After ten years of watching the racist, ignorant, arrogant bullies and having to swallow my crow with a side of humble pie on an almost daily basis, it is bittersweet to observe my Republican/Conservative friends and associates watching the carpet roll up on them.  I identify with their feelings of alienation and willingness to imagine a world where they can continue to practice their delusional thinking and beliefs.My tolerance has been stretched to a thinness I never realized possible.  Even so, it is clear to me now that language and abstract logic does not serve us at these ragged edges of human experience.  For there is a difference between tolerance and tolerating the intolerable, and several times in the process my ability to tolerate the intolerable broke through into full blown rage at specific ideas and the individuals attempting to wield them.So we have a novel situation where the feelings are shared and shareable, but the contexts are almost totally different.

After a couple of personal experiments, it is clear to me that the climate is very volatile and unstable.  People are afraid of what is and what might be.  Civil War is not out of the question here.  It would be disorganized and frenetic at first, perhaps owing to the FBI fetid attempts at infiltrating the militia movement during the 1990's, but it could reconstitute itself in those states where guns are liberally available.

Not everyone knows that there was an incident over the weekend in Paris, Texas, that was eerily reminiscient of what took place in Jasper several years ago.  A black man was literally dragged to pieces by a truck.We have enough angry black folks fresh from the trauma of Katrina and Ike who are aching for leadership and meaning -- a vacuum of power exists among them.  It would not matter if that leadership were white or black, provided that the racial sensitivity was there.It seems that whenever serious work has to be done in this country, we have always counted on black people to accomplish the heavy lifting for us. 

I, as a white person with some background in the black communities of the 1960's, for one, am appalled by the apathy, and the antipathy, of my fellow caucasians.Polite company is becoming scarce in the South.  I do not believe it is a mistake that the first deployment of troops on American soil has taken place in Georgia.  If racial bigotry were gold, Georgia would be richer than California ever has been or will ever be.However, I would look to the Texas coast in the Ike-devastated areas bereft of any federal support or, most probably, any ability to vote..the climate of unrest could easily be stoked into an explosion of racial violence.