By Dennis Rahkonen

Discovery and "settlement" of America involved horrid genocide against multiple millions of native inhabitants whose desperate, surviving progeny live dirt poor in godforsaken places where substance abuse, crime, and stratospheric joblessness are the cruel, never-remedied norm.

What the European conquerors took, with a hypocrite's Bible in one hand and a dripping sword in the other, their later-generation offspring now rule with a callous disregard for the acute hardship that it's the Indian's "fate" to endure amid the dust and tumbleweeds, or swamps and mosquitoes, where a beaten people were forced to relocate after their slaughter finally stopped.

And let's not forget slavery. No, by all that's holy, let's not do that!

Brought here in chains, and compelled to toil under a blazing sun in the supposedly superior Master's plantation fields -- with whips cracking on black backs to assure proper devotion to the white owner's profit -- slaves built America's initial economic success.

A murderous war had to be fought because half the country saw nothing wrong with such a satanic arrangement.

Then came an extended period when newly-freed "Negroes" were uniformly consigned to doing the hardest work for the least pay even in the purportedly supportive North, while Southerners donned KKK garb and strung terrified, "uppity" ex-slaves from every variety of tree with branches strong enough to suspend a hideously jerking, expiring human body.

Today, in ghetto neighborhoods every bit as impoverished and soul-devouringly unlivable as they were just before rebellion erupted in inner cities across the country during the '60s, descendants of slaves wonder how a light-skinned majority that imagines itself so good can perpetually do them so much savage harm, through both benign neglect and malign intent.

Meanwhile, white folks gather in football stadium parking lots, to tail-gate themselves into drunkenness over their favorite teams, comprised primarily of black and brown athletes cherished as entertaining tokens, on Sunday afternoons, without giving a moment's thought during the rest of the week to how difficult the racist culture they perpetuate makes existence for black and brown masses, from coast to coast.

Each and every day, year after devastating year.

Relatedly, at a Nevada military site, white soldiers with specialized technological training remotely control Predator drones on their Afghan/Pakistani missions to "take out" alleged terrorists. Through biased eyes, and minds filled with decades of fundamentally racist propaganda, it's easy for them to think that any "raghead" or "haji" roaming through the Muslim mountains half a world away is a legitimate target.

It takes grotesque WikiLeaks-style disclosures to reveal how complete innocents consequently die, in sickening numbers, when the Hellfire missiles are let loose.

Next door, in Arizona, which used to be a part of Mexico, white folks who could easily be attitudinal clones of Germans who acquiesced to the Holocaust are crazily adamant in believing that their well-being depends on rounding up the Hispanics who under gird their state's base economy. "Ship them back where they came from!"

Never mind that many of their ancestors lived right where they presently are, while Cowboy Jingo's people were still dwelling in feudal huts somewhere in the benighted Old Country.

Each August, as a handful of morally aggrieved protestors point out that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki clearly constituted a monstrous war crime, old white men rise to object.

They indignantly contend, despite great evidence to the contrary, that vaporizing countless "Jap" women and children into sudden nothingness was necessary to save U.S. lives. With only names and places changed, it's the same argument used to justify every atrocity from Wounded Knee to My Lai, to Haditha, extending forward into a racist future.

So it goes, with a sizeable chunk of the U.S. Caucasian populace not having the slightest clue about why much of the rest of the world -- majority non-white as it is -- looks upon this nation with dismay, to put it mildly.

In fairness, not all white Americans are crude, prejudice-spewing semi-barbarians cleaning their NRA-blessed guns in preparation for a race war. Others are bigoted in subtler though nonetheless equally as wrong ways.

Some whites actually support civil and human rights for minorities, as a wise reflection of the enlightenment that's attributable to their association with left Christianity, progressive Judaism, organized labor, the peace and justice movement, etc.

But they're increasingly being drowned out by a cacophony of raging intolerance -- such as that surrounding the Ground Zero "mosque" in Lower Manhattan -- that's capable of bringing hellish results to our overall society if it manages to triumph and then consolidate its ugly, broadly destructive agenda.

We're behaving in a definitely uncivilized way, and the fate of civilization itself is consequently at stake.

It should be obvious to everyone -- but alarmingly isn't -- that our nation's destiny can't be safely kept in primitive haters' hands, or in those of their rightwing enablers.

(Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the '60s)