Fixing The Wrongs

I came of age in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Although it is a given that it was a simpler time, it really wasn't. No time in history is simpler. It just is. It exists all on its own, the accumulated sum of events and happenings of the millennia before it, and whatever is to come after. Meanwhile that spit of history – or time – is made up of many invisible parts that take time to figure out.

And determine their value and meaning.

The Civil Rights Movement had been alive for some time, but the 1950’s probably saw the greatest swelling of public awareness. Daily I watch the new Today show on NBC News with Dave Garroway before going to school. The water hosing of blacks sitting in at Woolworths lunch counter will stick with me for life. Sidewalk protests met with angry, vicious police dogs, again the water hoses, and night clubs punctuating the mob as police beat them senseless into paddy wagons.

Lynchings were evident. Crosses were burned on lawns. Homes were set afire, so, too, churches. Kids died in those fires. Moms and dads as well. Black families were the target of fear campaigns and they were made to feel unsafe at all times.

It was hard to watch on TV. Even harder to go to bed and think on these events. What was America really like? Were we the good guys we were taught in school during the day? Then why the ugly reality of the news broadcasts?

By the 1960’s things were getting sorted out kinda of! Remember President Kennedy was assassinated. Then Martin Luther King, Jr. Then Bobby Kennedy. Yeah. Sure. Things were getting sorted out.

Finally the violence took its toll and then President Lyndon Johnson wangled through congress the 1964 Civil Rights Act and peace was tentatively restored. It truly was. Fitfully at the beginning, but finally people began to cooperate and take time to see what could be rather than what was. Civil Rights began to build for black families.

Later it would come for many more people, too. Just not then.

America was not perfect then. It is not perfect now. Perhaps it never has been perfect. But then that’s just the issue I wish to write about today.

Our nation has been in progress of building from its beginning. It was never really clear what it ought to be or would be. It just was. And people hoped for a better model of governance than what had preceded it. A grand experiment was engaged and worked on, that work has gone on now for 239 years. And that’s only from 1776. Actual work on our nation began far before then, maybe even 100 years earlier.

Whatever time it has taken we still witness a work in progress – like all of history. The story is never done. It is always building, and none to pretty at times!

The complicating factors to this process are pretty simple: human behavior, selfishness, power hungriness and wealth. Those have been constant barriers to our principles and better instincts for centuries. In America as anywhere else. A truth, awful but real.

Good guys do exist. They just change from time to time due to the human factors already mentioned. Even the US Supreme Court are good guys that go wrong at times. They clearly confuse their responsibility for and among people with organizations. Political Parties are not people. The press is the tongue and voice of the people, but not the organization of the same. Nor are corporations people. They are an amalgam of individuals who own an organization or work for it; but they do not represent the sacred trust of individual citizens throughout the land.         

Theodore Roosevelt knew this early in the 20^th century:

“I again recommend a law prohibiting all corporations from contributing to the campaign expenses of any party…Let individuals contribute as they desire; but let us prohibit in effective fashion all corporations from making contributions for any political purpose, directly or indirectly.”

Interestingly that didn't take root. So President Roosevelt iterated the principle again:

“It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes. It is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced.”

Yet the Supreme Court nearly 100 years later fell into the trap. Made a colossal error. And is now allowing all corporations to have the same rights and privileges as an individual citizen.  It ought not to be. It is a complete distortion of legal principle. And the Supremes know this.

Guess we citizens will need to make another amendment to the constitution of the land. One person, one vote. One person, one citizen. No corporation is citizen. Period.

Until that happens, folks, our political system is theirs not ours. It belongs to those who have the most money and power. So they can buy the laws they want, and the politicians they want. And the judges.  Don’t forget the judges!                       

What a shame.

May 2, 2014