Why America is Powerless
When we most need moral strength to save the nation
by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ February 22, 2021
While watching the ramping up of a scientific breakthrough in vaccines that give us a ticket to a different future, old hatreds and the willful ignorance of our reactionary populations are trying to drag us down. Their goal is white supremacy and authoritarian oppression to ensure that they retain control and are not threatened with any change.
That the majority of the American population and the people around the planet find this disgusting and inexplicable shows that this is not a fight against alternative policies but a fight against irrationality and rage. Groups driven by irrationality cannot produce a positive society because destruction replaces creation and denial replaces knowledge.
This is not an oversimplification because, as has become obvious, there is nothing to simplify. In imitation of their demented idol, knowledge is too much trouble, and power provides the only reward. With lies, the only form of truth, the logical realization that all promises to solicit obedience and action is false must be prevented. Groveling mindlessness is the only form of thought allowed.
Behind this chronic delirium are nihilism and self-destruction. Again typified by the psychopathic idol whose impulses include the need to destroy himself. The internal agony of self-denial and inability to gain praise from any but those obviously damaged leaves no source but himself for praise. But that praise is invalid, and he becomes a joke as others laugh at his failures. They must be punished; only their cries of pain and outrage quiet the laughter, but there is no satisfaction.
Most people have enough historical knowledge to know how this ends. Like greed that underlies this, there is never enough. The quest for absolutes that justify inequality is difficult. It has been repeatedly shown a failure leaving only power itself as justification—another closed-loop of doomed justifications that cannot survive the loss of power. Power must be retained or regained quickly before all of the hidden lies are found out.
This is what we face. Tragically for a nation built on Enlightenment ideals that were never implemented but only worshipped abstractly, controlling this minority requires the rational and moral exertion of strength. But we have never been able to do that, accepting oppression and greed as legitimate with privilege as a racial birthright.
Morality escapes us with four hundred years of genocide, slavery, and economic oppression in the name of our own personal freedom. How do you wield the needed weapons of morality when your hands are slick with four hundred years of blood?
When we need to act as a national group for our own survival, we cannot. We are hoist our own petard of moral failure. This is the brutal reality and the cause of our weakness in the face of traitorous Senators, criminal Representatives, and mentally dysfunctional fascist demigods set on the destruction of everything we have told ourselves we believe in.
Biden is struggling to salvage the nation, however broken. We are appalled at 500,000 deaths in thirteen months but ignore 417,000 since 1980 because of a national healthcare system's absence.
We will mourn the 500,000 nationally, but we will not mention the others. The people who cause both great tragedies must be held accountable no matter how loud they squeal and call themselves ‘patriots’ and the real Americans.
We cannot round up a few neo-nazis for the January 6th coup attempt and ignore the monsters in Congress who encouraged and fostered it. We cannot tolerate racism, vast wealth in the face of growing poverty, and 500 military bases in 170 countries while we look the other way.
No wonder we cannot figure out what to do but pretend to see an economic boom at the end of the pandemic. Everything must fine if that will happen.
The moral dilemma and the great weight of historical lies leave us very little strength to act on those demanding more of what they have always had. But failure to act on a sound moral basis now will doom the future that we have just paid an incredible price to achieve.
