Anticipation, Black and White

Ferguson: A city on edge and waiting - CNN.com:

I believe everyone is pretty much in agreement on what is being anticipated:

1. No indictment or "insufficient indictment" -- Massive riots, destruction of property, violence against police and potentially others. 
2. Indictment -- Some columns written by "right wingers", maybe a couple of strongly worded letters to the editor. 

From the boarded up buildings in Ferguson and the National Guard at the ready, this basic dichotomy seems impossible to argue with.

Is it "prejudice"? Certainly it is -- we have a lot of prejudice. If we see a giant explosion, we expect a "boom", if we drop a glass on a tile floor we expect it to break and if the Packers play the Vikings, we expect the Vikings to lose -- well, those of us that are sane at least.

Prejudice is a deeply wired expectation of events, scenarios, people, etc. It is "what we expect" -- and while it CAN  be wrong, it is very often right -- that is why we develop it in general, it is adaptive.  Humans are wired to have prejudice -- it allows us to react quickly with limited time for thought and is passed down from an adaptive history of reacting to the lion without taking the time to admire it's natural beauty. Those that lacked prejudice proved to be lunch.

So we are all sitting around with pretty much the same prejudice relative to Ferguson, and for some reason -- apparently because it is so widely shared by both blacks and whites, and because there is near universal belief in it being accurate, it is completely OK and even CNN can be open about it.

Day to day however, we are expected to act as if the dichotomy between actions one and two does not exist. In fact, if a black man like Cosby comments on the fact of it, he needs to be destroyed.

Those that don't believe we live in a crazy world are really not paying attention.

*** NOTE!!! Neither I or Cosby claimed that the current situation relative to 1 and 2 is immutable/innate -only that it is a reality TODAY. In fact, Cosby's "sin" is the declaration that it is NOT immutable, so it could therefore and in fact should be CHANGED ... however, if it WERE changed, then blacks might no longer be largely wards of TP, which is NOT allowed!

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