The Divided States of Embarrassment
“A good democrat is a dead democrat” is a retweet from President Trump on May 29th, 2020; this is where America stands at the moment. Trump will not concede to the president-elect Biden by claiming the election is a fraud despite many saying it is not, and that this election has been one of the most secure in American history. Republicans have completely fallen silent the past four years, except for a few that have spoken out. Ted Cruz was blatantly humiliated by Trump in a tweet, that was deleted seconds after being posted, and still defends the president. Lindsay Graham is on video, multiple times, saying he will not pick a Supreme Court justice in an election year, and to hold his words against him, yet he still went ahead and picked a Supreme Court justice. Almost all of Trumps’ original administration is either in jail, indicted, resigned, or fired. Of those seats, most were replaced with yes-men/women who do anything the president wants. When Trump was running for election, during a campaign rally in 2016, he said “I could stand in the middle of fifth avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” and the sad thing is, after 4 years, he was right.
It is not just Trump and his supporters; we also are dealing with a shift in what is considered free speech. The left wants to ban certain words and label them “hate speech”, and then play the hero as if banning words is going to take away the actual rhetoric. First, free speech means you are going to hear things you don’t agree with, you are going to get criticized, people will be racist, but regardless of any of that, if you want to start telling people what they can and can’t say, you are becoming thought police, and that is a slippery slope we don’t want to go down. How many words or ideas will get banned before it affects your views? If you do not like racism, denounce it. If you do not agree with religion, denounce it. Conversations change things, not silencing views you do not want. Racism is horrible, but if you want to keep free speech, the right to express racism should be allowed, but what you can do, is denounce it, let people know it’s wrong, so hopefully, it goes away. Free speech does not mean “You can say what you want until it offends me, then it’s not free speech,” it means the freedom of thought, and the right to express yourself.
Now let us address socialism, which a lot of people do not seem to understand, and in its absolute form, it does more harm than good. Socialism, according to the oxford dictionary is, a “political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” The USSR tried socialism, and it crashed and burned, all the good things that were supposed to help society, ended up making it worse. Bernie Sanders yearns for socialism, and he uses to use Venezuela as the poster child for how good socialism is, and now we see what happen to them. Sweden is the new example that the far left is trying to use as an example, but they fail to tell the people that absolute socialism almost collapsed their economy, and they had to implement capitalistic-esque laws. They have incorporated capitalism and socialism, which America has dabbled in many times, and it does work, i.e., social security, Medicaid, The New Deal, etc. Every time a country tries absolute socialism it has failed. With that being said, socialist-esque ideas incorporated with capitalism works; so, the far left needs to stop trying to push America into absolute socialism, as the far-right needs to stop trying to make America a dictatorship. Socialists keep moving the goal post every time a socialist economy fails and blame Stalin, Mao, Fidel, Pol Pot, and Hugo Chavez, but sometimes it’s not the people doing the job, it’s the job, and socialists aren’t ready to admit that. I rode the Bernie train in 2016, but after doing a lot of research, socialism is not the best choice for this country.
Next on the list is the denial of science from all political sides, race, gender, religion, etc. At Rutgers University I took a class on The Philosophy of Death and Dying, and we got on the subject of beliefs, and I brought up evidence and scientific research, and the first rebuttal was, “Why does science always have to be the answer, why can’t people live in an illusion and be happy” in which I replied:
Science is a multitude of things, and it is far from having all the answers. Science is valued because it requires evidence, you cannot just say “That woman is a witch,” and then not expect people to retort with, “where is your evidence?” To answer your other question, people can be ignorant, and they can be happy in their ignorance, but if they are going to try and push their ignorance as fact, then they will be required to provide evidence, regardless of how it makes them feel.
Science is not an ideology, it is a way of understanding the world, through evidence. When republicans created the mantra “facts don’t care about your feelings”, they were right, yet they were scolded for it because of political contrarianism. The thing is, it’s been said in other ways, from all different groups, and what it means is that, no matter how much you don’t agree with a fact or how upset it makes you, it doesn’t matter because a fact is a fact regardless of how you feel. The MMR vaccine does not cause autism, and there are hundreds of studies worth of evidence, yet a lot of people deny the evidence because it doesn’t go with their views; that is what Ben Shapiro was talking about when he said, “facts don’t care about your feelings”. As of late, we have republicans denying science and not wear masks, or abiding by protocols that are scientifically based, and are disregarding the countries who have followed these protocols and now have little to no cases, while our sore past 11 million. They are claiming it is an infringement on their rights, which has absolutely nothing to do with it. They believe that by being forced to wear a mask, which is temporary until we have a vaccine, the government will become tyrannical. It is about protecting their life and others. They are fine when a bakery owner denies service to a gay couple, that’s a private business and they can do what they want, but when a business tells you to wear a mask, suddenly them being a private business doesn’t matter; you can’t have it both ways. Wearing a mask is a protocol as an extra safeguard to prevent the spread of disease, nothing more, and if someone believes that the government is trying to control them, that is a personal problem.
Facts are a nice segue into Religion in America and why Christians are so obsessed with simultaneously saying America is a religious nation but also saying that Christians are being persecuted. How are you persecuted, when in 2016, 73% of Americans identified as Christian? How are you persecuted when the president attends Christian ceremonies? How are you persecuted when “In God we trust” is on our currency? The answer is, you are not being persecuted, and you are making up history. The separation of church and state was so important, to our founding fathers, that it was put in the 1st Amendment. Religion has a very dark past that has plagued Europe for centuries, and so our founding fathers sought to make sure our government does not establish a religion because of what theocratic governments do to the people who don’t believe in their god or way of life. In 1803, James Madison, in a letter objecting to the use of government land for churches stating:
The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association wrote:
“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
John Adams, a founding father, and first vice president said, in the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli:
“The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
Our founding fathers wanted the right to practice religion or not, without persecution from either side, and that’s how it’s been, but Christian nationalism will have you believe that the secular side of America is trying to persecute them, but they aren’t; what’s happening is, as we get closer and closer to equality for all and minimize human suffering to the point of being nullified, people are raising eyebrows to things that are delaying equality and human suffering, and one of those things is religion. I am not religious, but I will always defend the right to practice, individually, but it should never be forced on anyone by the government, and when that is close to happening, organizations like the ACLU or FFRF swoop in and stop state officials and the government from taking away freedoms of people because of religion. Here is the disconnect, Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cake in Denver chose not to bake a cake for a gay couple because it went against his religion, which sparked a national debate; one side was saying you can’t use your religion to discriminate, the other was saying that the religious should be forced to do things that go against their view. They’re both right, but in different contexts; the religious shouldn’t be forced to do things they don’t agree with, like forcing a Muslim to eat pork, but when your religion makes you discriminate against another person, that’s when the line should be drawn. Jack Phillips denying a cake to a gay couple is very reminiscent of a white business owner denying service to an African American. Using your religion to justify discrimination and then crying persecution when scolded for it is a slippery slope. Let’s say I am an atheist doctor, and your Christian son is dying, and I find out his Christian and I deny him service because I don’t agree with his views, and he dies, is that acceptable? No, right? His religion has nothing to do with it and to deny someone something because you disagree with their values is the cesspool of human thought.
America has become Charlie Gordon from the book Flowers for Algernon, which is about a man who is mentally handicapped and is given a drug to give him intelligence, and he ends up flourishing, but the drug ends up being temporary and he regresses into being mentally handicapped. America had a moment of clarity, and now we are regressing, politically, intellectually, scientifically. Racism is at an all-time high. Biden will be president, and our country will have some normalcy again, not because he is a democrat, but because he is not a petulant child blaming everyone but himself and furthering the American divide. Biden will heal the political wound for the time being, but all walks of life are denying science, education is failing, people are more divided than ever, ideologies are being censored by the PC movement. America is having an existential crisis, and it needs to end because people’s lives are at stake.
