Where’s Our Kent State?

Here is an excellent opinion piece by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar about the coming race war which he says will really be a class war:

http://time.com/3132635/ferguson-coming-race-war-class-warfare/

His points echo strongly across the decades. I clearly remember what happened at Kent State; I was in college in Cleveland, OH at the time.

But I don't see it the way Kareem does.

Things have changed significantly over the past 44 years:

• The US economy has become an empty shell;
• Instead of being potential employees, most of us now are useless eaters;
• Robots are on the verge of taking over the remaining jobs;
• The police have been hyper-militarized;
• The national/homeland security state is on steroids;
• The MSM have become empty-headed cowards; and
• Our so-called leaders are intentionally destabilizing the country at a level which makes Richard Nixon look like "Mr. Smith goes to Washington".

The Vietnam War made a giant dent in the US economy. Among other things it started the wholesale gutting of our currency and made us come off the gold standard. But when the war was over, the country still possessed the resources to eventually rebound, if that had been what our brutal overlords intended for us.

The "War On Terror" and accompanying "War By The Rich On The Rest Of Us" have absolutely destroyed this country. There is nothing left with which to bounce back. Nobody is going to finance the rebirth of America. If the rich can save anything, they will invest the remains of their wealth somewhere else.

And if Kareem's race/class war does succeed in wresting power from the bankgangsters, corporations, and their accomplices in the one percent, what then? We'll have an economy of poor people, backscratchers, and broken down old people without a pot to pee in.

The amber waves of grain are gone, replaced by GMO poison. The rivers have turned into dry gulches, bringing a new dust bowl to the heartland. The mines have been stripped empty or intentionally shut down by the EPA. The oil wells have been sucked dry, and the frackers are destroying what remains of our potable water. Our biggest products are waste and babies. Oh, and video games. We play a lot of games.

Frankly, I think the folks in charge would be pleased if an open race/class war broke out. We'd mainly kill each other and prove to them that they were right about us all along: we can't be trusted with guns.

I hope there is a peaceful solution to the mess we're in, but I have no idea what it might be.

By the way, Kent State is about 10 miles from Akron, OH. In 1970 Akron was the "rubber capitol of the world". A significant portion of rubber production depended on raw materials from places like French Indochina and its successor nations. So in reality what happened at Kent State was a form of generational warfare. My parent's generation, whose jobs depended on raw materials such as Vietnam's rubber, willingly sent their children to die or be maimed in Vietnam and even applauded when the students were shot at Kent State. How dumb was that?

And what happened when all those millions of demonstrators mentioned by Kareem rose up and more or less "forced" the US to get out of Vietnam? Nixon made peace with China and the true destruction of the US economy began in earnest. As the Cold War eventually thawed and "stability" was achieved in former enemy countries, all of our manufacturing and many of our service industries moved offshore.

My point is this: yeah, we "won" ... but what the hell did we get for it? NOTHING, and we lost our jobs too.

What are we going to get if and when we "win" this time?