'I want our future back'

From Reclaiming our real future

I've been thinking about this for a while now. History has been off course. I don't just mean the accounts of what happened. I feel as if someone grabbed our future and put a noose around it, forcing us all down a different, much darker path. What if that hadn't have happened?

What if Medgar Evers, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had all lived long and full lives? What kind of country would we have had? Where would the racial divide be today? Where would our politics be like? Would the right wing have risen to the same kind of power? Or would creativity flourished and the economy soared as the middle class expanded, presenting an ever-larger market for goods?

What if Jacobo Arbenz had not been overthrown in Guatemala in 1954? What if Mohammed Mossadegh had not been killed for nationalizing oil in Iran? What if millions of dollars of our taxes never got spent trying to overthrow Fidel Castro? What if we had let Salvador Allende rule Chile without interference?

What kind of world would we be living in now? What if we hadn't decided, years ago, that it was okay to hand over oil rights to private individuals, instead of ensuring that, as a national resource, the profits from such were plowed back into our nation? What if, as we started to run out, instead of going to war to secure more oil, we instead spent the same amount of money to create a green economy, inventing new technologies, employing hundreds of thousands of people in a life-making effort, not a death-making one?

For most of my life, I've seen evil triumph over good, hate trump love, incompetence edge out brilliance, disinformation bury truth.

Can someone please make it stop? Remove the noose from our real future?