E Unum Pluribus

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

- Dr. Benjamin Franklin

From the very first days of the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers understood that America had to be one nation - truly, the United States.  Of course there were regional differences and factions; the frosty Bostonian John Adams was a world away from Southern patrician and slaveholder Thomas Jefferson.  But they both loved the United States as a whole, and each of them understood fully that the other did too.

Even when politics drove them apart at the pinnacle of their careers, they still maintained a fundamental respect for each other that resurfaced after both retired from their respective Presidencies.  The closing years of their lives were marked by a warm correspondence of immense value to history, but must have been even more valuable to both of them personally.

America has never perfectly lived up to its ideal of mutual respect in spite of differences, but most Americans truly believe we should judge people by their own actions and not by any pre-conceived biases.  One of the arguments used by liberals for affirmative action and school busing is that children need to be exposed to people of other races and cultures to learn that they don't really kick kittens or eat babies.

Unfortunately, our political leaders find it more convenient to inflame racial tensions, not smooth them over.  The election of Barack Obama was supposed to usher in a post-racial America; instead, we've been treated to the sorry spectacle of Obama's own racism against the police officers of Cambridge MA.  His Supreme Court appointments show the same thing: far from being irrelevant to someone's character, a person's race is the only thing that matters in Obama's America.

The World Turned Upside Down

Forty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr urged America to look beyond skin color into people's hearts.  America answered his call, and gave black people the rights they had been wrongfully denied.

Today, with a black man in the Oval Office and another as Attorney General of the United States, is Dr. King's dream triumphant?  Sworn testimony says not: Former Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams stated under oath that, in Eric Holder's Justice Department,

"There is an open hostility to race-neutral enforcement of the voting rights laws," he stated. Officials, he said, openly refuse to bring "cases against black perpetrators [on behalf of white voters]."

Overt racial bias by government officials takes a wrecking-ball to the very foundation of these United States.  Rather than defend the civil rights of all Americans, Holder's regime dismissed charges against a Black Panther who threatened voters with a nightstick and called for the murder of white babies - and who also received the kind assistance of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund.

Yes, America is not perfect and never has been.  Yes, America has a dark history of slavery and Jim Crow.  But even through those years, our founding documents spelled out the unity and justice that ought to be, and great Americans worked towards that shining goal.

Today, our head law enforcement official doesn't even acknowledge that colorblindness should be the goal.

Judging Righteous Judgment

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - a racist name if ever there was one - recently demeaned their history and whole reason for being by "condemning" the Tea Party Movement as racist.  The Tea Party calls for limited government and lower taxes, policies which would benefit all Americans.  It contains people of all colors - yes, mostly white people, but America is still a mostly white nation so that's what you'd rationally expect.  Its professed aims have nothing whatsoever to do with anyone's color.

Are there racists who support the Tea Party?  Sure there are; in a movement of millions of people, there will always be a few nuts.  Of all people, the NAACP should know the evils that result by judging any group of people by their worst members.

Consider this report from the New York Times:

Based on reports filed by victims, blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crime in New York in 2009, including 80 percent of shootings and 71 percent of robberies. Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 98 percent of reported gun assaults.  [emphasis added]

Blacks are only 23% of New York's population!  Using the NAACP's logic, it would be right and prudent for New York's finest to treat all blacks or Hispanics as criminal suspects, since those two races commit almost all the worst crimes.  Yet it's exactly the NAACP who protests that blacks are stopped and searched by police 55% of the time - though compared to the percentage of crimes they commit, they're not being stopped nearly often enough.

What the NAACP and their fellow racists forget is that people must be judged as individuals.  Yes, our prisons are full of black men; each one of them has been tried in open court and convicted of a crime.  The NAACP thinks this is a shocking injustice, but that's only possible if most of the imprisoned are in fact innocent, and not even the NAACP believes that.

A crook is a crook, no matter their skin color; the New York Times tells us that black people are more likely to be criminals.  Surely that is no reason to condemn all black people as criminals any more than it's fair to condemn the Tea Party because a handful of its supporters are racist loons.

We see this reality every day: even the bigoted generally have a black person that they personally know well, and think well of.  In your place of work, there are probably people of every race, gender, and political persuasion; most of them are decent, honest people, are they not?  No race has a monopoly on evil or on virtue; each individual's choices can and should stand alone.

So if the Tea Party's aims are colorblind; if the New York police are simply trying to protect the innocent of all colors; if America wants desperately to move toward Dr. King's world of fairness and justice; why on earth are our national leaders doing everything in their power to prevent it?

The Power of Sowing Strife

Today's Democrats are drumming up votes from the black and Hispanic community by creating an entirely false picture of white racism that simply does not exist today.

Yesterday's "Dixiecrats" held a lock on Southern political power by frightening white voters with fever-dreams of the consequences of Negro equality.

Your great-great-grandfather's Democrats - starting to see a pattern here? - brought about a Civil War by their demand that slavery be preserved.  The white folks of the South were set against the blacks; then, that injustice led to the South being set against the North.

From the very beginning, the Democratic party has always clung to power by setting Americans against each other.  If the white hates the black, if the Southerner hates the Northerner, if the city hates the farm, if the coasts hate the flyover country...

Then Americans will be too busy fighting each other to notice that their independence, their money, their very freedoms are being quietly stolen by the politicians they think are "protecting" them.

Yes, there are some people we need to be protected from.  Domestically, they are called criminals; internationally, they are called "our enemies" by the mealy-mouthed and "terrorists" by the forthright.  Isn't it interesting that the Democratic party hates to lock up or execute criminals, and Obama set out to be nice to our enemies - while at the same time condemning everyone from the Cambridge cops to the people of Arizona for enforcing our democratically-enacted laws both foreign and domestic?

In the storm of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a Biblical saying that was struck on posters and medallions for decades following - "A house divided against itself cannot stand."  Sometimes we see its shorter version - "United we stand; divided we fall."

For two hundred years, as a conscious choice of political strategy, the Democratic Party has striven to divide the country against itself.  It should be no surprise that today, under total Democrat hegemony, America seems to be falling.

By rejecting the artificial divisions of race and class, and instead judging individuals by their actions, the people of America can retake their stolen liberties.  As a fortunate side-effect, that would doom the current Democratic party and large chunks of the Republicans - but then, with popular favor of Congress in single digits, isn't that what we all want anyway?