Isn’t it amazing how much panic looks like rage?

                If I were authorized to speak for white, middle-aged American men what I would say would enrage many of them, not because it’s a lie, but because it’s a truth that terrifies us.  The fact is that we are terrified of the Michael Browns in our communities, the way the beneficiaries of Apartheid were actually terrified of those Apartheid oppressed, the way slave-owners in the old South were terrified of their slaves when their slaves outnumbered them, the way Pharoah was terrified of the fast-growing contingent they knew as The Children of Israel in Exodus.  There can be no logical thought process that dictates that making the lives of those on the ascendancy so miserable can slow our descent in any way.  But somehow that is what inevitably happens.

                The fact is that the world in which I grew up is dead.  It has been fatally wounded.  A teacher I loved was fond of saying, “The corpse just ain’t quit quiverin’ yet.”  Another funny way to put it is, “It hasn’t had the good grace to lay down yet.”  If there were any doubt that the Leave It to Beaver world I knew in my childhood is dead, the presidential election of 2012 went a long way to proving it.  White middle-aged men no longer run this country.  We haven’t for quite some time.  But we have been successful in pretending we still do.  Now as our pretense is being stripped from us, what is left to us is panic, brutal and bloody.  The statistics are damning and the outcome is inevitable.  The future of leadership in this country is no longer the face of a white man.  It is a woman, a person of color, someone whose eyes look foreign to us, whose background is different from ours.  It is a new world, a world in which we are no longer the lords of creation, and we don’t know how to do anything else.  We are terrified.  And, in our terror, we are reacting violently, with verbal violence, economic violence, and physical violence.

                This is not an excuse.  It is an explanation.  And it is an apology, at least from one middle-aged white man.

                It is also a prophecy.  We are not going to lose.  We have already lost.  The rest of the world has won.

                That is as it should be.  If we were wise, we wouldn’t just get out of the way, we wouldn’t just give up.  We would step up and help.  Then maybe the day would come soon when the whole world would be a more nearly safe place for all of us.  And maybe the inevitable retribution the rest of the world surely will exact of us wouldn't be as devastating to us.

                One last fact:  this is not the death of the American Dream.  This is the fulfillment of the American Dream.