The desperate condition of the USA is a much greater illness than the symptomatic grievance of systemic racism — though, for the moment, that complaint galvanizes the nation’s attention because it is woven into so many strands of national myth, narrative, and historic psychodrama. The short version of systemic racism is that predatory white Europeans came upon the New World and raped it, and then, utilizing that ill-gotten treasure, proceeded to rape the rest of the world and the non-whites peacefully living there (a.k.a. Colonialism). Who has any sympathy for the rapist?
Leaving aside the omissions in that story, the USA faces a graver set of circumstances than the animus between blacks and whites. In the background these weeks of protests, riots, looting, and arson is the disintegrating economy, which signifies that pretty much everybody in this land will not be able to keep on keeping on in the ways we’re used to. Everybody will have a harder time making a living. Everybody will endure shocking losses in wealth, status, and comfort. And, sadly, everybody will be too perplexed and bamboozled by the rush of events to understand why.
The short version of that story is we’ve overshot our resources, especially the basic energy resources that all other activities require. This mystifies the public, too, but you can boil it down to the cost of getting oil out of the ground being too high for customers and not high enough for the oil producers to cover their costs — a quandary. One result has been the rapid bankruptcy of the shale oil industry. Another is the incremental impoverishment of what used to be America’s broad middle-class — a malady that has, just for now, ring-fenced off the denizens of Wall Street, the notorious One Percent (of the population), who still luxuriate in zooming share prices and dividends while everybody else sucks wind in a ditch with-or-without the added affliction of Covid-19.....read more......
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