What I have to say (long version)

Last edited Mon May 11, 2026, 05:32 PM - Edit history (1)

...if you relate with me on this forum (or haven't yet), please give this a read.

It's what's most important to me, fwiw.


____IN so many ways, I was a direct beneficiary of the civil rights movement. In 1968, I was living in D.C. and witness to the upheaval that the shooting of Martin Luther King produced in our middle-class neighborhood. D.C. was a smoldering mess of brick right after Dr. King was killed. It was chaos for everyone. Blacks there seemed to suffer the most from the violence.

It was a fearful time for a young kid like me, although black myself. Knives, not guns, were the weapons of choice. Really tough times. Lots of robbery. Mostly blacks were the victims as well as the perpetrators.

I remember in that same period, a kid strutting down our street singing 'I'm black and I'm proud' at the top of his lungs. I was pretty young and naive, and I imagined he was saying, 'I'm black and I'm brown'. I thought to myself, Yeah, that's me. Black and brown.

My parents certainly knew the importance of civil rights, as their own livelihood and their own expectations of comity and acceptance were challenged by my African-American mother's pale skin - which was often mistaken for that of a Caucasian individual - and her marriage to my dark-skinned father.

Their own work experience was advantaged by the new civil rights initiatives which were opening the workplace for blacks and providing opportunities which often were in the very civil rights field that they were counting on to lift them out of the oppression that their earlier lives had endured during segregation, Jim Crow, and the like.

Mom worked in the personnel division at Raritan Arsenal overseeing and managing a fresh population of light-skinned blacks who had managed to find higher employment in the clerical field.

Dad had taken on civil service positions ever since his stint in the Army in New Guinea where he was given a field promotion with the expectation that he would keep his all-black unit in line and still be accommodating of the expectations of the segregating majority.

He went on to achieve a position in the federal government in the newly created Equal Opportunity Commission which was to facilitate the influx of the new generation of blacks into the federal workplace who were advantaged by the Civil Rights Act that had just passed. He moved up the ladder and retired some 30 years later in the position of Deputy Director of Civil Rights in his division of HEW.

Our progress was a progression in which the negative forces we were pushing back to allow us room and opportunity to grow and prosper fell steadily away as our generation grew and staked our claim to our newly-protected citizenship.

In many ways, the struggle was glaring, but, to those who observed our progression out of the era of Jim Crow and other resistance and indifference, it was all opportunity with the worst behind us. Slights and other aggravating remnants of the earlier racism began to fall out of public fashion (at least up north, in the region which was our nation's capital).

My father moved us to the suburbs very shortly after the riots and looting and I was propelled into a world which was green, open, and almost pristine in comparison to the broken glass and the suffering facade of our once-quiet and serene community.

The folks who I met had the same sunny, polite manner that masked any resentment or discomfort they may have felt in the presence of this brown person in the middle of the sea of light skin. It was a culture shock for me. It was likely one, as well, for the kids and adults who mostly welcomed me into their community.

I say 'mostly welcomed' because most of the folks were unfailingly polite. There was no visible tinge of overt racism in their embrace of me that summer when we arrived. There was also no visible expression of the upheaval that had characterized my former community - and many parts of the nation, as well.

I remember getting lost riding my new bike around the neighborhood in the first week in my new home. I had never been lost and I was in some sort of strange wilderness, in this pristine community and I had no recognizable bearing.

After an hour or so of an exhausting effort to weave my way out of the maze of freshly-blacktopped streets, I broke down and just went up to the first house I had the nerve to approach and rang the bell. An older white lady came out and was just as sweet as she could be. She put aside what she was doing, loaded up my bike in the trunk of her car, and drove me directly to my house.

Now, I didn't know exactly where I lived; I didn't even know the house number or the street address . . .but, somehow, this rescuing angel did. Turned out, her daughter, (Mrs. S) lived directly across from my new home. She knew exactly where this recent aberration to her community belonged.

That incident characterized the majority of my life as a black kid in an overwhelmingly white community. It represented the best of humanity; but, it also represented its hidden face, as well. We had gotten this property by the skin of my parent's wallets. Turns out that our welcome into this community wasn't preceded by a carpet of rose-petals from the residents.

Mrs. Green next door, before she died, told my mother that most of the neighborhood had been, literally, in the middle of the street, up in arms over the prospect of a black family moving in. The alleged ringleader of it all, according to Mrs, Green, had been, none other than our neighbor directly across the street; the daughter of this exceedingly kind lady who had scooped up this young transplant and deposited me at the door of my new home.

Go figure. My father came to regard these folks across the street as his best friends in the neighborhood over the years we lived there; yet, they had actually instigated against our arrival in the past. Who knew where their true affinity for their black neighbors lay?

Did it matter? We'll never know, I suppose.

Does it impact my own thinking and attitude toward that community, as I look back? Absolutely. You see, life growing up in that atmosphere of outward tolerance, was much different from what most folks would regard as acceptability and acceptance.

I remember Bill Clinton once correcting someone who suggested that we need to 'tolerate' our differences. We should 'celebrate' them instead, he had said. I was certainly tolerated in this community, but I had a difficult time gaining acceptance.

I participated in most of the activities of the others, but I never really seemed to have the same social experience as the rest of my peers and friends. There were actually quite a number of parents of these kids who would not allow me to come into their homes; and the suburbs was all about the indoors. I got edged out of many of the events which should have been the hallmark of my youth. I didn't really get a grip on the camaraderie others seemed to revel in.

It was a period of transformation of views. It was a period of misunderstanding of the, mostly contrived, differences between us.

Folks were wary and cliquish. Things like finding a cub scout troop whose mentors would welcome you into their home for meetings. Things like being invited to parties or finding room in a group for the special trips they took to ski or to the beach. This was hard for a kid.

Thing is, though, most of the racism and discrimination was well undercover. Reasons and justifications needn't be openly discussed to deny a kid access to those elements of society that folks wanted to restrict for themselves. You just turn your back.

Or, you just decide, as a group, to exclude others.


Here's the deal...

In my view, and life experience and knowledge, this nation was built on the subjugation of dark-skinned people to labor and efforts which generally and ostensibly served to support and elevate much of the white majority, to the extent that much of the celebrated progress of America could not have happened by the hands and effort of the white majority alone.

W.E.B. Du Bois, responding to the primacy of the white majority in America in his book, 'The Souls of Black Folk'

Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit. Around us the history of the land has centred for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation's heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of Right. Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive. Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse. Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood. Are not these gifts worth the giving? Is not this work and striving? Would America have been America without her (Black) people?

”

There has never been a full realization of the promises behind the 14th Amendment which intended to grant citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., including formerly enslaved individuals, and ensure equal protection under the law. Or the 15th Amendment, prohibiting the denial of the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Instead, there's been a wanton clawing back of those federal protections in successive republican presidencies since the Reagan era, aided vigorously by like-minded republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court.

Thing is, Americans already witnessed to the injustice and abuses of the past voted these republicans into office. It's not as if aliens landed from another planet and brain-boxed these people. Sure, republican politicians have honed their political appeal to the lowest denominator and have either discovered, or advantaged a well of racism in America that never went away.

We saw this during the Obama presidency with the 'backlash,' as many journos described it, against the notion of a black man and his supporters making rules and norms for a white majority, of which, many were assuming their race's (or religion's) eternal dominance over the rest of the country.

So much noise was made about affirmative action, as if blacks in America had achieved more than a tenuous parity with their white counterparts which was balanced on a disingenuous promise of equality that never occurred to millions of white in the country, and was never actually accepted by the multitudes who were made to grudgingly relinquish their spaces to people they'd been conditioned to believe were beneath them; made to be subservient in ways they'd never before even contemplated.

I remember well, my first opportunity to rise to the level of management in the retail store where I worked as a young man, and being told that I would be transferred to D.C. in a predominately black neighborhood, and asking (and getting such defensiveness) why the company seemed to be unable to keep black managers in the suburbs.

I explained to him that I grew up in this community, and in fact, had attended the high school directly in back of the store. After a few hours I was called back into the office and informed that my retail management training would begin in that very suburban country, not the suggested deporting to someone else's hometown; but not without a lecture from him about how 'offended' he was by my complaint.

I told him that, 'I appreciated his offense,' and I don't know how that went over with him, but that one act of defiance propelled me into several decades of upwardly mobile successes in that industry into retirement.

We got to a certain point in repairing the damage done in this country, with successive presidents honoring and assisting the advancement of black people through a society still inclined to discrimination as opportunism against people who can't remove the color of their skin to accommodate or negate their bias against them; and someone decided it was fine and dandy to appeal to those antipathies as a way to political power.

That's the essence of the republican party today, with their appeals to the worst of the worst, parading out the same tired, corrosive racism that their great-grandfathers once used to subjugate an entire race of people to their will.

But while this nation may well still have a well-spring of insecure losers who think blaming people of color for their own lameness makes them lions and kings; if you look around, these fools are surrounded. THAT'S why they're squealing and slopping about like stuck pigs.

They're sensing the end of their delusional political front they erected to avoid measuring their weakness and cowardly lameness against the people they've been telling themselves are 'DEI' and inferior to their sorry selves. it's been really something to see what the republican party has become as they parade around in what they believe are their best suits, and soil themselves as we watch.

My father was a proud and original archetype DEI pioneer in government and the military.

In June 1941, on the eve of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 8802 prohibiting government contractors from engaging in employment discrimination based on race, color or national origin, but it had no enforcement mechanisms.

Kennedy's order granted the EEOC Committee, initially chaired by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson (who established his own EO after JFK's death), authority to impose sanctions for violations of the Executive Order.

Roosevelt recognized the value of the untapped pool of able black Americans who would help him realize his ambitious plans for war. The recruitment and retention of qualified black Americans into the federal government and military was coupled with efforts to make educational opportunities more available to them.

Indeed, my dad began his own journey toward opportunity by joining that very war effort, and later, before joining the federal government, advantaging his higher education with the G.I. bill, and working his way up to eventually becoming Lt. Colonel in the Army Reserves, as well as Director of Civil Rights at the (Equal) Employment Opportunity Commission.

It's not just sad to see his legacy so callously discarded by this inveterate demagogue reviving remnants and vestiges of a disgustingly cruel era where my welfare and opportunities in this nation, and those of my father and family, hung on this Executive Order from 1965 to protect us from the self-interested domination over our lives by racist bigots like Donald Trump.

What Trump did in revoking the 1965 Act is to dissolve decades and decades of leadership from the federal government which forced the rest of the nation's employers to respect the rights of my father and me.

It was only through the tireless activism and advocacy of notables like Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the civil rights movement in the 1960's, who were protesting and demanding equal opportunity and access for African Americans, that politicians like John F. Kennedy and his political predecessors saw fit to introduce and advance legislation which would bring the federal government into compliance with the aim of equal employment opportunity and require contractors who were hired by government agencies to form 'affirmative action' programs within their own companies as a prerequisite for getting tax dollars from Uncle Sam.

Although President Kennedy didn't live to see the passage of the Civil Rights Act, he did manage to accommodate the lobbied demands of Dr. King in both, his Executive Order 10925, introduced. in 1961, establishing a 'Committee On Equal Employment Opportunity' (providing for the first time, enforcement of anti-discrimination provisions) ; and in his introduction of the Civil Rights Act to Congress on 19 June 1963.

Almost a year after President Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress and signed it into law. One of its major provisions was the creation of the 'Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.' The law provided for a defense by the federal government against objectionable private conduct, like discrimination in public accommodations; authorized the Attorney General to file lawsuits to defend access to public facilities and schools, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, and to outlaw and defend against discrimination in federal programs.

So, Dr. King and others in the civil rights effort, had done their part in agitating and promoting through demonstrations, the notion and the ideal of advancing equal opportunity into action and law. The passage of the Civil Rights Act was, by no means, the end of advocacy by black leaders. Neither was it the end of the political effort by Johnson and others committed to advancing and enhancing black employment and establishing anti-discrimination as the law of the land.

On September 24, 1965, President Johnson originated and signed Executive Order 11246 which established new guidelines for businesses who contracted with the Federal government agencies, and required those with $10,000 or more of business with Uncle Sam to take 'affirmative action' to increase the number of minorities in their workplaces and keep a record of their efforts available on demand. It also set 'goals and timetables' for the realization of those minority positions.

Dad completed three years of high school (vocational school) without a degree and worked as a machinist apprentice operating a drill press. As far as opportunity went in that town, he had the best of it at the machine shop.

He joined the U.S. Army, in 1942, during WWII. He'd had enough of life in Reading and the world was beckoning. That summer as he trained in munitions handling and other military tasks, U.S. troops had landed on Guadalcanal. A year later, as Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met together for the first time, Dad was aboard a Navy carrier bound for New Guinea (the time of his life).

Dad was attached to the 628th Ordinance Company and their mission was to establish an ammo dump near Brisbane, Australia. He gained a field promotion in New Guinea to Staff Sargent after his superiors recognized him as a leader among his unit of black soldiers. He had an experienced ability to relate with and communicate effectively with the majority of white commanders and superiors in the military and that also served to elevate his profile among the military leadership.

Dad returned from his voyage and two-month deployment to New Guinea and Australia, newly energized and ambitious. On the way home from the West, he had to repeatedly switch trains to ride on the 'colored' cars through the segregated states and towns.

He subsequently enlisted in the USAR in 1950 where he was assigned to work on civil affairs, recruiting, and personnel. Years after that, in 1963, Dad became a military policeman in the National Guard of the District of Columbia.

Back in his community, Dad had also organized a civic association in his home named the Raritan Valley Association which was founded to further the goal of racial equality and for "greater awareness among Negroes of their own responsibility to the community."

It was also at this time -- right at the point in 1963 where President Kennedy is introducing the Dr. King-inspired Civil Rights bill of his to a divided Congress -- that Dad was hired as an Employee/Management Relations Specialist in the Office of Undersecretary of the Army overseeing and processing complaints that passed through the Army Policy and Grievance Board.

When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, he had been promoted to a Personnel Staffing Specialist, Chief of Employee Services Section, at NASA, with responsibility for managing equal employment, mentally ill, and affirmative action programs; along with responsibility for recruiting and outreach.


Dad at NASA

By 1966, Dad was NASA's 'principle action,' Equal Opportunity Employment Specialist for the Federal Government, and assisted in the implementation of Kennedy and Johnson's 'affirmative' action-based Executive Orders, 10925 and 11246.

In 1968, after being a rare bird in the Judge Advocate General's School and completing its International Law course, he was, simultaneously appointed Deputy Chief, Placement at the Office of Economic Opportunity Personnel and Job Corps. The remnants of the OEO that were reorganized into the Department of Health and Human Services. were the last vestiges of Sargent Shriver's hopes and dreams which Nixon had dismantled and tried to underfund and eliminate.

The next year Dad was moved to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as a senior consultant top legislative officers of state, local governments, and private industry in providing ways to implement Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

By 1970, he was promoted to a position as Deputy EEO Officer, responsible for implementing and evaluating a program of equal employment opportunity for employees of the Public Health Service hospitals, clinics, and major health services divisions.

Later, as Deputy Director of OEEO and HSMHA in 1972, Dad would direct the implementation and administration of affirmative action, upward mobility programs, and the processing of the Federal Women's and the Spanish-Speaking Program which had also been folded under EEO's mantle. This was the period where EEO had been granted actual authority to file lawsuits against violators. In the past, those cases were processed and prosecuted by the Labor Dept., with EEO merely providing friend-of-the-court briefs in support or opposition.

Dad took advantage of this period to play 'Lawrence of Arabia' and leave his paperwork-laden office and go out in the field to bonk some heads. He'd take a sheaf full of the new regs and new authority and put on his best angry administrator face for the code violators and abusers he encountered along the way. Not to diminish the effect of the enforcement ability afforded EEO, there were several landmark cases which were quickly prosecuted by the government and won.

It was also during this period that my father had become frustrated over being ignored, yet again, for a promotion in his membership as a major in the Army Reserve. He had been with the Reserve for over 20 years at that point, attending to that career at the same time he was submerged in his government one. Three times he had achieved the required service for consideration for advancement, and twice he had been passed-up.

Anxious that this third bid was destined to be rejected, he wrote then- Brigadier General Benjamin L. Hunton, USAR Minority Affairs Officer, and complained about a process where there were never enough blacks available in the pool to ever stand a chance of any minority gaining the promotion.

"There are a total of 61 officers in the unit," he wrote. "Two are minority group members; a total of 67 officers in another -- two are minority group members . . . a total of 63 in yet another unit with three minority members. The first cited has seven officer vacancies."


Dad's in the far back row, third from the left, behind a soldier

"The normal promotional procedure has been to select company and field-grade officers from the companies to fill headquarters vacancies. The procedure of promoting from within is as it should be. My only reservation," he wrote, "is that there are too few black officers at the company grade level available for consideration -- and when available, not selected for promotion."

After little more than lip service from the general, Major Dad wrote then-Major General Kenneth Johnson:

"I am concerned that, despite the rhetoric and regulations, the Army Reserve and Command, have not now, nor in the past, initiated programs designed to seek and encourage blacks and other minorities to enlist in the Reserve forces . . ."

"Where they do exist, implementation of programs designed to recruit and maintain minority members has been delegated to local commanders with authority to implement according to local needs, but, without specific guidance or compliance review. Herein lies the problem; historically, the Reserve program, as you know, has been a haven for white boys. It has not changed . . . "

Major Dad recieved his commission to Lieutenant Colonel almost 3 years after he had lodged his complaints, and he retired from the Reserve at that rank in 1981.

Ironically, one year after that promotion, LTC Dad was assigned by the U.S. Army as an Education and Training Officer, providing support and assistance to U.S. Army Race Relations/Equal Opportunity Staff in preparation and presentation of the Unit RR Discussion Leader Course.



In a validating, but dumbfounding review by his commander, of his new promotion and new 'race relations' assignment, LTC Dad was described as 'diligent' and 'exemplary' in the performance of his duties. "His background as Director of Equal Opportunity for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare enabled him to greatly assist First U.S. Army in establishing the Unit Race Relations Discussion Leaders Course," the recommendation read.

He would serve as Acting Director of OEEO and the Health Services Administration from August 1973 to September 1974. Next, he would serve as Special Assistant to the Administrator for Civil Rights, and then, as Director of the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity.




Office of Equal Employment Opportunity Moves to HSA

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is about widening the net, not excluding anyone

...it's basically a commitment to look beyond more represented groups in government and businesses to recruit and retain less considered, but qualified applicants among the historically underrepresented - like women, black American, Latinos disabled, LGBTQ, transgender - in an effort to broaden and enhance both fields of experience and expertise which may not be in sufficient supply elsewhere.

White Americans aren't being displaced out of workplaces by the migrants Trump is targeting for deportation and imprisoning under dehumanizing conditions, as much as they are being challenged to compete with a wider pool of qualified applicants.

That's extremely desirable in both government and expanding businesses because of the high rate of attrition in many fields which requires a continuous stream of qualified applicants to take their place. It's just good business to maintain a large pool of applicants with expertise and experience, and that effort shouldn't be regarded as anything other than that.

from Migrant Insider:

A new working paper published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research — the first comprehensive, causal national study of the labor market effects of Trump’s immigration enforcement surge — finds no evidence that heightened ICE activity has produced job gains for U.S.-born workers. None. Not in agriculture. Not in construction. Not in manufacturing. Not anywhere.

“The chilling effect in Trump 2.0 is larger than in past mass deportation campaigns,” the researchers write, noting that during the Obama administration, each detention produced 2.3 undocumented workers who stopped working out of fear. In Trump 2.0, that ratio has climbed to six workers per arrest — consistent, the authors argue, with the increasingly indiscriminate nature of current ICE activity.

The study finds a statistically significant 1.3 percent reduction in employment among U.S.-born men with a high school degree or less working in the same high-impact sectors. The sectors where ICE enforcement hit hardest are the same sectors where American blue-collar men got hurt worst.

Why? Because undocumented workers and U.S.-born workers aren’t in competition with each other for the same jobs. They are complements — different rungs on the same ladder.

It's just not reasonable or sound economic policy to repress or exclude people of color in the function or business of government. So why do so many people seem to be acquiescing to it?

I can easily envision much of our nation's white majority pacified by just eliminating the amazingly enabled and tolerated open racism from the president, and satisfied with their own prospects for success in this country still assured, even encouraged, by the enhanced primacy of their position and place.

Why, for instance, is there still room in our economic debate for advancing the obvious and pernicious lie that immigrants, even those who are undocumented, are some kind of drag on our overall economy, instead of the supporting benefit that allows the more successful to create and sustain that economic success?

Why is there still room in our national debate to represent our nation's Black individuals and communities as a threat, instead of the supporting benefit that helps float all economic boats?

It should be clear to everyone by now, that racism isn't intended to just repress and subjugate dark-skinned people in this country, it's a direct means to render EVERYONE vulnerable to the harm which minorities experience regularly at the hands of the heavy hand of government, the courts, and businesses.

Du Bois, again:



If you, as part of that white majority, have come to recognize these injustices as a description of your own individual plight, it's because racist demagogues who've assumed positions of power and authority over us all in the Trump era understand that history of self-interest all too well that compels you measure your nation's successes by your own privileged condition.

It may well be beyond the awareness of most of us to recognize how acquiescence to subjugation of those most Americans have accepted as inferior or less-entitled to the things we all aspire to exercise, employ, and enjoy is a direct invitation to subjugate and repress ANYONE who the government or other authorities in business, health care, education, military, and the rest decide aren't worthy of the benefit of even their OWN contributions to our economy and society.

If we are to effectively confront Trump's exploiting revival of historic fears and resentments against vulnerable and marginalized Americans, we'll need a movement that emphasizes solidarity and celebrates our diversity; in effect, we need a new Civil Rights movement.

It the government is going to persist in beating people down, we need to stand them up and directly defend them with our own values and demands for recognition and protections against discrimination and abuse.

In fact, I'm a little surprised how many Democrats and others who ostensibly value diversity and their neighbors' disparate identities and origins, haven't organized an influencing campaign that celebrates the diversity within our own party; not as a matter of course, but in direct contradiction to what Trump is doing as he uses Biden's diversity initiative in government as a cudgel and tool to dismantle almost every instigation or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc. which he politically or personally opposes.

I go back to what compelled our government and nation to get behind helping Black Americans move beyond the vestiges of institutionalized racism in all aspects of American society, and it comes down to a realization by past generations that ALL of our plights are intertwined so thoroughly that, when one group is repressed, we all suffer the consequences; no matter where the blame is cast.

Trump and this reinfected generation of opportunistic bigots and racists are dragging the nation down at the same time they are blaming dark-skinned people for the decline; taking things away from ALL Americans at a rate that mirrors the evisceration of rights and opportunity for blacks after Reconstruction.

It's not just a repression of people of color, but a reorganizing of priorities of the federal government (and the other aspects of society they influence and impact) away from ALL Americans outside of a privileged, connected clique; which is shrinking in size, not expanding to include a white majority, for instance, which still believes they're gaining something by keeping their neighbors down; a majority which could be expanding along with the prospects of the very people Trump is working feverishly to exclude from opportunity and enterprise.

The white majority in America is being deliberately disadvantaged by this bigotry and racism; deliberately kept from the dynamic economy that is derived from advantaging ALL of our society in the effort to achieve the maximum of what we aspire to; not just directing all of our labor and contributions to government and society into the coffers of a privileged few in a debilitating pyramid that reduces us all to mere rungs and footstools for the wealthy to advance.

Will America just settle back into a position of decline, still blaming the people who's govt and court-enabled advancement has served for decades and decades now to elevate all of us for their economic decline?

Or, will they take this time to fully embrace their non-white counterparts in resistance of this Trump generation's attempt to divide us all from what sustains us against their undeserved grab at dominance over us all? __Ron