by Ruth A. Sheets
I am one of those strange folks who has been studying
American history since childhood. I was beyond excited when I got to hear
John F. Kennedy speak near my home and see him pass by in his open car during
his 1960 presidential campaign. Then, in 5th grade, I read an
historical fiction book called Silver for General Washington by Enid
Meadowcroft which described the adventures of 2 kids who helped Washington’s
army at Valley Forge, and my parents sent me at summer camp an American history
workbook. I was hooked. For years, my nearly exclusive reading was
history, biography, and historical fiction. I have since expanded my
reading significantly, but still regularly turn to these.
All of that is to say that I had what is probably a warped
sense of what this nation is and the role of our government. I believed
all the parts of the government were set up to help the American people.
Perhaps that was the intent at the beginning, but something changed.
As a kid, I knew a little about slavery and understood it
was horrible, but did not come close to appreciating just how horrible. I
also didn’t understand until high school how much involvement the government
had in maintaining slavery. My faith in our government and elected
officials began to tarnish. What made our government care so little about
the worth of enslaved persons as human beings and so much about their financial
value?
Then, there was the War in Vietnam. At first I thought
it was a good thing, or must be because our president supported it and Congress
voted to pay for it, and weren’t we helping those people? It took keeping
a month-long “diary” ( of daily events in the war (February 1968) to turn me
against the war. I hope that is what our 9th grade Civics
teacher had in mind. Where was Congress when by this point, many people
in our government knew it as a useless war? Did they care so little for
the thousands who died fighting it?
It wasn’t until after college that I learned about the
Japanese-American “internment” during WWII and the massacres of Black Americans
in Tulsa, OK and other cities and that our government seems to have fully
supported both. Is the reason the teaching of these events was neglected
because people came to care and were ashamed of them? Nah!
I still can’t imagine how I had missed these huge events in
all the reading I had done. I had read about Reconstruction and the Klan,
but those books ended in 1876 before things got really bad. They
mentioned lynching but almost as an aside. I had read about WWII but not
that over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, of all ages, were removed from
the west coast to concentration camps in some of the worst environments America
has to offer. There are no words to express how I felt and still feel
about such inhumanities and the governmental consent and dismissal of
objections that went along with them.
Like most Americans, instead of getting the real story, I
got a child’s version of Rosa Parks, the Little Rock Nine, the Sit-ins, Freedom
Riders, and more. I eventually learned of the sheer level of violence
attached to all these events by racists. In only a few cases did the
Federal government step in to protect its Black citizens and, unfortunately,
probably not because they cared. Again, my faith in Congress, the
Presidency, and the courts slipped significantly. It did go up a bit
though, during Watergate when the House was in the act of impeaching
Nixon, forcing him to resign. Did Republicans in Congress care that Nixon
had broken our trust or did they just want to get over it and move on to their
next act?
A truly sad thing for me in 2020 as a citizen who has
studied American history diligently since I was 10, is that the government I
once thought cared about this nation really doesn't, or rather, right now, the
Republicans and a few Democrats don’t.
A group of people who need to know nothing or care about
anything but their partisanship (the Electoral College) elected a man who can’t
care for anyone but himself and what works for him, and that was known before
the election. And, congressional Republicans can’t or won’t effectively
act for the people in the face of a pandemic. They won’t seriously
address the systemic racism that has been outed by recent videos of police
abuses toward the Black community. In short, Senate Republicans get nothing
done beyond approving totally inappropriate judges for our court system (about
200 so far), judges who are nearly guaranteed to deny rights to all but rich,
white, straight, mostly Christian men (oh, and corporations). These
events have brought us to a critical place of uncaring. Getting as many
inappropriate judges in place is more important than the lives of Americans,
mostly Americans of color. We’ve seen this act before.
It seems power and money are the first things Republican
representatives in Congress think of. The second is how much of both they
can get from the government for themselves, their friends, and already rich
allies. I am certain that is not what the founders had in mind, you know,
the founders that Republicans and conservatives claim to revere. The
truth is they revere only their whiteness and wealth, not their hope that they
could create a nation that was better than what came before and could keep
getting better.
Republicans in Congress have decided they will do as little
as possible to actually help anyone but the rich whom they think are the ones
who keep the economy going. They're not! They think white is right
and whatever happens to Black, Latinx, or poor Americans is their own fault and
they deserve what they get. They won't say that aloud, but their actions
as members of Congress shout it to the heavens.
Congressional Republicans despise (possibly fear) women,
even the Republican women in Congress hate women and believe they are in
competition for the few available places for strong but totally feminine women,
like themselves, of course. However, in order to keep those spots, they
believe they have to do whatever the men in their world demand and they do,
rarely challenging anything McConnell or McCarthy say or do. Oh yes,
they also assist those men to deny women their rights as often as
demanded. As good Republicans, they must demonstrate their uncaring for
the women on the front line of stopping the pandemic.
congressional Republicans also despise LGBTQ persons and despite
seeing how these people are being treated in our society, have done nothing to
protect them. Why? They don't care. I suspect fear is part of
it too. The mass of Republicans can't be bothered. They don’t see
LGBTQ persons as having any real power, so they aren't on the radar.
Republicans have adopted the idea that God wants them to discriminate against
LGBTQ persons and they are sure they are up to the task.
On Monday, June 15, 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that
LGBTQ+ people are protected in the workplace by federal discrimination laws.
This landmark ruling is a major win, but not to Republicans. They saw
this as a defeat for Donald Trump and therefore for themselves.
What!
Something is really wrong here. Personal defeats for
Mr. Trump are therefore defeats for Republicans in general? That is
crazy! How is assuring rights to work unharrassed for Americans a
defeat? How is starting the process of dismantling systemic racism by
controlling police actions a defeat? How is getting protective gear for
front-line workers in a pandemic a defeat? How is giving people
brought to this country as children the right to stay here and continue
contributing to this nation a defeat? So, the man who cares only about
what makes him look good decides what is a defeat?
For Republicans, if those are defeats, what does a victory
look like and who will have to suffer for it?
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