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ACCORDING TO LIZ - When reparations were eventually paid to Japanese Americans interned during WW2, it wasn’t the $20,000 check, it was the letter of apology from George H.W. Bush that meant so much to many of those who received them.
Will we ever see Donald Trump apologize to the American people who lost loved ones due to his inappropriate approach to the pandemic? The United States has nine times the population of Canada but 23 times the number of deaths.
Will we ever see Texas Governor Greg Abbott apologize to those killed at the border or during forced relocations to other states?
Will we ever see proper restitution to indigenous children sent to schools to have the Indian – language and worldview – beaten out of them?
Will we ever see a president, Democratic or Republican, apologize to the people for spending taxpayer funds on a bloated Pentagon with its profligate budgets and political intrigues, instead of improving the quality of life for Americans?
Will we ever see the Pentagon apologize for the “collateral damages” from its forever wars, including the amorphous one against “terrorists” that terrible American policies created.
As President Dwight D. Eisenhower said over seventy years ago on April 16, 1953 in opposition to the escalating arms race:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . .
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Eisenhower, a veteran of the War to end all wars, knew of what he was talking. And that it was not only Americans that would suffer, but people all around the world.
His farewell address warned us of the military-industrial complex, which has since become cancerous with corporate greed, running up the costs of living for American taxpayers while presenting the Pentagon, the CIA, and Homeland Security with overflowing Christmas baskets – making everybody’s lives a little less safe.
As well as filled with a lot more hardship... because reduced funding for healthcare, education, housing, transportation, violence intervention, refugee resettlement here and abroad, and other innovations to help improve people’s lives tends to reduce people’s quality of life if not kill them.
So when do we-the-people get our apologies?
When do our leaders start spending our taxes on Americans instead of filling the coffers of the armaments industry and the war machine?
When, instead of waging proxy wars with Russia and China, do we join with them in one last battle to the bitter end with fossil fuel companies and all their enablers on the existential crisis of climate change?
Instead of digging in our heels like the Donald, how about softening our approach to others, opening our hearts to our fellow human beings, and doubling down on curtailing the actions of those who see personal profit as an end in itself and damn anyone who limits that godless right.
We must walk the walk, not just talk the talk.
It’s not worth the air it flows out on if verbal assertions are not followed by concrete action. JFK’s assurances to MLK grew into the historic Civil Rights Bill of 1964. Compassion for the poor led to LBJ’s War on Poverty.
Both actions had earth-shattering impact at the time but have since stalled largely due to elites twisting the rules so they could profit, leaving the poor of every color to suffer, and Republican reduction of tax burdens on high net-worth entities further exploiting the poor.
The clarity of voices calling for idealistic change is being smothered in the ambient noise social media. And the power of profiteers continues to grow with agents embedded at all levels of government.
Ordinary Americans need money on which to live but the multi-nationals and uber-wealthy are conspiring to limit that to the bare minimum for survival to enhance the availability of cheap and mostly compliant labor. Companies like Walmart rely on federal handouts to their employees to keep their plutocratic profit-margins high.
Technically, an apology is a formal written defense of something you believe in strongly – such as what was sent by George Bush the elder to Japanese internment camp survivors. Or a commentary on what is wrong with the world.
The speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. were polemics challenging the raison-d’être of the United States of the 1950s and 1960s as he fought the legacy of two and a half centuries of slavery. As well as racism, he called out the war in Vietnam for what it was – a horrific waste of young men and money, both of which could have been put to far better use in a war on poverty here at home.
And even though persecuted by those who utilized racist practices, disparaged by media opinion which was then fully in support of the war, and by the government itself, King continued down a path of non-violence, pursuing his vision of an ethical world to the bitter end.
Right now we need more than apologies, we need to take action. Non-violent action.
We need the truth, we need the acknowledgement, but we must always remember the magnitude of King’s simple assertion: that the arc of justice won’t bend unless it is pushed.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
