Chris Tomlinson is an award-winning columnist for the Houston Chronicle. In this column, he describes the damage that extremists are doing to our country.
The true story was almost custom-made for Hollywood.
A powerful man convinces his nephew to marry into a wealthy family, and the two conspire to kill four of the bride’s relatives to inherit their fortune. Then, they begin slowly poisoning the loving, unsuspecting wife. Will anyone catch on and stop the villains before they complete their nefarious plot?
A good yarn, but like too many products these days, it’s gotten caught in the culture wars because the killers were white supremacists, and their victims were members of the Osage tribe.
The National Review says the only thing Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” has going for it “is the woke idea that America’s white men are spiritually sick…”
I think the only thing conservative media has going for it is racial grievance, convincing older white people of their imminent demise if they don’t elect white supremacists. Bankrupted of ideas, these billionaire-financed outlets have become nothing more than outrage factories.
Conservative media wants to make every aspect of American life political. Want a vaccination? Woke! Don’t want to pay taxes? Righteous! Want renewable energy? Woke! Want a military-style rifle? Righteous! Electric vehicles? Woke!
Why? Because powerful people with financial interests vulnerable to human progress want voters to elect backward politicians who will protect their profits.
So, partisans work to make every consumer purchase a political talisman.
Come back to the office with a Chick-fil-A bag, and some of your coworkers may suspect you oppose LGBTQ rights. But conservatives will also give you a side-eye too because they’ve launched a Chick-fil-A boycott over the company employing an executive overseeing diversity, equity and inclusion policies…
Conservatives and progressives have extensive lists of companies and individuals that have perpetrated some egregious act. The perceived misdemeanors are as wide-ranging as they are sometimes absurd. But propagandists know calling out a well-known brand, especially on Twitter, now called X, is a surefire way to grab attention…
I saw “Killers of the Flower Moon” last weekend, and Scorsese made another fine film about what Hannah Arendt might call the banality of evil. Almost all his films have been about America’s spiritually sick white men; this one is no different.
I agree with critics who say Scorsese spends too much time with the white guys and not enough with the Osage, whose people were murdered. Woke this film is not.
The director’s biggest mistake was making a historical drama revealing how white people did terrible things to people of color. Teaching history has also become a political act.
Anyone who deviates from the white supremacist narratives established between 1875 and 1955 should brace for conservative condemnation, no matter how many endnotes they include. Conservatives want to ignore how many of our ancestors sweetly depicted in sepia-toned photographs committed crimes against humanity. Talking about it gets you labeled woke or worse.
The Texas Legislature has made it a crime to teach American history that might make children uncomfortable. By that measure, no teacher can screen “Killers of the Flower Moon” without fear of persecution.
The systematic murder of the Osage took place in Oklahoma, but Texas also has a long history of atrocities. The Texas Rangers are celebrating their bicentennial, but few are talking about how troopers massacred Mexican Americans or ethnically cleansed Native Americans in shocking numbers and violence.
The Republican majority has also made it illegal to explain how slavery was the original sin of the U.S. Constitution. Teachers must say slavery was a deviation from American values, even though Southerners forced Thomas Jefferson to cut a proposed part of the Declaration of Independence that called for abolition. The Constitution ordered that enslaved people only count as three-fifths of a human.
Pretty originalist to me.
These days, politicians rely on grievance and fear rather than ideas and hope. But politicizing everything only divides us, and ignoring our history condemns us to repeat it; look at the resurrection of fascism.
Patriots don’t hate their fellow citizens; they learn from the past and compromise for a more perfect Union.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
According to a CNN poll from August 39% of the GOP still maintain that Biden stole the 2020 election despite all Trump’s indictments and bad press. The fact that so many people still cling to this factious lie shows the power of entrenched thinking from propaganda. A great many conservatives live in a continuous confirmation bias loop and rely on a mental diet of Fox News, OAN or any of the many extremist media outlets that are part of a cottage industry of negative, regressive rhetoric. Their daily lives are spent in a toxic, brainwashed bubble that stokes the flames of fear and hate.
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Dear Diane,
This is hard to read. It’s hard to stomach all of this content. It’s just bashing each other over and over. Like America was once great. Well, it once us. The Indigenous people lived here for thousands of years. Simply. Lived off of the land. They had no interest in building skyscrapers, twin towers. They lived simple for thousands and thousands of years.
And then came the white person.
My Great Grandfather Ludwig Yohnke and his family left Colmar, Germany (now France), on a ship called the Rhein, and arrived in the United States on September 19, 1885.
Ludwig was 43. My great grandmother Julia was 32.
Ludwig’s first wife died in the Franco-Prussian war which occurred between 1870 and 1871. My grandfather Emil was 8 when they came to America looking for a new start for the family.
What would make a family leave their family and homeland with a wealth of history and heritage? Look at the landscape of finely crafted buildings in Colmar, as just one example of its beauty. What made so many of our forefathers leave their homelands? Why couldn’t the people live there with one another? Why were there so many killings, and this trying to outdo your fellow person mindset? I need to have more than you. More jewels. More gold.
How did this incorrect vision of searching for a better life in another land ever develop? The mistaken idea that more money, land, and wealth would make us happier? We are still killing each other here in the new land too. Not even over basic needs like food and water but for money! Is this the vision that should be ever remembered?
Our forefathers came to a totally undeveloped America to build a new future and new hope for their families and yet it has not turned out as they had planned. Yes, they endured hard times here as well. Perhaps they became wealthy with money and land, but most of their descendants still remain poor in spirit and human development.
Turn on your television. Look at your tablet, or smartphone. Look at the news. Look at all the senseless killings. The senseless lifestyles we have created. Is this what was meant as “a better life?”
It saddens me deeply to write this. My family ran away, as did so many others, and we are all still running away from something. Too scared to deal with and resolve our problems and live as one. To live a truly meaningful life. A happy life.
Life is more than being drunk with guns. Your life’s existence should amount to more than a shared file on someone’s hard drive. A Facebook page in remembrance.
The first parent who bought their child a toy gun and thought that it was a good idea, who was the inventor of the toy gun, and why didn’t we question it then and now?
Why did so many parents teach or show their children how to play, “Cowboys and Indians?” What were we really teaching? And look at the racism we still have. Look at all the killings. Look at what we do to one another. Look at how we still judge one another. By skin pigmentation? Not by our contribution to each other
Are you crying as you read this? Ashamed? I sure am as I write this. It has to be written. Discussed. It has to change. How we are living, and what we are doing to each other is simply wrong. It has been wrong since cavemen walked upright, and we need to resolve it now. To stand upright and not cower in fear over being honest and real.
How do we resolve this? It starts with breaking out of our inherited collective mind patterns that have held us hostage. The wrong mindset of a better life. Reshaping the incorrect mold of happiness.
Discover what is false in you. I speak of the nature of the human unconsciousness and dysfunction, as well as its most common behavioral manifestations, from conflicts in relationships to warfare between tribes and nations.
Such knowledge is vital. For unless we learn to recognize the false as false – as not us – there can be no lasting transformation, and we will always end up being drawn back into the illusions and continue the pain.
Learn to recognize, take charge of, and change your emotional reactions. The only way any of us can get to a place of peace and tranquility is by understanding our minds and conquering our emotions.
The most painful process is self-analysis. It is imperative to master, in order to truly know ourselves completely, and how to treat each other correctly. Humanly. Godly. Is this not what any religion really is teaching? Who decided to twist the writings of long ago and word them to meet their personal agenda and perhaps greed? To make it ok as long as they write that their God is the person who said it was alright to do so. We as a race have always twisted words around to meet our hidden selfish agendas.
To create a universe of peace we have to first create a universe of self-liking.
A person whose life’s ambition is to defeat others only defeats themselves. For it is a lesser person who knows not themselves.
It is the time that we start loving one another, no matter our race, gender, national origin, religion, physical or mental disability. It is time that we stop all this discrimination. It is time that we build a place where we are all equal. It is time that we put down our firearms and open up our loving arms.
The possibilities are literally within each of us.
The most comfortable place to live is where there is peace within your heart.
What is the definition of a successful person?
Answer: a happy one.
How do we build happiness?
Begin with you!
And we talk of rightwing news. You think any news outlet is proper?
And we bash Donald Trump. Donald Trump is just hurting no different than Bill Clinton was and is. You don’t cheat on your wife if you have it together. If you have developed your brain. He was dealing with deep personal issues that he avoided.
The media, either side didn’t hold him accountable.
And the same with John F. Kennedy. You don’t cheat on your wife if you have developed your brain and developed yourself. If you love yourself.
Why don’t we have documentaries about that? Get to the root of the problem. Have documentaries on why John F. Kennedy cheated on his wife. We have so much interest if there was a second shooter, but we all keep avoiding the real issues.
Always picking sides. All this divide. All this bashing.
Aren’t you all tired of it?
Let’s start loving each other.
One love.
There aren’t two types of love.
Just one love.
Love,
Miles Patrick Yohnke
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I read your comment with interest.
Adding, my forbearer moved to the US to avoid conscription into the Prussian army. He pretended to be on a walk for a picnic and crossed the border to be free of Prussian rule.
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Dear Linda,
Thank you for your time reading and responding. I greatly appreciate your time and life.
I hope you have your best day!
Let’s throw kindness around like confetti.
Love,
Miles Patrick Yohnke
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Your comment is hard for me to read, Mr. Yohnke, because it rings so false. You say things like that you were crying as you wrote this. Really? You were crying? Literally, actually crying? That is either untrue or bizarre. You tell us that we are false, that we discriminate, that we have a mania for owning stuff, and then you say that the answer is “self-liking.” So, we are supposed to like all these things? You claim that Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy cheated on their wives because they had deep personal issues. They did, and in Trump’s case, do have deep personal issues, but they cheated on their wives because they were powerful and thought they could get away with it and wanted to get laid. And somehow we are supposed to cure everything by stopping our criticism of one another? We should look at Donald Trump separating babies from their parents at our border and say, well, can’t go around criticizing that? The fact is that social sanction, for good or ill, is a powerful force for shaping behavior. It is largely the reason why overtly discriminatory language of the kind that was common in the 1950s has MOSTLY disappeared from the public sphere. And that’s a very good thing.
A little advice, Mr. Yohnke: Writing well is about telling the truth, about doing one’s level best to tell the truth however complex or difficult it is. Vague overgeneralization is not something a writer should strive for if he or she wants the work to be enduring. “There aren’t two types of love.” Do you know, Mr. Yohnke, that New Testament Greek had a number of different words for different types of love?
Eros: romantic, passionate love
Philia: intimate, authentic friendship
Erotoropia or ludus: playful, flirtatious love
Storge: unconditional, familial love
Philautia: compassionate self-love
Pragma: committed, companionate love
Agápe: empathetic, universal love
Do you know that ideas about what constitutes love have evolved over the centuries and that our extremely problematic ideas about what constitutes romantic love were basically an outgrowth of the extremely fraught literature around chivalry, which in turn derived from a) lords employing poets as the PR department, b) Persian love poetry brought back by Crusaders, c) Cathar heresy, and d) the cult of the perfect Virgin Mary?
You suggest that you are way into self-examination. But what is the self? Is it something that already exists that you can find, like a lost sock? ( I found myself, man.) Or is it a complex construct partially based on bodily feedback, including that related to location?
It always annoyed TF out of me that the Beatles had the ear of the whole world and all they could do with it, at a time when stuff like the Biafra Famine and Vietnam War and the Munich Olympics Hostage Crises were going on, all they could do was sing, “Love. Love. Love. Love is all you need.”
Childish.
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Once upon a time there was a failed businessman named Donald who wanted BADLY to be as successful as Daddy was. But he was the breadth of a microbe on a hair of a rat’s tushy from going bankrupt. So, he ran to the lair of the Russian bear, who gave him a big bear hug, and he fell asleep in those large, comforting arms. And when he awoke, he was transformed into an enormous cockroach of a man, with a tiny cockroach brain and a cockroach’s moral sensibilities, but it turned out that that’s just what half the country wanted. Who knew?
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Dear Mr. Bob Shepherd,
We cannot ever respond in this fashion. In the end you are no different than your subject matter.
Your response was like a child. Like a little child fighting with another child in a sandbox.
It wasn’t a clever response. Just one of hate towards another life. This is how wars start.
Responses like that; shows us and shows the world – you’re hurting just like the subject matter you address.
And you’re not alone. Sadly, so many people think and respond in the very same matter as you’re written.
And Mr. Shephard, I haven’t singled you out to hurt you. My goal is to show you and most of all I hope it goes viral to help all other human lives.
In fact, Mr. Shepherd, I feel your strong enough to state that your actions were wrong. You’ve learned from your grave mistake and will speak and live God’s one love.
As I stated from my original posting to this article enough is enough of bashing each other.
I hope people will read and ponder the contents at this URL.: https://salmonstudio.wixsite.com/yohnke/post/bullying-lives-here
Let’s throw kindness around like confetti. Let’s unite as one. One love. Let’s build positive memories together. One love!
Love,
Miles Patrick Yohnke
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The way to combat evil, Mr. Yohnke, is to recognize it AS SUCH in public. Do you think that back in 1932, people in Germany and the rest of Europe should have been running around saying, “That Adoph Hitler–don’t you just love him”?
Aie yie yie.
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Expressing my thanks to our president:
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Let’s throw kindness around like confetti.
You mean, treat it as disposable, random, deployed thoughtlessly and therefore without any actual meaning, like confetti? But making a mess of everything? Because no one actually thought through what they were doing?
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Love that which is worthy of love. Otherwise, it’s indiscriminate and meaningless.
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