Increasing divide in society

[LotusCarsLtd]

I heard once that it’s getting to the point where society is becoming so immoral that we will hit a point where we cannot transform the culture anymore but have to confront it once and for all. There are those that also say that the nation has become more and more polarized as society starts to split politically, socially, and morally.

And I think I have a theory to explain this. Much of the country can be broadly categorized as social “progressives” that wish to change everything about society and move away from traditional political, social, and religious mores, and social “conservatives” who wish to maintain the traditional understandings of political, social, and religious life. The progressive wishes to do-away with morals and traditional understandings of government while the conservative wishes to maintain what has always been there (a progressive might want to go against traditional understandings of government but the conservative wishes to maintain a traditional understanding of, say, the Constitution).

So what’s happening is that the conservative rightly wishes to maintain the traditional understandings of these things but the progressive wishes to continually change everything, taking him more and more away from the “clearing in the woods” to the “unknown darkness of the forest”. And because the progressive is quite belligerent in his pursuit of “progressiveness” he is quite cocky about his efforts and sees no problems in forcing the conservative to join him. But the conservative refuses to, and it’s getting to the point that confrontation is beginning to become the only option and the conservative will have to stand-up to the progressive and put him in place.

And that’s what seems to be happening to society. Progressives refuse to see that what they propose is bad and will not work long-term, writing-off the conservative as outdated, evil, bigoted, etc. to try and make their own useless cause seem more plausible by attacking the other side. The progressive here is hard to reason with and the only real way of getting through to him now is to stand-up to him, get in his face, and tell him to back down. Society is going to have to start doing the same or else. It’s not that society is moving away from tradition, it’s that one side is trying to do so and the other refuses to go along with it (and rightfully so).

Thoughts?

Also bear in mind that I am not referring to “liberal” vs. “conservative” since, for instance, Catholicism doesn’t fit into either category. Take the terms for what they literally mean: “progressive” wishes to be socially progressive, “conservative” wishes to maintain tradition, and the different approaches they have in regards to society.

 

[CPA2]

King John, at the time of the Magna Carter, said that his mouth was the law. I find that attitude disturbing and I find it disturbing now. Look at our forfeiture laws. Those laws were outlawed under the Magna Carter and are unconstitutional today.

Should a teenager’s computer be seized under the forfeiture laws? The law makes no distinction between free speech and theft. Most hackers are just playing around or swapping information. They have no intention to steal. However, an accusation of hacking results in seizure of property. The mouth of a bureaucrat is the law.

The role of the government is an umpire. Thomas Jefferson supported this idea, and it is embedded in our laws going all the way back to 1775 (e.g. Virginia and Massachusetts Constitutions).

The IRS, Social Services, and all the “alphabet police” incorporate another idea, the idea that government is a participant. There is no Constitutional justification for this idea, as far as I can see. Additionally, government bureaucracies violate another intent of the Founding Fathers, the separation of powers. For example, Congress gives the IRS very broad powers to make law (legislative). The IRS has the power to go out to find the people who break “the law” (executive). Additionally, the IRS has the power to judge a taxpayer guilty (judicial).

 

[jc-servant]

I guess social “progressives” were wrong when they advocated for the end of slavery, voting rights for women, the end of Jim Crow which continued the denial of rights to racial minorities nearly a century after the Emancipation Proclamation. . . all of those things were not popular in public opinion with the “majority” yet most people can now look back with some perspective and see that enslaving other humans, denying the vote to more than half of our population simply because of their gender, etc was morally wrong and in fact not in the best interests of our country economically either. You could not tell that to the white people screaming at and spitting on little children who just wanted to attend the public school that their parents’ tax dollars paid for because those angry people were protecting their “traditional” way of life even if it was wrong. The natives in what is now Mexico used to kill babies in their sacrifice ceremonies, but I would not want to return to that “traditional” practice either.

The “traditional” position is frequently not the best one. It all depends on how far back one looks for the “tradition” and whether one looks at the reality of the earlier time period or the fantasy/idealized version that people frequently cite when they want to talk about some “tradition.” For example, in the 1950s many people would say that mothers stayed home with children and golly gee weren’t things great. Maybe if one lived on The Donna Reed Show, but not if one was a racial minority who could not attend most colleges or have a chance for many union jobs or public service jobs like police/fire services and could not shop in many stores unless one went around the back (and even then could not try on clothing before buying it in many places) . . . and if one lived in a southern state there was no exercising the constitutionally granted “right” to vote due to all sorts of discriminatory practices, intimidation or outright violence.

If one was a woman who needed to support herself in the 1950s, one could expect harassment (“Why are you trying to take a job from a man who needs to support a family?” or worse), a majority of jobs that would not even consider a woman and if one got the same job offered to a man it was usually for less pay with little hope of promotion. There was a “pink ghetto” of jobs to which most working women were shunted. If one was a minority woman, then the opportunities were even more limited. My grandmother had to work since my grandfather got disabled on a construction job, but she was stuck working long hours in extreme conditions for low pay in a commercial laundry because it was one of the few places that would hire a black woman. Of course, there were also the lovely “traditional” jobs as maid, housekeeper and nanny for white people that was the “traditional” place for black women who “knew their place” in our society during those “good old days.”

I’m not a progressive or a conservative in all areas of my life, but I’m enough of a student of history and a realist to know that all evil is not coming from one group in our society. We have so-called conservatives fanning the anger of people on all sorts of issues instead of trying to find a constructive way to get something done when they are not the majority in power. It is a dangerous game they are playing for the sake of politics when so many people start wondering if our democracy can withstand the normal cycle of one party being out of power for a few years.

The scapegoating of any one group (progressives, conservatives or anyone else) is not the right way to handle things. The Nazi Party did that very thing in the 1930s in Germany and it did not turn out well at all. They started out with fanning the anger and resentment of the Germans who were left out of the rebuilding after WWI. They gradually turned that anger toward “outsiders” who didn’t hold their “values” and who didn’t look or sound like them, Jews, other non-Aryans, homosexuals, etc. Once they got large numbers of people heated up into such anger, resentment, etc that they were not thinking clearly any longer, then they upped the ante and began justifying doing more and more things to those “others” and the everyday citizens went right along with them. They worked to take over the democractic government and then they stopped pretending to be a democracy any longer and just became an extreme right dictatorship.

I believe that we are heading down a dangerous road and it is not toward “socialism.” When supposedly mainstream people (like our elected officials) stop talking about changing things by waiting on the next election to vote for the change and start advocating leaving the Union, etc it really scares me that people are allowing their frustration at losing an election to put them on a slippery slope that has a lot more in common with the road toward violence than I think people want to admit. I am sick of people pointing at their opponents when they are caught doing something wrong and saying “but they did it at X time or to Y person” as two wrongs can make one right. When I was a kid my parents would say “if Johnny wanted to jump off a bridge would you do that also?” Our politicians and a lot of ordinary citizens who are running around using extreme language and talking about watering the tree of liberty with blood, etc need to look to that old lesson.

When is someone going to grow up and take the high road? As Catholics we are called to do better and I believe that we can, but then I’ll get another forwarded email filled with lies that someone feels it is OK to send out because it targets those “others” who they see as the enemy. Nevermind that spreading unfounded gossip and outright lies is a sin that we should be striving to avoid. Who has time to check out snopes or multiple news sources before fanning those flames of righteous anger with more nonsense!