Any system that would bring us here is broken.
Why did we build a train to suffering when we knew better
Because big minds can have unimportant big thoughts and small minds can have important small thoughts, but small minds are so much easier to make and control and are immune to big thoughts, even the good ones.
To make a great society we must be a people of great minds and greater ideas.
We must be a society that values investment and process improvements, we must value error-correction in all its forms or else we will have errors, and grow comfortable with those errors, compounding them.
This is a history of three errors.
I. The deal with the devil that changed the timeline.
The civil war was a brutal, embarrassing period in our history. A war by the poor on behalf of the rich slave-owners Vs the poor on behalf of the enslaved and the preservation of the union. Ideals and mechanisms fought for control while poor people bled and died. We thought we won, we thought we moved forward..
(A political cartoon by Joseph Keppler (Puck, 1877) depicts Roscoe Conkling as Mephistopheles, watching Rutherford B. Hayes stroll off with the "Solid South," personified as a woman, implying a deal with the devil. The caption quotes Goethe's Faust: "Unto that Power he doth belong Which only doeth Right while ever willing Wrong.")
The 1876 presidential election had some unique qualities that resulted in an agreement that has doomed us all. There was the looks of a tie and the conservative candidate offered to withdraw if the progressive candidate agreed to end Southern Reconstruction. In short, the slave owners raised enough trouble during the 1876 presidential election that they got control of the south back through back-door dealings in Washington- of which there are no official records, just evidence it happened like the political cartoon above and the terms of the deal very clearly being carried out.
The people in charge of the south before the war got control back and found ways to restore and expand their power. The newly founded/Federally imposed education system in the south was immediately segregated, the term ‘Jim Crow’ hadn’t been coined yet, but Texas was always a thought-leader in hateful and especially race-based legislation. For example: that 1876 election that seemed like a tie happened to be the same year Texas required a ‘poll tax’ on electors, something that would later be illegal under the voting rights act because Texas wouldn’t be Texas without voter suppression.
In short, we are not who we think we are, we are not the story we tell. We did not win the civil war. At the very best it was a stalemate that forced slave owners to be more creative.
We do not live in the timeline where the Federal government reformed the south. We are still the Texas that didn’t tell slaves they were free for two years and then found new ways to indenture them.
II. The timeline we thought Vs reality.
Nearly a hundred years after the civil war is ended with political deals the civil rights movement was ended with bullets. In our real timeline the Black Panthers are being gunned down and Malcolm X is being gunned down, and the civil rights movement is dying with Dr King as he too is finally gunned down- as the secular, Muslim, and Christian leaders and systems were killed and dismantled, we didn’t realize we were seeing the truth of America play out. When John F Kennedy was assassinated in Texas Malcolm X suggested it was America’s chickens coming home to roost. He seemed to think it was the white man’s violence coming back to us, and it is, but maybe we can widen that view with hindsight. It was America’s violence coming back certainly, but in the long view of history it seems Malcolm’s ally on the timeline of equality was killed by a system that saw Malcolm and JFK as both obstacles and dealt with them. JFK dreamed big and inspired the nation to greatness. We literally went to the moon for the man. A man who refused the false-flag operation the DoD wanted carry out to falsely justify a war with Cuba. A man who died and suddenly it was easier to pull us into Vietnam. September 2nd, months before his death: “In the final analysis, it is their [the South Vietnamese] war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it.” is not the public statement of a president intent on continuing down American military-industrial-colonialism. Who-ever killed him and why-ever he died, we were left in a timeline that was darker and slid into war in Vietnam- a war we know was wrong, a war we know we lost, a war full of atrocities and war crimes and expensive American firebombs crossing borders.
We thought we were a nation with strong leaders, we though we were having difficult conversations about being a nation.. Instead we found out how far we were allowed to pretend to go before getting assassinated. The Black Panthers formed as a community-based response to the KKK. The FBI murdered the Black Panthers, but the KKK openly helped get Trump elected and re-elected. Dr. King is praised as a nonviolent revolutionary, but he was painted as a riot-starting race-baiter and instead of him running for office and serving America for another 50 years he was shot dead at 39 and we’ve had a vacuum filled by for-profit televangelists and talking heads. Our moral backbone is now handed down by presenters on for-profit networks owned by people who directly benefited from all the deaths, they won and own things. This is the painful truth we’re hiding from. Because if the dead are right.. then we’re the bad guy.
III. The Bad guys, Presidents Reap and Sow.
Reagan.
Every Trump thing can be traced to Reagan. Talking points, policies, and problems.
If you’re worried about drugs or smuggling you can thank the Reagan administration and friends for creating the drug trade and creating modern drug smuggling and cartels. The CIA funded operations with drug sales, moved drugs and arms, and sold crack to Americans creating the crack epidemic. To be fair, the CIA has investigated itself and while *maybe* it was *indirectly* associated with drug trade it totally never did anything personally.
Then if you’re worried about the children you can thank Nancy Reagan for covering up the government’s responsibility there with her self-righteous ‘just say no’ and phony anti-drug campaigns, taking the responsibility from the extraordinary changes in regular American’s lives caused by the importing of drugs and placing the burden on children- acting as if children are the weak point rather than a system that gives them more access to drugs than to solutions.
It’s bullshit to parade around on the drug moral high-ground blaming children while blocking for your husband, the guy selling the drugs. Although, all that flows nicely into understanding why we didn’t do anything about the opioid epidemic. We were selling drugs to Americans and the right people were getting rich again, like the tobacco and oil companies. And it follows why we’re so ok watching children die in school shootings- decades of children dying and reinforcing the idea it is somehow their fault rather than a failing of society that must be fixed. If we can ignore the young black humans dying and blame them for it then we’re already over the biggest hurdle of ignoring humans dying.
The class and race divide of Reagan’s rhetoric cannot be understated, the ‘welfare queen’ he referenced in repeated campaign speeches was one woman who was caught and tried for defrauding many public programs and private persons. He mythologized one criminal to condemn the entire concept of a social safety net and dismiss the poor, blacks, and women all at once. I will repeat that, he got poor whites to vote against the poor because poor blacks *exist*. He gave the simple and the hateful a target way down the ladder to punch at, an imaginary poor black woman who was stealing their paycheck. We let these lies play for decades with no real societal correction so here we are with the same rancid ideas, distilled with time and hate, seeped into our very fabric. So now Trump’s cries of the ‘illegals, cartels, not their best people’ and blaming people for the problems the experience rather than seeing a failing in society’s structure, are straight from the Reagan hymnal. This is who we’ve become.
And that’s before getting to the economy. We fundamentally still operate as though trickle-down works. We knew it was a scam *when we were debating doing it*, but now after decades of decline and collapse.. It’s a scam. It’s a blatant scam that we’re all still running even though our experience of the market is blatantly worse.
Donald Trump is the inevitable defense mechanism and coping strategy for a nation of weak and willing men and women who would rather be vile and disgusting and quiet creatures than admit we made did bad things. A nation where the right can’t face the left, the middle can’t face the truth, and the left has had our balls shot off.. this is who were are until we change it.
In closing,
We lost the civil war, we lost the civil rights movement, and we set our course with Reagan. Reagan has sown the seeds of our destruction for Trump to reap and none yet have stopped them. Until we admit these flaws we will be subject to them. Until the Democratic party is free of depending on corporate donations, they are subject to them. Until the DNC admits that Clinton played corporate politics for corporate money and lost the party in the process we won’t be the party of the people. Zohran Mamdani ran a campaign of the people and crushed the primary. Now his main threat in the general is a divided ticket caused by the establishment candidate who would rather see his corrupt opposition to his own party member, even after his party has spoken.
So long as we are a nation of hiding our mistakes rather than fixing them, we can’t see the truth. We’ve become a truly disposable society, but the replacement US Government you order on Amazon will make you wish it was from TEMU.
Until we mutiny; upon this course we’re bound.
It’ll be broken until we fix it.
Love, Robin