I don’t say much online any more.
Why would I? Why would anyone dare enter the F5 tornado that is United States political discourse? it’s insane. And now we have even further proof of how insane it has gotten.
But I kind of can’t help it now. I feel like If I don’t say what everyone is thinking, or should be thinking, I’m not doing the right thing.
What happened Saturday in Butler PA is the collective failure of all Americans. Every single one of us.
We have failed miserably. George Washington told us in his farewell address about the dangers of political parties. He felt that creating parties would lead to division and inevitable conflict, which would undercut everything he and his fellow countrymen had done to unite to defeat the crown and its’ tyranny at the time.
George Washington knew that political parties would succumb to their own self-interests and abandon the common good. He knew that would cause a revenge dynamic that would cause the government to falter.
He knew that dividing off and being territorial would cause rule by faction, and would cause the country to become unstable. He knew that the public interest would be ignored if leaders could only speak on behalf of their party instead of the people. He also knew that party politics is corruptible by outside forces, including adversaries of the United States.
A DIRECT QUOTE:
“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
We didn’t listen to a single word of it.
In the decades and centuries since, we fought a bloody Civil War due to our divisions. We have been nothing but divided ever since I can remember. I’ve heard people label and lambaste each other, and endlessly demonize those that – in reality – they don’t have a lot of differences with in the first place.
This is what we get when we don’t respect the wisdom of our forefathers.
We should abandon party politics. All of it. This should be a moment where we stop the Red vs. Blue binary ignorance of this abysmal and narcissistic two-party system.
We should all as Americans feel nothing but shame over how insane our political climate has gotten. In all seriousness, we should have a constitutional convention and add an Amendment to the Constitution that makes all elections public, bans private and corporate money in politics, and creates an antitrust mechanism that breaks up political parties when they become too big.
Because factions that grow too big become regimes. We have gone through too much unnecessary suffering as a nation due to this refusal to abandon party politics. Consider the insanity of trying to lump hundreds of millions of people into one of two groups. This is madness.
I have met so many people from so many parts of the country. I know that we are better than this. I have seen it. I know it is there. The American standard. A standard of having each others’ backs. Taking care of our own. Uniting in cause to ensure that America is where a better standard of life is available for every citizen, and no one is left behind to suffer.
We can have that standard. We can achieve that standard everywhere. We just have to be unafraid to reject and abandon what harms us, in pursuit of what is right, and what is good.