Dot to Dot Books

When I was a child and when my own kids were small, we all liked those dot to dot books where one connects the dots in order of the numbers and a picture emerged, and then we would color the pictures.  This, of course, was before television, iPads or smartphones!  Some events have been happening in our nation in the past few years that have reminded me of those “dot to dot” books.

First off, after Barack Obama was elected President there was a lot of talk about how America had emerged from our terrible racial history, racial prejudice was a thing of the past, and we could all move on beyond that.  What a wonderful, naïve, and very short time that was!

The first dot didn’t tell us much.  Just some crazy Republican states back East that wanted to place restrictions on voting, but local talking heads seemed to think that those restrictions could be worked around.  Then some knuckle-head from Philadelphia, I think, got caught on camera talking about how they had gotten the restrictions through, and those restrictions would guarantee that Mitt Romney would win the election.  I can still close my eyes and see that doofus with his infamous, “Done”.  That was the second dot.

About this time it was made public that the very night Barack Obama was inaugurated as President of the United States, the Republicans in Congress got together and determined they would undermine anything and everything Barack Obama wanted to do.  The third dot.

More and more states began efforts to restrict voting.  Then Congress began dodging the immigration ball.  Although the Senate passed a bill, Congress refused to take it up.  First because it didn’t secure the border; then there were not enough funds for border patrol officers; then they didn’t want to pass the entire bill at once, but wanted to “piece-meal” it.  Then, and then, and then until nothing has been done.  The fourth dot.

Children from Central America began to trickle across the border into the United States.  The trickle became a stream, and then a river.  Nothing was done to fund assistance for these refugees from countries devastated by the violence from the drug trade that supplies users here in this country.  When Congress did act, it was to essentially throw these refugee children back into the cauldron of violence they had attempted to escape from.  No sense of compassion for them at all.  The fifth dot.

Mostly these same states were also refusing to expand Medicaid services for poorer people under the Affordable Care Act.  That these poorer people were mainly African and Hispanic Americans was never mentioned overtly, but it certainly became pretty obvious that was the intent.  Somehow it never occurred to those making the decision not to expand Medicaid which would make people sicker, would then make them go out and look for a part-time or minimum wage job that provided health insurance benefits!  Another dot.

This past week in Ferguson, MO, was a real horror.  To shoot an unarmed teen-ager, still a boy, because he was walking down the street with a friend was disturbing.  And when his community members came out onto the streets to protest that killing to have to face even more violence was nearly intolerable.  To watch citizens of the United States denied the right guaranteed to them under the First Amendment, “…the right of the people to peaceably assemble…” made me shiver.  Virtual tanks on the streets with a sniper riding on top in a small town in Missouri!!  Another dot.

Now, once again, the police are trying to infer that the boy that was killed had been involved in the theft of a box of cigars at a local store.  So what if he had?  Is a box of cigars worth shooting an unarmed boy over?  I think not when one considers the Wall Street tycoons who stole billions of dollars and walked away without even so much as a slap on the wrist.  Another dot, however.

At the same time as all of this is going on, in another corner are the people who keep saying that, “We have to take our country back”.  At first there was just the question, sort of asked generally, “Back from who, or what”?   After the census numbers were released from the 2010 census that indicated there was a significant demographic shift taking place in the United States, and that the traditional white majority would, by the year, 2020, not be the majority anymore, it became really obvious what has been going on.  Another dot.

After all of these dots are connected, the picture that has emerged is really pretty sick.  Now we know who the “who or what” is.  There are enough white people in power who believe that it is possible to knock women, and black, brown or Asian’s back into their proper place.  Which is to be second class citizens in a country ruled by a white male power elite. 

The only advantage of the picture we have drawn by connecting these dots is that those within the dots are already colored, so we won’t have to do that coloring.