Even if Harris/Walz wins, I have begun to reckon with the idea that my country as I’ve known her is dying, if not dead already. That America cannot overcome its original sin. That the center cannot hold.
There’s a saying people like to whip out because it makes them sound smart.
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.”
Thing is, it’s not true. It’s never been true. It’s, as this Reddit post says better than me, an ancient and “utterly baseless morality tale.”
Because what the saying conveys isn’t truth but confirmation bias. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. A conspiracy theory. A comforting mask placed over the face of an unknowable future.
But what’s scarier isn’t the lickspittle collaborators willfully blind to the evil they launder. It is the true believers bringing about the white supremacist project with lust and zeal, for whom the future is not unknowable but a single rigid line leading to a preordained outcome.
The white supremacist project and its goal of a Christofascist ethno-state in America is based on the support from Christian evangelicals, nothing less than an apocalypse cult at the colonial root of the American experiment (see also Puritans and Millerites).
To hold the Bible to be the literal Word of God is to believe that Israel is central to the end times when Jesus does his Second Coming blah blah blah.
“One main strand of evangelical theology holds that the return of Jews to the region starts the clock ticking on a seven-year armageddon, after which Jesus Christ will return.” (The Guardian)
This ideology enslaves the land and taxes the environment and biosphere, rather than coexisting in any sort of harmony, because why bother, the world’s gonna end, so get while the gettings good.
As the climate degrades, it is hard not to see the extreme weather events as Earth’s vengeful retaliation for years of abuse while at the same time feeling heartbreak that the worst consequences will be visited on the most vulnerable and least deserving. This will be seen by the white supremacists and their Christian evangelical allies as further confirmation of their beliefs.
Yet another self-fulfilling prophecy.
TOMORROW: The Original Sin of America, Part VI: Good Night, and Good Luck
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