A lack of shame

I am a bit ashamed to admit it, but I have a friend who is seriously racist. He isn't a Nazi or a Skinhead or anything, just a middle aged white guy with an ugly take on people who are not as pale as he is. Truth to tell he pisses me off sometimes and then I find a reason to be somewhere he isn't; but the fact of the matter he is still a friend. When he needs something I will step in to help, and he does the same for me.

Perhaps what bothers me the most is that he doesn't see his racism as something that should cause him the least bit of shame. In fact, is some twisted way that completely eludes me, he seems a bit proud of it - throwing this backward and hateful attitude in the face of the politically correct and liberal minded like he is standing some kind of ethical ground.

There seems to be a lot of that going around lately. People are proud of being ignorant and uneducated; as if not being able to read above a third grade level is a badge of honor. Educated people reject evolution and climate change with the claim that they are superior to people who accept facts and try to act in a way consistent with those facts. People who spew hate act as if those who call them on it are the real evil.

I would be utterly ashamed at being counted among any such, how can they look in a mirror? How do they sleep at night? Clearly they don't see themselves as shameful people, they are proud of what they are.

Which, perhaps more than anything else, convinces me that this is a dying society. Even the most blatant lies are simply glossed over; leaders no longer even bother to deny that they are, in fact, lying. It is part of the game and besides, "the people" don't want to hear the truth anyway. Indeed, rather than shame at being caught, they take pride in the aggressiveness of their attacks on their political enemies.

Politics in America is nothing now but hate and spin, lies and open threats of violence. The gun crowd is big on this, though they are quick to insist that don't mean "real" violence every time bullets fly and people are cut down. Which is just more lies. Of course they mean exactly that. How can they not? They are violent people - so long as they are the perpetrators of violence and not on the receiving end.

Which makes them cowards as well; something else that should make them hang their heads in shame.