THE JENA SICKNESS-

A Real Noosance

By DW Foreign Policy Editor, Dusty Schoch

Nooses in the news are a nuisance…or maybe noosance. In any case, it’s all non-sense—way too much “ado about nothing”.  Having issued that silly stream of cultural commentary, I have to admit what follows may be as ironic a composition as I’m capable of composing. In taking time to contend that the ado is in fact about “nothing”, am I not in fact making more something of nothing?  You decide.

The point I’m compelled to make is this: What’s the best thing (I say the only thing) to do when the KKK gets a permit and schedules a parade or public demonstration in your town? There’s only one answer – Don’t go. That’s always the best response. Going out there and noticing these pathetic hoods--with their hoods in our hoods--is what they want us to do. Go there and express yourself righteously and emotionally and the event is—always-- liable to escalate into another Klan/Nazi shootout.

Klan marches and now “noose in tree hangings” are essentially the same – they are little ripples in very little pools of bigotry that big bigots like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would have us turn into  sunami surges of racial tide in order to garner more demagogic power for their own messianic arsenals (and tills). 

It appears that locally we’ve got some more little bigots  trying to copycat the original “Jena 6” thing—which is so much--so very too much--in the news.  The “Jena 6” noose affair is a parade of bigots that it seemed everyone on earth was determined to attend--20,000 to 40,000 in fact!

The best thing to do with a noose in a tree in a schoolyard is – take it down. Toss it in the trash  where the ones who hung it belong.   Making a great media “ado” about it is tossing B’re Rabbit in the Briar Patch.  It’s precisely what little bigots want---their several minutes of vain “glory”.  It also brings out from the woodwork and from under rocks all the demagogic  bigots who want to capitalize on the event by making it a media/photo op for their own lines of intolerant backlashing grandstanding.

When Al Sharpton , Rev Jesse , MLK III,  and rapper Mos Def throw a rally or march to protest  a “Jena 6” event, the best thing to do with that is what I’ve already recommended we do when the Klan marches….don’t go. These racially-self righteous rabble rousers are assigning to this Louisiana schoolyard teenager fight (over loops of ropes and street brawls over loops of ropes) epic historic status when in fact it’s simply a matter of some of Louisiana’s white and black bigots having a series of set-two’s over a series of silly issues (rights to sit under shade tree, rights to hang rope in same tree, rights to crash a private party, who did what with a shotgun-pulling incident, why 6 beat up one, and whether one aggravated assailant is getting due process in the process).

   “Jena 6” is Madison Avenue marketing moniker for an event about which the basic facts are not even in, likening it (with the media’s pet “Jena 6” moniker) prematurely to a historic sit-in such as the seminal “sit-in” by several (was it 6?) blacks at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.  Not even close!  The ‘60 Sit-Down in Greensboro was a one-sided and heroic display of pure black right vs pure white wrong. Freedom peacefully flexing its courage and might against previously-overwhelming forces of  prejudice and bigotry. The victors weren’t black heroes ; they were heroes of humanity.

This thing going on in Jena, Louisiana is a racist comedy of errors. Bigots and bigot supporters line both sides. Since that first black student sarcastically asked his principal about sitting under that tree with predominantly white students, and was told “yes”, one bigoted domino has flipped down another until what we have is in effect a cascading of one bigoted karmic evil after another. The loosely-related events all bear evidence that there has been angry and over-killing bigotry on both sides of all the events which have occurred in the wake of the initial “noosing” of the shade tree in Jena. For just a cursory treatment of the complexities, but one showing there are no true “heroes” or “victims” in this story of

Epic non-proportions, check out the complicated and still-cumulating account on line at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jena_Six

This—the seminal “racial act”-- was not a black person being hanged---It was a tree being roped. A “hate crime”? By no stretch of the legal imagination or book. An act in bad “taste” --like a KKK or Black Panther march? – Most certainly.  But 
“cause” for an entire nation at war in the Middle East to focus 80 percent of its media’s meandering focus on this little rippling of racial unrest in our nation of discontents approaching its second major economic depression in their short history?  I think not.

So, about this noose business in Jena, Louisiana, and this copycat noosing at Andrews High School in our own little North Carolina town---Let’s just think of it all as what it principally and proportionately is…just a little minor-league parade being conducted by some little minor-league bigots who—desperately—want our attention.

Let’s not give it to them.   Let’s just not go there.

Dusty Schoch
Sept. 24, 2007