Over the last twenty or so years, the level of resentment in American society has risen to a dangerous, or at least dysfunctional level, leading to destabilization in the balance of world power. When I read about the Russian invasion of Ukraine or Chinese aggression toward Taiwan, I see it as the fruit of American disunity.
Therefore, if there is blame for breaches in world peace, it stems from our abdication for responsibility for it. Russia and China realize that our preoccupation with our internecine rivalry distracts us from effective world leadership.
In an interview, the German news magazine Der Spiegel asked former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, "Is America still capable of acting as a world-power?" Kissinger admitted he had his doubts. His doubts should speak to all of us. If we cannot answer Kissinger's doubts in the positive, we will never answer them in the negative. We really need to act soon.
Sometimes the circumstances of our lives have to get worse before they get better. They have to reach a level of visibility that Americans can no longer deny or shrug off. We hope things will improve on their own, so that we don't have to get involved; but letting the disunity or polarization drift without remedy has its risks.
The Right defines the risk as "Cancel Culture" or the "Woke." The Left defines it as intolerance, inequality, and racism. We have grown so used to angry marches and street-confrontations, we hardly pay them attention anymore. We respond to the disunity by tuning it out.
I wish I could have stood before 500,000 people at Woodstock in 1969 and prophesied that in 2022, America would reach a crisis-point and either collapse in revolution and anarchy, or else redraw its property boundaries to create new nations and to renew their national priorities.
