/2 I stood there with half an eyebrow and was sullen. Why, I demanded to God, is there not some kind of pop-up screen where I get asked if I really want to shave off my eyebrow Y/N? Why is there no guardrail?
But Guardrails are ineffective against human indifference, incompetence, or evil.
...who came home from 4th grade in November, 1963 to see my mother weeping because the President had been shot to death in the streets of Dallas, a city where I was born and we’d moved away from only 3 years earlier (and where most of my mother’s family still lived)…
3 What we’re seeing with the accelerating collapse of America is that the things we see as guardrails are not self-enforcing — they rely on norms and values and when those norms and values are ignored or defied the guardrails no longer work.
...who watched black Americans peacefully march for civil rights, being attacked by dogs and water cannon on TV; who entered “Robert E.Lee” high school the year the school district was forced to integrate, and did so by closing the black schools (because no white parent was going to tolerate their children being forced to attend those schools), and people cheering the symbols of the Civil War as.a weapon against the black students (the Confederate battle flag, the “Rebels” as the school mascot, the whole nine yards…)
Hell, I’ll diverge right here because the city was Tyler, established shortly after the Republic became a state, named to honor the President who pressed for the Republic’s acceptance into the Union, because he wanted another slave holding state, and Texas obliged. The first high school in the town was also named for him, so if you were black and forced into either school, you weren’t escaping the honoring of the legacy of American slavery. But I guess those “norms and values” worked to keep up the guardrails, huh? For white people, anyway.
/4 There is no Do You Want Society To Collapse Y/N prompt. There is no American ur-adult to step in and stop things from going to far. There ain’t to deus in this machina. If we are led by ineffectual, craven, dishonest, or evil people, all the bad things can absolutely happen ……
You mean like in 1968, when MLK was assassinated in broad daylight? Or 2 days after Kennedy’s death, when Oswald was shot to death while in police custody, live on TV? Or when RFK was assassinated, in ‘68? The same year Daley released his police thugs on protesters at the Democratic convention in Chicago? Or Nixon meeting with the North Vietnamese that year in secret to be sure there would be no peace agreement before the ‘68 election because he had a “secret plan to end the war”? The war that led people to flee to Canada to avoid the draft (or college; neither escape was really available to the working class kids who were fodder for that meat grinder. Right, Donald Trump?) A war Nixon kept going in ‘72 so he could get re-elected? (If you need the history lesson, the war officially ended in 1973. Coincidence? I think not. Watergate really was a trifling matter, in the rear view mirror). “…all the bad things can absolutely happen”? Really? No shit? What was your first fucking clue? A nation based in chattel slavery, maybe? And that slavery enshrined in the constitution as the only way to establish the nation?
/5….because the things we thought of as stable guardrails relied on the people running them adhering to a shared set of values. No values, no guardrails.
I really want to know, Pollyanna, who these people are, and who the man behind the curtain is, because in my 70 years I have yet to see a set of values shared by the country, except the value of keeping your foot firmly planted in someone else’s neck, and resolutely ignoring the fact that foot is your foot. The “shared set of values” was always “the status quo serves me and mine, and nobody better mess with it.” The ones who did were either murdered; shunted aside; eventually overruled or just discarded as no longer needed (how much of the 15th amendment is still needed, and how much of it is more honored in the breach than in the keeping? More relevant to your point, how long did it take for enabling legislation to begin to implement the 15th, and how long did that legislation last before it was effectively discarded? You can’t blame that solely on a few recent Justices.)
“No values, no guardrails”? Shit, son, that’s as American as violence and cherry pie. Ask anyone in American history who wasn’t white or just poor. The Reconstruction amendments didn’t do a damned thing to stop Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Chattel slavery was simply traded for wage slavery and perfectly legal discrimination, and the iron wheels rolled in. As Stephen Miller thinks they should today.
In some ways I must confess, I think he has a less naive and navel gazing sense of history. He’s certainly less disappointed with reality.
