Month: June 2021

“Socialism!” cried the Republicans. “America was built on hard work and rugged individualism! If you create a safety net, workers will just lose all of their incentive, and lounge in the hammock of dependency! America will go to hell in a handbasket!”

But FDR persisted, and the rest is history. Sure, we won World War II and the Cold War and built the strongest and most prosperous nation in history. But imagine how great we would be today if we made the poor, the elderly, and the unfortunate beg for charity and eat dog food! It would be awesome, baby!

I read two interesting articles about whitelash in the NYT two weeks ago. One of them addressed a resolution about welcoming people of all races in a Wisconsin town; the other was about a black farmer who receives money from a federal program supporting minorities in a rural community. In the first article, the town was preparing to vote down the resolution, because the white residents considered any suggestion that the community was racist to be a form of racism; in the second, white farmers were grumbling about the unfairness of funds targeted for minorities.

How do we deal with these attitudes? Don’t bother talking about slavery, because it is too remote, and the distant relatives of slave owners don’t feel any responsibility. Don’t talk about white privilege, because most white people struggle to get by, and don’t feel privileged. Talk about the issues experienced by black people as problems to be solved, not guilt to be expunged. In other words, social potholes that need to be filled in the normal course of business.

There is a house in my neighborhood whose owner flies both the American and the Confederate flags. I am tempted to confront her and tell her that the one is the negation of the other. The American flag stands for liberty; the Confederate flag stands for secession, slavery, and treason.

I haven’t done it, and I probably never will, for two reasons. One of them is simply that I don’t thrive on that kind of conflict. The other, which is more important, is that she might well tell me that the Confederacy is real America, and everyone else is an interloper, so there is no inconsistency. After all, that is what reactionaries genuinely believe.

I don’t think we will ever really have peace and justice in this country until they stop believing it.

The local TV station that we watch provides vaccination statistics for Virginia and Tennessee on a daily basis. The former is ahead of the national average; the latter is far behind.  

Could this possibly be because one has become a blue state, and the other is red? Inquiring minds want to know.

I was reading an article in The Atlantic about the Lost Cause a few days ago. In the article, one of the Confederate wannabes argued that the Civil War could not possibly have been about slavery, because hundreds of thousands of men who did not own slaves would have died fighting against their economic self-interest. Impossible, right?

Hardly. They were the ancestors of millions of white workers who voted for Trump against their apparent self-interest for culture war reasons. The GOP is completely dependent on those voters, and would perish without them.