Cowboys and Indians

Discovering the true culprit in America has become difficult.  The Golden Age of Television (and early film) depicted a stark delineation between good and evil.  Cowboys vs. Indians.  Good Guys vs. Bad Guys.  White vs. Black. (and not negro black)  Light vs. Dark.  I Recently saw a Broadway musical whose subject was a family who embraced darkness.  Once it was called "Goth."  That title and Goth's idiosyncracies have Fallen by the wayside.  (like many American popular culture tendencies)  "Preppies."  "Jocks."  "Nerds."  America had harmless stereotypes of small subsets of youth culture.  It was a useful.  You had to define your own identity, your inner self, and make decisions about how you would live your life.  It was common that you may not be accepted into the group of your choosing, so you had to persevere.  When forced integration and resultant "bussing" was implemented into the public schools, I was bussed across town to the predominantly African-American junior high school.  It was in what could be considered an "inner city" neighborhood.  Because America no longer talks about these significant social issues, an inner city is an area that the middle class has abandoned for greener pastures.  It was "Fight or Flight."  That is an accurate summation.  Drugs, crime, and violence are endemic in inner cities.  There is little opportunity, nonexistent social mobility, and no future.  There is an area in Fayetteville, North Carolina that economically is classified this way.  If you hailed from this area, your chance of succeeding were almost zero.  Inevitably you were forced into drugs, crime, and their ensuing violence to support your habit.  Drugs are a major determinate of life in an inner city.  There isn't much else to do.  When you are addicted and craving a fix, your behavior is premeditated.  Get the drugs!  The methodology becomes inconsequential.  When I was bussed to Washington Drive Junior High School, I feared for my life every day for the two years I attended.  I never got into a fight, but often I was threatened, almost daily.  "Give me some money, boy!  "We're gonna kick your ass after school!"  Tough ghetto black students would skip class, hover in the halls, and terrorize the younger white junior high students.  There were plenty of tough white kids as well.  There were a lot in my neighborhood, and often I was bullied by them.  We had several feral packs of dogs which were unleashed and chased me from the bus stop home.  Often I was bitten.  (I still have a taste for the sanguine!) Going to and from school was the challenge.  At home with my school teacher parents, I was safe, creative, and productive.  I had neighborhood friends, and we played in the rain in the streets, explored the local woods, and rode mini bikes together.  I skateboarded.  (and this sport changed my life)  While I don't feel like it today, I was adept at navigating a "sidewalk surfer."  I worked on it, and I excelled.  It was able transportation from our house to  local Eutaw Shopping Center.  When they paved its large front parking lot, I was in skateboard heaven.  This was before America began a war on skateboarding and its youthful aficionados.  This was the late 1970's, and America was a more culturally adjusted nation.  A healthy, vigorous, emotionally exhausting activity is cathartic for youthful sexual energy.  For two decades America has been brainwashing our children by allowing them to sit in a chair and kill viciously in Japanese-created video games.  With little parental guidance how can our youth determine the difference between cyberdom and reality?  What is reality?  This violent behavior has inundated American life, and it is called mass shootings.   If our children physically were active expunging their repressed feelings and sexual longings, then maybe they would not manifest in violence.  If America returned to a less conservative and more traditional heterosexual existence, then maybe we wouldn't be killing each other.  We would be "making love." (or at least having fulfilling sex)  "Make love, not war," but we have divorced this hippie philosophy.  We have chosen to blur gender identities further complicating the complexities of puberty and adolescence.  I am beginning to understand cross-gender tendencies in most likelihood are promulgated by parents.  Once parents knew how to be strict and disciplinarian with their children.  Otherwise they were in a world of hurt with unruly recalcitrant children.  America has experienced a  failure of humanity, and the neglect of public education has proven that other supporting cultural habits such as family and religion are not enough to rear intelligent, moral, responsible adults.  We have succumbed to the "The Lord of the Flies" scenario.  We have digressed to the lowest tier of survival.  The jury still is out on why.  Without being preachy God's model of Adam and Eve sustains the test of time.  Life is not easy.  It is a struggle, but the rewards of human love are what enable us to endure.