The
Great American Awakening?
By
Robert C. Koehler
February 18, 2017 "Information
Clearing House" -
Old
wounds break open. Deep, encrusted wrongs are
suddenly visible. The streets flow with anger
and solidarity. The past and the future meet.
The
news is All Trump, All the Time, but what’s
really happening is only minimally about Donald
Trump, even though his outrageous actions and
bizarre alliances are the trigger.
“As the nightmare reality of Donald Trump sinks
in, we need to put our resistance in a larger
perspective,”
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey
Wasserman
wrote recently, describing Trump as “our
imperial vulture come home to roost.”
The
context in which most Trumpnews is delivered is
miniscule: more or less beginning and ending
with the man himself — his campaign, his
businesses, his appointees, his ego, his endless
scandals (“what did he know and when did he know
it?”) — which maintains the news at the level of
entertainment, and surrounds it with the fantasy
context of a United States that used to be an
open, fair and peace-loving democracy,
respectful of all humanity. In other words,
Trump is the problem, and if he goes away, we
can get back to what we used to be.
In
point of fact, however, the United States has
always been an empire, a national entity certain
of its enemies — both internal and external —
and focused on conquest and exploitation. Yes,
it’s been more than that as well. But the time
has come to face the totality of who we are and
reach for real change.
I
believe this is what we are seeing in the
streets right now. Americans — indeed, people
across the planet — are ceasing to be spectators
in the creation of the future. The protests
we’re witnessing aren’t so much anti-Trump as
pro-humanity and pro-Planet Earth.
As
Fitrakis and Wasserman point out, Trump is
“actually (so far) a moderate compared to scores
of murderous dictators the U.S. has installed in
other countries throughout the world. Especially
since World War II, our imperial apparatus has
constantly subverted legitimate attempts by good
people to elect decent leaders.”
They
present a partial list of “duly elected leaders
the United States has had removed, disappeared
and/or killed to make way for authoritarian
pro-corporate regimes.” These leaders include:
Patrice Lumumba of the Congo; Salvador Allende
of Chile; Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti;
Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran; Jacobo Arbenz of
Guatemala and many, many more. Their removals,
and the installation of U.S.-friendly dictators,
were accompanied by social chaos and mass
killings.
Also
included on the list were such names as
Tecumseh, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph — a few of
the innumerable indigenous leaders who stood in
the way of Europeans’ conquest of the Western
Hemisphere, the mentioning of which opens a
chasm of largely unexamined and whitewashed
America history. Tens of millions of people died
and numerous cultures were mocked and destroyed
in this American holocaust spanning centuries.
This is
part of our history and it can’t be diminished
and written off any more than slavery can be
written off. In our failure to face such history
honestly, we remain trapped in collective
unawareness — and thus trapped, we repeat
history again and again and again.
As French anthropologist
Rene Girard
has said, in his book Things Hidden since
the Foundation of the World, “. . . men
kill in order to lie to others and to themselves
on the subject of violence and death. They must
kill and continue to kill, strange as it may
seem, in order not to know that they are
killing.”
This,
so it seems to me, is the psychological and
spiritual foundation of militarism and the
military-industrial complex, which, among much
else, has bequeathed Planet Earth with enough
nuclear weapons to wipe out all existing life.
Donald Trump, whose vision of American greatness
is all about military triumph, commands some
4,000 of them. This is terrifying, but not
simply because Trump is untrustworthy and
impulsive. It’s terrifying that we’ve created a
world in which anyone commands that
kind of power and that alone is a reason why the
time for profound, deeply structural social
change is now.
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And I
don’t believe change will come from elected or
appointed leaders, who, as they settle into
office, have to make their peace with the
current situation, a.k.a., the deep state, with
its unquestioned militarism. This is the status
quo Trump both represents and lays grotesquely
exposed for what it is, like no other president
in memory.
In
other words, I don’t think we’ll ever vote real
change into place. The social infrastructure
won’t be seriously altered by those who are
empowered by it, as Barack Obama, who was
elected to be the bringer of hope and change,
demonstrated during his tenure in office, in
which he continued the Bush-Cheney wars.
Serious
change will only emerge from an external force
able to stand up to the existing momentum of
government and the special interests attached to
it. The multifaceted resistance we see on the
streets — the great American awakening — may be
that force.
One
recent example is the huge outpouring of support
that emerged last week in Phoenix, when
Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, married, mother of
two, was suddenly seized and deported by
Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities
during her yearly check-in
“I think we sugarcoat it by making it very
procedural, but actually, that night she was
kidnapped from her family,” community organizer
Maria Castro said in a
Truthout
interview. She described the confrontation with
the deportation authorities:
“Myself
and about half a dozen people jumped in front
and were being pushed. The van literally pushed
me at least 30 feet, hyperextending my knees,
hurting some of my friends, knocking some of my
fellow organizers down to the ground. It wasn’t
until we had one of the vehicles in front of the
vans and then, another person started to hug the
wheels and put his own life at risk, because
this is just the beginning. This is the
beginning of the militarized removal of our
communities, of our families, and of our loved
ones.”
With
Trump as the official voice of the status quo,
more people than ever before are becoming aware
that “the way things are” must be challenged.
The moment is here. Social policy should not
dehumanize anyone.
Robert Koehler is
an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and
nationally syndicated writer. His book, Courage
Grows Strong at the Wound is available. Contact
him at
koehlercw@gmail.com
or visit his website at
commonwonders.com.
The views expressed in this article are solely
those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing
House.
Raucous crowds overwhelm
Reed town hall meetings:
Huge crowds of raucous progressives and quieter
conservatives overwhelmed Rep. Tom Reed's town
hall meetings in Ashville and Cherry Creek
Saturday morning, with the progressives
repeatedly interrupting and shouting down the
congressman
