Not if I have anything

Divide and conquer
has long been a favorite tactic
of the aspiring tyrant.

And how better to divide,
than to destabilize the power structure,
stoke paranoia on all sides,
appeal to one faction's cherished bias
and get it to self-identify
with your own movement's drive
for power?

Then, foster in your supporters
suspicion of all movements
that call for the solidarity
of the oppressed of any stripe.
Get your supporters to damn
those who rally in favor
of civil liberties
and human rights
as subversives.

Bitter irony,
in a nation founded
so strongly on the primacy
of the fundamental, inalienable
human rights of the individual
that the simple, self-evident truths
of those founding principles,
embodied in the Bill of Rights,
have dragged us kicking and screaming
feet-first from our founding, steeped
in patriarchal slaveholding aristocracy,
through and out of mire after mire
of religious, racial, and sexual
bigotry. To fail now? To fall here?

Not if I have anything to fucking say about it.