[1]The American people are at tremendous odds with one another. The timeless question as to whether we as individual citizens should continue to surrender our personal liberties and become increasingly mindless drones of a government colossus has a tendency to bring out some rather intense emotion. The ever-present spectacle of civil rawness is now reaching frightening proportions.
It was recently posited by a liberal pundit that the underlying reason for the high levels of current civil discord was nothing other than Donald Trump. Apparently, things were just fine until The Donald got involved and once again started asking for evidence of the President’s birthplace. His root-cause analysis had been completed, and our pundit’s findings indicated that Donald Trump was the precise source of the problem. Even when pushed on the topic, the answer was the same: Extract one Mr. Trump from the pages of history and we would all be living in harmonious bliss.
Harvard University jumped into the fray last week and blamed the GOP for co-opting Patriotic Parades as a cause of our malevolence. Given their emotionally entangled political insecurities, Harvard’s leadership apparently felt the need to once again vilify rather than clarify. Rather than address the issue of the Left’s perceived lack of patriotism, they just choose to demonize and degrade. Apparently a large endowment fund allows for this level of eighth-grade social behavior. Or, were they just trying to be funny?
The President recently commented (much to the comic delight of Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE and the President’s buddy), that there were not as many “shovel-ready projects†available for the stimulus money as they had originally thought. The humor to be found here seems to have escaped most of us. Maybe he would rather have Leno’s job.
It is clearly not Donald Trump that is the source of our problem. And no, parades are not a cause either. Nor is it Michele Bachman (who the liberal commentator Chris Matthews believes is attempting to bring back slavery with her appeal to a more constitutionally-predicated government). It is not Brangelina, or George Soros, or Ben Bernanke. Nor is it even President Obama, who can somehow chuckle over the waste of nearly a trillion dollars in tax money. The current civil disunion problem is not fundamentally one of disparate value systems or even one related to the definition of a successful system of governance.
The problem is rather one of simple intellectually-honest seriousness.
To experience fundamental disagreement on issues of importance is always of significance. To continually have to ask oneself “Are you kidding me?†is of infinitely greater emotional significance. Most of us can generally tolerate alternative opinions. We can even tolerate absurd opinions. We cannot, however, tolerate “humor†as a substitute for leadership in the face of massively threatening challenges. To publically state that Donald Trump is the cause of our discord, or that Parades are now being used as propaganda tools, or that a “little trillion dollar miscalculation†is somehow funny, is to play the role of the clown.
If the Left were to truthfully state what they are about, no one would follow them. So they resort to a form of obfuscating humor that endears them to a few, and infuriates all the rest. The “great political divide†is now being defined by a simple lack of willingness on the part of the President and his drones to engage in any level of serious adult-level dialogue.
Bread and circuses anyone?