Category: CRT

Looking Back One Year

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First floor plan for the US Capital as of 1997

It was the Sunday immediately before the inauguration in 2017. A fellow church choir member totally misread my leanings and said, “I’m sure glad we’re about to have an alpha male as President.” I don’t remember the exact words I said, but I left no doubt that I believed we were about to undergo rule by an Epsilon man, someone who was as far from alpha as it was possible to get.

Shortly after the inauguration, this choir member left our church. It may have been related to a dispute about him playing his bagpipes for a service intended to honor Ireland, but no doubt his disillusionment at finding himself in an ideological isolation ward was a piece of his motivation for leaving.

How did this nation get into the situation where so many were bamboozled into believing the bully in the White House represented the apex in evolution? Why is it that serial business failure and serial philandering were converted to symbols of strength and resolution? I guess PR is capable of overcoming just about any fault if the opposite is proclaimed often and loudly. At least there were enough credulous people to blindly support anyone who promises to bring back things the way they were, and they managed to overcome the will of the majority and install their favorite.

What is worrying is those who were on the short end of the stick in 2020 are feverishly working to prevent the “wrong” election results in the future. Wrong is defined as any election won by the liberal faction of the electorate. Supposedly the followers of Donald Trump are insistent upon attempting to reverse the course of history in order to bring us back into an age where women and minorities knew their places, and only right-thinking, alpha males glom onto the levers of power and wrench society back into its former trajectory.

So now any attempt at teaching facts about race and how it has affected the history of the US is viewed as brainwashing of innocent children in public schools. Never mind that most of the white population in the South withdrew their precious children from public schools back in the 1970’s when a challenge to white supremacy was made by integration and busing. Most of the children who were educated in religiously affiliated southern schools never gave up their view of their own superiority because they never had to face diversity. They now insist their children could not ever learn any facts about their country that were not passed through the John Wayne filter, lest it give their children distress.

One of the great benefits of living in the United States is the inclusion we offer. That inclusion is often far too gradual for the benefit of the original immigrants, yet it is true that the work ethics of immigrants often greatly exceeds that of native Americans of the correct race. Why is it so many restaurants are founded and staffed by immigrants? Small businesses form the springboard into the middle and upper classes, a path still largely unavailable to those in countries who provide these immigrants. We’ve had a little bit of exposure to a country where the flow of immigrants is suddenly cut off. The staffing shortages at many service industries is a taste of what life would be like without new residents filling the jobs deemed below the dignity of “true Americans”.

Supposedly this country gave away our manufacturing jobs in the previous decades. The anger of those who believe they are owed a living at a now rusted-out hulk of a factory is palpable, and helps to fuel the grievances of Trump nation. Nowhere is it acknowledged that the decline of international conflict allowed for money flows across borders, and it was the necessity of showing a profit which drove manufacturers to abandon the high wage and high regulations of this nation in favor of less restrictive and less expensive locations. If those who bemoan the current economic environment really wanted to improve their lot, they would mount an attack against those in the system who benefit from high return on investment. But instead, they have been coopted into believing an attack on the wealthy represents an attack on them, and thus they universally believe higher taxes equals communism.

It is the need to wave the cultural flag that drove the mindless hordes who attacked the Capital on January 6 of last year. So many of those hordes have now adopted an attitude of “we did nothing wrong. We were invited into the building.” The media facilitators go along with this farce, leading to a self-reinforcing do-loop of inane insanity. So when the House committee goes public with their hearings and report, it will make not a whit of difference to those who are fully invested in the fake universe they live in. No minds will be changed. No momentum will be gained by those who still view reality as something we have to adjust to. Well, now the reality we live in includes a minority who refuse to accept facts, and have proven a propensity to violence aimed at imposing their will onto those who disagree with them.

Will those of us who see the events of January 6, 2021 as symptomatic of a grave infection in the body politic of the US, be able to hold off the crazed minority aimed at domination of the US? Only if we are willing to share our perspectives across the political spectrum, so that those in the minority really do believe they are on the losing end of the arc of history.

So We Fight To Keep The Dream Alive

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Fire hoses in Birmingham in 1960’s

Critical Race Theory. Three words that strike dread into the hearts of many who believe this theory is being forced upon their innocent children, and makes the children feel bad. Of course, most of those who protest CRT wouldn’t know it if it struck them alongside their head like a 2×4. Instead, what we have is a noisy bunch of naysayers who have been driven to protest by what has been said on their various media sources. There CRT is mischaracterized so much that any attempt at presenting a contrary view to the lily-white version of American history is seen as communistic influence aimed at making Americans feel guilty toward the inherent racism of our society.

When will we ever get to the place where we can accept that multiple versions of the truth can exist simultaneously? Sure, the settling of the American Midwest involved much sacrifice by those who tried to eke out an existence for their families on soil they had to tame themselves. But at the same time, it is a fact that this land was occupied for thousands of years before white settlers broke the soil with their plows. The conquest of the indigenous peoples of North America enabled the white settlers to take over the lands and only have to fight nature instead of the previous residents. Sure, we gave Indians great reservations, and set up residential schools for the young (where the indigenous culture was carefully extinguished). Is it any wonder that today, reservations are where you find the most entrenched poverty, along with a plethora of substance abuse problems?

When it comes to the ongoing story of Black Americans, the story keeps getting stranger and stranger. Apparently since we elected a half-African as President, all of the racism in our society magically left and we now are in a post-racial society. Or, at least, that is the bromide Fox viewers keep telling themselves. What is not acknowledged is the social rebound coming from Barack Obama’s election exceeded the push to put him in office. Once he was there, the antipathy towards his policies was not only tinged with racism, racism became the sole motivating force. Using the example of the Affordable Care Act, something that was modeled after a Republican’s approach, immediately became anathema. The requirement to pay a tax penalty if you were uninsured was viewed as onerous and tyrannical. Underlying everything was the unstated fact that this was a program developed by a Black, and therefore must be opposed with every ounce of effort. We tried to link the opposition back to our founding fathers, by calling these racists “Tea Partiers”, as if they would be washed clean by the waters of Boston Harbor through this alliance.

When the rebound resulted in the election of Donald Trump, the unspoken part often became overtly spoken. Like in the response to the death in Charlottesville, where a moral equivalence was drawn between those protesting the racism, and those who emulated a torch march from the 1930’s and who felt morally justified in using their macho car as a lethal weapon. It took the events of 2020 to really show how far these purveyors of white pride would go to maintain their power. Antifa, that paragon of anarchy, became the boogeyman for the right, and their non-existent organization was decried time and time again. Meanwhile, those who instituted real violence on January 6 were coddled since white Americans could never be a danger, even when they used mountaineering tactics to scale walls, and mob techniques to overrun police lines. Of course, it was obvious that the Antifa provocateurs were behind all of this. Everyone who entered the Capital building were peaceful tourists who would never have caused damage or defecated in the hallway.

I am old enough to remember the television news showing the fire hoses and police dogs turned on those who demanded their right to vote. The fact that we have to revisit those scenes nearly 60 years later in response to Republican malfeasance in state legislatures is horrendous. The fact that my Senator from West Virginia believes in a non-existent comity among the Senators is worth more than moving legislation along to address voting discrimination is very disappointing. And the fact that so many folks wish to return us to a previous state of Great where it was ok to subjugate anyone who didn’t fulfill the Aryan ideal is worse than disappointing, it is disgusting.

I am an example of how demography is not destiny. I am a Caucasian retired chemical engineer, who spent his entire career in a manufacturing industry. I grew up in Nebraska, and now have lived in West Virginia for more than half of my life. If anyone should identify with the Fox news archetype for my political beliefs, it is me. But I grew up detesting the evil exposed on that television screen. And I am now exasperated at how we are having to fight the battles of the 1960’s over and over again, only this time with the added burden of those who refuse to recognize the true common enemy of the virus. I hope we have enough strength to repudiate those who select evil over humanity and actually work to build a society where all can share in the great wealth we generate in this country. There are ways we can do that and encourage work and thrift and all of those virtues supposedly embodied in that mythical time when America was Great.