Introducing Michael Fisher, another new contributor. Editor's note - this was submitted before last night's Convention of Founding Principles, where you had Clarence Mingo and R. Derek Black speaking to this very point in vivid terms and with serious courage. We greatly appreciate Michael's willingness to join the conversation as he comes from the left side of the aisle.
Said,
“Hey little boy, you can’t go where the others go,
‘Cause you don’t look like they do.”
Said, “Hey old man, how can you stand to think that way?
Did you really think about it before you made the rules?”
He said
That’s just the way it is
Some things’ll never change
That’s just the way it is
Ah, but don’t you believe them
I
remember hearing Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is” for the first time in the Fall
of 1986. I was just starting my
sophomore year of college. (Go ahead, do
the math, I’m not embarrassed.) The
world seemed a different place then. The
United States and the USSR had nuclear missiles aimed at each other, ready to rain
down mutually-assured destruction at a moment’s notice. There was still an East and a West Germany. Ronald Reagan (“the ACTOR!?!?”) was well into
his second term as President. Greed was
good; the United States — certainly in myth but to large extent reality as well
— was a beacon of freedom and democracy.
The possibilities that lay beyond the shadow that a weakening Iron
Curtain still cast across the world seemed limitless. Yet The Way It Is screamed out to those who
were listening that something was still very wrong.
So,
cue the record-scratch sound: In the thirty-four
years that have passed since The Way It Is hit the charts, the United States hit
the skids. We witnessed the fall of the
Soviet Union, we briefly rose in that cataclysm’s wake as an unopposed
superpower, and we saw eastern Europe’s fleeting and incomplete flirtation with
democracy. We survived the worst
international terrorist attack ever committed on U.S. soil. But instead of continuing to build and grow a
nation based on shared experiences, struggles, and realities, the absence of an
external threat opened opportunities for those wanting to harm us to find and
exploit a cancer that we still carry within ourselves.
One
of those most significant internal threats is white supremacy in all its ugly
forms: racism, misogyny, anti-semitism, anti-anyone who isn’t exactly like
us. As a nation, we have never fully
come to grips with the race, income, and class fractures that Hornsby wrote
about back in 1986. That is certainly
true today; it was true back in 1986, and it was also true back in 1886
after the failure of Reconstruction. Former
slave state efforts to block the freed slaves within their population from
exerting political power proved to be all too successful then; and the repercussions
continue to claim casualties today. Women
only secured their right to vote 100 years ago; Jim Crow segregation persisted
into the 1950s and 60s; today we argue over whether law enforcement officers
should face repercussions for use of overwhelming excessive force against
persons of color and law-abiding protesters.
Depressingly, today we also argue whether we owe each other a societal duty
to simply wear masks in public to check the spread of a pandemic the likes of
which the world had not seen for over a century.
What
is the opposite of E. Pluribus Unum, “In many, one”? Whatever it is, we are living in it today. The wreckage from battles fought over 150
years ago remain in race, income, and class disparities that continue to shred
our nation’s social fabric. And in 2016,
a criminal cartel figured out how to weaponize these societal failures against
us, convincing a large enough swath of American voters that electing a lying, cheating,
reactionary demagogue would let them re-kindle the era they longed for in which
white men stood at the top of a hierarchy, with persons of color — particularly
female persons of color, descendants of former slaves — at the bottom.
So that brings us
to today, when again we are called to test whether our great nation, “conceived
in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”,
as Lincoln said in his Gettysburg Address, can yet endure. And I hope this helps explain why this
upper-middle-class, white, Jewish, one-time East Coast liberal turned far north
Dallas suburbanite, has been engaged within some center-right thought circles
in the Twitterverse over the past several years. Simply stated, it’s time for us all to talk.
It is only with your help that
Trumpism can be laid to waste, and it is on your shoulders that a new coalition
of well-minded, decent, caring and careful persons who wish to proceed
with caution into an uncertain future — true “conservatives” within the real
meaning of the term — will be built. Our
collective love for our country is unquestionable; you are as eager as I am to
find new solutions to the socioeconomic problems that have dogged the nation since
before the time we all became politically aware. It is beyond time to stop screaming past each
other and instead, start talking with and listening to each other. I intend to do my part, and I look forward to
learning from each one of you.
“Some things will never change?” Don’t you believe them.
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