The Festering Sore of Empire: Confronting America’s Contradictions

Summary

The Festering Sore of Empire explores America’s origins, exposing contradictions of conquest, exclusion, and privilege. This powerful narrative challenges myths of exceptionalism and calls for confronting historical truths to build justice and equity.

Keynote Address by Every Sincere Person

Title: The Festering Sore of Empire

Opening Invocation

To Whom it all Concerns. We gather today not to celebrate myths, but to confront truths. The United States was not born as a shining city on a hill. It was born as a festering sore—a wound inflicted by empire, covered with scabs of rhetoric but never cured. From its creation, this land carried the contradictions of conquest, exclusion, and privilege.

The Imperial Roots

This sore was not unique to America. It was a product of British society itself. When the contradictions of class, religion, and power became too inflamed to tolerate, Britain exported them.

They sent their dissenters, their debtors, their convicts, their so-called misfits to faraway lands—America, Australia, New Zealand. Colonies became the dumping grounds of empire.

And yet, history books tell us this was a noble search for religious freedom. They paint it as humanity’s quest for equality and wellbeing. But let us be clear: those noble rights were never meant for all. They were divine privileges reserved for one group alone. Specifically, white, male, property-owning colonists.

Everyone else—Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, immigrant laborers—were relegated to a servant class beneath the hoard of British outcasts who claimed dominion.

The Mask of Human Variability

To make this demented concept palatable for themselves and the rest of the world, people were grouped by human variability. The discovered story of the Homo species was erased, hidden, and rewritten to justify acts of savagery and barbarism carried out by British and European subhumans.

The things that are happening today in the United States are the exposed portions of the festering sore that has defined this society. Since the landing of the Mayflower in 1620 by British thugs, this festering societal sore has fed on itself. And this is not counting the 1492 blunder that destroyed every New World civilization and about ninety percent of its people.

The Scabs of Reform

And so, America has tried repeatedly to cover the wound.

• Abolition was a scab.
• Reconstruction was a scab.
• Civil rights reforms were scabs.

Each attempt covered the sore but never healed it. Because healing requires sincerity, and sincerity has never been the foundation of empire. The sore has always been fed by exploitation—of land, of labor, of lives.

Historical Continuum

Consider the continuum:

• In 1492, the so-called “discovery” of the New World unleashed genocide and dispossession.
• In 1620, the Mayflower carried not saints but thugs, who imposed their will upon Indigenous nations.
• In 1776, liberty was declared, but liberty was chained to slavery.
• In 1865, emancipation was proclaimed, but Jim Crow rose from the ashes.
• In 1964, civil rights were legislated, but systemic inequality endured.

At every stage, the sore was dressed but never treated. The infection remained, festering beneath the surface.

The Present Exposure

Today, the sore is exposed again. We see it in racial violence, in economic inequality, in the dispossession of Indigenous lands, in the exploitation of immigrant labor. We see it in the rewriting of history, in the denial of truth, in the persistence of privilege. The sore has never healed because the nation has never wanted it healed.

The Challenge

We must speak truth:

• Liberty built on exclusion is not liberty.
• Democracy built on hierarchy is not democracy.
• Freedom for some is not freedom at all.

Until the sore is treated—not covered, not ignored, but cured, the pain will continue to fester.

Closing Call

Even with the lies and distortions taught in classrooms and written in books, there is no excuse for anyone not knowing this, given the learning and investigative tools that are at our disposal. Unless that person is pus draining from the sore.

So let us strip away the myths. Let us confront the wound honestly. Let us remember the civilizations destroyed in 1492 creating a new people group that had not existed before (Hispanics, Latinos) as the aftermath of that butchery, the thugs who landed in 1620 singing songs of Jesus, the millions enslaved, the millions dispossessed by those given self-professed divine sanction.

Only then can we imagine a society where rights are not privileges, where freedom is not selective, and where the festering sore of empire is finally healed.

“A nation that refuses to confront its wounds will forever live in pain. But a nation that dares to heal may yet live in justice.”

Readers note: Quote created by Microsoft Copilot