When is right absolutely true?
The Bible book of Judges covers about 300 years of Israel’s history from Joshua’s conquest of the land until the first king of Israel. One verse describes this time: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”
How do you remember 2021 in your own eyes? What was right? What went wrong? Will history agree with you? How long will it take for today’s public opinion to become wrong, biased or discriminatory?
On the sixth day of the first month, undercover federal agents opened the doors of the Capitol and let protesters inside. Capitol Police officer Lt. Michael Byrd shot and killed Ashli Babbit, an unarmed Air Force veteran and one of the unarmed protesters. The shooting was not racially motivated since Byrd is Black and Babbit was white. The year 2021 went downhill from there with woke LEFT agitators spewing torrential charges of “racism” toward anyone who disagreed.
That’s one way to look at it, a rather mild way in comparison with rantings from the woke LEFT.
In one of John Grisham’s first books, “A Time to Kill,” drunken white men tortured a little 10year old Black girl. The girl’s father shot and killed those men when they came to trial, and then he was tried for murder. The father’s lawyer ended his closing remarks asking white jurors how they would deliberate the case if the father and daughter were white and the perpetrators were Black. If the shoe were on the other foot…. Walk a mile in his shoes…. Well, in that case…. That’s one way to look at it.
How do we look at news today? How do we interpret what we see, hear, and read? How does “race” affect our interpretation? How about politics or religion?
“Build Back Better!” is not really different from “Make America Great Again!” Both campaign slogans presumed our nation was at a low point, and promised that politics could improve America “better” or even made “great” … again. Recent political polls indicate “Build Back Better” is not so popular these days.
In 1960s America, LEFT began infiltrating and influencing the academy with existentialism that had been popularized in the 1940s and 1950s throughout Europe. Truth is relative and certainly not absolute. ( When my students say there is no absolute truth, I love to ask them if they are absolutely sure.)
Existentialism justifies everyone doing whatever is right in his/ her own eyes. A biological male identifies as a female and government says schools must allow the male to compete with and share facilities with biological females. The government says so. Absolutely.
Critical Race Theory teaches that people are innately oppressors or victims due solely to skin color or race. Some school districts agree and demand that children learn these absolute truths.
In America, everyone can do whatever is right in his/ her own eyes unless Simon didn’t say so. Only Simon can give absolutely true commands. The AP style manual says the race of a Black person must be capitalized, but not for a white person. Simon says so.
George Orwell and Ayn Rand foresaw Americans doing whatever is right in our own eyes according to the academy, the media, and governing authorities who alone know what is absolutely true.