Some legal analysts have assessed our current Supreme Court as being “the most conservative Supreme Court since the 1930s.” The first question that needs to be asked is, “Who among us would want a return to the status that they and their people endured in the United States in the 1930s?” I’m guessing that the only people whose hands would be up would be rich white men. I cannot imagine any other category or group within our society believing that the 1930s was better for them than the current era. Not women. Not ethnic minorities. No one who is concerned with human rights, worker’s rights, voting rights, or the environment. That’s not to say we don’t have problems now, but thankfully, we are not living in the 1930s.
Speaking personally, I can certainly recall life in a “simpler time.” Growing up in the 1960s and 70s things “made more sense,” from my perspective. But that’s just it…MY perspective isn’t the only perspective. I share this country with 332 million other Americans, and this planet with 7.8 billion other human beings. It’s simply not all about me, my perspectives, my opinions and my wishes.
Sadly, I think the current Supreme Court, and the billionaires who paid for them to be there, don’t understand that it’s not all about them! Rather than use the word, conservative, I think regressive is more appropriate for this court. Regressive means “becoming less advanced; returning to a former or less developed state.” Several recent court rulings have undone decades of established law simply because of the personal ideology of the conservative activists on the court. Those rulings threaten to make us a less advanced and less developed nation.
In life, things move in one direction. There is no rewind button. Life does not afford us the opportunity for reruns. And yet this court has determined that it wishes to revisit an earlier time that is largely unacquainted with the changes that have occurred in our nation and the world over the last century. That sort of backward movement is simply unsustainable and wholly undesirable for a significant majority of our fellow Americans.
This is a direct result of the Supreme Court appointment and around 100 other judicial appointments, stolen from President Obama by Mitch McConnell and his cohort in the US Senate. Rather than fulfill their constitutional duty of “Advise and Consent” for court appointments, they simply chose to put their fingers in their ears and ignore the nominations the twice-elected President of the United States was attempting to make, because they wanted someone else to make those appointments. As a result, we have a court that is rendering rulings that are so contrary to the lives and wishes of large majority of our citizens that it is unsustainable.
In an Op-Ed, I wrote in mid-May, “The Choice Is Ours,” I wrote “we can either decide that maintaining what we have, imperfections, and all, is worth preserving, or we can determine that since I am not getting my way, I choose to burn it all down, wage war in whatever form against my fellow citizens, and assume that whatever comes next will be better than what we have now. I promise you that will not be the case.”
We must learn to share every aspect of this constitutional republic with one another. No one is entitled to dominate and have their way all the time. We cannot continue to go backward. That’s just not how life works! We must return to some governing “norms” where everything does not play out like a knife fight. Having one’s so-called “opponent,” lying wounded or dead on the floor is not a sign of victory, but rather, of an avoidable cliff that is fast approaching.
In the 1980s, in response to widespread violence in our communities, a collection of rappers came together to record a song of warning. The refrain of the song was “Self-destruction, you’re headed for self-destruction.” Uh-huh…
Submitted by Rev. Stephen Tillett, Pastor of Asbury Broadneck United Methodist Church in Annapolis, MD, author of Stop Falling for the Okeydoke: How the Lie of “Race” Continues to Undermine Our Country, Political Analyst for The Lavonia Perryman Show (910 AM Superstation, Detroit, iHeart Radio, Apple Radio, Roku)
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