Insidious Civility

Sometimes I wonder how similar Congress' current negotiations around the filibuster/voting/investigating treason/immigration etc. are to Congress' earlier debates that led to the three-fifths compromise? 

Did they raise similar points of order? Were they also inappropriately civil as they quipped over the lives of enslaved people.

My people. Your people. Our people. 

Did they let politics get in the way of basic human dignity? Did they let votes and custom and precedent prevent them from being a higher version of themselves? Did they feel the weight of bargaining over human life in their spirits? Did they feel that weight and ignore it? 

Has this always been democracy?

I imagine the sounds are almost identical. Sure there is more range, harmony and discord. After all, women’s voices are now allowed. But the bargaining back and forth. The laughter among colleagues. The lack of uproar. Every record a hit on the soundtrack of this trivial pursuit of liberty that can never result in true freedom as long as it is only available to some. 

Similar halls

Similar rooms

Similar sounds

Over and over and over again.

We are living in an echo chamber.

Compromising our very lives.

And for what?

To maintain the walls--the very structure of this hallowed democracy?

These walls will become our prison. 

The ancestors say that our dark past teaches us faith

And our present brings us hope

May faith and hope form the melody of a new day’s song.

In harmony with trumpets of truth, may the next revolution shatter these Jerochoan walls.