A New Declaration of Independence

I have just begun reading Sen. Ben Sasse' book called 'Them', which seeks to bridge the divide of hate that has come into our nation.  It's a subject that fascinates me: I see middle-aged white guys driving around with giant TRUMP flags in the back of their oversized pickup trucks...I see Facebook friends who do nothing but post anti-_____ (your choice of politician) screeds and memes on their home page...I overhear people sitting around and moaning and bitching about things that have no effect on their real lives and usually doing so without any comprehension of the facts. 

I'm only a chapter into the book, but Sen. Sasse seems to be going in a direction that I think is more of a symptom rather than the core of the problem: it's that technology, rather than uniting humanity, is tearing it apart.  We have virtual friends rather than real friends.  I think he's onto something, though it's something that has seemed obvious to me for awhile; we are 'alone together', in that you will see a group of people sitting around, all looking at their phones, even as they are 'together'. 

While he's right that this is a problem, I think a greater problem revolves around how we have allowed ourselves to listen to the voices that convince us that the other side is demonic.  In other words, mainstream politics in 2019.  When we become convinced that the problem is all on the the side of the 'other', the 'them' in Sen. Sasse' book, that becomes the problem.  And the very features of our modern 'democracy' makes this almost impossible to overcome.  For instance, in our past presidential election, we have inarguably the two very worst candidates of my lifetime.  Hillary Clinton was tainted by three decades of the Clinton machine, and Donald Trump was (and is) an ignorant bully who has been just as bad as many of us expected he would be.  You'd think that this would have inspired a real and viable thirty party challenge...but nothing materialized.  Johnson/Weld, both former governors (and the ones I voted for) gathered less than 5% of the electorate and never had a chance.  Even as we knew that the two main choices were awful, almost nobody was willing to think more independently...we were stuck within a paradigm where things had to be blue or red, no matter how messed up blue or red had become. 

Until we become convinced that the other side is not nearly as demonic as we have made them out to be, I don't know that there is much hope on this subject.  I have respect for Sen. Sasse facing this issue, but he has willingly aligned himself with a party and an ideology that is a very real part of the problem.  He is of the same clan that aligns himself with President Trump, and while occasionally he will speak against Mr. Trump's ways, he almost always votes for his policies.  Would he (and those on the political left, who in two years will probably be just as bad when they have hopefully swept Trump into the dustbin of history) better off staying in and working for change from the inside (which I hope he's doing?)  Or would he be better off taking a stand, to 'come out from them', to willingly renounce the world that they have created?

Here's what I want to see: a new 'Declaration of Independence'...not independence from people, not from civilized discourse, not even from conscience...but rather an independence from hatred, from bullying, from idelogical crystalization, from party over country, from tribalism over decency.  Here is the new declaration for those who would wish to be our leaders.
-We the people of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union, recognize the we have been our own worst enemy.  We have pointed fingers when our own sins were the problem. We have blamed others for our own faults when we should have seen that we, too, cause disunion and disorder.
-We renounce political tribalism.  When we see our leaders and our mouthpieces speak blatant lies, we will call them out.  When we see our leaders and our mouthpieces promote legislation and executive orders that are filled with self-interest, we will ask hard questions.  When we see our leaders and our mouthpieces mock opponents without regard to open and honest discussions of the real issues, we will become the voice of reason.  
-We will stop feeding the monster that promotes discord.  We will turn off our Twitter and our Facebook accounts and spend more time talking to our neighbors.  We will stop appearing on Fox News and MSNBC and CNN where we speak to only people who are looking for red meat and instead appear before our constituents to answer for our actions and our votes like the public servants that we are.  We will house our Congressional offices between others who do not hold to our ideologies, and we will regularly visit them and invite them to visit us.  We will stop gerrymandering districts in order to narrow democracy and instead strive to create an election process in which 90% of the races are not pre-determined in their results.  
-We know that change will not take place overnight, and we know that far too many of our colleagues are too embedded and dependent upon a system that rewards evil.  But we will never cease from our attempts at change, and forever seek a nation that truly lives under God, with all that means.  

This will never go anywhere, of course...and they are the ramblings of a single person sitting at his kitchen table on a Saturday morning rather than the product of a community of like-minded individuals as they ought to be.  But they are a start for me, though...and when I am King and Dictator over this once-great nation, I'll do my best to hold to their principles. 

We Are Screwed

So yesterday morning another lunatic went in and shot up another nightclub and another 50 people died.  Lots of questioning going on...was this guy (who had a semi-Muslim name) an ISIS terrorist?  Was this a hate crime, since it was a 'gay nightclub' (as most reports said)?  Were the guns he bought legally purchased?  Why was this guy, who had been questioned by the FBI several years ago, allowed to buy these guns earlier in the week?  And why, of course, do politicians of every stripe state their regular blather about 'thoughts and prayers' being with the victims when in fact nobody will do a  damned thing about preventing this from happening again next week or next month?

Not long after I arrived at the office this morning a man in the community called seeking advice.  Basically it came down to that he felt guilty that he wasn't sufficiently disturbed about what happened.  Yes, he would have been more upsetting to him if it happened in a school or somewhere else, but that it was a gay club made him feel bad that he didn't feel bad enough.  I honestly admire his concern; I don't know that I helped him, but I did tell him that likely a)we are all weary of these stories, so it is natural to shrug our shoulders...aren't we tired of the outrage?  b)The best thing he could do was to show sympathy and compassion and a tender heart to those around him.  I wish I would have said (I tried saying it but it didn't come out right) that if you let your heart be led to do compassionate things, then your feelings will follow.

Yet I failed in my advice, because I am so tired of these things and the inevitable gun control arguments, because nothing gets done.  The NRA has sufficiently poisoned the waters for so long that there is no hope.  If, as I have read in several places, there is a gun for everybody in America, this means there are 300 millions guns out there.  300,000,000, most of them not registered or trackable.  So, let's say that Obama puts in a gun control measure tomorrow to make it where there are no more gun purchases, that Wal-Mart really does stop selling AK-47s and pawn shops aren't stocked with walls of guns for whoever would want one...is that going to end the killings?

Let's say that he goes even further, and orders the ATF or FBI or some other agency to start rounding up guns.  This would play right into the hands of all the 2nd Amendment crazies, as they proclaim that the government is coming for their guns so that they can oppress the people.  How many shootouts would follow?  How many guns would be hidden?  How many more terrorist attacks would come not in the name of Allah but in the name of Freedom or the Flag or My Rights or whatever else the lingo is today?  Once again, the NRA has so allowed so many weapons to be bought over the years (300,000,000) that such a task of even the most draconian government would be impossible.

It's not a question of desire or even will, but simply reality.  Perhaps this is why 'thoughts and prayers' still get mentioned...but maybe what we need to pray for is that God will suddenly dissolve all these weapons, like he dissolved manna in the wilderness if it stayed over to the second day.  I'm sure that many of the crazies would think that Obama was still at fault for this, but then again I'm not so sure God is desiring to do this.  I'm becoming more sure that his judgment on us is that we are simply reaping the fruits of the stupidity we have allowed ourselves to be led into in recent years.

The Confederate flag comes to my town

In the small town in which I live I have started to see a disturbing trend: a spike in the number of Confederate flags waving proudly from the back of pickup trucks.  These aren't simply flags in a window, or flags on a bumper sticker (things that have always been in my little town), but big flags on poles planted by design on the pickup bed.  One of the trucks has a small American flag on one side, and a larger Confederate flag on the other side of the truck bed.  Another flies the Confederate flag alone, along with a sticker saying "Always been a rebel" as well as an OU sticker on the back window.  I'm safe in saying that actually going to college has probably never been an option for the driver.

I look at these trucks and the drivers are all very young.  What, exactly, do they think that they are doing?  We don't live in the South; in fact Kansas has a history centered on what it was going to be, slave or free, and ultimately and proudly chose free.  Osawatomie, Kansas (last town of one of my grandparents), is where the great abolitionist John Brown spent at least some time.  It's not that Kansas really has a problem with racism; we are a tolerant, moderate people, even with the short-sightedness of current government officials.  It's not as if slavery and/or racism has ever been thought of as a good thing in these parts.

And so these young drivers, if asked, probably would say something like, "I don't hate black people.  It's all about states' rights!  I hate the federal government trying to tell me what to do, to take away my guns."  And so, in opposition to all that, let's pick out a symbol that for most people means hatred and bigotry and under which in South Carolina there was a recent mass killing in the name of racial purity.  It's a flag under which many people went to war to fight against the country that they now live in, a flag that stands in marked opposition to the other flag that redneck #1 also has planted on the back of his pickup truck.

I get it.  People have free speech, and they get to protest how they want.  Accepting free speech means that you have to put up with a lot of really dumb free speech.  I don't want to go down the road of banning symbols and words.

But really, if you hate things so much, isn't there a better way than to fly a flag that for so many represents one of the darkest periods in our nations' history?  Do you have to make your point by waving proudly a flag that people in the years since the civil war has been used to still intimidate minorities and express hatred?  I know...for you it means one thing.  But for the rest of us, it's a sign of your stupidity.