That's Just The Way It Is - Ah, But Don't You Believe It

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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