Let’s talk about change. Over the course of our Nation’s History, we have witnessed and experienced monumental changes. Sometimes we were the progenitors of that change, sometimes we resisted, but changed with the world.
We witnessed great plantations, manned by slaves, who were kept, bought, sold and treated like animals. Only landed white men were considered citizens and allowed to vote. Women were viewed as possessions and possessed no rights and no say on how they were treated. l
The Papal Bull Inter Caetera, a solemn edict authored by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, gave Christians dominion over Indigenous lands and called for the subjugation of Native Indigenous peoples for the purpose of propagating Christian doctrine. In fact, Christians were charged with the duty of overthrowing Indigenous Nations in order to convert them to Christ, and Christian heirs were granted “full and free power, authority, and jurisdiction of every kind. https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/a-letter-to-pope-francis-abolish-the-papal-bull-behind-colonization-fZdn3jE4ikeHv58sizi_Hg/
In the 19th century, manifest destiny was a widely held belief in the United States that its settlers were destined to expand across North America. There are three basic themes to manifest destiny:
Sweatshops, child labor, illiteracy, slavery, restricted voting rights, unregulated work hours and conditions, industrial pollution of land, waterways, and air...all were common place. Until both legislation and societal expectations changed the reality.
Now we stand upon a precipice. We have taught our children and grandchildren that we all are entitled to education, health, safety, and living wages. We have taught them that rape is wrong and consent is importatnt. That we all should be afforded respect and opportunity.
We are at a new height for income inequality. The United Nations has issued a report documenting 3rd World Levels of Poverty. There are many communities, usually in areas with high density populations of people of color, who have no indoor plumbing and restricted access to clean water. There is disparity in educational opportunites not just at the pos-secondary level, but also at the Public School levels. We are seeing record high levels of homelessness, suicide, opiate addiction, and poverty. 25% of children under the age of 18 live in poverty. Veterans of old and recent wars kill themselves at the number of 22 a day.
Since the 1980’s the disparities have increased. Since the Recession, those who had wealth outside of stocks and bonds have recovered. Those whose retirement was in stocks have recovered at levels at parity with their race. People of color have had no recovery of stocks or savings.
Now our conversations are about behavior. What is acceptable and unacceptable. We call people snowflakes for refusing to accept name calling and judgement. Safe spaces for people in marginalized populations are being ridiculed, without any awareness or acknowledgement that being racially or sexually different can also be a life threatening situation or at the very least a socially unacceptable occurrence.
We talk about consent...to touch, to sexual behavior, to sex. When women entered the work force, women tolerated sexual touching, innuendos, harassment, acts in order to keep or advance in their jobs. It was seldom acknowledged, but generally known and accepted. There are many women of older generations who see the demands for consideration and the abolition of sexual currency and power in the work place as being whiners, pussies and snowflakes. But we, and they, were the ones who taught our children about bodily autonomy, about consent.
We whine about people who are made uncomfortable about lyrics of generations old popular songs, popular movies, popular books. But we elders are the ones that told them, stand up for yourself. Do not let others tread on your autonomy by insulting and infringing on your right to self-determination. We cannot in good conscience simultaneously admonish our yournger generations to be their best and demand respect, yet berate them when they do so.
We have reached this divide. Those who are comfortable with racial division and derision, sexual innuendos and sexual domination, sexual currency as power in the workplace, separation of the races in education as well as along economic lines. We have enormous inequality in housing, public utilities, the justice system, access to healthcare, education. Our political systems have become the gambling places of the wealthy, the oligarchy calling the shots, voting access being determined in many areas according to race, age and income.
It is time to pull up our big girl panties. We are pointing and laughing at the newcomers in our Political Systems who are calling out the corruption in campaign financing, corporate dominance in politics and political etiquette that has been acceptable since the times of slavery as unacceptable. We taught them to do this.
We aren’t there anymore. We know the wages of sexual, racial, educational, economic and health disparity. We know the devils it breeds, the children it kills.
It is time for us to fully invest in democracy. To listen to our children, whom we have taught so well. To step into the void and stop accepting the unacceptable. It is time be what even our forefathers never dreamed of. To be a Country where every persons potential is maximized. Where the earth is honored and treated with the respect needed if we are to continue our legacy upon its lands. It is time to embrace our indigenous populations and enrich where they live or remove the shackles that bind them to a non-productive land. It is time to embrace, feed, educate and love every child. If we do not, we already know what will happen. We are seeing it now. Suicide, opiate addiction and deaths, fun violence associated with underground and drug economies, human trafficking, mass shootings. “We have seen the enemy and he is us.”
