Black Community Opinions
Local Voices: Prejudices Bullying Creates and Feeds ISIS
By Sean C. Bowers
For years we have wondered why groups like ISIS gain traction, without looking at our role in their uprising. Objective self-evaluation has never been one of America’s strong suits.
The more we, as a nation, try to take advantage of or profit from other countries (as is the American way) the more we drive them into a third-world status and mental mindset. That very “we-think-we’re-better-than-them” outlook is at the heart of the matter.
We have the potential to be the greatest nation on earth, but unfortunately we are using the wrong judging scale as to how much better and superior we are to other nations, instead of how we could be the nation that uplifts all others equally.
When these countries reach their boiling point because of the generations of covert operations, invasions, and wars we have brought upon them, they decide to use our openness as a society as a weapon against us.
Their mindset is simple: if they can’t live in peace then neither can anyone else. Since part of their hatred for us comes from our technological advances, it is almost as if they won’t be happy or satisfied until everyone worldwide lives in dirt floored crumbling hutted war zones as they do.
This exported attitude of American (white) supremacy is not just sent off-shore. It is internally vented and force-fed to all immigrants who come to America for a better life. It has and is still being fed to black America as it has been for hundreds of years. It should be noted that immigrants to Europe face these same issues when they arrive from Africa or the Middle-East. When they encounter our even stronger “Home Grown” hate-triot-ism, they become the perfect ISIS American recruit candidates. We feed the machine of war and hate by the number of those we bully, beat, berate, without an even debate.
Those disenfranchised loners whom nobody befriended or took the time to get to know are time bombs waiting to explode. All ISIS has to do is troll the Internet, putting up websites pointing out how America has failed them, us and everybody and these unhappy angry people feel they’ve found their calling and purpose. They plot their fifteen minutes of fame/ horror/ jihad on the innocent, justifying it in the name of a God (who was peaceful) but whose words have been twisted to more closely match and align with their death and destruction rhetoric and temperament.
Today’s international elementary school age students here in America are tomorrow’s potential bombers, shooters and suicide terrorists, waiting to be radicalized and polarized against America and the American way. They do this as much for what we stand for, but they also do these things because of what America purports to stand against, but in reality, does not.
America is fickle with the nickel. If and when we see an advantage or profit to be made, we will move mountains (see the Panama Canal) to make it happen. But when it comes to spreading the wealth or a higher quality of life worldwide, something always gets lost in translation; the devalued foreign currency is just not the same. America knows right from wrong, but often loses her way when it comes to the fair proper exercise and execution of nation building (rebuilding.)
This happens because in our infinite self-aggrandizing wisdom, we always think we can super-impose our laws, judgments and values onto other people, other countries, and other religions. Americans and Christianity have some real soul-searching to do to overcome the crusader desire to convert the entire non-Christian world.
Conversely, the Muslim world and religion have to do some soul searching of their own as to whether or not they want the violent extremist fraction of their people to rule and set examples for them and for the world.
Both sides should unite about the proper treatment of over half the world’s population, WOMEN! In America we don’t pay women equally and we don’t have a moral leg to stand on, having only given women the right to vote one hundred and three years ago in 1912. In the Muslim world, women and girls are not allowed education, equal rights, choices and opportunities to name a few.
Both sides could make substantial positive progress by addressing women’s rights/ and women’s pay, paying it forward for all future generations of daughters, sisters, mother, aunts, cousins, wives and leaders. Women are the reproductive backbone of the race. Solutions and answers start and end with womankind.
Why should anyone be a second-class citizen of the world, their race, and a religious prisoner and because of their sex? Will we feed more lies to women and ourselves or will we feed them or their sons to ISIS one at a time?
Sean C. Bowers is a local progressive youth development coach, author and poet, who has written for the New Journal and Guide for sixteen years. His recent book of over 120 NJ&G articles detailing the issues is available via e-mail at V1ZUAL1ZE@aol.com and he does make large-scale solutions presentations upon request.
