Introduction
President Biden is calling for unity, and through unity, healing. All people of goodwill want unity, at the very least unity of purpose. Everything good, including unity, requires honesty; complete and unabridged.
Healing requires us to heal ourselves, not the “other person.”
That is the subject of today’s 15 minute episode.
Continuing
The issue at the very core of what divides us is the belief that we are right, and those who disagree with us are wrong. Add the conviction that: 1. Being right allows us to do, or at least excuse, just about anything done to pursue that supposed “right” and 2. That anything the others do in pursuit of their beliefs is deeply wrong simply because they are deeply wrong.
Certain principles are bedrock; here are two of mine:
http://resultswithreason.com/2018/12/07/responsibility-lessons-from-desert-pete-ep-85/ (Personal Responsibility); take it, teach it and,
Be Your http://resultswithreason.com/2018/03/23/am-i-my-brothers-keeper-2/ (Brother’s Keeper). The answer to the biblical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is a ringing, unequivocal “Yes.” There is no other answer.
These two are examples of overarching principles, and to me they are non-negotiable. But tactics, the methods which we use to live up to those principles, must be fully debated in the marketplace of ideas. Debated, not dictated. Debated, not fought over with cliches, insults and cancelling used as weapons. Debated and resolved, then implemented.
As with any good debate, we need to start by defining terms:
BLM. Black Lives Matter. It should go without saying that Black Lives Matter. But do all Black Lives Matter? If indeed they do, why is the focus almost exclusively on the less than 1% of blacks who die by being shot by cops? Where is the grief, the outrage and the attempt to find a fix for the other 99% who die by gun killings? And don’t get fussy with me by saying that my asking these questions means that I am somehow racist, or that I don’t care about people like George Floyd. I am more than willing to say his name, George Floyd, as well as others shot by the police. How many names from the other 99% can anyone even remember, much less say out loud? I want to say all 100% of the names out loud. Each and everyone of them has meaning for me; I want them to have meaning for you, too.
Antifa. Anonymous cowards who won’t tangle with anyone unless they have an overwhelming advantage in weapons and numbers. They are more of an annoyance than a threat, but they are also far more than just an idea. They are like the Lost Boys in Peter Pan. Pray they grow up.
QAnon. Scumbags, likely more dangerous than I had thought. They need to be denounced loudly and often by us, and confronted and defeated by law enforcement.
White Supremacists. See above.
The miraculous founding of the world’s longest standing democracy. The Declaration of Independence laid out the rights of man, independent of anything “granted” by the state. The revolutionary founders risked their, “Lives, fortunes and sacred honor.” for us.
The signing of the necessarily flawed Constitution that created the government which was put in place to guarantee and enforce the rights of man as laid out in the Declaration. Without the Constitution, there would have been no Union. Without the Union, the slaveholding South could have gone on its cruel way far longer. Martin Luther King called the founding documents “promissory notes.” Separately, I had been calling them statements of direction.
Defund the police. Idiotic. Any back of the envelope analysis says that police reform, and reform is needed, will cost more, not less. Let’s find the needed funds, and implement the needed reforms.
1619 Project and Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of The United States.” Scams. Their point is to tear down America with patent falsehoods in order to benefit from being one of the “rebuilders.” Join me in being...