The despair in this country is palatable. People are being murdered in the streets by radicalized, white 17-year-olds, coming to cities where mostly peaceful Black Lives Matter protests continue undeterred for more than half a year now. These kids have been manipulated and used as fodder in an ageless war with a simplistic view of our countrymen’s plight that pits races against each other and is fracturing the moral fiber of our nation. Is our democracy at stake with this disease of hate raging and waning over the landscape of our nation? No one is immune but some are more able to fight it
Unfortunately, some non-people of color (NON-POC) feel compelled to regain order at all costs and do not understand the long history of peaceful protest to change archaic and racist laws in this country. This ignorance of how grassroots efforts have historically been used to repeal unjust laws is fueling animosity deep enough to kill. The right to peacefully protest is under fire everywhere. The frustration with police brutality disproportionately effecting black and brown individuals is fueling dissent nationwide. Downtowns across America are still boarded up and burning a year later. People ask when will it end? It is like the first 3-month COVID quarantine, in the spring of 2020, caused an explosion of sorts. Compelling people into the streets like opening a shook up can of soda on a hot day.
A Political Science professor I had 30 years ago, doubted our country would have another revolution in our lifetimes. He had not counted on an autocrat propped up by a sinister strong man and a slew of “carpet baggers” running billion-dollar businesses causing such political and economic disparity. These mega corporations run tight ships and some older workers attest to the fact that they are required to stand for 4 to 5 hours straight in a return’s cubicle. Work hours are deliberately kept below the threshold for qualifying for health care benefits. Didn’t Unions correct these abuses of corporate greed decades ago? Healthy young workers do not mind the hours and are happy to have work with unemployment at record highs but, our fellow senior citizens often work these jobs because they cannot live on their paltry social security benefits, even after working in America for 50 years. Divorced women who took time out of the workforce to raise their children fare even worse financially.
The reality is that there has been a systemic destruction of vibrant communities now barren of honest ways to make a living in this country. Economic slavery of one group or another has played out over the millennia, it is just the races that have changed, and we’ve changed too. Not long-ago civil discourse was the norm, now we have hateful factions trying to propagate hate against thy fellow man. It is everywhere all over the world. How will we ever right the wrongs of generations of biased laws and racism? The criminal killing and imprisoning of so many black and brown fathers across the nation has impoverished scores of families. Sadly, we have fractured our democracy with such injustices, and many say it is time to be accountable. The world is in disarray and many NON-POC are joining forces with righteous folk, to right the wrongs of 500 years of economic slavery and the lie that separate but equal ever ended.
We cannot let this divisive climate continue for another 4 years. I am not sure we will recognize our country when Trump gets done with it. He has destroyed everything I hold dear in a matter of 3 years. He mentioned around the 2020 Election that he wanted to meet with Putin again before November. Does anyone else have a problem with the leader of the FREE World, seeking guidance from a notorious strong man who rules his country with an iron fist and silences descent? Another top Ukrainian official and dissident was poisoned and hospitalized this fall and all fingers point back to Russia. Is that the model of governance our President wants to emulate? Is silence of dissent a democratic value?
Has anyone noticed the play on the name Putin and Rasputin from a century ago? The Russian orthodox Mystic Grigori Rasputin, befriended the Royal Emperors family at first, under the guise, that he could heal their son Alexei’s hemophilia. He rose to quite an influential role in Imperial Russia and after ten years near the royal family with rumors of inappropriate sexual behavior and undue influence over the Tzar and his wife, German born Empress Alexandra, Rasputin was murdered in 1916. Feudalism was in decline and a refusal by the royal family to give up absolute autocratic rule hastened their demise. Seventeen months later, Bolshevik revolutionaries brutally murdered the deposed Tsar Nicholas ll, Tsarina Alexandra, (a favorite granddaughter of England’s Queen Victoria, both carriers of the hemophilia disease), their 5 children and 4 royal staff members in the cellar of Ipatiev House near the Ural Mountains.
The communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formed in 1922. After the deaths/murders of some of the more shall we say idealistic leaders of the fledgling socialist movement, like Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin. An all-out war was waged on the citizens of the newly formed republic. Under the guise of the state moto “Workers of the World Unite”, Joseph Stalin and his merry henchmen rose to ultimate power, installing a vastly different form of control of the proletariat with their own version of socialist communism. He also ruled with an iron fist and squelched dissent by outright murder of the opposition a hundred years ago.
In 1991, I was finishing up my senior year of college and watched amazed when the Russian perestroika movement shook loose 70 years of communist rule in favor of glasnost, or an openness policy to democratic ideals. Twenty years earlier in the late 60’s when my oldest brother was a Marine fighting in the jungles of Vietnam, I remember my mother having us pray the rosary on Sunday afternoons for his safety and the “Conversion of Russia”. She also told us that a treacherous leader would rise from within our country to try to destroy us. As a converted Catholic she read copious amounts of religious dogma of the times and it must have been something the church was encouraging people to pray about at that time.
It is all there in the Bible. The Old Testament is rife with violence begetting violence in the exodus from tyrannical rule in Egypt or Judith slicing Holofernes neck to free her people from generational exploitation. Is that where we are today? Civil unrest in the streets demanding change all over the world. The unveiling of the dirty little American secret of systemic racism keeping Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) trapped in poverty whether through broken or unfair Treaty interpretations, labor or housing practices or blatant public type “lynching’s” of black men and women by our state funded police.
The Russian Revolution of 1918 was not unlike the one we see the makings of today in the US. With the decline of feudalism, the Russian people were impoverished and literally freezing to death. Widespread inflation and food shortages after the Spanish flu, ravaged the worlds young returning from the front lines in World War 1, had crippled the nation.
A hundred years later we are battling a disturbingly similar foe here in one of the richest countries in the world. Is it any wonder that the young and oppressed would take to the streets? How will the revolution end this time? Unless our government figures out how to quell the unrest throughout the country by holding police officials responsible who kill unarmed countrymen and women, enacting less violent police tactics in traffic stops, and repealing unjust drug laws and excessive bail bonds are we doomed to tear one another limb from limb?
Just witness one of these questionable stop and frisk police cam videos on Frontlines, “Policing the Police” documentary. Ask yourself, would you like it if you, your spouse, son or daughter was walking down the street at night and a police car rolled up and stopped you, and if you asked why, you could be manhandled and physically frisked before being sent on your way. Frisking is very invasive. An officer takes their hands and touches your body all over, on or near your breasts and up the inside of your legs near your genitals with the intent to see if you are carrying a weapon. Many of these altercations are not logged if the suspect is unarmed but they legally should be. Black men and women have been suffering this type of police brutality for decades and only now are NON-POC ready to take to the streets on mass and fight alongside them in protest of such practices. No one should be manhandled for just walking home.
I am not so naive to think that some of police brutality is a holdover from years of law enforcement dealing with some very scary dudes hell bent on destroying their neighborhoods with drugs and warfare but, we have to take a deep look at what causes folks to lose hope and turn to a life of crime.
The cycle of crushing poverty has fractured generations of young men all over the world who have witnessed violence and become disenfranchised from their societies. They in turn can be radicalized by gangs or Al-Qaeda type groups. Without the wisdom and firm guidance of father’s, young men can become lost and or violent. How have generational imprisonments of Black and Brown men effected their families?
In nature, we recently learned of the importance of adult males in the lives of young males, when an ecologist in Africa noticed an explosion of male aggression in teen male elephants. The young males brought into the reserve years earlier with grown females were easier to transport than full sized male bulls. It appears that when these elephants became adolescents reproductive hormones flooded their systems and they would become extremely violent and kill one another or gang up and brutally wound other mammals in the reserve but, once they brought in some adult male elephants the youngsters would pass through the hormonal stage quicker in biological deference to the adult males and the violence was quelled. This aggressive behavior was totally out of character for this species of gentle giants and may shine a light on the important roles of adult males in our species.
Governmental removal of fathers from poor communities must end and awareness must breed change. Global protests have shone a spotlight on racism and the systemic causes of violence in communities of people of color around the world. The polarization of America is on view for the world to witness the ugly truth about our bifurcated economic and justice systems. Many marginalized people around the world are cheering us on and rising up to seek equal rights in their own countries. White privilege as an insulator of one portion of the populace has been revealed to all. The awareness of how poverty and corporate welfare has wounded millions has shaken us to our core. The emboldened NON-POC, have taken to the streets and now risk imprisonment alongside their BIPOC brethren. Police brutality and the lack of accountability has created a powder keg. Everyone is outraged and seeking justice. The problem is we somehow stopped talking to each other along the way.
Was Trump elected to help us witness the ugly underbelly of these practices and in so doing force change? Has our country’s political fall so far from grace made it clear to NON-POC that something or someone has got to right the ship. I’m not sure our country will survive this revolution because I’m not sure a new president can heal the myriad of warring factions. In my deepest heart I realize how fractured everything is. The process of white society becoming WOKE is painful and imperative if we are going to heal centuries of injustice and create a world where people have a right to talk back and ask why are we doing it this way? Is there a more egalitarian approach we can utilize? Our democracy is in true jeopardy if we do not get this right.
