So once again the question must be asked: What have we learned?
The question is on the subject of what America will look like if the "right" gains the control it so fervently seeks. And the answer is as plain as the day is short.
And in fact, comes when one just looks around and sees:
The revelation that Scalia and Thomas attend interest-conflicting righty confabs alongside the Kochs and Glenn Blecch;
The almost immediate results of the Supreme Court's heinous granting of corporations unlimited and anonymous funding of political candidates;
The regular dissemination of pseudo-history and pseudo-science in our broken public schools;
A media that is lodged squarely in the rectum of Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Military;
So much outsourcing of American labor to cheap foreign lands that it resembles a spigot left spewing by a careless brat or an unwatched child;
The spate of anti-gay, anti-poor, anti-black, anti-intellectual, anti-progress cant that gushes from the twisted mouths of so-called experts who have decided to throw in with the bullies that they themselves are no doubt terrified of;
The NO! NO! NO! coming from the Grand Old Party itself -- a bitter, obsolete Methuselah bent on ruining what it cannot control, unable to compromise, unwilling to see, hear or know the truth about itself and the world that is leaving it behind.
The "right" will not allow the answer to the question "What have we learned?" to germinate in people's minds because the people, undistracted by the "right"'s desperate tactics, will tell the simple truth: that an America which capitulates to the "right"'s assault on reason, on history and on reality will be America no more. It will be a massive and soulless strip-mall, peopled by myopic drones who have become lethargic in the face of Democracy's challenges and who prefer the easy armchair-quarterbacking of low-brow consumerism, content to let the very ones who blithely assure them that any form of control is a scourge -- control them.
The "right" has become the God they wish the masses to fear; indeed, become heaven and hell itself. As manufactured as all religions, this one -- fascisto-capitalism -- has real hardware behind it. No more need to walk on water or "heal" a leper: just give the rabble shiny, sexy baubles; things that blink and whirr at the swipe of a finger; social networks without any actual socializing; wars fought from a safe distance; life without consequences.
To answer the question "What have we learned?" is to come face to face with democracy's greatest crucible since finding purchase in the New World. And such answers have no place in a "right"-ruled country where truth itself is outlawed.
And after all we have recently witnessed and endured at the hands of the "right", the answer to "what have we learned?" is simple:
"Never to let them win."