Project Logic Ga

How did we get to this awkward time in American History? While this nation is the best country God put on his green earth, America can be wrong.  If anyone swears up and down that their country, religion, race, college, state or region can’t ever be wrong or incorrect, that person is fundamentally delusional.

Conservative sister former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “We forget in the United States how long it has taken us to make ‘We the People’ mean people like me. And indeed, I do think that America was born with a birth defect; it was slavery.”  The descendants of slaves and slaveowners share the same space while we remember that Jim Crow until say 1976 was basically slavery lite.  President Trump’s tone and nature has half of the nation speaking their true feelings: It’s divine providence that some folks were put on this earth to serve and others to be served. 

If this logic is the foundation of our country, we are in the middle of a new American Civil War and the January 6 Coup d’état attempt was our Fort Sumter.  Many Americans swear an oath or variation that states “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same…” What happens when many citizens don’t acknowledge that fellow twisted citizens are just as much a threat as Russia, China, North Korea and radical Middle Eastern nations.

If you romanticize the Confederacy and consider the brutality of slavery/Jim Crow to be no big deal, half of the nation and much of the world thinks you are crazy.  As children, we were in a constant state of alarm during the Cold War with the former Soviet Union.  For decades, nuclear Armageddon could have occurred at any time. 

Today, I declare that two major conflicts from our past reflect in our current sad situation. We are in an American Cold Civil War as Trump’s MAGA people form the Neo Confederates and as non-voting people from my community sit around whistling Dixie as Rome (Georgia) burns. 

If we think about it with an open-mind, maybe the Right is right: the American experiment could be over.  The economic foundation of our relatively young nation was the financial boost of free or systematically discounted Black labor until July 4, 1976.  And we should remember that northern industries processed southern cotton with the backing of Wall Street banks and Ivy League endowments.  When I see armed citizen militias, I’m thinking about John Brown’s effort before the previous Civil War but on the other side.

As we face enemies “foreign and domestic,” our citizen draft pool looks shabby.  If Ukraine or Taiwan sparked World War III, our ill-prepared youth couldn’t beat an egg.  Most of them are not athletic, didn’t play in the dirt like we did, don’t take oaths and vows seriously and can only win at combat on PlayStation 5 or Xbox.  Are video games the Japanese Trojan horse to soften America’s next generation for the next Pearl Harbor or to patiently response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki?  Revenge is a dish best served cold.

We won the original Civil War and Cold War with military strength and diplomacy.  To emerge from our current dilemma, all Americans need to dial down this confrontational energy and acknowledge that there are no winners in a Civil War—it’s the ultimate oxymoron. 

If good church folks would apply faith teachings of Sunday morning every day of the week, we could avoid the fate of ancient Rome. If not, the rest of the world is eager to see the big, bad Americans on our knees and from self-inflicted injuries. Chinese and Japanese investments in Africa, South America, and Latin America could be placing the foundation for a new power dynamic that the United States and Europe can’t check or shall I say checkmate.  “Go back to Africa” is starting to sound interesting.