The USA Has Never Been A Country

The United States has always been the exact same mess it is today. If you can fool yourself into believing the “good old days” were good for anyone but a small minority, good for you. You probably believe in gods and the power of prayer, infinite resources and a flat earth, you cross your fingers and knock on wood for good luck, and when you recite the Pledge you pretend to believe “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” was something that Christian socialist actually believed just before the 20th Century began. The indivisible nation had already proved itself to be a fragile falsehood in 1860 and 1892 was primetime for the kind of racial inequality America is famous for all over the world. The country wasn’t even five years old when working class people began to realize that they were barely 2nd class citizens and tried to rebel against the rules of the new nation. Local officials and the military led by George Washington make it clear to the people who had sacrificed the most to create the new nation that their sacrifice was going to be wasted on the rich and powerful.

Social and traditional media have done a good job of illustrating how unequal this country’s society is, but that doesn’t mean anything has changed or will ever change for the better. YouTube and cell phone apps regularly demonstrate how quickly and violently police “handle” minority citizens, but that’s just a modern version of what muckraking journalists were trying to tell society 20, 50, 100, 200, and 235 years ago. For that matter, in the 1880’s Charles Dickens was telling the same kind of stories about the country we rebelled against to supposedly resolve those issues.

Not only has the United States always been a magnet for international rejects from the Pilgrims to Irish Catholic potato famine rejects to ISIS wannabes, but even the mainstream is full of people with wildly different views of tolerance, decency, respect, and community. The rise of “popularism” and nationalism and extreme racism in the world probably demonstrates that humans are incapable of building sustainable communities, but the USA has often deluded itself with dreams of being a “melting pot” and presenting a democratic ideal to the world. Today’s racially intolerant MAGA nitwits are just a rerun of the country’s terrible history. Nothing new here, move along.