Baltimore - Washington - 2015
Born and raised in Maryland in the 1940s and 50s, I've spent the last half-decade settling family affairs in Prince Georges County between Baltimore and Washington DC. In this brief time, I've discovered history never taught to me here as a child, 60 years ago.
Under the new shopping development between Riverdale and College Park (6-miles north of the US Capitol) they found plantation slave housing foundations. I played there, possibly on those foundations, never having any idea about that. However, it makes sense, this was Lord Baltimore plantation country since the colonial beginning.
In the early-50s, as a teen I once saw our old worn-out textbooks at the run-down "colored" school in the "Lakeland" swamp along the railroad northeast of the University of Maryland. Somehow, that didn't seem quite right.
Mid-50s on a summer-job, I helped deliver office supplies to the University of Maryland Agricultural Extension County Agents. In southern Maryland counties, it was 1-box to the colored office and 4-boxes to the white. Somehow, that didn't seem quite right.
In the late-1960s with US Peace Corps in South-Asia and Mid-East I was immersed in diverse cultures -- missing much of the US Civil Rights Movement. Back home in the 70s, my interests remained global, focused on US involvements overseas.
Meanwhile, the US social cauldron continued to simmer, now boiling once again.
Now retired, with access to explosive Internet resources, I'm reviewing my own familial histories -- a dozen generations, back into mid-Atlantic colonial times. How could we not have been part of that outrageous exploitive social-economic system? I see well-documented social and economic abuse, barely mentioned in my own historic cultural heritage.
If past is prolog, the same-old--same-old cycle is again boiling -- as it will until acknowledged and resolved. Today in every venue we have discord, dysfunction and distrust -- a "Politics of Division" -- implemented by design.
I saw similar social dysfunctions in the remnants of European colonies overseas. "Divide and Conquer" -- an old, old tactic. While the "have-nots" battle over scraps excused as ideology, the "haves" wander off with the loot. It's happening today, globally and here in the US.
Increasingly evident, it's time for a new US-American paradigm -- one based on truth, historic reality, facts and reason; rather than mythology and discord. I resent my past indoctrination and today's demagoguery; but every day is a new beginning. It's time to move on. We The People are recognizing that.
We need a long overdue, all encompassing "Truth and Reconciliation" discussion, in order to drag ourselves out of the muck of our past. We need to put aside and condemn discord and division. We need to become People re-united, together re-gaining control of our destiny, re-directing ourselves on to a viable future.
--jf