I've Already Been There. Why Are We Going Back?

I came of age as the image of June Cleaver collided with the voice of Gloria Steinem, when the country basked in our goodness--“One nation, under God”--while enforcing Jim Crow laws with water hoses and snarling dogs.  Lake Erie caught fire, and young men I knew were fighting—some dying—in a civil war in the jungles of Vietnam.  We’d ignored humankind’s ongoing damage to our environment and slipped and slid into a civil war in South East Asia.  “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” (George Santayana, 1863)   Read history.  What have we learned?

We marched and spoke out and wrote letters and joined political campaigns, believing that we could make a difference.  We wanted equal civil rights and voting rights for people of color and for women, a sane foreign policy, and a safer environment.  And change did come.

Because of the courage of so many, Congress passed laws to make the 14^th and 15^th Amendments a reality.  The war ended.  We vowed to better the environment and lessen our dependency of Middle Eastern oil.  The 26^th Amendment gave 18-year-old citizens the right to vote, a right they’d certainly earned since they’d been deemed old enough to go to war.  The birth control pill and Roe v. Wade gave women the power to control their own reproduction.  Then, in 2008, the U. S. elected a Black president.

I naively became certain that my children and their children would see a world of equality, of fairness, of thoughtful actions.  That they would live in a world of safe food and drink; of clean water and air.  The idealist in me hoped politicians would have learned the lessons of history when sabers once again began to rattle.  I was so certain……..then.

Not now.  Howard Nemerov did warn us: “We know that we know better than they knew/ And history will not blame us if once again/The light at the end of the tunnel is the train.”  Looks like a big Kaboom may be right in front of us.

While racism has never been extinguished, very few felt comfortable being overt about it.  And then Tea Party members proudly carried protest signs depicting President Obama with a bone through his nose.  Talking heads convinced a gullible segment of the population that Obama wasn’t even born in the U. S, that he was a secret Muslim intent upon destroying the country.  Uber capitalists fought to weaken the EPA and regulations that protect the consumer.  On Meet the Press, Vice-President Cheney talked of “preemptive strikes” to begin a needless war with Iraq, a war that has unloosed chaos throughout the Middle East and strengthened Iran.  Women’s rights have been assaulted.  The Supreme Court has allowed a few billionaires to buy political power through Citizens United, something that unites only the power of money and the weakening of ordinary citizens.

I look at my grandchildren and worry about their futures unless everyone--in and out of government--awakens, reads, looks at the big picture, thinks long term, and realizes that the “Good Old Days” were only good for prosperous white men, not for most everyone else.  I so long for a day when America becomes a country intent to do what it takes to become what it promised to be.  Langston Hughes pleads, “O, let America be America, again/The land that never has been yet/And yet must be.”  Please, America, let us not go back to the past.  I’ve been there, done that, and I want to move beyond all that.  The past was not all that great for far too many in this country.