And The Walls Of Jericho Fell Down

It is an amazing thing to watch… the dismantling of the Confederate Flag.  These 9 murders have had an effect far reaching than any event I can remember since 9/11.

It is as if we always knew they all had to go… by we I am including  vast, vast majorities, almost everybody; but because one shrill element was loud, obnoxious, and obstinate, no one really wanted to take them on…   Reminds one of dealing with a bully at school…. One could probably take him out with several properly placed punches, but in that process you’d get hit hard, suffer damage yourself, and so the status quo of accepting an undesirable outcome, was better than striving for a more perfect world.   Everyone knows that the bully is wrong, but no one wants to invest in the personal cost it would take to permanently fix the problem, despite all secretly wishing someone else would….

That is racism in America.  The big problem which if we try to address it by tackling it on the edges, we get besieged, almost attacked, by a vocal shrill anti-social element representing the excrement of society: those of us who simply hate for hate’s sake.

Yet, they are easily outnumbered.  But since they yell and punch and we stay silent because we don’t want to bog ourselves down, they win.

But with one killing spree. the bigots lost it all.  With one killing spree, everyone is no longer afraid to throw the bigots in social jail, and lock the key.  With one killing spree, the bigots are being finally beaten down like the bullies they are.. by superior force…

I am reminded of a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr i once read… which said that the true legacy that Martin Luther King Jr. left us, was to no longer be afraid to stand up for justice…  After Selma, the next day freedom fighters were singing a capella gospel in the jails… After Selma, the next day the wounds of the batons, dog bites, and fire hoses… hurt half as bad as the day before, and tomorrow would be half as bad as today….  Everyone looked around at each other and said… “Gee, that wasn’t too bad; we can do that again, and again, and if we do, we can win this”… and they did…  Once you beat fear, anything is possible.

I think that is what is happening today… In sort of an impetuous response to the impetuous act committed in a church basement in Charleston… the flags are coming down… The omen of slavery is being removed from the state capitols and governor’s offices across the entire South. Confederacy has lost its legitimacy. And that fight which we were all afraid of… which we all lowered our eyes and looked the other way to avoid, which we all thought was better to leave those old flags up there, than take them down, get beaten up, lose the public opinion battle, and have to reinstate them,…. really wasn’t that bad after all….

All of what we feared was a paper tiger… nothing more… nothing less…

Now that we’ve done this… we must not stop on the first step. Now let us take back our nation not just in race or sexual identiy… but in economics as well…

If everyone who commented on social media, who ostracized racists making them extremely fearful of speaking out for once, if everyone who gave their opinion actually voted every election, this nation would get back on track immediately… Instead of everyone racing out to vote, we got apathy in 2014, setting our nation backwards from where it could be by at least, the minimum of two years; because of the overall apathy, we have a minority with which no one agrees, controlling Congress, running this nation into the ground simply because more of them went out to vote….

We won this battle over flags… It wasn’t free… 9 people died… but we won… The world is wide open to us… If we vote on election day, like we respond on social media… what now seems impossible…. America running on 100% renewable energy… Global cooling instead of warming…. decent minimum wages… more spending money… lifetime health, .. is in our grasp…

We just have to vote like we respond on Social media whenever we see evil rise up and knock down good…. We can do this America… and it isn’t hard at all… Get active… Join something.  We have enough votes to allow America to improve, if we all go out and vote…  And as we saw with flags coming down… exercising our power really wasn’t that hard…

Our ultimate power, is our vote…  Vote like your own money depends on it… It actually does.