The widely-held belief is that slavery is America's original sin and the cause of its racial animus and strife. I think that is wrong. I think that's a simplification that allows us to avoid culpability for our behavioral choices. I think if we force ourselves to remember that before there were slaves there were Native Americans who also didn't fare particularly well when they encountered Europeans, we have to come to a different conclusion about that original sin.
So what's really the cause of the animus and what's the real original sin? Which sin really came first, the chicken sin (slavery) or the egg sin (racism/white supremacy)? Given that America's troubles with slaves came after America's massacres and broken faith with Native Americans, I am forced to conclude that it cannot be the chicken (slavery). It would seem to me that massacres of the First Peoples; the creation of slavery into perpetuity; Jim Crow; the KKK; and the use of domestic terrorism in the form of lynchings and cross burnings, all these things are but effects. The cause of animus and strife is supremacy and supremacist thought.
There is a fix available to us, but I fear that it is a fix that may never occur. The fix won't occur because while Native people have had to evolve to survive; while people of color have had to evolve to survive; while immigrants have had to evolve to survive; while Jews, Italians, Catholics and the Irish have had to evolve in various ways (many of which have involved distancing themselves from aspects of their origins), the White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority has not. Majority status has rendered such evolution unnecessary but it is necessity that mothers invention (and evolution). The fix is to evolve. No spiritual, social or psychological evolution has been required of the majority up to this point.
Owning, or having been politically gifted with since the 1600s, the wealth and the land, the assets that produce wealth, and having access to the politicians who control everything else, has precluded the need to evolve. Economic power is supremacy.
Owning or controlling the means of educating - or miseducating - the populace has also been a critical aspect of maintaining the illusion of supremacy. Every move towards teaching and exposing the populace to the hard, ugly and blood-soaked truths of American history has been as effectively put down as a poorly-planned rebellion and some well-planned ones too. Control of thought and learning is supremacy. Being ever the victor, the savior, is supremacy.
But here we are in 2016 and the world has changed. There's no controlling access to information, neither is there any controlling demography. Either of those changes alone would have shaken the Earth's foundations and America's complacency on matters of race but both? Simultaneously?
Faced now with looming majority minority status, the multiple challenges of necessary rapid psychological evolution; speedy acceptance of the much-reviled 'other'; and public acknowledgement of the viciousness of minority status, are causing a very public national nervous breakdown which we can call a drumpf.
Drumpf: noun, a national condition akin to a psychotic break, which comes as a consequence of 400 years of refusing to acknowledge the full truth of your history.
Sanders: noun, the partial cure for a drumpf?
All jokes aside, the only cure for what ails us is evolution. No time like the present.
So what's really the cause of the animus and what's the real original sin? Which sin really came first, the chicken sin (slavery) or the egg sin (racism/white supremacy)? Given that America's troubles with slaves came after America's massacres and broken faith with Native Americans, I am forced to conclude that it cannot be the chicken (slavery). It would seem to me that massacres of the First Peoples; the creation of slavery into perpetuity; Jim Crow; the KKK; and the use of domestic terrorism in the form of lynchings and cross burnings, all these things are but effects. The cause of animus and strife is supremacy and supremacist thought.There is a fix available to us, but I fear that it is a fix that may never occur. The fix won't occur because while Native people have had to evolve to survive; while people of color have had to evolve to survive; while immigrants have had to evolve to survive; while Jews, Italians, Catholics and the Irish have had to evolve in various ways (many of which have involved distancing themselves from aspects of their origins), the White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority has not. Majority status has rendered such evolution unnecessary but it is necessity that mothers invention (and evolution). The fix is to evolve. No spiritual, social or psychological evolution has been required of the majority up to this point.
Owning, or having been politically gifted with since the 1600s, the wealth and the land, the assets that produce wealth, and having access to the politicians who control everything else, has precluded the need to evolve. Economic power is supremacy.
Owning or controlling the means of educating - or miseducating - the populace has also been a critical aspect of maintaining the illusion of supremacy. Every move towards teaching and exposing the populace to the hard, ugly and blood-soaked truths of American history has been as effectively put down as a poorly-planned rebellion and some well-planned ones too. Control of thought and learning is supremacy. Being ever the victor, the savior, is supremacy.
But here we are in 2016 and the world has changed. There's no controlling access to information, neither is there any controlling demography. Either of those changes alone would have shaken the Earth's foundations and America's complacency on matters of race but both? Simultaneously?
Faced now with looming majority minority status, the multiple challenges of necessary rapid psychological evolution; speedy acceptance of the much-reviled 'other'; and public acknowledgement of the viciousness of minority status, are causing a very public national nervous breakdown which we can call a drumpf.
Drumpf: noun, a national condition akin to a psychotic break, which comes as a consequence of 400 years of refusing to acknowledge the full truth of your history.
Sanders: noun, the partial cure for a drumpf?
All jokes aside, the only cure for what ails us is evolution. No time like the present.
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