6:09 am 11/24/2020: Just got a 6-minute video from Jim Stewart asking to subscribe to his youtube video series: Jim Stewart’s Historical Tonic For White Folks. Of course, I subscribed. I haven’t done enough. The rider I want to add is this: What we are doing to black folks in this country today isn’t the whole story by a long shot.
We’re boycotting Cuba for having a government we disapprove of; a government that provides universal health care because Black Lives Matter; a government that removed 500 years of virtual slavery from the lives of its darker and poorer citizens; and a government that has created a first rate First World health care system in a Third World nation under constant boycott by its neighbor 60 miles to the north. Cuba has withstood constant economic, political, and military pressure from the United States while the United States has succumbed to the notion that the wealthy, relatively white refugees in Florida, who hold immense political power in that state speak for the Cuban people, a lie recently repeated by the President. We still occupy a small portion of that island, Guantanamo Bay, a place where we illegally imprison dissidents from other Third World countries that also object to our selfish and ignorant heavy-handedness. Isn’t this part of the same problem?
How about the people of Fallujah, Baghdad, and the other formerly modern cities of Iraq who had the misfortune to get on the bad side of American Public Opinion? What, exactly, was their crime that merited a full-on invasion? Re-claiming the chunk of Iraq stolen from them by England and the folks of Standard Oil Company and the ARAMCO alliance at the end of World War I which was illegally stealing Iraq’s oil in massive quantities and selling it cheaply to the United States in competition with Iraq’s and OPEC’s prices? Infringing on the “rights” of rich oilmen and wealthy Saudi princes? Why did 73% of Americans and 99% of the US Senate believe the lies our President told them then: that Iraq supported al Quida and was working to make nuclear weapons? Was it too much to ask for confirmation before we crossed their borders and ruined what was then a moderate and relative progressive country?
How about the people of North Korea? Yes, they have a country of haves and have-nots (just like us) and they’ve accepted three generations of dictators as heads of their rather stable, if repressive, government. But we are the ones keeping the poor people of North Korea impoverished and have been since the early 1950s! We’ve also been funding the North Korean government with bribes for many years and supporting them by opposing their people and providing them with legitimacy — just as the Cold War kept the repressive dictatorships of Moscow and Beijing in power by providing ostensible opposition and secret support.
And the Persians? What is their current crime? Oh, yes, these “baddies” are enriching uranium that might possibly be used in a nuclear weapon one day. Of course, my grandmother’s twin sister’s son did that in the middle 1940s until he discovered it was going to be used in a nuclear bomb that did bomb civilians. And we’ve got these horrible weapons all over the place; in almost every continent and every ocean of this fragile and threatened planet!! Furthermore, we abrogated SALT II, choosing to keep the threat of worldwide destruction and pervasive radioactivity alive! Is this not a double standard? Isn’t this the same mindset that created the Jim Crow laws and divested two Olympic Champions of their medals in Mexico and put NFL athletes on their knees recently? Isn’t it the same thinking that made and broke countless treaties with Native Americans and continues to shun them today?
Isn’t “Build The Wall” and separating children from their parents a part of this as well?
And what about the confirmation of an ultra-conservative Supreme Court to legitimize every part of this ongoing national and worldwide injustice as well as a continuation of the imbalance of power by wealth and wealthy control of both laws and litigation? Forty seven percent of Americans believe in the slogan “Make America Great Again,” which won the election in a landslide for the actor Ronald Reagan and a squeaker for the “reality” show host and millionaire with six bankruptcies who tried to get a foreign government to substantiate his lies about a political opponent? Does the fact that this movement (as well as the racist state of Israel) have the overwhelming support of our fundamental Christian community ring any bells?
I know these people mean well. I know these people don’t know what they’re doing. But is ignorance today a legitimate excuse?? Yeah, my mom was a Friend of Israel and a fundamental Christian who might have supported Donald Trump if she’d been alive for the election. I’m pretty sure she supported Ronald Reagan. My fellow grandfather, a good and loyal friend of mine, supports Donald Trump and supports the Wall and the economic war with China and the impeachment verdict. It isn’t them. It’s us.
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