The fall of America, the doom of America, seems even more certain to me with each passing day, as I watch white Christians find new and imaginative ways to demonstrate their self-demeaning hatred of everyone not white and “saved” like them.
I’m not exaggerating. Every day, in new and unique ways, they demonstrate again, and again and again, their desire to prosper at the expense of everyone else. For example, imagine a member of Congress so consumed with jealousy and hate that he wished for an economic recession in the District because there was too much development going on for his taste.
Imagine a people so insecure about their own history that they make its teaching illegal, as if their “law” that will dry the bloodstains which soak the ground, as if Europeans, whose entire 6,000-year history is so shallow among the sands of time, can by decree turn the true truth into a lie.
Imagine a people who boast of an “invisible empire” of “White Knights” who boastfully wear T-shirts with a picture of nonviolent crusader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s face in a gun’s crosshairs gleefully proclaiming that “Our dream (his assassination) came true.”
Imagine a people who are willing to sacrifice the very existence of all human life on this planet in order to put a few more dollars into their already-overstuffed pockets. I could go on and on, until the break of dawn.
In October, Rep. Rod Blum (R-Iowa) was wandering around D.C. past a massive, privately funded development with nothing better to do than to scratch his head and think to himself that the eight cranes he saw in a six-block radius was just too many for the nation’s capital. In his mind the folks were living too well, so he advocated for economic hardship, writing on Twitter, “EIGHT tower cranes in 6 block radius. We need to cause a recession…in Washington DC.” He was so outdone by the Capital City with a Black plurality population that he couldn’t rest until he wished some suffering on D.C.
This is precisely the mentality that provoked white folks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to proceed to destroy the Greenwood neighborhood which was such a prosperous community that they deemed it to be too good for Black folks, so they attacked and destroyed it, murdering 36 and leaving nearly 200 seriously injured.
I suppose such hatred exists in other societies, but in the U.S. it’s like a sport. Some crafty politicians exploit this deep hatred embedded in the white American psyche, rather than ever trying to teach the people a better way, not in the schools, not in the halls of power, and certainly not in the churches.
In the eyes of one right-wing commentator, the “organized left” is purposefully trying to prevent conservatives from getting vaccinated, by advocating the shots, knowing that anything liberals advise them to do, they will do just the opposite. And it just so happens that the poorest counties in the poorest states — the Southern “red states” — have the lowest vaccination rates and the highest COVID-19 infection and death rates.
The trick is reminiscent of the warning from then President Lyndon Johnson: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” That’s what the famous Southern-born and -bred politician said to a young staffer, Bill Moyers, after encountering a display of blatant racism during a political visit to the South.
Since their post-Election Day cheating couldn’t steal the 2020 election in favor of the twice-impeached, one-term President Donald Trump, the leaders of the White Tribe are doing everything they can now, in advance of Election Day, to make sure that their side wins. Period. That’s the deal. Despite the rapidly changing demographics in the way of more and more non-white voters, who constitute a majority along with white liberal voters (a minority of the white vote), they want to stay in power, at all costs.
I predict there will not be another peacefully settled, “free and fair” election in this country, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Radical white conservatives, who promise their flocks they will go to heaven when they die, want to make life hell on earth for everyone, for everyone they don’t slaughter in the future, like they did the 55 million Native people from whom they stole this continent.
Their condition, their hatred, I fear, is terminal.