It would appear that most people in my country are having trouble these days understanding why there is so much ethnic strife surfacing throughout the world. They do not understand why people of color are so angry, and so willing to resort to violence, whether it be in the Middle East or in America. They see black men setting fire to and looting businesses in response to police shootings, while ignoring the violence in their own communities, and they don't know really what to make of it all.
To me at least, the answers lie in part in our nation's founding principles. Our founding fathers enshrined the idea that all were "created equal", and divinely endowed with certain inalienable rights: the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They further set forth that these "inalienable" rights could on occasion be relinquished, but only by "due process of the law".
What is "due process"? That question has been debated ever since America declared its independence. But we do know by now what due process is NOT, for it forbids any person, man or woman, adult or child, civilian or authority, from taking the law into their own hands to kill, enslave, or cause anguish to their fellow countrymen. Such actions are referred to by modern-day human rights groups as being "extra-judicial": outside the bounds of international, human, and (yes) Divine law.
Are you beginning to see the problem? The killings of black civilians by the police fits every possible definition of "extra-judicial" that one can come up with. And they in no way involve due process of the law. The suspects being gunned down are forever denied their day in court, and are instead judged postmortem by media outlets, police unions, mayors, district attorneys, etc, in an attempt to justify what our founding documents clearly state are unjustifiable actions.
So you see, we as a people are now routinely violating our own founding principles. And the world is taking note. Every time we deny citizens the right to be judged in court, the international community in turn judges us. And it finds us guilty of deep and pervasive hypocrisy, for we have incessantly pressured other powers to adopt the very measures we are ourselves abandoning. So the Chinese, the Russians, the Europeans, and Africans, and the Middle Easterners, start to look for alternatives to Constitutional Democracy. Fascism rises in Europe, Autocracy in Asia, Islamic Dictatorship in the heart of the Middle East, and so on and so forth.
But even more worrying, the American people themselves are starting to question our own nation's raison d'être. In the absence of any recognizable form of justice, they are inventing their own substitute: street justice. And their vigilantism is tearing this nation apart, block by bloody block.
I know what you're thinking: "If you're right about all of this, then what comes next?" My answer is a rhetorical question: how long can a nation that essentially stands for nothing endure? Probably not very long. It will either collapse, or morph into an unrecognizable monstrosity, as countless other Republics have done throughout human history.
There is only one solution that I can think of: Judicial reform. The entire corrupt, nepotistic system that lets some Americans off of the hook for killing other Americans needs to be directly confronted by those we elect to office. But for that to happen, we must first as a people confront the problem, for the authorities are only doing what they think the voters want them to do.
That is my reason for writing this: to raise awareness of what currently ails us as a nation, so that we can move on from debating its causes to discussing possible cures. And I will leave the latter task to those more well suited to it.
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