1. Those who have been chanting RUTO MUST GO, have been vindicated by Ruto’s announcement of his “new cabinet”.

2. Ruto has totally failed to understand what the vast majority of Kenyans want. It is pointless to discuss the “merits” of those he has named.

3. It is now clear that Ruto is incapable of understanding what the “WILL OF THE PEOPLE” of Kenya is, and what Kenyans want!

4. If Ruto resorts to deploying the army and the police to impose his will on the people of Kenya, he will set Kenya on fire!

The Rise of Ideologically Driven “Boomers” Who Comprised a Colossal Part of the 1960s Protest Movements in the United States: They Changed America Forever!

1. Immediately after World War II ended, there was prosperity that was driven partly by the heavy militarization of the American economy during the war and after. American corporation spread their wings globally in search of avenues for profitable investment.
2. The McCarthyism of the 1950s tamed and intimidated organized labor and ushered in the era of collaboration between “Big Business” and labor. In any case workers were also cashing in on the new American prosperity. Families bought houses in booming suburban communities, shopped in huge shopping centers and grocery chains, and drove around in big automobiles with V8 engines, sent their children to racially segregated suburban schools, etc.

But All Was Not Well in America

1. New books were published by scholars with a critical eye regarding what was going on! The publication of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” dropped a bombshell highlighting the stark contradiction of “affluence” and widespread poverty in American.
2. African American Civil Rights movements dramatized the pervasiveness of racism and its manifestations in the labor market, housing market, public amenities, etc.
3. Global anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism struggles sprouted all over the world, as the US and NATO countries were pitted against the Socialist block of countries spearheaded by the Soviet Union. The potential for a nuclear war was averted by a peculiar doctrine of “peaceful coexistence” dubbed “MAD”—Mutually Assured Destruction.

From the Internet

October 16, 1962

For thirteen days in October 1962 the world waited—seemingly on the brink of nuclear war—and hoped for a peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba.

America Under Siege by Student Movements

1. University and college students from New York to California mounted protests of all kinds: the war in Vietnam, racism and segregation in American society, rotten segregated non-white communities in what became known and the “inner city” occasioned by the flight of whites to the suburbs!
2. There was an escalation of culture wars as the “right wing of white political movements chanted “America love it or leave it! On the side of “left leaning” movements were groups such as the Black Panther Party, Yipies, etc
3. There were feminist movements that challenged the traditional roles of women in the family, labor market and the public sphere.

Popular music became a powerful instrument of youth radicalization across the US and the world at large.

The Republican Party National Convention, July 15th through July 18th, 2024

The Widening Polarization of the United States

Contrary to their rhetoric of “national unity”, the Republican Party is driving deep division across the United States.

1. The “Archilles heel” of the Republican Party is their obsession with “building the wall” to keep “illegal migrants” from “sneaking” into the Unites States. In their “Right Wing” imagination, these “undesirable aliens” are drug dealers and criminals, who will also take away jobs from “Americans”.
2. Bitter memories of Many Wisconsin voters, both Black and White:

A white police officer shoots a Black man 7 times in Kenosha, Wisconsin. In ensuing trial, the police officer is acquitted. Riots break out and destroy businesses in the central business district.

3. In the middle of it all, Kyle Rittenhouse, shows up and shoots three men killing two of them. Once again, he is acquitted of all criminal charges on the grounds of “self defense”. Simply incredible!
4. Enter Donald Trump

Wisconsin Papers: “He has been hailed as a hero. He has been feted by politicians, including Donald Trump. He has been compared to John Wayne as a symbol of law-abiding people fighting back against lawlessness. When he took a rifle to a protest over the earlier police shooting that left Jacob Blake paralyzed, Rittenhouse said his intention was to protect property against violence.”

5. Since then, investigative mass media reporters have shown Kyle Rittenhouse in a Trump rally in Iowa, campaigning in the 2020 presidential elections.

The Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya was instrumental in radicalizing many of us who came of age in the 1950s. The British colonial regime in Kenya facilitated this by creating the “color bar” that racially stratified Kenya along very similar lines as the South African “apartheid”.  Segregation was carried to the extent of segregating even toilets, with “African toilets” constructed with two huge blocks of cement and a pail in the middle in which you deposited your “stuff” as in “Shit”!

Housing: European, Asian and African estates

Education: European, Asian and African schools

Trains: European (first class), Asian (second class) and African “third class” coaches

Under these existential circumstances many Africans came to hate “Europeans” and “Indians”, just as they despised and looked down on Africans.

When the “State of Emergency” was declared in Kenya, thousands of Africans were sympathetic to “Mau Mau” insurgents and Dedan Kimathi was their hero.

Here is a story: We were playing soccer in our neighborhood in 1950s and suddenly we heard that Dedan Kimathi was “sighted” in a tea room in Majengo. We abandoned our game and ran to Majengo. When we got there we did not find Kimathi! There were so many of such pranks by some naughty young men!

Who was Dedan Kimathi?

From Wikipedia

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Dedan Kimathi Waciuri (born Kimathi wa Waciuri; 31 October 1920 – 18 February 1957) was the senior military and spiritual leader of the Kikuyu rebels involved in the Mau Mau Uprising. Widely regarded as a revolutionary leader, he led the armed military struggle against the British colonial regime in Kenya in the 1950s until his capture in 1956 and execution in 1957.^[1] Kimathi is credited with leading efforts to create formal military structures within the Mau Mau, and convening a war council in 1953. He, along with Baimungi M’marete, Musa Mwariama, General China and Muthoni Kirima, was one of the Field Marshals.