It's Not That Bad. It's Worse
All things come to an end. And this could be it.
The Holy Roman Empire: overcome and brought down by barbarians.
Issue #159 OpEd October 24, 2020
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I’ve been up for nearly an hour trying to come up with anything else to write about, but nothing else will stay on my mind long enough before I start hearing that train coming down the tracks. And that sound drowns out everything else.
About seven years ago, when Trump was first elected the 45th President of the United States, but before he took office, I wrote an opinion piece for The Michigan Chronicle (Michigan’s oldest Black newspaper for those who don’t know), entitled “The End of Empire.” Not long after the piece appeared, I was on a local news television talk show where I was asked about it because at the time the title appeared pretty drastic. Even to those who saw Trump as a bad deal, no one foresaw what his election would expose about the true corrupted state of the nation.
That includes me. I won’t pretend that I was any kind of prophet who saw it all and then it all came true. But one thing I did see was that if this was a country that could elect someone like Trump after he had shown himself to be so ugly, vicious, and incompetent, especially after having elected Barack Obama for two terms - and by wide margins - then there was something fundamentally broken about the Republic that perhaps cannot be repaired.
Because how can the country switch gears from sanity to madness that quickly, unless we were already mad? When President Biden was first elected, and throughout his campaign, he continued to say that “this is not who we are”, referring to the sickness of Trump and his cannibalization of the Republican Party, along with the souls of millions of Americans. But this is who we are, and it always has been. We just haven’t wanted to accept it until Trump shoved it in our faces and down our throats. I’ll leave it to your imagination to consider what ‘it’ is. And you’ll notice President Biden no longer claims that this isn’t who we are. But he clings to the hope that this isn’t who we have to remain, and he’s willing to fight for that hope.
Keep in mind that our so-called democracy was founded by slave-owning white men, for white men who owned property. Women wouldn’t be able to vote for almost a century and a half after the nation’s founding, not until June 4, 1919. And Black people wouldn’t be ‘free’ until Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, on January 31, 1865, and ratified it on December 6, 1865. And life didn’t suddenly become tolerable for us on December 7.
This means that democracy was never intended for all Americans to begin with. Democracy was intended for rich white Christian straight men. Until we come to terms with that - among other things - this nation will never be settled. America was built on racism and racial hatred. Without racism, and the raw exertion of white nationalist power over others that made cotton king and paved the way for the Industrial Revolution, America never would have made it out the gate. Think about that for a minute.
So maybe it really is our time. Perhaps this is a reckoning. I hope not, because the thought of living as one nation under Republican rule makes me want to …
But everything ends. Even the Roman Empire, which ruled for more than 1,000 years and is considered by many historians to be one of the greatest and most influential civilizations the world has ever seen. And you have to wonder if it’s just coincidence that Rome fell after literally being overrun by barbarians led by the Germanic barbarian Odoacer, leader of the almighty Torcilingi clan, who overthrew the child Emperor Romulus Augustulus.
Rome is still there, it’s just not the powerful world dominator that it once was, and that’s probably not a bad thing. And however this sorts out, we’ll still be here too.
But will we be able to tolerate what we’ve become? Especially when we had the opportunity to become so much greater?
Sidebar from Pam:
On Sunday, October 23, 2022, historian and professor Heather Cox Richardson published an article in her Substack that related how yesterday’s Democrats used voter suppression and voter intimidation against Black and white Republicans to establish a one-party rule in southern states. Today’s Democrats and Republicans are just the opposite, and now it is the Republicans who are trying the exact same voter suppression and intimidation tactics to establish one-party minority rule in the whole country. If we’re not careful and if we don’t vote, that is exactly what will happen.
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