I am sickened by what I've seen and read over the last ten days. What have we spent most of our lives working toward, if not equality in this country, for the last two hundred and fifty years? We were founded as a nation to eliminate the class system prevalent in Europe, to promote freedom of and from religion, under the premise that ALL men are created equal.
It took almost one hundred years after this declaration to eliminate slavery, another hundred to write that equality between races into our Constitution, and now, fifty years after that, we are watching the ugliness of discrimination once again rear up its rotten and appalling head virtually live in our living rooms. I am horrified, outraged, and nauseated by the events we've been subjected to by the repressive and aggressive police tactics and their military mindset of us vs. them; the disinformation and propaganda campaign by many in the media of brandishing a young person as not deserving of life; and a good-ol-boy network of town, county and state government who are operating under the philosophy that they've used for decades of pretending to care about these issues to conceal their despicable racism.
We are better than this. A melting pot by design, we were formed to become one out of many; a veritable amalgamation that has created some of the greatest thinkers, inventors, writers, artists, humanitarians, etc., that the world has ever known.
We've striven to be Number One throughout the world, and lately, lately we've fallen far short. The last few decades have created something completely different than what our Founding Fathers envisioned when they signed that piece of paper calling for our ancestors freedom from the tyranny and repression of a foreign government. We've been lied to, bullied, and coerced into believing that this is how it should be, that there will always be this division, that it's us vs. them.
We've had the lie of the "welfare queen" fed to us so long that one in three Americans believe that this phantom actually exists, and we make excuses for those who want to be so cruel as to starve and denigrate the poor to even more extreme circumstances. We allow our government to harass and penalize the less fortunate while they give more and more money to people who don't need it and will never be able to spend the wealth they already have. We have learned to care for those thousands of miles away and to ignore those in our own neighborhoods.
As our major media has been taken over and controlled by the few who are of the one percent, we've been told to fear anyone of a different color, a different political outlook, a different lifestyle, and a different income bracket. We're made afraid by not only what the media shows us, but also what they censor. The propaganda machine spews a daily dose of fear and hatred to the masses who've been repeatedly told not to think for themselves because it causes problems for the status quo. We've been programmed to think only of ourselves and those close to us, to harbor doubt and dread of anyone outside our own circle.
Our intimate lives are routinely watched, recorded, and housed in databanks to be perused by those who want to control the masses. We allowed our rights to privacy to be written away in a moment of fear and now find ourselves naked before those who seek to destroy all that is good in us.
We are better than this. We are better than tear gas and rubber bullets, better than the propaganda, better than the insensitive words and the lack of compassion. Our lives and our country mean more than a militarized police force, more than political division, more than us vs. them. What we stand for is not what I see when I turn on my television.
We are better than this.