I'm curious to wonder why this is being made out to be the state of the nation, rather than being made out as the state of the individual?
As long as we keep addressing these situations with blanket assumptions on race, racism will continue to grow.
Regarding this specific case, you're likely looking at and older person suffering from some form of dementia ( which causes feelings of paranoia) who grew up during a period where racism was more prevalent. As an individual, Lester does not represent the majority of white America. Nor is every black person a criminal waiting to break in to your home.
How about an Era of individual accountability?
While I agree with you, and "individual accountability" sounds great, it's not going to happen, I don't think.
The US used to pride itself on individualism, whereas I see that as having a healthy balance of said individualism, but also not losing sight of the group, or America as a nation.
What seems to be becoming increasingly a problem is we've lost sight of any group ethic, and focus on the individual exclusively, which is selfishness. Kids are raised to be selfish, and think the universe revolves around them and only them. Now you throw in social media, and the front that people put up, which makes others either jealous or wanting to mimick said behavior, and it's a recipe for disaster. Having 2 second attention spans doesn't help either.
Now, what I'm getting at is this extends well beyond the school shooters and other dregs of society. Look at American politicians. Very, very few are in it solely for the 'public servant' aspect, or trying to do some good. That may be one aspect of why they get in to politics, but more often than not they are making decisions that help themselves and their pocketbooks FIRST, and the constituents second. The fact that we have essentially legalized bribery in the form of a corporate lobby, and/or campaign contributions, is so ingrained in to our culture that we don't even think twice about it and nobody thinks anything is wrong with that. You mix this legalized bribery with the self centric attitude that most Americans have, and it's not good for the nation or the people living under those people's whims.
Can you be surprised? Absolutely not. American politicians were for the most part raised with American values (individualism above all else), educated in American institutions, etc., so it should be no surprise that they will behave in a selfish manner and do things that benefit themselves first and foremost before anything else.
And both parties display this behavior, as it is a human trait that has been amplified and glorified in the modern age. People look at greed and selfishness as good things - in fact they aspire to have those traits. That's exactly why Trump became a thing.
Understanding all of that tells me that nothing will change, because the people with the power to make significant changes would be doing so against their own best self interests. Sure, minor change is ok. Even major changes to shit that doesn't really mean much may fly (ie abortion, culture wars, etc.). But you are not going to see politicians or leaders advocate or suggest in anything that would disrupt the status quo, because the status quo feeds their selfishness. For things like lobbying, Democrats may offer up some half assed restrictions, but nobody is suggesting that the corporate lobby be eradicated.
Until that corporate lobby is eradicated, it's no different than physical force of 100's of years ago when the man with the biggest club always wins. Humans simply are smart enough to have figured out they can accomplish the same thing using economic force, and it doesn't take on the appearance of bashing people over the head for not complying to rules/society/laws. Instead, America's forefathers were very aware that themselves as a land owning minority, needed protection from everyone else. So we have protection of the minority against the tyranny of the majority - which is nothing to do with some altruistic value that the little guy must be protected. It was about protecting themselves and their property. And they were able to get away with it by appearing to make concessions to the common person (ie, rights, voting, etc). When in actuality, they always retain control, or allow for loopholes to give 'the minority' a different set of rules than the rest of us. That's why we have a 'representative democracy' - key word, representative. That's why very wealthy people, more often than not, are not convicted of crimes as much as someone who can't afford a clever lawyer (assuming both are being charged with a crime).
It's brilliant - you have what we call legislation (civil, criminal, even taxes) that is purposely so sophisticated, yet ambiguous enough to allow someone with the proper means to do so to interpret that legislation in their favor.
![[<diva2]](https://i.imgur.com/MGiu8g2.png "Diva1 [<diva2]")
