What is it that keeps peoples apart?
In respect to their biology, to their evolutionary history people are much alike, in fact almost exactly the same when compared with representatives of other species. Why is it therefore that the news accounts we read daily, in digital or hard copy, or hear about on the tube, are mostly if not only about the disenchantments and disagreements among the world’s peoples, real differences leading abroad, if not yet in our own country, to physical violence, firefights in which soldiers, insurgents, terrorists, and most of all innocent bystanders caught in the middle, will die?
The differences that are everywhere about us only rarely if ever stay in civilized, debate format, as, say, in Jim Lehrer-like led discussions on the subjects of health care, Afghan strategy, immigration policy and global warming. No, for underneath the differences, and even under the civilized discussions that do take place on National Public Radio, lie the real differences between peoples that keep them seemingly forever apart. These differences are not often talked about, probably to avoid the shouting matches that would follow.
Accounting for, if not satisfactorily explaining the differences, are the opposed beliefs that people hold. For example, there are those who believe that Muslims are terrorists, that Socialism is evil, that Americans are imperialists, that Big Oil is why we went to war in Iraq, that our health care system is entirely in the hands of the big pharmaceutical and insurance companies, that rapidly expanding entitlement programs are destroying our country’s work ethic, that workers’ manufacturing jobs are being eliminating with no regard to the worker as our companies move our factories overseas, that single mothers on welfare are gaming the system etc.
The middle ground between all these positions is rapidly diminishing. People who would defend government programs as doing necessary work where private initiative has failed or is absent, are hardly ever listened to. Instead, they are rejected out of hand as belonging to the socialist camp.
People who would limit federal control of public goods, such as health care, education, the care of the environment, even social security, and instead promote private initiatives, helping them to grow and expand in all these areas, in some instances with government supporting vouchers, these people are rejected as not caring about their fellow citizens, as only caring about their own narrow and private interests and pleasures.
The result is that, instead of being subjects of civilized debate, the disagreements among us rapidly become shouting matches between true believers of this or that usually opposite position or principle. Health care is a right, it’s not a right; home ownership is a right, it’s not a right; taxation is the legalized theft of people’s hard earned money, taxation is a positive good providing revenues that buy life support for those most in need.
Furthermore both sides have adopted the paranoid position in politics, believing that their respective opponents are part of a vast conspiracy out to destroy them. The extreme “conservative” right (Glenn Beck, for example, Shawn Hannity) talks about a conspiracy to take away the country from the people. In their view new mountains of Government regulations injected into all spheres of life will bring individual entrepreneurship endeavors to a standstill.
The extreme “progressive” left (Swans.com, Huf Post writers for example) talks about a conspiracy to give our country (what still remains of it anyway in public hands, for this process has been going on for a long time, at least since the time of President Eisenhower who first mentioned it in 1961) over to the military-industrial complex.
In the view of the far left some 99% of country’s wealth has been stolen by the leaders of our large corporations and is being held by them for their own private enjoyment, and so far the Federal government has caved in to lobbyist pressure coming from these wealthy few not to redirect significant portions of the country’s wealth to the now hurting middle classes, if not to the poor.
To be continued….
