Keep Right – Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
For most healthy Americans, being treated as “one of us” is high praise. It means that we are not on the outside, that we belong, that we are an actual individual, a fellow fully-real person.
Among our personal intimates, our friends, family, loved ones, co-workers, and even enemies, we are judged by our chosen words and deeds. To those who know us, we reap what we sow. This is unarguably fair.
What a splendid thing it would be to be assessed fairly. No hereditary aristocracy and no serfdom; our destiny would derive from personal choice rather than immutable identity.
When the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a society where his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, he dreamed of a colorblind meritocracy. He dreamed of this type of equality of opportunity. He dreamed the real American Dream.
One of the truly glorious aspects of contemporary America is that so many of us are willing to treat everyone around us as our equal. Distinctions of race, sex, and faith which have sparked so many past and present wars matter little to most Americans.
If this is true, then why does our current society feel less like heaven-on-earth than like an antechamber of hell? Because a functional, fair, and reasonably harmonious society requires no political hacks. No organized machine politics, no civil rights groups, and no community organizers are needed when people treat one another humanely.
Such a society will still have crime, poverty, disease, war, lawsuits, and broken homes. It will even still have bigotry. But, amidst the cacophony of natural and man-made sufferings that are endemic to the human condition, most of us, much of the time, behave as if we believe that individuals can rise above any background or birth characteristic to become their best selves.
When compared with almost any other society of people at anytime, anywhere on earth, the relative tolerance of a typical American is shocking.
No, we’re not perfect. There remain bigots among us, and there always will be such stunted minds and withered hearts. So long as people think freely, some few will choose evil over good, hatred over love, and the comforts of old prejudices against the unknown possibilities of equality of opportunity. Plus, even the best of us can lapse.
However, it has been illegal in the USA to discriminate on the basis of unchosen birth characteristics since 1964. During these threescore years, it has become obscene to publicly express race-hatred in politics, commerce, the arts, or polite society.
The vast majority of us today make every effort to see past the tribal “friend-or-foe” markers that are programmed into us by instinct. What is amazing is not how many of us remain bigoted, but rather how very many of us strive to our utmost to overcome this original sin of “us versus them”.
If this is true, then why does identity politics blight culture, business, academics, and entertainment? Because those social justice warriors among us are desperately afraid that they are about to become obsolete.
Today’s America is anything but systemically racist. We are determined to cut such bigotry out of our body politic.
Slavery did not build America. Free enterprise did.
Women here have not been uniquely oppressed by a patriarchy. All human societies have hierarchies, including sex-roles, which limited most people to a certain station. The USA is startlingly open to individuals defying such conventions in pursuit of personal fulfillment.
It is not more dangerous now to be homosexual than ever before. While it shall never be fully normalized, because most humans are simply not wired that way, homosexuality is now widely tolerated rather than damned.
No, we do not need to give woke zealots the power of life-and-death over the rest of us in order to right past wrongs. Communist China’s cultural revolution and the killing fields of Kampuchea show what happens when a narrow ideology replaces objective reality.
Anyone who touts identity politics is dragging us back into the hell of tribalism. Reject their infernal siren song. Instead, be a free person among other free individuals.
