It Wasn't Right Then and It Isn't Right Now

The Dark Recesses of My Soul | 7/14/2009 | agooga

[agooga]

America has a history of civil rights abuses that is undeniable. All nations have such a history and many nations continue that tradition into the present. For a while, it seemed as if America had turned a corner on it's own shameful past of slavery, Jim Crow laws, legal segregation, and had achieved a great moment of legal parity.

To be sure, there is no such thing as equal economic status. There has been and probably always will be those with little wealth versus those with great wealth. And it is impossible to mandate the hearts of those who would attempt to find ways around the laws we have devised to create a level playing field.

But, for a tantalizing moment America seemed to be poised at the forefront, once again, of the greatest sociological experiment of the ages: a society of equals regardless of race, gender or religious affiliation-- that lived relatively free from the fear and encumbrance of menacing government.

That short-lived moment, when virtually all Americans could feel equally protected under a common set of laws is over. Like a great, heavy pendulum that has completed it's arc in one direction, the swing now takes it the other way and nothing it seems can stop the motion. Indeed, there are significant numbers who would not stop it or slow it, but would rather cheer it's direction.

Perhaps half or more of the electorate see the stripping of basic constitutional rights as progress. But this time, the rights in jeopardy aren't about who can go to what school, where to sit on the bus or at the lunch counter. Today's civil rights battles are being fought at the front lines of property rights, gun ownership, carbon emissions, taxation, reverse discrimination, wealth redistribution and a vast array of bedeviling little laws that effectively neuter the common American.

True, most progressives will mock the urgency and gravity that conservatives use to decry the injustice of intolerable law such as Kelo and Sotomayor's New Jersey firefighter's case or her own property rights lynching in the 2006 Port Chester ruling. They will mock it, that is, until they themselves fall prey to the machine that they have helped devise.

Sadly, most of these rights are being taken away under the guise of the public good. Perhaps, in a few select instances, there is a demonstrable good that comes from such action. It is this tangled web of emotion, intent and the basic human need to help that makes this road to hell so easily travelled for so many people.

Tragically, there is no cure for the disease that is eating our republic now from the inside out. This disease simply must run it's course. Time is the great healer. A human being, in the span of his or her lifetime, will suffer a multitude of afflictions, and most of the time the body will heal itself as the immune system is allowed to fulfill it's duty. But sometimes the disease is simply too severe, or the body is simply too weak.

The Civil War proved that, at one time, America was robust enough to be literally cut in half, but was still strong enough to be sewn back together and pick itself back up and carry on.

Is today's America strong enough to endure such a trauma?

[OneWingedShark]

>Is today’s America strong enough to endure such a trauma?

Not without God’s own help; and why should He help a country that has turned its back on Him, Morality, and Justice?