Those in our great and wealthy nation who are cruelly fucked need to understand it is usually nothing personal.  Truly.  Nobody gives a shit about you as an individual, that is what the cruel part of cruel fucking is all about.  You as a person are erased, but it’s nothing personal.   The mistreatment was not meted out to you as an individual, so don’t get so individually indignant, man.   Let us look at the case of American blacks, for example.  Let’s take a short historical look at this cruel fucking, see if we can put it in perspective.

We should all be able to agree that the deliberate murder of perhaps ten million African ancestors during the mass kidnapping of slave laborers to the New World was an inhuman atrocity.   As bad as the Holocaust with a capital H was, and as many millions murdered, the sickening carnage of the “Middle Passage” makes any decent person want to vomit as much as the black and white film of rubbery skeletal cadavers being dumped down chutes in the death camps does, or Henry Morgenthau’s contemporary accounts of the nauseating brutality of the genocide Turks inflicted on the Armenians during WW I, or any modern-day version, for that matter.   There is no comparing mass murders, they are all the same.   Done with that argument, OK?

We can agree, one would hope, that slavery was an unmitigated evil that caused irreparable harm, while creating and concentrating vast wealth, and led eventually to a cataclysmic outburst of mass psychosis in which three quarters of a million, mostly poor, Americans lost their lives in combat, (more than the total of American dead in all other wars combined)  another quarter million dead civilians, not to mention the countless maimed, amputated, brain damaged.  The war was fought, as most are, to preserve the privilege of the wealthy who stood to lose a fortune, and their genteel way of life, if slavery was abolished.  There was talk, for a time, about 40 acres and a mule for every freed slave, to minimally compensate them for their centuries of unpaid labors and to put them on their feet as free families.   Nothing was ever done about that, there were soon much more pressing problems for America to deal with.   After the war the nation went into the worst economic depression in its hundred year history, at the end of which the robber barons made untold monopoly fortunes.  For the masses of all colors — mostly misery.  

The only good thing about the Civil War– the end of slavery.  The 13th Amendment made slavery illegal under the U.S. Constitution, except that the Supreme Court quickly put the 14th Amendment, enacted to protect the rights of freed slaves, into a judicially crafted ninety year deep sleep.  While the 14th Amendment slumbered the Ku Klux Klan put on the kind of horror show that hate-filled sore losers with weapons are apt to put on, if not restrained by the law.   A century of terrorism, protected by state laws upheld by the Supreme Court’s perverse 1873 14th Amendment ruling (the resurrected 14th has been in place now for fifty years and tens of thousands of cases brought under it), which gave the former rebel states, who had taken up arms against the nation they seceded from, the last word on the treatment of its citizens, including former slaves.

It is not surprising that the lot of former slaves was hard in the former Confederacy.  

A mass migration northward towards decent paying industrial jobs resulted in a large gathering of the descendants of slaves in the ghettos of major cities.  The decent paying industrial jobs eventually were sent places where the corporations could pay the workers less and therefore keep more of the profits.  Ghettos traditionally have the worst city services, worst schools, highest crime, highest unemployment rates, most repressive policing, and currently– a school to prison pipeline.  And as prisons are increasingly privatized, finally a profitable use for the bulk of these disaffected, often angry, sometimes violent, sons and daughters of the ghettos.  

So while some of us felt proud recently that America had its great post-racial photo-op, a very accomplished and unique half-black man is currently president, it is good to keep things in perspective.   It’s not post-racial in ghettos and housing projects, or in prisons, or on Ivy League campuses or in corporate board rooms.  This country is as divided in many ways, including matters of basic civil rights and race, as it was immediately prior to the Civil War.  Millions of Americans, of all races and every national origin, are simply, how to put this tastefully?… fucked.  

People who are the recipients of sex they did not consent to are often deeply disturbed by the experience.   That said, if it is done on an institutional level, and you live in a democracy where, unless your point of view has billions to spend selling itself via free speech, you have almost no voice as an individual and you must not take it personally.  You really must not take it personally, man.

Really, I mean… you know what I’m saying?