Originally published at: Their Loved Ones Died for the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court’s Ruling Is a New Injustice. - TPM – Talking Points Memo
Dennis Dahmer was 12 years old in January 1966 when Klansmen stormed his family home and set it on fire, murdering his father, Vernon. He still remembers the shootout; he remembers watching his father die from smoke inhalation. The trauma lingers to this day, 60 years later. Vernon Dahmer had been a fixture in the…
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It is time for all of us to just get on with making life better for our children and grandchildren It has been 60 years since the voting rights act. It has been 60 years since schools were integrated. Time for all of us to let the past be the past. We need to learn from it (big lesson some people are monsters) and move on. I am more worried about how our society is going to adapt to AI than I am about the Supreme Court killing the voting rights act.
It occurs to me that our society is in trouble on a lot of levels many of which we don’t focus on. Right now I am worried about the absolute decline of America and how we can fix it. How will a consumer driven America get money into the hands of citizens if AI destroys all the middle class jobs. Not all of us can be billionaires.
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Look at it this way the racists on the Court are pleased. It took years but they are finally getting what they want. I would call them White Nationalists but Thomas throws that moniker out the window.
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I remember each of the murdered heroes you cite and the rage I felt in those days. Those murders were two and a half years after the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. We were committed to non-violent resistance. The violence continued. But non-violent resistance won the day.
We will win again and this time our non-violent resistance will win the day for our democracy itself, for all of us, equally, inclusively in each, our own, diversity.
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“It was apparent to me that they had already made up their mind"
It does appear like the Supreme Court has an agenda that’s being organized by forces with a specific agenda having nothing to do with law or precedent. It’s an agenda that says the good of the country is bound to the good of a few individuals.
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I had someone comment to me that “now that the Supreme Court has done all of this, and claimed there is no racism and gone full in on allowing gerrymandering basically for any reason, it’s even more preposterous that they only approve Republican changes.”
If the California case had come to the court any later in this process than it did, it would have been denied like all of the others are now.
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"The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, — this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.” ― W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
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I disagree. It is not time “to just get on with making life better”. That is what white people said throughout Jim Crow.
The racism, bigotry, and hate is the problem with this country. It is the entire Trump/MAGA platform. Without it, MAGA would dry up and disappear. LBJ once said that if you can convince the lowest white person that they are better than the highest Black person, then you can rob them blind. And that is exactly what Trump and the AI tech bros are doing. Robbing us blind. Meanwhile in the south, they are taking away our votes. Making them not count. My recent vote was taken away. And guess what, if your vote doesn’t count, nothing else does either.
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The Letter is going to be lit haha
The KKKristofascists are running blindly into a public reckoning with their hypocritical blasphemy and it’s going to be so much fun to watch.
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I don’t know how the government can mandate changes in the human heart. All it can do is make overt racist actions illegal.. For the most part it did that 60 years ago. Segregation is gone. Schools are integrated. Black and brown people can and do vote. That all happened 60 years ago.
During those last 60 years our politics hasn’t progressed all that much. Instead the parties have divided the nation between the urban black and suburban white populations. The Democrats think they own the urban black and brown voters and the Republicans think they own the suburban white voters. Neither tries to poach on the others territory. Getting things done in goverment has taken a backseat. National issues like universal healthcare, improved education for all, infrastructure are ignored for racial issues and culture wars.
I don’t think the national Democratic party wants to do anything to break free. I am sure the Republicans are happy with Democratic indifference to the white suburbs (they aren’t as lilly white as they once were but they are certainly suffering from Republican rule.)
Look upon the Alito decision as a call to Democrats to try to represent all Americans including white suburban Americans. America deserves two national parties. It doesn’t need ethnic parties.
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Everest had become Disneyland lines with more expensive bragging rights. Two more dead this week.
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Nordic countries have far lower gini coefficients (a rough measure of wealth disparity in a society) and more public pride in taxes (which are higher than in the US). One principle that makes this possible is public openness, which means that basic income tax information is public, allowing anyone to look up a person’s taxable earned income, capital income, and taxes paid by individuals and corporations for a given year. When income disparities are lower, this information is generally pretty dull, but it also instills confidence that everybody contributes their fair share and is paid fairly. Income disparities between genders are also lower than in the US.
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That quote in the middle of the article,
“We wonder what we would’ve done in the 1960s in the Civil Rights Movement, in the same way that you can ask what would you have done in Germany in the 1940s? You’ve got your answer, you’re doing it now.” Marika Olsen
might be the most powerful quote of the current era I’ve seen.
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