Grieving

Today I am remembering and honoring all the victims of US military aggression in El Salvador, Honduras, and other parts of Latin America where George H.W. Bush and his School of the Americas engineered the destruction of democracies that did not serve the economic interests of U.S. corporations. I am remembering the dead in Iraq and Iran. I am looking at the connections between the Bush family and the Carlyle Group, and how those connections led to the kind of power wielded by billionaires now.

I am looking squarely at how U.S. policies framed the chaos that people in the northward-bound “caravan” are now fleeing. I see that caravan of families stuck between razor wire and gangs that will murder them if they return to their homelands. I am grieving, not for a billionaire who lived comfortably into his 90s, but for hundreds of thousands who have suffered because of his policies. If Ariel Dorfman isn't enough to spell it out, there's this. 

“A society of equal opportunity, without a top 1 percent hoarding the wealth and power, would actually benefit the vast majority of White people much more than racism does.” --Ibram Kendi, in Stamped from the Beginning, p. 504.