Tl; dr: The world’s richest failed state is increasingly making its
failure official, an inevitable result of its criminal roots. It’s not just the U.S., though, we all have to start thinking of alternatives.
The news coming out of the U.S. in recent years is sad
and sickening. With the retirement of Justice Kennedy and his inevitable
replacement by a far-right Justice, the damage to American institutions
will persist for decades at least and is likely to be permanent.
It
may seem strange, but on hearing this last piece of news–which was
just a matter of time really, you can only plug the dam with a finger
for so long–my mind went to Exodus. I have heard that when Jewish
people celebrate their ancestors’ emancipation from slavery in Egypt
they also mourn the innocents who suffered in the Ten Plagues that God
brought on Egypt. Many Jewish people have
also questioned why the plagues were necessary at all, an admirable
example of both critical thought and compassion. I can also see
why God spent half his time being annoyed with y’all he freed you from
slavery and here you are nitpicking his methods
I
personally think, though, that it wasn’t God’s choice to bring the
plagues. If we read God as a personification of universal forces, and
that’s how I understand these stories as an atheist, the plagues were just the
inevitable results of slavery and genocide. God no more brought the
plagues than “Mother Earth” is “avenging herself” against humanity with
global warming and the depletion of natural resources. These are
symbolic ways to describe physical forces at work, except with Exodus we
are talking about moral physics, or karma as they say in Buddhism.
In
this view, God hardened the Pharaoh’s heart and brought the plagues
similarly to how thermodynamics are warming the planet: The rules are
simply there, unbreakable and unnegotiable, and the cause is the actions
of humanity.
Take the precipitating cause of the plagues, the hardening
of the Pharaoh’s heart against letting the enslaved Hebrew people go.
Such refusal is a nearly inevitable reaction to institutionalized and
profitable slavery, both because freeing the slaves will cause
catastrophic economic loss and because an enormous amount of
justification and dehumanization are required to make slavery socially
and psychologically tolerable.
From the Pharaoh’s
stubbornness, itself a consequence of slavery, came the other disasters,
the frogs, the locusts and the rest, culminating in a direct callback
to the Egyptians’ own crimes of infanticide against the Hebrews–the
deaths of their firstborn, from which the Hebrew people were given the
ability to save themselves. The story of Exodus has a happy-ish ending with
the enslaved people leaving their captivity and setting out for the
Promised Land, though the subsequent events are much more complicated. I
like how these books don’t stint on the brutality that entailed the
fairy-tale promise of the land of milk and honey; the Hebrews were not
saved because they were inherently good, rather they were a people like
any other just as capable of cruelty and hypocrisy once they had enough
power. But that is a discussion for another time.
So what does
this have to do with the United States? It’s essentially the same story
as the Plagues because you can’t grow a just and well-functioning state
from the roots of slavery and genocide any more than you can get
wholesome fruit from a poisoned tree.
What’s more, unlike the
link between the enslavement of Hebrews and, say, a swarm of locusts,
there are direct and observable links between America’s policy of
genocide and enslavement and its failures as a country. The vast tracts
of land stolen for Native Americans required an equally vast workforce
to make profitable, and slavery was allowed to fill that gap. The
accommodation of the slave-owning states with its large numbers of
enslaved Africans is the root of much of the distortions in U.S.
politics today, including the shameful vestiges of slavery in the text of the U.S.
Constitution and, more saliently, the electoral college, which is how
Donald Trump could be President of the United States and why
conservative rural states have a disproportionate effect in national
elections.
This is to say nothing of the gross social and
economic injustices that persist long after legal chattel slavery is
gone, the white supremacy that split the working class along racial
lines and weakened them as a political force, the fact that states with
large Black populations are more reluctant to extend the benefits of health insurance to the population, the
crisis of mass incarceration that drains the nation of its human and
public resources for the bottom line of private prisons, the war on
drugs that has pitted police against the communities they are pledged to
protect, the changing of the electoral map in response to the passage
of the Civil Rights Act, blatant gerrymandering to corral and limit the
political effectiveness disfavored populations, voter suppression against
targeted communities, the wholesale abduction of children from their
parents, the list goes on.
The brutality, the enslavement, the genocide never
stopped. They have come back to become plagues on the general American
public, and they have been hurting and will continue to hurt the already
exploited and wronged populations the worst. Even God, should he
exist and should he wish to, cannot stop an unjust system from crumbling
in on itself and taking the guilty and innocent alike with it. Voting for one party over another may slow the decline but cannot shore up a rotten foundation.
I have focused on the United States but the system of exploitation backed by state violence is a global one, and no one alive is free of it. We are paying and will continue to pay in the form of a degrading environment, more unequal societies, and the increasing inability to correct these ills through nonviolent electoral politics.
Physical removal of exploited minorities cannot be a solution this time, even a “voluntary” departure as when the Hebrews left Egypt in Exodus. And just how voluntary is it to leave when your alternatives are slavery and death? The ending of Exodus was bittersweet at best, and the sequels were increasingly violent with the Hebrews, ethnically cleansed out of Egypt, slaughtering and displacing other groups in order to survive.
No, we must all walk away together from the rotting empire or not at all. We must imagine different ways of life and live them. No one serious can pretend this will be an easy process. Our lives will change, our most deeply-held values may have to change, and many of us will die in the process. Chances are we will not muster the necessary willpower until the plagues have run their devastating course–and perhaps not even then. I don’t know if there is a way out or if the cure will be worse than the disease, as in the case of Soviet-style Communism. But we do have to look and look hard, because the state of affairs in the United States should be a warning to the world.
Dude sounds like some choosy guy who has to use a surrogate… Must not have ultimate power if he can’t come down from his high throne and do it himself??
L.J.'s Obsessions 
