Thread by @l78lancer

PERSPECTIVE:

You can never move into your future if you don't deal effectively, completely, and honestly with your past. Any other accommodation that falls short is simply denial.

It may even be self-sabotage. It assures that the past will be resurrected and block any hope of progress, particularly in our most desperate and vulnerable moments.

That's true whether the past consists of a bad relationship, abuse and trauma, bad debt, or the national historical remnants of discrimination, entitlement, racial superiority, and oppression predicated on economic inequality, sex or sexuality.

This nation carries that baggage.

Whether it's issues on slavery, racism, women's equality, wealth and income disparity, or the LGBTQ community, the US has talked the talk, but their real actual actions indicate that we've never practices what we pretend to believe.

We as a culture and society have not been honest with ourselves. We've place laws on the books but not practiced the tenets in our lives. We have pretended that imposition of laws were a surrogate for the actual practice of the proscriptions contained.

Regardless of what we believe about ourselves as individuals, if change had really occurred structural, institutionalized racism would be a relic of the past rather than in the forefront of our lives and daily conversation.

There would be no question of or debate about the values of black lives compared to the accountability of police because those lives would have value and all police would be accountable.

We would understand but the need for, value of, and the reality undergirding immigration. Immigrants don't just pick our produce, work in our factories build our houses, cut our grass or clean our homes.

They are - as they have always been - the very bricks by which this society and nation are built.

Women wouldn't still be living as second class citizens having choices foisted on then rather than independent self determination.

Or they wouldn't be relegated to earning and living off a fraction of what men earn, yet still expected to be the backbone of society responsible for rearing our children and managing our families almost singlehandedly.

They, in fact, are the very heart and engine of the survival of our society.

And, the anachronistic views of the church towards the LGBTQ community would not be the dominant force in society manifesting itself and pure hate and inhumane treatment of other humans.

And with the possible exception of the pure malice towards the LGBTQ from the very people who claim the mantle of love, compassion and nonjudgment, every other failure to advance in society concerning the people of our society...

...is directly related to hoarding, maintaining and assuring the perpetuated power, wealth and security an infinitesimally small group who pretend the meanings of elite and exclusive means rich, pure blooded, and insular.

In almost every respect, while we present as a modern, erudite, forward-thinking, sophisticated nation, we are as backward now as we were in 1919-1920.

The laws on the books intended as the vehicles of change are just a little better than wall paper because the enforcement of those laws are not a priority. Indeed, why even write laws when the means of enforcement aren't included in the laws themselves?

Neither the mechanisms nor the funding are included, so the laws tend to be mirages. It's a sham. It's lip service. It's intended to maintain the status quo. Why is there so little inertia for change when the laws are clear? Laws do not create the change.

The values, beliefs, and actions of people promote the change. Talk is cheap, and laws are just talk on paper. A politician once said, "Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I'll tell you what you value."

This nation has yet to demonstrate that they value the lives of those in the groups above, and are willing to invest wealth, compassion, to promote the wellbeing and ability to thrive for all.

It is simply a fact that the better off all members of a society are, the greater the growth and development of the entire society.

So why does this society pretend to believe that all the while subversively applying a perversely rigged form of social Darwinism to cull the herd from the bottom up?

We as a civil society know how to be kind, polite and even deferential, even if we choose to not proactive those attributes. But politeness under the pretense of respect and as a substitute for the smallest vestiges of full rights and freedoms is far from enough.

Until we, as a society, stop pretending that the only values worth achieving and maintaining are pure wealth, political power, and the fraudulent notion of race-based superiority that's entitled to dominance, we'll always be stuck at least century behind where we pretend to be.

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