Election 2018

[Bob Butler 54]

(10-28-2018, 03:30 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The next President will have the obligation to teach us some lessons about the minimal civic duty of getting along with people who don't look like us, pray like us, talk like us, or have sex like us. Political violence is the bane of democracy. The Golden Rule still applies, whatever our ideology. Sometimes we will need to defend the old decencies as necessary tradition.

Maybe those people are lone nuts for the simple reason that they could never tell us some of the mad deeds that they intend to do. So if I am a bartender and somebody who has had too many blurts out that someone ought to shoot the President, do I call the Secret Service on him? Yup!

As the would-be multiple bomber in Florida and the butcher of a Pittsburgh synagogue demonstrate, one lone nut can do huge damage to the fabric of our society. One bomb or one machine gun can kill several people at once.

The above is a clear expression of the newer values.  So long as you see the above as an extension of the old idea that all men are created equal, not an idea that has always been held to be American.  Slave holders, Jim Crow, resistance to new immigrant groups, these have long been among us.  I believe the time as come for the new equality, for a new birth of freedom, but this is only an extension of how the Revolution got rid of kings, and the Civil War got rid of slaves.

Conservatives of the time did believed in holding on to privileged patterns.  They always do.  Always there is a resistance to extending ideals to solve problems.

But this is exactly what I mean that some people will attempt to keep the old values alive when many have grown beyond them.  Always we will grow, but always some will want to stay behind.