Monthly Archives: April 2023

America has become a society of rage

This rage is driven by racism, political divisions, cultural differences, and for-profit industries that promote violence.

The evening news on one local channel in San Antonio recently led with three stories about road rage, one involving a promising young college student.

Stories appearing in Yahoo News over the past weekend carried reports about current and former sports figures arrested for violent behavior.

Our society has become so infested with rage that too many athletes feel that violence, whether mimic or actual, enhances their “brand.”

In other words, they are not “for real” unless they can shoot a gun like they shoot a basketball or hit their partners like they hit baseballs.

Rage seeps into the very fabric of society. It stains and ultimately rots the threads that hold the society together.

A 16-year-old Black teenager—the kind of kid everyone would be proud to have as a son—mistakenly walked up to the house of an 84-year-old White man in Kansas City looking for his brother and was shot, and seriously wounded, by the embittered racist old White man. The Black kid survived; the old White man went to jail.

The incident has triggered a “national discussion” about race in America—especially after it was reported that three White families refused to help the wounded young Black teenager seeking assistance.

Rage leads to some White people in our military betraying our county to declared enemies who are not only encouraged but actually praised for their traitorous actions by lunatic right-wing Congressional leaders.

That is the fabric of our rage-driven American society today.

So, if a young college student or a person of different color cuts off an already pissed off driver, he (much more often than a she) feels he has a license to shoot and kill the offending driver with one of the dozens of guns he keeps handy for such a moment.

In Texas, White men, especially those with former military or law enforcement backgrounds, have a license to either run over or shoot to kill any Black Lives Matter protestors that stand in his way.

In Ohio, White police officers can shoot an unarmed Black man 46 times for a traffic violation without any accountability.

More than half of all murders committed in the U.S. each year are committed in the South—the former Confederate States of America. Most of those murders are not committed by “bad guys” with a gun but rather by “good guys” with a gun who let their rage make them feel they have a license to kill.

Rage is a cancer in society. It awakens the worse demons in all of us. And it will consume our society.

These three words are frequently employed to describe a situation in which justice has been debased or wrongfully withheld;

What was done to Lydell Grant in Houston, Texas in 2010 was a travesty of justice. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for stabbing a man to death in a barroom.

Grant was wrongfully convicted.

He was innocent.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said as much in 2021 when the court declared Grant “actually innocent” for the barroom killing. DNA evidence and a confession by the real killer unequivocally confirmed his innocence.

Grant’s exoneration gained national media attention because of the travesty of justice in his wrongful conviction. The State of Texas tried to make amends for the seven years he spent in the state’s prison system by awarding him $1 million in compensation.

As of this month, Texas had paid Grant $317,000. The state still owes him $673,000.

Prison, standing alone, teaches an inmate nothing. Whatever an inmate gains or loses in prison depends exclusively upon the endeavors, mentally and physically, they undertake while incarcerated.

The success or failure to those endeavors will be determined by two frames of mind.

First, a reckless, irresponsible reaction to people, events and circumstances that percolates throughout any given incarcerated day which inevitably lead to negative consequences. Or, second, a measured, self-discipline reaction to all the myriad situations that arise in an angry, hostile, fucked-up environment which brings an acceptable level of tolerance. In other words, your mouth stays closed when every fiber in your brain screams “fuck you!”

One is lack of control, the other is control.

I don’t know what kind of inmate Grant was during his seven years in prison. I just know he was a former inmate given $1 million dollars and “we’re so sorry” pass from the State of Texas upon his release from prison.

So what did Grant do with that $317,000?

He bought a goddamn gun he used to kill a 33-year-old man in a “road rage” incident earlier this month in Houston.

Texas still owes him that $673,000 that it will have to continue to pay him while he awaits disposition of the road rage killing. If convicted, most of the remaining $673,000 will most probably go to court costs and victim restitution. He will not enjoy it in prison, for sure.

Did prison damage Lydell Grant?

I doubt it.

I’m sure that with a little cache of money in the bank, a socially inherited right to feel victimized, and a desire (not need) to open or conceal carry a firearm as a license to shoot the fuck out of anyone who cut him off in traffic, the “prison experience” had nothing to do with Grant’s decision to kill that man because of road rage.

Prison is a beast with a lot of warts. I don’t think “road rage” is one of them. That wart belongs strictly to stupidity.

Catholics and evangelicals form the nucleus of Christianity in the United States.

Both Christian entities are extremely pro-life. They preach the theology of protecting the unborn in the name of God’s only begotten son.

It is from these religious ranks, like White Christian Nationalist Marjorie Taylor Green, that promote the outlandish—obscene actually—political mantra that “Democrats are pedophiles.” The Florida politically conservative “war on Disney,” led by its Gov. Ron DeSantis, is based on this belief expressed by a right-wing White Christian Nationalist and conspiracy theorist Candace Owen in a tweet:

“”Child groomers and pedophiles.  They (Disney) have now openly admitted  they have a not so secret agenda with your [Christian] children.  This is the death of Disney.”

But what are the facts?

A recent report issued by the Maryland Attorney General’s Office list more than 150 priests accused of sexually molesting more than 600 children with the near-blessing of the local Catholic Diocese for decades. This latest report is just one of the hundreds of other reports released in the U.S. (and around the world) chronicling the history of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.

In 2018, the Washington Post carried a major story about “the epidemic of denial about sexual abuse in the evangelical church.” The author of the article, Joshua Peace, made this observation:

“So many Christian churches in the United States do so much good—nourishing the soul, comforting the sick, providing services, counseling congregants, teaching Jesus’s example, and even working to fight sexual abuse and harassment. But like in any community of faith, there is also sin—often silenced, ignored and denied—and it is much more common than many want to believe. It has often led to failure by evangelicals to report sexual abuse [including that of children], respond appropriately to victims and change the institutional cultures that enabled the abuse in the first place.”

That means, as evidenced by the latest Catholic Church child sex abuse report in Baltimore Maryland, that while literally tens of thousands of standard-bearer Catholic Christians and Evangelical Christians fight and protest for the rights of unborn children, they are simultaneously sexually abusing, and terrorizing, the very children they saved from abortion.

There are more Christian child sexual abusers in the nation’s churches every Sunday than all the “liberal Democratic” Disney executives who may be “grooming” children for pedophilia.