What's up with the frightened white U.S. males?

I went to the post office this afternoon and I noticed a tall Caucasian-looking guy with a shaved head looking at me from where he was standing – out of the line me and the three people in front of me were in. When I looked back at him, he sort of nodded and started looking in another direction. When the person being helped by one of the two clerks left, the clerk called him up, she said, did you stand in line like the rest of the people and he said, no I thought I was behind the lady that just left. She said, yes, but there is only one line. He wheeled around while she was still talking and said: “Stuff like this is the reason I’m moving to South Africa.” In an otherwise quiet post office, that is an attention getter.

He came and got in the line behind me and I said: “You were here before me, do you want to go ahead of me?”

He said: “Nah, I’m not in any hurry.”

He stood there a minute and then he said to no one in particular, but I guess mostly to me since I was closest: “This country is not the way it used to be when I was growing up. I spent 16 years in the military and now I have come back and this country is not the same, that’s why I am moving to South Africa.”

I said: “So, you have a place there and everything?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, “I am leaving in two weeks. This country is not the same country I left.”

I said nothing else. I was determined to not egg him on, but if I was going to say something, I had it picked out and it would have been: “No, you are right, this country has changed. I don’t think people are quite as racist as they used to be, or at least they can’t be and get away with it.” I am so glad I didn’t say that. Who knows how he might have responded and in some ways, I would have been joining him rather than somehow “correcting” him.

One day last week I received a text from my wife in the middle of the morning saying they were in a lockdown situation at the learning resource center of the Tipton County center of Dyersburg State Community college, where she works, because a fugitive was thought to be in the area. They spent the rest of the day in lock down, with students finally escorted out in the middle of the afternoon and then my wife left around an hour early, escorted out to her car by police officers. They were afraid he might try to steal someone’s car in the parking lot. He had already stolen a police cruiser and abandoned it, a few days before. They caught him two days later, near the center where my wife works.

It was all over the news and in the papers and from the coverage we learned he was: “anti-government and anti-police”, “a survivalist,” that he had a stash of guns in his mother’s basement, which was in a subdivision just behind where my wife worked. Pictures of him in the paper showed long white hair and a long white beard, although in the picture taken of him after they caught him, he had shaved all but his mustache and goatee, his hair was darker and shorter and he appeared to have lost a lot of weight – it was about 10 degrees the night he was caught in an abandoned house.

I know a number of white males who have lots of guns and who often say things such as: “I hate the government,” “I hate paying taxes,” “I just want to be left alone,” “This country is headed in the wrong direction” and so on. A few months after President Obama was elected, we were at a wedding of a friend and a white male at a table behind us was talking to people at his table loud enough for everyone to hear and he said: “People, I am telling you, we are in big trouble. This country is in deep trouble.”

I know people are paranoid about a number of things, but I am not sure I have seen so much fear among white males in the south of the U.S. until a black man became President. It is as if they are living their worse nightmare.

Is racism the primary driver of their fear? Such an accusation can easily be denied and of course, not all white males who think our country is in deep trouble are equally concerned over race. Some of them would cite high taxation, some would bring up that: “They are coming for our guns”, others would say: “This country has not been the same since they took prayer out of the schools”, and I am sure there would be a lot of other things on their list too.

But one thing they have in common is an apparent belief that their backs are to the wall, that things cannot get worse, that something has to be done. Some of them get so far gone with this thinking that they start taking action, like the fugitive who caused my wife’s school to be locked down.

They seem desperate, ready for a fight, ready to join a militia; to want to do something, anything, to join an action to redress wrongs. They are believers in grand conspiracies, defenders of the true values of this country, lovers of some sort of myth that things were better but got worse and that a lot of people who could have done something, did nothing; and that they cannot allow themselves to do nothing too.

I have spent my entire life around men (I suppose the occasional woman too) who think this way. I am not sure of the best way to handle it, because most of them are blowhards, but once in a while one of them will do something violent. I suppose the best we can hope for is if we are in a line with one at the post office, he is the blowhard type and not the action type, unless of course his action involves moving to South Africa; in which case I'd say: enjoy your new life.