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*We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. - Louis Brandeis
*Andy Young, former mayor of Atlanta, once observed: "Nothing is illegal if a hundred businessmen decide to do it."
*Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to . . . the general prey of the rich on the poor - Thomas Jefferson
*There is no sickness in the world that can be cured by propaganda.-Thomas Merton
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As a native of the South, I grew up with the burden of Southern history: the legacy of overt and violent racism that soiled every Southern's soul. As a child of the 60's, I watched the news reports of Dr. King and the other prominent members of the civil rights movement and tried to square their calls of love and nonviolence with the anger and hatred spewing forth from the mouths of white people,friends and even relatives that I knew and loved. It was hard to reconcile the two.
And then, in the 1970's, something happened. Schools were desegregated and I began to know black folks as equals, and it seemed as if the burden was lifted; that the struggles of the 50's and 60's and somehow redeemed the land.
And in 1976, a native Southerner, Jimmy Carter got elected, and the State of Mississippi gave President Carter the deciding electoral votes. Hundreds of thousands of black Mississippians and white moderates banded together to carry the state for a native of the South and a moderate Democrat to boot.
It got even better. Jimmy Carter held a town meeting in Yazoo City, Mississippi, a national town meeting on network television, to extoll the successful integration of public schools. It seemed as if the United States was moving into a new era, where the original sin of race in America was being overcome in the WORST place for race relations.
Then, in 1980, it all seemed to change.
Ronald Reagan came to Philadelphia MS (Philadelphia, the city of love) and 17 years and 17 miles from the murders of three nonviolent civil rights workers, and invoked the phrase "states rights." There it was an appeal to history; an appeal to the buried racists who had been in retreat; an appeal to the very worst in our nature.
And at that point, the Republicans made their deal with the devil. They knew that they had to take back the South to get control of this country. So, they did what old Southern politicians had done for 100 years. They divided and conquered. They reopened the historical divide between blue collar folks and black folks. They did it on the basis of race.
Then, they joined hands with the moral majority and utilized the wedge issues of abortion and the death penalty and organized the theology and preaching of ministers across the South, and these preachers stood in their pulpits and told these people that America had lost its way. That the liberals in America had taken this country down the wrong path, and that they had to vote for the conservatives to do God's will. And the people in these congregations, with simple understandings of faith and a belief in the authority of preachers, believed what they were told. And so the Republicans divided people on the basis of religion.
And then Reagan won.
All of a sudden, it changed. All of a sudden we were in dirty wars in South and Central America. All of a sudden, the Republican Party became strong in the South and America as a whole.
All of a sudden, there were tax breaks for the wealthy. And the military industrial complex was fed, and more wealthy people made more money.
It all changed with Reagan.
Now, some twenty five years down the road, America is the most divided it has been since the civil war.
The Republicans have been successful in doing in America as a whole, what had been done by Southern politicians for years and years, dividing and conquering.
And it is all intentional, of course. Divide and conquer. Keep the average people fighting among themselves. Distract them with wedge issues, so that they can enrich themselves.
It is all about money, you know.
That's what it is all about.
Just my two cents on a rainy MOnday afternoon.
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