America: The Difference Between Great and Accomplished.

America is like Trump, it is accomplished, it has done much to gain fame and fortune, but it is not as respectable as it thinks.

Americans without much research, like to call America the first democracy when it was far from the first. Iceland, Greeks, and Iroquois were democracies long before American forefathers decided on democracy as a system of government.

America was also in many ways far more classist and repressive than other societies. No other society codified slavery in its Constitution, the ownership of human beings as personal property, humans became things with fewer rights than people in the worst of tyrannies. No other developed country at the time would steal human beings from their homes, take them to another place, rob them of their language, culture and even their name and force them to build their nation and then once it built it, deny them all of the privileges of that country.

Furthermore, American women unlike women of other nations at the time had no rights while people without property had no voice. American founding fathers only offered citizenship to Europeans, not to Native Americans.

The woman aspect is interesting. Because one cannot say that women are incapable of being rulers when many countries at this point have had female rulers, from Mary Queen of Scotts to Catherine of Russia. The great learned men of American colonies knew this and they not only denied any kind of ability to women as far as leadership and education but even the right to vote.

America in the 1930ies was not much different from Germany. United States had massive homeless encampents of poverty not unlike those in Germany. It had regulations that barred Jews and Chinese from entering certain areas, schools, jobs and even living in certain areas, not unlike Germany. America was using Eugenics to sterilize people who were disabled, not unlike Germany. America was using state-sponsored violence to stop people from even asking for equal pay and have bargaining rights at work, not unlike Germany and Fascist Spain.

While we point our fingers at the crimes in Germany, tens of thousands of people were killed and their businesses smashed across the south, by police and regular citizens under the eyes of the police. People were wrongly accused and executed for the crime of being black, and we had the largest mass migration as black people fled Jim Crow South where they could be murdered for the smallest infraction, just like the Jews who fled Russia and the pogroms.

America turned its back on Jews in 1924 when it set stiff quotas and refused to lift them even as it knew that thousands were dying in the gas chambers in Europe.

At the same time, America sent black people to war but did not offer them same GI Bill and help with housing as it did to white people as a thank you for their service. And when the black people used their constitutional rights to demand that they have the same right to vote and rights, they were attacked relentlessly and their leaders were assassinated without even the courtesy of a mock trial that Soviets gave to dissidents.

American FBI under Hoover hounded, recorded, and arrested black and Latino and labor leaders in the same way as the Stazi government in Germany of 1950ies, 60ies and 70ies. Then it found that by bringing drugs into black neighborhoods, it could simply arrest the black people and completely destroy their economic and political demands without the semblance of a political repression. It was the most cynical and cruel and devious action that any government has ever come with.

Today, the people who worked their hardest to prevent progress are claiming that no more progress is needed, at a time when black people and the poor are still denied healthcare, child care, education, and the ability to have work and rise up. The banks continue to deny loans based on race, schools continue to be underfunded in black areas, roads and public transportation lack in poor areas where there are few jobs, preventing them from leaving and police continue to brutalize and over police areas with black people in an attempt to repress the black population.

Rational, simple freedoms continue to be denied like the ability to vote, the ability to marry, the ability to have kids go to better schools, or simply go for a walk. There are black parents who dared to place their kids into better white schools, who now sit in jail for the crime of wanting to help their kids, because that can be deemed “fraud”.

We have a party that is based on the demonization of people while claiming that their are demonized because we are not even free to call evil an evil. An already unlucky child who is born into the wrong body must face attacks from people in power like Marjory Taylor Greene who attacks a trans child of a fellow coworker. Congresspeople like Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanick defend a lie that election was stolen and actively support the man who nearly succeeded in a bloody coup against the democracy that we have. The reality is that half of the nation prefers a man who brags about “grabbing a woman by her pussy” than to vote for a woman, and makes up and believes ridiculous stories because the misogynism and desire to keep the tyranny of the white male is so great. When this many people vote for a man who brags about sexual assault, calls groups of people racists who come to US for asylum, puts kids into cages, we can’t say that we are not a racist nation, or at the very least, we cannot say that we are a good nation.

We tell ourselves a lot of lies and we are able to do that through an indoctrination that we create in schools where we refuse to teach the truth that the war of 1812 was not a war of defense but a war of aggression against Canada. We do not teach reality about the Spanish American war and the millions of people that Americans killed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines. We ignore the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Native Americans in the United States, such that of the 100 million, there are only 5 million left, which is fewer Native Americans than there are Jews. We forget that until recently, their freedom to speak and practice their culture was illegal.

We never study the details of World War 2, how it started because we created a blockade of Japan, for the right reasons, they were ruthless in Asia, but their attack was expected. We never study that they offered to surrender several times, but we refused because we needed a target. We ignore the millions we killed in South Korea and the ruthless dictatorship we supported there. We ignore the genocides we supported in Cambodia and Indonesia, claiming that we support freedom but we were supporting utter evil.

We ignore how in an effort to prevent communism, we made the entire continent of South and Central America turn red with blood as we supported decades of fascist military dictatorships that killed thousands of people seeking basic human rights.

We claim that we stand for justice and freedom, hard work, and good morals, but we build massive walls to keep out the same workers we abuse and underpay to get cheap products and we deny people the ability to make a living wage by refusing to rais a minimum wage. The workers who come to US because of our insatiable desire for drugs which we do not address as long as those who take the drugs are white. We send weapons to those narco states, create narco economies and narco governments, and then the people who chose to come north because they refuse to take part in narco-trafficking, we call criminals for the desire to live and work, and we send them back or watch them die crossing the desert.

We will prosecute Americans in America for slave labor and murder, and we might sometimes prosecute a soldier for killing a civilian, but if that person wears a tie and murders hundreds of children in a sweatshop in Asia, or thousands of striking workers in Peru or Ecuador, or poison rivers and destroy the land in Brazil or Indonesia, they are free to continue killing with impunity. Somehow our morals and our values end 200 miles off the coast.

At the same time, god help anyone who comes over and kills one of us on our land, or worse, threatens our ability to do business. As a result of 9/11, our response was to utterly destroy four countries in theMiddle East protecting our way of life as we fought wars of terror that resulted in waves of immigration that created mass instability in Europe. We propped up corrupt governments that had a marginally better human rights record but a friendlier behavior to our business, and that was good enough for us. We sent soldiers there who were free to kill with impunity, not to protect our citizens, but to protect our profits from a government that might act in its own best interest. We claim it is to stop the attack on women but the way we treat our women, the way we treat our citizens, the way we allow our allies to treat their citizens and women, makes it clear that those are platitudes that no one truly believes, but allow us to rationalize unspeakable crimes.

And all this and we haven’t even gotten to the point of Climate Change. Carbon Dioxide stays in the air for more than 100 years, and nearly all the CO2 in the air right now, was produced by US. This means that nearly all the catastrophies, all over the world, are the cause of one country: the United States. A few people who benefit from this hold the world captive as they use the power of their wealth to convince millions in America to ignore science and resist the apocalypse that barrels towards us. But the way system is set-up, we are all part of it. We are all invested with our 401k and mutual funds and pension funds into these companies and we demand profits, because we refuse to fund a Social Security system that is independent of the stock price. We are killing ourselves for a stock price and destroying the planet and the life capacity of all 7 billion people for the hope of the ability to retire. This is insanity, not greatness.

The reality is that American people while thinking that they are good and successful are miserable people. From doctors to engineers, from high school kids to parents, from entrepreneurs to movie stars, they are addicted, lonely and utterly unhappy. American people live paycheck to paycheck, they become bankrupt trying to pay medical bills, they live in debt from 18 to death, they have no job security, they have no vacations. Those who have the good luck to make it into the middle class have to save hundreds of thousands for children’s college, they have to live in homes they can’t afford because that’s the only place where there are good schools due to a racist system of suburbs. Americans work into the grave as most end up having no money for retirement and live in an ever-present fear of becoming homeless. They are addicted to shopping and shooting, TV and sports and they divorce and self-destruct because this “Greatest Nation on Earth” makes them all depressed and lonely and angry and hateful and suspicious of everything and everyone.

What makes a nation great is not its GDP, or its military, or its number of billionaires or the toys that middle-class people can buy. All those things are ways that people with small testicles or huge inferiority complex rationalize their lack of confidence and lack of happiness. What makes a nation great is its art, its music, its culture, the happiness of its people, the pride of its history without having to erase or deny or ignore huge swaths of it.

America has accomplished much, but so did Hitler’s Germany, and Ceasar’s Rome, and Alexander’s Greece and Napoleon’s France, but that didn’t make them great, because it made their people vulnerable, trapped, and miserable. And Americans are vulnerable, trapped, and miserable.

What if we started over? What if we stopped for a second worshiping the constitution created by afar from perfect and generally bigoted white men, and tried to be great, not accomplished. What if we chose to forget, bout found a way to be all Americans. What if the rich started bing Americans and valued the idea that the money they create is our money and is a gift of trust to them in a belief that they can help their country and their people, that they don’t need to show off to their fellow wealthy friend with what they have or their bank account, but with their patriotism by helping the least able American. What if we forgot this idea that if you are rich it means that you work hard, and realized that this idea is a correlation, and luck, not causation. What if stopped worshipping the golden calf of the wealthy and admire the military for the defends of our nation, our citizens' right to protest, our citizens' right to life and liberty. What if we valued life more than property and ownership of guns?

Then I think America could be a truly great nation.