Live-and-Let-Live Tolerance Is Strained by Identity Politics

The vast majority of Americans that you and I respect care nothing about racial or gender characteristics of candidates they vote into office, rise to top corporate leadership positions, perform life-critical medical procedures on themselves or loved ones, or teach their young children.

In each case, we only want confidence that they have earned those positions through fair measures of meritocracy rather than through preferential matrix appointments which eliminated more qualified candidates.

Nor do most of us care about personal choices individuals make concerning same or different racial or gender partner pairing … it’s really none of our business, with no approval or disapproval warranted.

Racial and gender discrimination is regarded as offensive and ignorant by everyone most of us would choose as friends.

We are a nation that places high value on fairness.

Just as no one should be deprived of access to a property or service based upon skin color or ethnicity, a top-level girl swimming team competitor shouldn’t be deprived of an award or athletic scholarship by a self-declared female in a larger, stronger male body.

We enthusiastically and gratefully endorse a great guiding vision articulated by America’s founders in our Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [people] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

By Life, we assume rights to determine individual goals that most appeal to each of us, setting our expectations as high as we can imagine and dare to pursue.

By Liberty, we share a mutual assurance to protect each other’s freedoms so long as they don’t unreasonably encroach upon prerogatives of ourselves and others.

By pursuit of Happiness, we affirm that Life and Liberty afford opportunities to enjoy unbounded satisfactions: blessings of family and community; personal and shared achievements and rewards; triumphs over challenges and setbacks that make us stronger.

But we can’t enjoy any of these blessings without compatible rules of law and institutions that we can trust to apply them fairly without prejudice.

Here, we recognize a fundamental difference between rules that establish and protect “equality” of opportunity,” vs. “equity” of outcomes irrespective of earned merit.

As a compassionate civil society, we also recognize that some individuals and groups among us need and deserve special economic and social help.

Some of these truly tough-luck cases are obvious, including people who are old and alone, mentally and/or physically infirmed, or are temporarily unable to find work with young families that urgently depend on them.

This determination of appropriate support often poses a very consequential slippery slope “tough love” vs. “nanny state” governance paradox of a general sort that many parents encounter.

Offered too freely to too many, charity disincentivizes a culture of self-reliance and personal responsibility, giving rise, in turn, to an ascendent culture of entitlement and external blame that is tearing our great civil society apart.

Such fault line divisions are being deepened and exploited by divide-and-conquer political opportunists that seek control over our lives, liberties and free enterprise rewards.

Complacently unaware and unprepared, circumstances have turned terribly bad very fast.

Most of us have never imagined witnessing as recently as a couple of years ago the election of a president who would unfairly, destructively, brand America as “systemically racist.”

We could never have contemplated prevalent K-12 classroom indoctrination of children with critical race theory (CRT), where students are asked to self-identify as “oppressors” and “oppressed” according to inherited skin colors.

It would have been unthinkable that powerful teachers’ unions would endorse anti-patriotic 1619 Project revisionist history propaganda that America was founded on a racist slavery agenda.

Parents and the public are appropriately outraged that protests against introduction of age-inappropriate sexually explicit materials to elementary school children have been targeted as “domestic terrorist” activities by top Department of Justice officials at the behest of those same teachers’ unions.

The federal government’s role in protecting our nation and citizens from foreign invasion has been blatantly abandoned through a U.S. open southern border policy that has made every state and community a de facto illegal migrant sanctuary. And whereas those who oppose this assault on American sovereignty are routinely accused of racism, Hispanic border communities are among the most impacted and angered by this dereliction of fundamental constitutional protections.

Whereas out-of-control open border cartel drug and human sex trafficking in combination with escalating urban lawlessness disproportionately victimizes racial minority communities, Black populations in particular, these obvious facts evade predominately liberal mainstream media narratives.

After all, it’s difficult to ignore that spiraling crime problems across the country have a strong correlation with leadership policies in Democrat-controlled cities.

Six notable examples for rising homicide rates include Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Indianapolis … where the victims in each of them were disproportionately Black, and all but two have cut police budgets.

If you imagine that there’s any issue that can’t be weaponized as race or gender oppressive, consider the weather.

“Climate equity,” or “climate justice,” broadly defined as measures to ensure the just distribution of the benefits of climate protection efforts and alleviates unequal burdens created by climate change, disprove any such off-limits blame assumption.

Not generally addressed in these equity and justice measures are consequences of climate alarm-premised anti-fossil energy policies which have driven skyrocketing fuel, food and commodity costs that are most burdensome on lower income populations.

Tragically true, some individuals and families face daunting, even irreconcilable, hardships which should concern all of us. As recipient citizens of a compassionate and generously humane nation, we must each never lose sight of our responsibilities to perpetuate that legacy which makes America so very special.

America is also a nation that celebrates its rich racial and cultural “melting pot” which owes to its earned reputation as a land of opportunity for legal migrants that share those all-important Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness values.

Efforts practiced by those who exploit our diverse cultural enrichments to divide us, have no place in our founders’ vision to create that free and independent American legacy we so fortunately inherited.

Let’s finally recognize that such divisive neo-Marxist stereotypic identity class system tactics represent organized bigotry in its vilest, most destructively weaponized form.