Elephase is an app that uses Artificial Intelligence to write for you, is that something good?
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- I think the root cause of the problems we have in the United States is a lack of understanding and therefore a lack of consensus on the fundamentals about what the United States is all about. The Revolutionary War was a fight for freedom from tyranny and the Declaration of Independence makes the case for why the King of England was a tyrant. Freedom/Liberty from tyranny is why the United States exists and protection from tyranny by preservation of individual rights is the purpose of the government of the United States, and the Constitution is the blueprint for how the founders believed tyranny could be prevented. #
- For a government that is made of people who represent citizens of a country to prevent tyranny there needs to be a common understanding of what is tyranny and that in fact it's prime directive is to prevent tyranny. The problem is that in the United States today we do not have a shared understanding of what is tyranny. In fact, what is worse it seems, is that we also don't have a shared understanding if what is the rights of citizens, let alone our values and norms. If we are honest with ourselves, we will acknowledge there has NEVER been a shared understanding of tyranny, particularly because tyrants frame their actions as being good rather than evil. #
- Slavery pre-exists the founding of the United States, it was an issue at the time when the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were written. The founders punted on the topic and the Constitution institutionalized an attempt to square democracy with slavery by way of things like the Electoral College and the Senate. Even the second amendment, with it's tortured language and revered status is a reflection of this dysfunctional beginning. In reality, the United States traded one tyranny for another, it was just a difference of who was on top of the pyramid. England's response to our declarations for independence pointed out this very hypocrisy. #
- Slaves and sympathetic northerners saw southern state governments and plantation owners as tyrants. Southern state governments saw the north as tyrants, who they feared so much they insisted on the second amendment to preserve their militias that tracked and killed, if necessary, runaway slaves. When Abraham Lincoln was elected President southern states tagged him as a tyrant and thus succeeded from the Union, declaring their independence from the north. Then and and for many now, the south saw themselves as revolutionaries or freedom fighters while the north saw them as traitors. #
- In the finger pointing between the north and the south, who was right about who was the tyrant? Your answer depends upon your point of view when there is no shared values and no shared agreement on freedom for who and for what! Truth is the problem was not resolved and with Lincoln assassinated, reconstruction surely reinforced the south's belief that northern states are tyrants. During the 20th century the lines between north and south transformed to Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, urban and rural and perhaps the only reason why there hasn't already been a second civil war is that during that time that both factions had common external enemies that we fought in the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and on and on. #
- Unfortunately, the end of the Soviet Union in the 90s removed the primary shared external enemy and ever since the old internal enemies took up their battle anew. Globalization has created an additional element that is creating an alignment between previous enemies, Republicans and Evangelicals with Putin and Russian Orthodoxy with Conservative Roman Catholicism all desiring to institute "divine order" of supremacy that sees democracy the enemy to that order. Members of this collation see themselves and market themselves as the good guys, fighting for freedom to be as rich as they want and to do whatever they want by establishing "divine order" that puts them above those they view with contempt, those who seek true equality with all the disorder that entails.#