Bad Things Clumping

So American Christians have made a 400-year (or so) series of bad decisions, and now all the bad stuff is clumping on our heads. And because we made a 400-year long series of bad decisions, the bad stuff is so much worse.

First. We decided that America was God's Chosen Nation,  a shining light upon a hill for all the world to see and envy. We love that envy stuff. It's like cocaine for nationalists. We truly believed from the very beginning and still believe that we are Exceptional to God. American Exceptionalism is based in the Chosen Nation Syndrome.

That has allowed us to believe, in turn, that anything we did to become an Exceptional Nation was justifiable.

Like, slaughtering all the people who lived here first. You know. Indians. Native Americans. We killed 95% of them, relocated the rest of them in stages to horrific places to live, breaking 400 or so treaties with them wherein we promised them whatever we promised them forever, which always lasted like weeks until we discovered oil or gold or good dirt or whatever on their land, and then we'd run them off again. God wanted us to have this land, so they had to go. I guess we could have made them an offer, but killing them felt so much more righteous.

Like, slavery. Free labor for 200 or so years, us getting rich on the backs of free, black labor, and then pretending like we are all self-reliant and earned all those riches ourselves through our own hard work when we pretty much just drank mint juleps and watched them work, taking a break every now and then to sell off some of their children or husbands or wives or raping a few of them. Dehumanizing them was important. You couldn't treat humans that way, so we redefined them as not human. All men are created equal, but if they aren't human, they're not equal.

Like, Jim Crow. We refused to believe that, slavery being over, they were actually human, and so we did whatever we could to slap them down and keep them down. The cops were in on it, the mayors were in on it, the governors were in on it, the pastors and priests were in on it, the Sunday school teachers were in on it, all of the Christians were in on it.

Like, immigrants. We found ourselves needing cheap labor, but good decent white people wouldn't do that nasty work, so we needed workers, immigrant workers, Italians, Poles, Irish, Asians, Latin Americans, Mexicans. But we had to dehumanize them as well, and deny them decent wages and benefits, and we continually harassed them and deported them, creating, as we did with blacks and Indians, a police state worthy of any of the great autocracies, dictatorships, and communist governments on Earth.

Like, invading other countries in our "national interests" which covers, as you might imagine, a multitude of sins. Stealing land from France and Mexico and Spain. Destroying countries and peoples like Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, the Philippines, Haiti, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq.

And so on. It was all good because America is God's Chosen Nation, and we are just doing his will. Clearly it's OK, because we have been blessed with great wealth. Or at least, white folks have. If you have not been so blessed, well, then, I guess you've been cursed by God, because you are nor worthy.

How is it playing out in these days of Covid-19, Climate Change, and race protests and riots?

Covid-19. At the moment, we are the worst country on Earth in terms of daily new cases. We have pretended as though America 1) is immune to things like pandemics, 2) doesn't need to learn and thus refuses to try to learn from the examples of other countries that have been successful in beating the virus back, 3) exists in a vacuum of specialness all on its own, in separate holiness from all the other lands as God is separate from man, 4) has been subjected to some sort of political hoax about an alleged virus that never was real but was conjured up by the enemies of our godly president, who is the perfect representation of the leader of God's Chosen Nation, as he persists in believing that absolutely everything is about him, that the universe rotates around him, and whatever the Bad Thing is, it's not going to happen to him. He is the archetype of America, which believes that everything is about America, that the universe rotates around America, and whatever the Bad Thing is, it's not going to happen to America, and 5) America always makes the best decisions about everything and doesn't need input from other countries, which are all socialist and dysfunctional and have no freedom, because 6) God has given freedom to America alone. We would share it with other countries, but they are not worthy, being socialist and dysfunctional.

Imagine being self-centered enough to believe that the virus is a hoax aimed at Trump even though the entire rest of the world is afflicted by the same disease. In our warped little minds, it is all about Trump, and it is all about America.

That is American exceptionalism at its finest, modeled by Trump exceptionalism at its worst. And bad things are clumping around us.