Obama Assassination Causes Culturist Terror

The Barack Obama assassination plot terrified me. No I am not afraid for Obama. The culturist dynamic I saw begin today was worse than the death of any one man. And, don't get me wrong, I would not like to see him assassinated. That is third world style idiocy. We have a democracy. And as bad as I may think Obama is, as an American my job is to ride it out Presidents I don't like and wait for the next election. What I saw today concerned me more than the death of any one man would.

The media jumped to report on the white supremacist plot to assassinate Obama. But when you read below the headlines there was no "plot." An 18 year old and a 21 year old had a less than half-baked scheme. To get enough guns for it they were going to start by robbing a gun store - lotta luck with that! Then they were going to kill eighty-eight black Americans. Fourteen were to be by beheading. And, if they still hadn't gotten caught, they were going to assassinate Obama. This is poorly thought out juvenile fantasy, not a white supremacist plot.

I got my news of this from an black man who put the paper down on the bus as he was leaving. As I politely went for what he was leaving behind he saw me and gave me an unlikely combination of a sad, cold, disappointed and angry look. It was intense and meaningful enough that I noticed it. When I picked up the paper and saw the headline I understood. He had been reading about white people beheading black people. The feeling could not have been good. That moment sent race relations back fifty years.

The horrifying thing is that the media loves this sort of sensationalism. It could be that it confirms their leftist view of the world. It could be that hate simply causes such a visceral reaction that it makes people pay attention to the newspaper for once. If it bleeds it leads. Regardless of why they ran it on the front page of two local papers, the trend could be devastating. Imagine reading of white supremacists trying to kill black people every week. And if they print every teenage fantasy as a white supremacist plot, under an Obama presidency we could be in for a lot of such print.

The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did not have to set off days of rioting. No cultural event has significance apart from the interpretation of it. One man being shot led to so much mayhem because black power advocates and the left had spent years telling black Americans how oppressed they were. People such as Jesse Jackson still teach that anger, despair, bitterness, rage and even violence are justified by the brutality and injustice of our racist system. The reason you didn't have such rioting in the 1950s was that black Americans got a different message.

Compared to the rest of the world even our poorest citizens are well off. A huge portion of the world's population lives on less than a dollar a day. People come here because there is still some social mobility. The world is not poor because America is rich. Before the West, everyone was extremely poor. Now there are other opportunities with which to compare your station. Feeling rage over being in America is not an obvious choice. But that does not matter.

If the media continues feeding America pictures of white supremacists who hate black people, just like on my bus ride, bad feelings will rise. Just imagine if another ethnic group was targeting yours. And in a multicultural world, where we have made a fetish of differences, we have many ethnic boundaries to cross. Multiculturalism has put us on a powder keg. But if endless images of hate get capped by an assassination, we could have an explosion. Unfortunately, the media seems ready to prepare the fuse. They are taking us into a dark place. If they do not resist the temptation to sensationalize every teenager fantasy as evidence of a hateful racist white America, things could get ugly.