The Future of the United States
A message to Elizabeth Graham from Heather Cox Richardson begins by saying: “On a clear, cold morning of December 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, three U.S. soldiers tried to wrench a valuable Winchester away from a young Lakota man.” In the end, these soldiers massacred the men, women, and children of the Lakota’s that day.
What a heart-wrenching tale, but with an incredible ending of “One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability. But it is never too late to change the future.”
The “white” men of our world – such as Donald J. Trump – have unleashed fear, threats, and terror on others. One of my favorite books, White Fragility written by Robin DiAngelo and quoted in From Democracy to Democrazy (www.democrazy2020.org) states: “As a White person, I can openly and unabashedly reminisce about “the good ole days. Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is a hallmark of White Supremacy. Consider any periods in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of Black women for the pleasure of White men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of Black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people; Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; share cropping; Chinese exclusive laws; Japanese American internments; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; Black codes; bans on Black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work, medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination, educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices, redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; and untold and perverted historical accounts. You can now see how a romanticized past is strictly a White construct. But it is a powerful construction because it calls out a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement.”
So, whether our past – White society – is associated with the killings of native Americans in South Dakota, the discrimination or lynchings of Blacks throughout the United States, the internment of Chinese or Japanese, or Donald J. Trump saying “The KKK are good people” – our nation has a sordid past.
The year 2024 is creeping up upon us and gives each of us a chance to transform ourselves and our country. We have a choice. A vote to elect Trump is a vote to return to White Supremacy, violence, hatred, and possibly the drastic conversion of our country from a democracy to a dictatorship. It is to allow a man to lead us who has 91 felony charges, a fraud conviction, 4 bankruptcies, and he is most likely in the pocket of Vladimir Putin – who blames the U.S. for the downfall of the Soviet Union and wishes to destroy our country.
Take a deep breath and think about how you wish to live the rest of your life? “It is never too late to change the future.”
Elizabeth Graham had a Top Secret Clearance as a senior in high school and worked undercover with the CIA at the age of 17. Then she joined the Foreign Systems Research Center (SAIC) where she spent 12 years of which 8 years was studying Russia and Russian, and managed the largest Russian-language military, technical and intelligence library in the U.S. She began to travel to the Soviet Union and then became one of the very few Americans to move to the USSR. She lived under Communism in the Soviet Union, then Russia, and Central Asia long enough to become bi-cultural – she became Russian. Her first-hand knowledge and understanding of life in a communist or dictatorship country is shared with Americans in her book, From Democracy To Democrazy, as well as an alarming expression of pure fear of Trump’s behavior, decisions, and words.