Red Tails comes at a Good Time To Be Reminded About Our Soulful Journey

As I proudly observe the renewed interest in the story of The Tuskegee Airmen that is the result of George Lucas new film Red Tails, I am reminded of how much we as Americans have to be proud of that is either a direct or indirect result of the scourges of slavery and segregation. For so many years the main focus of slavery and its aftermath has been the negatives. I would like to see a renewed focus on the positive things that came as a result of or in spite of one of America's most  infamous times in history, especially for the sake of the young who grow ever more distant from any memory or understanding of what Americans have faced together and overcome. It can be said that we as a people are as much a product of what we have triumphed over as anything and in America, we have triumphed over many difficult times in our history, slavery and segregation being only two.

I personally would like to believe that if Americas young people had a better understanding of the pride and determination so many of their ancestors maintained despite suffering through indignities that most of them could not even imagine, they would have more respect for each others lives, and the lure of gangs and drugs would be at least a bit easier to resist. It is with great pride that I urge all Americans regardless of ethnic origin to go and see Red Tails. And I hope it will promote a conversation among families and friends about other examples of Americans overcoming their circumstances to triumph in pride and glory that are closer to home. What better time could there be than now when our nations future seems so tenuous, when we are a people strained by the worst depression in the nations history and divided against each other over ideology and even religious beliefs as we search for answers to restore what in reality has never really been. The problem for Americans is that each generation tends to not understand that Americas history is one of struggle. When the economy flourishes, and when it is in decline, we struggle with many of the same issues that divide us today. The only real difference is who is suffering most at any given time and how we collectively perceive what the solutions are.

As a child growing up in North Central Texas, raised by a poor mother who grew up in East Texas, I heard over and over the stories of the pain and difficulty of living in a place where the Ku Klux Klan flourished. Lynchings, beatings of innocent people and the daily humiliation that was a natural byproduct of segregation was not some distant memory or stories in a book. I watched my mother cry with the pain only someone who had to support her children by devoting so much of her life to cooking, cleaning and raising the children of people who required her to take her meal breaks on the back porch where they fed the dogs. Yet what I remember most about my mother was the forgiving spirit she had. Her faith in God. The way she insisted that all people were not bad and that most racists were in fact victims themselves of the ignorance promoted by those who profited from maintaining such a climate. I remember my Great Aunt Maude, a proud woman of Native American and African American mix who told me stories of unthinkable atrocities in the area of Oklahoma where she raised her children at a time when it was worse to be Native American than African American. I treasured the stories my Great Aunt told me because her sister, my Grandmother, died at a young age due to the racist policies of hospitals of the area at that time, a subject that was so painful to my mother that it was never discussed in our house.

Among my favorite things to do when I was very young was to sit and listen to the elderly Black men who gathered daily at the neighborhood grocer where they sat outside during nice weather and talked about everything in the world and their view of a world that even after they had served in world wars and worked them selves to the bone for meager wages still subjected them to sickening insulting treatment daily. Yet these men didn't speak with anger, they spoke with pride about what they had survived. Proud that despite all that was done to take away their dignity and self respect, they had made it through and could still hold their heads high in the knowledge that they had helped to insure another generation would have an ever increasing chance to set things right.

Enemy Expatriation Act is itself an act of treason

Throughout America's history, after every great challenge; the civil war, World Wars I & II, The Great Depression, part of what helped America recover was that America felt it clearly saw it self and recognized who it was. But the America of today has its greatest challenge in  that when it looks in the mirror it does not recognize what it sees. Since the end of segregation, because of immigration coming  from all over the world, thanks to the result of years of oil profiteering, America no longer resembles to power wielding conservatives the country they wanted to believe they lived in. This is why they are now willing to gut it. They want to rip it apart and remake it in the image they want. Only a fool believes this will benefit anyone who believes in freedom and democracy for all. And I think this problem will define how history judges America of this current time period.


 I think historians will say today's Americans lived during the last gasp of a great society. That America became a victim of itself. Like a fat, ignorant, greedy child, lost in the woods surrounded by predators anxious to eat it, the most dangerous of whom we thought were friends,  we put on blinders to what was really happening around the world and allowed ourselves to be seduced by ideas like Amercian Exceptional-ism, even as we saw a steady decline in the nations quality of education, health system and the very idea that a free market should be inclusive and reward all who contribute to its success, not just those who get themselves to the top. Like every accomplished society in history, our decline was made inevitable by an ever increasing focus on greed that inhibited our ability to see the forest for the trees.

Against the backdrop of these times,  our government debates the legislation being promoted by Joe Lieberman and Charles Dent known as the Enemy Expatriation Act, it is clear that we are facing one of the greatest attacks on the very foundation of the principles of the constitution of the United States in our lifetime. No matter how innocent these supporters of this bill claim their intentions are, it is clear that this will ultimately become a tool for those who would silence any form of dissension of US citizens aimed at any part or member of the US government. Is it merely a coincidence that this legislation should be proposed now, when terrorism, which sponsors of this legislation claimed this act is designed to deal with, is actually on the run, but more and more Americans are awakening to the erosion of their rights by those who would break unions and give ever increasing power and benefits to the conservative elite.

I feel that the most powerful thing America's founding fathers did was to assert that the citizens of these United States should always have the right to protest the actions of their government and further, if they found that this government no longer served them, to change it for the best interest of the majority. The Enemy Expatriation act would clearly be most effective at limiting the number of people who can participate in their duty to oversee their government and supporting it is no less than an act of treason. It is time Americans take a long look at people like Lieberman and Dent and others who would propose legislation designed to limit the ability of ordinary Americans to participate in their government. They need to be removed from their offices and banned from ever holding a leadership role in American politics again. 

The fundamental foundation of a free market system is the win-win situation.

One of the things that concerns me most about the world we live in today is the way the concept of free markets has become interchangeable with the idea of anything goes. As much as any single thing this frame of thought has contributed to the decline of morality in the way business is done, oddly enough most often seen in those who constantly claim to be filled with integrity.

I believe that the concept of free markets are based on the idea that when markets work, everyone who contributes has a fair chance to earn. And that the dynamic of having as much participation in the markets as possible by competing forces keeps them honest and contributes to the vitality of the markets. Throughout history this idea has been proven to work when markets are in development and are free to grow without interference. But in our world today, there are those who would insist that regulation is the chief culprit that stymies the effectiveness of free markets. Problem is, an honest examination of history proves otherwise.
Almost without fail, when markets thrive, someone will eventually become greedy and start to look for ways to gain a greater share of the markets by creating unfair advantages for themselves. They use their wealth, power and influence to try to shut the door of opportunity on those who would compete with them, and by doing so they become the force that inhibits the natural order of a free market. As this perversion of the markets grow, the markets become less and less free and the result is a market controlled by the ruthless.
The most effective tool to combat this occurring has been responsible regulation overseen by those who have a vested interest in keeping the markets free, and by the ability of those who work for these competing forces to be able to level the field for themselves through collective bargaining. When the people whose labor helps to make the difference between success and failure are no longer able to bargain for a fair wage and instead they are forced to work for wages that will not fairly sustain them, the markets are not free and the offending business is not successful, because  ultimately these businesses suck the life out of a community rather than contributing to their vitality. That is why once the vitality is sucked out of a community, the offending business feels it has no choice but to go someplace else and begin the process of sucking the life out of another community somewhere else. In today's world we call that out-sourcing. In the beginning, the new location of these blood sucking businesses welcome them and laud them as progress, but without fail in time they will be seen as a pariah when it is understood that they will pack up and leave as soon as they find someone willing to do the job cheaper and allow them less regulation. They tell us regulation, again is the bad guy, ignoring the fact that without rules, too many simply cannot be counted on to make a long term commitment to the vitality of that community. When America thrived in the past, it was because owners of business felt a need for their own good to make such a commitment to the communities they operated in. They understood that if people could not afford their products, they would not thrive. This was a dynamic of the free market concept that became somewhat obsolete when small and medium sized local businesses began to disappear in the wake of the mega-corporation. Ironically, the people wanted them. They wanted cheaper prices and convenience, somehow not realizing, or not caring that they were contributing to the perversion of the free market system by removing its most important ingredient, competition. And by contributing to the decline of dynamic localized competition, they set the stage for the loss of jobs and their rights to negotiate fair wages and benefits.