Letters to the Editor
-
Perception is Everything
But not all perception is incidental. There is a massive grass-roots, organized effort to distort the perceptions of those who are most susceptible to having their perceptions warped: those with little to no exposure to the groups they are being taught to mistrust and, ultimately, to hate. This is not happening by some essentially benign accident. It is carefully planned, worked and played out by a very worrisome movement among the far right, and while Bill O'Reilly may actually be stupid enough to be a pawn of the movement it seems infinitely more likely that he is a part of it. For that matter so would the Fox network executives who keep his potentially-exlpoding head yakking on the screen.
O'Reilly's intent, on this occasion, ran into a brick wall in the form of fellow media pimp Rivera, who coincidentally happened to be right this time. What O'reilly was saying was utter "bull." However, he had carefully chosen his example, an illegal alien, which was like a gift from the heavens and argues strongly against the dumbshit defense.
It doesn't matter now, because the damage has been done. Rivera, correct as he may have been and righteously indignant as he may have been, fed right into the conspiracy theory ("They" are taking over - just like blacks before them and Jews before that) simply by virtue of his name. Among the ill-informed (that is to say the brainwashed Fox viewership) a man with the name Rivera is naturally going to take the part of the evil intruders. O'Reilly, on the other hand, is perceived by these people (and they are legion) as the beseiged spokesman for the "good, decent, ordinary men and women" who comprise what today passes for a lynch mob and one day soon may actually revert to lyncherdom.
It does nothing to help the cause that the accused was in the US illegally. However, this is the red herring which O'Reilly successfully rubbed all over Rivera, who otherwise acquitted his point exceedingly well. It's lost on the Fox clientele.
The finest point that can be put on this is that we who consider ourselves intelligent and good need to work toward bridging the gap between critical thinkers and those who believe illegal immigrants are natural-born criminals, blacks are lazy and shiftless, and Jews control the media and the banks (or is it the Freemasons?). The left has helped create this pocket of intransigent ignorance by showing its disdain for those who aren't quite up too speed on the hipness curve. By looking down on the more concrete thinkers, the earnest-but-mistaken part of our nation, by making them fair game for all sorts of ethnic and social ridicule and disdain, the "enlightened" among us have helped create a virtual civil war in which aliens, illegal and otherwise, have become the latest pawn.
We need to take our ethics and our love to the street; not just for the downtrodden Latino or black or Muslim or Jew or sexually non-traditional person, but to all persons. Start talking now, and not down but across, or we will all find ourselves in a cross-cultural brawl that will make the Rivera-O'Reilly fiasco look like Abbott and Costello - which, upon reflection, it did.