The news for last couple of months has me brokenhearted, and unfortunately I get angry when my heart is broken, so...fair warning.
What is wrong with us
these days?
- Police shooting or choking Black and Brown men is an almost weekly occurrence.
- Supplying weapons and money to a country bombing the civilian population back to the stone age.
- Air raids on Iraq.
- Troops in Iraq.
- NSA and CIA spying on everyone, including their own people.
- Reporters arrested trying to cover the protests in St. Louis over the shooting of a unarmed black teenager.
- Republicans and Democrats fighting over minutia so that there is no real governance.
- Mass shootings… again, almost weekly.
- Children…CHILDREN…being detained and sent back to their countries to die with hateful protests calling for those children to go home.
I’m appalled. I’m shocked.
I’m ashamed.
And yet, I was a history major:
Until the Civil Rights movement refusing the vote to Black people,
beating Black people, LYNCHING Black people by cops, the KKK, the Establishment
was hardly news worthy.
The US has supported Israel
through its many wars and occupation of Palestine. With weapons, policies, and our own CIA, we
have propped up dictators who jailed, tortured, killed, and terrorized their
own peoples: Iran, Chile, El Salvador,
Brazil, Philippines, Honduras (now), Guatemala, and here, Nicaragua.
Air raids in Iraq…Daddy Bush, W.
Bush, Obama, and Obama again.
Troops in Iraq…see above.
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| Sen. McCarthy keeping the US "safe" |
Much of the spying when I was a
girl and a young woman was done by the FBI but it was done on peace and
justice groups, peace churches, and “radicals” who oppose nuclear weapons. William Stringfellow, a lay theologian, used
to read his Bible into his phone…he thought the people tapping his phone ought to
hear it. And let’s not forget the McCarthy hearings in the 50s.
Reducing the access of the press
has been a tactic by the government for years.
In WWI and WWII most of what was heard by the American public was approved
by the government. In the Vietnam War,
the press covered the war on the ground and the war was immensely unpopular as
a result…ergo the government put a stop on full and free access of the media in
times of war.
Just having a two party system
limits what concerns and needs are addressed.
Since Abraham Lincoln, almost every president has taken more and more power than was originally proposed by the constitution. Now with more and more money going into
elections, corporations are taking more and more control. But this is not new: remember that the founding fathers were
wealthy.
Mass shootings are new, but
people of color can cite time and time again when THEIR people have been
targets of lynchings, bombings, genocide (tribal people), internment (Japanese
during WWII), etc.
And the children from El
Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras coming to the US just to have a chance to
grow up…well, we immigrants have always hated other immigrants and
refugees…that started when the first immigrants grabbed the land from the people
who were already here and then did not want to share anymore.
The one thing I truly
internalized from all my history classes back in the day was that if we do not
know our history, then we are doomed to repeat it. So let’s learn…let’s not repeat the same
horrors…let’s evolve…let’s repent. From
where I stand, change is a good thing…it is hope.
