EDITOR’S VIEWPOINT/The joke’s on us
Late in the evening, while leisurely driving through Northern Ireland, a driver quickly stops his car as two masked and armed men jump in and hold a gun to his head. “Are you a Protestant or a Catholic?” one of the intruders demands to know. “Actually,” the man says, “I’m Jewish.” Confused, the two attackers look at each other, and then turning back to their victim, one of them asks, “Well, then, mister, are you a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew?
We are fast becoming a nation as divided as Ireland. With such an astounding number of issues between us, it makes me nostalgic for the time when I was young, and Southerners and Yankees were imaginary enemies. Today, however, we appear to be heading back in time, not to the America of my childhood in the 1950s that some consider a golden, civilized age, but deeper into our history to the time between the Revolutionary War and the creation of the Constitution.
Once the war erupted, each state possessed sovereign power, so by war’s end, few of them wanted to surrender much of it to a federal government. The result was the Articles of Confederation, in which the federal government was just a national legislature, with no executive or judicial branch. Congress could establish courts for specific purposes, but legal disputes were handled inside states. Basically, states could do whatever they pleased without any interference from other states, much less a national government.
Enough political, personal and economic abuses had occurred because of the formidable power of each state that, by 1786, the country began moving toward our Constitution, which balanced the powers between the states and federal government.
Today’s issues that divide us may be exploding nationally, but the fallout is beginning to hit close to home. Hot-button subjects — such as stem cell research, eminent domain, homosexual unions and abortion rights — are landing squarely on the desks of local and state officials. The decisions they make on those issues could create communities that attract or repel people and businesses, further exaggerating the differences between the states.
For example, several scientists considering jobs at the University of Texas warned their future employers that if the state passed a proposed ban on embryonic stem cell research, they would go to a place more hospitable to their field of study. Of course, those professors might not feel welcome if their facilities, which could house lab animals, came under attack by Eco terrorists, who also hate loggers and fur farmers. Combine the efforts of the saviors of our environment with activists shooting abortion doctors or blowing up clinics, and it begins to sound uncomfortably close to Belfast a few years ago, or maybe downtown Bagdad today.
Early in our history, the states saw the virtue in abandoning self-interest and the wisdom of compromise. Are we as smart as our founding fathers, or are we doomed to holding guns to each other’s heads demanding allegiance to our positions? If we don’t wise up, then, like the two Irish thugs, the joke will be on us.