Bill's Focus

Can take several forms

“The American Revolution” as a show is loaded with facts and observations that were new to me. Did I forget I was taught that stuff in school or was that information deliberately left out of the curriculum? Probably some of both. But after all, why spoil the myths of the “Founding Story” with embarrassing facts?

The latest documentary by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt premiered Sunday night. Last night we watched episode two. There are six and all are available to stream on the PBS app. It’s the best streaming subscription for small money. We boosted our monthly donations when our government abandoned the network.

The first episode impressed me right out of the gate with its explanation of how populous and sophisticated the Indigenous Peoples had been – living in a version of democracy for centuries. We immigrants learned a little from them – but not nearly enough. They alternately helped us and fought us. We fired back and decimated them with smallpox.

The second episode is a story of great heroism and great abuse of human life. “All men are created equal” – if you were a white male Protestant land owner. Not if you were a woman, not an African American, not a Native American, not if you were a poor “worker”. We always knew that our nation was founded while slavery, bigotry, racism, misogyny and elitism were the norm. And what the show demonstrates so horrifyingly is that the colonists (not all but a majority) were fighting for the RIGHT to retain their slaves. The British were luring their “property” away with promises of freedom. And that “property” was the backbone of the southern state’s economies. While Blacks comprised about four percent of Massachusetts population, slaves and a few free Blacks made up about 40% of some southern states. The British were not anti-slavery. But they saw a way to wound the “rebels” by stealing their property – the engines of their success.

The Declaration of Independence. I added some paragraph breaks and bolded a few phrases for emphasis.

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

”Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security…

One of the first events that rallied support from multiple neighboring colonies was the use of British “Regulars” to suppress their fellow British citizens in Boston. A standing army as a police force horrified them.

The other “principle” that infuriated the Colonists was a Stamp Tax and then a tariff on tea imports. A group of elites were taxing their own citizens without their consent.

Does any of this resonate 250 years later?

Soon, Donald J. Trump will leave power. All despots end their reigns. They die or are removed. Nothing lasts forever – let alone an almost 80 year old man with a ridiculously bad lifestyle. And we should never forget how fast presidents age in office. All of them. Trump is crumbling, caving, desperately dodging the ghost of Epstein and the failure of his policies. It’s going to be an ugly ending. But end it will.

What we should worry about is the Triumvirate of Terror. The Oligarchs, Heritage/Federalists and the MAGA Nazi White Supremacists. This “Unholy Alliance” shares the DNA of the Confederacy. Can they be removed from power through the elections of 2026 and 2028? I think so.

But will we make the same mistake that we did after the Civil War? The traitors who made brutal war on the USA were pardoned and many were welcomed back into power – into the halls of Congress. Slavery was abolished in law but continued in a new form for over a hundred years – as a fact of life for millions. And the ugly heads of this hydra are still in view.

When sanity and democracy are restored, there must be an accounting.

As someone reminded us recently:
“Richard Nixon didn’t go to prison, but his Attorney General did.”

Cells should be prepared for Trump’s cabinet and the members of ICE who violated the most basic rules of law and decency. There must be a “Nuremberg Revisted”.