This country sowed the seeds of its own destruction at its inception when it tolerated slavery. We never fully recovered. We never will.
Respectfully disagree. As others here have pointed out, America was created in a world that had long been comfortable with slavery. The remarkable thing is that we chose, as a nation, to buck that conditioning and reject slavery as a moral wrong. On a national scale, it is a one-of-a-kind achievement, and we have a right to enjoy it, and to hold it over other nations as a mark of our truly exceptional nature as a people, and a goad to them for their own moral improvement.
However, we did blow reconstruction. My dad taught and was a principal in the Chicago public schools for about 40 years. He saw all this coming. All of it. A woman from the community once told him, to his face, "you had us in slavery for 400 years, we're gonna have you in slavery for 400 years." Dad's analysis was that we prolonged the slave mentality by early on by trying too hard to protect the newly freed slaves from the challenges of life as free persons. This was done for political reasons, of course, and the policy lives on in the likes of the new plantation masters Jaskson, Sharpton et al. The key is dependency. Frederick Douglas understood the problem well:
"I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and as far as possible, to annihilate his power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right...."
Enter Marxism. How can we persuade millions of former slaves that slavery is still right? By rebranding it as a "right" to depend on big government, or the instruments of revenge (aka reparations), to set right things that a free-thinking man or woman would insist on taking care of for themselves. The greater tragedy is that so many who have no history of slavery have bought into the lie, and are putting themselves in chains without a fight, because they too have begin to think like slaves.
Is there a way out? Yes, there is. Jesus said it. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Jesus speaks here to spiritual realities, spiritual truths, because they do come first. No man or woman can be free who fails to understand that they owe their first duty of obedience to their Creator. A man or woman who only worships God will have little use for the lesser deities invented by humans or politicians. It is a paradox. If God is our one Master, no one else can be. Jesus said it. You can't serve two masters. Those truths are the seeds of our redemption.
But the truth sets us free in a broader sense as well. One of the things my dad tried to do, and for which he was punished by Jesse Jackson and the elder Mayor Daley, was instill in his students the sense of reality that comes from having the opportunity to
fail. He rejected the idea of using classrooms as day care warehouses for disengaged hoodlums. In that view they were so much dead weight being passed from grade to grade, with no concern at all for their future success. His programs rejected that slave mentality, and ran instead on the principle of personal responsibility. You own your own success, and you own your own failure. Those programs were working. Kids respond to a genuine challenge, especially when they figure out it is really for their benefit. It can happen. Those of you who have given up all hope are probably unaware of how much we could do to turn this around if we regained control of the educational process. It's not the only piece of the puzzle, but it's a big one.
But the obstacles are well-entrenched, and it would take a serious fight to root them out. A younger Jesse Jackson sat with my dad in his office one day and told him, to his face, he was the wrong color for the job. If that isn't racism, then there's no such thing as racism. The good guys in the black community have to come out against this, and some are. But numbers matter. They have to learn the truth, the whole lot of them. That's how they get to freedom. It begins in the heart and mind. Race hatred IS slavery. It darkens a person's "moral and mental vision" profoundly. It limits your world to a nightmare cartoon, created by your masters explicitly to control you through misguided fears and desires. When the hatred and the quest for vengeance stops, freedom can begin. It is possible. Because with God, all things are possible.
Peace,
SR
The remarkable thing is that we chose, as a nation, to buck that conditioning and reject slavery as a moral wrong. On a national scale, it is a one-of-a-kind achievement,Ummm, not it isn't. On top of that, we weren't the first... or even close.
Denmark was the first European country to ban slavery. In 1807 Britain declared the slave trade to be illegal. Sweden in 1813, The Netherlands in 1814, France in 1815, Spain in 1820.
(Another interesting ntoe: Between 1811 and 1870, 60 percent of African slaves were transported to Brazil, 32 percent to Cuba, and 3 percent to the US... although many that arrived in Cuba went next to the US.)