This is not a political column, and the businesses of Valdosta don’t get paid for their political acumen. But we can’t just act like the last twelve weeks didn’t happen.
Over two hundred years ago John Adams said “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy… in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music… and porcelain.”
Well, if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we are back to John Adams.
First there was the investigation into Trump’s “Russian Hoax”, then the impeachment trial, then COVID-19, then Ahmaud Arbery, then George Floyd and the burning of Minneapolis, and the biggest riots our country has ever seen, triggering the biggest military response we’ve ever seen. (According to the Wall Street Journal, 67,000 national guard troops were mobilized, the most in US history for domestic response.)
We can’t bury our heads in the sand and act like our country is ready to just get back to business. There is a crack in the subfloor, and the house is shaking.
That crack is not owed to the Democrats, the Republicans, or to racists, or to a Chinese virus. The crack is evil—and we have always had evil. The KKK, the civil war, the Spanish flu, the oppression of the American Indians.
What is new is how we are expected to react.
Because historically speaking, a riot in Minneapolis is not Valdosta’s problem, but because of social media and the culture of “social action” and solidarity, it is.
The unjust murder of a man (regardless of the color of his skin) 125 miles away in Brunswick is also not Valdosta’s problem. But now, it is.
Saying that may cause offense to some, as if we don’t care.
Because our culture has weaponized empathy, defining “caring” with “reacting.“ If we don’t respond, we don’t care. Those are the new rules.
But the hard truth is Minneapolis has had racism problems within the police department for years. According to an article in the Journal on June 1, 2020, the police chief was elected in 2017, the first black police chief in their history, and he promised changes.
No amount of social media posts or burning cities will change that.
That city is obviously rife with this struggle against evil. But they are the only ones who can change it, and they must do so by putting in the real work to creating meaningful, lasting change.
It’s like we all believe that we can solve evil, across the board.
But we never could.
All we can hope to do is limit evil, responding on a local level with real-life discipline to the offender and justice for the wronged. The judicial system. Jail. The death penalty.
So there are systems in place, but the reason the mob is reacting is because they believe the system is broken.
Is it?
Is our judicial system broken and in need of fixing?
If the answer is yes, is rioting going to create meaningful and lasting change?
What about digital rioting, bullying online followers with the rhetoric of empathy and solidarity?
The only real solution is agreeing to submit ourselves to a higher power with a true, objective set of values and morals and to join John Adams and get to work solving the actual problem. To begin a political revolution of intelligent power, seeking meaningful and lasting judicial change.
Which sounds a lot like what the police chief of Minneapolis has been doing since 2017.
Historically, there is a great example for us in the power of riots in the French Revolution. Anarchy rose up against the Fascist government and lasted a few weeks.
But across the pond, there is another example we will find in the long, unsexy, deliberate, slow process that John Adams and the other founding fathers worked on.
While media teaches us to “react” in emotional, shallow ways, we must look deeper at the crack in this beautiful house we live in and straighten the nails and mend the brokenness.
It’s time we got back to the basics.
“Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not.” ~John Adams