When Laura Ingram mocked Parkland high school student, David Hogg, last week, it was yet another example of how petty, childish, and mean spirited the political and religious conflict has become in this country.
Americans don’t simply disagree with each other over policy issues. We fight, separate, and divide ourselves into opposing camps.
The reason is not that we have different points of view. It is because we hold different values systems that clash with one another, a fact that has a long history going all the way back to days before the nation was founded.
American colonies did not share the same values regarding religious freedom, morals regulation, or relationships with native Americans.
After the American Revolution, the first government was formed around the Articles of Confederation that endowed states with sovereign power because they did not share common values regarding issues such as support for a centralized government or the ownership of slaves.
The Civil War was a tragic flashpoint of clashing values among Americans, but its end did not reconcile those differences as evidenced by the segregated system called “separate but equal” that was another name for slavery perpetrated by southerners whose values made a mockery of justice and equality.
The election of Donald Trump was yet another flashpoint in this continuing conflict over values.
Our problem is not the lack of civility when we debate the critical issues of our day. It is the fact that we are engaged in a war of values wherein some of us want one kind of America and Trump and his supporters want another.
When former Ambassador to Panama and a career diplomat, John D, Feeley resigned his post in early March he said in a Washington Post article that it was this conflict of values that prompted his decision:
“I did not resign over any policy decisions regarding my remit in Panama…I resigned because the traditional core values of the United States, as manifested in the president’s National Security Strategy and his foreign policies, have been warped and betrayed. I could no longer represent him personally and remain faithful to my beliefs about what makes America truly great.”
He then named Trump’s policies that convinced him they no longer share the same values:
“The amateurish promulgation of a country-specific travel ban, the push to build a ‘big, beautiful wall’ and to expel the ‘dreamers’ beyond it, the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the belligerent renegotiating of the North American Free Trade Agreement and counterproductive steel and aluminum tariffs are all making the United States weaker and less prosperous. America is undoubtedly less welcome in the world today, as the president pursues a unilateral and isolationist path.”
The reason Ambassador Feeley gave for his resignation is the same reason our entire nation is divided. Neither Trump nor Trump Republicans have the same value system the rest of us do.
That is why I cannot in good conscience show respect for what they say and do. I find their values abhorrent. I don’t want to live in the kind of America they want to live in.
When I hear Trump talk I experience a level of cognitive dissonance like I have never experienced before. He and I simply don’t share the same moral universe.
That is why these times are both difficult and dangerous. The sad truth is that the promise of E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one) we hold up as our national motto has crashed and burned.
There will be no union of ideas, no grand compromise that will bring us together anytime soon, no “one nation under God” that any of us can honestly say is real.
A war of values is not something any of us thought we would have to fight in our lifetime, but it is here and we cannot shy away from it.
To save ourselves from the temptation to do so, we need only to recall the words attributed to 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke whose truth remains timeless: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing.”
linnposts.com 