Tag Archives: Racism

We Are Already at War

Russia is developing smart rockets that could send nuclear warheads to the U.S. and kill 250,000 people at a go. Recent reports say that Putin already has the ability to shut down parts of our power grid. We now have evidence that Russia infiltrated U.S. voting machines in 2016.  The U.S. just withdrew from a major nuclear treaty with Russia, and Putin has used extensive social media posts and ads to groom the U.S. to be as unprepared as possible for further Russian attack and infiltration. He’s trying to foment a civil war here by backing white supremacists and the NRA and polarizing Americans

Russia is already at war with us. And our Republican leadership is actively aiding the enemy

We are woefully unprepared for what is coming. Fear has led too many to support a sociopathic authoritarian president who purposely confuses and stokes mass hatred. Our system was not built for a mass breakdown in faith or for takeover by a party that actively subverts the rule of law. I often fear that we may not rally enough to recover, short of civil war and invasion by foreign oppressors that might inspire us to fight back. But the invasion is underway, and all we have to show in response is Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi biding her time and Democratic candidates saying nice words while the president and his cronies dismantle our nation. 

Those who run this country in our names make sure that children are left abandoned in the streets or tortured in cages, ripped away from parents, forced to live in filth, then made to disappear. National agricultural research labs were slated to be dismantled this week as a large swath of the country’s top agricultural scientists were forced from their U.S.D.A. jobs; their experiments and studies will be left to rot. All of Alaska’s sea ice disappeared this week, yet Trump continues to press for more fracking and coal mining. Trump writes love letters to murdering dictators and alienates all of our major allies. He fires heads of major government agencies and never replaces them in a dictatorial move to centralize all power under himself. 

What will it take for us to see what the world sees: We have a reckless madman at the helm who is actively destroying our nation’s morals and infrastructure. He is spitting on the Constitution, on the values of equality and respect for diversity that we hold dear, and on everyone who has sacrificed to build this nation, safeguard it, and uphold its laws and ideals. 

Our country is convulsing, and we wring our hands but deny it the care it needs to survive. We are in an undeclared state of emergency. We must remove Trump from power as fast as is constitutionally possible. We will still have divisiveness and hatred and homegrown terrorism to deal with—we will not be out of the woods. But stopping this madman is a necessary first step.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler says an impeachment investigation is underway. Please let your senators and House representatives know that you support this effort. Please speak out against the evil done in your name. Please vote against the terrorist-in-chief and his enablers.

Coretta Scott King’s Condemnation of Jeff Sessions

Coretta

Above is the beginning of the letter that civil rights leader (and widow of Martin Luther King Jr.) Coretta Scott King wrote to segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond about Jeff Sessions in 1986 when she was protesting his nomination for a position as a federal judge. On the cover page of her nine-page letter, Mrs. King wrote, ‘“Anyone who has used the power of his office as United States Attorney to intimidate and chill the free exercise of the ballot by citizens should not be elevated to our courts. Mr. Sessions has used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters. For this reprehensible conduct, he should not be rewarded with a federal judgeship.”

Thurmond was supposed to make the letter a part of the Senate record, but he failed to do his duty in an attempt to the hide the filthy history of a fellow believer in white supremacy. Thurmond’s action hid the fact of the letter from the public for 30 years. It was recently rediscovered and shared by the Washington Post.

Tonight Senator Elizabeth Warren was reading it aloud on the floor of the U.S. Senate when Republican Senator Mitch McConnell shut her down, saying she was breaking Senate rules against impugning the name of a fellow member of the Senate by sharing historical facts about his long history of racism, facts necessary to properly assess his worthiness for one of the most powerful posts in the nation.

Jeff Sessions has spoken on behalf of segregationists and white supremacists. He has gone out of his way to stand by bigots and against racial equality in his public as well as his private life. Now Donald Trump wants him to be our Attorney General.

Stand up to them, America.

Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself

fdr

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the following statement during a campaign speech in November 1940, just over a year before the U.S. entered World War II:

“We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions—bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one nationality against another, seeks to degrade all nationalities. Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races. Whoever seeks to set one religion against another, seeks to destroy all religion. “

This is a noble statement, but the president himself made the grave error of rounding up all people of Japanese descent and imprisoning them in internment camps during World War II on the baseless assumption that they would be less patriotic, loyal or law-abiding than people of other ancestries. He was wrong. Not one single Japanese-American was determined to have committed a treasonous act anywhere in the United States before, during or after World War II. Not one.

Indeed, many of those same Japanese-Americans fought nobly for the U.S. and Allied Forces during World War II, even as their families were imprisoned at home. FDR’s words quoted here are right and beautiful, but even he was blinded by fear. He had said at the outset of his presidency that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself, and fear is certainly the source of hatred for people and ideas other than our own. Fear makes us turn inward, and that allows us to remain ignorant, to refuse to empathize, ask questions or try to figure out how it feels to be one of those people who frighten us.

Fear keeps us from facing the humanity of our enemies, and makes us see enemies among our friends. It makes American governors look at orphaned Syrian toddlers and see danger; it makes Trump rally audiences look at a single African-American man who asks to be treated as if black lives matter, and then beat him to a pulp because he peacefully but loudly speaks up about bigotry in public. It is only by seeing others as human first that we can figure out how to talk to and deal with them honestly, honorably and peacefully.

[Image source: missrevolutionaries.com]