Note: This is my 100th and last article.

I would like you to look at a demographic map posted last year on reddit. Here is the link:

https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/aoodm8/how_the_electoral_map_would_look_if_only_voted/

In this country this week, over 70 million people felt the need to re-elect as President a man with a history of criminal behavior, a man who refuses to accept any authority other than his own belief system, a man who has attacked and threatened democracy at every level in every way possible for four years, a man who has threatened the lives of some American citizens and abandoned all of our lives to a pandemic, a man who has used the office to enrich himself, his family, and his cronies.

That’s over 70 million votes against the fundamentals of democracy and in solidarity with bigotry and xenophobia, in solidarity with negligence in the face of a pandemic.  Those were not votes to improve the lot of people who have been marginalized, discriminated against, or impoverished – not the little Black boys who have to be taught excessive caution around police officers, not the rural poor who struggle to feed their families, not the Muslims whose mosques are being defaced, not the Central American immigrants in fear of deportation. Those votes reflect how tangled up in our racist history we remain.

That is why I believe a civil war continues to be fought in this country. People who have power and privilege, of any kind, do not want to give it up. Most men still do not want women to be treated as equals in all ways – salaries, business leadership, family responsibilities, political power. Most white people, both men and women, do not want all BIPOC or all gender identities to be equal in all ways – employment, political power, the arts, housing, health care.

Slavery, the defining issue of the Civil War, is about one set of people trying to dominate and control another. Slavery today manifests through our cultural and political terminology: socialism, racism, cultural resentment, minorities, gender bias, bigotry, religious freedom, conservativism, originalism. The labels are an effort to keep some people in the ranks of our superiors while casting others as inferior to some supposed mainstream. It’s about society rewarding the superiors and punishing the inferiors: a thinly disguised form of slavery, a cloak for polite company to put over the term slavery.

Slaves are treated as property. Witness the number of males who believe a woman’s reproductive rights, and women’s health care options, ought to be dictated by men. Witness the gerrymandering of voting districts by Republicans, in order to exclude the human bodies of color that would vote against them. Witness the corporations paying billions to elect officials who will allow them to continue building pipelines and drilling rigs on land owned by individuals and tribes, while we are in a climate crisis of Biblical proportions.

According to Wikipedia, “Slavery relies heavily on the enslaved person being intimidated either by the threat of violence or some other method of abuse.” Witness the ICE organization and its tactics of intimidating immigrants, often accompanied by violence. Witness the long list of Blacks killed at the hands of white supremacist police officers. Witness the treatment of Native American protesters at Standing Rock. All of these cases reveal a contemptuous crushing of the civil rights that are readily afforded to white people.

For the past four years, I have hoped that I could help to address this issue by writing about what equality looks like in day to day life. As I wrote, I kept an image in mind of white people who were fundamentally good folk, but who were scared or nervous about what it would mean to make the equality they take for granted available to everyone. Churchgoers. Grandmothers. Neighborhood volunteers. I wanted to help at least some of these people relax, look at life a little differently, and consider the benefits of equality.

But this web page has never achieved the audience I hoped for. The number of readers and members has remained painfully small, and those that do read, don’t comment to engage others in conversations about racism and discrimination. I’d rather have people arguing fiercely with me on each posting than to have this deafening silence.

I have decided to end my efforts here, with the 100th essay, and look for other things I can do to promote equality and justice for everyone.

One of the things I am doing is reading more books on anti-racism and more writing by people of color. I want to see more films and more artwork by minorities. This past year, after the death of George Floyd, I started looking for ways to learn more about systemic racism. As I began to expand my reading on this issue, I realized that my ideas on equality, however well informed by my own education and experiences, have been extensively hampered by my privilege as a white person in this culture. I have much more to learn.

We need to hear other voices – the voices of people who daily experience the pain of racism, bigotry, and discrimination: Black people, indigenous people, Puerto Ricans, immigrants, the poor and suffering. It’s long past time for us to listen. Listen and act.

We need to hear the loud, clear voices of our faith leaders, whose prophets and ancient teachers called on us to care for one another, to look out for every single person – no exceptions. The Pope has been providing this leadership for our pathological society, giving his blessing to the LGBTQ family, deploring the harsh treatment of immigrants, and supporting Black Lives Matter. The Reverend William Barber, Jr, has spent the past four years organizing the voices of the poor and disenfranchised into the Poor People’s Campaign. We need similar leadership from all faith communities, all churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples across the country.

In the meantime, I have no use for the political labels that divide us. Living as equals is about giving up that ingrained sense of superiority – about anything. It’s about living up to your values. If you say you value all lives, you must value the lives of all Native Americans enough to teach their history. You must enact laws and budgets that value the lives of all prisoners, and the lives of all children living in poverty, and the lives of all immigrants, and the lives of all Black people, and the lives of all of the sick and elderly.

If you say you value education, you need to accept decades of research into preschool education and start taking steps to ensure that this country has universal child care and preschool education led by teachers who are certified to the highest standard. You must fight to make all public schools excellent – no exceptions; to promote an accurate history of all the people in America, not just a white people’s history; to eliminate student debt, and to pay our teachers wages commensurate with their education and experience.

If you display the American flag on your body and your automobile, declaring your love for America, you need to work to ensure that the military budget allocates resources to keep military families high above the poverty line and work to ensure excellent care for our veterans.

Over 75 million people voted to end the current President’s term of office and bring in a democratic leader.  That’s roughly 5 million more people than those who were willing to sacrifice the entire democracy to keep in office someone who does not care a fig for anything except his criminal empire and money. That, my friends, is a very, very thin space between citizens holding on for dear life to their supposed superiority, and citizens who embrace a future for this country that makes life better for all of us. I’d like to think it shows progress over the past four years, but what it really shows is the exceedingly hard work of people like Stacey Abrams, Reverend Barber, the Sunshine movement, and Black Lives Matter, to get the vote out among those who have been the historic victims of prejudice.

Living as equals is about human kindness. It’s about cultivating generous, warm hearts, instead of closing them off, prejudice by prejudice. It’s about treating every single person we encounter as an equal. In this era of divisiveness, to live as equals means finding ways to build an understanding of one another’s viewpoints, making reforms that move us closer to our ideals, and wanting to do it with kindness and respect for one another.

It’s hard work. Yet, if we each convert one person with self-centered, bigoted, or racist views into an anti-bigot, anti-racist, that could mean the thin space swells to 10 million people next time we have a national election. And so it goes. I wish us all godspeed.