Reality Check 101

The United States was founded and has thrived on the idea of “social compact”.  It was an unspoken understanding by most citizens that certain norms had to exist in a free and ordered society in order for it to survive – free exercise of natural rights (not created rights), reverence toward and submission to the rule of law, citizen government.  The compact was birthed in 1776 and codified in the Constitution.  The authority and power of those instruments and of the government that administers them rests completely on the preservation of that unspoken compact.  Abandon the compact and chaos follows.

Ask any supremacist on the street – including but not limited to racists (of any color), Marxists, Fascists, sexists (feminists, LGBTQists, etc.), Islamists, anarchists, illegal immigrant activists – if they or their cause are self-centered or immoral and they will most likely be, or feign to be, hurt and protest that their intentions are only for the greater good.  That claim is uniformly the instrument of every social/political revolutionary that has ever vied for power, no matter what the realities are; compact be cursed.

And it works.

But why?  How is it that First World America has fallen prey to the oldest tool of Third World despots?  The answers lie in powers as deep as the fallen human heart and as shallow as the “Obamaphone”.  Our beloved nation is progressively falling under the spell of those powers as we continue to fracture and display the fruit of our division for all the world to witness.

Politicians and pundits from every political and ideological camp are busy being surprised and flummoxed at conditions on “the street”.  They seem to be oblivious to the absurdities that got us where we are.

Absurdity #1:  Human nature is not what it clearly demonstrates itself to be.  At our core, we are lovers of self, reactive, and easily tempted by what the Apostle John called “the desires of the eyes, the desires of the flesh and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16).  That is not to say that there is no conscience in us or that we lack the ability to do the “right thing”.  The national response to Hurricane Harvey demonstrates the ability of the soul (heart) to open itself to everything from suffering to intimacy.  The genius of factionists (supremacists) is the ability to hustle desires and pride in order to exploit them on a mass scale.

Absurdity #2:  Segregation yields openness, unity, and peace.  Nowadays we call factions “communities”.  God designed mankind for community as well as a diversity of “humanness” but not in the false and disfigured form operative in America.  When, in the decade of the seventies, the federal government began labeling citizens for tax and social welfare purposes (“Directive 15”, Office of Management & Budget), it blindly aided and abetted the ruin of real community for the sake of idolized “communities” of kinds, classes, languages, and victims.  The genius of factionists (supremacists) has been the ability to deceive wide swaths of the American people into resting significance and identity on their kinds while creating an “otherness” of anyone outside themselves.

Absurdity #3:  Rebellion and patriotism are partners because loyalty to one’s group transcends loyalty to our nation.  Having successfully preyed upon desire and pride, and having clustered the respondents into “sub-national” cultural nativist communities, factionists are now free to incite rebellion on the streets and subversion in Washington D.C.  Idolatrous communities are conquering our nation.

The road we are on can still be abandoned.  The externals are obvious.  Mike Gonzales (Kathryn & Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies) has suggested ending Affirmative Action, returning to “the ethos of assimilation” and teaching patriotism again.  But initiatives must go deeper.  A simplified tax code and all social programs must eliminate the categorization of people based on race, victimhood, ethnicity, gender, language, and any other pigeon holes.  The Justice Department must vigorously prosecute as civil rights violations any suppression of state and federally-protected constitutionally-guaranteed liberties.

Genuine diversity in unity has nothing to do with kinds; races, ethnicities, genders, cultures, national origins, or religious affiliations.  The original design was all about valuing the uniqueness of people who are God-created in His image and learning from each other’s contributions to the life of the whole.