This Week ::: OUR COMMON GROUND

“The Glitch in the Matrix”

This Week on OUR COMMON GROUND

“The Glitch in the Matrix”

OPEN MIC

Saturday,September 11, 2021 ::: 10 pm ET

Tune In: http://bit.ly/OCGTruthTalk

Call-In & Listen Line: (347) 838-9852

In the arc of American history, Donald Trump’s election as the president of the United States is no shock. The functional preamble remains that all white men are created superior and those who subscribe to it are periodically compelled to stick it in the face of Black folks — and now brown and Muslim folks, too — even if it comes at considerable cost to the nation and world standing.

It did not matter that under Obama the unemployment rate fell to 4.9 percent from the 10 percent he inherited from Bush. Under Obama’s Affordable Care Act insured millions more Americans than under Bush. It did not matter that many of Obama’s policies put money in the pockets of the working class, such as dramatically raising the federal salary threshold to collect overtime pay, or the Lilly Ledbetter Act for fair pay based on gender. Despite that he was so much like all Presidents before him. He was like them. The same kind of occupant of the WH, as Bush, Clinton, Kennedy. But, ultimately, they would elect an obnoxious, underachieving, corny, egomaniac conman to ensure that an Obama would never again usher shadows into their sacred places.

Since none of that mattered, all of Trump’s rhetoric about everything in America being a “disaster” was a smokescreen for the consolidation of crude white power. The majority of white Americans, a century and a half after the end of slavery, still spectacularly preferred economic uncertainty in exchange for returning Black people to their place and now sending brown immigrants and Muslims “back home.”

Early in the Trump candidacy an opinion columnist wrote in The Boston Globe that his “hateful nonsense, meant for white people who still think the country is theirs, is a death rattle for the most crude forms of white privilege.” I was hoping that his election would be as a death rattle for the snake, not for those whom the snake struck. Finally, and most disturbing of all, there was the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump last November, despite his record of governing incompetence – crystallized by the COVID-19 debacle – and toxic, divide-and-conquer political, to say nothing that he literally ran a global criminal enterprise out of the White House and throughout the government.

In the “The Matrix”, the film describes a future in which reality perceived by humans is actually the Matrix, a simulated reality created by sentient Machines in order to pacify and subdue the human population while their bodies’ heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source. In Matrix parlance, red pills are those who are aware of the Matrix construct while blue pills are not. An often used admonishment to Black people to be realistic, clear about the political nuances of our citizenship.

The Matrix represents a system of control that operates completely in the mind. As a complex, machine-driven program, it appropriates any personal, political, or ideological leanings and renders them wholly false. It allows illusions but no action. The problem with the matrix that most people of control and power depend upon has a glitch. That is that Black people don’t believe in things, as Stevie Wonder reminded us in his awesome song, “Superstition, ” When you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer. . . “ The matrix which encapsulates America is built on the superstition of American exceptionalism- a superstition of massive import.  Black people have taught this country the potential value and power of its own rhetoric around democracy. We have also taught them the lessons of its hypocrisy and fragility. Uncovering, exposing, and revealing. Demonstrating time after time that “we” are not who “we” say that we are. So many Americans are beginning to understand more and moving beyond the energy field of the matrix. The glitch in the matrix ?  Black people. We discuss it at OUR COMMON GROUND tonight.