History is our past, sets groundwork for our present and can indicate our future. trump poses a threat to a free society and to World peace. Greater threats to what we value include forces trump symbolizes - ignorance and hatred.

Racism was on display when white idiots sashayed into The Capitol on January 6. Their anger has its roots in slavery, an institution that was legal (1620-1865) longer than it has been banned in our history. Its effects are felt today.

If the U.S. economy circa 1787 is viewed as a person who weighed 200 pounds, slavery was a tumor that comprised at least 25% of that weight. Removal of such a tumor, even if benign, has significant effects on the person’s metabolism.

Seven states that later seceded had, before the Civil War, laws that prohibited teaching slaves to read and write. Tolley, “Slavery and the Origin of Georgia’s 1829 Anti-literacy Act.” After the Civil War, and even after Brown v Board of Education I, this discrimination has continued.

John Quincy Adams, later elected President, reflected on attitudes of white Southerners toward slavery: “‘The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls ... It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. ..

...It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice; for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?’” Kaplan, “Lincoln and the Abolitionists,” 2017, p. 126.

During Reconstruction, Southern whites were bitter toward (1) the North and (2) former slaves, who comprised nearly 39% of Southern states’ population. Because Southern laws aimed to keep former slaves under-educated and with few job skills, 39% of the population could not be integrated into the war-shattered economy.

In the mid-1960s, GOP leaders’ “Southern strategy” played on prejudices of under-educated white people. The differences between our white and non-white populations - median incomes, infant mortality rates to name 2 - are stark and always favor whites.

LBJ said of racism: “I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best [African American] man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

To prosecute those who committed criminal acts at The Capitol on January 6 is not enough. We need to restore our infrastructure - education and health care, to name two parts of it. To address the hatred we have to extinguish ignorance.