I am so glad to see millions of Americans finally waking up to what I have said over the past twenty years or more, which is that Republican officeholders have only one principle:
Heads I win, tails you lose.
That is the witty version of having no principles except to get and maintain power for corporations and white supremacy--though the white workers get nothing except the right to use the N-word and feel superior to people with darker skin; they are screwed along with everyone else.
Can we imagine, too, if the current situation regarding the US Supreme Court was reversed? Republicans would be telling their supporters to arm themselves and threaten the Democrats in the senate. Oh, wait. No need to reverse or imagine anything. That mindset is already here.
Just check the photo of screaming white male Trump supporters at a polling place in Virginia. It's here, and these pathetic, but dangerous white working class men know they are representing a set of opinions and polices the majority of the nation rejects. These white men claim they are rallying around the flag, and, of course, their other favorite flag, the "Confederate" (really Northern Virginia military) flag. However, they are really not rallying around the post-Civil War Constitution, or any of the Bill of Rights--except THEIR right to have a gun; and God forbid if a black guy holds a gun.
Oh well. Somewhere Chief Sitting Bull and the medicine man Black Elk are smiling with that special sense of schadenfreude.*
* For those who may not get my meaning, below are quotes from Chief Sitting Bull and Black Elk, the medicine man, about us white settler-colonialists who are now increasingly at each other's throats, with those who would have supported the genocide of Native Americans and slavery being the ones who are armed and ready to kill those of us who live more by John Lennon's Imagine:
Chief Sitting Bull: "The love of possessions is a disease in them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break, but the poor may not! They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not! They even take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbor away. ... If America had been twice the size it is, there still would not have been enough. (Sitting Bull: The Collected Speeches, p. 75)
Black Elk: "I could see that the Wasichus [Whites] 'did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation's hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. They had forgotten that the earth was their mother. This could not be better than the old ways of my people." (Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition, pages 135-136).
I wanted to use the quote sometimes attributed to Chief Seattle, and sometimes to other 19th Century Native American figures. However, the quote turned out to be a misattribution. The quote comes from much more recent vintage, the early 1970s, and one or more Native American environmental activists. Here is the quote, as it also speaks to our time and predicament:
When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you can't eat money.
See the Quote Investigator for the etiology of the quote.
