written 13 Feb 2022
published 20 Feb 2022
In the summer of 1955, when I was 8, my father contracted polio. The decade long epidemic had already infected 34 million Americans, sickening 1 percent, while killing 17,000. The Salk vaccine was developed in early 1955, and as a family with a polio case, we had access to some of the first doses. I received two more doses as a wide spread vaccination campaign, including schools, ended the epidemic.
That was when Republicans still believed in science and public health. President Eisenhower even initiated the federal interstate highway system, the largest socialist infrastructure project in American history, and warned about the growing power of the military industrial complex. How times have changed!
An article in Daily Kos by Andy Schmookler presents that the American ideal of "equal justice for all", has been stymied by two significant forces: White Supremacy and Corporate Greed. Both of these forces are symptoms of the same flawed illusion of separation, fundamentally at odds with our unity reality.
"For centuries, White Supremacy has fueled the unjust treatment of one race by another. From the beginnings of slavery even into our times, that force has generated a great deal of cruelty. Foreign observers regarded racial oppression to be America’s original sin.”
"The corrupting force of greed, operating through those economic powers that came to dominate the American economy, especially as industrial capitalism took off following the Civil War, warped American politics, enacting policies, and concocting constitutional interpretations, that gave more wealth to the richest and more power to those already mighty."
"Those two forces were mostly divided between the two major parties. From before the Civil War up until the mid-1960s, the White Supremacists operated politically as a component of the Democratic Party, which protected white oppression of blacks to hold its coalition together. Meanwhile, the Republican Party was the “Party of Big Business,” advancing the interests of the corporate world at the expense of other components of the society."
"That division was fortunate, because neither party’s most extreme elements were dominant, and the more benign elements generally played by the rules, and mostly worked to move the nation forward. But the balance changed in the mid-1960s, when the Democrats passed Civil Rights legislation, putting an end to legal segregation, and the Democratic Party lost the South, which began changing Republican, and the “Party of Lincoln,” the Great Emancipator, became the Party of Strom Thurmond, defender of segregation."
"As a result, the two main dysfunctional forces in American politics were joined in the same party and formed an alliance. Over time the mostly decent elements of the Republican Party were gradually subdued, or squeezed out, by the combined power of unbridled greed and racial hostility and oppression. The darkened Republican Party then turned to brilliant propagandists to bring the Republican base along to support such a party, like Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, the FOX network, and Karl Rove."
Added to this is the rise of Christian Nationalism. Despite Christ's core teachings being "Love God" and "Love Each Other", expressions of the unity reality, we see "fear God" and "hate everyone not exactly like us" being promoted as Christian morality, manifesting the illusion of separation.
The consequences of this new Republican Party alignment are apparent. The Republican Senate has prioritized reducing taxes on the very wealthy, stonewalling any Democratic legislation while proposing no policies of their own despite the serious issues facing our country, and stacking the entire judicial system with conservative corporatist judges. Obligingly, the Republican Supreme Court has allowed corporations to buy elections with unlimited funds, gutted the Voting Rights Act by permitting gerrymandering and racially discriminating voting regulations, and is dismantling long standing social legislation and environmental protection to maximize corporate profits.
The question before us as a nation is: who are we? Do those obsessed by greed and hate represent your idea of America? Do corporations care about you and your family? Or are they only a very vocal minority, simply expressing the worst aspects of humanity? Money is not speech, it only amplifies speech, like a bullhorn. When the noise is so loud, it is sometimes hard to notice how few people are really speaking. I believe most Americans are of good will. We need to decide what world we want for our children, and then work together to make it so.
