There's still a lot of white people who are afraid of black people, because of what their ancestors did to black people in the past. They figure the blacks want revenge, that they will come back to rape their wimmen and plunder their loot. That's what the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the KKK, segregation, separate but equal, strict constructionism, state's rights, conservatism, the Tea Party and a good piece of American history and conflict is really all about. They are afraid.

Like fish swimming in clear water, Americans, even those who do not share this paranoid delusion, are unaware of the racist medium they are immersed in. For those not indoctrinated from birth in American culture, it is painfully obvious.

The white people burdened by this guilt and shame are now declining in both numbers and influence. The nation is slowly and painfully emerging fom its racist and nativist past, it is increasingly peopled by immigrants and their children--all of them invited to come here and do the work too unpleasant or too poorly paid for those already here. Now they are having the audacity to demand to be treated as full and equal citizens.

The declining caste, suddenly realizing they are a dwindling minority, finding themselves surrounded by dark complexions and incomprehensible languages, imagining themselves the victims of endless sinister plots and conspiracies, are terrified. They seem blissfully unaware of their complicity in their own genocide. Even their own children are sleeping with the enemy, finding it uncouth and unnecessary to embrace the prejudices of their fathers.

The most prestigious technical jobs are going to yellow people from Asia, brown hordes pour across the border reclaiming the lands stolen at bayonet point from their ancestors, and now, in the ultimate indignity and insult, a black President is in the White House. It is not so much the African in Washington they find troubling, its the fact that increasingly, nobody else seems to care that he is black. It just doesn't matter any more. They sense their time is coming to an end--not as a race, but as a culture.

That is the ultimate reason for this endless hate and the orgy of ignorance and fear that accompanies it. And this shooting in Florida has brought this dirty littly family scandal bubbling to the surface yet again. Racism, the first and final legacy of our Puritan forebears and founding fathers, is the curse on the national soul. Our country is like a beautiful woman with rotting teeth.

"It's afraid..."