That enslaver legacy, e.g. kidnapping, degradation, deculturation, exploitation, humiliation, segregation…pick an “ation”, has left a good many slave descendants on the very bottom of, well, everything. This complicates our feelings, having been raised in this erstwhile and presently ostensible “land of opportunity”. Bootstraps, baby, bootstraps.

What is truly at the very root of this issue is the political and economic hegemony of corporate capitalism. (yawn) Of course there are still racists, but when the big picture is explored, demographics trump race, but corporate capitalism trumps all.

When property ownership and the commodification of goods became the means to power (Thank you Akkadians!!), humans began an 11,000 year slide down the slippery slope to corporate personhood. In the interim we’ve done a lot of cool stuff, but we have failed to recognize our behaviors and indeed utilize our most powerful gift: Syllogism. We, as a species fail miserably at anticipating the consequences of our actions and acting toward best possible outcomes. I mean, really…!

And here, I return to my perception of your discomfort which appears more complex than at first blush. If you are not responsible for slavery, and you are discomfitted by those who still wield it as an issue, I would suggest that you’re discomfort really stems from a frustration that we have not yet solved the problems stemming from the hegemony that condoned enslavement (capitalist/dominator); moreover, we have not recognized, or perhaps admitted that corporate capitalism (CC) and its adjutant activities is now codified, (and poorly regulated!) behavior akin to those ruled by religious dogma.

If those who took this CC behavioral path, or any of those who followed in that path were collectively transpersonally conscious enough to extrapolate the seemingly inevitable consequences of their folly–truly failing to recognize somewhere along the line the historical pattern of established societies exhausting their available resources and having to move or fight over resources with their neighbors–perhaps the legacies of genocides and slaveries would not now haunt us.

So the question becomes not about the next hundred years, but the next forever, or indeed, right now. Lennon’s dreamers are not the only ones, but we have to find a means to overcome willful ignorance and intransigent short-sightedness, both of which stem from fear–a wholly mutable state of being. Then different color skins will just be sexy.

Hey let’s put on a show.

That same speech left me with an uncomfortable feeling. I squirmed at the thought of still bearing the cross of slavery…..over 100 years later.

Didn’t Obama recently attack McCain for saying we were going to be in Iraq for 100 years?