White America Couldn't Handle What Black America Deals With Every Day (@henryrollins)

More truth from Henry Rollins at LA Weekly:

Things are bad, but I would posit that they have been this way for as far back into American history as you want to go. What has changed is the amount of information available to the average citizen. Thanks to cellphones and people employing social networking to spread news quickly, what goes on minute to minute has crossed the line into overload.

And (emphasis below is mine):

The despicable litanies of willfully ignorant denial and misinformation I have heard spouted in the last several days by pieces of shit like Rudy Giuliani all but ensure that things will get worse. The mainstream media outlets allow this utter crap to slide by unchallenged and, by doing so, legitimize falsehoods that could get people killed. Ratings-based, 24/7, for-profit media is the complete death of true journalism and a catapult for propaganda.

The reason this ratings-driven news industry succeeds is our own laziness, and we get what we collectively deserve. Very few of us seem to ask tough questions or do much critical thinking or even our own thinking. So many people want to be told what to think. So for all these folks, there is an entire industry waiting to serve whatever they want to believe, all day long. It’s not strange, then, that journalists too often shirk responsibility for accurate reporting and real analysis. They are satisfying demand. It is certainly not all news organizations and journalists, but it is becoming troublingly widespread.

And it happens on both sides, the political left and right. Willful ignorance has become universally desired. The actual truth is under-appreciated. And the robots, oh, the robots are coming.

Anyway, the focus on the media is not the primary theme of the Rollins article. The media’s loss of its shit and society’s acceptance of that is a theme I’m hung up on, so I pulled it out and highlighted it, maybe even dwelled a little. The article is really about prejudice and our split society:

If white America experienced a fraction of what black America deals with regarding law enforcement, incarceration, the court system, employment and countless other facts of life, they would immediately and collectively lose their minds.

We who are not in that America have had no idea what it’s like. But now, because of photo and video capabilities of mobile phones combined with social media, we are getting an awful glimpse.

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