Public Space Violence in the USA Doesn't Happen by Accident

I didn't intend to pick on Tennessee when I wrote these more realistic Hallmark Christmas stories. The post came out that way because the stories I read, prompting my comments, came out of Tennessee, violence against an interracial couple, and inhumane treatment of homeless people. One might wonder what's in the water down there, but it's not the water; it's the stories they tell themselves and each other, which are the stories fed to them by their political and church leaders.

People are incited to do violence when manipulated using stories that make them feel better about themselves and justify their worst inclinations and actions. Talk about grooming; these folks are groomed from within their limited society to hate and justify violence against the chosen targets.

It's no coincidence that while Ronald Reagan made up lies about Black people and welfare and used antebellum imagery to describe black men, he was dubbed the great communicator. Reagan told a very convenient story for the rich but not so true.

It's a three-act play of manipulation, and it's been going on for the entire life of the USA, but heated up in the 1980s in the Nixon hangover that created Ronald Reagan and morphed into the whole Republican Party with help from some Democrats through a combination of disloyalty and fear.

Here's the story:

Act One: You're the hero and the victim; the people we tell you to hate in church and through our endless fake news cycle are the villains.

Inciting incident: Anything and everything that happens can be twisted into an inciting incident. This week we're told the Tennessee shooter was gay or trans or whatever, convenient as the hate machine against trans people had been heating up. Of course, there's no mention of what that "Christian" community did to that shooter. It takes a village to create a mass murder: isolation by disapproving, too-busy, confused, or absent parents, judgmental neighbors, church leaders, teachers, law enforcement, and employers. Make a person feel under attack all of the time. You get what you made, and it won't be good.

Look at my previous story linked above to see how the community treated the interracial couple. The inciting incident: an interracial couple buys a house and tries to live a peaceful family life with their children — the nerve.

Act Two: Your church and political leaders feed you stories about your suffering and assure you that they, and only they, have your best interest in mind and will show you how to defeat the villains. We're somewhere in Act Two at this point in modern US history.

Act Three: It starts with more division and isolation, more priming to violence, which is now easier from all of the division and isolation, and you end up with something between WWI trenches, 1915 Armenia, WWII death camps, and 1990s Rwanda, or worse.

Epilogue: Depends on who wins. It's either 1. Shit, did we do that? or 2. Our glorious victory came at great expense, but we're all the better for it. There's been a shift away from #1: Shit, did we do that? People with money and connections learned they can justify and lie to avoid taking responsibility, including theories that enslaved people enjoyed slavery or that the Holocaust never happened. But that’s baked into Christianity through the notion of vicarious redemption.

And back to Act One to start it all over with new heroes and new villains.

The church is a great manipulator. Take a look at the Jesus story.

Act One: God has the Holy Spirit impregnate Mary because she comes from the “right lineage,” sending many uncomfortable messages about ancestry and rape, thereby sending a messiah to Earth to communicate God’s existence and die for people’s sins. Humanity is the villain destined for eternal punishment, and there’s an easy-to-follow formula to eliminate the villain within and ensure one's place in the Kingdom of God, like a weight loss program requiring no diet or exercise per the advertisement. Jesus is born, and although there's no record of it outside of the Bible, and even though the party resembles various pagan celebrations, people get pageantry and presents, so they like it and will defend it with disproportionate zeal.

Inciting incident: Matthew talks vaguely about sin, and the specific sins depend on your Bible’s translation but note the prevalence of false witness and slander as sins, now disregarded by many Fox News watching Christians. Matthew further discussed a time when Jesus was hungry, having fasted for 40 days and 40 nights (not advisable), and the villain enticed him to turn rocks into loaves of bread, but as they say he said, man can’t live by bread alone.

Act Two: Adult Jesus preaches love and empathy toward the less fortunate to the masses, and his opponents, who rather enjoy commerce inside the temple, slowly gather forces to stop him.

Act Three: Jesus is tortured and eliminated, but he took the time to wipe out all your sins and bad acts, and you don't have to do anything in return but have faith in your church leaders. So, you’re both horrified for him, grateful to him, and fearful of the consequences should you disobey his self-appointed spokespeople. It sounds like this story where a man used a combination of sympathy, gratitude, and fear on young impressionable college students to start a cult.

Epilogue: Your church leaders, who now dole out Jesus' forgiveness in stingy quantities and also work to criminalize homelessness and homosexuality, looking more like the sinful Jesus preached against than the enlightened, give you prosperity gospel and judgy hate so you can feel good about your pursuit of money and efforts to dispose of your competition, being all other people.

Moral of the story: It’s okay to be just like the sinful Jesus’ preached against because his death wiped away all bad acts for everyone who buys into and preaches the story. It’s vicarious redemption and freedom to continue on as you wish.

“I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There’s no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man’s debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.”~~Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

We’re letting agenda-laden dubious characters create an explosive situation in the USA using outrageous, false, or at the very least unproven stories that promise absolution for our worst behavior for the price of adherence to the story. It worsens because the storytellers have become expert manipulators without fear of being called out as liars because, in our enforced society, you’re a bad person if you speak out against religion and the self-proclaimed religious. Few have the courage to point out the speculation and lies. Those who do are shouted down. We give too much credence to institutions just because they’ve been successful in the past or give us a good party and a great way to justify being our worst selves.

One would think people would be more suspicious of their leaders whose solution to public space, particularly school shootings, is more guns and more Christianity, and not fewer guns and more common sense.

If you think I’m being mean, note how dangerous the situation has become: https://www.rawstory.com/trump-supporters-civil-war/