Why our Liberty Bell is Cracked
The tragedy of our 235-year American Contention goes all the way back back to our Constitutional Convention.
In Section 2 of Article 1 of our founding document, the very breaking point of our egalitarian resolve was implanted.
Representatives . . . shall be apportioned . . . according to their (each State’s) respective numbers . . . including those bound to Service for a Term of Years (slavery), three-fifths of all other Persons.
Our corruptive legislative compromise — intended as an agreement to prevent strife and enable progress — has proven to be foundationally toxic. That provision for 3/5, or “second class” legislative value has forever hobbled our efforts toward true equality and justice. In multiple applications of government, federal, state and local, we have continuously failed — and continue to fail — to live up to our high calling of true equality among citizens.
Most notably now, we are still failing to obtain true justice in law enforcement, although recent judgements in the Chauvin/Floyd case and the McMichael/Arbery cases may represent a glint of hope on our dark Justice horizon.
Dred Scott decision, Civil War, Plessy v. Ferguson, Ross Barnett, George Wallace, Byron de la Beckwith, James Earl Ray, Derek Chauvin, the McMichael duo and many more abusive manifestations of white supremecy have exacerbated our failures to obtain an egalitarian nation throughout our entire history, even now.
The liberal journalists, editorialists, academics, eggheads, idealists who campaigned as Abolitionists before our Civil War are now represented as the Eastern Establishment: aka (formerly) liberals, now progressives or Democrats. Their presence and their impact on Law and public opinion goes back two centuries, but it is not enough to bring us all around to a societal fulfillment of true Justice.
We do have a deep chasm of contention here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. This enmity will not disappear by itself.
Now, because the oversimplifying contentions of social media are disabling forever whatever Constitutional agreement and compromise we had managed to attain . . .especially under the spell of the self-glorifying demagogue who used his mussolinic rhetorical alchemy to totally corrupt our nation’s (formerly conservative) conservatives . . . we are at a chasm that will not be crossed without serious trouble and, tragically, more bloodshed.
Those who warn of the dangers to come are not playing chicken little. Although our sky is not falling, the ground beneath us is erupting; we are descending into a chasm of contention that is unlike any we have ever seen, but nevertheless imitative (hopefully less extreme) of the war that divided us in 1860.
But this time we do not have the simplifying factor of a Mason-Dixon line. The complexity of our mess looks something like this:
There is only one way out. In God we trust. Pray. Turn or burn.
