Let's be realistic: Barry Bonds committed the crime of earning while black. There is no doubt that not a few well-liked white athletes used (and some still use) steroids: Gonzo, A-Rod, The Governator, everyone in Pro Wrestling and almost every college athlete in the big three sports have likely lined up at the pharmacists window. Every one of them has lied about it at some point publicly, and most will continue to do so.
This mess should have been about the war on drugs, and it should have been a soft slow rising puff-pitch, hanging out over the smash zone for an easy grand slam.
The white millionaires who managed this as a "bad press" event have missed every opportunity to further the "War on Drugs". They made it instead about personalities, and that made it about prejudice. The real impact of steroids is in our high schools, where a vast sea of trans-pubescent boys from every economic class seek the little edge that might get them into the heroic athlete game. This should have been about that. It is an enormous problem at that level.
Racism is a bigger problem and at a higher level. Racism has seen a nasty resurgence in recent years in the Homeland. American christianity and the white moralists in power have allowed this most unchristian value to creep back into casual acceptance. They have embraced it in many situations, such as this Bonds controversy, with the devil's tired old excuse that it is a minor and marginal occurrence.
The truth is: We embrace prejudice at these fringe moments not because it is too hard to stand against it for such a small gain, but because it is so easy to get away with it at such a broad level.
In related news, the courts are getting ready to free about 20,000 inmates early. They are almost entirely blacks and hispanics, who have been convicted of holding user (not dealer) quantities of crack or free base cocaine. They have all been sentenced to terms ten times as long as the white men caught with similar quantities of regular powder cocaine.
Sure, crack is much more severe than regular nose candy, (the Cowboy could tell you stories...) but there is something to the theory that we have established two justice systems in America: One to protect whites and wealthy folk from crime; and another "dark side" system to keep blacks and hispanics from rising up into the middle class. In the case of Bonds he faces the dark side not because HE deserves it, but because WE can get away with it.
Barry's crime is being almost as unlikeable as Brittany Spears, almost as wealthy and not nearly as white. The Cowboy doesn't gamble but if he did he would take 3 years in a federal prison with half off at the end as the over and under. Mr. Bonds will soon join the other 20% of young blacks who spend time in a white man's cage.
Someone in white conservative America seems to have decided that institutional Prejudice is no longer a Christian Sin and an American Crime. On main street U.S.A. people have gone back to the view that it is o.k. to be a passive witness to racism up until the point boxcars, machetes and crematoriums are involved.
As long as wealthy white partisan lawyers control the freedom of marginally criminal blacks and whites alike, Barry Bonds will face the Dark Side system, do real time and pay maximum"fines" despite being a hero to millions of father-starved children. Meanwhile Brittany Spears will face the Light Side. She will stay free to help news editors embarrass themselves, and she will remain a dangerous, confirmed drug using menace to her children and those around her.
America, you have a lot on your plate right now. A lot to pray for in the enclaves of fervent whiteness come to be called "Post 911 America", or as some call it, Das Homeland.
Every week Americans denigrate Jesus by praying, nationwide, for victory in games that are spiritually meaningless compared to the struggle against true darkness. Perhaps this week some of you might find time to Pray for one of those "activist" judges, or, as much of a long-shot as it sounds, pray for a white federal prosecutor who will sacrifice his rising status in the white man's party for a chance to be a gunless hero against institutional prejudice.
This matter is a foul, foul ball, and it will haunt us for many years to come.
Thanks for letting me try and express my concerns.
The Cowboy
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