The slums of Mumbai gives me nightmares; I can't believe government allows their people to live in squalor.
OURS does. They’ve gotten better at hiding it (private) & better at trying to be accountable (public).
First time I saw people living in squalor was maybe 50 miles outside Macon. I was helping the church camp with a supply run, and along the way, we passed a field full of derelict old vehicles - dozens at least. Rusted out, missing doors, broken glass everywhere…and every single ONE a had a black *family* living in and around it. No shade, no other shelter. No water, no electricity. It had a catastrophic effect - apocalyptic - on me. I asked the pastor driving why all those people were living in such a place, under such conditions.
His response was matter-of-fact: “It’s their choice.”
The impact of these words from a man of gawd, THE most unchristian, un-Christ-like, thing I’d ever heard, sent me into orbit…but I kept it to myself. My distrust of white people on matters of race was already profound, and this clinched it. If he knew the length & breadth of my disapproval, he could have ruined me (still in high school), and my family. I kept it to myself…and I chewed on it for a long, long time.
Eventually, some things I learned bumped into something else I’d always wondered about, and *it* fell on the question of what ‘it’s their choice’ really meant…and I began to see they were all pieces of the same picture: from a particular POV, black people *aren’t* people at all, biology & reality notwithstanding; what they *are* - their ACTUAL STATE is PROPERTY. ESCAPED property. Doesn’t matter that Lincoln gave them cover under which to escape, they STILL escaped and theyre STILL property: their owners didn’t free them, they weren’t stolen away by scalawags, nobody paid for them, THEY STOLE THEMSELVES - and the LAW, THE GOVERNMENT let it happen, prevented their recapture & return to service, pretended they were due the same rights & privileges AS THEIR OWNERS…and just generally paraded around as if they HAD the right to do THAT.
Imagine the anxiety of white men with no skilled free labor to profit from - grow & harvest the crops, cut down, stripped & cooked down the sugar cane, the pine sap, make the carts and boxes and nails and charcoal and stoves and ships and lamps and hats, etc, tend to all the other farm stock, raise the children, feed, clean up after, and take care of the household, run errands….
Imagine the self-sympathy of that slaveless white man, having to shave himself; having to dress and clean himself; having to eat the cooking of a white woman who knew nothing about cooking (though she knew what her favorite dishes were); having to see the walking criminal of escaped slaves walking the streets every day; having to NOT drag his malingering escaped property by the hair back to the house & beat him until he understood his position. Imagine how many there were; imagine how many of them were veterans of the rebellion; imagine how many of them worked as police, as sheriffs, as prison guards.
Imagine how fucking angry they got every time *any* of it got stuck in their craw - with EVERY black face in view a fresh insult, a new wound to their pride & independence. Imagine how groups like the Klan, Sons of the Confedracy, White Citizens Councils came together naturally. Imagine how seamlessly the jim-crow ‘way of things’ came together, maintaining slavery in everything but name, hiding all the while behind the church, the flag(s) and their bullshit pretense that they were above racial animus, but the law is the law & must be respected and obeyed, evvybody got rights….
The roots of MAGA - and the roots of inhumanity are in the words of that preacher: it’s their choice. They could have gone back to their masters, accepted their punishment & returned to their labors, but no. THAT was not their choice: it was their choice to NOT do that, and squalor, hunger, disease, and being ‘kept where we could keep an eye on ’em’ are the hand maids of their choice. If they don’t like it, don’t want it, they can surrender & accept their state as property.
But they better not ask for - or TAKE - a single *dime* of tax money: until their owners’ descendants are PAID for on-the-hoof livestock, every dime of it would be stolen from their owners, by “the government”, to bribe the criminals (crimes walking around in daylight) to go along with their gravy train. Let ‘em suffer enough, they’ll see the light. Eventually.
It is “grievance culture” in its very essence; no wonder Trump swept up so many of them with an anti-millennial zeal & ‘a righteous cause’: if they lose the stranglehold they’ve maintained on power since 1865, then they’ll NEVER get the reparations they believe THEY deserve, never get the respect they feel their ‘natural nobility’ is due (“Slavery ENNOBLES *every* white man!” proclaimed an anti-abolition pamphlet popular in the antebellum south (antebellum: “before the fight”)), never see the white people reclaim their exclusive grip on the top of the food chain.
It’s not exhaustive by any means, but that frame (or something much like it) is the only ‘scenario’ I’ve found that could actually seed & feed the enduring rage & jealousy, the paranoid vendetta mentality that we see & hear in so many perfectly ordinary people, the sense of standing on bedrock’ they’re able to maintain - & maybe account for / propel many (most? some?) of the scattered threads of derangement we now see gathered together in the House, among other places. Weird to think they’re nearer to winning NOW than they were in 1865…but then they’ve had a long time to practice the pseudo-legal slavery, their high-sounding & fake-principled justifications, cover stories, professions of patriotism & True Americanhood…and the rest of have had our eyes closed ALMOST ALL THAT TIME.
We believed them. Took them at their word. Took their ‘culture’ seriously, made real effort to compromise, repeatedly overlooked, even made excuses for in the name of unity & bipartisanship.
THEY have been at war with us ever since they were forced to admit that ARMS IN THE FIELD WOULD NOT WIN THE FIGHT. They have hidden among us, their unAmerican peculiarities shrugged off, their protestations acknowledged, their good faith assumed, just good Christian gawd-fearing’ folks, who want what’s best for us all, just like the rest of us.
We were wrong. Their idea was - IS - as different from mainstream American culture TODAY as Hitler’s idea (Confederate-style slavery w/ Jews, not Africans, because, well, there WERE Jews in Europe (…Africans = hard to come by)) was from the arc of European life, law, & civilization was in the ‘30s. We’re not on the same side: they want their property, their payment - or both - and if they can GET control & KEEP it, they’ll take it without a second thought.
Oh, almost forgot: one more thing they very much want: to punish the race traitors who let/made all this happen: Republicans then, Democrats now. The EEVILLE liberals and their big ideas about getting along & letting bygones be bygones & working together for the common welfare and defense & fulfilling the promise of America…. Imagine how “rolling coal”, “pwning the libs”, constant lies, libelous accusations, and an entirely fraudulent information chain (brainwashing) improves the chances that ‘patriots’ will cheer the most unpatriotic slogans, policies & people, double down on every dangerously insane slander or paranoid fantasy, and draw ever closer to destroying the nation itself in a pyhrric display of “destroying the village to save it”.
…sorry. Kinda went off-road: point was, how governments can accept citizens in squalor. I wonder what scripture the Hindus use to maintain the caste system
