I Thought We Were The Good Guys

I thought We Were the Good Guys 

The United States of America. A beacon of hope and light, democracy and prosperity for the whole world. We are the defenders of human rights and democracy and always there to help the hungry and the oppressed.  

We live the good life here in America. We live how everyone wants to live and how everyone should live. The land of freedom that oppressed people from all over the world escaped to. 

We are the good guys.

A light without a shadow.  

Oh yeah. Of course, when those adventurous, courageous and oppressed people made their way to America there was a little inconvenient truth. They landed on land already inhabited. It was a land where people and animals and plants had flourished together for thousands and thousands of years in harmony.  

The Europeans did not make it their job to learn from this harmony nor to fold gently into a current and beautiful way of life, but they arrived as conquerers. They proceeded to plunder and kill whatever got in their way, and maybe sometimes just for fun. They committed genocide not only on the people living in the new land of plenty but on the herds of animals, the forests and the pure waters. 

The good guys?  

Oh yes, they brought Christianity.  

That beautiful religion teaching to turn the other cheek. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute them. The message that God loves them.  

To share their religion of love and joy they ripped children from their families. They beat the children who clung to those savage old ways of walking gently on this Earth and thinking of all of life as relatives to be loved and respected. How dare those savages not welcome and cherish this God of love the Europeans brought as they killed their parents and friends and ravaged the land and non human relatives. 

With the land conquered and tamed there was still much work to do to force this land to give up its bounty. A bounty it had poured forth abundantly since the beginning of time. The native people, having proved to be useless as slaves, were killed so it became necessary to travel the ocean and rip people away from their homeland and their people to bring them as property for profit to this land of the free and home of the brave, to do this work for them. Free? Brave? This is what we call brave? Certainly lazy since they wanted other people to do their work for them. 

So now we have the land. A land established through genocide and built into amazing prosperity through slavery.  

The land of the free and the home of the brave. A Christian nation built on the firm foundation of God’s love.  

What is wrong with this picture? 

But hey, we have Democracy! We developed and taught the world democracy and are still spreading it to the far corners of this Earth so everyone can live free. Yes. We really are the good guys. American democracy is such a great thing. Our gift to the world. 

Oh, you mean we learned democracy from the Iroquois? Yes, The early settlers learned from them about democracy, shared decision making, fair and equal. Yes. We learned and then proceeded to kill them and try to build a new nation based on democracy. Well, democracy for the white, male, landowners. But hey. It was a start.  

Oh yes, it was a start. And our story is that we are continuing to expand our circle of equality to include more and more of the people; Black people, Women, …. You know the drill.  It will be a long time before they start to include the rivers and the mountains and the forests as the original people did. 

All that has somehow all been known and yet still we continued to believe we are the good guys.  

And me? I kind of thought we were. I knew all that had happened. Still, I hadn’t quite put the pieces together. I genuinely believed we still sought to bring aid to the needy and democracy to the oppressed. I believed the Democrats were the party of concern and care for the working class and the poor. Standing on their behalf, creating laws to protect the people, the environment and choosing peace over war. Except maybe it was a good thing to take on Germany because they were the bad guys. 

But a country founded on genocide and built on slavery does not all of a sudden become the innocent hero of all that is good. We are the country that created the A-bomb. We are the country that continues to hold the entire world hostage with the ability to kill literally everything. We are the country that created ( and continues to do so) coups to topple democratically elected governments and plant a government to our liking so we can control them and steal their resources.  

But we give so much aid to the poor countries. Opps, Turns out a huge percentage of that is what one might call shark loans. Where it puts the country in debt and therefore controlled by us forever.  

But really, we go to the rescue of Ukraine to selflessly protect that poor democracy from the unprovoked dictator of Russia. Oh no, you mean there is more to that story too? Well, if Russia put military bases 300 miles from Washington what do you think America would do? And what? We supported a coup in Ukraine that disrupted a genuine democracy and put in our guy? And there was a promise to Russia years ago to not expand NATO and now we keep expanding? Hey. Why would those things make Moscow feel threatened? 

Inch by inch this veil is getting ripped away in front of me. It feels traumatic and painful. Starting to see things I never wanted to see. Understand things I never wanted to understand. Learning that those I trusted, voted for and supported, thinking they were the good guys and it would make the world a better place to vote for them are leading us into war after war and right off a terrible cliff.  

Climate change is threatening humans and a multitude of our other relatives with extinction. Yet still, Democrats and Republicans keep subsidizing fossil fuel and cattle industry, the main causes. The lies that come out of the “news media” serve to keep us all ignorant of all the realities that could help us wake up and shift course. 

Mass shootings happening every week makes me begin to wonder, maybe there is something going on here besides a few bad apples. And wow, why would so many young people be committing suicide or addicted? I am starting to seriously question this good guy idea.  

We have a pandemic and thousands are dying. Helpful (even if only possibly helpful medicines) are outlawed BEFORE the CDC has anything else to offer. That fact alone set me to thinking…something is fishy here. So I started listening to information outside the national media narrative. 

 Wow, I am shocked how much censorship is going on. How many good credentialed and brilliant doctors are getting black listed and shut out for challenging the national narrative. Hmmm, to my understanding it has never been the good guys who do the censoring. If you have truth on your side you don’t have to censor. And then low and behold, the pharmaceutical companies become wildly rich and the rest of the world never really recovers. It begins to dawn on me the the level of lies I have been swallowing all my life. 

I have always considered myself a Democrat. This was not only a significant sense of identity for me personally but also part of my family identity, something we all shared. I feel deeply betrayed when I watch the Democrats all buying in and supporting the censorship. When I see them create and benefit from war in Ukraine to weaken Russia so the USA can still be in control of the whole world. And we do it using Ukrainian bodies and just American money.

The last vestiges of my crumbling belief that we are the good guys got violently ripped away as I witness undeniable genocide in Gaza, knowing that this is happening with America’s Democratic administration’s full support. We support it with weapons and money and protection and voting against a ceasefire that the whole rest of the world can see needs to happen. These are the people I voted for? Trusted to be peacemakers and support for the poor and oppressed? I can’t seem to hold all this in one basket. Everything I thought I knew and trusted keeps tumbling out of the basket. 

An African friend of mine recently said he wanted to come to America because we are so advanced and he wants to learn from America so he can help his country.  

I feel like shaking him. 

Really? Really? You buy that? You know, don’t you, that we are advanced down a road that is taking us and the whole world off the climate change cliff. You know don’t you that we are only prosperous because we are riding on the backs of you and of all the people whose land and resources we rip away from the very poor countries who would be rich themselves if we weren’t stealing their resources and keeping them in debt. Your country is in trouble because we put it there. Do not learn from us. Find your own play book. This one I hope is dying.