First Person: Living in the Last Days of the American Republic

[The Straight Story]

First Person: Living in the Last Days of the American Republic
By Marvin Chachere (01-08-08)


Many distinguished scholars agree in general that we are witnessing “the last days of the American Republic.” But, ordinary people don’t need to rely on scholarly insights because the evidence that our republic is failing hits us almost every day, evidence summarized in the record low job approval ratings of both President Bush and Congress.

So many basic prescriptions of the Constitution have been violated that our government no longer honors the genius of its founders: legislative, executive and judicial powers go unchecked, unbalanced and often overlap. Even so, I can neither weep for the loss nor welcome what we have become.

The reason I do not weep arises from the conditions of my growing up in Mobile, Alabama, at a time when Jim Crow was in its prime; I was too white to be Negro and too dark-skinned to be white.

The Constitution allowed for each slave a political credit worth 60 percent of a man and this allotment was deposited in the voting accounts of the slaveholders. Emancipation effectively emptied those accounts and a subsequent attempt at redirection—“forty acres and a mule”—failed. The void was eventually filled by the “separate but equal” doctrine. Then Jim Crow arrived to personify prejudicial practices and to impose capricious and degrading legal limits on former slaves and their descendents. Thus, the 60 percent credit evolved into a segregated condition fixated on a “one drop” rule—one drop of Negro blood from one of my sixteen ancestors debased, by fiat, gallons of other kinds.

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?issue=01-08-08&storyID=28892

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

1. Good article. K&R