Racism as We Know it Will Become a Nonstarter

Well that statement will piss some people off, but hear me out.

I recently spent several days immersing myself in an attempt to understand (partially, never fully in my distracted mind’s case,) the intricacies that exist in the blockchain/cryptocurrency world.

I had to come up for air several times. In my addled mind, with fogged mental capacities, alarm bells like klaxons blaring off the coast on a foggy morning, rampaged through my intentions. I really wanted to get a grip on the wave of enthusiasm that was gripping millions across the globe.

I failed.

I was similar to the proverbial hedgehog who innocently ventures into the daylight to check on his shadow. The shadow I saw was not what was expected and I scurried back to my hovel to rethink my position. Was there a thaw coming? A niggle told me there wasn’t. I snuggled down and thought to preserve my warmth, but the visions or learning I had experienced raged. Sleep or any form of extended rest was not forth coming.

The forces raging in m mind stemmed from three swirling visions, three colors that, like a Jackson Pollock painting, collided with an aggression and randomness that dictated a hurly burly or chaotic landscape. Therefore the trundle back to my hovel.

From my nest I tried to replay the reading that led up to my near masochisitc decision to embrace the metaverse. It consisted of musings on Medium.

From my drowsy state, I recalled how writers on Medium often consumed tens of thousands of pages reliving the past atrocities of the slave trade which as a tangible business raged in America for several centuries. During this period millions of men, women, and children were kidnapped and imprisoned by their local tribal enemies and then sold for trinkets to the voracious consumer forces driving New World expansion. Thankfully and belatedly, the civil war, in America at least, brought the obnoxious practice to a close. This cost 750,000 lives, 95% of which were white. Similar to the forces turning on itself in Northern Africa, so too the forces turned on themselves in the United States. This is not meant to trivalize either nor hold a comparitive yardstick to the situation. It is a perspective, a view point not meant to judge or remonstrate.

The question is, where has this taken America? How has the America of the 2000s improved? If one reads Steve QJ the question is still out there. Such a fine writer as Steve QJ (QJ)raises a constant barrage of questions and thoughts that implore readers to think and truly assess the situation rather than be inflamed or enraged along political, religious or racial lines.

The reason I ran into my hovel was that I saw many similar writers and thinkers all barking at the wrong tree. The cause is not the question. The future is what must be questioned. The issues writers similar to QJ, who explains his arguments lucidly and tackles them with respect and equanimity, are admirable, yet I believe it to be the wrong tree.

The instigator of my scurrying retreat was not only QJ but also Tom Bilyeu. As I said at the opening, I watched his Youtube explanations of NFTs and cryptocurrency and was staggered at not only at my lack of digital sophistication, but also the torrent or underlying current of greed and avarice that permeated the latter stages of what was an extremely well thought and enlightening one hour video. The video descended into a barrage of implorinmg viewers to get more, more, everything for me. Me Me Me.

I am not condemning nor judging either man. It was the content that unsettled me, an affable befuddled hedgehog, to cower and I was left unable to look up to see the future.

QJ often writes with an informed, easily relatable and inspiring passion on issues of color and the injustices inherent in segregating peoples by the color of their skin.

Tom Bilyeu who operates an extremely informative service entitled; Impact Theory questions the means and providers of expansion and improvement of the human condition. Until the dying moments of the hour long NFT/Crypto broadcast I watched happy to be informed of the new advancing concepts. Then it turned to an ugliness that revealed; unless you have the education and funding you will not join the elite Me Financially First movement.

Both men pursue the enhancement of the human experience on the planet, but as much as Steve constructs his words with a focus on repairing the disparities existing in conflicts of color, Tom drives or reveals a different, and I believe a far more sinister, threat to both America and the broader world.

As a lowly hedgehog I saw one man attempting to placate the horrors of the past while the other was in a sense providing the means to enflame a new horror, a new segregation.

Looking up from my bristled hedgehog perspective I saw the evolution from discrimination based on color superseded by discrimination based on financial standing.

The efforts and laudable achievements of Mandela, Tubman and Martin Luther King, to name but a few, may well pale against the ominous force, the Kraken of destruction, soon to infect the land which once held a dream for many. As little as two hundred years ago it was the land of great promise. Less than one hundred years ago it became infamous for being the only nation to use nuclear bombs to vaporize civilians and fifty years ago to spray chemical poisons on noncombatant villagers. Now, I fear, like a weasel snared in a trap, it will become a nation that will gnaw at itself to save its maligned carcass.

The divisiveness of ‘Me Financially First’, the depravity of the ‘My Millions’, will lead to a disparity and segregation of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ that will transcend issues of color, race, and ethnicity. The new ‘religion’ will feature the elite few able to garner the right education to handle the speeding technological digital expansions and soar above the unedcuated masses. The new slaves of the coming decades will not be amassed because of their tribe or color, will not be imprisoned and interned because of their religious or racial differences, it will be because they have not been allowed to acquire the digital learning to play at the table of the financially blessed.

Those who are capable of embracing the digital jump to the approaching new paradigm of financial structure which will replace the simplistic means that grew from barter, to coin, to plastic and now resides in the netherworld or web3 metaverse, will prosper, all others will not only suffer but will be shunted callously, brutally, like the doomed individual on the auction block to a life of subsistence, not even mediocrity.

I admit from a Medium writer’s viewpoint that may have been an excessively long sentence, but so too will the life sentence being dished out by the soaring 1% ‘haves’ to the destitute and increasingly disenfranchised middle and lower income 90+%.

The practices which are taking on a global aspect to garner the most cryptocurrency to enable greater power will leave the uneducated, or those without opportunity to acquire education, to plummet through the cracks leaving a disparity and level of discrimination that would make the ‘hunger games’ a sad harbinger.

Is there an answer to stay off the segregation that will increasingly unfold between the two entities?

Perhaps, but I don’t know it. I am but an hedgehog.

What I do hope is that more quality writers, activists, playwrights and poets will make their voices heard to act as the conscience of society before another dooming separation of humanity occurs.

Thanks for reading.

You can find me on Substack where I have a newly birthed newsletter entitled Words, Wit and Wanderings which provides a fifteen minute fiction fix of novels excerpts, poetry and thoughts. A short novella was released there today. It’s free, hope to see you there.