A USDA worker, Shirley Sherrod, speaks before a group and talks about her past in a racially unjust country, and about the things she had to go through in order to extend fair and equitable assistance to a white person. Some vile and unethical reporter posts and edited version of her remarks, one that only includes her struggles with her feelings around the racial inequity, it goes viral, and the poor woman is fired from her job.
Once the facts are determined, she's offered an apology. She's not offered her old job back, but another job with the USDA. What I don't understand is how a government employee could be summarily dismissed from her job without the benefit of due process, and without even the opportunity to address or defend herself from the charges against her. It's as if we live in the 1950s, but instead of the enemy being communism, it's now racism.
Any hint of racism, any suggestion of racism, is immediate grounds for being excised from American political life. Yet some individuals with incredibly narrow minds, whose ideas and opinions smack of racism, are in the media, assigned either to report or comment on current events. How can the utterances from their mouths (or writings from their blogs) be regarded as truthful? Why are they assumed to be? What has happened to the process of checking facts before passing them on?
In many instances, Americans seem to possess a lemming-like mentality. We unquestioningly follow the group, against the tide of reason, on to our collective death. We are a people who say we value freedom and individuality, yet in one of the most vital human arenas, that of the mind, we show ourselves to be merely mindless facsimiles of whatever is the latest or most sensational bit of news.
There appears to be a national intellectual erosion -- as a nation, we don't exhibit a fondness for math or the hard sciences like we used to, but we don't exhibit a fondness for philosophy, theology, or the discipline of the mind like we once did. It seems we're all flash -- our news is dominated by celebrity gossip, but we know little of the lives of average people beyond our borders. We cling to news about European style and fashion, while few of our children could locate European countries on a map. We hang on the antics of American sports stars, but other than when the US is a contender in the World Cup, know or care very little about the two most popular sports in the world (soccer and cricket).
For most of the time she existed, America was so incredibly prosperous, she could afford to live in a self-absorbed vacuum. The world is smaller now, and the cost of ignoring (or not being mindful of) one's neighbors is higher and higher. At some point, it seems to me, we have to buckle down and get to the basics: we have to learn to read and write and count. We have to learn to play together. We have to learn to be honest. We have to learn not to tell untruths and not to spread things we know to be untruthful. Perhaps we don't have to love one another, but we have to learn to treat one another with dignity and respect, understanding that they may look quite different than our preconceived notions of them.
I still think it's a wonderful thing to be an American, but I wonder what Ms. Sherrod's take is on it? I wonder what unthinkable atrocity we will next commit to continue to erode the meaning of that wonderful thing of being an American. I wonder how close we are to plunging over the cliff from sane and civil behavior, to a mindless plunge into the waters of self-absorbed national ignorance.
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