Friendship and affection have to be given freely. You can’t force someone to like you, just as you can’t be forced to like another person or even a group of people. Any attempt at this type of coercion will likely produce the opposite result.

Progressives want to use the power of government to codify favoritism and then manufacture kinship. That’s hardly a recipe for success. Nevertheless, they seem determined to force the issue until the country is so polarized that we can no longer see any common ground.

The left has heralded sensitivity training and instruction in critical race theory as the solution to America’s race and gender issues. Instead, they are no more than a thinly disguised form of coercion. Any appearance of success is more than likely just a veil that individuals wear to protect themselves from further abuse or even job loss.

How long before the state prosecutes people not only for what they believe you’re thinking, as in hate crimes but also for what they believe you’re not thinking, as in “you’re not really learning what we taught you in re-education camp”? A nation of automatons hardly seems like a productive use of resources. A great deal of time and money would be required to purge any unacceptable thoughts from an entire population and this “education” will have to be repeated with each new generation. The public schools are working on it already but if their success rate is equal to their rate in teaching academic subjects, it’ll be a rocky process.

The best path to a relatively colorblind society seems to be through virtue and success. People will respect each other if they share common goals and values. America’s objective has long been for all people to have the same opportunity to go as far as their skills and gumption will take them and for our laws to be applied equally across the board. It’s a work in progress but we were making great strides until the “modern era.”

People will gravitate to like-minded individuals regardless of race as long as they’re all a part of a wholesome and prosperous country that’s not obsessed with skin color. There will always be exceptions but that is what it means to be human. We’re not all of one mind and one point of view.

The left perpetually sermonizes about diversity while trying, all the while, to shut down freedom of speech. In a truly colorblind society, the greatest diversity would be diversity of thought and expression. This is seen as unacceptable in today’s liberal world. Anyone who thinks outside the box is dangerous and must be shut down.

Ours is not a perfect society but no society is. History shows, though, that the attempt to create a utopian world always ends up with tyranny and oppression. The Founders’ wisdom planned a limited government that would defend the country, provide an even playing field for people to prosper, and make sure that it doesn’t do much of anything else. The people are responsible for their own happiness. That is the American way. It hasn’t always lived up to the ideal, and we’ve strayed quite a bit from the original plan, but we continue striving to get there and, by comparison to other nations, it has worked remarkably well.

Leftists know that their fixation on race and ethnicity is destructive, but they have calculated that power arises by dividing and conquering. By trying to force our kinship through government action, they’re instead driving a wedge between us. They seem to want us perpetually at each other’s throats so they can look down from their lofty perches, squawk about how despicable we all are, and then corral all the votes that the division has wrought. The corrupt and sickly media dutifully echoes all their talking points, and the beat goes on.

President Trump has been called a racist nonstop since 2015. I’m confident that there is not a racist bone in his body but that had nothing to do with it. Progressives had to endlessly repeat that narrative to keep a grip on the African American vote which they knew was in peril right up until the pandemic hit. Trump’s roaring economy lifted all boats and, had COVID not provided the left with the opportunity to devastate American employment, I’m sure he then would have carried enough of the black vote to lift him past all the fraud.

Trump’s first three years do, however, provide us with an example of what a healthy, robust economy can do for unity. Even in the midst of the most vicious lies ever perpetrated by an American political party and their twisted news media enablers, we were doing pretty darn well.

When we’re all doing well there is just no reason not to get along. With success comes kinship. Harmony is linked to freedom and prosperity. Coercion breeds misery and strife.

Frank Liberator is a pseudonym.

IMAGE: Image used under license from Freestock.com.