Summer Park County Fair Moon
My brother asked, “What do you think is the cause for the recent turmoil in the U.S.?”
We used a promissory note to build our early republic. Its collateral was the freedom of African men and women captured and brought to the New World as forced labor. Slavery. The transaction made economic sense. The winding together of these two, slavery and economic advantage, created a long rope of unearned privilege, unearned wealth. This rope supported, and, to our everlasting shame, continues to support a bridge, a suspension bridge, whose terminus is Edina, the Upper East Side, Nantucket, Orange County, Cherry Hill, Jackson Hole, Vail, Aspen, the Gold Coast, Hyde Park.
As in the Monty Python movie the Holy Grail, there is a bridge keeper, one who lets only certain people cross from the realm of the ordinary to the realm of the moneyed, the elite, the one percent. The first question he asks is, “What color is your skin?” The second, “Where did you go to school?” The third, “Who is your family?” If you answer, give the wrong answer, you immediately fly away from the bridge back to the ordinary place from you which you came. Read the recent novel Sport of Kings if you want a literary explanation.
The turmoil so painfully evident right now is but one instance of an attempt to collect on the promissory note, but the debt collectors have little power and those who cross the bridge are far away from them. Affirmative action, reparations, integration, voting rights, model cities, all of them attempts to change the bridge keeper’s questions, have altered, to a modest extent, the foot traffic on the bridge. But only for a very, very few.
