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Fear—LL&L Monthly, Feb.2007
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Benjamin Devey
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Feb 02, 2007 15:06 PST
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Learning Love and Life
Monthly Relationships Newsletter
No. 157, February 2007
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Politics of Fear
(Part 1)
© 2007 by Benjamin Devey
Why is it such a challenge today to hear honest discourse on virtually
any topic in current events?
Why is there so much divisiveness on issues of right and wrong?
What has polarized America so much that we have become a house divided?
Are some topics so emotional, that any discussion of them must be banned
from public discourse?
There have been times in U.S. History when dissent threatened to divide
the country. During the Civil War, the conflict over the issue of
slavery, that it wasn’t just a conflict between Union and Confederate
states that wanted to secede. There were real, divisive issues of life,
morality, and threatened livelihoods. Yet there were questions of right
and wrong. The inhumane practice of slave labor, trade, and inhumanity
to people of a different race—in spite of the fact that it had become an
entrenched practice—was fundamentally, and in every other respect,
immoral. Even if the war’s outcome had been reversed, the owning and
abuse of humans as slaves would have been an abomination, regardless of
anyone’s opinion on the matter.
Today, several issues come into focus that are so clearly right or wrong
that rational thinkers wonder what dementia has crept into half of the
population, that we can’t even have a sane discussion on issues.
What happened, and how did we get here?
The human mind is a complex organism. No one has an inkling how proteins
in the blood and electrical currents in the synapses of the brain come
together to form ideas, how memories are stored, or least of all, how we
think. As advanced as computers have become, they are so inferior to the
autonomous working of the mind that there is hardly any comparison. Yet,
the mind is a delicate balance of internal workings, chemical
equilibrium, discipline, and a dynamic relationship between internal and
external stimuli
One of the most difficult challenges for the human mind is how it
handles disparity. When belief is in a different place from behavior,
the mind has to turn off one or the other to cope with reality. In
practical terms, that means adjusting reality to conform to truth, or
changing belief to conform to observation.
For example, if your belief tells you it’s important to be nice to
people, but all around you see people abusing others, you might change
your belief that it isn’t important to be nice. Instead, you need to
look out for yourself. You can’t maintain the belief that your behavior
matters and act in the opposite way. That is a cause for dementia. A
different way to cope with the disparity would be to maintain the belief
that it’s important to be nice, and correspondingly acknowledge, I’m
responsible for the way I treat others.
You often see people who grow up with abuse who lose a respect for
boundaries. This happens because of the disparity between values and
actions. Because of violated trust, their coping mechanism either
switches off the value system, and end up behaving the same way as their
abusers, or they make a switch to become the opposite. There is always a
choice, but seldom a middle ground that maintains opposing beliefs and
behavior.
Culturally, we’re in the same place as victims of an abusive lifestyle.
In The 1973 case of Roe v. Wade the Supreme Court overturned all state
and federal laws outlawing or restricting abortion, ruling that they
violated the right to privacy under due process under the 14th
Amendment. Our laws and culture have derived out of the disparity
between the law that allows infanticide within the womb, including the
culture and mindsets that insist a wholesale slaughter of innocent life
is crucial to progress; and on the other hand, the moral position that
knows abortion is immoral an inhuman atrocity. The opposite views will
never be reconciled.
Have you ever wondered why liberals in America have irrational,
unbridled hatred for President Bush? If you think it’s because of the
War in Iraq, you haven’t been paying attention. Liberals hated Bush
before he ever became president. Liberals hate anyone who thinks
abortion is immoral. For that matter, they hate anyone who speaks up in
any way, shape, or form to suggest that any line of morality exists.
The problem started with the acceptance of abortion as a cure to
promiscuous abandon. If you father/mother a child but don’t want to take
responsibility for raising the child, what could be better than being
released from the obligation? Abortion was like a magic pill that
released people from the burden of unwanted pregnancy. Once a person
accepts that it’s okay to kill fetuses, then any lifestyle choice,
deviation, or abusive fetish. In fact, no one has to account for their
choices, and the worse sin is the audacity of anyone suggesting there is
any such thing as moral right. That is the line of thinking between the
liberal left and the moral right—a disparity that will not budge.
It isn’t a civil war between people with opposing viewpoints. It’s a
mental illness that has long since crossed a point of no return—the
right to kill babies. People who believe in the right to abortion will
use any rationalization, misdirection, or lie to preserve the
indefensible stand at any cost. Anyone who stands against abortion is
attacked, hated, and reviled. You can’t be for infanticide and draw
lines of civility. It doesn’t happen. Once you think innocent life is
expendable, nothing else is worth preserving, not family, not marriage,
not the welfare or security of the nation.
Have you ever wondered why the abortion is so dear to liberals? I can’t
put myself in the demented mindset that denies the value of life to
answer that. It only seems that overturning Roe v. Wade would rob the
liberal platform of everything it stands for: the right to unrestrained
promiscuity without responsibility; the right to freedom from the
tyranny of family bonds of children; the right to take life when it
isn’t convenient to care for it. That’s why Terry Schaibo was such a hot
topic two years ago, and why it was so imperative for the courts to end
her life at the earliest convenience.
Our culture war extends to nearly every issue on the table. In our next
newsletter, we’ll discuss a few un-broachable subjects that seem to keep
us a nation divided. There’s a reason that we can’t have rational
discussion on certain subjects. Let’s talk about them in the next few
issues.
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READERS' FORUM
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that separates people today? Does it frustrate you that we can’t have
these dialogues without it turning into all-out warfare?
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Copyright (c) 2007 by Benjamin Devey. All rights reserved. Permission is
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