Happy White Independence Day, United States of America. People around the country are going to break out the barbecue, gather around, and celebrate the founding of a country where ‘all men are created equal.’ All men, except for indigenous people, people of color, and women for starters. We took a step in the right direction on 6 December 1865 when we said most slavery was intolerable through the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. The loophole we left open was for people convicted of a crime, and you don’t have to look hard to see the USA has around 25% of the entire global population of prisoners. Who makes up these prisoners? A disproportionate amount of people of color, as a matter of policy. Happy Independence Day.
Lenin once said, “there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” Since POTUS Obama has exited, the firehose of falsehoods and crimes committed by the failure of the electoral college has been difficult to wrap one’s head around indeed. However, 2020 has taken the pace and scale of history and turned it ‘up to 11.’ We will be unpacking this for years to come, and I hope we emerge the other side better from it. We are hit with something new to be angry about and something else to mourn at such a pace that we haven’t had time to process any of it properly, while it hasn’t even ended yet. In those terms, it is akin to a combat operation. However, in combat, we didn’t lose 120,000 (and climbing rapidly) people to a leadership structure telling its people it will go away magically.
Maya Angelou reminds us, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” We have a statistically significant portion of the population who get angry if you tell them Jesus, a mythical entity designed to teach you how to be a good person, isn’t white. We have a good chunk of people who wrap themselves in the confederacy, a period lasting around four years, and angrily scream about ‘heritage’ despite their entire reason for leaving the USA was slavery and racism as written in their founding documents. We have a sizable sect of people who will look at you in the face and bemoan rural poverty as a tragedy and how they’re forgotten, left behind. Yet, these same people will say impoverished inner-city people brought it on themselves; the ‘pick them up by their bootstraps’ kind of mentality. From voting booths, Sunday services to 24/7 media channels, this hatred is embedded and expanded.
Lao Tzu wrote, “Failure is an opportunity. If you blame someone else, there is no end to the blame.” You can turn on any news channel, flip to any comments section and you will find this. There are some visibly, exponentially, worse than others, but it exists. Some stake the bulk of their identity on the impossibility of them being wrong, it is always ‘them.’ Who ‘they’ are may change, but when we go back to the founding of the country, it was: white, wealthy, native-born, land-owning, heterosexual, Christian, men. Hundreds of years later and there is still a vocal group of people trying to keep things that way. Unalienable rights? Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? Everyone is equal under the eyes of the law? All of those things are just words on paper and at best applies to the narrow group of applicable citizens.
2020 continues to show this struggle in ways that not even the billionaire-owned media channels can brush under the rug. We have a Russian ally in the Oval Office playing multiple rounds of golf and hosting ego-boosting parties during a pandemic and trying to shift the narrative to statues of traitors. We have an ongoing Friday-Night-Massacre in the Department of ‘Justice’ with firings and track-covering. We have half of the Congress that either is shut down entirely or only exists to corrupt the Judiciary branch. Meanwhile, the people are still getting killed in the streets by police and the failures of government. Individual narratives are trying to paint agent provocateurs as ‘looters’ while their corporate buddies walk away with free billions, no accountability. From coast to coast, from sovereign lands to public parks, and from small towns to big cities, people are trying to do the only thing they can with what they have available.
The second half of Lao Tzu’s chapter from before is, “Therefore the Master fulfills her own obligations and corrects her own mistakes. She does what she needs to do and demands nothing of others.” In an ideal world wherein we are all self-aware, compassionate, and strive to be harmonious, such a principle would be fantastic. However, we are not surrounded by such. We continuously fight with racists, religious zealots, and others who are not Masters, whose view of harmony and compassion is of obedience to their belief and deviation is exile. Their demands aren’t just let us be in peace but subjugation of those around them, and it has been for thousands of years.
In the Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln illustrated, “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” History is happening every day, sometimes rapidly. Blaming other people to the extent of some of the media outlets and comment sections doesn’t get us anywhere. We have a troubled past and population, and it is up to us to do something about it. The process will be painful but ignoring the problem is the same as approving it now, silence is consent. From the snarky comments in bars to fights at dinner tables, from the underground railroads to the creation, signing, and upholding legislation, we advance little by little.
I ask you to dedicate yourself to the unfinished work of making the USA ‘a more perfect union’ and join the ranks of people who can no longer tolerate the intolerable. It isn’t enough to vote and be politely quiet in public anymore. The ‘battlefield’ isn’t limited to the supreme court docket or the presidential voting booth, but in the attitudes of everyday people and everyday interactions. Removing statues and taking down flags of another country is just one step. If we want to live up to the ideals genuinely we claim to have; we have a lot of changes to make. Let’s make future fireworks shows ones we can be proud of, not ones tarnished by wildfire risks, spreading viruses, racial hatred, and more. We’ve accomplished some beautiful things; this is within our power.