I feel sorry for Palestinians languishing under the boot of Israel who cry out for sympathy from Americans, because I know they won’t get it. We have been trained to ignore such cries.

I’m not talking about the modern infotainment news industry that slants every story on Israel vs Palestine into pro-Israel propaganda. It’s a factor, especially because it prevents many from questioning “the way things are.” But the media didn’t train us to ignore our sympathetic impulses.

I’m not talking about our terrible Civil Rights history, which a new crop of fascist governors and State legislatures are busy whitewashing. While you still can, educate yourself about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, for example, in which White Americans got fed up with Black Americans enjoying prosperity. And because Whites were stronger, they destroyed Black Wall Street. Racism is good at destroying sympathetic feelings, but it didn’t train us to ignore them.

I’m not even talking about Bible-thumping idiot America putting conspiracy theories (known to the believers as “Bible Prophecies”) above people.

I’m talking about a training that goes back to the very beginning, and may be in our DNA. By that I do not mean this defect is destiny, but only wish to point out that we who yearn for a more perfect union and who want to make this nation an enlightened member of the geopolitical world need to remember what we’re up against: our own genetic heritage. We must evolve our minds.

We have always subscribed to the philosophy that If you are strong enough to keep it, You should grab more land. It goes back so much further than the indigenous in the Americas finding themselves on reservations or worse. The strongest of every continent have always stolen land for the entire history of our evolution as a species. The old euphemism is “War;” the new one is “national security.” The fact that this planet has plenty of territory for everyone to enjoy a generous piece of it never occurs to us.

It’s been US versus THEM since we were apes. Do apes go to war over territory? Do white supremacist Christians want to Make America Great Again?

Make Apes Greedy Again.

It’s the racism, stupid! It’s the ape’s instinctual adaptive greed for territory translated into the maladaptive human obsession with race.

We are Frank Herbert’s Harkonnens, George Lucas’s Empire, Gene Roddenberry’s Klingons (or perhaps the Borg). We got ours, fuck everybody else; unless they have something we want, then take it from them, and after that, fuck everyone else. We are brutal, and I’m afraid that’s built-in. To deny that is to fail at a worthy goal before we’ve started: becoming better human beings. If you want to win at war you must know your enemy. We have found the enemy, and he is us!