Celebrating Sin

I do not mean to get biblical about this, but our nation was born in sin. The precedent of waging almost genocidal wars against native Americans had already been set and slavery was already considered an institution by the time our founders declared our independence. Racism was used as a justification for both of those sins. It was a classic case of blaming the victims of oppression for the oppression; they (those other races of people) do evil things and are not capable of governing themselves, don't you know?

As I have written elsewhere educated people do not celebrate whatever intent they can glean from the very difficult compromises our founding fathers had to make in order to establish or preserve this nation. What educated people celebrate are the ideals expressed by our founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Preamble to Constitution and other documents stating the virtues of democracy and the rights of all people. Indeed the need to reach compromises that forced an inconsistent application of the proposition that “all men are created equal” weighed heavily on the minds of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and many other delegates to the Continental Congress. This can be seen in the following excerpt from Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence:

 "He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce...” 

This paragraph condemning slavery caused an absolute furor, and many delegates from colonies that profited from slavery threatened to walk out. It is very doubtful that there would be a United States of America if the delegates of good conscience had insisted on condemning slavery. Needless to say that the compromise they reached was a pact with the devil that caused untold suffering. Some eighty years later it was a pact that also cost tens of thousands of men their lives. While I cannot say that the North entered into the Civil War to end slavery, there is absolutely no doubt that the South entered into that war to preserve slavery. Therein lies the difference between the founders of this nation and the founders of the short lived Confederate States. Our founding fathers did not fight to establish or preserve slavery they fought to establish a new nation. The founders of the confederacy fought to preserve slavery, and they tried to found a nation in order to accomplish that end!

While the Civil War did put an end to slavery on this continent it could not and did not put an end to the denigration of an entire race of people. The racism used to justify the “peculiar institution” of slavery remains an ugly part of this nation to this day. At the end of the reconstruction era and well into the nineteen hundreds, as Jim Crow laws were passed to codify the superior position of white people, those southern white people celebrated their lost cause by erecting statues of Confederate Generals and by displaying the flag that has come to represent the old Confederacy. This was both an affirmation of their belief in their racial superiority and a threat to anyone who might challenge that belief.

Many of Trump's apologists say he is not really as racist as the absurd comments he made about the demonstrations and violence that recently took place in Charlottsville, VA would seem to indicate. I disagree with those apologists, but it is a moot point. Whether Trump is a racist or he is merely pandering to racists does not matter one whit to the victims of the violence or prejudice encouraged by his apparent rationalizations. In this regard Trump is as guilty as any Neo-Nazi. He is a disgrace to this nation, and the fact that so many in his party are still willing to support him is just another indication of how morally and intellectually bankrupt the Republican Party has become!