Cassi Creek: Over the
last century, America has dabbled in establishing progressive forms of
government. We have elected leaders who
understood the need for a social contract that provided safety nets for the poor
and working class. We have provided a
free public education, public health networks, and unemployment and retirement
insurance programs. We did this while
fighting two world wars, Vietnam, and the Cold War. We did this while absorbing huge numbers of
legal immigrants who came here wanting to become Americans. We did this while
surviving a worldwide depression, a drought of legendary size and
duration. In addition, we did it while
trying to overcome religious intolerance, racial bigotry, and cultural changes
that broadened our acceptance of multiple minorities.
However, the
need to discriminate lingers on in our population. We find ways to exclude minorities from the
full rights of citizenship. We’ve
allowed religious demagogues to fan the fires of intolerance, while weakening
those progressive laws and regulations, which were always intended to
strengthen the social contract. The
GOP/teavangelists have used their base’s collective disdain for and growing
lack of education beyond 8th grade to demand that Congress pass a
series of laws designed to formalize discrimination and bigotry in a manner
that denies the former promise of America, the core of equal opportunity, that
was the American dream.
To make matters even worse, the states which comprised the
Confederacy during our Civil War, in concert with other states that preserve
those same social, cultural, and political disgraces, have mounted campaigns to
force the passage of similar laws, drafted and funded by corporate sponsors and
churches, so that a stacked, and highly reactionary Supreme Court will
ultimately find and rule for the return to pre-revolutionary conditions.
We are likely
to replace the office of Attorney General with a Grand Inquisitor. The purity tests are already being applied to
GOP/teavangelist candidates during the 2012 elections. Can burning at the cross
for heresy be far behind?
Shabbat Shalom!
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