Until A White Man Has A Problem

The tendency armed white people (like the police) have shown recently towards killing unarmed black people in America has put me in mind of Canada's native people. The problems, troubles, crises, injustices and apathy the First Nations are subjected to regularly turn up on mainstream (read: white) news, and yet are never actually addressed by government. For generations.

The reason is obvious. A problem isn't a problem until a white man has it. Aboriginal Canadians are not a significant financial or voting base, so until the problems of the native community matter to non-native voters or backers, no politician has to campaign on them. Should non-native (mostly white) voters ever say to politicians vying for power, "look, this shit has got to stop. You better fix it because poverty, suicide, disease, and injustice are just not fucking acceptable in this country," things might change. Until aboriginal issues start to matter to non-aboriginals, nothing is likely to change.

In South Africa's apartheid age, sanctions worked because they meant whites pressured the government - a government that was elected by them and dependant on them - for change, because they couldn't do business. It was costing white South Africans, establishment South Africans, money and inconvenience - in other words, the problems of nonwhites (powerless and poor) in S.A. became a problem for whites (privileged and not poor) in S.A. That's my theory, at least.

How does a mistreated group: black, female, native, French speaking, Spanish speaking, immigrant, poor, make progress on a grievance? Perhaps when their problems become problems for the empowered groups. Through violence? Maybe selectively, but embrace mass violence and it becomes easy for them. The answer to violence is violence, and you know who wins that.

Social action leads to politics, but politics is where the bottleneck is. How many policies that large majorities in the country support and want have no chance of ever happening? Many, very many.

George Bernard Shaw said that as long as we have prison cells it matters little which one of us sits in them. The question is how do you get people who don't experience poverty to see poverty as a problem. Or people who don't experience racism, or may benefit from racism, to see racism as real. Change requires a critical mass of people - but not necessarily a majority. If the persecuted and the poor where not so powerless they would not be so persecuted and poor, and if the were not so persecuted and poor they would not be so powerless.

The system is self-perpetuating, and that is also it's weakness, because entropy applies to everything and there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. Every civilization eventually winds down and our civilization will inevitably be replaced by something we cannot now imagine. What we do now, be it clean energy, peacemaking, environmentalism, equal rights, or justice in the system, we hope influences that change. Let us hope for a soft landing, a positive change - from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, not from Rome to the Dark Ages. But you never know.