Please Bring Back Segregation -Convoys, Community, and the Question of Power: America at a Crossroads

 Wednesday Night Read

Please Bring Back Segregation:  Convoys, Community, and the Question of Power: America at a Crossroads

By SDC News One IFS News Writers Staff | Compiled from contributor writings

Just after dawn, drivers on I-20 West in Georgia slowed as flatbed trucks rolled past carrying military tanks. The images spread quickly—grainy phone videos, startled captions, uneasy jokes that weren’t really jokes. For some contributors, the convoy felt routine, another logistical movement in a nation with a global military footprint. For others, it landed like a warning bell, an emblem of a country drifting toward permanent mobilization.

That split reaction—between normalization and alarm—runs through America’s current moment.

War, Profit, and the Politics of Fear

Several contributors argue that militarization has become a business model as much as a security posture. The phrase “war is profit” echoes a long historical critique dating back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the “military-industrial complex.” Contracts, they say, have a way of outliving the threats that justify them, and political rhetoric about enemies—foreign or domestic—keeps the machinery humming.

Claims about crime and migration are cited as a case in point. Contributors point to federal crime statistics showing violent crime at historic lows in recent years, contrasting those numbers with speeches warning of invading criminals. The tension between data and discourse, they argue, fuels fear while distracting from policy debates about prevention, public investment, and civil liberties.

The concern is not abstract. The Selective Service system—requiring registration from most people aged 18 to 26, including non-citizens—reappears in the conversation as a reminder that the costs of escalation are borne by families long before they are tallied in budgets. “If we don’t want our children used as leverage for profit,” one contributor wrote, “the time to be loud is before the orders come down.”

Immigration Enforcement and the Boundaries of Power

Anger toward immigration enforcement agencies surfaces repeatedly, particularly after reports of shootings involving ICE. The criticism is sweeping and emotional, but it also raises a constitutional question as old as the Republic: where does enforcement end and abuse begin?

Historically, moments of expanded federal power—from the Palmer Raids to post-9/11 surveillance—have later been reassessed with regret. Contributors argue that today’s enforcement climate risks repeating that cycle, urging public oversight, lawful restraint, and accountability rather than broad mandates driven by panic.

Segregation, Integration, and the Meaning of Equality

Perhaps the most provocative section of the contributors’ writing centers on segregation—specifically, why many Black Americans are not rallying around incidents that do not address the core issue they see as unresolved: equality of access.

This argument draws on history. After emancipation, more than 200 Black towns were founded between 1865 and 1888, many later erased by violence, displacement, or public works projects. From 1866 to 1985, scholars document more than 100 race massacres across 39 states. Between 1945 and 1951 alone, at least 152 lynch mobs terrorized Black communities. These are not footnotes; they are the context.

Contributors emphasize a distinction often blurred in popular memory: the fight was never simply to sit beside white Americans. It was to gain equal access to schools, credit, housing, employment, and political power. Integration without protection or parity, they argue, hollowed out Black institutions and wealth rather than strengthening them.

Several voices describe segregated childhoods where Black ownership, education, and mutual support created safety and dignity—conditions that eroded when integration opened doors to opportunity but also to discrimination. Others cite research on community wealth, noting that in places like Greenwood—often called Black Wall Street—a dollar circulated locally for years, not hours.

These reflections are not calls for nostalgia so much as challenges to conventional narratives. If segregation was imposed through violence and inequality, contributors ask, what would voluntary separation with equal resources look like? And why, they add, does America pretend segregation doesn’t already exist?

A Nation Talking Past Itself

Running through all of this is exhaustion. “Every new day feels like a new episode,” one contributor wrote, capturing a shared fatigue with crisis-as-governance. Yet beneath the anger is a consistent demand: honesty about power—who holds it, who profits from it, and who pays when policy fails.

On this Wednesday night, the tank convoys have moved on, the videos have slipped down the feed, and tomorrow will bring a new headline. But the questions linger. Is the country organizing itself around fear or around facts? Around profit or people? Around access or exclusion?

History suggests that how America answers those questions matters far more than any convoy passing by on the interstate.

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