The Debt

 

It’s hard to see through current capacity to different reality where we don’t end up with further calamities, or more fatalities.

 

Dudes looking like me have committed the most heinous crimes against humanity in both quantity and quality that we know of... ever. (my ancestors are Scottish and German, guess what having an ancestral home far from the intensity of the equator does to skin color? Do you know what living near the equator does to skin color? Right. So does that mean the Sun is racist? Not really. Attributing racism to the sun is as stupid as attributing inferiority to people who aren’t white. It’s as stupid as attributing value to land and drawing lines on a map and then killing people over it, instead of creating new ways to share it.

I inherited the shit that White people have been taking all over the world and I accept that as I'm able. Frankly, I think monetary reparations or some other reparation effort would be a good step. Back in the early 2000s the figure was supposedly around 1 trillion dollars and change.  So now, think about that figure. It comes from an estimate of the cost of manual labor at the time, multiplied by an estimated number of hours, by an estimate of how many African men, women, and children were abducted, murdered, or slowly murdered through slave labor. Any Bible Belt White Male would go all Liam Neason if this happened to him or any member of his family. Why should we expect a less intense response from those to whom it’s been a reality for centuries? There's no amount of money that could come close to make up for what was done to the people of Africa and it's forced emigrants. It is a recognition of the fact that this country started off in a climate of horrific exploitation. The technological advancement and industrialization of the Northern colonies occurred in the fashion it did because of the exploitation of Africans down South. When basic needs are met by others you have the time and ability to learn to read, go to school, to  college, to experiment with things, go places.

1 trillion dollars worth of manual/slave labor at virtually no cost built at least half of this country. Africans, Mexicans, Italians, Germans, Scots, Brits, Pureto Ricans, Cubans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, and on and on and more have all bled to assert their humanity at one point or another in the history of the United States. I think it's far past time the rich White man discover his. The Kochs (pronounced 'cocks', small c) have inherited privilege for generations, how about we help you help those who have only inherited exploitation... you've been fucking the poor for a while (shittily), and black and brown people for even longer... maybe you could start paying for it? You can leave mine on the dresser, that's just me though. What y'all owe to the African-American, Mexican, and poor White communities where your shitty pipes leak, and all your cult like religiosity, and all of the horrors men like you have thoughtlessly chosen for others, theirs probably won't fit on a dresser.

When I realized that this country built itself on the backs of African men, women, and children for relatively no monetary cost, the whole 'American Experiment' thing of rights and such kind of went out the window, almost entirely. Not only did we massacre the original inhabitants of these lands to a holocaust-like degree, albeit stretched out over 600 years, we built the country on slave labor. This gave the colonies an advantage that most nations didn't or hadn't ever had. It's why countries remain undeveloped or underdeveloped still. I wonder what a couple hundred thousand barely nourished laborers could do to boost Myanmar's infrastructure.

Some ignorant white trash douchebags, or white privileged assholes are saying to themselves as they read this, 'a rising tide lifts all boats' or something like that. I'll agree that it's probably better that children work in factories for 2$ a day than as prostitutes or abducted and used as soldiers. But, my point is that America came about through an economic climate of genocidal slave labor. The only qualification for murder or enslavement being dark skin, inherited from ancestors that developed such skin tone because of their proximity to the Equator, and not as the Spaniards and Portuguese of Columbus’ day (late 1400s) thought, as a condition of having 'impure' blood, (in their minds similar to Jewish blood).

At one point in my life I spent 10 years studying Christian theology, the Bible, and Judaism. The insanity of Western history is that much of it was spent killing the people Jesus blessed, his own Jewish people, Gentiles, those without representation, and without opportunity to be heard. The entire point of the book of Romans, the New Testament’s most important text aside from the gospels, is to bring Gentiles and Jews together under a hostile governmental rule biased against both Jews and what they perceived as a Jewish sect, the Christians. It wasn’t until after Constantine and the council of Nicea in 325 the Christians really started to shit the bed. They became largely gentile, and stayed largely uninformed as to the origin of the metaphor they had chosen. Eventually the symbolism was a wash in all but a few Christian communities, a tool for the powerful to unite the weak in coercion.

America established itself through ethnic cleansing and work camps (aka Plantations), like the Chinese and Soviets of the last 100 years. Mao and Stalin both knew they were beaten largely because of infrastructure. So, they took a trick from America's book and enslaved or slaughtered their people until they could rebuild and industrialize to their hearts desire. The problem with the communist model is that it invites corruption throughout the bureaucracy. There aren't many checks and balances (kind of like those that existed before 1978's soft money pro Super-Pac ruling and then like dominos, the further deterioration of all kinds of less profitable regulation.

Many American white men joined up during our civil war because they believed ethnic slavery especially, and slavery in general to be an assault on one of the most fundamental things in the human experience, our agency, our ability to choose for ourselves apart from manipulation or coercion, through fair and authentic persuasion. But, given the two economic models, and the common 'follow the money' tact, it's more likely that this war was mostly about two competing economic systems.

It's hard to imagine for me that the Northern states would have been able to industrialize apart from centuries of using slaves to build, well, everything. Even our current White House was built and then re-built again by slaves (the British burned the first house on Pennsylvania Avenue back in 1812). I wouldn't be surprised if the Lincoln monument was built by slaves. Kidding, it was finished in 1922 so ... shit, probably underpaid minorities? Probably.

Slavery reparations would be a good step towards seeking forgiveness for the actions of our unfair but fairly skinned ancestors, passed down to us and in many cases perpetuated by us through various forms of mental and physical abuse, even going so far as using biological warfare used against the earlier inhabitants of these lands in the form of smallpox infected blankets. Most of them are gone now. Though for any of these efforts towards connection I’m really not sure where to start.

Food for thought: The US, China, and Soviet Union (now Russia) have all been formed after genocides and on the backs of unpaid or barely paid laborers. In China, Mao's revolutions reduced the population of China significantly, indoctrinated them, sent them to slave camps, etc. Stalin did pretty much the same thing. One reason China has done so well for itself since, is that it came to the capitalist model before the Soviets did.

China, though they entered the Korean War, has mostly been either neutral towards us or likening themselves to the Capitalist economic model, albeit their Capitalist economic model. China takes everything it can as 'tributes' of its neighbors. Had MacArthur not pushed all the way to Northern Korean border with China, it’s likely China would not have entered the war.

Traditionally, China believes itself to be the center of the Earth, just like Americans believe ‘mericuh is the center of ‘mericuh’s world (despite it’s failing grip). The resounding difference is that their claim is 4000 years old whereas ours is a mere 400. They have literally ten times as much history. Everything that the Chinese people discover or are given is used to 'magnify their own glory'. Where they see opportunity, we see unoriginality, fraud, etc.. But that assumes ownership and I'm not sure how one can own an idea, or a service, or a way of doing something. We can agree to things, but agreeing to things isn’t something you can put in a bank, valued artificially. It takes vulnerability and trust. The kind that you get when you put money in a bank, but relational, and the bank is the mutuality between two parties or individuals. What you put in, you get out. As a result China, by picking and choosing from the world has grown exponentially, beyond what anyone (save Mao perhaps) could have imagined.

Though they had differing and competing economic ideas and interests, Roosevelt and Stalin got along well together. Unfortunately, Roosevelt's successor, Truman, was said to have cursed Stalin out in the Oval office upon hearing news of the first successful test of a Nuclear device. Perhaps as a result of a short momma’s boy gushing with arrogance over becoming the most powerful man in the world, and Stalin, one with nukes, and the other with spies about to steal the plans for said Nukes so as to accelerate the timing of production the said nukes far sooner than anyone predicted, the Cold war began. Two insecure bullies talking shit with Earth destroying arsenals, for 40 years. Imagine what that does to the human psyche, corporate and individual. Now, on top of that we have to worry about planes flying into buildings. But, alas, the Cold War is probably not a result of something that simple.

Churchill and Stalin only got along by drinking together. Perhaps Churchill's dislike of Stalin was fueled by the fact that Stalin had initially been Hitler's ally. That, and the fact that his country didn't have Oceans between itself and these threatening powers.

If Hitler was to be dispensed with, it wouldn't be by England alone, which meant American involvement. Up until the surprise attack by Hitler on Russia in June of 1941, the Soviets were indirect enemies of England, happily carving up Eastern Europe with Germany after having signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler. But Hitler’s stupidity took over and he made a decision that cost him the war. By opening up another front the pressure on American and British forces was lessened just as the American war industry was gearing up. Timing is everything. The Soviets suffered dearly for this betrayal, and as the other allies built their forces up.

Perhaps from England's perspective, the greater the Soviet involvement in a final victory, the more potential there was for that momentum to carry them all the way to the Atlantic. England's infrastructure was bombed out for the initial phases of the war. Unlike Japan, Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, et. Europe, Russia and China used slave and slave-like laborers to reconstruct and in their efforts towards progressive industrialization

Americans, Chinese, and Russians live in comfort achieved through genocide and the most basic of economic exploitations. Personally, I’ve found blame doesn’t help much as I’m more or less complicit, though I’ve had a hard time seeing how due to my pretty cushy childhood. What has helped South Africa in healing from Apartheid was a courtroom where people confessed and testified as to what occurred. Shame wasn’t the goal, nor sentencing, people weren’t there to blame, but to come together in a solidarity that expressed the horror of violence and the failure of hate filled exploitation.

Today, discrete corporations (supposedly the most democratic institutions there are, for the board members anyway) own our governments through super-pacs and indirect 'gifts' to candidates that have no hope of getting elected otherwise. These, like the Kochs (again, pronounced cocks) are the de facto leaders of our planet. We’ll never get money out of politics, but at various periods in its history this country has had stronger checks and balances. If nothing changes, I think we’re in for another French Revolution type deal, but in a globalized world where international addresses are fairly easy to come by and get to.

Though I've used strong language, I hope my bluntness hasn’t offended anyone. This is what the big picture looks like to me. We have to recognize the brutality of how things came to be or we’ll just keep forcing one another into slaveries, producing enmity and debt. ‘Taxation without representation’ (sound familiar?) carries with it the assumption that human beings must be treated fairly in all matters.  

Racial tensions will continue as long as the idea of 'race' or the preference or diminishment of someone based on some arbitrary trait exists. As long as arbitrary difference has a prominent place in our everyday language, this particular linguistic choice will remain. We need to speak differently, sitting at (or jumping over) lunch counter boundaries, wearing hairnets and even washing dishes if need be. It’s not much, but it’s... a start...?