Civil Rights & Liberties or "White Privileges"? Re: Green Party official busted at gunpoint

Mina Kumar wejazzjune at hotmail.com
Sun Nov 4 12:39:10 PST 2001



>From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>Subject: Re: Civil Rights & Liberties or "White Privileges"? Re: Green
>Party official busted at gunpoint
>Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2001 15:08:33 -0500
>
>>>Why is it wrong to be or act "surprised" when you lose pieces of your
>>>civil rights & liberties?
>>
>>I think it's the implication that you haven't been observing what
>>has been happening to the people around you, or that you didn't
>>expect that what happens to them would happen to you.
>
>Well, the same can be said about many Americans' responses to the S11
>bombings: surprise, grief, shock, outrage, etc. Perhaps you may say
>it is "naive" to be surprised that "what happens to them would happen
>to you," but still it doesn't seem to me that you can equate being
>naive with being wrong.

In fact, the same *has* been said about many Americans' surprise. I think I mentioned that a friend of mine who had been on Wall Street on the day of the attacks turned to me that night and said, "Now America knows how the rest of the world feels."

And I'm not at all talking about grief, which can exist in the complete absence of surprise. I'm talking about a certain kind of naivete which is an exercise of privilege. Whether this has been exemplified in the Oden case, I'm not sure, but it is exactly what motivated Bush and Co. to talk about the End of American Innocence.


>Besides, leftists can gain no political
>mileage by saying that "you should have seen it coming" in either the
>Oden case or the S11 bombings case, so why bother?

Viz. S11, because there's only so much of "We never attack civilians" and "they hate us because we're free and democratic" and "America has now seen evil" that I can take before my gag reflex self-activates.

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