The Guilty Truth

The "Guilty Truth" of America is much older than the United States.

It was here for the Pequot War in 1634-38, at the Boston gallows in 1660, and in 1692 Salem.  It was with us in the Philippine "Zones of Protection" enforced by the US Army
in 1899, the "Strategic Hamlets" in Vietnam, and at My Lai. It rode us as we devastated Central America with rape, torture, and massacre in the 1980s, and it clutches us now as we prop up Gulf Oil dictatorships with drone strikes and other forms of unrelenting terror.

The "Guilty Truth" showed its face when slaveholders enabled our 1776 political revolt, and it glowers out from us now as we imprison more citizens (most of them young men of color) than any other state on earth.

Today most Trump supporters surely do know that by voting for Trump, they are voting for torture, for terror, and (as Paul Krugman aptly puts it) for making America White Again. And, deep down, most Trump supporters probably also know (and some - maybe? - hope) that it's all a cruel sham. Trump will betray them too.

But who can appeal to the "Better Angels of our Nature" when all such appeals sound like lies? And those appeals ARE ALL LIES, if we can't face our truth which is a guilty one, but may also be more than that. We are all condemned to lack words for our human truth (crushed and twisted now by the idiot greed of the .01%), but a big part of that truth is out there in plain sight.  It's there on the cold streets of panhandlers, in the eyes of our veterans, and there in the fiery veins of the American youth and the middle oldsters craving for their angry fix.

Our truth is a guilty truth. That is the human condition. Unlike the wolf, the snake, or the spider we can hate ourselves for what we do, what we have done, and what we have failed to do. We can even despise and punish ourselves for what we know we will - or will not - do today and tomorrow.

If there are "Better Angels" of our human truth, they sometimes hide.  But their hiding place is never secret.  They always hide beneath the shameful and guilty parts of our truth.