Perhaps the saddest thing about America today is the palpable divisiveness at virtually every level and in every realm of our national life. Internationally, I’m not sure President Obama could make it any worse, even if he tried. It seems it is all reaching a crescendo, a boiling point, a breaking point, an explosive eruption. Jesus described a coming time of terrible distress “wars and rumors of wars” and that, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.” It’s time for the world to enroll in a Lamaze class.
Domestically, it hasn’t seemed this bad since the tail-end
of the civil-rights movement with its attendant urban riots. That period included the Harlem Riot of 1964, Philadelphia 1964 riot, Watts Riots
of 1965, and the 1966 Hough Riots in Cleveland. I can vividly remember 1966, as a six-year
old boy, visiting my Aunt and Uncle’s place in Ohio. A throng of rioters were marching down their
street. The adults had my cousins and
brothers all huddled in the attic, while my Dad and Uncle armed with a hunting
rifle and a shotgun kept watch out of the attic window.
The following year, 1967,
over 100 US cities experienced widespread rioting, including in Newark,
Plainfield, NJ , Detroit,
MI and Minneapolis-Saint Paul. After the assassination of Martin Luther
King, Jr. in 1968, extensive rioting again occurred in cities across the
country, most notably in Chicago, Washington, D.C. , Louisville, and Baltimore.
The other movement I distinctly recall from my youth was the
anti-war movement. Hippies protesting
the Vietnam War turned against the government, their parents, and virtually all
authority. “Never trust anyone over 30” was their code. The police became “pigs.” And who can forget their recruiting slogan
and raison d’être, “Sex,
Drugs, and Rock ’n’ Roll.” Virtually
every mall had a “head-shop” and record stores that served as a reminder and
promoter of their counter-culture practices.
Although the civil-rights and anti-war movements were both against
the status quo that the US government represented, they never really converged
as completely as one might have thought.
Even though Martin Luther King, Jr. was against the Vietnam War, he
didn’t trust the hippies enough to fully embrace them. Dr. King expressed this sentiment in a 1967
lecture at Massey College in Canada, “The importance of the hippies is not in
their unconventional behavior but in the fact that hundreds of thousands of
young people, in turning to a flight from reality, are expressing a profoundly
discrediting view on the society they emerge from.”
Tragically,
or perhaps ironically, we now see the worst of these two movements merged in
one man -- Barack Obama. He’s not alone.
Many modern leftists of similar temperament come to mind, e.g., John Kerry,
Eric Holder, Bill de Blassio and Hillary are all comparable. They’ve sworn to uphold and enforce the law
but know that won’t produce the outcomes they desire – so they find themselves
conflicted, occasionally defending and enforcing it, other times condoning or
demonstrating outright lawlessness.
They are expected to ensure tranquility and the common defense, but loathe
the police and military that are charged with trying to achieve it. They dare
not admit there’s a war on – not
even on poverty -- let alone admit they are the very reason we are losing
it.
Martin Luther King, Jr., in decrying the “white moderate,” describes
the character of these modern leftists to a tee, “I have almost reached the regrettable
conclusion that the {African-American's} great stumbling block in his stride
toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but
the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers
a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is
the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you
seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically
believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a
mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the {African-American} to
wait for a ‘more convenient season’.”
I agree with Dr. King, as long as these leftist/moderate
whites are in charge, they’ll continue to paternalistically dole out government
largesse, as if that’s the solution -- in the hopes of coming to a more
convenient season or their next election, whichever’s first.
The contractions have started.
