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I was going to stop posting for a while but your comments have triggered more thoughts. I'm sorry only two people cared to comment on my ideas and I appreciate very much your taking the time to comment and talk here. I really wanted to talk about solutions for novelists but we've gotten into an interesting conversation here even if it's a digression. Again, well said on the duties of the artists. I could not have said it better. As to your interesting and unique isolation from Jim Crow--this makes me wonder further about desegregation--would blacks have been better off separate but equal, equal schools etc. Your experience suggests an alternate reality could've happend in the 1950s. Maybe if that famous town, in Oklahoma was it, if that town wasn't bombed out of existence. It could've served as a great model of negro success. It is sad to think this way--that it was geopolitics mostly it seems to me and not moral outrage that helped desegregate the military and the schools. The neccessities of war. The communist could have used American racism to gain support for their idealogy. I don't think the fear of communist subversation was a joke, given Stalin and his methods. They could have used disaffected blacks as a fifth column or saboteurs. I recall reading somewhere that the Japanese were thinking about it and that some blacks identified with a non-white race standing up to whites. Given the outrages, the killing of returning blacks soldiers. It must've been shameful for America to push capitalism and democracy overseas while having Jim Crow in the South, though there were also the invisible signs of it in the North, too. It seems looking back on it that some backward thinking whites can smugly feel that black people forced themselves on them by wanting to live in their neighborhoods, go to their schools etc--the controvery over affirmative action relates to this for want of a better word sense of pride--blacks had nothing of their own. It doesn't matter what the economic reasons were for their poor housing, schools etc. It would've been better for civil rights then if whites had initiated the reform themselves. And of course, blacks could not have broken the South without the help of whites of good will and the media exposure of police brutality on non-violent demonstrators. Blacks heroically insisted on fighting racism and the conscience of decent white people was stirred to act and they joined in. Blacks didn't achieve it on their own however. It is false pride to think so. Blacks were also the underdogs. Looking at those black people now in the films, I don't see the same black people today. I don't. I really don't know if blacks then are the same black people now. I don't think whites have as much sympathy for blacks as the whites of the Civil Rights era. Those Civil Rights era whites are also not the same or are all of them passing on. If blacks were wanted, sort of like the experience you had of being exotic haha, we might see better race relations today. Given that there is already a kind of reinstitutionalized segregation in terms of neighborhoods, inner city schools, the loss of tax revenue for them, the crime, we don't hear about white gangs shooting kids down in their own nieghborhoods. But if all things are equal, we do hear about crazy white folks going off and shooting up a school or movie theater. I see your post on Chicago touches on this subject: And the carnage continues. There doesn't seem to be any effective tactic to combat the gun violence being dispensed by the urban terrorists in the inner city neighborhoods of Chicago. The tragedy is that so many of the killings are random. They are not necessarily the acts of organized gang warfare or about drug trafficking. They're frequently about personal retaliations gone wrong. Have the black working class and poor really benefited from desegregation? Of course, if you are rich you can live in the best neighborhoods which are usually white neighborhoods. When I moved here, in this city, it started out 50/50 in terms of blacks and whites but gradually whites have departed for whiter areas and black crime has increased but it is not as bad as Miami. Blacks and hispanics now out number the whites that have remained. I wonder what your thoughts are on the new version of the Planet of the Apes. I think the first versions showed how some white intellectuals related the struggle of the apes to slavery. I've yet to see the one coming out now, so I'm not sure this remake deals with slavery or racism today or yesterday. I'm only guessing but it's more about genetic experiments, ecological questions, which species is fit to take over etc. Are those the subtexts? As humans we've certainly made a mess of things so it is an interesting theme in anycase. Yet I saw the earlier two remake movies and they are not really about the social and historical relations among black and whites, you could say the truer reality rather than the escapist fantasy.

And the carnage continues. There doesn't seem to be any effective tactic to combat the gun violence being dispensed by the urban terrorists in the inner city neighborhoods of Chicago. The tragedy is that so many of the killings are random, incidents that end up with the shooting of innocent bystanders who just happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Or are they necessarily the acts of organized gang warfare or about drug trafficking. They're frequently about personal retaliations gone wrong, about somebody trying to get back at somebody else for a slight, or for attacking someone's homie or relative - cases of one individual taking aim at another individual, either of whom may just incidentally have gang affiliations. Hispanics are the exception to this, however. They have very structured gangs with notorious leaders and drug king pins who issue hits on rivals. These gun wielding young Blacks have been described as being very fatalistic about life on the mean streets, feeling that if they die, they die. It's like they have no souls or regard for the consequences of their actions. It's a given that a gun is standard equipment when settling "beefs". Yet, time and time again, families of the victims and victimizers describe these youths as "good kids", some of whom were attending high school and had positive plans for the future, not to mention being baby daddys. What are the circumstances that have culiminated in the present state of affairs in Chicago's ghettos? What has turned the west and south sides of the city into killing fields? Everybody says the breakdown of the family is responsible, citing the usual lament about fatherless kids and negligent mothers. And of course the lack of wholesome alternatives for aimless young boys, along with the scarcity of jobs. Everybody knows about this particular pitfall, but no one can figure out how to convince black females of child-bearing age to stop bringing children into this world that they cannot properly care for. A new mind-set has to be adopted. Shame has to be re-introduced into the ghetto subculture. Pregnancy among unmarried teens needs to be recognized for what it is. Not a badge of honor but a disgraceful liablity. Older single black females would also do well to curb multiple pregnancies by different fathers. These situations are not conducive to stable home lives and therein lies the problem. Garbage in, garbage out. Of course all of these familiar suggestions are easy to voice. Describing the situation is one thing. Eliminating it is another. We are dealing with the the flux and limbo of the human condition. Maybe the genocide flourishing in Chicago's black enclaves will just have to play itself out. Calling out the national guard, could create more problems than it would solve. Sometimes things have to get so bad that there's nothing left for them to do but to get better. And so it goes...