Sea Change Needed In USA

Slavery was abolished not quite 150 years ago and we are still trying to get justice for some of the most horrific crimes that were committed in the decades after. The Supreme Court has turned their back on the children left behind in the inner cities.

There is the Japanese-American internment camps. I never wondered in school how the U.S. came into possession of the Hawaiian Islands - Hawaii was just another state.

The U.S. helped some capitalists overthrow the Hawaiians’ beloved queen in a bloodless coup to get their hands on the sugar plantations. To most people that would be perceived as an act of aggression and so I wonder if it had anything to do with Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor?

Maybe we would be having major problems with the Native Americans, still today, if we hadn't done such a good job of almost exterminating them. But, they are off somewhere out of sight and we only occasionally are reminded of how the oil men cheated them and the politicians and money men don't even want to allow them to go "reservation shopping." That's where the tribes try to open a casino in a place where they might actually be successful.

Immense fortunes were made on the back of slavery. We pay five times the price of sugar. And the oil in Alaska and offshore is owned by all Americans, it would seem, but the oil companies drill it for obscene profits and we all pay the market rate.

That's a lot to think about. The ideals set forth by the founding fathers have never been reached. It is a work in progress. Maybe Americans should get down from their high horse and lose the holier-than-thou heavy handedness in dealing with these other cultures which most Americans KNOW NOTHING ABOUT.

I sincerely wish that women could be liberated in these places, oppression vanquished, but I think it takes much, much more than outside interference. There has to be a "sea change" in the beliefs and traditions of the people themselves.