Bob Dickerson - America
America, America, God shed his grace on thee, from sea to shining sea…
We all know those words, sung them all our lives, since childhood.
The America we sung about, the one with beautiful spacious skies and fruited plains is showing some chinks (in its armor).
But let’s face it, America has never been exactly honest about itself. Starting with the lie that Columbus discovered it, the cover up of a genocide so massive that the holocaust pales in comparison, the treatment of Africans, enslaved and dehumanized but,
revisionist history of the Eurocentric variety, would have you believe that the natives were happy to have their land invaded and conquered, that Africans were happy to serve their masters and that people of color are less than human anyway, so whatever the Europeans did to them didn’t matter. So that line about crowning thy good in brotherhood, well I guess it depends on how you look, where you’re from, or what you got.
America, America, things are changing very quickly.
The country is becoming browner and browner and, it seems that the descendants of the European conquering invaders are nervous.
They are pulling out all the stops to set up and sustain an apartheid-like system where the few rule over the many, hoarding wealth and resources, denying natives of this hemisphere the opportunity to pursue opportunity anywhere and frame it as border control.