[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]T[/dropcap]he US’s solution to the “Indian problem” was resolved by means of the barrel of a gun, as slavery was enforced by armed slave patrols.
To this day, cops in the US continue the blood-drenched legacy by gunning down a greater (far greater) number of citizens than any nation on the planet. Result: Everyday is Wounded Knee in the US.
And yet, it’s not enough killing. Witness the keyboard Sergeant Fury sorts, who, in a finger pointing fury are shaming a single sheriff’s deputy for not acting in the manner of a movie action hero during the unfolding of a recent mass shooting tragedy.
Few among us can predict how they would respond to being caught in the midst of an eruption of violent, death-delivering madness.
The self-proclaimed courageous might fold into a foetal position and whimper while persons, who, previously believed themselves to be a coward might evince selfless bravery, or closer to what human beings experience during times of extreme danger…be pushed by raging, unrelenting fear into desperate action.
Courage and cowardice are ineffable qualities, mysterious phenomenon among the multiple and manifold variables within all animals. All who have never been tested by the forces of fate in such a manner can do is feel gratitude for the fact and withhold petty-minded, shallow value judgements in regard to those individuals who have not been passed over by the horrors that hideous circumstance has spared us.
In all likelihood, frightened fellow would have been responsible for a greater death toll in a situation fraught with such terror and confusion. For example, It is terrified and confused cops – who in their racist based fear, by reflex, kill unharmed members of racial minorities.
On a personal basis, I had the opportunity to acquire German citizenship for my son and I, and even though I’m a bit long in the tooth, we left the US for the sake of the kid. Even though, Germany is a de facto US client state, healthcare is considered an entitlement, as opposed to the acquisition of a personal arsenal of military assault weapons. The US exists in a perpetual psychotic episode, and I didn’t want the kid to internalise the normalised madness.
By all indications, the pathology in the US will not have a bottom that will serve to deliver a collective reckoning. The viciousness is embedded in the very DNA of the US. It is not possible to outrun a vile legacy; the attempt will result in a head-on collision with Fate.
Conversely, legacies must be faced, addressed, admitted to, amends made and reparations proffered. Building a massive wall — mirroring a metaphoric wall of the collective mind — will only result in walling in the raging pathology and sealing the denial-ridden nation’s fate.
Image by Pixabay/Jessiebuss
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
