Post: A Republican Exodus?
Our Own Nation!
Last night, I watched The Ten Commendments movie on YouTube for the first time in years. It was released in 1956, starring the late Charlton Heston, and was directed by Cecil B. DeMille. The film contains important dramatic scenes that are as good as any in the history of cinema.
The Ten Commandments really tells the Exodus story from the Bible, how Moses led the Children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt and, over a period of forty years trekking though the desert wilderness, delivers them into the Promised Land, named "Israel" for its patriarch, born Jacob, the son of Isaac.
In one scene, Moses tells the Children of Israel, as they begin their trek, "Remember, o, Israel, the Lord God has led you out of slavery. Remember this day forever!" Interesting that Moses addresses the entire assembly as "Israel", defining them even while their nation existed only as a promise of the Lord—just as a concept, in other words, years away from realization.
Then Moses turned his back on Egypt and marched purposefully into the seemingly endless desert. The Israelites followed him in a noisy, motley procession with their meagre belongings and bleating animals—overjoyed at the prospect of leaving hateful Egypt, fueled only by the Lord's promise that, at the end of their trek, they would inhabit their own nation. The movie was so popular among American Jews, some TV stations broadcast it every year during Passover.
As they travel farther into the wilderness, however, the Israelites go astray , engage in debauchery, and worship foreign gods. A nation-builder must understand that the Israelites have left behind the controlling structure of the Egyptian yoke. Moses has, to an extent, uprooted them from all that and left them to their own devices. They start mourning the day they left Egypt. The independence and nationhood they once craved may now cause their downfall.
Moses has to rescue this situation. He retreats to a place high up on Mount Sinai to meet the Lord for help. In the most dramatic scene in the movie, the Lord etches the Ten Commandments onto tablets of stone with fiery fingers. DeMille had done his research and knew the fiery fingers would start from the right and write left. Biblical scholars will recognize the Hebrew text from the Gezer Calendar, circa 850 BC, the earliest known example of written Hebrew.
The fiery fingers and the dramatic musical score make it a memorable scene, thrilling and triumphant. Then Moses descends from the high place. The few Israelites who have accompanied him up the mountain see him with the two tablets and bow almost involuntarily. The music becomes gently intimate, with an equally moving effect.
Now, the Israelites have not just a future life in a national home, they also a legal foundation to stabilise the new nation and guide its sense of direction, and they have a leader who will them there. I had already seen The Ten Commandments several times, and I knew the story by heart, but I watched it nevertheless, thrilled with the expectation of a people delivered from an intolerable existence as slaves—given the promise of nationhood and accepting the inherent risks of an independent life, in order to "assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station which the laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them," as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence.
Surely someone in America can find inspiration from this ancient biblical story and use it to deliver America from it acceptance of terminal disunity, browbeating, and fear. With a new vision and new nations, they can enter a new era of unity, the assurance of shared values, and common sense of purpose.
How Long Must We Tolerate This?
Americans live everyday with a near-fatal political division. It causes heaps of antipathy, paranoia, and resentment, enough to contaminate every man, woman, and child in the nation—as dangerous as the Covid-19, but more gradual and insidious than any virus or incubus. As Americans, we carry on bravely, dealing with the political tirades, waves of accusations, and hope in our hearts that some superior being will rescue us or blast us into oblivion. Real life shouldn't work like that. We should fix the problems ourselves.
First, we know we have a problem—the political divisions. Our knee-jerk response—"Can't we all just get along?" Lingering collective identity as Americans makes us ask, "Can't we put the unity of the nation above divisive politics?" The lingering American can-do spirit says, "Let's put aside our differences, put our collective shoulder to the wheel, and move the nation forward!" but the rhetoric cannot get into specific how-to's, because there aren't any.
I can say unequivocally that real-life does not work like that. It has not, and it will not. All we do is hide our dislike and mistrust, then wait until someone touches the spring on the jack-in-the-box and knocks our teeth out. For Democrats, it is former President Donald Trump hiding in the box; for Republicans, it is the current President Joe Biden. Although they serve as leaders of our country, they more often serve as targets of our abuse. We need to send a radio-warning to mission-control: "America, we have a problem!"
For all his off-putting bluster, former President Trump has made one important contribution to the root of the problem: he goaded Americans into taking sides. The truth is that everyone has already taken sides. Trump just brought the divide into the open—exposed the hidden aspects of it, so that we know we have a problem, and the problem is not Trump. After all, half the nation voted for him. The problem is the diverging directions of the political mandates that the Democrat and Republican leaders advertise to their voters.
The division has already happened. The public needs to wake up and take notice. Our leaders need to start talking constructive changes to head off the inevitable destructive changes that will occur if we do nothing.