and B, Mississippi and Alabama. While the great American melting pot looks more like jambalaya everyday, a number of people in these two bottom rungs of the educational and cultural ladder believe interracial dating should be banned. Gotten rid of. Made illegal. No white folks should be marrying anybody black. To be specific, 29 percent of those enlightened Republican voters in Mississippi believe interracial dating should be illegal. Another 17 percent weren't sure. In Alabama, 21 percent of their likely GOP voters in Alabama thought the same - this in a state where interracial dating was actually illegal until 2000. (the poll was done by North Carolina-based Public Policy Polling)

As usual, loyal and brain-washed GOP loyalists will try to downplay and dismiss this poll with any silly reason they can make up because they, a) are afraid to admit how they and many of their breathren really feel, and b) because they think it's okay for them to believe those silly thoughts.

Why?

Well, it goes back to 1992. How can an entire party of people be angry for 20 years over losing an election? Ask those on the right. Since Bill Clinton came out of nowhere to defeat George H. Bush in the '92 presidential election, they have been hell bent on defeating the Democratic party, no matter what it took. Since then, they have been on a systematic, strategic, selfish and immature moronic mission to kill the donkey. And since then, anything coming from a Democrat or anyone seen as a left-winger is painted as bringing the country down into some deep pit of anti-American hell -- facts and history, be damned.

So now those on the right constantly stamp liberal and social concerns as the bastion of waste, socialism, wasteful spending, voter fraud or any made up ism or fraud they can wave out of thin air. One of their targets continues to be race. In fact, race is the main area they've used to deeply divide this country. They frame anything darker than Barack Obama (oh, heck, him too since he's the product of an interracial relationship) as the main contributor to the nation's doldrums.

All of this to build a coalition of scared to death voters who believe the nation is going to hell unless we rid ourselves of this dark filth, either by deportation, jail, the death penalty or whatever they can come up with. Its led to the renaissance of the politics of scaring the hell out of you and making you believe "they" are the problem and "they" are out to get you, wherever you may be.

That means things are right or wrong, black or white. Us against them. There is no gray.

Some of the results have been an inept breed of career politicians and a bunch of stupid and wasteful laws allowing people to carry guns anywhere you can find air or giving you the right to off one of "them." Ask teenager Trayvon Martin. Oh, you can't ask him because one of those lunatics who believed one of "them" - one of "their" uniforms is black skin and a hoodie - was out to get him. He fatally shot Martin who was armed with the deadly weapons of a can of tea and a bag of Skittles. A Republican-authored law written in Florida just a few years ago allowed him to do so.

So for a lot of people, these are us against them issues. Right or wrong. Black or white. Shouldn't have been in that neighborhood. Shouldn't have worn a hoodie, as Geraldo Rivera stupidly said. Yeah, that's the progress we've made in this great country. Seven steps back to the need for a renewed civil and human rights movement in this country. We again have a bunch of morons hell bent on painting made-up pictures of "them" out to get you. Dead brains and dead kids are now the result. Expect more.