[BRIGADE] PJB: Is America Coming Apart?
Published: Fri, 09/11/09
Flying home from London, where the subject of formal
debate on the 70th anniversary of World War II had been whether
Winston Churchill was a liability or asset to the Free World, one
arrives in the middle of a far more acrimonious national debate
right here in the United States.
At issue: Should Barack Obama be allowed to address tens of
millions of American children, inside their classrooms, during
school hours?
Conservative talk-show hosts saw a White House scheme to turn
public schools into indoctrination centers where the socialist
ideology of Obama would be spoon-fed to captive audiences of
children forced to listen to Big Brother -- and then do assignments
on his sermon.
The liberal commentariat raged about right-wing paranoia.
Yet Byron York of The Washington Examiner dug back to 1991 to
discover that, when George H.W. Bush went to Alice Deal Junior High
to speak to America's school kids, the left lost it.
"The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high
classroom into a television studio and its students into props,"
railed The Washington Post. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander was
called before a House committee. The National Education Association
denounced Bush. And Congress ordered the General Accounting Office
to investigate.
Obama's actual speech proved about as controversial as a Nancy
Reagan appeal to eighth-graders to "Just say no!" to drugs.
Yet, the episode reveals the poisoned character of our politics.
We saw it earlier on display in August, when the crowds that came
out for town hall meetings to oppose Obama's health care plans were
called "thugs," "fascists," "racists" and "evil-mongers" by
national Democrats.
We see it as Rep. Joe Wilson shouts, "You lie!" at the president
during his address to a joint session of Congress.
We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to
have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally,
racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others' throats.
One half of America sees abortion as the annual slaughter of a
million unborn. The other half regards the right-to-life movement
as tyrannical and sexist.
Proponents of gay marriage see its adversaries as homophobic
bigots. Opponents see its champions as seeking to elevate unnatural
and immoral relationships to the sacred state of traditional
marriage.
The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and
one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a
common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same
God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate
the same holidays, and share the same music, poetry, art and
literature?
Yet, today, Mexican-Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a skirmish
in a French-Mexican war about which most Americans know nothing,
which took place the same year as two of the bloodiest battles of
our own Civil War: Antietam and Fredericksburg.
Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once
united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even
be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.
Where we used to have classical, pop, country & Western and jazz
music, now we have varieties tailored to specific generations,
races and ethnic groups. Even our music seems designed to subdivide
us.
One part of America loves her history, another reviles it as
racist, imperialist and genocidal. Old heroes like Columbus,
Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are replaced by Dr. King and
Cesar Chavez.
But the old holidays, heroes and icons endure, as the new have yet
to put down roots in a recalcitrant Middle America.
We are not only more divided than ever on politics, faith and
morality, but along the lines of class and ethnicity. Those who
opposed Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and stood by Sgt.
Crowley in the face-off with Harvard's Henry Louis Gates were
called racists. But this time they did not back down. They threw
the same vile word right back in the face of their accusers, and
Barack Obama.
Consider but a few issues on which Americans have lately been
bitterly divided: school prayer, the Ten Commandments, evolution,
the death penalty, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide,
affirmative action, busing, the Confederate battle flag, the Duke
rape case, Terri Schiavo, Iraq, amnesty, torture.
Now it is death panels, global warming, "birthers" and socialism.
If a married couple disagreed as broadly and deeply as Americans do
on such basic issues, they would have divorced and gone their
separate ways long ago. What is it that still holds us together?
The European-Christian core of the country that once defined us is
shrinking, as Christianity fades, the birth rate falls and Third
World immigration surges. Globalism dissolves the economic bonds,
while the cacophony of multiculturalism displaces the old American
culture.
"E pluribus unum" -- out of many, one -- was the national motto the
men of '76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the
unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?
Is America, too, breaking up?
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