Why I do what I do for a living

A friend of mine posted on Facebook an account of a young fellow South Floridian who is graduating from college and high school this weekend at age 16. She is African-American and has somehow become an iconic figure among conservatives. What I objected to was my friend's use of her achievement to claim that "liberals" a group which includes me apparently, think that Aferican Americans are victims who have no capacity to achieve success on their own. 

This is my response:

What I have fought for is equal opportunity. I have seen that no matter one's race, creed, color, sexual orientation, disability, or  gender we all pretty much aspire to the same things-good jobs, good educations for our children, comfortable homes, and respect from our neighbors. 

The problem is that doors open easier if you are a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male like you and I are. I usually refer to people like us as having been given the keys to the Kingdom.  

When an individual can achieve something special in spite of having to pull harder to open that door or having to kick it in, I always wonder what he or she could have achieved without such obstacles. Some, I am convinced, would achieve far less for the struggle against discrimination may have inspired them onward. For many however, our society is lesser for we have prevented our fellow Americans from reaching their true potential. 

So please do not presuppose that my commitment to justice and opportunity is because I lack faith individual achievement. Rather I mourn its suppression. That is why I have spent my professional career helping fellow human beings kick doors down.

Slogans

We often credit slogans more than thought itself. The reason for that is that they contain elements of truth. Here is a discussion with my boarding school roommate Bill about how freedom is maintained.

 

Blood and freedom

• Bill Watson Let's hope we stay that way, but that type of freedom has always been purchased and maintained with blood. I wonder if it will always continue to be.
  
• Ware Cornell That expression about purchasing and maintaining freedom and blood strikes me as a slogan which overstates the value of armed conflict and understates the value of the third branch of government. I actually work to maintain freedom. Our system of laws and our adherence and respect for those laws puts everybody on the same page. The fascists gave lots of blood for their cause. The Russians lost 20 million citizens and did not gain freedom until 1989. Very few died then.
• Bill Watson Yes, but there will always be the Adolph Hitlers who can be defeated no other way but by the shedding of blood. You cannot assume that everyone will always have adherence to and respect for law. It they did, there would be no need for a military or, indeed, a domestic police force. You can make all the laws you want, but when it comes down to brass tacks, a willingness to shed blood to protect those laws must be in place or the law is nothing but a piece of paper. That's just the way it is.
  
• Ware Cornell Bill, my point is that it's just a slogan. The Soviets had very advanced written Constitutions and their laws were scraps of paper when it came to individual liberties. But they also fought furiously against the Germans in World War II. It wasn't that blood that made their laws meaningless, and we cannot brush off the patriotism of the Russian people. The reality is that it is something far more complex than the text of laws or the patriotism of a people that will determine whether laws and liberties will be respected.
  
  In America I point to the Civil War. We in the South believed that the danger to our way of life was in Washington and we separated from the Union and as a result over 600,000 of of countrymen died. That bloodshed, futile from the Southern cause's perspective, was in fact necessary to cement the Union. Within ten years of the end of the Civil War we were truly one nation, a nation which sixty five years later, along with our Allies including Russia, would save the world.
  
  The Civil War settled in blood a Constitutional question: is this country one sovereign or is it a compact amount fifty sovereign states?. This is why I get so upset with people like Rick Perry, who try to stir up the "base" with talk about secession when he doesn't like certain laws. john C Calhoun tried this and thirty years later we paid dearly for that arrogance.
  
  The Civil War also undercuts your hypothesis somewhat. Lincoln had to fight. There was no other choice once Beauregard shelled a federal fort. But our ancestors did not have to fight. Our insistence that laws were pieces of paper had tragic consequences. What of the blood of our mistaken ancestors? Inadvertently, it advanced our freedom. Out of it we got the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, without compensation. We also got the Fourteenth Amendment which applied the Bill of Rights to the states.
  
  This is America and we are governed by laws which our federal and state legislatures have passed. They are not pieces of paper. They are the collective will of our fellow citizens and it is our courts, not a bunch of self-sytled "patriots", which stand to protect us from tyrannical acts of the majorities.

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