America, We Hardly Knew YE

It’s hard to comprehend, understand, and accept what is going on in this country.

I keep going back to the movie, “The Sound of Music,” where in the last scenes, Christopher Plummer, who played Captain von Trapp, sings “Edelweiss” as his family makes its last appearance before they flee Austria. He has decided not to give in to pressure being put on him to join the navy of Nazi Germany.

I had no idea about what Edelweiss was; I only knew that he looked very sad and was singing it as a tribute, to his beloved country, which was being taken over by the Nazis. The flower was and is known to be strong and able to survive in the harshest of Alpine weather. Perhaps he was stating that his beloved Austria would likewise survive.

As he chokes up toward the end of the song, his entire family comes out and joins in, and prompts the audience to join in as well. The song ends, the family leaves the stage, and then begins its trek out of Austria. Everything that they have known has changed; the Edelweiss will remain the same, and that brings some degree of comfort, even in the midst of von Trapp’s profound sadness.

America seems to be getting to a state where many Americans will fall back on memories of a country that changed right before their eyes. It seems that we are being led into an exile of sorts; it seems that we, like the Israelites in the Hebrew scriptures, will sit on the banks of our own River of Babylon and weep as we remember this country when there was a semblance of civility and a commitment to democracy, even though the promises made in our founding documents were never realized.

As much as I think of “Edelweiss,” I think of Psalm 137, where the psalmist writes:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and there we sept when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land” If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I don’t set Jerusalem above my highest joy,

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!” (Psalm 137:1-7, NRSV)

Those who despise democracy are working intentionally to tear this government down, and while they say that there exists a “deep state” (which is true) what they are proposing is not the end of the deep state but the creation of a new deep state, a state in which the freedoms that Americans have enjoyed will be stripped away. Already, we see the freedoms being attacked; we see state governments imposing rules and making laws that make it difficult if not impossible for teachers to teach what they want; we see politically irate parents bombarding school boards demanding that the history of some groups of people not be taught; we see people burning books like the Nazis did as they destroyed the German government as it had been. (https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/theyre-burning-books-in-tennessee/article_1f8c631e-850f-11ec-bc9f-dbd44d7e14d7.html) We hear the former president saying things like military generals who oppose him are treasonous and should be executed (https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/28/politics/milley-donald-trump-execution-comment/index.html) and we hear him say that if he is reelected, some news operations will not be allowed to be on the air.( https://thehill.com/homenews/4221310-trump-pledges-to-investigate-msnbc-parent-for-threatening-treason/#:~:text=Trump%20pledges%20to%20investigate%20MSNBC%20parent%20company%20for%20%27threatening%20treason%27,-by%20Rachel%20Scully&text=Former%20President%20Trump%20pledged%20to,%2C%20things%2C%20and%20events.”).

America was never all it claimed to be. It was built on a broken foundation, one that pushed capitalism by using and exploiting people brought to this country for that reason alone. The country was built on a broken obelisk, which meant from the beginning that as the country grew it would not be able to withstand the pressure and the weight that comes with growth. (Ancient Egyptians refused to continue to build the obelisk once they discovered it was cracked. It sits unfinished to this day. https://mymodernmet.com/unfinished-obelisk-aswan-egypt/)

America had chances to correct some of what was wrong and what would continually weaken it, but reneged. It forged ahead, giving in to greed and the raw desire for power, ignoring the creaking of a government that was not able to withstand the seedbeds of racism and sexism. While it touted its “democracy,” the whole world watched and knew that America was not all it claimed to be. Other democracies imitated America’s racist practices; the Nazis actually studied America’s race laws in the creation of their own.

What this country failed to embrace was the impossibility of a country built on a cracked foundation being able to withstand the winds of bigotry, enmity, and greed as time went on. When the former president was elected, I remember being shocked when one of my social media friends said “Democracy needs to end.” I was stunned.

But it is a fact that there are groups of people working to do just that – end democracy. Big business is running the country and the politicians are allowing it – and some appear to be actively participating in the process.

I keep seeing Christopher Plummer singing “Edelweiss,” and I keep referring to Psalm 137. It seems that we are on our way to the shores of a river in a country we once thought we knew – and I say “we” in a pejorative sense, because many Americans were never included in the benefits of being American. They were not even considered to be citizens…yet, they held onto hope that one day this country would be what it professed to be.

My thought is, though that none of us really knew the real America at all, and are about to be made to reckon with that. Maybe, in spite of all the warning signs and flashing lights that have been a part of our government for hundreds of years, we will learn the hard way that silence is complicity, and for that, we will be forced to sing an “American” song in a strange land.

A candid observation …

Neither Slavery nor Naziism Ended; they Both Evolved and Are Still Evolving

When the former president began his trek toward the American presidency, his violent and hateful rhetoric was troubling and when I shared with a Facebook friend, a white woman with whom I had had some conversations, I was afraid that what he was saying and doing would result in the end of our democracy, she said, without a pause, “Democracy needs to die.”

I was shocked and silent. I finally wrote her that I didn’t agree and got off Facebook for the day, and I never talked with her again.

The fact that there is a move on to end democracy as this country has known it is all the more troubling because there are so many people who adhere to that desire. They say they resent big government – i.e. government that has created policies and programs that help the masses of the people, but they don’t seem to understand that an authoritarian government represents the highest form of big government – where the government controls all aspects of the lives of individual citizens. For some reason, people who are pushing for authoritarianism do not seem to be concerned that some in the government are already stepping on the freedoms Americans have held dear – including being able to teach or read what we want, the right of women to make decisions about their bodies, and even going so far as to intrude on the privacy of young women by asking those who play sports about their menstrual cycles. Some of our most beloved books have been banned, and more will come. (https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/freedom-to-read-books-on-lgbtq-racism-banned-in-32-states/) (https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/freedom-to-read-books-on-lgbtq-racism-banned-in-32-states/) (https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-desantis-florida-sports-female-athletes-160560972802) (Florida has recently backed away from this plan.)

Adolph Hitler wanted complete control; he was able to inspire millions of Germans and other Europeans as he blamed Jews for everything that was “wrong,” even if “wrong” was tightly defined by the Germans. As German Jews faced mass murder and sought to come to the United States, this country, sadly, was not as open as we would have believed. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/)

From the way history was taught to me, the fact that Hitler did not win his war meant that Hitlerism and Naziism had died along with him. As a child and young student, I believed the Nazi threat was gone.

But it did not die; it has evolved. We see Swastikas appearing, and we hear angry white people shouting “Jews will not replace us.” They are serious. Naziism appeals to them and they make no secret that they want “white power,” meaning, they want this country to be inhabited and controlled by white people. Many are unafraid to flash the “white power” symbol, something most recently reported as having been done by George Santos as he took his oath of office to be a US Representative. ( https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/01/did-rep-george-santos-flash-the-white-power-symbol-in-the-house-chamber) (https://abcnews.go.com/US/symbols-hate-extremism-display-pro-trump-capitol-siege/story?id=75177671)

The anti-Semitism that is a core component of Naziism is still very much alive. The former president is said to have slept with a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf at his bedside. (https://abcnews.go.com/US/symbols-hate-extremism-display-pro-trump-capitol-siege/story?id=75177671) Modern-day believers in Naziism are not being subtle about their support of the ideology, much to the chagrin of many.

But this country decided what it would be at the outset. From our beginning, the primary value was capitalism; enslaving people of African descent had proven to be a cash cow, and the framers were unwilling to let it go. Even after the Emancipation, whites found ways to re-enslave Africans, primarily through the Convict Leasing program, but in later years, through putting Blacks in positions where they could make good money – but make even more money for those owners of football and basketball teams that operate much as plantations did before the Civil War.

Slavery is yet evolving, as is Naziism. Black and brown people are still working for wages that do not allow them to have quality lives and in essence, be free. We have wanted to believe – and we have touted the narrative that this is the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” but it is neither. The “free and the brave” tend to be a very small group of wealthy, white people who also call themselves “Christian” to give their ideology more validation. Still, nothing that Naziism or enslavement stands for has anything to do with what was taught in the Gospel.

Though it is troubling to see elected officials willing to stomp over and dismantle American freedoms, and in fact dismantle the government, it is not a new thing. Those who have adhered to racism and sexism and are anti-democracy have walked into this country and served in its government from our beginning. They, like my Facebook friend, do not want democracy. They don’t want the masses to have liberty and justice, they don’t want everyone to vote, including Black and Brown people, students, and women.

This country may never have been a democracy; it feels as though it never was in practice, but only in verbiage. Both slavery and Naziism are still evolving. Patriarchy and sexism are still evolving. Those in power are working to keep the evolution going. We are not “united,” nor were we meant to be.

That truth works to the detriment of far too many in these dis-United States of America.

A candid observation …

Watching a Government Wash Down the Drain

Whenever I have my phone or keys in my hand, and I walk across a street drain, I clutch them more tightly. I have a fear of dropping them down a drain, making them forever irretrievable.

Unfortunately, I cannot clutch the government of the country I’ve lived in all my life, the government of a country that made people want to come here and live because this government was believed to be better than so many others. Here there were freedoms and fair elections. This country was an idea and an ideal that people in other countries recognized as being special and rare. We called it a “democracy.”

But it turns out that a fair number of Americans did not like or appreciate democracy, and it seems that they have resented “the experiment” for some time. The very pluralism that helped make America stand out was a source of irritation for many. It got in the way of the maintenance and growth of white supremacy, and that was not acceptable. (https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/stories/posts/democracy-is-a-threat-to-white-supremacy-and-that-is-the-cause-of-america-s-crisis/)

Since the 2016 election, this country has been on a downward spiral, with things like truth and ethics being washed away as lies and racial hatred and an almost hysteric series of actions designed to keep white people in power. Fox News has helped the process, but so has the mainstream media. The rights of Americans are being taken away, bit by bit, and are being lost in drains that move swirling waters of raw political ambition further and further away from even a chance of those rights being retrieved and saved.

While the Republicans have been largely silent and have defended the attacks on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, calling what happened legitimate political discourse, they have been quick to condemn people in this country who for the most part have engaged in peaceful protests for their constitutionally guaranteed freedoms – including freedom of speech, religion, the press, and assembly.

The only freedom for them that is sacrosanct to them is the freedom to bear arms, a freedom that leads to untimely and unnecessary death, not life, as they proclaim to support.

It is probably not hyperbole to say that millions of Americans wake up every day to see if the Department of Justice is going to do something to plug the drains before there is so much water in them that the drains will overflow. But there is nothing, and the people who are running roughshod over the right of people to be treated as human beings are getting more and more emboldened. They are cocky about their capacity to be white in this country and get away with pretty much whatever they want, a sentiment that was expressed by one woman who participated in the insurrection who said she would not be arrested because she was “white with blonde hair and blue eyes.” (https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/jenna-ryan-convinced-she-wont-go-to-jail-apologizes-for-having-white-skin-blond-hair-12000445)

All that is going on is part of the work to “make America great again,” but what people are yearning for was not great. It was filled with discrimination, racism, sexism and unfettered violence. It was a country that allowed and encouraged discrimination against people who were easily identifiable and not worry about being held accountable. It was a country that supported the rights of wealthy white men, primarily, who brought their women along although they treated them as objects just as they did non-white men and women.

These people cannot be called Republicans. Or Christian. Or Conservative. They are nationalists, rabid supporters of white supremacy. In the current controversy about the renunciation of a woman’s right to choose whether or not she will (or can) carry a fetus, they are blind by their quest for white male domination, and unconcerned about “liberty and justice for all.” They believe not just in big government, but in enormous government, a government that controls every aspect of the lives of its citizens. They want control of women’s bodies, yes, but also control of a woman’s right to privacy, the right to use contraception, and a child’s right not to be forced to carry a fetus after having been raped by a stranger or family member.

They want to end public education, get rid of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, raise taxes for the very poor, and make everyone practice the same religion. (https://thehill.com/homenews/media/581443-michael-flynn-says-of-the-us-we-have-to-have-one-religion/)

We are watching it happen in real-time. Those who hate democracy, who ignore the Great Commandment that we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves – a commandment that appeared in the Hebrew Scriptures and was repeated by Jesus -are on a mission. The United States Supreme Court is not a believer in liberty and justice for all; it is and has always been, a political tool used to uphold and protect white supremacy, which attacks not only the rights of Black people, but of Brown and Asian and Indigenous Americans, women, and anyone whom they think is not “American” enough. Women, even white women, are not protected from white male nationalism. They will see, but by then, it will be too late.

When something falls into a drain, the rushing water pushing it along, there is a sense of hopelessness as you reach and try to catch it before it gets out of reach. But the water is strong and the drain is there; your phone or keys or glasses are gone forever.

If we can plug the drain, if we can put something over the grid to slow the water down, we may save democracy. But we had better move more quickly than we have. The storm of white nationalism is getting more and more intense, and we are all at risk.

A candid observation …

Requiem for America’s Mythical Democracy

The debacle of the Trump impeachment process ended, for all intents and purposes, with the GOP-led Senate refusing to allow witnesses and documents which were said to support the charges of the president’s abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

In spite of some very few die-hard optimists who hoped for a miracle of justice, the GOP senators followed the lead of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. In spite of some Republican senators admitting that the president had, in fact, done something wrong, his offenses did not rise to the level of deserving impeachment.

When the president is acquitted of wrongdoing, he will be free to continue his disembowelment of the American democracy as we have known it, but he is not the primary source of this state of being in this country. If the truth be told, even the Founders did not wholly believe in the concept of democracy, where everyone, rich and poor, black and white, male and female, would have an equal voice and equal rights. The concept of “one person, one vote” was understood from this country’s birth to mean “one white wealthy man, one vote.”

The Founding Fathers had problems with what the phrase “we the people” meant. While it was an idealistic goal to have all of the people of the nation participate in its governance, the truth of the matter is that many of the founders thought that to be not only impossible but impractical. The problem was that the country was set up to be run by a small group of wealthy white men. The masses of people, who steadily increased the ranks of the poor, were a threat to what the founders wanted this country would be. Alexander Hamilton said “the people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give, therefore, to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government.” (Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States)

It was the wealthy, therefore, wealthy, white, Protestant males who set this country up with the firm belief that this country should function as an oligarchy.

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Democracy, they thought, was a problem, because a true democracy required something of the masses that they often did not want or could not handle. In the end, the masses were not able to govern themselves, and hence, would lean toward an authoritarian government. Hamilton’s assertion that the masses were turbulent and changing supported the contention made years later by Shawn Rosenberg who said: “human brains are not made for self-rule.” (https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/08/shawn-rosenberg-democracy-228045) The chasm between the poor and the wealthy makes the capacity for more turbulence all the greater, leading to the poor fighting against each other and blaming each other for a piece of economic power that was never intended to be passed on to them.

We in America have basked in a sort of pseudo-democracy for years, but the powers that be, the very wealthy, have always been in the middle of government, leading the way and calling the shots. Presidents, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson have all exercised excessive power – an abuse of power according to the US Constitution, yet people have acquiesced and given in because they (we) have trusted wealth and the dream of becoming wealthy more than they (we) have trusted our collective power. Democracies die, say experts, not from guns and missiles, but through the acquiescence of people, people who vote them into office and keep them there.

The United States Senate’s refusal to call witnesses in the impeachment of the current president is not surprising, given that they represent the power class and have grown wary of so many people of color coming into the country and, they believe, threatening their power and therefore, their wealth. Making America “great” again is about fixing what many believe to be the skewing of the American government model – where wealthy, white men govern the masses and it seems that many in the ranks of the masses want to be controlled and led rather than taking on the responsibility of living and working in a true democracy.

With the president’s almost sure acquittal next week, one thing is certain: the façade of this government being a well-oiled, functioning democracy will finish the crumbling that began years ago, only to be accelerated by the Trump presidency. America the mythical democracy is in decline. What will rise up in its place is yet to be seen, but it will surely not be a place where “one person, one vote” is the norm, and where “all” people are considered to be equal.

But then, that wasn’t the plan as the country was formed. As the guardrails of the myth of democracy come crumbling down, it will be interesting to see what kind of government America really is.

A candid observation.

Denying a Creeping Autocracy

Whenever anyone in this country talks about what is happening here and compares it to what happened in other democracies that fell to an autocratic leader, there is stern rebuke and criticism. Just as we deny our racism and sexism and the other “isms” that plague our lives, we are in denial now that there is a serious transformation happening in our government – and it isn’t good.

Our “democracy” is undergoing a radical change under the leadership of the current president, and while, in anticipation of the upcoming 2020 general election, the battle cry of “never socialism” is being tossed about more and more, in fact, there ought to be an equal groundswell, a counter-argument, where we declare that we will never be a dictatorship.

In his book Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, author James Q. Whitman writes that “the same aspects of American life that appealed to Nazis seventy-five years ago are with us again.” House Majority Whip James Clyburn D-SC) and said that the current president and his family are “one of the greatest threat to democracy” he has seen in his lifetime, correctly noting that the German people elected Hitler to be chancellor. (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/clyburn-calls-trump-family-greatest-threats-democracy-my-lifetime-n985131)

Dr. Tom Snyder, in his book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century makes the same observation. The history of modern democracy, says Snyder, is one of “decline and fall,” and he notes how “European democracies collapsed into right-wing authoritarianism and fascism in the 1920s and 30s.” He says that both fascism and communism “were responses to globalization, and says that while Americans “might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats,” history shows that to be a dangerous way of thinking.

Our country has never been a pure democracy, not if one believes that in a democracy a basic foundational principle is “egalitarianism.” Frederick Douglass recognized that America’s founding documents, including its Constitution, were “flawed from the beginning” because they were not inclusive of all races, religions, and gender. From the beginning, the wonderful phrase “all men are created equal” was tainted by an underlying belief in white supremacy and all that that ideological system includes.

In spite of our stated belief in democracy, the fact is that democracies too often fall to authoritarian figures. Snyder notes that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” He calls it “anticipatory obedience,” and says that it is a political tragedy. It is not a new phenomenon, but I at least had hope that the American governmental structure, including checks and balances, would prevent our country from beginning its downward spiral to authoritarianism.

The fact of the matter is that up to this point, checks and balances have failed; the only arm of the federal government which seems serious in upholding the US Constitution on that principle is the US Congress, now dominated by Democrats. The Republican-led and controlled Congress were disappointingly sycophantic in their blind allegiance and support of the president.

The GOP lawmakers have been following along because such a large portion of the GOP base is in favor and is supportive of everything this president does, even if it adversely affects them and their lives, but nobody is really talking about that. Our media spends too much of its time talking about how despicable the president is. Too few people care.

When democracies have fallen in other countries, the masses who have supported them have often been surprised, saying that they never thought “it” could happen to them. Their surprise is reminiscent of those in whose neighborhoods there is a violent crime. Too many of us live in bubbles that are comfortable and which feel safe and we like to stay inside of them, closing our eyes and shutting our ears to what is happening around us. In so doing, we make ourselves vulnerable to attack and in the matter of government, a demolition of democracy. Dictatorships led by authoritarian leaders and a group of lackeys are not prone to helping the masses live better lives. Their concern is for their own accumulation of power and wealth.

America is in a bad place, but too many Americans will not own it and therefore are ill-equipped to fight it. I hope that this period of time passes with at least a smidgen of our democracy in place. Democracies rise and fall; that is a historical reality. My prayer is that our democracy can survive this assault and attack and that the American people – all of us – will still be able to claim this country as our own once this administration has run its course.