SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT!

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 14, 2009

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In the pages of my missives, I have often openly wondered if America was coming apart at the seams. As a boy growing up, now looking back as an old man, I have wondered if it was a dream it seems so idyllic.

Not everyone loved everyone else, but I rarely ran into anyone that was not civil. I am a person with strong views and yet people have allowed me to have them without being hateful towards me for the inclination.

A person of my youth has written that she becomes physically ill when she reads newspapers, magazines and the Internet for all the hate and vituperations. Although not saying so, she implies the same sense I have of the past, a past when we lived and let live while recognizing we were all part of the same whole.

By the accident of our birth many of us were young when America was jolted out of its complacency and isolationism with World War Two.

We saw how we forgot our personal pet peeves and pulled together, how we became truly one nation out of many. In my view, we have been unraveling for the past sixty-five years. That said there is hope.

Nearly 150 years ago, America was coming apart as President Abraham Lincoln entered the White House. Go to the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois and you will see the walls covered with the hate and vituperations, which have bled black ink across the pages of American newspapers of his day.

We managed that storm because of Lincoln's eloquence, tenacity and resolve that we were and would remain one nation that would not perish from the earth.

Yet the more things change the more they remain the same.

Nearly 180 years ago, Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina authored the Nullification Act in defiance of the presidency of Andrew Jackson and the federal government's right to make laws binding to all states. It was a question of States' Rights and slavery, then. The Nullification Act never became law and the Civil War did away with slavery, but not the mindset.

Last week, we had U. S. Representative Joe Wilson from the same state of South Carolina shouting out in President Barak Obama's address on healthcare to a joint session of Congress that the president lies.

Apologies have been made and accepted but the damage has been done.

How do I know? Republican Wilson and his Democrat opponent for the 2010 South Carolina Congressional seat both have accumulated campaign purses of more than a $ million a piece in less than a week. Polarity could not be more apparent.

We have elected an African American as President of the United States. If he fails, we fail. If his presidency is a disaster, it weakens the United States of America to survive in a hostile world.

When we disagree with the president on policy, and do so civilly, we are demonstrated our constitutional right as citizens of this country. When we treat the president with disrespect or disdain, we are disrespecting and showing contempt for ourselves. That is where I draw the line. I have not always voted for the man who has become my president, but I have always respected the man who has held that office.

We are a nation divided. Conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan ponders this in today's The Tampa Tribune (September 14, 2009):

"In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?

"Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.

"E pluribus unum -- out of many, one -- was, the national motto the men of '76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?

"Is America, too, breaking up?"
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It is something to think about.

We have been here before. We took our heads out of the sand in World War Two and pulled together. Today, it is more challenging. Our heads are not in the sand, but engrossed in some electronic device in our hand or plugged into our ear.

There is no narcotic that can approach the mass catatonia with which these electronic devices have successfully drugged our society and world. We call this progress but how can it be progress when it seeds such blantant polarity?


How do I know this is the case? Most people won't have the inclination or time to read much less consider Buchanan's concern. First of all, young people, especially, don’t read newspapers today, but are smittened with all the suspect legends on the Internet, and secondly, they don't see such concerns as their problem.

Totalitarianism is a cancer waiting in the wings to debilitate and exploit this advantage. "Remember," said John Adams, "democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

Be always well,

Jim