Last Gasp

The history of the country which has largely been ignored in schools and then recently banned is a simple story of white supremacy married to patriarchy and unchecked capitalist greed (need one word here!) that purposefully puts profit over people. Our wealth and power has been built entirely on decimating the original inhabitants who caretook the land we came to ravage and pillage, the stolen labor force who did the work for free, the women who raised the kids and served the meals and kept the houses so husbands could go do their work of systemic brutalization of people and the land, the immigrants who brought energy and culture and great food and great music and so much more. 

With Native Americans banned to reservations, enslaved blacks doing the unpaid labor of providing cotton, sugar, tobacco and such and then the poorly paid labor of raising white children, working in our factories, fighting our wars, the women deemed the property of their husbands and nursing the sick and teaching the young, the working class doing the backbreaking and dangerous work while bosses got rich, etc. etc. and etc. All of them marginalized, kept out of positions of power and beaten down and stuck with labels of lazy, shiftless, criminal, while white men born on third base kept boasting about hitting a triple. It’s a sad, sad story and as long as its sustaining narratives were kept hidden, untaught, banned, spun by Fox news to gullible consumers, nothing would ever change. 

 

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron said, “Nothing goes away until it teaches us what we need to learn.” The rise of Trump and Trumpism showed clearly that Obama’s victory did not drive the lesson home deeply enough into the psyche of the American people and the Toddler King’s resurgence in 2024 showed how very, very far we still had to go. Those Americans with still functioning brain cells, a heart capable of feeling and a conscience capable of recognizing immorality and indecency were baffled that we seem to have learned nothing. 

 

Until now. We just had to give the Repugnatins enough rope to hang themselves before we awakened out of our stupor and as the recent election shows, that’s what seemed to turn the tide. This election represented the last gasp of a dying animal whose time for extinction has finally come. 

 

Of course, not to be naïve. The dinosaurs will double down and re-group to spin their narrative in new ways to brainwash a population not wholly capable of critical thinking and caring kindness. I’m not imagining any moral re-awakening of conscience of people and parties who spent every minute armoring themselves against facing their own failings and pointing all their guns outward at the evil villians-du-jour out to perform trans operations on innocent schoolchildren.

 

But just perhaps the public will stop drinking that Kool Aid. The election results clearly point to that. All those marginalized groups mentioned in the first paragraph now have a seat—many seats!— at the table. (see below)

 

And I, for one, welcome them heartily. Of course, an ethnic or gender or sexual identity doesn’t automatically guarantee good-hearted, clear-thinking, morally upright people (ie, the recent news about Cesar Chavez), but it clearly breaks the stranglehold of white privileged males who time and time again have shown their incapacity to care about others and just be decent human beings. 

 

To paraphrase Wynton Marsalis’ quote: “Jazz is what America could become if it ever became itself.”— “This is what American could become—has just now become— when it matches the promise of ‘all are created equal’ with the opportunity of all American citizens to sit together and make the dream real.”

 

Here are some leaders of our new country. Let’s go, America!!