Image Source: History.com/Civil Rights Act of 1964
Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism, Human Rights
Sixty years ago today, I was a month and twelve days from my second birthday. Sixty years ago today, my world was changed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act, ninety-nine years after the surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, and the cessation of the insurrection known by the Orwellian name: "Civil War."
A year prior, my parents would see four little black girls murdered by Klansmen on her 38th birthday (September 15, 1963), only exacerbated by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (November 22, 1963), which propelled his then Vice President into the presidency. The year prior to that, barely on the planet, the "Missiles of October" threatened my brief existence as nuclear weapons had been staged off the coast of Florida by Russia in Cuba (October 14, 1962). The sixties may have given us the utopian vision of Star Trek, but it was not the "Dawning of the Age of Aquarius" as the Fifth Dimension sang joyfully.
The project to dismantle American democracy started today as well.
The 9-0 vote on Brown vs. Board of Education was untenable at the time for Southern Dixiecrats, who wanted it as a ballot initiative because they knew they had the votes to defeat it, and "put things back in proper order," the hierarchy of the chattel enslavement of kidnapped humans, and Jim Crow. The parties "flipflopped" as Dixiecrats left the Democratic Party, after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the next year, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, migrating to the Republican Party, all willing to absorb southern racists with the slick, Hollywood line a B-Movie Actor gave them as mantra: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me." After the Powell Memo that set the framework for the first decades-long lurch to fascism, "The Gipper" was born, the first of three avatar presidents that made you feel nostalgic for halcyon days that have never existed, all of them always preceded by memos, the Project for a New American Century, and the frightening, dystopian document Project 2025.
It was always going to come to this.
My letter to the President after the "Supreme Court" decision establishing a monarch:
The Revolutionary War was fought to get out of the authoritarian rule of a tyrant, King George of England. This "Supreme Court" is neither. It is broken, and I will be voting for you, working to elect Josh Stein in North Carolina, and donating to both campaigns. I feel passionate about the successes of this administration, and we're so close to addressing climate change. Mr. President, please consider something that goes against the grain and your respect for institutions: stack the court. Propose that if re-elected, you will rebalance the high court, which is clearly activist, out-of-touch, and out of control. This convicted felon, this adjudicated rapist CANNOT regain political power, or else we will be a byword, a proverb, an oxymoron. If the U.S. falls, so will every democracy across the globe, which is the goal of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government, a kleptocracy masquerading as a state. The extinction-level event for the dinosaurs was a meteor off the Gulf of Mexico. I don't see the human species continuing if this cretin gets back into the Oval Office. The United States is an essential nation. Thank you.
My biggest critique of the Democratic Party is they lack strategic vision. The evisceration of Roe vs. Wade was a decades-long strategy that the DNC treated as a political football. The party had since 1973 7 Republican - 2 Democratic justices' decision to codify women's bodily autonomy into law, but it was too useful a political football, so no one tried. Meanwhile, the Republicans are following no rules other than the grasp and maintenance of power; call it class warfare or white supremacy; it doesn't matter.
The Dred Scott Decision by Chief Justice Robert B. Taney is credited for the impetus of the "Civil War," resulting in about 622,000 countrymen dead from both sides, only surpassed by the ineptitude of the tyrant who botched the Coronavirus response, who Chief Justice John Roberts just gave dictatorial powers to if he were to return to office January 20, 2025.
For the maintenance of a toxic social hierarchy, may history list John Roberts as our last Chief Justice, the one who destroyed our republic and democracy worldwide.
The sixth mass extinction event clearly will not need meteors, just incompetent, pious jurists who think themselves gods.
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