The Road Ahead: "Syria"?: Or, "America"??
Citizens of this country should stop kidding themselves: We are in the late stages of a long, "defining" war for a "New America". It started, I think, with President Harry Truman, who dropped the "bomb" on Japan; but also "Integrated" the Military Services in 1948. I wrote a Master's Thesis in Public Administration in 1972, which examined closely the status of that existential shift, and the historical roots of the underlying conflicts. The Warren Court "Integrated" the Public Schools six years later. The Freedom Rides to "Integrate" Public Accommodations, began shortly thereafter. I was commissioned as a military officer fourteen years after Truman's Executive Order.
Both, in the military and in our "civilian" lives, the battles were waged against Truman's action to integrate the military and the Court's action to integrate our social lives. Jim Crow and Segregation Laws were in place in those days. They defined the new face of "slavery" for black citizens (shifting from irons to economics). Presidents since then, all white and male until 2008, have taken steps to shape the outcome of the social and economic upheaval that came in the wake of Truman's Order.
The Republican Party, in response to public resistance, turned their historic stance on this subject (racial oppression) on its head when Nixon lead it into the "land of cotton". Earlier, Lyndon Johnson, as atonement for the assassination of President Kennedy, did an "about face" on his earlier political stance and policies regarding Race, by taking the lead (with the silent support of J. Edgar Hoover and his "blackmail" files) to "integrate" our legal structure vis-à-vis Race. Reagan came along, brought the Catholic Church into the fight, enlarged the battlefield, and kicked the war against persons of color into "high gear".
The Republican Party, in its new clothes, proceeded to wreck our economy, stir up racial animus, and set a new path for our national politics. Aided by the likes of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, they seduced a majority of white voters to their side of politics.
In 2008, they succeeded in running everything off the rails. The economic collapse (global in size) was so "scary" that even a large number of Republicans voted for the first black President. Hispanics, who, like Native Americans, believed themselves to be "white", because the other whites told them they were; woke up and realized that they had been, all-along, treated like the blacks. Women, Gays, and myriad others joined the train. The Hispanics took on the cause of "Immigration".
The same warriors that had been fighting blacks since 1948 (religious people, Southern "Crackers", etc.) now turned against the Hispanics. As late as 2000, the Republican Party had hopes of driving a wedge, permanently, between the Hispanics and blacks. Their stance on Immigration lost the Hispanics for the Republicans.
Stay Vigilant! Is it to be Cruz and "Syria", or the Democrats, and the end of the race wars?
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