Essay: Downward Slope

 

Not all that surprisingly, the American people have chosen a downward slope of ominous Darkness.  They have chosen Whiteness and patriarchy instead of equality; thuggery over decency; and violence over justice.  This is a country that only 165 years ago fought a war with itself because about half the States wanted to keep Black people enslaved.  The South went to war with the North to defend their freedom to keep Black people as chattel.   Needless to say, when the North won, the hatred of the South for the victors didn’t dwindle, nor did its will to oppress.  It festered instead, ambient in a culture of extreme and barbarous racism, including legalized segregation.

As well as its legacy of enslaving Black people, who built much of the country on their backs, America was founded in genocide of the Native Americans and continued that practice of murdering and herding entire peoples from the 1700s onward.

In sum, the core culture of America embodied in its ruling White class has a repugnant history of claiming manifest destiny while trampling on other peoples, territories and countries. Even today, right now, the USA, under its liberal president Joe Biden-- and this is not its right-wing fascists, who will soon take dictatorial power--is participating in ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza.

Cruelty and chosen ignorance has been the ceaseless standard of White patriarchy, ever since the inception of the country.  Even so, America stumbled along for over 230 years, maintaining its republic and avoiding the tyranny it was founded to escape.  The Constitution itself was designed around the idea of protecting against takeover by a tyrant.

In his Farewell Address on September 17, 1796, George Washington warned against the dangers of political parties.  They could divide the people and lead to dissolution of the union:

 

However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

 

This is exactly what culminated on November 5, 2024.  On that day, which is yesterday, as I type, the republic of the United States died.  It was replaced by “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men.”

Despite its horrible entanglement with genocidal blood and slavery, the USA managed to evolve ethically.  For two hundred years, faltering and awkward progress was made.  Slavery became illegal.  Women gained the right to vote.  In the last sixty years or so, we continued to approach a standard of general equality among people.  We still had a long way to go, but the progress was real.

Feeling a shudder to its pillars of dominance, the White patriarchy fought back.  And won.

Now commences a most brutal, unstable time for all of humanity.  I myself am an old man, pretty jaded.  I’ve had a good life, all in all, and was blessed to be born in and experience a democracy.  It hurts me a great deal that children born in the USA will now be taught to worship a repugnant man of no moral fiber whatsoever, and to revere him, perversely and with full Orwellian irony, as ‘the greatest man who ever lived.’ 

By separating greatness completely from morality, we shame ourselves completely.  We thereby alloy ourselves by definition with the Dark, not the Light.

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