Lyndon Johnson, writes historian Peniel E. Joseph, in The Sword and the Shield, noted how the violence of racism undermines "the grandeur of the American experiment." Delivering these words in a speech after Bloody Sunday, Johnson added that such violence as witnessed that day when police bloodied Black citizens protesting the right to vote, sullies "the moral aspirations of all its citizens."
Comparing Black demonstrators in Selma to soldiers at the Battle of Appomattox, signaling the end of the Civil War, for Black Americans the struggle for civil rights would continue. White America could go on about the business of getting ahead, some taking advantage of their belief in whiteness to pretend the struggle for Blacks had ended at the Battle of Appomattox. Other white Americans, however, the battle for the maintenance of white supremacy was beginning anew.
The kind of American citizenry Johnson imagines would be endowed with a collective fair mind and a willingness identify with victims of enslavement. insisting, along with these victims of violence, that they have a right to be! Imagine a world in which victims and perpetrators, as American citizens recognize a history of human resistance against tyranny of Kings, fascism, and totalitarianism. They recognize and, collectively, vigilantly reject such an intrusion on human progress.
Unfortunately, today, it would seem that the tyranny of would-be-kings, the iron rule of fascists and totalitarians is fighting to dissolve any remembrance of human rights.
The John Lewis voting bill is sitting in some box in Washington, D. C. as is the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. If after the Civil War, America had turned the corner and decided that democracy was, after all, worth trying-- for really-- then maybe, it would be the guiding light leading this nation to a more perfect union, a diverse, an equitable country, where humanity is welcomed. But democracy has interfered, if our politicians are honest, with the flow of profits and tax breaks for corporations and billionaires.
With eyes wide-open, however, the US is waging a war against democracy, by embracing a fascist president who has turned his sights to Putin, admiring the strongman and arming himself with politicians loyal to the goal of divesting the US from any further concerns with democracy. European nations along with Canada and Mexico are no longer acknowledged as allies and neighbors. Democracy is an enemy!
On the other hand, fascism is attractive. Look at how corporations and the likes of Amazon's Bezos and Google's Pichai and others have purchased jackboots to walk lockstep behind the leader. Elon Musk, no official office holder, nonetheless, points his cabal of teen hackers to set up shop at one government agency after another, to infiltrate the buildings, dismiss heads of departments and fire employees, and, then disrupting services thousands of people around the world have come to rely on. The cruelty of it all conjures up images I would see on the nightly news during the Vietnam War. Men, women, and children running from flames furiously engulfing their homes and fields. Shouts of "Fire in the hole!" and explosion of bombs from American war planes landing on their "targets," is inhumane as is the wearing of jackboots, signaling the power granted one by a fascist government to crush all enemies.
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