Hello, again, everybody,

Wow, seed, you've articulated what I was feeling when I felt the song had militia/KKK connections. To wish for Lincoln to undo the Emancipation Proclamation is very scary.

Problems related to race, gender, and violence are foundational cultural issues of our time. The US was forged with racism, sexism, and violence as building blocks. These blocks still stand.

People still believe that Black people are inherently not as good as white people-not as smart, more criminal, etc. They justify these beliefs by consulting test scores, that measure how much poor urban minority children know of what's taught about European culture in private and suburban schools.

They also consult court and prison statistics, which are based on how many alleged criminals are arrested by majority white police forces all over this country. Many black neighborhoods became high-crime neighborhoods because in earlier eras, it was considered to be the "proper" or "acceptable" place for many criminal ventures. Allowing drugs, prostitution, numbers, etc, in black neighborhoods, and directing whites who sought these things to the black neighborhoods, kept white neighborhoods "safe".

Using these faulty measuring sticks gives people very unsound ideas to base their beliefs on. They wind up believing that the group with the history of the most unjust, inhumane, violent behavior: the history of kidnapping people, taking them thousands of miles from their homes, holding and using the power of life, death, maiming, rape, etc, over them, denying them the right to speak their languages, maintain their religious and cultural traditions, form families and raise their children to adulthood, deny them the right to learn to read and write, etc, etc, etc, is now believed to be the victim of the group it has so horribly oppressed. Meanwhile the education, justice, and economic systems are set up to perpetuate INequalities.

You cannot just look at certain incidences and experiences without looking at the history of how things came to be set up the way they are. These problems have complex historic causes, and short sighted solutions like longer jail terms and more executions do not solve any of them. People of good will must look at how we can begin to level the playing field, giving genuinly equal opportunities to all. We must seek other solutions besides execution and imprisonment, which do nothing to heal our nation, any more than the whip, the chain, and the lynch rope did.

Trusting that you are indeed people of good will,

I remain thoughtfully yours,

Mary McCaffrey