America's Vital Unity

Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, we are Americans! And whatever that means that may be evil---slavery, greed, racism, etc.---it certainly means much that is good. We have thrown off an oppressive government and established one that is superior to any other in human history; a government of, by and for the people, based upon unprecedented individual freedom. We have had the courage to believe that people can govern themselves if they base themselves on the “pillars of morality and religion” {Geo. Washington} and work for the common good. We have shed our own blood to end slavery. We have extended billions of dollars of aid to other nations---and not always motivated by what they could offer us in return. We have a governmental system that recognizes the corruptive tendencies of power, and was designed to prevent it from taking hold; and it has by and large been successful. We can still have a bloodless revolution each time we go to the polls. With the exception of the Civil War, we have miraculously maintained unity, under one constitution, for almost two and a half centuries; and we have generated an unprecedented level of prosperity for our people. Disharmony and conflict, as in any human system, from marriages to the entire human family, has always brewed under the surface and threatened our Constitutional unity. But we have always been able, by the grace of God, to maintain it, and the blessings that accrue to it. In fact we see that our unprecedented prosperity on almost every level of human existence has brought the inherent curse of generating an ungrateful, entitled spirit among many of our brothers and sisters; a human tendency that goes back historically at least to the time of Israel’s deliverance into the land “flowing with milk and honey”. Decadence [defined as “a condition or period of decline, as in art or morals”] is the product of prosperity minus spiritual growth. [And it is actually celebrated by some segments of our society.]

In the Bible, God is recorded as having warned the Israelites against it when He was delivering them into the prosperity of Canaan [Deuteronomy 8:11f]. Our Founding Fathers had a clear sense that they had similarly been providentially delivered from an oppressive greater power into a bountiful land with a God-given freedom. And they cautioned coming generations about what it would take to maintain it. Geo. Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 is an amazing statement describing the necessary societal requirements for maintaining our democracy. [available here: https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8111689183754542301#editor/target=post;postID=3901505139305844432;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=postname ].

America has tyrannical enemies who hate and fear the freedom of democracy, or who greedily make profit on our weaknesses. They would love to see us implode in the fires of our internal conflicts. Agents have seized enough fentanyl coming across America borders to poison our entire population. It seems evident that Russian agents, via the internet, have fueled the fires of antagonism and hostility on both sides of conflicting parties within the U.S..

We must maintain our unity! Our internal hostility makes us vulnerable to our enemies. We don’t have to exercise “group-think”---we are not robotic copies of each other. We don’t all clap in unison [like the North Koreans] when our president speaks. But we are under-girded by a common foundation that we would do well to recognize and maintain. Ben Franklin’s statement at the signing of the Declaration is as true today as then:  "We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."