I don’t think there has been one morning in the last thirty years when I didn’t start things off by jumping in the car, driving down to a Dunk or a convenience store and getting a regular – hot coffee, two sugars and cream. Which is why I remember the first time I walked into a Dunk, it was on Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach, FL and the guy behind the counter was a non-White guy from somewhere on the Pacific Rim.
For the same thirty years, I’ve been hearing about what will happen when America is no longer a majority White. Frankly, I couldn’t give one rat’s damn whether the country is White, or non-White or anything else. And I don’t understand why this is an issue of concern.
But I also don’t understand why anyone ever spent one minute worrying about gays getting married, or transgender bathrooms.
People are people. Am I missing something here?
Anyway, if there’s one thing which explains Donald Trump, it’s the issue of race. When you get up at a campaign rally and yell, ‘Where’s my Negro?’ you are making a racist statement that no politician has been willing to make in public since George Wallace was around. And if you stand up at a Cabinet meeting and scream something about all those immigrants coming from those ‘shithole’ countries, you’re not talking about White immigrants showing up.
And that is what’s behind this bizarre attempt by those shitheads on the Supreme Court to get rid of Roe v. Wade. Call it an attack on women, fine. Call it an attack on freedom of choice, okay.
But what is really going on is an attempt to create a new and different country for the third time.
I’m stealing this idea from my good friend and former officemate, Eric Foner, whose book, The Second Founding, should be required reading for everyone who woke up this morning pissed off at what the Supreme Court pronounced last week. It’s a short book, only 175 pages of text, but Eric really nails the issue of Constitutional revision right on its head.
The book is about the political debates which swirled around the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which were added to the Constitution between 1865 and 1870, and basically made the United States what Eric calls the world’s “first biracial democracy” by granting freedom and equality to an entire population which had previously been slaves.
These three Amendments, and here is the connection to Roe v. Wade, also shifted the authority to define and enforce civil rights to the federal government and away from the states.
This is why Eric says that the passage of these three Amendments represented a ‘second founding,’ because even though the original Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, listed rights like free speech and free exercise of religious beliefs, these amendments did not explain whether laws to define and enforce those rights would be made at State capitals or at Washington, D.C.
In Roe v. Wade, the Court held that privacy was a ‘right’ and that no state government could abridge that right by passing laws which prohibited women from exercising that right by deciding whether to terminate a pregnancy or give live birth.
Now those shitheads on the Court have decided that a Constitutional ‘right’ can be defined and enforced by every, individual state. What’s next? The ‘right’ to peaceful assembly? The ‘right’ to free speech? The ‘right’ to vote?
The 14th Amendment created the definition of citizenship as being based on a birthright. If you are born in the United States, no matter when your parents came here, you’re an American, and that’s that.
Foner reminds us about the time that Trump said he would issue an Executive Order to abolish birthright citizenship. How could he say something so goddamn offensive and dumb? You can say it and maybe get away with it when you have five shitheads sitting on the Supreme Court who also want to remake the United States back to when it was a majority White place.
Let’s not forget that the ‘second founding’ happened after the Civil War. And these three Amendments were forced on the defeated Confederate states, just as they were forced to come back into the Union, whether they wanted to or not.
There are plenty of people out there who believe that skin color matters, or that I’m better than you because I’m straight and you’re gay, or that we need to finish building the wall on the Mexica border or we’ll be overrun by all those criminals and welfare cheats coming up from the South.
Right now, these people seem to have five friends on the nation’s highest court.
They can all go f*ck themselves, as far as I’m concerned. Right now I need to get in my car and drive down to the Dunk.
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