Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Not everyone can be born noble. Every one of us can choose to be noble. Who we are, our identity, is far less important than what we do, our choices. This simple idea is at the heart of every hope for human freedom.
Not one of us can decide the circumstances of our births. We do not select our parents. Their mental and physical health, finances, and social status are as far beyond our control as is their race or religion. The genetic dispositions that they bequeath to us owe nothing to our personal wants or needs.
We are each born into an exact context of place, time, and culture; a precise set of circumstances determined by an omniscient and loving God (or, if you insist, by random happenstance, signifying nothing).
Because of this, all the contemporary obsession with our personal racial identities, birth-sexes, our innate levels of intelligence, and our athletic potentials are utterly narcissistic nonsense. None of it defines us, because not one aspect of our birth circumstances and inherited characteristics were ever chosen by us.
Yet, so many of us have been taught that our born identity defines everything important about us. Why?! For someone’s political power. Those demagogues who crave to cheat us out of our independent agency insist that we are merely bullets fired from gun barrels. They paint our lives as following a ballistic trajectory that we cannot affect, a trajectory determined at birth.
They claim that we can only overcome our natal disenfranchisement and achieve freedom with their help. This demagogic call to socialism-by-any-other-name is a self-serving lie.
No one was ever born with every advantage. Only the poor can fantasize that money can solve all life’s problems. Everyone faces ordeals; pain and betrayal touch all of us; everybody bleeds. None of us get through life free from
suffering.
Yet, the demagogues stoke universal envy and perpetual outrage against an enemy that they invented; their caricature of “the rich”. Like a toreador, who with a red cape teases a bull into impaling himself on his sword, the demagogues of identity politics manipulate us into granting them power over us in return for their false promise of an effortless liberation from life’s limitations.
Their lie is birthright determinism, a siren song of a structural racism, sexism, homophobia, and implacable bigotry that hems us in and blights our prospects. They sell an inescapable hopelessness which can only be defeated by the socialist ideology of these false prophets.
To be clear, in almost every traditional (and totalitarian) society, birthright determinism is the universal truth that determines everything for each individual.
Are you from well-connected highborn aristocrats who help govern society from mansions in a capital city? Are you from a class of hereditary human tools with no legal role or moral significance beyond being a disposable resource to serve others’ goals? Under both monarchy and communism, a person’s birth truly determines their entire life’s possibilities.
So, are the demagogues of identity politics right after all? NOT HERE! Not in these United States of America. Incrementally, not since the Revolution, the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has the birth of an American citizen determined his or her destiny. Yes, it took us some time to expand the boundaries of equality of opportunity under the law to include every born and naturalized citizen. But, the year before I was born, we accomplished it!
Since then, in our American Republic, our decisions determine our destinies. Are we honest, hardworking, loyal, dedicated, and generous? Or, are we deceitful, lazy, untrustworthy, distracted, and self-absorbed? Do we accept
responsibility for our choices, including our failures, or do we blame others for how our lives proceed?
In today’s America, our own virtues and vices determine our outcomes. Certainly, our birth circumstances give some of us initial advantages and disadvantages. None of these need to decide our fates, not if we insist on making our own destinies by embracing hope over despair.
We Americans do not need any demagogue’s help if we want to be free. Our successes and failures result from our decisions. We are not locked in to being defined by our identities. Who we are is insignificant compared to what we choose. Live in hope, choose wisely, and be bravely free!
