E Pluribus Unum: The Honest Conversation Starts at Common Ground

Apr 24, 2022

It’s no secret that we live in a very divided society. This divide, sadly, is by political design. The opportunistic political class has come to understand that utilizing the strategy of divide and conquer – accredited to Philip the Second of Macedonia and utilized early on by Julius Caesar, among others – allows for the cobbling together of demographics based on grievances so as to achieve that fifty-one percent threshold needed to acquire and maintain power.

Put another way, it’s beneficial to the political class when our society is divided because the masses – the people – are more easily emotionally and intellectually manipulated. A terminally divided and aggrieved population is the political opportunist's playground.

The political opportunist – the special interest activist, the community organizer – is a weaver of emotional incitement; emotional discontent. His or her mission isn't to serve the people as an elected representative – those are statesmen and women. It’s to play off your emotions so that you’re moved to champion the issue they’re hawking at the moment. This is how they both herd you into targeted demographics – necessary for your exploitation – and also cleve you from your neighbor.

Think about it. Rarely – very rarely – does a politician, ideological activist, or one-trick-pony “advocate” ever take to the podium and talk about how much we all have in common? It’s always about our differences, never about our commonalities.

And so it is that all of the public pleas by these political charlatans about starting a “conversation” or a “dialog” about the hard issues and problems facing our country, our states, our cities and towns, necessarily have to be a boatload of bullsh*t. It doesn’t benefit them to solve the problems facing the electorate because they can’t exploit those problems to their advantage by demagoguing their opponents. The rhetoric sounds good, but nothing ever comes of it because the elected class doesn’t want solutions to be affected.

To that point, political opportunists – again, who are not statesmen and women or public servants, but instead a grifting class that laughs at the very concept of “public service” – are the laziest and most selfish bottom-feeders in the public sphere. Hack journalists at least have to cobble together arguments to support their points. Political opportunists and organizers simply have to prey on the people’s emotions.

Let’s take the sorriest excuse for a mayor in mayoral history – and that’s a pretty high bar given Bill deBlasio was elected as Mayor of New York. Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot – disliked and perhaps even loathed by many in circles within her own political party, talks a great game about battling crime on the mean streets of Chicago but she has done nothing to combat that crime. In fact, it’s gotten worse during her tenure; a tenure that saw her kneejerk supporting Black Lives Matter and ordering the police to retreat in the face of Antifa-backed riots, destruction, and looting, all of which sent the lawless dregs of the earth into the streets armed to the teeth.

As I’ve said before, on occasion, I listen to the Chicago Police Department's citywide ban on the scanner app, Broadcastify.com. I tune in after midnight and the neverending transmissions announcing “shots fired” and “multiple rounds fired” are appalling. It’s constant, with battery, assault, and robbery calls – as well as anything you can think of – peppered throughout.

When Lightfoot came to office in 2019 on the promise of addressing crime and making the city safe for all of its “diversity,” Chicago experienced 492 murders, 15,296 aggravated assaults including non-lethal shootings, and 1,761 rapes, totaling 25,532 violent crime reports, and that’s just violent crime. Each of these numbers increased dramatically in just 3 years.

In 2022 – and these projections are conservative and based on FBI database calculations, Chicago will see and most likely exceed 666 murders, 17,048 aggravated assaults including non-lethal shootings, 2,882 rapes, and a projected total – and remember, this is a lowball figure, of 28,223 violent crime reports.

So, what has political opportunist and activist Lori Lightfoot done since taking office? Well, she embraced the false narrative Black Lives Matter movement and championed the Defund the Police movement, which emboldened the over 59 active street and drug gangs within the city to have at it.

Lightfoot was too busy reigning over the financial destruction of the city; including the demolition of Michigan Avenue’s “Magnificent Mile,” which used to house all of the ultra-high-end stores. Today, this prime retail real estate has empty storefronts because it’s not only too dangerous for shoppers to go to the stores but because the retailers face an existence where the city’s government does nothing about flash-mob-looting and the blatant violent crime on the streets just outside their doors.

Meanwhile, Lightfoot lies about the health of the economy and pivots to social issues almost exclusively championing the most radical of LGBTQ+ agendas.

Lightfoot’s plea for “dialog” and “conversation” starts with her being correct and anyone with a viewpoint other than hers being wrong. She is typical of the fascists of today’s Left; an ignorant, arrogant, intolerant, opportunistic bully who never should have been elected to any public office.

The “dialog” and “conversation” the disingenuous political class rattles on about – and this cancer exists on both sides of the aisle, not just the Left; the Right is just as guilty, although the predominance of this grifting exists on the Left – these dialogs and conversations cannot be executed from the ends, from the edges. Any productive dialog or conversation – regardless of the issue – has to start with establishing the commonalities between those having the dialog or conversation.

Call it having skin in the game, call it addressing differences from a common position, call it whatever you like. But discussing differences with someone you have something in common with begins discussions from a point of agreement, not a point of division. It’s from this position of agreement that solutions can evolve because common goals can be agreed upon; goals that actually provide the solutions politicians don’t want to achieve.

If a person who believes the gun is the problem sits down with someone who believes the criminal is the problem, they can establish the commonly held belief that the shootings that plague their neighborhood are both unwelcome and also committed by people who don’t follow the law. This provides a much better starting point for a discussion – a position of agreement, not one that debates the validity of the Second Amendment.

We can’t trust the political class to have these conversations because they benefit from the chaos. These discussions – these conversations and dialogs – have to happen amongst the people and they must start from a vantage point of commonality, a position where we all have skin in the game and where our general goals are the same.

Out of these discussions emerge the statesmen and women, the leaders who actually deserve to be elected to office for they too have skin in the game; they are part and parcel of that common ground we all share.

The United States Congress of 1782 – which seated many of the Framers and Founders in its body, adopted the phrase e pluribus unum as our national motto, “out of many, one.” Many believe they adopted this motto to acknowledge that our country exists as a nation of immigrants who have come together to create a new and unique national identity. It’s a valid point, but not the only reason they adopted the motto.

The Framers knew that solutions emanating from a common ground consensus – a consensus created in identifying our commonalities and compromising on our differences – would make our nation cohesive and symbiotic for all. They knew that to achieve a “greater good” or a “common good” our path forward needed to be built on common ground. It was a brilliant plan and it worked brilliantly until the cancer of political factions infested our nation’s governmental system.

Washington, in his Farewell Address, warned us of this cancer and pleaded with us to stay on common ground, to embrace e pluribus unum:

“Let me now take a more comprehensive view and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally...The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.”

If we’re to re-ascend to the responsibility of maintaining our Republic – which is in dire need of championing at the moment – then we must get off our asses and take up the mantle of “We the People.” Otherwise, the rodents of the opportunistic political class – both nationally and internationally (think World Economic Forum) – will redefine freedom to mean oppression and we will be forced to swallow it as they serve it.

The political opportunists and their lackeys in the media have drilled the idea that discussing politics and religion in “polite society” is, well, impolite. But that is a bald-faced and dangerous lie.

We must discuss at least politics amongst ourselves so that we can identify our common ground; the common ground on which both solutions and future leaders are born. If we continue to follow the advice of those who have succeeded in making us feel alone in our political and religious thoughts; if we continue to allow the dividers to run roughshod over the nation and the world, we are doomed and it is our own fault.

The choice is clear. Do we want to live in Orwell’s 1984, or do we want to exist as a free people?

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