The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

(07-22-2020, 01:19 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Confederates are only part of our American heritage to the extent that they recognized the failure of their cause and rejoined the Union, and now uphold all its ideals and true heritage and not that of their lost cause.

The common history of America includes a continual movement to update, reform, revolutionize and transform that heritage. The Constitution can be amended and re-interpreted. 

American heritage includes folks like me whose ancestors were mostly here before there even was a USA, and a few more who came here before it became truly a United States, instead of a collection of states within two regions of opposite natures.

It also includes all those who have come here ever since then, many of whom have hoped that this is a land of opportunity, and it includes those who were brought here against their will since 1619, and who were bought and sold and then endured second-class citizenship because their skin was dark, because of the white racists some of whom sought to establish an entirely different country with a new heritage of white racism.

To some extent you are making the same mistake as Classic.  You are taking your own extreme viewpoint and associated culture and presenting it as American.  The reality is richer, more complex.  You both represent different aspects of an America which includes both.  Each take center stage at different points in the cycle.

Now, in a lot of ways I am with you.  Every four score and seven years, you get a new birth of freedom.  You have to address problems identified by the science.  You have to purge aspects of racism that the people demand end.  To these and other things, it is time for the rural aspect to recognize the handwriting on the wall and retreat.  America is not perpetually racist and selfish.  There is more to us than that.

The blues waited with varying degrees of patience through a long unraveling waiting for our time to come.  Well, it has come.  Our half of the inning.  There comes a time when people are willing to sacrifice for the common good.  Things will never be the same after.  Parts of the American culture will be forever changed.

But that doesn’t mean their half inning won’t come around again.  There will be problems still.   Our half inning will come again too.  The cycles continue, and you have to recognize the other half of the culture.