In order to heal racial injustice, economic injustice, environmental injustice and to fill the voids of mind, body and spirit that exist in the American commonweal, vast sums of public treasure need to be expended. That intention is currently blocked both by a philosophy of governance that privileges the free market and by the impregnable massif that is the military establishment - the mastodon in the room of a profoundly unquiet American society. Such socially targeted expenditures might prevent America from sinking further into a quagmire of pathological dependencies - the gloss of its over-consumption since WWII having long since been made pallid by the endemic inadequacies of health care, education, infrastructure, nutrition, housing, income distribution and the historically charged racial injustices that haunt the nation. These represent profound failures of state in terms of both remediation and restitution. Such failures demand a revolutionary re-focusing of the purposes of government; a redefinition of democracy; and a relinquishment of the grand myths that have sustained them - myths that have weaponized the base economic impulses of freedom loving conservatives over the life of the Republic. That re-focus will come with a price-tag, but one that is almost certainly less that the inordinate sums channeled to the military industrial complex, now justified by the maintenance of a superannuated Empire.
Redemption from the sins of the past is possible: the nations of Germany and Japan both took the difficult steps to excise their respective historical cancers which metastasized into nightmares of state sponsored horror in the first half of the twentieth century. South Africa, through the processes of resistance, revolution and tribunals of truth and reconciliation, replaced a violent white supremacist government with a multi-racial democracy in the early 1990's. America's historical sins are well known. That its nuclear arsenal further burdens the human spirit with an existential dread that compounds our everyday intimations of mortality is less recognized.
Trumps victory four years ago, and his recent defeat, were both cries for help from the voting public. After the Civil War, a great and noble effort was made by Americans to heal the wounds of slavery. It was called Reconstruction. The effort was destroyed within a dozen years by the mean and ignoble. Old wounds continue to fester, and new lacerations of mind, body and spirit have continued to assail the nation. It is now time again for the country to make a great and noble effort to heal its wounds. Call it Reconstruction II.
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