Online Journal Contributing Writer
May 3, 2010, 00:14
Courtesy Of "The Online Journal"
Jim Crow didn’t really die in 1964, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, nor did Ku Kluxers suddenly trade their intense prejudice for benevolent enlightenment regarding our nonwhite citizens.
US racism has persisted through ensuing decades, often hidden beneath layers of denial and obfuscation.
It took Barack Obama’s election as president to demonstrate, with shocking clarity, that countless Caucasian Americans are chronically afflicted with a noxious mix of fear and hatred toward all people of color, but especially blacks.
Through Tea Party extremism and Town Hall incivility, former nightriders, or their confederated kith and kin, are now unleashing old venom in the full light of a new day.
It can be said with total certainty that, no matter what else they piously contend, the bulk of the most hard-line anti-Obama activists are infuriated by a (insert the “N” word) running the country and telling them what to do.
They’re driven almost literally crazy by a maelstrom of raw emotion.
On the one hand, their skin-color supremacism stokes outrage that a man they believe to be inferior sits in the Oval Office.
Simultaneously -- and with immense trepidation -- they see that he’s actually a person of tremendous intelligence and capability, which undercuts their lifelong assumptions about race.
Their greatest fear, and the true impetus for all of the absurdity and virulence directed against Obama, is that he’ll ultimately prove to be a better national leader, appreciated as such by the electorate, than any of the conservative white men who’ve resided at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. over the years.
Which would constitute a crushing, fatal blow to the objectively bankrupt ideology of conservatism.
After all, conservatives are already being humiliatingly exposed as fraudulent.
They call themselves “pro-life,” but support capital punishment and senseless wars, in which countless innocents die, including pregnant women and already-born babies.
They condemn deficit spending for vital social programs, but favor huge tax breaks for profitable corporate and financial interests. No worry about “burdening our grandchildren with debt” when the rich benefit!
Infamous for obstructing racial civil rights and women’s liberation, they now attack gay equality, placing Biblical biases from a benighted era above the last six words of our Pledge of Allegiance: “ . . . with liberty and justice for all.”
As staunch “Obamacare” opponents, they ignore that as many Americans die annually from lack of proper medical access as the number of US troops who were killed from the Vietnam war’s beginning through 1969.
They assail labor unions while even blue-collar conservatives enjoy the decent wages and conditions that were won through hard working-class struggle, which bosses and their Republican allies have always sought to thwart.
They want to scuttle public education in favor of private, for-profit schools, claiming it would be best for our kids. Never mind that strong public schooling exists in all countries having lofty learning outcomes.
Though pretending to be America’s salvation, conservatives are actually its nemesis.
Republican hypocrisy, social irresponsibility, selfishness, mean-spiritedness, and routine lies are wearing thin with the reasoning electorate. Out of acute political desperation, the GOP is consequently forced to appeal to base, visceral sentiments of its most backward supporters.
Disturbingly, it’s also the strategy employed by German Nazis to consolidate power, via their broad scapegoating of innocents, behind which capitalist authoritarianism carried on its profitable plunder of the masses.
As that process grimly advanced under Hitler’s wicked aegis, deceptions and propaganda such as we’re seeing again today rendered most Germans incapable of resisting the drift toward tyranny until it was too late.
Cross-pollination and overlap between US anti-tax zealots, militia groups, Neo-Nazis, Obamaphobes, etc., all harrowingly point toward the emergence of Brown Shirt mentality and active organization in the period immediately ahead.
Horrible history mustn’t be permitted to repeat, now in our time, within our own borders.
On a scale every bit as great and inspiring as we saw during Martin Luther King’s day, Americans possessing salvational sense must come together, without delay, to erect a barricade built of understanding and solidarity to thwart our nation’s slide toward hate-based disaster.
Crucially, that emergency response for saving American democracy must largely be led by members of those minority constituencies who’ve always suffered most under institutionalized US injustice, and who are presently taking the hardest hits.
Our marches and rallies have to contain an empowering mix of many races, in contrast to the lily-white presence always seen at essentially bogus, diversionary Tea Party gatherings.
Pivotally, white liberals must throw their full support behind issues such as immigrant rights and affirmative action, from a developed awareness that both are absolute prerequisites for establishing, and securing in perpetuity, a fair order for all.
If we begin with the wrong premise that it’s okay for some of us to be left behind, or sacrificed, then we’ll lose every possibility of saving ourselves, and our country, from the start.
Seamless adherence to the tried-and-true labor axiom “An injury to one is an injury to all!” is required, combined with relentless exposition to our country’s populace that those who collapsed our economy with their unregulated greed, and who then voted against extending unemployment benefits at the back end of the catastrophe they selfishly created . . . can’t possibly serve the people.
They’re the enemy of prosperity, progress, and liberty itself.
We can’t succumb to rampant bigotry, such as we’re presently seeing in Arizona, that helps hide that utterly unacceptable fact.
Dennis Rahkonen of Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the ’60s.Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
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