Create Your Own Path
Frederick Douglass
Vastly Higher Ground
As the pen
of red Angus calves flowed down the alley toward us, I couldn’t suppress the
pride in what I was witnessing. Those calves represented much more than just
the sum total of their numbers. They started as a concept and a goal many, many
years ago.
In truth,
their existence was the culmination of what started as early boyhood dreams and
wound their way toward reality through a hurricane of barriers and impossible obstacles
that offered little to no chance of success. I not only liked what I saw I was
struck by the notion that two or three inspirational role models of my past
would have approved as well. They would have heralded a personal, “laudable
pursuit” of six decades.
I got to
spend another hour with those bright red calves before the sorted heifers were
loaded and on their way to Texas as herd replacements and the steers were
headed to Iowa to be grown on summer grass before going into a farmer/feeder
operation for finishing. The bigger heifer calves were left in the feedlot to
grow before they come home to become our own 2017 replacement heifers.
They will serve as the next step toward
something very important … our future.
Frederick Douglass
I’m not alone in believing our
American experiment is not just remarkable it is “pure, natural, and noble”.
That quoted subphrase came from a
man who grew to love America
for its principles and its promise. His birth provided every reason to take an
opposite stand and fight to overturn and denigrate his homeland, but he didn’t
allow spite to rule his life. Rather, by reflection and conscientious study,
Frederick Douglass, set a different course.
We know Douglass was a slave by
birth, but he escaped those bonds to become a great American thinker and true
emancipator. In the crosswinds of our youth and educational processes, few of
us grasped the importance of this man, but reassessment has a way of altering
initial impressions and lessons dimmed by time and teachers as uninformed as we
were. Douglass is a model that deserves to be heralded.
What makes his life more remarkable
is the fact he was influenced by mentors who rejected the Constitution as a
proslavery “covenant with death”. They called for free states to secede from
the Union and go their own way. At that time
in his life, he was constantly under that tutelage. In the end, Douglass
rejected those radical, progressive teachings and became a messenger of a
different promise for America.
Douglas trumpeted America in a Fourth of July speech he gave in 1852. In
it, he praised the Constitution as a “glorious liberty document”. In his mind,
the Founders were great men who put their lives on a course toward oblivion if
their bet and their resolve failed. Theirs was a “glorious example” of what
separates the American model from all the rest.
From that
realization, Douglas found his own distinctive
promise in his America,
but, from there, the lesson deepens.
Certainly
slavery was a contradiction of any premise of constitutional equality, but its
resolution was sealed through the blood of 750,000 Americans in the Civil War.
Beyond that blight on our history, Douglass came to assign the prevailing interpretation
of inequity toward his surroundings as the natural failure of men and their
imposed translation obf the document and not the Constitution itself. Racial
uplift, reconciliation, and integration were matters that transcended slavery
but the fixes certainly didn’t get resolved with the collective graves of est those
Americans. The true doctrine was to be found in the simple premise that
barriers were treated by casting out all racial identities rather than
elevating them into federal policy importance.
Douglass
agreed wholeheartedly with the Lincoln
suggestion that the best way to elevate the condition of men was to set in
motion universal freedoms to “clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all”.
“The true
doctrine,” Douglass wrote, “is one nation, one country, one citizenship, and
one law for ALL the people.”
Just before
he died, he warned what he had to say would “be more useful than palatable” but
it needed saying.
“We hear, since emancipation, much said in
commendation of race pride, race love, race effort, race superiority, race men,
and the like,” he counseled. “(but, we) make a great mistake in saying so much
of race and color.”
“I would place myself, and I would
place you … upon grounds vastly higher and broader than any founded upon race
or color … not (various races as we are addressed), but as men,” were his
words. “God and nature speak to our manhood, and to our manhood alone.”
Consider the immensity of those
words and align them in juxtaposition to how our federal government and our
society have treated race and classification of citizenry. Since the Civil War,
and, continued relentlessly today, the opposite has taken place. Since the
‘60s, it has become an entire industry, but all the racial uplift and equality
has actually created differential states of citizenry and emancipation. It has not
solved problems. It has promoted sectionalism and fundamental divide.
We are where Douglass warned us not
to go.
Vastly Higher Ground
Where does the “vastly higher grounds” of
Douglass’ vision exist today?
The truth of the matter is much
easier arrayed where such conditions don’t exist. The hellholes of urban
centers where radical, racially divisive leadership prevails and triumphs like Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis and Los Angeles are diametrically opposed
examples of the Douglass model. It is there the race industries have set up
shop and spread their tentacles of oppression and hate, but those centers
aren’t the only battlegrounds.
From Victor Davis Hanson’s Private Papers, we can begin to realize
entire states and, indeed, entire regions are on the cusp of the same dire
dilemma. California
is on center stage. Hanson notes that in “eery irony” California is in a headlong descent toward
the catastrophe of the Old South in the days leading up to the Civil War. All
of a sudden that liberal leadership is promoting the ideas of “states rights”
it has so blatantly disregarded and promoted on a general basis. What it
projects as “cool” is actually the epitome of a permanent society of haves and
have nots. “King Cotton” of the old South is alive and well in Silicon Valley where trillion dollar companies like
Google, Facebook, Apple, and others are a world unto their own. Huge estates
surrounded by impoverished shacks of servants are duplicated by mostly poor
communities like Pixley or Redwood
City living in squalor next to places like Atherton
and Woodside. The state has become a reactionary two tiered state of masters
and serfs no different from the antebellum South.
The emergence of full view
self-righteous preening, though, has existed across the West in full view for
nearly two centuries. Indian Reservations are institutional locker plants of
suppression whereby proper rights to human beings much less American citizens
don’t even exist. They are differential states akin to zoos where emancipation
never came and racial degradation and disintegration are permanent. Those
people may as well wear T shirts proclaiming “We are Stupid and We Can’t be
Trusted with Private Property Rights!” The fact is they are not trusted by
federal policy and they are heaped into a permanent state of despair and
underachievement.
The story doesn’t end there.
The illumination of a permanent
class of exclusions who are being effectively condemned to a covenant with
death is growing. They are a collection of men who are not judged on their
respective merits, but with regards to their antecedents in direct
contradiction to the Constitution.
It is little wonder that there is a
growing rejection of the suggestion of “one nation, one country, one
citizenship, and one law for one people”. These Americans have either been uninvited
to the party or they are being excluded in starts and stops by artificial
regulatory weights added to their shoulders. In all cases, the two tiered
system has continued its diabolical advance. Its governing doctrine of
permanence does not align itself with the vision of Douglass. It is not a Lincolnesque
“laudable pursuit for all”. Rather, it is defined inequality that pits one
element of America
against another. The management philosophy is now arrayed by classification. Navajo, Miner, Apache, Lumberman, Cheyenne, Rancher,
Black, White, Comanche, Farmer, Mexican American, illegal Alien, Urban, Rural,
and the continuing myriad of racial and societal demarcations that divide us
rather than what God and nature speak to … our manhood alone.
Stephen
L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New
Mexico. “I will guarantee you that if Indian
Reservations were offered to homesteading by their resident internees their
support for national monuments and other environmental “Wunderlands” would be
dramatically altered. There would be subsequent starts and stops, but
eventually American flags would be flying where they never have.”
1 comment:
As Steve says we should all simply be labeled as Americans. The politicians have profited by dividing us into groups and pitting groups against each other. For instance, politicians love to tell certain groups that they are going to "give" them special benefits and then make the "rich" pay for it. Class envy and hatred is destroying the USA.
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