Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc...

 © 4 September 2020, the Griot Poet

The 2008 presidential election was the youngest and most diverse in Pew Research history,

 

Many of that electorate,

Cast their vote for president,

For the first time ever,

Because of an Octavia Butler inspired Earth Seed vision: Hope and Change,

 

It was a mystery,

That previously,

Politicians and pundits hailed,

The magical thinking moment,

As a “post-racial society,”

 

See? We’re not racist,

White supremacy is a unicorn: it does not exist,

Your pine for reparations

And “40 acres and a mule.”

Is based on myth,

After all: you have a negro president

 

That we want to fail,

Grey Poupon, bare arms, and tan suit “controversies,”

Praying Psalm 109:8-10 over him:

 

8 May his days be few, may another take his place of leadership,

9 May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow,

10 May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.

 

At the height of the Great Recession that

His smirking predecessor gave him,

Tax cut for the smash-and-grab operation,

That always happens

 

When the criminal enterprise,

Masquerading as a political party,

Comes to power,

And works the script from the route,

All futures sour,

 

As Lincoln’s Grand Old Party

Transmogrified to

The “gang of Putin,”

 

Differences are amplified,

Racism, sexism, and homophobia stoked,

Trotting out straw men step-n-fetch,

At Hatch Act-violation, super spreader convention events,

To mask their criminal incompetence,

 

Jeet Heer wrote October 24, 2016:

“The Right is Giving Up on Democracy”

In The New Republic,

 

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc (Latin): after this, therefore because of this,

Is usually a logical fallacy,

In this instance, it fits:

 

The Constitution has gone through historical apotheosis,

Similar to the game of “telephone,”

A 3 x 5 card whispered,

To a student from first to the last friend,

Is always distorted in the end,

 

We are here:

From Crispus Attucks to George Floyd,

Nothing occurs in the void,

KKK domestic violence,

Jim Crow, night raids,

Public hangings, castrations,

and burning crosses,

Against the previous enslaved new citizens,

 

We are here,

Because this country was based on slavery: the wealth of the nation

Built on the backs of free, uncompensated, kidnapped-from-Africa labor, for generations,

 

We are here:

Because those persons were described as a fraction, 3/5th’s,

The political calculus foundation for,

The electoral college,

Designed undemocratic,

And the children of chattel,

Sold away like so much cattle,

Ripped away from their parents’ arms beyond their ancestral borders,

 

We are here:

Because those same slave owners,

Who defined us as inferior beings,

Had no problem,

Inserting their stumped mushrooms into our bodily sovereignty,

Siring Mulatto children,

In heterosexual, serial rape of African women,

 

And “buck breaking” in

Homosexual encounters meant,

To emasculate,

African males in front of their females and families,

 

Sally Hemings was not Thomas Jefferson’s “lover”:

The rape started when she was fourteen,

 

That is BY definition,

Pedophilia,

And, like all those above violent sexual acts, sadistic.

 

We are here:

Because the slaves,

Nor their descendants

Received reparations

For years of enslavement,

Murder and terrorism by the KKK,

“Sundown towns.”

Requiring a Green Book to navigate around,

And white citizens councils,

 

We are here:

Because such wealth exchange,

Might fund universal Medicare and Medicaid,

Dismissed by sociopaths as being socialist,

As reparations would dismantle,

The current biased system,

Of white supremacy,

And the reason it is opposed so vigorously,

 

We are here:

Because to justify the system,

This nation built-in mythologies,

Of superiority and inferiority,

Socially-engineered society

To self-fulfill the delusion as “prophecy,”

Propaganda codified as laws,

 

Racism = prejudice + political power,

The ability to codify your hatred and depravity,

With the legitimacy of the judiciary,

 

We are here:

Because unlike the logical fallacy:

Our current “this” is logically followed by the obvious “that.”

 

For us to have a new tomorrow – “[Built] Back Better,”

We are going to have to admit

The sins of the nation’s past,

And in the vernacular of scripture:

 

Repent.