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I wrote him back, and he wrote me again, "Surely you can see why a white man is going to get scrutinized, and any miss is going to be held against him. They probably don't want you there—nothing personal, here, Derrick—because you, or rather what you stand for, which in this case is whiteness, control every other place in town except the basketball court. Whites control the government, the economy, the newspapers, plus the police and the rest of the legal system. And now we want the damn basketball court, too! It's no wonder they want whites to miss." All I'd wanted is some exercise. But I knew he was right. It's no more possible to remove these basketball players from the racist society that engenders their anger than it is to remove our political leaders from the culture that creates their drive for power. My friend John Keeble has said he likes to study members of the Aryan Nations and other hate groups because "at least they admit they're racist, and that they're afraid. The whole culture is racist and afraid, but most of us don't talk about it."

I know all this. And it makes what happened at the gym comprehensible. But I also know it's not okay to displace anger. Nothing excuses rude or violent behavior toward random or semi-random people. My father stealing my childhood is no reason for me to steal someone else's, just as his own parents destroying his was no reason for him to steal mine. The psychological wounds that drive CEOs and politicians do not excuse their genocidal and ecocidal policies. The wounds that drive our culture to these same ends are similarly no excuse.

I mentioned a fantasy before, of Jesus or someone like him not being crucified but accepted. I have another fantasy. I wish that those of us who feel anger—which is most of us—could learn to see our anger for what it is, and turn it toward appropriate sources. Instead of cursing a white guy for missing a layup I wish that the people in the gym would turn that anger toward bringing about change. Instead of complaining about racist basketball players I wish I would turn my own anger also toward change. I wrote this again to my friend. He wrote back, "If only it were that easy. It'd be great if we could simply pick out the real enemy instead of having the poor fight the poor. But our culture is designed for us not to see that. Instead we find some 'common enemy' to unite against. It's all sleight of hand. 'Look how the welfare bums ruin society.' Or blacks, Jews, the Ayatolla, Saddam, Mexicans, Cubans, commies, homosexuals, feminists, environmentalists, Indians, the white guy who just missed a layup. All of which takes our attention away from the mega-corporations that basically dictate, and destroy, life as we know it."

He's right again, of course. But it's actually even worse than that. Who, exactly, are we supposed to get mad at? Picture this: you're driving down the interstate, and you get passed by a semi of logs going to a Weyerhaeuser mill. You know, from having read Weyerhaeuser's own documents, that the company has clearcut more than four million acres. You know that just in 1992, the company deforested forty-five square miles in Washington, twenty-five square miles in Oregon, and 152 square miles in the southern United States. You know that Weyerhaeuser is a major deforester of tropical rainforests. You know that the company has from the beginning been a strong supporter of the Indonesian military dictatorship that has murdered nearly a million of its own citizens. You've read vice-president Charles Bingham's response to criticism of the company's genocidal destruction of the land bases upon which indigenous peoples (and all of us, for that matter) depend: "I feel no apologies are necessary for offering the members of those ["primitive," his word from a previous sentence] societies a choice." You know that Weyerhaeuser offers similar choices to indigenous peoples across the globe, deforesting its way from continent to continent, consciences cleared all around the boardroom by the multiple