Summer Park County Fair Moon
Some pundits are asking, “Is this 1968?” Luckily, I can answer that question. No!
Easy way to tell? It’s 2016. That’s almost 50 years since Bobby and Martin were killed. A lot of conservatism under the bridge since then. Nixon and Reagan and G. and G.W. Even, it could be argued, Bill C. That river of economic purity and social reaction, never clear, has rendered public conversation opaque. Barack Obama had the misfortune of serving his two terms with largely Republican Congresses. This forced him, somewhat like Bill Clinton, to govern with a millstone.
That millstone, a public weight pressed from the grit of ground up Tea Partiers, Moral Majoritarians, the Christian Right, rebel flag wavers and just plain angry old white folks, is now slung around the American electorate as a whole. And it’s pulling us down, making us read each new Trumpet blast with slackjawed despair. This may be the moment that the millstone finally proves too heavy and sinks us all.
Or, it could change the balance of power in Congress. May that be so.
This time, this 2016 time, this third millennium time, has come after the old days have passed away. The second millennium, a thousand years of Western history, has been written and shelved.
The connection between the times is the unsolved problem of what some call America’s original sin. Our racist history, born in the middle passage, and steadied by the demise of reconstruction, will not disappear. There is no “color-blind” world waiting on the other side of the Edmund Pettus bridge. My own sense is that our original sin was capitalism, the economic system that made cheap, cheap labor appear desirable. In slavery we bound racism and capitalism together, a poisonous vine connecting 2016 to 1968 to the Klan governors and senators, to Jim Crow and the Civil war, to the 3/5ths compromise.
Each time we try to pull ourselves away from that history just grasping the kudzu of capitalist reinforced racism sickens us as a nation. Why? Because we try to fix issues rooted in white racism without fixing economic injustice rooted in American capitalism. This original sin demands a redemptive price no politician will ever be willing to pay. Salvation in this instance is an illusion until we can find a way to uproot both of these evils.
