This week’s Homespun…

This week’s Homespun Symposium poses this question:

Is the division in America important to you? What will be necessary to heal it? What part do you see Bloggers playing in that discussion and how will you personally contribute to it?

If you look at the answers from Homespunners who’ve already posted on this question, you note that this country has been divided for a good long time. The Civil War is typically mentioned, as well as quotes from a few other Presidential campaigns, showing how bitterly divided we’ve been before, more so than now. To these examples I’d add that there was quite a division in this country over whether or not we should even be our own country. Not everyone was in favor of the Revolutionary War. After the revolution, not everyone was in favor of a national government. The Federalist Papers were, in part, an attempt at convincing those people.

So division in this country is nothing new. What is relatively new is that this division is being portrayed as a Bad Thing. When Bill Clinton couldn’t muster 50% of the popular vote, the MSM said little to nothing about how Clinton would have to reach out to Republicans and compromise with them, or about how “bitterly divided” the country was. Division then wasn’t reported on much. Division today is the above-the-fold front-page headline. Division, according to liberals and the MSM, is bad and it’s destroying the country, or so they’d want you to believe.

Well, except that within a Republican administration, division is good. When Colin Powell resigned, Democrats and the media started the hand wringing over a lack of diversity of opinion within the Bush administration, while they were silent over a similar situation under Clinton (and remain consistently silent over the huge diversity problem in universities today, which slant heavily liberal, which explains why they’re silent).

The way I see it, a healthy division is good. It keeps both sides from falling off their respective extremes. Too much division can be bad and can simply paralyze us. The division in the country is good, the debate is good, we need it. Division within an administration is less good and can keep it from doing what it was elected to do. Leadership means making decisions, not bickering until we all agree, because we won’t.

So is the division important to me? I think the “division”, as currently defined (red state / blue state), is important to me, but not in the sense that it needs “healing”. I think that division is good for our republic. I do believe that the way some folks express that division needs “healing”, but that’s beyond my power. The best way I can keep the division healthy is to express the truth as I see it, exposing lies I come across, and doing this in a civil way. One of the other respondents referred to individual blogs as “gnats” in regard to how bloggers will contribute to the discussion. He has a point, but at the same time a swarm of gnats can alter the direction of a person. So I’ll continue to buzz.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!