Letter from America:with KENNETH MUFUKA
In order to understand the present political turmoil in the American social fabric, one must keep as a background the fact that the US elites were shocked at the electoral victory of a street billionaire from New York for the presidency in November 2016.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it aloud. They will get rid of President Donald Trump one way or another, sooner, rather than later.
When everything failed, the death of brother George Floyd, whose personal history was marred with five trips to a jailhouse, became the rallying cry for all men of goodwill and good sense.
The issue, as encapsulated by the Reverend Al Sharpton, is very simple. Revolutions always begin when grievances, long ignored, are illustrated by a single event which becomes the rallying point.
Despite all the liberating laws passed in favour of blacks, beginning with the Civil Rights Laws, 1964, the white establishment seems to have always been able to rally and regroup and impose more onerous conditions which brought blacks back to square one. The more they advanced, the more the system was able to recreate old Jim Crow.
Old Jim Crow was based on the idea that a black found away from his home after dark, was a target for police or vigilante brutality.
This explains why Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin, knowing full well that his choking of Floyd was being video-taped, and as bystanders shouted at him to heed Floyd’s cries that “I can’t breathe”, he maintained the choke eight minutes and 46 seconds, even after Floyd was dead.
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This explains why Ahmaud Arberry, who was jogging in his own upscale neighbourhood, was followed by three white men, two with hunting rifles and a third taking a video of the expected encounter. After shooting Arberry three times, Travis McMichael shouted to his videographer these words: “I have shot the F…Nigger.”
McMichael and his two accomplices reported the incident to the police and were allowed to go home. One explanation is that the three, though they were armed with rifles, were afraid of Arberry who was jogging, dressed in jogging pants.
The revolution While all white men of good character understood that blacks had a torrid time just “breathing”, they felt that incidents were exaggerated by trouble-makers.
That is why gruesome video records of Arberry, Floyd and Eric Garner in New York are important. All reasonable white people are agreed, after seeing the videos, that blacks indeed have a case against the police. They are tormented between what they believe the US and what they see on the videos.
Speaking to the Oxford Union in 1968, James Baldwin said: “It comes as a great shock that the country that you have pledged allegiance to has not evolved any place for you.”
The revolution is coming in the way white Americans are beginning to embrace Baldwin’s pronouncement: “I picked the cotton; I built the railroads, for nothing. Why is my right to live there a question now?”
Behind this great revolution is a desire to overthrow Trump from office, one way or another, sooner rather than later.
The Barak Obama coalition is rearing its head once more. Trump, in Sharpton’s words, is the personification of evil in high places. Obama’s desire to “fundamentally transform America” may be within reach.
Media stations and anchormen at Cable News Network (CNN) and National Broadcasting Corporation no longer report news without clearly stating their contempt of Trump. They have become spokespersons for the progressive party.
That is a shift in news broadcasting. CNN has gone further. It will no longer show Trump’s addresses, except in edited version, calculated to show him at his worst.
The sheer size of the “Resistance” (an Obama word) is overwhelming. All across the US, including in my small town of Greenwood (100 000 population), streets have been filled, largely by multiracial crowds, with white protesters making up a majority.
Trump, as Sharpton has alleged, is the personification of “cosmic powers (of) this present darkness, (representing) spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”.
Trump, is considered a replica of the late Alabama governor George Wallace, who opposed Dr Martin Luther King at every turn.
The fundamental changes, already in the works, reflect the new “truths” taught at universities.
Laws against hate crimes will be enforced more vigorously than before. But, according to Trumpkins, hate speech includes derogatory references to gay life, which is part of the Christian faith.
Affirmative action, which has been abandoned, may be on its way back in support of African Americans excluded from certain jobs by institutional racism.
Universities, wanting to be ahead of the progressive curve, have already put in place programmes designed to protect minorities and gays.
The most fundamental change may be outlawing of hate speech. As we speak, William Bennett, senior editor at the New York Times (NYT), has been “outed” from his job for an error in judgement. He allowed Senator Tom Cotton, a Trumpkin, to write pro-Trump “stuff” on the editorial page of the Times. In the past, it was the NYT’s custom to invite different views from world leaders, including Zimbabwe’s President Emmerson Mnangagwa to be expressed therein.
New thinking says that wrongful ideas, such as Nazi ideologies, should never be given the light of day. Dennis Praga, a renowned conservative propagandist, complains that his books and articles are censored at Amazon and by the New York Times. One such write-up involved Ten Commandments. The mention of “Thou shall not commit adultery” was considered part of a hate programme against innocent hardworking sex workers.
Praga is also alleged to spew hatred against abortionists. Anti-abortion thinking is rooted in Catholic ideology, based on the sacredness of all human life. This idea, if it interferes with a woman’s right to do whatever she wants with her body, is considered medieval and patriarchal hegemonic tyranny.
The police hegemonies will soon fall under the sword. Minneapolis and New York City are leading in a campaign to defund these oppressive organs of state and replace police actions with social welfare outreach. It has been suggested that instead of sending a trooper to “deal with a truant kid” and probably “throw him in a juvenile jailhouse”, it makes more sense if a loving and caring mother figure is assigned to the truant kid.
Twitter has given notice that it may, in future, refuse to carry Trump’s tweets, as they are deemed to be spewing ignorance and hatred.
The revolutionaries are also keen on the appointment of gay judges who will enthusiastically embrace gay marriages. Trump is supposed to be on the other side of the issue.
While the revolutionaries know what they hate (police brutality), it appears as if they are walking in the dark, not knowing what to put in the place of the hated misogynist racist patriarchal hegemonic oppressive counterfeits.
One can surmise that evangelicals, who form the bedrock of Trumpkin support, are in a state of disorientation. If they support the revolution, they are engaging is self-immolation. If they don’t, they are accused of being haters and racists.
