HOW DID WE GET TO THIS PLACE? – Marilyn Armstrong

Like many other countries, we’ve hidden our ugliest history in the backs of closets. We have written phony history books and made sure our kids read them.  Now we wonder how come they don’t understand history.

A good start would be to teach them what actually happened. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

Andrew Jackson President of the good old U.S.A. wiped out entire tribes of Natives. But that was only one part of the slaughter. They kidnapped children and beat them until they were “American.” More to the point, too terrified to be anything else.

Does that sound familiar?

Then, of course, there was slavery, over which we fought the bloodiest war ever in this country, followed by a never-ending cruel inequality that still remains and continues — with the help of our disgusting president — to grow.

And let’s not forget interning Japanese citizens — many of whom were born here — during World War 2.

We’ve always felt we were morally superior to Those Other Countries who slaughtered and mass murdered people for whatever idiotic reason they held. Yet here we are (and were) doing the same.

We haven’t started killing immigrants yet, but who knows? Trump is just being Trump, so if he thinks it’s a good idea, I’m sure his sycophants will step right up and follow his orders. Or maybe they’ll do it just for fun. Nothing would surprise me.

You can bet Sean Hannity will be explaining how it’s not even happening anyway. And 28-30% of all Americans will smile because mass murder sounds like a good idea to them. They will volunteer for jobs in “the camps.”  A job is a job.

With a president who has so little conscience that he thinks kidnapping foreign children is good politics, does murdering foreigners if he thinks it might help him get reelected sound too far out? Assuming he isn’t planning to bypass that whole annoying election process, that is.

A couple of weeks ago, he said (who knows what he is really saying?) we are returning to the old-fashioned method we’ve been using for the past 50 years. We’ll stop refugees at our border and say “Sorry, no room. Go home.” This is what we used to before you-know-who moved to the White House.

Someone asked me why we can’t make room for them. No idea. This country is built on the sweat of hungry immigrants, but we seem to have lost our way. As long as we have borders, we are obliged to keep track of who comes and goes across them.

I’m too far down the line of brilliant thinkers who have turned our world into whatever it currently is, but don’t you wonder ever what would happen if we didn’t have artificial lines around “countries” and lived in a single world? Then we could just hate each other for personal reasons.

Author: Marilyn Armstrong

Writer, photography, blogger. Previously, technical writer. I am retired and delighted to be so. May I live long and write frequently. View all posts by Marilyn Armstrong