The roar of planes flying overhead, the rumble of tanks or the perhaps the specter of a mushroom cloud are some images that the word ‘power’ conjures for me. However, as I rode a Greyhound bus through the outskirts or perhaps a residential section of a small town somewhere in Ohio on my way to visit my parents, I perhaps observed what is perhaps another aspect of power. It was a man in shirt sleeves on a small front porch eyeing with what seemed to be a look of suspicion, the bus which passed him.
My hunch is that the backbone of power is social control, and that some human beings are more instrumental in the exercise of it than are other human beings. As I jotted these notes while in the bus over three years ago, I looked upon that man as someone who was controlled by others.
I prejudged him as being someone whose prejudices against various people comprised the reigns by which various leaders controlled him. My rationale in autumn of 1999 was that various working class European-American people were being manipulated by various leaders into thinking that a variety of undesirable people were taking away their rights; and that categories for conceiving of other people such as that of blacks, gays, and Mexican immigrants comprised some of the framework of scape-goating by which some people misled these working class whites, so as to distract them from discovering the ways in which the leaders of major US corporations and the politicians who represent their interests are disserving the interests of working class whites, as well as the interests of working class blacks who they similarly seek to distract.
Presently, in April of 2003, I am less inclined to assume that other people are so gullible. These social phenomena likely occur in some manner which is at least not entirely dissimilar from the way I describe it above. However, I think that jumping to conclusions about how deceived a certain other person may be is incompatible with pursuing my own interests.
It seems that in a manner of speaking, I was being condescending and paternalistic by prejudging the man in shirt sleeves, assuming that he was self-defeatingly blinded by his prejudices, on the basis of me making assumptions about him on the basis of his clothing, his skin color, and what I deemed to be the generally run-down appearance of his surroundings.
I may have thought that what I deemed to be suspicious demeanor indicated that he was generally suspicious of anyone who was not a part of his small-town community; and that his leeriness of strangers reflected his lack of understanding concerning matters beyond his own neighborhood or town; and that such a lack of understanding was what prevented him from having any input to the political process.
Perhaps it was a form of ESP which I possessed which enabled me to have, in the span of 4 or 5 seconds, knowledge of the life-story of the man in shirt sleeves on a front porch. If only I could have said a few words to the man, perhaps waking him from his state of being misled–but, likely, asking the driver, who probably was misled himself, to stop would have done no good.
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