Legislating, Marketing and Entertaining us Into
Insanity
By Daphne Muse
Each day as more
impossibly absurd matters “drone” and attack the landscape of our humanity, I
say: “This must be the last act in the
theater of the absurd,” only for the next act to be even more egregious, vile,
unholy, treacherous and breathtakingly unbelievable; more ready to make the
last atrocity look normal.
There appears to be no
more reverence for reason, as the beacon of compassion has been snuffed out,
twittered away and spun beyond any semblance of recognition. Cauldrons filled with legacies of hate boil
over, as mighty minions tap dance on the Metaphysics of Morals doing all the
bidding for the new corporate personhood.
Moral clarity, ethical behavior and principled standards have become
tongues tied into knots of lies that languish, embedded in the national psyche
and turned into public policy. The
mental illness of racism is suffocating the very life out of those who could be
future doctors, engineers, visionaries and presidents.
The Supreme Court has
recently ruled that officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense,
however minor, before putting them in jail even if officials have no reason to
suspect the presence of contraband. But
being colored has been a long standing tradition of being contraband in and of
itself. Employees are requiring your
Facebook password in order for you to be hired and privacy is just an illusion
that even the one-percent can’t buy their way out of, as so adeptly
demonstrated by Wiki leaks and hackers of every stripe. We’ve been
“blingsided,” entertained, marketed and legislated into insanity, as
demonstrated by what has become the daily barrage of enraging stories about
black men being murdered wantonly, children being raped in what was thought to
be the trusted hands of “responsible” adults and relentless efforts to drag
women back into the caves by our clitoris.
Power buys more power and those who challenge it are deemed unpatriotic,
demented and get parked in the cue for camps that have been kept fresh since
the internment of the Japanese in 1942 through Executive Order 9066 signed by
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
On airplanes, in
grocery stores, along sidewalks the tensions that people hold are palpable. From a disgruntled man walking into a college
classroom in Oakland, California and killing seven people to reality television
and presidential candidates teaching the basics of Bullying 101 to lottery
winners refusing to share with colleagues who were part of the buy-in and Second
Amendments proponents legislating weapons as part of the daily diet, the
national psyche is dialed up so frighteningly high that I find myself awakening
almost daily wondering what the calamity of the day will be. But let us be clear that this has been and
remains a well orchestrated effort to dismantle any semblance of Democracy and render
chaos the modus operandi. From
presidential hopeful Rick Santorum comes yet another inane statement from his
bucket overflowing with lies. This one
notes that he read “something from the state of California” and within the
system of seven or eight universities they don’t even teach American
history. Never mind that some of the
country’s leading historians and historical scholars teach hundreds of
thousands of students in the UC system on a daily basis and that several of the
schools offer advanced degrees in American history. Legendary historian Leon Litwack taught
classes with seven to eight hundred students in them at a time.
People eat up the five
star lies and chaos by the platter. Our
country is so broken in spirit and fact that one can smell, hear, see and taste
just how irreparably broken it is. The
massive boil on our guts has imploded and the blood of our souls continues to
spill from sea to shining sea, across landscapes plagued by foreclosed homes,
businesses and dreams. Efforts to climb
the ladder of optimism, and look beyond the quagmire over into the fields of
Democracy, are thwarted and derailed by the endless Dr. Greedloves, politicians
and state sanctioned operatives set on taking us out rather than seeing us
climb another step. The takedown would
not be so brutal had the victories claimed not been so bold. I think we got so mired in what we didn’t
accomplish, through a range of movements and initiatives connected to social
change, that we forgot how to build upon what we did.
Now on life support,
can America ever be America again? So many days, I find myself mourning for what could have
been, who we could be/become. The
profound words from Langston Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again”
continuously resonate all over the spirit of my topography, as a reminder of
what never was but could be:
Let America Be America Again
By Langston Hughes
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
To read a complete version of the poem, go to http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15609.
Can the
country find its way into becoming a nation, using the collective intelligence,
wisdom and skills of its people and the best of its history to build something
truly formidable for all the reasons that can make a country sustainably great? There is no singular savior or movement to
shift the paradigm and return to the path of new possibilities for who America
can be in all the incredible glory of her racial, ethnic, class, gender,
cultural and spiritual diversity. This
must be a collective movement across all lines of demarcation, for this
position of weakness primes us for an even greater vulnerability than most can
imagine.
While history can be
instructive, bold new ideas have to be put on the table for discussion
accompanied by even bolder strategies for realizing them. There are just too many intelligent,
visionary, compassionate and highly skilled people among us to allow the
country to embark deeper into the hell in which we now find ourselves. I so want to work even harder at being a
practicing futurists, if only for the sake of passing on something far greater
than legacies to our young.
·
Send me a link to a website, blog or
video reporting positive and progressive news
·
Suggest a strategy or idea for taking us
sustainably forward
·
Provide links to things that are working
I so appreciate every effort, strategy or action to
help us navigate our way out of the lockdown of despair into the realm of new
possibilities and realizations of who we really can become/be.
I will post those results on my blog: www.daphnemuse.blogspot.com.
©Daphne Muse 2012
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