This country is at one of the most dangerous times we have ever been in.
How did this happen?
When I look back over the course of my fifty-two years (just had a birthday and wonderously fabulous Mother's Day), I wonder about the kids I grew up with who are now parents and grandparents. What made so many of them so mean?
Hillary Clinton, a full-fledged baby boomer, is leading in the Democratic polls. Bernie Sanders, an octogenarian, is pulling hard against time to finally be able to get a "for the people" democratic message heard. Then there is the orange sexist, Donald Trump, who has used his media savvy and sheer narcissism to pull the covers back from America's polite evil.
For the majority of the past two years, on my facebook page especially, I have unrelentingly posted about the racism, sexism, xenophobic, bigotted, misogny that is taking over all reality. I know I wrote and posted, linked articles and commented. Compelled, even. Not to be one of those twitter rising activistss that emerged after Mike Brown was murdered, or even a content filler on Huffington Post.com, I kept speaking out because I had to.
And because history demands that ordinary people find their voice to counteract the corporate media narrative pushing a Clinton-v-Trump fall ticket and their glee over an almost assured bloodbath.
This is what I do know.
There is nothing new under the sun.
That is what I kept telling the Black Lives Matter activists who kept thinking they invented revolution and that this "isn't your mother's civil rights movement" as if the young people and mothers who marched, sat at lunch counters, blocked cars for the Jefferson Bank protest, or refused to ride a bus to work in Montgomery, were no longer worthy of appreciation or praise because we were not all "free." I kept writing that the only thing that separates the two distinct age group movements - Boomers and Millennials - was the greater advancement of technology that Boomers invented.
Smart phones with the world at a swipe is how the murders of black men, women, and children came to a world-wide light.
They had already happened, like the dragging death in Jackson, Mississippi or the little girl killed in a bogus raid, these things had happened before a camera could capture the police action, the tears of the mothers, or the outrage of the community.
All that was already there, held in the stories of the poets, the rappers, the writers, the artists, who never let the world forget.
Langston wrote about it, as did Zora in her tomes about the white publishing world. Countee Cullen lamented about visiting Baltimore and the only thing he remembered was being called that word, long before Beyoncé got in formation, the Black Panther Party was taking a stand against just non-violence and decided to protect themselves, not kill anyone, just feed their women and children, educate their own community, and keep the KKK-in-uniform away by standing guard with their own shotguns.
Nothing new under the sun.
What happened is the white man came.
The cameras came to capture sensationalized emotion of black people, that is what happened on West Florissant Avenue. It fed their narrative of petulant children who do not want to stay in segregated space that the white man "gave them" in a suburb where a couple generations ago, the only black faces were the maids cleaning a white woman's two-bedroom bungalow.
Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II - that's what happened.
Then the country overwhelmingly had the audacity to hope and elected a true American - a man of an African father and American mother - to the office.
Perhaps it was just that.
President Obama's "mixed" heritage was not the kind that made so many of us many shades lighter than our African foreparents forced on a ship across the Atlantic.
White men have raped, murdered, and pillaged for over 400 years.
And they felt slighted.
Mitch McConnell declared that the only thing his party had to do was defeat or block everything President Obama proposed. They did not care who it hurt, even if their own white people were starving to death in Appalachia or drugging themselves to death in Kirkwood, they did not care.
Eight years is a short time.
President Obama turned around the economy that a white man destroyed. But they still hate him.
They hate this man who is faithfully married to his one wife raising his two and only daughters, one just being accepted to Harvard and subjected to the keyboard warrior twitter rants of pimply faced overweight manhood challenged white folks in a basement. The vitriol to this beautifully accomplished young woman was more than the stomach could handle.
It was so much that even the network that fed off the racism took down their page.
The animal they created has jumped over the cage of just talk radio, white evangelical circles, and conservative morning news channels.
Soccer moms in the suburbs were riding around with Cruz (he said God told him to run, guess he didn't hear correctly because he dropped out after Indiana) and Trump stickers.
Black girls in suburban middle schools were subjected to being accused of counterfeiting over a $2 bill, sent home for their natural hairstyle, or told how they should be considerate of the poor white person's feelings.
The genie is out of the bottle.
The world is watching.
And laughing.
Hard.
We can not possible erase the success of this most excellent President for a carnival barker.
Yet, that is what even the Republicans who refuted him are circling the wagons to try to figure out how they can square their ideology with a man who has more marriage licenses than they have hate for black people; a clearly ignornant nationalist who has brought out the dumbest of the dumb of their base; a man who has middle school locker fights with others proclaiming he has no problem in the size department and that he gets more sex than his other candidates. They are trying to figure out how to tame the beast and still stand respectably on the world stage.
This country is a laughing stock, literally.
They created it because they bought into the lie of white exceptionalism.
Many of them do not even read or bother to have a clear thought beyond their Starbucks in the suburbs or their rifles in the country. World affairs, private prisons, prescription drug abuse, marginalized schools, borders, diplomacy, none of that resonates with them.
So they have an orange face, flyover, sexist man as their candidate to go against a pandering feminist who isn't beyond throwing another woman under the bus and trying to be hip by playing dominoes in the "hood."
America, the soul is on fire.
Wonder what it will take to save the republic?
How did this happen?
When I look back over the course of my fifty-two years (just had a birthday and wonderously fabulous Mother's Day), I wonder about the kids I grew up with who are now parents and grandparents. What made so many of them so mean?
Hillary Clinton, a full-fledged baby boomer, is leading in the Democratic polls. Bernie Sanders, an octogenarian, is pulling hard against time to finally be able to get a "for the people" democratic message heard. Then there is the orange sexist, Donald Trump, who has used his media savvy and sheer narcissism to pull the covers back from America's polite evil.
For the majority of the past two years, on my facebook page especially, I have unrelentingly posted about the racism, sexism, xenophobic, bigotted, misogny that is taking over all reality. I know I wrote and posted, linked articles and commented. Compelled, even. Not to be one of those twitter rising activistss that emerged after Mike Brown was murdered, or even a content filler on Huffington Post.com, I kept speaking out because I had to.
And because history demands that ordinary people find their voice to counteract the corporate media narrative pushing a Clinton-v-Trump fall ticket and their glee over an almost assured bloodbath.
This is what I do know.
There is nothing new under the sun.
That is what I kept telling the Black Lives Matter activists who kept thinking they invented revolution and that this "isn't your mother's civil rights movement" as if the young people and mothers who marched, sat at lunch counters, blocked cars for the Jefferson Bank protest, or refused to ride a bus to work in Montgomery, were no longer worthy of appreciation or praise because we were not all "free." I kept writing that the only thing that separates the two distinct age group movements - Boomers and Millennials - was the greater advancement of technology that Boomers invented.
Smart phones with the world at a swipe is how the murders of black men, women, and children came to a world-wide light.
They had already happened, like the dragging death in Jackson, Mississippi or the little girl killed in a bogus raid, these things had happened before a camera could capture the police action, the tears of the mothers, or the outrage of the community.
All that was already there, held in the stories of the poets, the rappers, the writers, the artists, who never let the world forget.
Langston wrote about it, as did Zora in her tomes about the white publishing world. Countee Cullen lamented about visiting Baltimore and the only thing he remembered was being called that word, long before Beyoncé got in formation, the Black Panther Party was taking a stand against just non-violence and decided to protect themselves, not kill anyone, just feed their women and children, educate their own community, and keep the KKK-in-uniform away by standing guard with their own shotguns.
Nothing new under the sun.
What happened is the white man came.
The cameras came to capture sensationalized emotion of black people, that is what happened on West Florissant Avenue. It fed their narrative of petulant children who do not want to stay in segregated space that the white man "gave them" in a suburb where a couple generations ago, the only black faces were the maids cleaning a white woman's two-bedroom bungalow.
Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II - that's what happened.
Then the country overwhelmingly had the audacity to hope and elected a true American - a man of an African father and American mother - to the office.
Perhaps it was just that.
President Obama's "mixed" heritage was not the kind that made so many of us many shades lighter than our African foreparents forced on a ship across the Atlantic.
White men have raped, murdered, and pillaged for over 400 years.
And they felt slighted.
Mitch McConnell declared that the only thing his party had to do was defeat or block everything President Obama proposed. They did not care who it hurt, even if their own white people were starving to death in Appalachia or drugging themselves to death in Kirkwood, they did not care.
Eight years is a short time.
President Obama turned around the economy that a white man destroyed. But they still hate him.
They hate this man who is faithfully married to his one wife raising his two and only daughters, one just being accepted to Harvard and subjected to the keyboard warrior twitter rants of pimply faced overweight manhood challenged white folks in a basement. The vitriol to this beautifully accomplished young woman was more than the stomach could handle.
It was so much that even the network that fed off the racism took down their page.
The animal they created has jumped over the cage of just talk radio, white evangelical circles, and conservative morning news channels.
Soccer moms in the suburbs were riding around with Cruz (he said God told him to run, guess he didn't hear correctly because he dropped out after Indiana) and Trump stickers.
Black girls in suburban middle schools were subjected to being accused of counterfeiting over a $2 bill, sent home for their natural hairstyle, or told how they should be considerate of the poor white person's feelings.
The genie is out of the bottle.
The world is watching.
And laughing.
Hard.
We can not possible erase the success of this most excellent President for a carnival barker.
Yet, that is what even the Republicans who refuted him are circling the wagons to try to figure out how they can square their ideology with a man who has more marriage licenses than they have hate for black people; a clearly ignornant nationalist who has brought out the dumbest of the dumb of their base; a man who has middle school locker fights with others proclaiming he has no problem in the size department and that he gets more sex than his other candidates. They are trying to figure out how to tame the beast and still stand respectably on the world stage.
This country is a laughing stock, literally.
They created it because they bought into the lie of white exceptionalism.
Many of them do not even read or bother to have a clear thought beyond their Starbucks in the suburbs or their rifles in the country. World affairs, private prisons, prescription drug abuse, marginalized schools, borders, diplomacy, none of that resonates with them.
So they have an orange face, flyover, sexist man as their candidate to go against a pandering feminist who isn't beyond throwing another woman under the bus and trying to be hip by playing dominoes in the "hood."
America, the soul is on fire.
Wonder what it will take to save the republic?
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