The Black Minister Damns an America that was ending....

[catnhatnh]

...And I Damn what it's started to become.And because for a brief transitional moment it could have become better than either we are each right.

But for a short era of two decades 1960-1980 what he fought was ending and what I must oppose now had not fully begun.In that brief interregnum suppose instead of the road followed our nation had followed the paths initiated by FDR and orated about by Kennedy.Suppose a leader had read the early reports of environmentalists and thought "Hey, that's right." Suppose the country had Listened to Jimmy Carter and ignored the Reaganesque class bashing and instead of welfare queen hunting had embraced the less fortunate among us....what if unions were allowed to flourish and the econopaths and corporate raiders had been jailed??? What if just once when a movie declared "Greed is Good" there had been a clear voice crying "Bullshit"???

To a degree the minister is right-nobody ever called any of us white folks a nigger-But if we're not bright enough to think about his remark in context and heal ourselves and unite,we are very likely to learn how being treated like one feels.And ignoring wrongs whether old or new is a plan to allow those we oppose (republicans for those who missed it) to teach this to us...

[hfojvt]

1. It's a little bit too late

"If there is any law that has been consistently operative in American history, it is that the members of any established people or group or community sooner or later become 'redskins' - that is, they become the designated victims of an utterly ruthless, officially sanctioned and subsidized exploitation. The colonists who drove off the Indians came to be intolerably exploited by their imperial governments. And that alien imperialism was thrown off only to be succeeded by a domestic version of the same thing: the class of independent small farmers who fought the war of Independence has been exploited by, and recruited into, the industrial society until by now it is almost extinct. Today, the most numerous heirs of the farmers of Lexington and Concord are the little groups scattered all over the country whose names begin with 'Save': Save Our Land, Save the Valley, Save our Mountains, Save our Streams, Save our Farmland. As so often before, these are designated victims - people without official sanction, often without official friends, who are struggling to preserve their places, their values, and their lives as they know them and prefer to live them against the agencies of their own government which are using their own tax money against them." "The Unsettling of America" Wendell Berry 1977 pp 4-5