'Manifest Destiny' and Other Lies
In a couple of hundred years, after the American Revolution, the French-Indian war and the Civil War, an unnamed journalist waxed poetic about America's 'Manifest Destiny' and the leaders like it so much, used it whenever possible to keep the American people focused on taking land from other countries, of purposely starting wars in order to obtain the resources places like Mexico and Spain owned, wars which were always blamed on the other guy.
The sad truth is this: Regardless of all our talk about embracing the lost, the hungry, the needy, we were building an America of white people who gave so little to everybody else and made them think they were our equals...Sort of. White men used religion in order to justify everything they did...Slavery. Murder. Keeping women at home and out of the daily grind of creating a country that would eventually tell the world to believe we're a nation built on democratic notions, all the while invading other countries to force them to believe like us, to behave like us, to do what we say and, probably the most atrocious act of all, to either take the 'Christian Doctrine', which by the 1800s was nothing like that which tthhe first Pilgrims believed in...And that wasn't so much anything more than keeping women at home while the men made like leaders...You know what we call anyone else who does this?
Dictators. Terrorist. Bullies by any other name.
We believe we're told the truth about everything, our history, our victories in every war, except when we didn't win any particular war then we called them 'Conflicts' or 'Police Actions'...What 'Truth' means in our country today is what the current leaders living in Washington, DC want's us to believe and that is a horrible truth indeed. Building walls and throwing out sayings like 'Make America Great Again' when what they are really saying is make America 'White' again. Make America 'Straight' again. Make America obey again.
Growing up I only had a few white friends. Most of them weren't Caucasian and I never really thought about race at all...Which was monumentally stupid and naive because only a white person can afford to think like that. I'd go to movies with my friends, the 'French Connection' was one such movie, where bigoted insults and slurs toward the Gay Community ran rampant and America celebrated these words by giving out Oscars. As we left I looked into my friends and saw the hurt in him as he asked why anyone would give awards to something like that?
I had no answer.
A while back I was given a dismal diagnosis about living very much longer and I decided I didn't want to die stupid, so I dove in, I began reading history books, some written about WW2 and the creation of the first Atom Bomb, about the government getting involved with what people saw on television those first years after the TV was brought into our living rooms, creating shows that would make women remember their place, by glorifying the idea that this was all they were suppose to do, which wasn't easy because women took over many of the jobs left open by men fighting in those wars and they really liked being in charge, of starting to believe there was more to being a woman than bearing children...They never had a chance.
The biggest lie, though, came from the bombardment of books and films after the Atomic Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of the fact that America rounded up Japanese Americans and put them in what they called 'Relocation Camps'...A Concentration Camp by any other name. While America was basking in Norman Rockwell's 'Four Freedoms' paintings, Japanese Americans had their land, their businesses, their dignity, stripped from them by Roosevelt and his military cabinet with Executive Order 9066 giving them the authority to round up all 'Potential Threats' and putting them throughout the country. It's important to note that EO 9066 is still 'Open'...Just in case this happens again.
The entire history of these acts fill up a wall with books written without the 'Red, White, and Blue' fever the previous decades had put forth. I am so tired of hearing that Japan deserved the Atomic Bombs because of Pearl Harbor when the truth is...Horrible. When Los Alalmos and the Manhattan Project started, the scientists were told the bombs were necessary to stop Hitler and with most of them being refugees from Germany and the Nazi Government, they were willing to be held under 'Protective Custody' while they worked on the weapons. The something happened: Germany was defeated. The scientists thought they were finished, but the military 'Insisted' they stay and finish the bomb because Japan was still a threat. Through the Freedom of Information Act the papers from Roosevelt and the rest paint a more depressing reason: They never wanted to drop the bombs on European type countries (White), they had always intended to drop them on Japan.
Then beyond telling this lie to the public, they then heaped up lie after lie after lie, sending American Troops onto a radioactive wasteland to 'Prove' the bombs were safe...Giving virtually every soldier who walked among those ruins cancer as they grew older, an insult which grew more painful as our government wouldn't pay for their families for their action because that would expose the lie.
These aren't 'Conspiracy Theories'...If you want to understand what America did to their own citizens, read 'Impounded' by Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okhiro. It's not only a good historic look at what was done to Japanese Americans, it contains the uncensored photographs of the great photographer Dorothea Lange. The photos released at the time were cropped, cutting out the armed guards, the primitive conditions they'd been forced into...Some lived for a while in a horse stable!
This might actually be the last generation that has the opportunity to be told the truth of America's past because our own Dictator Trump and his Fascist Regime are attempting to put a stop to the 'Freedom of the Press'. They're systematically trying to rid America of those who aren't white as they slowly chip away at all the rights the GLBTQ Community had earned through countless deaths and attacks on their character leading some of those Military Leaders asking our government to implement Executive Order 9066...Again.
The 'Truth' will not set you free but is will set upon the course toward the true meaning of Democracy. I wish that I could have more time to act, to walk and talk and cry out to the world to stop and look at what has happened to our country, our nation. I don't and I fear for my grandchildren (Though I haven't seen one and the others...It's complicated), for my daughter who has had a brief moment of being equal, a moment all women should really think about because the Constitution was written by men for men and women were not a part of this action...There's a whole lot of chatter on the Net about this aspect of 'Making America White Again', politicians telling whoever will listen to them about how easy women had it when they got to stay at home while the men went to do man stuff.
You have a scary future...Two mad leaders are having a fight about who has the bigger dick, threatening to unleash a new war, one in which no one will win. Everyone who belongs to the GLBTQ Community, as well as those who support them, are in danger of losing everything...Even now some 'Churches' have refused to preside over weddings of heterosexual couples simply because they support the right of Gay couples to wed.
Stop listening to that orange headed freak and his barrel of monkeys, stop sitting in front of the television while people are currently being killed by law enforcement officers because they are black, stop ignoring the loss of our freedoms being taken away bit by bit, and get ready for a new war, a war to regain our footing, a war to make certain 'Equal' means exactly what it is suppose to mean.
It's up to all of us to act, to get new blood into the halls of congress and the presidency, of being courageous again and saying 'NO!' to those who would take away everything you hold dear. Think that's impossible?
Look up Executive Order 9066. It's happened before and the government is ready to make it happen again. If you don't want to be a slave, a prisoner in the country of your birth, if you believe in equality, then you have to act. Now.
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