Hardened
Our political lives are hardening. What used to be a conversation among friends, a “mental exercise” of point and counter-point no longer occurs. The conversation now dances like a water bug, flitting from subject to subject but always wary of breaking the surface tension and plunging into the emotional depths of the issues of the day.
Talk about “going out to dinner,” and flit on the surface of COVID, of vaccines and masks and “rights” to “do what you want” in a pandemic. Discuss driving, and dodge the question of police afraid to enforce safety laws. Talk about watching television, and avoid tonight’s national address by the President. Talk about the city, and skirt the issues of poverty and crime.
I hoped that the end of the Trump Administration would mark the beginning of political dialog once again. I believed (and still do) that people of good faith could have differing views: that disagreement doesn’t require hate. And I thought that perhaps the emotion of the Insurrection on January 6th would be enough to “scare” us back to each other, to communicating, to recognizing that there was more in common than ever separated us.
But I’m not so sure that’s so.
Framers
I’m driving a lot these days, travelling to officiate high school track meets. As I travel, I’m listening to lectures on the Federalist Papers, the essays of three of the Framers of the US Constitution. That may make me as big a “history geek” as everyone always suspected, but the arguments of 1787 still ring true today.
Hamilton, Jay and Madison; the authors of the Federalist Papers, all were morally opposed to slavery. Hamilton and Jay were founders of the New York “Manumission Society”, dedicated to freeing owned humans from bondage. And yet Jay owned slaves, and while it’s unsure whether Hamilton did, his father-in-law Phillip Schuyler absolutely did. And Madison, scion of a Virginia plantation owner, had over a hundred.
Madison believed that the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise written in the Constitution, that counted those owned as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of population and taxation, actually was “good” for those in bondage. It demonstrated that they were not “chattel property”, they had a portion of “humanity”, three-fifths. Madison thought once that “humanity” was enshrined in law, it was inevitable that the “peculiar institution” would ultimately end. Three-fifths humanity is more than none, better than the cows and horses also traded in the markets.
They Were Wrong
They all believed, as Abraham Lincoln did, that ultimately, “…the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place in where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction…” (House Divided Speech, Chicago 1958). They were wrong. The course of ultimate extinction required a Civil War, a national blood-letting with over 600,000 dead, to resolve the issue.
From the carefully constructed compromises in the Constitution, the issue hardened to the point that the US Congress literally banned debate on the topic. People “of good faith” could no longer even discuss it. As John Brown said, in a letter written prior to his execution, “I John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood.” It only took two more years for that prophecy to come true.
Polarized
America has been so divided in the past that there was no alternative but “blood”. The question today: is that where we are?
- Our nation cannot even discuss the issue of mass shootings – there is no point. We have given up on any solution that would require controlling guns.
- We have allowed fiction to become fact when it comes to our election process. Our Constitutional Framers believed that the ultimate check on the government was our democracy: the vote of the people to change their leaders. But today, a fictional accounting of our elections is encouraging impediments to voting. If a portion of our citizenry is kept from voting, they can be kept from having a voice.
- And many of us are in denial about the recurring issue of race in our society. The fact – we will become a “majority/minority” nation in the next score of years – appears to some as a threat rather than a benefit.
Our history does not promise easy answers. Nor does it provide many examples of solution. We will determine our own fate, but we must do so despite the past, not because of it.
We need to talk.
