Last week America, the groundbreaker, successfully used an advanced space vehicle to get an up-close look at the planet Jupiter. If you ask the 46 million African-American citizens, who make up 14% of the U.S. population, they'll tell you that it's apparently easier to reach Jupiter from Mars than justice on Earth. The violent events in the past few days in Minnesota, Louisiana (black men killed by cops) and the mass shooting of cops in Dallas by a young black man, Micah Xavier Johnson, only show just how close America is standing to the mouth of the interracial volcano. There is a real risk of that volcano erupting: 100 years of slavery and half a century of discriminatory laws (until President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1964) have returned to the public consciousness. Essentially, they never disappeared. The atmosphere is charged; there is tension in the air. The demonstrations in support of and against white cops have turned the streets of America into a big chessboard, black vs. white. This isn't how the first black president dreamed of finishing his time in the White House. President Barack Obama's years in office, now drawing to a close, have not made the world a safer place. And not America. America under its first black president is hanging out a black flag. It's dangerous out there. Islamist terrorism from outside and local terrorism are taking turns. Obama, just like the presumptive nominees for president Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, is trying to calm things down. Everyone knows how volatile the situation is. Among the black population, there is a great deal of "sadness and anger," as Obama put it on Saturday, speaking from Poland. On the other hand, among whites there is a lot of fear. Obama was elected, among other things, to eradicate the gaps in society. In Obama's America, these gaps just got worse, in every possible area: economics, health, education, society. The only thing Obama has done for minorities was the Affordable Care Act -- his "Obamacare" health reform -- but it's hard to say that's been a huge success. As we've said, Obama is trying to restore calm. The way he sees it, the Dallas shooter was mentally ill and does not represent black Americans, just like Dylann Roof, who shot and killed nine black people at a Charleston church last year, does not represent white people in America. But Obama is forgetting one thing: these weren't lone incidents. They are part of a series of similar attacks. In 2016, black citizens still feel oppressed, and white citizens feel threatened -- and they both have reason to. Obama tried to explain that the Dallas shooter does not represent black people in America. Black people in America feel that Obama doesn't represent them. There were great expectations of the 44th president of the U.S. It must be said that Obama inherited the problems of radical Islam and interracial tension. He didn't invent either of them, but things got worse on his watch. On his watch, a young black man who served in Afghanistan and didn't have any criminal record, sought to "kill white people," and white cops are shooting black people. Obama didn't know how to address the problem. He couldn't calm the streets. His policy only added fuel to the fire. The statistics in some police stations (such as Dallas, as it happens) indicate that the situation is improving, but the mood hasn't changed. As with the economy, when it comes to the sense of oppression, mood counts a lot. The horrible massacre in Orlando (the worst terrorist attack in America since 9/11) was followed by the Dallas killing spree on Thursday (the most lethal attack on security forces since, well, since 9/11.) It's a little too much for the Americans. The current administration is of course bringing us back to the matter of unfettered gun sales in the U.S. (the Second Amendment), but there are some who would say that it's exactly like online incitement: as if there was no terrorism before Facebook, as if there were no racist horrors committed in American prior to the advent of automatic weapons. Micah Xavier Johnson's killing spree, which claimed the lives of five white police officers, took place a few blocks from Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Even the place of the terrible crime thrust Americans back into the 1960s that they want badly to forget, but can't. "Only in the darkness can you see the stars," Martin Luther King Jr. once said. Justice, like Jupiter itself, seems to be moving farther away.
