OUR DEMOCRACY MATTERS

You know what? Every country or empire ends. That's what history says to me.

So, I know the United States is not going to last forever. But, when I see things like this and especially the white willingness to just implode the country over the perception* that whiteness isn't as impenetrable as it used to be via electing somebody like Donald Trump president, I wonder if it's going to happen sooner rather than later. 

Some of us may be silly enough to think things aren't better than they were in the 1960s. But they are. That's how we have a black president. People of color and a small to medium size portion of white people managed to override white men and elect President Obama twice.  

The other way that things are better for people of color is our ability to make white people lie about their motivations when they kill us. For a long time, we couldn't even get that done.

For the white racist having to explain at length and even be threatened with jail time is a sign that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. In the good old white days, a white man say a black man did X so I did Y and that was the end of it -- within hours or days, not weeks, not months. When white racists see a white male cops have to take desk jobs and sometimes get fired, that's a huge sign that all is not the way it should be.

Do not underestimate white entitlement and how just a tiny bit of it falling away makes these jokers a little bit more dangerous than they were in the late 1990s but not quite as dangerous as when they were straight lynching us at will from the 1860s to the 1960s.

So I guess what I'm wondering now is if we, people of color, will see any semblance of equality in this country before this "great experiment" called the United States is over.

I expected that white supremacy was going to die violently. So  I guess I'm not really surprised by how things have been going lately -- cops murder, wind up in the national spotlight, get away with it anyway. But Trump is sending so many arrows in so many directions, at allies etc.

Trump is starting to worry me less and less. The people, mostly white, that are stupid enough to vote for him worry me more and more. And it's not even from a racism or sexism standpoint.  

If Trump should buy himself a spaceship and fly away to Mars tomorrow, the idiots behind him right now will still be here. They will still think it's a good idea to charge are allies for military assistance, or send Chevron into Iraq to "just take the oil" with our army standing around the Chevron employees for protection. They will still talk about building a wall between us and Mexico. They'll just find a new and dumber Donald Trump. 

The power of the arrogance and stupidity in some of our countrymen  has to be reigned in before they destroy us with their lust of money and power-over.  The lust for power-over inside the country is one thing (sexism and racism). But the lust for power-over outside the country, imperialism, is going to earn us enough enemies that other countries, including some of our allies, will decide to work together against us.

Or, maybe I've been reading too much of Cornell West's Democracy Matters

Our democracy is flawed, no doubt. I sit in the most flawed part of it as a black and as a woman. But at least half of us (mostly white) are trying to claw it apart from the inside in an effort to remain standing on the backs of others.

It never really occurred to me before that the country might not survive the shift. Maybe Texas's occasional threat to secede the Union isn't the big joke I thought it was. Maybe that's a symptom of something to come 10 years, 20 years or 50 years down the road. 

If this country was a newborn baby in 1776, I wonder if this country isn't the equivalent of a prematurely crotchety middle aged man in 2016.  Maybe the premature crotchety-ness is about knowing life is not going to go on forever.

But I'd like to see a black woman be president before the U.S. goes into the long good night.