MAKE ALL AMERICANS EQUAL FINALLY
Equality is the true basis of modern democracy, only on the basis of equality will a democracy not implode into an oligarchy as the first "democracy" never escaped being and which it imploded into and oligarchy was the motive of the aristocrats who rigged the American system of government for the slave owners and the finaciers and their modern descendants who are the de-facto ruling class of the United State even as we celebrate the The merely theoretical "freedom" and the "rights" that the First Congress had to adopt as a deal to adopt the Constitution by those rightly suspicious of the results of the Constitutional Convention.
The realization that the language of "rights" and the notion of freedom was far, far from being a secure basis for democracy and that only full equality made that kind of talk and thinking safe took me a while. Considering I was not totally ignorant of American history, it should have taken me a lot less time. One of the better early clues was seeing the crypto-fascist William F. Buckley's denigration of equality as an endangerment of HIS kind of freedom, the freedom of the rich to steal, cheat, lie and govern over the interests of those they wanted to fleece and cheat and, ultimately, use. Oligarchs have always wanted their individual freedoms to do those things unimpeded by the government, they are the beneficiaries of those crimes that Balzac wisely noted were behind all great fortunes and if they ran things they could come to an agreement among themselves to do so without the government being any problem. That is what you are going to see in the Roberts Court as they dare to impose that on the United States, this latest ruling to reinstate a modified Jim Crow proves that they aren't going to let reasoning or the truth interfere with their wordsmithing opinions that do exactly what they and their patrons want in that regard.
That I am white and male, though also gay and so a member of a partially oppressed group, certainly also figured in my tardiness to learn the lesson that equality was the actual and safe basis of democracy, a system of government put into power on the basis of a majority vote, I suspect that it was a lesson that Native Americans, Black Americans, Latino Americans, Asian and Pacific Americans would find far easier to understand. It seems to be as hard for white women to comprehend and white women have had a far harder time of things than a white man who could, if he chose to, pass as a member of the favored class for all of American history, including now, straight, white males, a minority who still rule and are still the major force in the media, in the law, in government as they were when the Constitution was written and adopted and all through its period of amendment. White privilege is as basic to understanding the history of the United States as European immigration and theft of North America. In fact, they are the same thing.
So, this is my 4th of July message. Equality should always be understood as being the only guarantee that an electoral democracy will really be free and a guarantor of rights, that is as plain as the legal methods that are being adopted and employed to prevent it in voting which are going on right now as they were in the period after the Civil War, after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War amendments were adopted and, especially, as the Electoral College and a corrupt deal made by Rutherford Hayes (who should be among the most despised of Presidents, known for nothing more as John Roberts' name should be infamous for this ruling as "Taney" is ) with the slave power to impose Jim Crow with the full support of the Supreme Courts, then, coming up with one after another legal argument with precedent in law to reimpose a de facto and partial slavery and to suppress other groups, making them less than fully human even as they wanted their own class of people to be. Real history matters if you tell the full truth about it and the more privileged you are the less likely you will be to tell the full truth because there's no reason for anyone to allow privilege any privilege.
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