The No-Win Scenario

The United States was Admiral James T. Kirk in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," right before the near-fatal encounter with Khan aboard the Reliant. Spock makes the following observation: "There are two possibilities. They are unable to respond. They are unwilling to respond." At that point, he has given Kirk a clear warning: this is accidental or on purpose.

We all learn shortly thereafter which it is.

We are now James T. Kirk after the attack on the Enterprise. the turbolift doors have opened, and there is Chief Engineer Scott, holding the plasma-burned body of his nephew, Midshipman Preston. The shock envelopes the bridge leading to audible gasps and a pained expression on Spock's face.

You might wonder why I would talk of the country in these terms. Not everyone may be familiar with the movie, and while "Star Trek" is a global phenomenon, many people would not think to imbue it with more than entertainment value. But the many series and movies have always been about telling the story of the human species (and other species) from a distant perspective, to highlight the issues we face in the current centuries.

Right now, is our Wrath of Khan moment.

We seem to be dealing with the No-Win Scenario, mentioned as part of reminiscence about Kirk's days in the academy, taking a character test called "The Kobayashi Maru," in which cadets are faced with a situation which has no practical solution. Kirk, deciding the conditions of the test were unwarranted, reprograms the simulation to "win" the no-win scenario. Rather than being expelled, he gets a commendation for "original thinking." Even in the 23rd Century, a white man can fail upward.

Our no-win scenario is this: we cannot trust the Democratic Party to fight for us with all the necessary vigor and fortitude, despite their best of intentions. We cannot get the Republican Party to care about us at all. Given the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election, it does not appear we have anywhere to turn. All the signs and portents indicate that we have stepped off a cliff, to plunge into a chasm of Fascism, from which we cannot recover. We are enveloped in a miasma of hopelessness that has rocked so many of us progressive stalwarts to the core.

As we know from the movie, Kirk eventually defeats Khan, with guile, trickery, and the use of knowledge and skills Khan, despite his intellect, does not possess. He harnesses everything in his power to bring about a successful conclusion to the adventure... but at a heavy cost, that of the life of his friend and first officer, Mr. Spock.

This is what we face. In order to turn back the tide of White Christian Fascism that threatens to overwhelm and undermine our Constitutional republic, we are going to have to tap the deep veins of knowledge, experience, and original thinking that we possess, to beat our opponents at their own game. They have had the advantage of time, time to plan, time to be outraged, time to plot their vengeance, and we are left with very little. But those of us not subsumed by the darkness of our situation have energy, determination, knowledge, and healthy dose of cunning to use in order to rescue ourselves from the situation. To do this, we're going to have to set aside the preconceptions of what the election represents, and focus on the future, and what steps we will need to take.

We may very well face hard sacrifices, and there will be casualties. No fight against Fascism is ever free of them. We have an opportunity, if we play our cards right, of stopping the march toward autocracy before it gets too far down the road. There are always possibilities. Now we have to find them and exploit them to arrest the slide of democracy into the void.

Straining At Invisible Chains

There is no Emancipation Proclamation for bigotry.

There is no Civil Rights Act for hatred.

There is no Civil War for racism.

No matter the extent of actions taken to drive out slavery and tamp down the racism behind it, it will not die. It may be strangled, it may be driven under rocks, it may be forced from the light of day, but it rests below the surface, sits quiescent in dark corners, and it waits.

The Black portion of America is straining at invisible chains. Ephemeral, insubstantial, but as strong as the strongest irons that ever held their ancestors in the bottom of ships bound from Africa. Chains forged in racial supremacy, scientific impurity, and patriarchal psychology, by a White race that has done its level best to make every effort to prove its inherent superiority while simultaneously proving Black inferiority. No amount of blood on the battlefield nor ink on paper has rid America of the scourge of systemic, endemic racism.

We can proclaim progress, we can point to a Black President and a museum dedicated to the African-American experience, we can point to all the walks of life where Blacks can now be regularly found, and still there are the invisible chains. No Black person may be made to dance on the auction block, but they are still for sale in the marketplace of ideas, and the idea that they are a threat, that they are lazy, that they are expendable, are all bought and sold in blood and rhetoric.

Police still routinely shoot Black people who pose little threat to them, claiming "imminent danger." GOP Congressmen regularly denigrate Blacks as dependent on government, and a GOP Presidential nominee has lumped all Blacks into the category of having little or nothing to show for their efforts.

We can see, in the clear air of the 21st Century, the biases that wove the bonds of slavery, that built the self-reinforcing system that perpetuated the idea of racial superiority. We can see the tricks and obfuscations and tyranny used to continue to hold the Black race in thrall to the White race. Even with all the steps taken by so many, Black and White, to scour clean the stain of slavery and bigotry from the nation, like Lady Macbeth, we curse that apparent inability to blot it away. It seeps out from the pores of a nation that has defective cells in its marrow that perpetuate this cancer.

Where will the day come that a Keith Scott, or a Sandra Bland, or a Tamir Rice, or a Mike Brown, or an Emmett Till, might walk down the street and not be the subject of the depredations of police? When will legislators understand that affirmative action is the redress for a system that was designed to prevent Black inclusion in colleges and universities? When will the Voting Rights Act no longer be necessary?

Right now, our nation seethes, as one man has brought into the daylight the bigotry and racism most decent Americans have tried to hold down for decades. Donald Trump's atonal ignorance on matters of Blackness is only superseded by his willingness to overlook the overt racism of many of his followers. He cannot see the chains that still bind Blacks to centuries of scorn and sabotage and slavery through White supremacist attitudes. It easier to claim on one hand that no one has helped them, and on the other that they need to help themselves, and that somehow, he alone, can be their emancipator, though his history is strewn with his own racist tendencies.

Now, in our nation, we finally have a chance to deal a severe blow to racism. We can take the Republican response to a Black President, the odious and fatuous bigot that is Donald Trump, and thrash him at the polls. Every decent American has a chance, through their ballot, to proclaim what we know in our hearts: there is no room for racism anymore. We can repudiate Trump and the minions who follow him, and deal them a death blow of seismic proportions. We can ring the bell of freedom for all Americans loudly and fully, by showing our Black brothers and sisters that we will no longer tolerate their being bound to the past. We can, once and for all, take up the hammer of justice and break those invisible chains.