Poisoned roots...
Everyone has said everything about yesterday and many far more eloquently and profound than I could, but after a historical day like that, you can’t just be quiet and pretend nothing happened.
So, the only thing I would add or at least document is… from one of the best books I’ve ever read… Caste… by Isabel Wilkerson…
America is an old house. We can never declare the work over. Wind, flood, drought, and human upheavals batter a structure that is already fighting whatever flaws were left unattended in the original foundation…
…We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now. And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands. Unaddressed, the ruptures and diagonal cracks will not fix themselves. The toxins will not go away but, rather, will spread, leach, and mutate, as they already have. When people live in an old house, they come to adjust to the idiosyncrasies and outright dangers skulking in an old structure. They put buckets under a wet ceiling, prop up groaning floors, learn to step over that rotting wood tread in the staircase. The awkward becomes acceptable, and the unacceptable becomes merely inconvenient. Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be…
Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton, a caste system that is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order.
This isn’t Trump. This isn’t Ted Cruz of Texas; Josh Hawley of Missouri; Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi; John Kennedy of Louisiana; Roger Marshall of Kansas; or Tommy Tuberville of Alabama though all of their names (along with many others) should go down in history as self-seeking cowardice leeches.
This is America (as Childish Gambino said it). This is who we are and the names above merely tapped into those evil roots and destructive foundations and “inspired” people with them (and technology makes it easier than ever).
Many in this country demand the caste system not be broken and that system has white men at the top and it always has. It was founded that way, built that way, and perpetuated that way. Many have also demanded a god who goes along with it all, a fantastical god built out of greed and power and violence - not love or unity or peace.
But some repairs are happening. The first black senator from Georgia was just elected as was the first black (and) woman Vice President as was a whole host of other things. Even yesterday seemed to open some eyes to the reality - confederate flags and nooses are still being erected as symbols? What do those have to do with a stolen election?
As Van Jones said eloquently on CNN - sometimes you have to believe to see and he believes there is hope and change coming and possible, and when you believe, you start to see it.
So, I hope despite the long predicted chaos of yesterday, that some better destruction is on the horizon. The destruction of the uneven pillars and joists and the eradication of the toxins lurking in the soil. If not, we’ll just do this again, even if it gets buried for another few years.
With that destruction is going to have to come listening and empathy and kindness too… and radical honesty and self-reflection and selflessness.
So here’s to better and bigger change on the horizon that will take all of us to help carry out.