How did we get here? Once again, America has been faced with the option of moving forward or moving backward. Once again, we find ourselves at a fork in the road, and once again, we are struggling to establish a United States of America.

So why the indecisiveness? Why the hesitation? Why the rationalization and justification? Why is it so hard to simply do the right thing?

Can America be made great AGAIN when it was never legally great for everyone?

Perhaps, in reality, America is bleeding out. While some are seeking to stop the hemorrhaging others can’t seem to stop cutting.

Cutters cut out of pain, engaging in SIB (Self-Injurious Behaviors). It is an act of destruction fueled by desperation. It acts as a distraction from deeper-rooted underlying and unaddressed issues. It is often rooted in fearing the loss of control, and emotional distress.

Perhaps it’s the fear of retribution for 400 years of racialized oppression and brutality. Perhaps it’s the fear of the homogenous population becoming a minority. Perhaps it’s the fear of Black leadership and Black success or the fear of shared resources and providing due reparations for the descendants of America’s enslaved and victims of Jim Crow legislation and legally denied opportunities for economic advancement. I suppose that can be quite scary for those who have been so diligent in the struggle “to keep Blacks in their place” by any means necessary. So, more cutting goes on. Cutting words, cutting policies, cutting rights, and cutting personal behaviors.  

America celebrates the 4^th of July every year, acknowledging its freedom from the tyranny of Great Britain, and marking the end of being controlled by a monarchy under the ruling thumb of King George III. America celebrates its DECLARATION of INDEPENDENCE.

But in this election cycle, we stand at the precipice of deciding whether we are willing to forsake the Constitution and return to a monarchy or seek to maintain our democracy. Some seem ready to take the razor to what so many have maintained to be a sacred document, virtually handed down by God Himself. And the cuts continue, leaving us a bloody mess.

The cutters are cutting voting access to communities of color. They are cutting Affirmative Action. They are cutting our children’s access to reading materials by banning books. They are cutting programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). They are cutting the pathway to the teaching of well-rounded comprehensive history in our public school curriculum. They are cutting presidential accountability. They are demonizing and cutting opportunities for immigrants seeking asylum from violence and oppression, and a better way of life for their families. They are cutting bridges to prosperity and the advancement of the middle class with lower wages, higher taxes, and a growing cost of living while providing lower taxes, higher wages, and bonuses for the wealthy. We have a nation of cutters in a position of power propped up by a base of supporters who can’t seem to realize that they are hemorrhaging.  

 But this is nothing new. America has always been hemorrhaging via a thousand cuts with a razor, made right here in the USA. It’s the psychological warfare of microaggressions perpetrated by the indoctrination of racism/white supremacy. It’s a system that has been thoroughly baked into America’s social construct and well established at an institutionalized level. It’s all that accompanies such a well-developed structure on an individualized basis. It’s the discriminatory practices and biases that can function overtly or at a subliminal level. It’s years of conditioning and the normalization of a lopsided system that caters to white privilege without apology. It’s the consistency of discriminatory practices and accepted as “that’s just the way it is.”

America was born with disabilities. It’s been a walking contradiction from day one when it celebrated freedom from a tyrannical governing body in Europe while 450,000 Blacks were enslaved representing 90% of their population. Many, about 25 of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, owned slaves. This included some of the most well-known Founding Fathers of America such as Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Mason, and Monroe.

“What to the slave is the 4^th of July,” asked Frederick Douglass in his speech delivered on July 5, 1852, in his hometown of Rochester, New York. Said Douglass, exposing America’s hypocrisy, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. . . . I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism a sham, your humanity a base pretense, and your Christianity a lie.”

The promises of the Constitution were reserved for those deemed “white,” rich white male landowners, to be more specific. All others had to fight for inclusion and are still fighting to “cash in a check marked insufficient funds,” as stated by Dr. King during his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered during the march on Washington in 1963. More than 100 years later, America was still engaged in self-injurious behaviors and cutting herself.

How much better could the nation have been if it hadn’t habitually denied the education of a large segment of its population? How much healthier would it have been if it had not consistently denied opportunities for the POC to excel and benefit ALL of America with their gifts and talents? Racism and discrimination are ugly and detrimental to any organisms that seek to be healthy. It is a poison which defiles the entire system. It’s a cancer which, if not treated, can destroy the whole body, one organ at a time, and lead to a very painful death. Perhaps, America as we know her, is at death’s doorstep now. Only time will tell, and this upcoming election will give us our medical prognosis.