The Nature of Things

Hat tip to Daily Kos and Tom Tomorrow for the cartoon and to Donald Trump and company for the idea behind it.

Slavery was the original sin of my country. Or maybe it was hypocrisy. After all, a country that, with a straight face, claims to be founded upon the principle that all men are created equal while simultaneously keeping in enslavement a good percentage of the men who live in that country is a country that practices mendacity and dissimulation even in its founding documents. Two hundred and thirty-nine years have, unfortunately, not been sufficient to wipe away the stain of that original sin, the original lie, and we still suffer the consequences of it today. The acceptance of slavery at the founding of the country has cast a long, long shadow across attitudes toward those who were enslaved and their descendants. It continues to affect our society and our politics in pernicious ways. It has repercussions on how we deal with social inequities and why we have been more reluctant than any other modern Western country to implement policies that would serve to enhance the equality and the qu...