Monday, November 13, 2017

E Unum, Pluribus

OK, I don't speak Latin, and I am really sure that title doesn't actually translate the way I meant it.  Maybe it should be "e unibus, plurum", but if I did that, you would have already clicked on something else and never gotten the point.

E pluribus, unum, of course, is one of the mottoes of the USA and, as we all know, means "out of many, one."  It is meant to refer not to people particularly, but to the notion of a Federalist nation of different states, each self-governed but collectively defended and with a designated few collective functions -- the military, the post, currency, interstate commerce and a small few others -- reserved by the Constitution to a Federal government.

The left, of course, does not see it that way; they do not think the states have any purpose at all, that the Federal government has all the rights, all the power, and must be manipulated to be all-powerful so that they can control the citizenry -- and merge it into their global governmental notion.

Now, whatever we may think the intent of the Latin phrase was, there is certainly general agreement that we are a nation of people from all over, descendants of those who built the nation, and those who came here for a better life and to take advantage of the freedom and promise of America -- to nurture those who will love that freedom and that nation.  The phrase does apply to people, too, to the many people who come here to form a special nation.  Out of many, one.

But that one nation is not precisely the way the left sees it.

No, the left is committed to creating the divisions among us by its fanatic desire to identify group victims of perceived or invented inequities.  We are no longer two genders, or a small number of races, or a definable age.  We can "self-identify" and then declare ourselves to be members of some oppressed group God did not put us in, and try to gain the benefit of laws made to level the playing field.  We are rife with "underrepresented minorities" and are forced to implement corrective actions to ensure that our populations of hired workers or admitted college students precisely map to proportions that may or, more likely, may not make any sense.

The left is thrilled with that.  The more subjugated groups it can invent, the more it can scream for a more powerful Federal government to prevent them from being further subjugated, because clearly the states cannot be relied upon to protect the rights of transphobic tri-racial six-toed Martian-Americans not to be exploited and trampled upon.  More groups, more separation, more division. 

Out of one, many.  That is the motto that serves their ends.  They might as well go ahead and get some Latin-speaker to translate it right, because whether they want to advertise it or not, they want more division, more groups, more perceived oppression by ... well, it's hard to imagine who is left to be the actual oppressor, once we are all divided up.

I'm embarrassed to be left-handed this morning.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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