Taken in sum, the horrors these coups have imposed on innocent people throughout the planet comprise a terrible karmic debt our nation owes the rest of humankind.
The idea that such retribution would come home to roost may have been best stated by our 16th president. It is chiseled on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial in our nation's capital, for all to see.
At the end of the Civil War, in his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln mourned that this "terrible war," which killed more than 620,000 Americans, had come "as the woe due to those by whom the offense came."
The offense, of course was slavery. To pay for it, Lincoln warned, we would see the war "continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword."
Are we, as modern Americans, now being called to pay for the blood drawn and the pain imposed by our imperial armies? And for all the wealth and comfort and dignity unjustly stolen from innocent peoples around the world?
As we squirm and mourn and march and organize, we might keep in mind the image of Donald Trump as imperial payback.
We might remember that as we work to overcome this homegrown vulture of our own making we must make right what we've imposed on so many others.
And that the restoration of sanity, dignity, and democracy to this nation can only come with a genuine sense of perspective ... and with the resolve to never again impose any such suffering anywhere else in this world.
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