We Are Babylon
Empathy is for Suckers, Righteousness is for Fools
I, apparently am a sucker. A fool. An optimist with one eye toward Utopia, and the other peering through my fingers at the creeping invasion that would bring it down.
My parents grew up during the post-war establishment of the middle class. I was born during the Civil Rights era, which extended a welcoming hand to the people who had missed out on the benefits of the mid-20th century.
It turns out there were far fewer people extending that hand than I had thought. And far more subconscious resentment toward the descendants of slaves and survivors of Jim Crow than I, fool that I am, realized.
I have been watching our U.S. empire, the leader of the free world, falling slowly under the weight of its fatal flaw; a land built on the idea that some people are better than others. No. A land built on the idea that some people aren’t even people.
I thought we were past that.
I thought the racism was fixable. If only the good white people would band together to act.
In the last decade, I’ve realized too many “good” white people have no idea that they need to act.
The week before last, the Supreme Court put the final nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act. The VRA was passed in 1965, and then reauthorized and amended by Congress in 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992 and 2006. It gave teeth to the dictates of the 15th Amendment.
And, as the New York Times editorial board notes, “When Congress amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982, it rejected requiring plaintiffs to prove intentional discrimination.”
That was in answer to the Supreme Court’s 1980 ruling in Mobile v Bolden, which ruled that Section 2 of the act only prohibited purposeful discrimination, not discriminatory effects.
On April 29, the Supreme Court effectively reinstated Mobile. Knowing that now we do not have a Congress that works, much less one that will override them.
The VRA not only banned stopping Black people from voting, it put in place government oversight mechanisms to ensure that states like Alabama and Mississippi didn’t ignore the law.
But in 2013, while hammering the first nail into the VRA, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court wrote that racial equality had been achieved, and that we didn’t need oversight anymore.
It was clear to me then, when Shelby County was handed down, that John Roberts didn’t know what racism was, or how it existed and perpetuated in the fabric of American systems.
It became clear to me in subsequent years how many white liberals felt the same way.
It also became clear how many of those white liberals were journalists.
And how much I had been a sucker for believing that we were better than that.
It took a day - one day after the ruling - for Louisiana to halt voting that was already in progress so it could redistrict away any and all Black representation in Congress.
A week later, the Tennessee legislature split up - or cracked - the Congressional district of the majority Black city of Memphis, ensuring that most people in the city will not be represented by someone who understands them.
Who IS them.
Memphis. Where Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered.
And I can only think that we are Babylon. A civilization that gave us the Pythagorean Theorem, the idea that people are innocent until proven guilty, and the architecturally innovative Hanging Gardens - a concept that Las Vegas’ casino resorts have taken as their interior design template.
It was a civilization that, in its last incarnation in the 500s BC, was overthrown not because of a fiery conflagration of a tower too tall for god’s ego, but by a Persian ruler who diverted the Euphrates River so that his army could wade into the city while the Babylonian king was partying with his uber rich friends.
Before you ask, I have checked. The palace of Nabonidus was not called Mar-A-Lago.
But we are Babylon. And in our historical ignorance, we have waded into a war with what used to be Persia. And the leaders of that new state of Iran are throwing our hubris and ineptitude in our faces via the manipulation of another waterway.
While our government wallows in corruption, muzzles its citizens, and turns warehouses into concentration camps.
I weep, in my foolish hope. Watching the world crumble around me.
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Here are three pieces of media that shed light on my despondency.
The first is an essay by Timothy Snyder, an expert on authoritarianism who used to be at Yale, but left for Canada after Trump was elected.
The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future.
The second is a scene from the brilliant sitcom, Blackish, about the Voting Rights Act.
The third is this piece from Public Notice about how Democrats need to be bolder if they win back Congress and the presidency in 2028.
I roll my eyes wherever I hear someone exclaim “This is not who we are as a country!” Last week showed us exactly who we are, or at least what we’ve allowed ourselves to become by ignoring the warning signs.
Much of what you see, or don't, is highly dependent on where you live and with who is in your immediate circle. I came of age during the Civil Rights era and experienced Vietnam firsthand. Both opened the eyes of this small town boy to the good, the bad, and the ugly humans. Postings across four continents and time spent in roughly 40 countries and several US states have tempered those first experiences." Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow" requires each of us to call out the bullshit and stand up for your rights.