This morning when I opened the paper, the faces of three young, white men stared back at me. They had been arrested in North Georgia, a matched set for the three that were arrested elsewhere yesterday. All of them had a common goal: to ignite a race war.

The thing I noticed about the three in the paper this morning was the deadness of their eyes. It may have been that these were mug shots; nobody ever gets a flattering mug shot. But it may have been that those eyes look out at the world and see nothing hopeful.

It makes you wonder what goes on in the minds of those whose highest goal is to set one race against another. What kind of fear or hopelessness has captured them that to the point that they need to strike out against those whom they think want to take something from them? As much as I hate what they are trying to do, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the fear they must live in.

A few weeks ago, I read Chris Hedges’ America: The Farewell Tour. It’s a gloomy view of the future of our country. It’s sad that Mr. Hedges, a journalist and an ordained Presbyterian minister, has such a pessimistic view. It’s even sadder that when you read his book, you can’t disagree with him. This country—one that once did great things—has had its soul sucked from it by greed. Hedges gives example after example of companies pulling the financial rug from under people who have given large parts of their lives to making money for the company, leaving them with no income, no employment, and no hope.  Their choices seem to be suicide—which middle-aged white men are choosing at an increasing rate—or finding someone to blame for their misery.

There’s a third choice: killing the pain with drugs.

So the United States has an opioid epidemic, increasing rates of suicide (especially among white males, those who should be the most privileged in its population), and people who want to start race wars.

Obama looked at this when he was running for president, and he diagnosed it correctly. The Right tries to use his comments as an example of his racial divisiveness, but it’s not. It’s a recognition that we’re repeatedly opening our own veins and watching the blood flow while trying to blame someone else. Here’s a portion of the transcript of his remarks, complete with his hesitations and repetitions:

"But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress, uh, when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in, in, Pennsylvania, a lot, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced 'em. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or ... uh, anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Obama’s point was that those who have lost their livelihoods, their positions in their community, and their hope for a better future for their family cling to the familiar and find something or someone to blame. We’ve been watching that become more and more blatant for the last four years with pictures of angry faces at Trump rallies, painfully reminiscent of faces behind the small black children who were entering white schools in the 1950s.

It’s fairly simple: when you’re afraid, you find something to hate. It has always been so and will continue to be so.

Obama saw the problem. Chris Hedges saw the problem. And when I opened the paper this morning, I saw the problem: three young men who are so frightened that they will lose something that they want to start a race war.

Obama’s point was that the deeply-felt cynicism regarding the government was deserved and that going into those communities with talking points and unkeepable promises would only feed it. He felt that the government really needed to do something to help restore hope to those communities.

But those in control don’t seem to be able to understand that. They find it easier to feed the hate, make promises that will not be kept, and continue to make the rich richer and the poor even more hopeless.

We’ve never been a perfect nation. We have treated some of our citizens terribly. But we’ve never been a timid and fearful nation either. We did bold things. We took in tens of millions of immigrants in the last century. We went to the moon. We eradicated polio. We helped win two global wars. We promoted the American Dream.

According to Hedges, all of that is over. Instead of striking out to solve the problems, we cower, protecting what we have left from the immigrants, the terrorists, the Socialists, and people who are not like us.

Unless we change, it appears that our farewell tour will be poorly attended and hardly acknowledged.