Our political lives are hardening. What used to be a conversation among friends, a \u201cmental exercise\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Talk about \u201cgoing out to dinner,\u201d and flit on the surface of COVID, of vaccines and masks and \u201crights\u201d to \u201cdo what you want\u201d in a pandemic.\u00a0\u00a0Discuss driving, and dodge the question of police afraid to enforce safety laws.\u00a0\u00a0Talk about watching television, and avoid tonight\u2019s national address by the President.\u00a0\u00a0Talk about the city, and skirt the issues of poverty and crime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t require hate. And I thought that perhaps the emotion of the Insurrection on January 6th<\/sup> would be enough to \u201cscare\u201d us back to each other, to communicating, to recognizing that there was more in common than ever separated us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I\u2019m not so sure that\u2019s so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m driving a lot these days, travelling to officiate high school track meets. As I travel, I\u2019m 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 \u201chistory geek\u201d as everyone always suspected, but the arguments of 1787 still ring true today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cManumission Society\u201d, dedicated to freeing owned humans from bondage. And yet Jay owned slaves, and while it\u2019s unsure whether Hamilton did, his father-in-law Phillip Schuyler absolutely did. And Madison, scion of a Virginia plantation owner, had over a hundred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cgood\u201d for those in bondage.\u00a0\u00a0It demonstrated that they were not \u201cchattel property\u201d, they had a portion of \u201chumanity\u201d, three-fifths.\u00a0\u00a0Madison thought once that \u201chumanity\u201d was enshrined in law, it was inevitable that the \u201cpeculiar institution\u201d would ultimately end.\u00a0\u00a0Three-fifths humanity is more than none, better than the cows and horses also traded in the markets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They all believed, as Abraham Lincoln did, that ultimately, \u201c\u2026the 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\u2026\u201d (House Divided Speech, Chicago 1958). <\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cof good faith\u201d 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.\u201d It only took two more years for that prophecy to come true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n America has been so divided in the past that there was no alternative but \u201cblood\u201d. The question today: is that where we are? <\/p>\n\n\n\nFramers<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
They Were Wrong<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Polarized<\/h3>\n\n\n\n