Our national dialogue needs to change. Unfortunately it’s not going to on its own. The level of vitriol in our national conversations has reached a fever pitch not seen since the 1960’s with the added insult and injury of a national press fully and willingly engaged in terrorist journalism. What a misnomer. I have now lived long enough to have personally witnessed both epochs. Socially speaking and unchecked it appears our current trajectory leads toward the edge of something that will result in an uncontrolled descent of some kind.

  I want to outline four basic points in an attempt to truly communicate to whoever is reading for the purpose of finding a realistic starting point for turning the ship so-to-speak. Consider this an identification of “root cause.”

Fear

   We fear that someone else will control us, forcing us to live and become someone we despise while engaging in a lifestyle we presently find repugnant (i.e. racism, capitalism, socialism, activism, conservatism, liberalism, progressivism etc.) The tool of this control is government itself. Consider the supreme irony of this statement in light of our heavily documented constitutional founding. In essence we’re mesmerized by the fear of “isms” that so completely conquer us mentally we’ve excluded all other considerations while heaped in a deadlocked consciousness of fight or flight. At present, we truly do not know or understand each other in many ways anymore and mega-schisms are the result.

Denial without Acceptance

   Masked by fear we fail to see (or choose to ignore) the real problem which is we are stuck in the quicksand of contrast ideology. It has become a serious even deadly problem and endlessly repeating the same steps will not produce a different result. Fanning the flames of this wild fire is the industrial complex of information distribution manned by assassin journalists and our predictable and repetitive reactions to it. It’s not healthy for our Republic but boy does it sell advertising. This ideological Mobius loops back through this same process crisis again and again.  Within it we’ve lost all memory of any previous journey and that our past actions and subsequent failures effected any real change. Getting the “one-upsie” on the other guy seems to be all that matters. This is much of what has made Twitter a global phenomenon.

Misplaced Faith

  Our faith in politics to solve the complex social problems America now faces is dreadfully misplaced because politics is not “root cause”. Ultimately the problem with politics is not politics. Good governance doesn’t start with policy it starts with people. If this is true then why are we constantly growing government? We should be growing people in ways that guide them into personal responsibility, self-governance and self-sufficiency. This will require the populace to become far more engaged in the private sector instead of loitering between elections waiting for government to “do something”. Ask yourself if you’re the most content being free to pursue your life and vocation of choice or conversely controlled as the ward of a bureaucracy. As an example, in socialist/communist states you choose a vocation from a list of vocations the government has approved. This is the illusion of freedom the communist revolutionary only discovers “after” it’s too late.

True Faith

  Our faith must be placed in believing that we can and must change personally before our circumstances can. To achieve this first requires recognition of the divine order in which it exists which is to say good governance starts with “me”. The Founding Fathers believed this and codified it by identifying and explicitly protecting the fundamental attributes of our humanity from the limited bureaucracy they were compelled to create. This concept presents the first simple step to what is actually the greatest crisis of all, the recognition of our dilemma. The most profound study guide for this endeavor is in fact The Bible. By peeling away the religious exterior and digging into the accounts recorded there in the writings we see the same types of people, relationships, governments and conflicts visible today. We can also see how they reacted, decided and were molded and changed by their experiences. Though they lived so long ago they were just like us.

   How do you recognize that a problem is a problem having lived with it for as long as you can remember which in essence makes it your “normal”? Therefore ask yourself a question: Why do I believe what I believe, I mean really? What are the roots of my belief system? Is it centered on me only and how would I know if it is? Answer: You must choose to be courageous and consider the possibility that someone else may see something you do not and seek them out. It may be a person, a book, an experience but it must be centered on finding what is real using results based outcomes and demonstrates the promotion and care and peaceful respect of others. As a contrasted example, AntiFa apparently believes that the beatings should continue until moral improves. (See communist revolutionary as stated above).

  Things will get worse before they get better. History is littered with social upheavals going back for centuries, including wars fought over ideas about who people are versus whom the other side perceives themselves to be. Once that dichotomy grows large enough it creates the necessary tinder after which only a minute spark is required to get a blaze going. Just think Fort Sumter.

  Humans have two basic avenues of knowledge acquisition; learn by reason or learn by experience. If the latter is chosen hopefully (with some unavoidable suffering) reason follows. If not and on a long enough time line demolition is the outcome.