There are things I just don’t understand. Among them is how my internet system works. Yes, I know that the internet connects me digitally to my email, google, favorite news sites, and topics related to my research. Mine broke this week, badly, sometimes ten times a day. For that reason, I was obliged to call my service provider who sent a very conversant repairman to fix the problem.
After educating me on what had failed in my connection, I learned the problem was rather simple. I had two modems competing for the affection of my digital signal. One controlled my phone system, the other my internet digital stream. When they battled, the entire system would disconnect and then attempt to “set things straight.” The solution was to use the one modem that would handle both the phone and the internet. Internet connectivity is so important in much of what we do. Yet this problem made me wonder just how connected we are as a people in America today.
The motto of our nation is E Pluribus Unum, out of many one. That represents a special kind of connectivity that reflects the founding vision for our nation. Our founders warned that unless this was our motto, we could find that it could be replaced by one more pleasing to our enemies, divide et impera.
During Abraham Lincoln’s campaign for the US Senate in 1858, he declared that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He was speaking of a nation divided over the issue of slavery. In doing so, he was also reaching back to the words of scripture in Matthew 12:25 where Jesus declared, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand.” Of course, Jesus was speaking about how his work in casting out demons rested on his completely divine unity with the Spirit of God, a holy relationship that was united, not divided. Nonetheless, Lincoln’s application of the unity sentiment was suitable. When we are divided, we are weaker. American is weaker today. Why?
Much divides us. There is of course the culture war where one side wants to cling to what is traditional and has worked to make our society a better one. The other side seems to resent all of that, seeking to cast aside historic traditional mores and values. For this latter group, new values are better ones. The nuclear family is “out.” Sexual identity is “in.” Christianity is passé, atheism is the better choice. If you’re uncomfortable with your biological sex, that’s not a problem. You can pretend science is wrong and just modify your body. Again, it is all about your felt identity. Biology is meaningless.
And conveniently for some, the modern application of divide et impera includes class warfare. People who have worked hard are evil. People who have not are wholesome and to be admired or pitied depending on whatever it takes to justify filling their pockets with money they did not earn. The work ethic is not ethical at all. Now it’s repressive, indeed, an element of “white supremacy.” Such thinking is a lie and dangerous to a civil society. But for those who hate traditional values, it buttresses the larger race-baiting hatred that seeks to pit people of different colors against each other. Such evil is hollowing out the soul of our nation. Divide and conquer is in ascendancy.
We are less connected to one another and more divided. And our enemies are gleeful. These past few weeks our intelligence experts have testified before Congress on the threats we face from enemies using cyberwarfare to harm our national security. We all know it’s true. Yet we fail to understand that our enemies exploit our homegrown disunity by fomenting division between us on the internet. They use those divisive issues to further fracture us by foisting disinformation, lies, and false narratives that keep us distrustful of one another. Our foreign enemies have become the puppet masters of our hatred and agitate it regularly to further our national and cultural divisions.
To be sure, we need to combat this destructive use of the internet and do so without undermining free speech and other principles established in our constitution. But if we are to be united, we must set aside the lies of our own making that create the auger in which our adversaries adroitly plant and nurture more lies. We must stop helping them. We are our own enemy.
We have two modems, lies and truth, fighting one another that disrupts our connectivity as the united people we must be. It’s time “set things straight.” Therefore, we need the intervention of a repairman in the form of a leader who understands the truth that a house divided cannot stand.
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