Why Can't Anyone GO FIRST?

Jean Paul Marat posted a comment to yesterday's harangue: "Why do we keep waiting for a spark? This spark never seems to come. Why not just act already?"

The White man has many character-related problems, but I think he's put his finger on one of the central ones. White men seem to have completely lost the ability to GO FIRST on anything.

We used to be leaders in everything. Bear in mind that we are the race who piled into the Conestoga wagons and lit out for California and Oregon across lethal and uncharted plans, as recently as 150 years ago, without so much as a map, never mind a Motel 6. A few of us still have the moral fiber to still be good followers, good sergeants--but we produce no captains capable of leading a charge, and certainly no generals capable of planning a campaign any more.

It is true that we have largely lost our physical courage, but you still see occasional remnants of that in White firefighters and cops and those poor dumb bastards who ended up in Iraq because all the entry level jobs in their little home towns were taken by Mexicans, and they had no choice but the army if they wanted a paycheck and even rudimentary benefits.

I think with a little practice we could recover our courage. But what we can't seem to recover is our initiative. I have had more than one person comment who attributes the White man's failure to act as being due not to cowardice so much as pee-pure laziness, and I think there's a lot to that.

Ever since I completed The Brigade in December, I have been confronted with an odd phenomenon: all kinds of strange people whom I do not know have been trying to get me to call them on the telephone. (Not asking for my number; they want me to call them so that the LUDs will show that I initiated the call.) It's usually pretty clear from the contents of their e-mails or their chats what they want to talk about. These yo-yos quite seriously expect me to telephone them and talk about committing serious felonies on the telephone with people whom I do not know and never met before in my life.

I've simply been assuming that these people are especially incompetent police informers or cops (your taxpayer dollars in action!) But maybe not. As the incidents keep on recurring, as people read The Brigade, I'm getting a slightly different impression as to what may be going on. Judging from the tenor of their e-mailed comments (FTR, I'm not nutty enough to call total strangers and talk about overthrowing the government, so knock it off, will you, guys?) I get the impression that they want, that they need to hear my voice to fulfill some deep psychological need in the White man--the need to get permission.

The White man has grown up in a quietly totalitarian society based on the corporate workplace where, in some cases, you literally need to get permission from the boss like some shamefaced schoolchild raising his hand in order to go to the bathroom. The White man has grown up in a society where he is accustomed to being not only told what to do for eight hours of the day, but told what to think by the television; he has become accustomed to allowing a box with an electronic screen to make his moral judgments for him. He has completely lost the ability to think and to act without permission from someone, the boss or the electronic box or someone or something else he has been conditioned to hold in authority.

Now there is another box with an electronic screen in front of the White man (this one) where he can at least find a few dissenting opinions, but the problem is reversed; it's TMI, too much information, too much choice, too many things that try to make him think and make the White man's head hurt. The White man can't think on his own any more; the attempt confuses him and upsets him.

The White man knows that things in this society are badly, terribly wrong. He gets it every time he pulls up to the gas pump or goes through the grocery store checkout line and hears the gabble of Spanish. His own primal, instinctive urge to strike out and smash Barack Obama's grinning monkey-face to a pulp with a hammer tells him this, not to mention the entire lifetime of crap he has put up with from America's swaggering bullies in black skins and black suits.

But the White man can't seem to GO FIRST any more. He can't act without permission. It's the way he's been conditioned, the way he's been socially engineered. He has to have someone hold his hand, and stroke him, and tell him it's really okay after all for him to think and feel these things that the television tells him he shouldn't. These weird people may well be trying to get me to call them because they want my permission to do the right thing.

But that's not the way it works. A White man (as opposed to a mere White male) does the right thing not because he has asked or obtained anyone's permission, but because it is right. And he doesn't need an electronic box or a talking head on a cable show or some blow-dried, bouffant-haired preacher to tell him what is right. The instinctive knowledge of what is right should be imprinted indelibly on his genes.

It's still there, guys. What you need. Seek for it within yourselves, and you'll find it.