[Corey's Digs] I have to admit that my skin color has been a problem for me throughout my life: it’s pale, prone to blushing and gets incinerated by the sun in the blink of an eye. I envy anyone who has a complexion that isn’t reactive and can handle sunlight. All other things being equal, my friends of Kenyan and Caribbean origin really have it easy.Some of the most wholesome and selfless women I have met have had Caribbean, Indian and South American roots: generous, warm and caring to such an extent that you enter a private reality in their presence — of safety and nurture and self-worth. That’s not to say that I haven’t had negative experiences with people of other ethnicities: I had a Nigerian flatmate once who hated me on sight, because no doubt he took me for a middle class white boy who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. A drugged up black guy threatened to stab me on the subway many years ago, because, again, my affluent Anglo-Saxon appearance triggered his programing or sense of victimhood. Both of those people were wrong in their assumptions; the first one, who had changed his surname to sound more English than mine, had a family who phoned him regularly and generally looked out for him; that was more than I could boast. The other thug was greatly deceived in thinking his hard life made him a more ferocious foe than Little Soft Pale Skin on the seat opposite. I had recently been on the martial arts tournament circuit and was fit, with honed reflexes.
It’s easy to forget, if you don’t hang on the media’s every word, that many people live a life of regurgitated clichés — they talk like a sitcom character and their value system is as vapid as a Saturday afternoon ball game. It’s no surprise then that they react on cue when the media authorizes them to be incensed about an issue that previously they hadn’t even thought about. The anger; where does that come from? Well, maybe, from trying to reconcile the blandishments of a Babylonian slave system, where consumption and self-gratification are substituted for introspection, self-knowledge and meditation.