I'm just catching up here, owing to a new job that demands a great deal of my time and energy. I will try to address some of the issues raised here, as they are not merely important, but perhaps vital to the matter of our survival as a nation.
Fisherman wrote:
Andy, your writing is eloquent and noble, but did it ever occur to you that for some, it might be impossible to replace "the rules of the jungle" with the precepts of Western civilization ??
Well, in a word: yes. But that has always been the case. The difference today is that our dominant culture no longer subscribes to those precepts, and instead celebrates beliefs that both predate America's founding principles and which are often wholly antithetical to them. A great harm is being done especially to black communities and citizens, who have been cruelly encouraged to make of themselves permanent dependents rather than free citizens.
Progressives have sought to destroy each and every mediating institution by which Western civilization organized itself into a functional, if not always a harmonious society: families, neighborhoods, membership and fraternal groups, churches, synagogues, and charities.
The Progressives' chief purpose has always been (and still remains) one of empowering the State and its elite power brokers by making dependents of all others, setting group against group and class against class; dividing in order to conquer.
And so it has come to pass that in an effort to maintain and augment their power, Progressive liberals have used the false pretense of "compassion" to turn vast swaths of America's cities into havens of hopelessness, and districts of despair - while blaming Republicans and conservatives for the results of policies that they themselves advanced, and which their (hated) adversaries opposed.
Because the culture, its language and its transmission is so fully controlled by the Left, far too many victims of Progressivism remain deceived, morally confused, and compliant. But because mainstream Republican leaders have seen fit to protect their increasingly narrow bases of power rather than challenge the status quo, no serious national challenge to Progressivism has yet been mounted. Power corrupts, even as it wanes.
Black people deserve better. Americans deserve better. But our tragic human history suggests that we shall not get "better" until things fall apart, at which time, we are likely at first to get much worse.
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As for Cliven Bundy: he is not in my estimation the sort of person of whom I would be tempted to make a hero.
As much as I instinctively sympathize with any person who must wrestle with our increasingly overbearing Federal government, and as much as I comprehend the human devastation brought about by the expansion of the welfare state, there is simply no excuse for favorably postulating a return to slavery as superior to the realities of modern inner-city life.
If there was ever a bigger "big government" program than slavery, I should like to hear of it.
Conservatives have no business trading in ignorance or bigotry; liberals have by now cornered the market on both, and we ought to make them painfully aware of it at every opportunity.
To advance the notion that black people are entirely responsible for the state of their communities is to ignore the role of government, culture and education in promoting and shaping the values that define the acceptable bounds of human life. But to hold them entirely blameless for not resisting the cultural chains that shackle them would be to deny the abilities of human perception and of choice.
Perhaps if we all had leaders who promoted a vision of freedom, backed up by a philosophy that explained and justified its necessity, we might begin to find the courage to challenge those who only pretend to appeal to the best in all of us, while promoting the worst of our human instincts, for their own shallow benefit and no one else's.
