A Struggle for Unity?
Cats: This Week's Guests and Topics|The black community received the right to vote. Women were given the right to vote. The American-Japanese remuneration program. The nation’s first black president. All major and desirable accomplishments. What does it all say about our nation’s sense of unity? Have we made the progress worthy of a country whose greatness is lauded within and without?
The progress has been real but so has the action that diminishes the impact these great accomplishments should have. Fortunately we no longer have on-going debates about threats to women suffrage. Unless we consider the tension that arises each time we need to have a president sign a bill giving the black race, including the black women, the right to vote for another period. Fortunately the majority of our nation decided to vote for the person we believed to be the most qualified in turning the economy around in addition to bringing about other needed changes and who showed the greatest interest in bringing about change. Unfortunately, we found out even before Barak Obama was inaugurated that our nation has a sizable population who hated the fact that a black democrat was elected president.
We have people taking very different views as to what should be done to resolve the immigration issue and hostility pervades this discussion.
When we look back on this nation’s history, we realize that at the same time that we had people enslaving and brutally treating human beings while justifying their motives and behavior, we also had people strongly opposing slavery. At the same time that we had women and children being exploited in the workforce, we also had people crying out against this unjust treatment of our citizens. Our Japanese citizens received remunerations because even though fear and insensivity lead to the essential imprisonment of people who had no interest in doing harm to their fellow citizens, many of their fellow citizens spoke out against this unfair and harsh treatment. Cases such as these abound and serve to illustrate the dichotomy of America. A nation that has long gone in two directions at the same time. Those who fight to impose injustice and those who fight to resist it.
Our history and our present seem to indicate that in many areas of our American life we have essentially two groups of people. Those who work to keep us divided and those who struggle to bring us and keep us together for the greater good. Will this be the case as we move into the future? Will 2050, assuming we’re still here then, see us moving in two different directions as we have throughout our history or will one of the two groups described have begun to win this battle by then?
