Harvest of Disaster

“We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.” W. E. B. Du Bois

Leave it to Du Bois. A “harvest of disaster” is precisely what we are facing in this time of Trump and the collapse of American empire. Following the House, Senate Republicans voted on a tax plan that will stand as a massive rip-off of the public treasury all so “tax relief” can be delivered to their wealthy benefactors. What is left of vital social programs like Medicare and Medicaid will take a gut punch. The glee on the faces of the mostly white, male, and wealthy Senate Republicans after the party line vote was nauseating. If any more evidence of the fact that we are ruled by oligarchs was needed, Senate Republicans just delivered it. If a national budget is a map of a nation’s priorities then it is very clear that the only priority in America is to give more to those who already have the most.

The war machine gets its money. The fossil fuel extraction industry gets its tax subsidies, as does big pharma and agriculture, and of course the finance boys and girls -- best represented by Goldman Sachs -- reap all manner of perks at our expense. The rich will get even richer, wealth inequality will deepen; the poor and working poor will bear the burden, as they always do.

Year after year we sow the same seeds, reap the same harvest. Trump, as I’ve written many times, is not the cause, he’s a symptom of a diseased, corrupt and compromised system. Trump is only hastening America’s decline and laying bare for all with the will to see that this country has misplaced its soul. Writing on the Truthout website William Rivers Pitt put it this way: “You are certainly a man of the times, The Man, avatar of all that ails us. You are, among other things, the end product of a decades-debunked economic model that consigns a vast majority of Americans to poverty and stasis while lavishing trillions on the wealthy. This we call ‘trickle down,’ and we've waited half a century now for the rain that never comes.”

I feel like I’m watching a train wreck in super slow motion. Sparks and flames, metal twisting, glass shattering, and bodies tossed around like trees in a hurricane. I don’t understand how we can be so blind, so ignorant, so cruel. Has the US always been this fucked up and I just didn’t see it? We seek peace and stability by waging endless war; we propose to stop senseless gun violence at home by making it easier for more people to own more guns; we purport to blunt the jagged edges of climate change by denying science and the evidence of our own senses.

The Democratic Party, ever willing to render itself inept and irrelevant, tacks steadfastly to the failed ideology embodied by Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. So much for the best and brightest.

Despair is a bitch. Staring into the abyss for hours on end is exhausting. We must still rise from our beds, do whatever work is before us, pay bills, help children with homework or with navigating the treacherous shoals of social life, take care of elderly parents, and deal with the unexpected. In other words, though our ears are ringing and our face is battered, we have to keep coming off the corner stool and walking to the center of the ring.