Race, class, rich, poor are divisions and subtractions that greed and fear have conjured up from the depth of mass insanity. Earth’s human population explosion amid finite resources has heightened anxieties, especially among society’s leaders, causing spiritual and social apoplexy.
Most of the time Congress is more juvenile than kids in a kindergarten playroom and the public as passive as lambs. It is that mass passivity, though, that actually wreaks havoc upon American society. That is precisely why slavery occurred and how the Native Americans and the buffalo were slaughtered.
People cared but did nothing — a startling contradiction. And that mindset has characterized all of American history. So the world witnessed a grotesque manifestation of this society’s madness during Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath in New Orleans five years ago.
NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY
While America would rightfully disallow another nation’s ideology, our consistent foreign policy is to pour so-called democracy, like an elixir, down the throats of other nations’ leaders and invade their national sovereignty with proselytizing. America’s historical and present practice of “democracy” is contradictory: American democracy is elitist and white nationalistic (or so-called “racist”).
How long will American leaders exclaim that the Union is not yet perfect while the middle class, the poor and near-poor, including senior citizens on fixed incomes, all get poorer as the elite rich get richer? Information technology instantly beams America’s contradictions to the world’s people but the powerful among us don’t care. They only want to exert power over other Americans and the world.
Surveyor Benjamin Banneker helped lay out the city of Washington, D.C. He was a freed black astronomer, mathematician, almanac author and farmer, as well. And the nation’s capital was built mostly by black slave labor. For a very long time, D.C. has been “Chocolate City” via an overwhelming majority black population.
Today, there are 600,000 residents of Washington, D.C. who last year paid $3.6 billion in federal taxes but are denied federal voting representation.
THE RULE OF LAW
That makes Washington, D.C., America’s last colony, with Eleanor Holmes Norton representing the city in Congress as a non-voting member of the U. S. House of Representatives. So this is “democracy” that America wants the world to emulate, especially the non-white world. The world’s people must wonder why the American people don’t step up and demand statehood for Washington, D. C.
White America leads the world in consistently touting that civil society is a society governed by the rule of law, the inference being that, before colonialism, non-white societies had no white law, therefore they had no recognizable law that had to be adhered to. So the pillaging of people, their goods and resources, rape, murder, genocide, medical experimentation and discrimination were granted, under the law.
Modern America’s defining moment came in 1954 when the Supreme Court, the highest law of the land, ruled segregation in education was illegal. But what happened to the rule of law? White America decided to defy that law by escalating segregated housing patterns, zoning of schools and funneling federal, state and county tax dollars to “white” schools.
ANTEBELLUM THINKING
Thus, suburbia and “rich” schools were created for most whites and inner-city “poor” schools for most non-whites. To this very day, the skewed notion that schools paid for with tax dollars can be both “rich” schools and “poor” schools and yet public schools is antebellum or white nationalist thinking and action. It is also criminal.
Here’s what else is criminal: The black male high school graduation rate in New York City is 28 percent. It is only 37 percent in Florida, 44 percent in Chicago and just 47 percent nationally. Go to www. blackboysreport.org for the full report. That’s not a Katrina, people, that’s a tsunami.
Al Calloway may be reached at Al_Calloway@verizon.net.
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