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Local Voices: Exemplary (Presidential) Leadership

By Sean C. Bowers

True leadership beckons one to follow because of its inclusiveness, not because one shuts already open doors in exclusionary fashion to potential new citizens who would add to the overall progress.

We, as Americans, pride ourselves as being the nation on earth that best exemplifies a torch of freedom for others around the world to want to emulate. Since our inception, America has always had an inclusive open door policy of welcome in regards to immigration, understanding clearly that the varied backgrounds of our population is what helps to make US all better. Because of that very diversity, we are a richer and stronger nation.

Now we face new threats from outside and from within. Foreign terrorists seek to sell their deadly reduce-the-entire-world-to-rubble-Jihad, all in the name of their hijacked Muslim prophet, Muhammad.
One political candidate on the current horizon loudly proclaims, we as a nation, take unprecedented steps backward in time. This candidate plays his sick siren song to the ever-shrinking, scared, white, what-used-to-be-a clear majority through the FOX News Network mouthpiece. That same bullying majority brought US the provably flawed policies of the slave trade, now rebranded and repackaged as the triangle trade for Texas textbooks, effectively whitewashing history.

They brought US Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, voting districts, participation laws, voting rules and criteria, reducing equal opportunity and fairness in housing, employment, education and elections. They brought US discrimination against women, minorities, and the gay community. They brought US all the same things their candidate now proudly loudly proclaims as the pillars of his program to “Make-America-Great-Again.”

The question is, Great for whom? Great for the land-owning white men and wealthy elitists who still look at minorities as “3/5’s” of a man? Great for the white men who still think women should never have been given the vote and won’t ever deserve equal pay? Great for the same white men who still want all gays rela-GAY-ted to the back rooms of societal invisibility? Great for the white men who, still control all women’s reproductive rights to choose what’s best for their own bodies’ mental and physical stability? Great for the white men who still seek to continue to pack the Supreme Court with conservative judicial obstructionist judges? Great for the white men who still PERP-etrate and PERP-petuate the white-collar Wall Street crime, but do none of the time?

Great for all the white men who still seek to deny science’s proof of global warming because of the profitability (for them) of their existing energy oil and coal-based infrastructure systems? Great for the white men who still are the military industrial complex and still profit from all the wars they wage (covert and overt) in America’s name? Great for all the white men who built, still own, maintain, and operate their (supposedly) fair version of a privatized US prison penal system?

For those old tired white men, only one candidate embodies their hate speech, and exudes and oozes their primordial slime. They only have one choice who speaks for them in not-so-coded-hate re-tor-WRECK. They, who have stood for all the previously outlined evils, still stand UNITEDly, STATEing the obviousness of their hate for all the non-white men here or anywhere. United by that old white man hate, they cloak themselves in the Bible’s colors and robes, using their so-called “tolerant born-again Christian” religion as a smoke screen to camouflage their true immediate intentions and long-term goals.

They deliberately choose to ignore all the progress made in the name of the Civil Rights, as they ignore all the positive contributions made by minorities, women and the gay community because it simply doesn’t fit their narrative. (Funny, Jesse Owens didn’t fit Hitler’s eerily similar narrative then either in the new “Race” film now in theaters.

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So if you’re an old white man and believe in the past [and its supposed (self-centered) Greatness,] if you believe only you old white men should have a say, a vote, any and all money, power, freedoms and rights, then you’ve got your Trump card (dubbed CRAZYHORSE) for all time. Pull that magic-carpet-ride-time-machine-voting booth-lever you think can transport you back to your hey-day.

Note to the rest of US. Rig that time machine lever to only take those old white men haters back to their past heyday by themselves. Then the rest of US can get busy fixing today’s real problems together, with exemplary leadership buoyed by inclusiveness, empowered by our youth’s optimistic heart-like engines, fueled by tolerance, respect and justice- ending centuries of status quo lip-service.

Sean C. Bowers is a local progressive youth development coach, author and poet, who has written for the New Journal and Guide for seventeen years. His book of over 120 NJ&G articles detailing the issues is available via e-mail at V1ZUAL1ZE@aol.com and he does make large-scale solutions presentations upon request.

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