Ethnic violence has taken an unusual turn since the presidential administration turnover, and it’s uncertain if the issue is slowly going away and a few stubborn people don’t want that, or it’s still the same but we’re not being reminded of it daily like we used to. Since it’s the end of Black History Month for another year, the media have been focusing on how the Black population struggled to be recognized as human in an inhumane world, but next to those historical informational snippets were news articles about random attacks on Asians. It seems our former president’s words about the origins of the current pestilence* have implanted a mental seed of fear and loathing among the misinformed and ignorant, and these folks seem to have taken to handling their frustration by proxy, assaulting random persons to make their point.
Their point appears to be, “I’m not happy about the disease, and somebody who may not even remotely be related to you may have been responsible, so you take this punch in the face or chair smashed onto your torso and tell them I sent you, so maybe they will just go off and die somewhere and pay the price for all this death and suffering.”
Life doesn’t work that way for anybody, so nobody has a right to act this way. It may not have been a person who started the disease, for all we know: it’s possible that an animal had something that caused the disease in a random person by accident. Biological anomalies frequently start because some organism, somewhere, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Unfortunately radical scared people don’t stop to think about possibilities or chaos or randomness; they’re just primed to react strongly to any disruption in their perceived utopian routine.
I’m glad they weren’t around in the time of the dinosaurs: they would’ve been trying to punch out comets because they were coming around to wipe out the lifeforms on our infant Earth. They would have been beating up anybody of Spanish origin back in 1918, when the so-called “Spanish Flu” came around.
Funny thing is, we people who don’t believe in beating up people don’t go looking for these folks to beat them up. In fact, it would be hard to figure out who to look for. They have eyes and ears, limbs and joints, they wear clothes. . . .how scary is that? They look like us, but we are not them! Maybe that’s the problem: on the outside maybe it’s hard to tell who is who. A radical could be beating the whoopie out of somebody who is not at all part of the group on whom they are directing their anger, so we could make the same mistake while seeking them out.
Of course, those folks who stormed Washington back in January also looked like the rest of us.
Except their curdled, evil souls were showing.
When you look into people’s eyes while they are headed out to a task related to battle or conflict, the look tends to be one of fear tempered by a resolute purpose. You’re worried about doing it, but you feel you have to. The “it’s me or them” mindset can be misdirected by the wrong information, and that is what’s going on here with Asian targeting. The current disease didn’t start with an Asian: it started with a germ that happened to be picked up and spread in Asia; it could just as easily have originated here in the United States or anyplace else on earth.
Who or what started it cannot be eradicated by assaulting somebody and saying, “There, that puts my two cents’ worth in,” but it can be a battle won by helping each other and not discounting any one person’s contribution to the good of the planet.
If you don’t want to do good, please sit down and shut up.
*(Because some online filters are sensitive to terminology, I am assuming that you know to what current disease I am referring without naming it and risking censure.)
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