Other “women’s marches” against the inauguration of Cult45 are being organized, very similar to the one that occurred in 2017. In Austin, Texas–a supposedly progressive city–yet another older, white man was elected as mayor, and for the second time against a Latina woman. Everyone is supposed to look at all these efforts and say, “These are the people geared for a fight for change,” but the same thing keeps happening. In 2024, I think it has been long past time to accept that if certain people always need “just a little more time” or “one more step” to do the right thing, those people are never going to follow through and do the right thing.
What none of these failed “progressives” seem to realize is that discrimination is an every-present thing. The statistic that women from the US majority population always like to pounce on is the statistics that occur to them; they barely mention that women of color have always had it worse in this country, partially because of women from the US majority population. The same men from the majority population like to keep popping off about how everyone needs to [fill in the blank], and then the resources will flow; either college degree, trade program, or tech training is irrelevant–it always demands mass participation. The mass ideology conveniently skips over displacement campaigns from multiple cities, staggering costs of living with stagnating wages, and the assistance from academia that proclaims racial inferiority without context.
Even more demoralizing, people of color from previous generations, who could shore up resources and respond to discrimination, punch down on younger people who never got a chance to attain resources. They point to previous efforts and triumphs, as well as completely biased films discussing one side of a story without mentioning all the pitfalls that the dominant narrative had in play. Younger people trying to emulate elders are trapped in vicious cycles of grinding their bones to make someone else’s bread, working twice as hard to get half as much–and now, not even that. The elders conveniently forget how they became gatekeepers and wardens while pulling up ladders behind them, often sabotaging younger generations trying to maintain communities. The danger behind having “heroes” is that the plight of everyone else is ignored, and fewer and fewer continue to fall for those narratives.
All of the people with control and resources, however limited, keep talking about how people need to wait patiently for others to behave in accordance with their messaging. Even now, the broke and exhausted are being bombarded with instructions not to give up “the fight.” Vote shaming marginalized populations is nothing new, even to the point of ignoring disenfranchisement that happens for distressed communities. People are pretending that nothing happened to make others disengage from efforts within the dominant narrative. “Just one more election. The midterms matter! Keep fighting with us!” Fortunately, those disingenuous and inauthentic efforts are no longer working.
Now those historic segregated communities will never be recreated because the damage has become too extensive, and the majority of younger people lack resources. Life costs more, so those small “pay your dues” wages never amount to savings and mortgages, so everyone just becomes more and more broke. The climate has changed, so the energy required to power side hustles and gigs takes more than it offers. In short, no one has the time to wait on “good people” to “do the right thing,” and 225 years should have been long enough to coast on “potential.” We are all out of time, the verdict is in, and the United States does not have enough redeeming qualities to constitute a legitimate opportunity for “liberty and justice for all.”
**Please click here for more information about Antoinette Thomas.
Chasing A Dying Empire 