There’s many takeaways for pondering on. I chose to highlight this one because I just feels right. It seems a better definition that democracy should be primarily about equality of emotional support. It inspired me to realize that those who are not “intelligent,” especially those born with physical mental impairments like Down Syndrome or such, are still fully human and still deserve there political voice, which is equal to others. When we base equality on betterment, such as better intelligence, we lose the ability to hear those who suffer, are affected by genetic “defects,” and we forget their full humanity, the basis for equality.
I am frustrated in perhaps a similar way that I don’t wish to vote for either of these two parties. They’ve both not delivered for my brethren of different ethnicities and religions, attacking the very people they should be defending, and now Biden showing his parties (my ex-party’s) true colors by fully supporting genocide. California voted to keep slavery on Prop 6, another clearly vile and anti-democratic institution, also betraying not just democracy but the struggle for it and those who struggle for it. Nationwide black and brown disenfranchisement spread coast-to-coast for the first time in American history, breaking out of the South, under the disguise of “mass incarceration.” Laws quickly built up state by state stripping away the votes of 5 million blacks, and millions of latinos, and yes poor whites, taking away their political voices and the right to politically participate and be heard. This is also a betrayal, leaving only 2 states without “felony” disenfranchised citizens—Vermont and Maine, where felons can vote even in prison. Such a reversal of the Civil Rights movement, aimed only at the South 15 state region where it occurred, produced a worse result than before it.
The Democrats have failed to deliver on democracy while the Republicans continue to attack it, and deceptively turned the country around—once again—against these foundational principles. There is nothing wrong with the principles, which were not from Jefferson superior mind but from one hundred years of political philosophical struggle, which he merely cribbed. He was only propped up by Franklin and the other three Northern whites on the committee who chose him precisely for the reason he knew this ideas, was young and handsome freshly returned from Paris with a university education, and most importantly was a rich aristocratic slave owner. The Southerners would not tolerate Northern pacifist Quakers and Puritans dictating terms for a new nation based on some hippie ideal of love and equality. The continued to resist implementation of it, and we have not been taught that hard truth. South Carolina and Georgia never installed democracy as promised, to protect their “slave fortune,” the engine of their wealth generation.
The problem is with our perception and intent focusing on Jefferson and not enough on the successes and the failures of the people to implement these ideals, or at least try to. While Massachusetts and Pennsylvania succeeded in a relatively peaceful transition to legal abolition of slavery by 1783, those Southern states head in the opposite direction, restricting voting rights even further, making more “negro laws”, which allowed whites to kill black humans under certain conditions. We are not allowed to think of individual states and are told to think about democracy on a holistic national level, a level it never existed on. The gains of democracy got reversed as the autocratic white resisters never stop fighting using violence. They fought and fought, and still fight, against any tangible gain. It too hundreds of years, but finally they infiltrated Massachusetts and in 2000 that state stripped voting rights away from felon for the first time. While whites have been politically napping in their quite white-picket fenced suburbs created by national red-lining laws locking black Americans out, the raging fight to dismantle any gains made protecting blacks and browns. When we call modern day Republicans as anything but autocrats, we do a disservice to equality and liberty and justice for all. The Democratic Party deserves to die for agreeing and compromising with Republicans since Reagan, until their fighting spirit evaporated—if it indeed existed.
We do indeed need to ponder and reflect on this matter of democracy and how it looks, and what acts are ones of it or actually ones of autocracy disguised under democracy. There will be much to discuss. Thank goodness your will and mind look strong. Stay well.
