Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
CIRCUITOUS "SHITHOLE" CIRCLE: ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO DONALD TRUMP
FULL CIRCUITOUS "SHITHOLE" CIRCLE: ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO DONALD TRUMP
Pledging allegiance to a political party, rather than to a nation, is blasphemy, at least, or treason, more probably; but this nation has so many undesirable people who are still descendants of "shithole countries" who are now counted as its citizens, by virtue of wars, that discriminating minds must choose whom to serve: party or the nation.
The Trump GOP has chosen party over country, as had the Democrats before them, when the Democrats were Dixiecrats, Confederates; and the Reconstruction's GOP was the short-lived "Radical Republicans."
Even the abolitionists who fought to end slavery, fought against equal rights for black men and women, whom they deemed to be inferiors. Of course, the Confederates, cum Democrats fought to keep slavery, because their "white" superiority, was in the Africans' 'best interests.'
What a political paradox for black people to be in! Despised by their friends as inferior, while beloved by their enemies: enslaving-superiors.
Both were and are white. The issue was whose 'white' was more right ?
Abraham Lincoln took a whopping in the press, as on the battlefields, for as long as he could! He tried to come up with an emigration plan for Africans to Haiti and to Central America, as late as 1863, but black leaders said "hell no! We won't go," as they had told the Liberia-touting African Colonization Society before them! So Lincoln fired his warning shot across the bow on September 22, 1862, warning that unless the South stopped fighting and came back to the national white fold by January 1, 1863, he would hit them hard where it most hurt, in their tender private parts: black slaves!
Finally, Lincoln pulled the plug on official American slavery with his wartime measure, the executive order "Emancipation Proclamation," which carefully excluded border states like Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and parts of Louisiana, like New Orleans, that had not formally self-declared as enemies of the United States.
He had had to free the slaves or suffer defeat in the war, because the South was using their beloved slaves to grow, harvest, process crops, at home; to take care of white children, to tend to Mama , grandmother, sisters, cousins, everything, everywhere; while "Johnie" marched off to war. Slaves were used to build fortifications in the field, cook, clean, handle latrine duty, serve as messengers, scouts, spies, servants, nurses, washers.
The slaves did not revolt during this "ideal" time to revolt. They worked, watched, read, listened, prayed, whispered, winked, nodded, sang, from 1861-1862. But, whenever the Union Army came nearby, they fled to the Union lines by the hundreds, soon by hundreds of thousands.
So many Africans came, so fast, in fact, during 1861-1862, the Union Army and national government had to figure out a name for them, and a new status for them, too, to justify retaining them, from their former "owners." They called them "Contraband of War," since they were property like livestock or grain that had been captured in battle.
Soon enough, white men in the North came to realize that a black man's body could stop a bullet as readily as their own! White men in New York infamously revolted against the draft law and burned down black homes, businesses, churches, including a black orphanage, and lynched dozens (some say hundreds of black people), in 1863, in protest. No one went to jail, of course, for these heinous acts of terrorism, against innocent black people! No financial reparations were ever paid, by the government of New York, nor the by the United States to the black persons' family victimized by this.
This long-winded digression brings me, and us, back to where I began: discussing the priority of political party values over national country ideals . "Country" is the nascent idea, the soaring is ideal, that is reposed in our original founding documents, many of which were written by Thomas Paine, the colonial propagandist who was brought here to America to decry King George III usurpations' against the landed elite, who were Paine's sponsors, coadjutors, editors.
Englishman Thomas Paine's legendary electrifying, pamphlet documents, included the "Declaration of Independence," (usually falsely attributed to slave-owner, Thomas Jefferson ) "Common Sense," and others pamphlets that were lesser known. These refined, highly polished documents came from the brilliant, fertile, fiery pen of the revolutionary itinerant writer, and 'non-slave holding' "Founding Father," Thomas Paine, who left for France, a few years after the American Revolution, where he wrote the "Rights of Man," for the French Revolution, where he was as piquant there, as he was here!
These documents, edits and all, are the verifiable corpus of the American ideal. It is the aim reached for rhetorically by scholars, lawyers, preachers, politicians, judges; and which are as surely evaded, avoided with respect to certain people, those primarily from "shithole countries" in Africa or Central America, per Donald Trump, as previously per Abraham Lincoln. Full circle, again!