Throughout the ages, in various cultures and societies, it’s been known by various names: “The Wrath of God,” “Karma,” or as I prefer to think of it, “The Arc of the Moral Universe” that the reverends Theodore Parker and Martin Luther King spoke of. But call it what you wish, it’s real and unless there is a substantial course correction in America, our nation is about to experience a terrible, long-overdue reckoning.
Even the slave-holding founding father Thomas Jefferson realized our eventual fate when he wrote, “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” By all appearances the God Jefferson wrote of is now awakening from his 400-year slumber and His retribution is close at hand.
Our nation perhaps could have survived one calamity, either a pandemic or the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. But surviving both upheavals at the same point in time and emerging unscathed is well nigh impossible. Only fools and dunces fail to realize that we are a nation on the brink of disaster.
But this is my country too, the one my children, grandchildren and great-grandchild will occupy after I’m gone. So therefore I cannot in good conscience root for its demise, no matter how badly my people have been treated over the centuries. But I sometimes have to check myself from wishing that all of the flat-out fools following a false leader, those eschewing the basic cautions our medical scientists have prescribed — such as wearing face masks and engaging in social distancing — don’t succumb to the coronavirus. I simply cannot allow myself to become as low and callous in my thinking as those who have perceived me and my race as the enemy since 1619.
Universal justice, while it may be long delayed, is indeed very clever. It caused our nation to elect a fool for a leader so, while the other nations of the world are managing the pandemic and will emerge from it relatively unscathed, the nations being led by would-be autocrats — such as Brazil, Russia and the United States — will pay a heavy price for their recalcitrance and stupid decision-making.
While the total deaths in our country will probably not reach the terrible figure of one percent of our population of 328 million, conservatives are obviously willing to live with whatever loss of life that occurs, as long as our economy and preeminent status in the world is preserved. However, it’s all ready too late to make that diabolical trade off since we are firmly on the wrong side of history.
The consequence of our nation electing a fool in 2016 will result in our being toppled from our perch as the world’s number one superpower, which only proves how much elections matter.
Nonetheless, we will survive this current calamity and bounce back, hopefully as a fair and just country that has atoned for the sins of its past and one that at last is willing to treat all citizens with the dignity and justice everyone human being deserves.
But, at present, the jury is still out.
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsIn