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Health & Fitness

The Radicalization of America

Xenophobic Americans want to close the gates to immigrants, and build a bigger fence. America has always been a bit radical.

The roots of America’s radicalization began well before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Federalist Papers.

Christians could have cared less how many Salem witches were hanged. White Deists in Washington were sympathetic to the idea of religious freedom, but slavery was common practice among the founding fathers. Racism was rampant, especially in the South. They were radical times.

Even after the bloody Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans had little representation in Washington, and little respect anywhere else. In 1870, they got the right to vote in presidential elections, but it was – and still is – a government of mostly white men.

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Racial prejudice in America is mainly a Caucasian disease that affects the lives of African Americans and other minorities. It is a dangerous, deadly epidemic – to think otherwise only spreads the disease.

It has become poor taste, lately, to denigrate the poor, regardless of their race or ethnicity. We like to think we are politically and socially more evolved than our parents. Prejudice has become a dirty word, regardless of its continuing effect on our politics, where we live, and whom we invite to dinner.

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But, there are growing, radical differences between rich and poor in America; between those on their way to college, and those on their way to jail; between those on their way to a better life, and those on their way into poverty; between the way it should be, and the way it is.

Our most recent radicalization stems from one political party calling the other “the enemy.” Gingrich designed the strategy; McCain repeated the charge. The phrase implies that you and I, if we take opposing political positions, are at war.

The “enemy” is always trying to destroy America. Forget about peace talks, or finding solutions to our problems – we aim to crush the “enemy!” The walls go up, the troops split into separate camps, positions become hardened, each side shoots down ideas lobbed by the opposition, and things get ugly. People get hurt. The American people get hurt!

So now, everything is radicalized. If you are a secularist, you’re at war with religious fanatics – forget separation of church and state. (Was that really in the Constitution?)

And, by God, you can’t fight a war without guns! Who is going to head up that “militia” the Second Amendment talks about? Whoever he is, he’ll be shooting an AK47.

A black man is President! OMG. More than 20 states petitioned to secede from the Union when Obama was elected; conservative states mostly, including, reliably, Texas. Now that’s radical thinking. (Didn’t they try that once before?)

“Immigration, my eye,” says a friend of mine. “It’s the end of white, Anglo-Saxon America. It was bad enough when the Italians overran Staten Island. We couldn’t keep the Irish out – they were Europeans at least. Then came all the Asians – a white kid can hardly get into Stanford anymore. But now: Mexicans, as far as the eye can see!”

Some Xenophobic Americans want to close the gates; build a bigger fence. It’s a little too radical for me.

Jac Flanders is the author of “What I Learned On The Way Down” - eBook and paperback at Amazon.com.

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