Fighting Through Another Civil War

The Republican Party was formed in Ripon, Wisconsin on March 20, 1854.  A small group of men got together to create an alternative party that could deal with the issue of slavery.  Eventually, that party succeeded in electing Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States.  Shortly thereafter, South Carolina left the union and the Civil War was born.  Ironically again, South Carolina was among the first to open itself up again to a working economy. The parallels are strangely astonishing.

Although slavery and the dehumanizing of African Americans was the precipitating cause of the Civil War, the causal drive for Lincoln to advance forward was the preservation of the Union and the desire to retain a group of states “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

We find ourselves again living the tension between liberty and equality, one where the COVID crisis of 2020 reveals the ever-present friction between equality and liberty. This tension exists at several levels.

In the Civil War South, the economic foundations of slavery and the desire for State’s rights, resulted in decisions that placed economics before human values. They refused to address moral corruption to preserve financial stability, for in fact in the Southern mind, no federal government was going to tell local economies how to run their plantation businesses.

Today, we face similar tensions.  The devaluation of the elderly and vulnerable is causing a rift in the Union, only reversing the Federal and State roles in caparison to the Civil War. The federal government has refused to act collectively to create a plan that preserves the unity of purpose and the dignity of everyone.

In an age where we can place men on the Moon, pick up our phone and have a video chat with someone across the globe at a moment’s notice, or create a vaccine for a virus in a year when it normally takes 20 years, it is astonishing that we cannot all sit at the table and talk how we can honor “the proposition that all men are created equal.” 

The dehumanizing or devaluing of life is of first importance.  If we kill the elderly at the expense of employment, we have crushed the image of God and we will pay with Divine judgment.  Having said this, if we preserve life without constructing a way to work, we obliterate the very means of financing the preservation of life we profess to value. 

Yet beyond this logic, if Lincoln has shown us anything, he showed us that preserving the Union, and valuing unity of purpose in facing challengers is the most fundamental means of accomplishing the goals of both protecting the vulnerable and preserving the economy.

Ironically, the federal government has abdicated a precise method for a unified response and has fractured the nation by passing the resolution of the present crisis into the laps of the States, thereby fracturing the Union and endorsing the power of State’s rights in a potentially self-willed era driven by economics. 

If the Civil War taught us anything, it was that if we allow individual decision-making at a time of moral crisis, many people will certainly choose economics over life. Many Americans would rather dance with death than be poor. That is, unfortunately, the American way.

In the State of Pennsylvania, there are some that are advocating an approach to a bipartisan resolution to the specific problems.  Those people have helped me readjust my thinking on this tension between life and liberty.  There needs to be a unified approach to the problem.

The polarization of a North/South, quarantine/civil liberties bifurcation only exacerbates the problem and prolongs the eventual resolution that would come through unity of direction.  So, who is to blame in this?  It is clearly the federal government. The very party that was formed to answer the problem of slavery and was created based on human values and Union-preservation has abdicated its foundational values.

In a day and age when we need leadership that preserves essential values, life and liberty in particular, the abdication of the federal government to preserve a unified front in addressing the regional challenges has demonstrated that the current administration prefers economics to the preservation of the Union, and for me, the preservation of moral values.

Sadly, States have not created models that work either, or most are embroiled in partisan politics.  When we need a unified approach to creating an economy that can fund the protection of the elderly and vulnerable, we have sides talking to themselves.  This is a travesty.

Ultimately, we have very smart people who must come up with a plan to mitigate death rates and keep people working, providing the latter are not in danger or endangering others.  It remains to be seen if we can actually accomplish this because we no longer seem to adhere tenaciously to representative government or the essence of republicanism and popular sovereignty. We are party-driven. If we are not working together, we need to return there.  We must abandon the self-will culture that silos its own ideas and return to the lessons we learned in the Civil War.