In my portentious "Address to the black people of America - or a minority of them anyway" - waddya mean you never read it?! - I stressed the word 'minority'. I have long suspected that America was, as much as any society ever can be, in a post-racial mode. Yes, yes, of course there are still outbreaks of racial friction, that is the everyday warp and woof of life anywhere, but in America today the old great divide is mostly healed. I may have mentioned this before but it's worth re-telling. My first clue as to this new situation came about as a result of a fleeting image on a TV news report from somewhere inside Iraq in which an American APC had been hit and one man wounded badly. The cameraman was inside the APC and was filming close up to the wounded man as his comrades attempted to dress his wounds. Then, gradually, the camera pulled back and in the dim light you could see the faces of the other American soldiers - it looked like the United Nations not the United States! I can't remember exactly but there were a couple of whites, a couple of asians and a couple of blacks. I sensed the importance of this accidental image instantly. The American army, to say nothing of its airforce, navy and marines, is a huge number of men coming from all strands of their civic society to which, hopefully, most of them return sooner or later. You cannot serve in the military, especially 'up the sharp end', without building up bonds of comradeship and friendship. You quickly disover the worth of your 'buddies' irrespective of their ethnicity. This, I think, has spread through the civic body of the USA which is why the vast majority of blacks have failed to dance to the tune of shysters like Sharpton, Jackson - and Obama - over the Zimmerman affair.
Roger L. Simon at PJ Media confirms my earlier guess that the turnout for the Trayvon Martin rallies was pathetic:
According to Reuters, in New York a grand total of 2000 people showed up Saturday to protest in favor of Trayvon Martin in the George Zimmerman trial. That’s .00024257 of the population of our most populous city. More New Yorkers show up for pizza at Ray’s between 6:00 and 6:05 in the evening. (Well, who knows? But you get my point.)
In our second most populous city, my hometown of Los Angeles, the results were even worse, according to the Los Angeles Times. A measly 400 people demonstrated. The totals in Miami, closest big city to the event, were 300.
In other words, the turnout was somewhere between minuscule and puny — maybe, at best, fifteen thousand people nationwide in a country of 314
million. (You do the math on that one…. Okay, I’ll do it. That’s .00005 of the
population.)
Of course, it is an irony of such deliciousness that it positively makes me drool that the biggest setback to race relations in the USA in recent years was the election of a black president! This wretched man taints everything, including what was never more than a tragic minor fracas, with the color of black. Happily, it seems that the majority of black Americans ignore it - and, on this occasion, him - and simply get on with their lives knowing that by and large the great historical divides are now exactly that - historical.
