FAILURE OF
MEMORY, FAILURE OF CONSCIENCE
Charlottesville,
Virginia
August
12-13, 2017
Clash of
Cultures -- White Supremacists with The Left
JAMES R.
FISHER, JR., Ph.D.
© August 16,
2017
First of all, there is no way to justify the violence, or the
driving of a vehicle into the crowd by a young Neo-Nazis and killing a young
lady who was attending such a rally in support of her views. Indeed, it
was in fact a terrorist attack in every sense of that distinction because it
was motivated by political and racial animus, and therefore an act of
murder. A score of others were also injured, many of them
critically.
What produced this insanity was the small city of Charlottesville,
Virginia became the site for a Neo-Nazis, KKK and White Supremacist group with
the aim of protesting the removal of a statue of the Confederate
leader of the American Civil War, Robert E. Lee from the city center.
FAILURE OF MEMORY
Many signers of the American Declaration of Independence who led
the successful struggle against the colonial rule of Great Britain of the
thirteen colonies were also slave owners.
The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson, a
slave owner. Seventeen other Presidents of the United States were also
owners of slaves including George Washington, James Madison, Andrew Jackson and
Ulysses S. Grant.
The Federalists Papers, which are the basis of the United States
Constitution were written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John
Jay. Madison was a slave owner, John Jay possibly as well as he was
somewhat ambivalent towards slavery, while Hamilton himself was literally at
one point a slave. He, too, had an ambivalent attitude towards slavery.
It is a fact that the American idea, which is representative of
American democracy and all that most Americans have enjoyed with regard to
freedom over the past 241 years had originally been created by white men, and
as pointed out with many of them slave owners.
That is American history. That is how the United States of
America came about; that is the legacy of our country. It cannot be
changed. It cannot be modified. It cannot be denied.
Here in Tampa, Florida we are about to remove the statue of a Confederate
Soldier that sits downtown close to the Hillsborough County Courthouse.
It is to be removed to a cemetery out of the sight of people who work or live
or visit the fine city of Tampa.
Once you launch into the madness of attempting to erase unpleasantness
of the history of the past from reality, what is stopping you from removing the
Washington Monument and other monuments in Washington, DC and across these
United States that are associated with the history of the Founding Fathers of
American society?
Those who fought and died for the Confederate’s cause believed
they were right. They believed in States Rights and the authority of the
State to exercise its authority and control in matters of social, political and
economic matters.
Yes, slavery was bad, and yes slavery denied what the US
Constitution and the Declaration of Independence states emphatically: That
all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable
rights.
And yes, it was hypocrisy to deny people of color those rights
from 1776 to 1865; and yes, it was wrong to thereafter in the South to
discourage black voters from voting with a poll tax and literacy requirement;
and yes, it was not until 1954 when the United States Supreme Court considered
Brown versus the Board of Education that the process of ending segregated
schools and education commenced to be integrated, but not without bloodshed and
a flight of many Americans to private schools to avoid sharing classrooms with
people of color in public schools.
This explosion of private institutions of learning was not only
true of the south, but across the nation, and continues even to this very day.
That said children of color have proven to have the aptitude,
intelligence and capability of children of any other race or ethnicity, but yet
it is still difficult for them – in many cases – to acquire the education that
they desire and deserve.
When you destroy our monuments, our data points of our climb
through history, and then attempt to erase our blemishes by political action,
you erase us as a people, culture and society from ourselves. You drive
out our essence and plaster over the surface a Teflon mask of how we would like
to be viewed.
We celebrate our connections to Greece’s Golden Age (500 to 300 BC)
and its democracy, the times of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle forgetting that
slavery was part of that Golden Age, as nascent democracy grew out of that
ugliness with only 10 to 20 percent of the Greek population actually
participating in the government.
When you cherry pick what you are for from what you choose to
believe you are not, you are marching down the road to oblivion and ultimately
to expire over the abyss. This has happened to other societies. It
could happen to our own.
FAILURE OF CONSCIENCE
Our conscience is an inner feeling or voice which acts as a guide
to the rightness and wrongness of our behavior. When we feel shame; when
we have a guilty conscience, it acts as a barrier to doing something that hurts
others or ourselves. It provides us with a moral standard, a value
system, an ethical system and a belief system that governs our behavior even
though our good behavior may never be found out.
With a conscience, we do it because we can. In other words, it provides
us with the scruples and the controls that monitors our compunctions.
With a sense of
consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one’s own actions or
intentions, the content of our character shines brightly because we feel a need
and obligation to do the right thing. It is a matter of our individual
principles guiding us irrespective of the subliminal stimuli from the
television media, talking heads, or the Internet. We are our own person. We
march to our own drummer.
With such an internal personal authority, we are happy campers because we have
a moral center, are self-directed by a moral compass, and therefore know our
way.
Alas, this is missing in today’s society because we have a failure of
conscience. We are not internally directed and motivated but outwardly so,
looking for a cause to project our anxiety, frustration and, yes, our insanity
with those who are of a similar mind.
It is the herd mentality that rationalizes its hatreds into justifications for
a cause. The basic justification always originates out of fear; fear that some
other group; some other ethnicity; some other race or religion will disrupt our
bigoted comfort and security.
This emotional dependency and irrationality is easy for evil leaders to exploit
and orchestrate by playing on our jealousies and envies, our insecurities and
doubts, our self-disgust and self-contempt.
Unfortunately, rabble rousers on the left as well as on the right have reduced
this collapse of civility, and are now at the ready to exploit it for power.
The paradox is the belief that hate can dissolve into happiness and love into
fulfillment to fill the void, is but a false positive generated by unhappiness
and hatred.
Why? Because life doesn’t work the way of either/or but either and or. Hate is
the other side of love, as darkness is the other side of light.
Hate is as natural to us as is love. There are things we may hate such as
idleness, or laziness, or waste; and there are many things that we love such as
family and friends, our community and our work. But human emotions being what
they are at times can have a problem with those things we love.
Don’t be pulled in by the pundits and journalists who make a business of
exploiting hatreds. They make a career of our dissembling, corruption,
contretemps and foibles. It is the emptiness of this electronic age.
You can despise people who think and believe and behave differently than you
do, but in the United States of America and not the United States of Anxiety,
they have a right to the tenets of their beliefs independent of everyone else.
Destroy them and you in turn destroy us all.
Again, it is fear that fails to allow us to be equanimous when we encounter
people who do not have the same pegs in a row as we do.
When people break the law whatever their persuasion they should be prosecuted
to the full letter of that law. But should they not be able to assemble
freely simply because we disparage them as a people?
WHAT THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER SEES UNRAVELING
We are coming to behave like a Third World nation in total chaos. Good and
tolerant people of all socioeconomic, political, religious, racial and ethnic
origins are becoming so tired of relentless trauma that they are spurning
newspapers, magazines and watching television news.
Americans are increasingly becoming like the 80 or 90 percent during Greece’s
Golden Age who were forced to the sidelines without a vote, only in the case of
Americans today, they are doing so voluntarily.
People work, stay with their own kind, play with their electronics, texting and
tweeting, listening to their music having retreated essentially into a
self-imposed cage. Forget a wall across the southern border of the United
States, many Americans live in gated communities behind seven foot walls, and
others have no idea who their neighbors are, as they are divided by fences.
The fringe on both sides of inflammatory issues have now taken center stage.
They get much of the media coverage and are in the process of destroying the
very idea of American democracy with a willing if ironic hand from people in
power by being obsessed with the fringe.
We once prided ourselves in being self-directed and self-responsible
individuals who were known for our volunteerism and for coming together in
crisis. We are in crisis now and we could not be further apart.
Once shame controlled our behavior. Now there is no shame. Once we gave others
the benefit of the doubt until they crossed us. Now if they look and act
differently than we do, we have no regret if they are forcibly removed from our
midst.
We worry about nuclear holocaust and the threat of North Korea, when we are in
the center of an emotional holocaust that we conveniently deny.
It is a troubling time.
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