Wow. Just, wow.

You would think that almost 150 years after the Civil War, and nearly 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement, people would be a little more savvy with the race issue in America.

For one, you would think that most sane people would recognize that it exists.

It’s a problem.

It’s not something that’s just going to go away by thinking happy thoughts.

So I told you about my little run-in with avowed Internet sock-puppet Amanda Chapel.

I mean, I have to admit, this was entertaining. She is the first troll I’ve met whose responses did not degenerate into random blathering. No. This was different. Instead, she decided to play the Ward Connerly card. Whoo-ah!

I will re-type the passage, in order to savor the flavor of it. Mmm-mmm.

amandachapel Actually, I imagine you an adjunct professor for a CA State School brought in as part of some bullshit diversity program. (emphasis mine)

I’m not even going to bother pointing out that she misses the mark wildly on that guess. And I thought that Google was idiot-proof.

And, not that I would expect her to give a rat’s ass about the history of people-of-color in California, but it just so happens that Filipino Americans have been ineligible for affirmative action since 1989, several years before I applied for college. And that affirmative action has been illegal in the University of California system since 1995, when SP-1 and SP-2 were passed. And while these were repealed in 2001, that’s only because they were made superfluous by Proposition 209 in 1996, which abolished affirmative action state-wide.

In essence, she charges me with skating in through the system through preferential treatment, when clearly it would’ve been impossible to do such a thing.

If someone said shit like that to you and you weren’t offended, I gotta give you props. You’re a stronger person than I am.

But to be faced with such bullshit was so preposterous that I laughed out loud.

Whatever. It’s sock-puppet entertainment. Who hasn’t baited a troll before?

But what kind of disturbs me is this response I get from a certain Mark Davidson:

markdavidson I just read your blog post about your exchange with @amandachapel. Straw man much? That was just an embarrassment. Study debate.

Fine. Whatever. It’s still (mostly) a free country. You’re entitled to your opinion. I’ve got no problem with that.

markdavidson Oh and I’m blocking you for being offensive. Every time someone inappropriately plays the race card, it diminishes the real thing.

Now that boggled my mind. Holy shit. A person who has no idea who I am, except for what I look like, decides to pull out the “bullshit diversity” line, and someone comes to defend her, and tells me I’m the one playing the race card? Uh. WTF?

Was I supposed to wait until they started throwing out epithets before I could call racism?

How fucked in the head do you have to be to not interpret “bullshit diversity” as “people-of-color don’t deserve what they’ve got.”

The thing is, I’ve always been wary of people who are privileged. Not that I’m not one of them, having grown up with two highly-educated parents with an upper middle class income. But privilege has always been an uneasy thing with me.

What I learned, growing up with it all around me, is that if you’re privileged but are not compassionate, you’re pretty much a sorry waste of protoplasm. I don’t care if you’re worth several million/billion dollars. You’re essentially contaminated fecal material. I’m sorry. That’s just how it is.

So when you get up and try to shout down the human dignity of people who are struggling and who are poor, I get the urge to beat the living shit out of you.

But why fuck with piss-poor protoplasm. What the hell is the point?

I’m thinking these things as I wait over in the pharmacy at one of the hospitals I work at and find myself amidst people who are clearly not in the same social class as the folks who gallivant around on Twitter, who have the same color of skin that I do. These are not iPhone owners. And it may be presumptuous, but I would hazard to guess that they are not as overly-educated as I am. I watch them as the pharmacy clerk informs them that their state insurance isn’t active, and that the meds their prescribed are gonna cost about $500 for a month. We’re talking about shit they need to live. You can’t go walking around without your cyclosporine and Cellcept, you know?

And I think about my colleagues who, like me, are extraordinarily privileged, but at the same time, very compassionate. Don’t get me wrong, there are some asshats among them, but even the most asshatish has more compassion in their pinky nail than some of the folks I’ve run across on Twitter. I mean, c’mon! No wonder this country is fucking doomed.

Seriously, though. When the shit hits the fan and the revolution goes down, all you privileged fucktards who do nothing but complain about how the poor are weakening your bottom line? You all are lucky that I’m constrained by primum non nocere and I won’t be joining the firing squad. In fact, I might even be helping all your sorry asses. So when you start believing in your self-reliant bullshit, and how you made it through the world without anyone’s help, I want you to meditate long and hard about who is probably gonna be on your side when you start having that anginal chest pain, or when the right side of your body goes numb and weak all of the sudden in the next few years or so. Deal?