Posted on 09/08/2021 12:10:11 PM PDT by bitt
One thing has become clear in recent months: many Americans recognize the attempt to manipulate and rule over them through invoking hatred, dealing in lies, and making a case for an economy of death and fear – and they don’t like it, and are fighting back against it.
It is by no means only Americans who are making this clear. Mass protests in other countries, where streets fill with people rejecting collectivization and control, testify to how widespread the revulsion is.
But it seems that nowhere are the hate, lies, and death cult illuminated in such vivid, specific relief as in America. There is a simplicity and clarity to the propositions in America not necessarily found elsewhere.
If the same simplicity and clarity are approached, they seem to be most nearly so by the other nations of the “Anglosphere.” All of them – call it the Five Eyes club of the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – are in varying degrees of meltdown at the nexus of society, culture, language, and moral spirit. From one day to the next it’s hard to decide who’s in the lead. Will Australia spin off the planet first, or will it be Canada? Will some redemptive earthquake in the United States clear the roiling fog and smoke, and restore a sense of order and balance?
We can’t know. The world has never been in this place before. There have been breakdowns of order over large swaths of the earth, but never before without the safety valve of ill-traveled, unmapped hinterlands, conveniently separating ruling hatreds from each other, muffling the echo of lies, and giving breathing space to life, against laws of predation and death.
It’s not small things Americans are dealing with at the moment: not small encounters with moral conundrums. I want to lay out only three whose grip we writhe in. If America does not defeat them, no one will escape them. No other nation is constituted with the idea of rejecting and defeating them.
One is the phenomenon collectively known as Critical Race Theory. I have no quarrel with those who argue that as an academic perspective, at the university level, it is suitable for debate and analysis. I disagree with its central premise profoundly, but let there be robust dialogue and argument.
The problem is precisely, however, that as it is administered in K-12 education, it is not subject to robust dialogue and argument. Rather, its central premise is taken as a given, and it is made the basis of orthodoxy that can’t be transgressed.
The central premise is that a racial divide engulfs all of human life in an inescapable reality of pernicious social patterns, producing forms of arrogance, privilege, animosity, and unfairness that are basically impossible to extirpate. The foreseeable outcome of teaching from this perspective is that every graduate of the resulting curriculum will hate life: his or her own, that of others, the patterns and events of life, its rewards, virtues, enjoyments, and obligations.
Parents who confront school boards are much wiser about this than the academy. We can argue about how intentional the inculcation of hatred is, but the real point is that it’s inevitable, given the perspective. The perspective is one of obsessing over resentment and a sense of perpetual imprisonment in an unjust situation for which there is no solution or even temporary relief. Everything is terrible; people, all people, are categorized and prioritized for hatred based on assumptions about race.
No one has ever overcome resentment or hatred by obsessively circling back to it and analyzing it. No one ever will. The pedagogy of CRT is entirely about this relentless horror: cultivating the worst sentiments of the human spirit, literally preaching that to reject that practice is to make everything worse, and validate all the things CRT says we ought to hate about each other.
The prospective scale of spiritual destruction here is colossal. Yet America’s education establishment is so determined to implement it that bureaucracies and school boards try to defame, attack, silence, and “cancel” parents who object. CRT in its guise as a K-12 education standard is the opposite of an academic proposition seeking independent thinking or the truth. It is the orthodoxy of a bronze god who demands conformity and brute submission.
The parents who encounter its implementation in their children’s schools recognize it as an attempt to rule their children, and one day their communities, by destroying young spirits. It’s not the parents who are sick in spirit here. Of course they don’t want their children to be ruled by a comprehensive theory of hatred that essentially makes hatred a god that must be worshiped and sacrificed to.
The second phenomenon is the category of lies, and in particular, rule by big ones. Now that we have seen some absolute whoppers laid bare before us over the last few years, I suspect many Americans have begun to question how much earlier the big lies started. The uneasy sense that we can’t be sure, and that the lies clearly have a purpose, is profoundly unsettling, but it can’t be ignored. Life and death can’t be faked; lies don’t rule them, and lies must not rule our orientation toward them.
...more......
p
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.