Trying To Be Perfect Is Killing Us

We used to be a nation of imperfect humans organized around the idealism of personal freedom and boundless opportunity. But now the pursuit of these ideals is being attacked by a new malady that is grinding down all that once served the nation and its citizens so well. Perhaps this can be better understood by comparing it to an auto-immune disease where the biological systems designed to protect ultimately become the agents of our destruction. If this sounds complicated, it

If this sounds complicated, it is not. And the simplicity of it is why we are so befuddled when our world seems out of control. The answers we seek are hiding in plain sight. We are imperfect dummies being told we must achieve perfection, or else. We have far too long been propagandized to believe freedom and absolutes are compatible — to believe our lives can be neatly defined with everything good on one side and everything bad on the other. If this were true there would be no need for a jury of our peers or a balance of powers government. The life we live will always be burdened with the warts and scabs of free will influenced by the passions and corruptions of the human condition. We are free to do both good and stupid, and embrace all the moral shades in the middle.

Mandating all things into the black or white of racism or moralized propriety leaves no place for forgiveness and the benefit of lessons learned. Then there’s the irony of a nation having survived a bloody civil war, and now, once again, set to face a firing squad of grievously similar political consequence. It’s nuts. That somehow we imperfect beings can define and demand perfect human behavior is even more nuts. Yet we are besieged by wall to wall messaging from every conceivable media source proclaiming just the opposite — socially shaming and ever shifting, politically correct propriety with totalitarian impatience.

Now, shamefully divided, we are at each other’s throats. Friendships are trashed in long editorial letters claiming a non-existent moral high ground. Bad agents with unknown motives infiltrate parochial demonstrations and turn them into riotous mobs.

For what purpose? A treasonous coup, petty theft and destruction, or something else? For whatever ends, the sickness is enabled by free people who have come by whatever means to believe a lie. This is the single most important reason journalists and politicians should never share the same bed.

This civil disorder and our growing culture of constrictive propriety, now have become a serious national disease. And the only way to stop it from becoming terminal to the ideals and protections of personal freedom on which the country was founded is a national awakening prescription. Each of us needs to turn down or turn off the news, and regain a sense of what a normal life in our normal place, among our normal friends, is. Then we need to understand that blame is an indictment that does not heal. Healing comes from our acceptance of the reality of honest consequence, and from the freedom, and obligation, to speak one’s mind, over and over, in many places, to everyone who will listen. Call it the infectious healing of free speech.

Healing also comes through change and progress — for which we strive, imperfectly. Yet the benefit of that striving nearly always produces results. Those results will never be ideal. But failing to understand this, and demonstrating, peacefully or otherwise, for the impossible goal of mandatory appeasement, is little more than a con. It is a deception and an autoimmune assault on the constitutional doors through which all personal freedoms must pass.

Carpenter lives in Schulenburg.