A Nation in Confusion
The answer is as vague as the non-culture we observe. Reality is parsed out to segments of our community by some sadistic cosmic clown, who delights in confusion. Reality is anything you choose it to be and there are no absolutes. Evidence? – Some few months ago, a police officer in St. Louis pursued a suspect who turned and shot at him five times before his gun jammed. The officer returned fire killing the suspect. Forensics? Yes, the gun, the shells from a suspect who was out on bail for similar actions just days before. Reality? – Quite a different matter.
The official reality is simple. Bad guy with a gun shooting at the police, now dead! End of story. But for the black community where he lived this is simply another in a long line of contrived scenarios, designed by the white cops to kill blacks. Huh?
Now, reconcile that! One incident, two realities. Who is right? To some degree it doesn’t matter for it speaks more of the divide in cultures and sensibilities than it does of objective reality. When emotions produce realities, there can be no objective commitment by the people to the rule of law. Take a look at any political conflict we face and, although the incident is different and the issues are different, the divergence of realities is the same. We believe what we are predisposed to believe, not what really happened.
It is for this basic human frailty that we have the rule of law and a court system that relies on a jury hearing the facts and determining a reality. But increasingly, the system is breaking down. Different cultural influences have learned to twist and turn the facts and filter them through their biases until truth becomes whatever they want it to be. The end result is a conflict of cultures and a war of mini-segments of a multicultural mess.
The way out is simple: Redefine our culture, gain ascent from all segments of our nation and reestablish the rule of an objective legal system. The prospects of doing that are the difficult part. The motto of our nation, E pluribus Unum, means out of many, one. But we forgot the last word, which means we cannot achieve the objective. America was envisioned to be a melting pot of cultures, in which the culture we brought with us we give up to became one new culture. Little by little, the objective of being one has vanished in the affirmation of the culture we brought to the table. We have not melted. We are not one culture from many other cultures, we are a conglomeration of individual cultures with separate realities, values and needs. We are in trouble.
The probability is, that as we bend to accommodate our differences, we will cease to have control by the rule of law and we will disintegrate into culture wars, each administering their own law, reality and leadership without a central core. This is the legacy of our former president who wanted to change everything but does not have a roadmap to define where it is all going. We have become a nation, not of ethnic diversity, but of ethnic separation. We have degenerated into a nation, not of many cultural flavors in one larger culture, but the individual flavors have become autonomous, separate and disconnected. The inevitable consequences of this separation is the breakdown of any sense of the rule of law or of a reality to which we can all agree is the ‘us’ of the ‘one’ in our motto.
Either the definitions of law will have to be accepted by the whole of the nation, or the individuality of realities will break us apart.
Editors Note:
The above was written a few years back under the Obama administration. Now, Donald Trump is the President and his perspective is to take us back to our roots and to reestablish our greatness as a nation.
He will have a hard time doing this, because, as predicted and explained above, our culture is not one, but many and each sees their slice of the pie as the only legitimate reality. No matter the results of the election and the statement of the electorate in favor of reestablishing out roots, each sub-culture is digging in to affirm that they are right regardless of the rule of law.
We will have trouble. The question is, can we manage it and come together or will our segmentation blow us apart? The enemy is not Trump but the divides that we affirm in contradistinction to all others. We are the enemy!
