Our nation’s history has always been a ball and chain around our collective id, but mostly because we have pretended not to feel its weight. As the thorough 1619 Project documented, there is so much of America’s ugly past that is written in to our laws and permeates our culture. The racism of the North allowed the Confederacy their resurgence after the Civil War; and we continue to allow it today through all the injustice and inequality that pervades our not so united states.
Our nation was allotted a few brief decades of striving to make our lofty language a reality for everyone, An early wave was fairer financial laws and the beginnings of a social safety net under FDR; and next few waves continued to roll with the Civil Rights Era. Alas, forward progress started by that era was jealously stymied and slowed. Our dark timeline was waiting, ready for the next opportunity.
That moment came with Nixon who wedged open the door with his seething prejudice and resentment toward those that dared to presume equality.
Then the barbarians started to storm the gates with Reagan. The ghosts of the Plantation owners whispered like a Tolkienesque Wormtongue into our common ear about “lazy Welfare Queens” and “Thugs”. So much so, that the New Democrats adopted their messaging rather than push back.
Our country became harder to achieve the American Dream; and wages stagnated. (We have that history of labor exploitation after all.) But there was still a coat of decency. And there was the misplaced hope that we had moved on as a nation with Obama’s election. In spite of the Confederacy’s champion, Mitch McConnell, doing what he could to halt progress, the U.S. still felt like it reached for it’s rhetoric.
That fantasy came crashing down when Trump was elected. The Plantation and all its brutality and selfishness are out in the open. This time, they want to make sure their brand of southern fascism is here to stay. And their attitudes of profit over people have infested all corners of our economy, including the media.
The New Confederacy has no decency. Nothing symbolizes their power more than the fury directed at Representative Ocasio-Cortez. Enabled by the media, she and the majority of U.S. citizens have to be subjected to menacing threats of terror leveled at her. I worry daily now for her safety. This ad that a GOP PAC ran should horrify us all.
As should the threats made against Beto’s call for gun control of assault weapons. And the willful gun nuts subjecting us to week after week of fear as nothing is done on gun control after the bazillionth mass shooting. The Confederacy needs their guns to keep the rest of us in line, after all. (And they have their complicit New North doing little to challenge them.)
The comparisons of Trump to Hitler are deserved. But we don’t need Hitler to point to. After all, he pointed to our racism as inspiration for the Nazi brutality.
Trump is as American as Southern Chain Gangs. And as the rest of us squabble about incivility in the most recent Democratic debate, he lurks in the wide open, with his corrupt cabal, taking what he wants; and doing whatever he feels.
We may indeed be headed towards another all encompassing violent conflict in the country. I don’t know — there are so many willing participants in his white supremacy and gleeful oppression. I do know that so much bloodshed has happened already since the end of the last one in 1865.
I would hope, however, that all the hype over my fellow citizens holding their arms at the ready, being Trump’s Champions, are inflated by a very vocal minority, plus Putin's puppets and bots.
Rarely do I allow myself to speculate such a grim future. I also hold our leadership class to blame as they obviously hold the most power: and do, really, not that much for us with it. The Democrats (post-WWII) used to be the power of the people, but the leadership of the unions f*cked it up for the rest of their members, so the New Democrats felt like they had to plug into the same corrupt campaign-finance system already holding the GOP by the gonads (obviously those wily Republicans also enjoy themselves).
And I don’t know what the answer is to how we rid ourselves of this seemingly immortal beast. After all, the powers-that-be have a huge propaganda machine, control most of the assault weapons, and the complicity of so many regular Americans that don’t have the time, will or means to vote.
We would, though, go a long way in chasing it back into it’s hole by leaders that will:
— Increase the Minimum Wage to a living wage, tied to the rate of inflation.
— Forgive the massive balance of student debt; and guarantee a K-14 public education for all children moving forward.
— Enact healthcare as a right for all citizens.
— Subsidize a new economy to save the planet and ourselves with clean, green technology and a new infrastructure.
— Protect our public lands from the grasping hands of the New Confederacy.
— Buy back and outlaw assault-style weapons.
— Reform the criminal justice system, including rolling back the War on Drugs The American People.
— Make federal election day a national holiday.
— Guarantee women their reproductive civil rights.
— Abolish, by federal law, private, for-profit prisons.
— Rip down and demolish every last one of the public statues honoring Confederate leaders.
Sound familiar? Everything America could be has not happened because the Confederates — the losers supposedly of the Civil War — have been owning the message and blocking real progress for decades. (Look around the globe, it’s not about the means.) When you realize this, and hear words, like Kellyanne Conway’s this weekend on how they will “not allow” gun control, it creates a whole new level of outrageous irony that the Old South is dictating what gets to happen in a country where supposedly the North won. (But I guess liberal ideas look like “socialism” when you’re using the unfettered brutal rules of the South as your baseline, right?)
The Declaration of Independence written by our founders has never been tenable as the reality of our inequality will always overshadow it’s bombast until the only words that count — legal documents — lead us to an equitable society.
The arc of history “bend towards justice”, but it doesn’t bend by itself. I will continue to hope that those on our side — the Squad, Democratic pool of candidate, the ACLU and all the rest of those that care deeply about justice, fairness and being able to live a peaceful healthy existence — will prevail. We must all do what we can to see to it.
I appeal to ABC and the rest of the Main Stream Media, also, to start turning down the likes of that threatening — yes, threatening violence — ad that was leveled at AOC (and at her constituents and admirers, I would add, as if, MSM, you didn’t know that already). After all, if our democracy goes down, your profession will be one of the first casualties.
I will continue to speak out and act as I can for the nation I call home. But we’re just a few minutes to Midnight and I cannot see past the wee hours. Perhaps it is just the dark before the dawn.
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” — Theodore Parker
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“If you ever wondered what you’d do during slavery, the holocaust or the civil rights movement, you’re doing it right now.” — Unknown.