Race Relationships and the Evolution of Freedom?

Image from Inquisitr.com

Tonight (9/13/17), while watching the Oakland Athletics play the Boston Red Sox on ESPN, they reported fans were removed from Fenway Park for hanging a sign on the Green Monster that read “Racism is as American as Baseball.”  In watching the video of the sign being displayed, it appeared the sign holders were young and urbane, so I am guessing they were protesting against racism, not in support of, but in today’s world it is increasingly hard to tell.

Over the past ten years we have seen an amazing transformation in the state of race relations in America.  Perhaps it is necessary and should be expected.  You cannot solve a problem unless you are willing to confront it, but the problem of racism will not go away as long as everyone chooses to make it the central issue of every aspect of our lives.  We now hyphenate our Americanism to show pride in our heritage.  Yet for some reason we set aside specific months to celebrate the culture and heritage of only select minorities like the Hispanics and Africans, casting aside the Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Russians, or Polish.

In 2008, this country elected a mixed-race President who identified as an African-American and had rejected his childhood name for his formal name, Barrack.  It appeared to many the dreams of Martin Luther King, Jr. were finally coming to fulfillment.  Granted, there would always be the hate-filled groups that would not surrender the racists views that bound them together, but for the average middle-class American, we as a nation thought we had achieved a maturity in our attempt to reach equality.

Unfortunately, President Obama and his party chose to make race the central focus of his administration.  Choosing not to bring reasonable people together, but using it for its political advantages.  Anyone and everyone who disagreed with any position the President or the left put forward was automatically given a label, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, the list goes on.  The question I can’t answer with certainty was did this occur because of his active political decision, or was he merely floating along with the reactionary forces within his political sphere?  I tend to believe the latter because he rose so quickly on the national stage that I suspect there must be a “king-maker” in the background, and I saw very little true leadership coming directly from the President.  He was a gifted speaker when his teleprompter was working, but I sense he looked to others to make the hard choices as we see in the timing of his public positions on marriage, and sexual identity.

President Trump, who clearly breaks with the approach of the traditional parties, has been under continuous attack from the left, and regular condemnation from the moderate right since his election.  This war of identity politics has clearly escalated as those who don’t like the President now resort to physical violence to achieve their political goal.  Again, maybe this is the natural evolution of the identity politics we have used for the past 20-years?

If so, then what will be the next stage in the evolution of individual freedoms I grew up understanding, and spent my life protecting?  We see, in our young, an intolerance of opposing views, of only one right answer, coming from one source.  It seems to the casual observer that our schools have moved from education to indoctrination.  We have, under the guise of entertainment, gone to selecting nameless people and highlighting them as foolish or stupid to make the point one side or the other is clueless regarding some fresh political issue.  With each showing we erode the middle and encourage political attack, not on solid reason, but on the visceral emotions of the viewer.

Sadly, this is encouraged by the broadcast media.  As commercial enterprises, they are more interested in seeking profit, even if it comes at the sake of a common good.  We see it as well from the personalities we enrich with our viewing who have chosen their political positions and push those opinions forward as the only right answer.

Then we come to the next stage of information flow, the internet.  With the creation of social networking with billions of members on a few sites, what kind of control will go to those who guide what is and is not allowed on those sites?  I suspect the idea of a free exchange of ideas will fairly quickly be squashed in the name of safety.  Yet another of our rights cast aside, or was it only an illusion all along?

The historical view of freedom rested on the acceptance of responsibility by the individual citizen.  As more and more refuse to hold themselves accountable for the common good, and move towards their more selfish instincts, what will be the next version of freedom here in the United States?