A Disconsolate, Sick-hearted America in Full Display
By Norman Franklin
The day that the legal system worked as it should was heralded as a sad and dangerous day. Conservative pundits, politicians, the convicted and layer sons of celebrity cults echo in a united chorus. They sing a sad, sad song. America is broken.
I can think of sadder days. I can think of times and events more egregious that signaled the sad state of America.
A sad day is apparently relative.
Lady Liberty lamented in sepulchral unutterable sad ness on February 18, 1915. Then President Woodrow Wilson hosted a screening of The Birth of a Nation at the White House. His family, friends, and the film producers viewed the silent film in the East Room.
Wilson applauded the racist mythopoetic film as true and accurate history. “It is like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” The Torch of Lady Liberty is still raised high, the flame of liberty still flickers, the broken shackles of an ignoble past lays at her feet. It would have offended the South ern insurrectionist to have it in her hand. The shackles were to symbolize the end of chattel slavery.
America lumbered with disassociated compassion as the tenebrous proceedings of the Houses of Congress failed to codify justice for Americans of African descent. There were 200 attempts to pass antilynching laws.
As the legislature debated, more than 4,400 African Americans swung from lamp posts, tree limbs and bridge abutments. The racial terror lasted from 1877 to 1955.
Vigilante justice. Whites were judges, jury, and executioner. The offenses were defined by restrictive social norms.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, “Lynch Museum” located in Montgomery, Ala., chronicles the horrors perpetrated during the years of congressional ambivalence.
The Emmitt Till Antilynching Bill passed in 2022. Till was the 14-year-old Chicago teen murdered in Mississippi in 1955.
There was a short film clip of a loyal brokenhearted supporter on that fretful day of the Trump conviction. The woman profusely weeps over an outcome she was unprepared to accept; the reach of the Criminal Justice System – it applies to all Americans.
Her heavyheartedness emanates from the misperception that the convicted is the light for Chris tian America. She is glum because the ‘light’ is being persecuted. The Criminal Justice System is incapable of justice.
It is not clear what her spiritual eyes see.
Jesus, the Messiah, has become Jesus, the American Patriot.
In Matthew 6:22-23, the Jesus of the Bible said, “The eye is the lamp of the body. Therefore if your eye is sincere, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is evil, your whole body will be dark. Therefore if the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”
January 6, 2021 was a sad and dangerous day for America. Four people died in the mob-lead attack on the Capitol. Five Capitol Police Officers on duty that very sad day in America died from injuries in subsequent weeks. The bereaved families saw accountability skirted and the tenor of the insurrection framed as tourist orderly strolling through the Capitol Rotunda. America should have wept with the mourning families.
Speaker Mike Johnson was forlorn in a Cimmerian desert of despair. It seems inconceivable that the Criminal Justice System would effectively prosecute the rich, privileged, and powerful. The poor and marginalized are rightly subjected to the thumb of law and order.
The crestfallen Speaker intimates that the Supreme Court should intervene. He co-ops the strategy of painting the Justice System as corrupt. The echo chamber of conservative Republicans is falling in line with the strategy.
Will Speaker Johnson, second in the line of succes sion to the Oval Office, honor the system of democracy he is sworn to uphold? Are the lapdog antics of Johnson indicative of the character, integrity, and honor with which he will serve the nation?
A sad and dangerous day for America! There have been many sad days in America. There are many more sad days ahead for America.