it’s a long slow walk…

CBC Radio had Chris Hedges on yesterday morning talking about the Ferguson race riots, growing income inequality, and various other “proofs” that America was a nation in decline. Declination implying that there had been some loftier beginning point from which it was falling away from.

I hate this sort of pop culture dribble that plays itself out in the mainstream media. As if today’s talking-heads generation was the first to experience race riots and poverty – and that the sky was falling on all of our heads. Yet, the Revolution is at hand!

Holy fuck! get some perspective people! There has never been a time when America wasn’t dealing with its race issue. They built an entire economy on the use of Black slaves as a tool of labor in their capitalist model. There’s been a Civil War over it, for Christ’s sake!

In the summer of ’68 – what’s happening in Ferguson today was happening in more than 100 American cities – all at the same time. And the two largest figures fighting racism – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy – would be assassinated. All the while America was upscaling its massacre in Vietnam.

There have never been “better” times in America. The only “better” America is the ideal one, once printed on some paper, now hidden away somewhere in Washington.

The only better times in America has been the massive continuation of wealth accumulation amongst the top 5% of the American population. And in real dollars and cents terms, the last 20 years have been the best ever in America’s entire history for wealth accumulation. (So who’s nostalgia exactly are you talking about?)

The sense-of-nostalgia is deeply entrenched in the human psyche . For a return to those golden moments in my childhood when I rode my tricycle with the sun in my face, and my old man leaning against his stockcar with a beer in his hand – and Lynyrd Skynard’s Simple Man floating out from the kitchen window. It serves a very real biological imperative: to help us forget trauma and keep moving forward as a species.

Hedges knows that there has always been a struggle for justice and equality. The Magna Carta didn’t just pop up out of the grass one day and then taken by a knight to the King for signing.

In 1914 in America – when miners went on strike in Ludlow, Colorado (seeking an 8 hour work day, compensation for what was called ‘dead work’ (the entire maintenance of the mines), and a litany of other now common sense issues), the mine owners simply brought in hired mercenaries who lined them up and shot them (and some of their wives). The ensuing ten-day miners riot ended up with almost 200 people dead and Ludlow lay in ruins.

If this was 1940’s America the Ferguson Police, with the help of the KKK would round up a bunch of the Black “agitators” and simply lynch them. And then tell everyone else “to go on home now, ain’t nothing else to see here.”

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No, these are not the worst of times. But Chris Hedges gets rich selling his books and lecturing on the circuit. And CBC thinks it’s groovy to have such a widely recognized intellectual on its morning news show talking about social revolution. “Look at us, aren’t we all so smart?”

If I had more guts I’d take my radio outside – ala Hunter Thompson-style – then get my dad’s shotgun out from the basement, and blast that fucking noise box of fear and loathing to Kingdom Come!

If you want to know the struggle for justice and equality in America – like really know the struggle – get yourself a book – start with Howard Zinn, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison – or any one of the 1,000’s that have been keeping the records, and giving voice to America’s soul.

And leave your nostalgia where it belongs: to that day in the 11th grade when you hit the only homerun you would ever hit in your organized baseball career, and you have hit it in the 8th inning, it won your team the city championships. And again it was a sunny day – and the sun was shining on your happy face…