Ump on a Blog

Something struck me yesterday and came into focus this morning, and since I haven’t seen it put quite this way in the mainstream media yet, I thought I would try to boil it down to a simple blog entry and get it out there. The idea came to me while watching the special episode of “The West Wing” that aired right after the 9/11 attacks. It was called “Isaac and Ishmael,” and it tried to lay out the reasons why the U.S. was attacked on that day. In its simplest form, it boiled down to one word: pluralism.

As it pertains to American politics, pluralism is defined as a condition in which numerous distinct ethnic, religious, or cultural groups are present and tolerated within a society, along with the belief that such a condition is desirable or socially beneficial. That is the philosophy that is spelled out explicitly in the First Amendment, the words most often quoted both at home and abroad in defining the United States. It is by those words that we carved out our existence in 1787, and those words that we have gone to war to defend.

Additionally, Americans have fought and died to preserve the pluralistic rights of countries and peoples all over the world, from Korea to Europe, the Middle East, South-Central Asia and Northern Africa. If you could boil down the entire U.S. Constitution into one word, there is a strong argument that the word that best fits the definition is pluralism.

With that in mind, we look at the events of the last year. We have seen racist attacks on then-candidate Obama, now President Obama, that include death threats numbering 30 per day (Secret Service numbers). We have seen attempts to limit the rights and privileges of homosexuals. We have seen the U.S. Supreme Court, with its conservative bias, attempt to codify discrimination against women and people with disabilities. And we have seen attempts to disrupt discussions with democratically-elected members of Congress by radical elements of the GOP, sometimes resulting in violence.

All of this can be attributed to the right-wing conservative Republican party. And all of this can be attributed to a clear-cut rejection of the pluralist foundation upon which the United States Constitution is built.

Freedom means freedom for everybody: men and women; Christian, Jew and Muslim; black, Hispanic, and Caucasian; straight and gay. Freedom does not mean freedom for everybody except who we say can’t have it. That’s Hitler’s Germany. Liberty means liberty for everybody: not liberty for everybody who thinks the same way we do. That’s the Soviet Union. The Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” and does not endow the decision-making process of who gets which rights, freedoms and liberties to any man: that it leaves in the hands of God. Therefore, no American can stand in favor of restricting the rights, freedoms, and liberties of any other American and still call himself a Patriot. For that, above any, is the most treasonous belief of all.

The Founding Fathers didn’t set out to establish a set of rules that governed everyone’s behavior for all time: in fact quite the opposite. They realized that times change, people change, hopes and dreams change, and the needs of the people change. They forged a document that wisely accommodated those changes, and encouraged us — in fact, required us — to hear all points of view. They saw the future as one they could not know, and ensured that no matter what the future brought to our great nation, the underlying structure of the country would not crumble when the pace of change accelerated.

Americans have seen what anti-pluralistic tendencies can do to a society. They have lived through World War II and seen the horrors of the Holocaust. They have braved the cold war and seen the oppression of the Soviets on their own people. They have witnessed the brutality of the Middle East, as Muslim and Jew and Christian murdered each other in the name of a common God. And they have experienced it first hand, as an ignorant president and his paranoid henchman tried to bend the Constitution to their twisted ends, ending countless lives in the process. Americans have seen what a rejection of pluralism means. And they will never, ever allow it to clench its murderous fist on this country again.

That is why the conservative movement and its rejection of pluralism is doomed to failure. Pluralism was the underlying premise of the Constitution, and it remains the cornerstone of the American belief system. Attempts to undermine pluralism in America will always be met with strong resistance, for it is these fascist tendencies that Americans have fought against throughout the history of this great nation. At every turn, when pluralist ideals are at risk, Americans come to the aid of the oppressed. Conservatives will never succeed in their attempts to undermine American ideals, replacing them with bigotry, anger, hatred and oppression. Americans will rise up in force, and will never allow it to happen. For as the Founding Fathers proclaimed to us through the centuries, “…With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”