The Error of “Equality”
Sunday, May 21, 2006
By David Yeagley
Indeed, "all Men are created equal," says the American Declaration of Independence (1776), and "they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."
The Declaration does not say that all men are alike, and live at the same socio-economic status, or that all have the same interests, talents, health, or goals in life. The Declaration does not say that every man born in the world has a "Right" to everything created in and by America. This document is the Declaration of Independence for the movers and shakers of the new Americans, in 1776, not for every man born anywhere in the world thereafter. This document is not the Declaration of Independence for the world. It does not give the world the "Right" to America, nor to everything that's in America, nor least of all to American citizenship.
The mind set of these Britishers who framed the constituion was itself framed by European education and Judeo-Christian heritage. Their concepts, and their manner of expressing them, clearly demonstrates they had themselves and their kind in mind, and not the primitives of the world, or the "heathen." Their conceptions of themselves and their new government was clearly reactionary to the class struggles they experienced in Europe, and the tyrannies and oppressions which they rejected and departed from.
The great error, or I should say, the inevitable misapplication of these concepts, would be to apply them to those people who are unprepared, incapable, or otherwise uninterested or perhaps unworthy of these concepts. There are two major examples from American history. The American Indian was on a par with the Britishers, in the beginnings of America. That would be "equal" in authority. The Constitution reflects the nationhood of Indian "tribes." Indians had our own nations, and voting as an American was not a consideration, nor of any interest. The Negro, on the other hand, was simply not addressed. He was not included in the Declaration ideology at all. He had no place but personal family service to his owners. Historical testimonies such as those found in Charles C. Jones, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (Savannah: Thomas Purse, 1842) suggest many reasons for this state of the Negro. The 15th Amendment was not ratified until 1870. That was to insure for the Negro the right to vote. (Indians did not exercise that right until 54 years later, when, in 1924, Indians were declared citizens of the United States.)
Red Cloud, Oglala Sioux, ca.1900. The only real "equal"
Americans ever faced were the Indians. No one else ever
forced America into a treaty, not on the mainland anyway.
The business of applying sophisticated social ideology and governance, or of even applying basic concepts of polity and social mores to all men, is not the idology of the founding fathers of America. Their ideas were to apply to the citizens of their new country. This was about the new America. The thought that these socio-political triumphs of hundreds, yea thousands of years can be immediately applied to primitive tribalists at will is not only naive, but dangerous. That is the missionaries job. It is not the job of the nation, or a government, to invite the ill-prepared, and often ill-willed masses into the country, with the idiotic thought radically changing their behavior and values.
Enter the Mexicans. The Arabs. The Hindus. The Chinese. The Africans. The cultural rapists?
"Melting pot?" If there was ever a cultural myth, that idea is a living example. It is a totally mistaken analogy. For an 18th or 19th century American Scot to "adjust" to the ways of the American Irishman, the Englishman, or even the German or the Swede, is not the same adjustment required of an imported Burmese tribesman facing life in an American metropolis. The only thing people used to "melt" into was a western European mode of social norms and polity. It was all white, and all Christian. That's all that was on the minds of the early Americans. Melting Germans with French, Italians with Netherlanders. Not Swahilis with Japanese.
Such a society as evolving today in America is unprecedented withint the boundaries of any single nation. America is not a empire. It is a nation. But the liberals want to have a mini-empire within the boundaries of the nation. This is unnatural, and bespeaks profound greed and avarice. It also suggests complete lethargy of cultural responsibility. It is cheating, really. The liberal doesn't really want to travel to Kathmandu anymore. The home-grown American liberl, indolent and indulgent as he is, would rather have the Napalese shopkeeper open a business on mainstreet America. And the Napalese will surely speak English.
And his children will get full scholarships to the local university.
That's equality. That's the ideal equality for the liberal idealist. But the more radical, quasi-violent liberal wants to see hordes of illiterate, diseased, criminal Mexicans marching up and down broadway. Treating the dramatically unequal as equal--that's what the liberal loves to do. It's his Christianity (with or without Christ, of course). The liberal wants everyone to think he's all about saving the poor, when he's really about destroying everything America has achieved.
Our only hope here is that the liberal, ever so careful to secure his own place, will very soon see that he has threatened his own position in this mass Mexican tresspassing enterprise. Yet, the liberal can be won over to common sense only when his own property and business is jeopardized. I've seen this kind of conversion among liberal environmentalists and preservationsists when the dreaded Indian casino comes to their idyllic little cove. Then the liberal turns conservative overnight.
All concepts of equality suddenly disappear. The Indian is an enemy again. The Indian deserves nothing in the way of special privilege or advantage. Indeed, the Indian must be treated "equally!" He must not have any advantage. Equality takes on a whole new meaning to the liberal, when his own pocket book is threatened. And therein lies a new slogan for conservatives: Equality: Converting Liberals One at a Time.
So, let the Mexicans start claiming land, and start establishing casinos. After all, they're truly "native" Americans, right? The government wants to hand them citizenship as the reward for international criminal tresspassing. It's all about taking from Americans, and giving to non-Americans. It's all about taking from the achiever, and giving to the unworthy. "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good," said Hillary Clinton. That used to be called Communism. Marxism. How did the label get effaced? What is it called now, "equality?" When Mexicans start taking from the liberals, personally, our liberal Congress might get serious.
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