I find myself agreeing with the darndest people...

If you haven't noticed, an underlying theme of my posts has been the lack of willingness by us to discuss issues in a rational way. I believe that the politicians of this country have been successful in one main thing over the last century...

Want to know what it is? I could go on and on about the failings of the political elite in the United States, about the corruption, the waste, the power plays and the outright corruption (oh wait, I already said that one...). I could go on about those things, but I will not. I am going to focus on the positive today. What is this one success that has trumped all else? What great thing have the politicians of America done that has been so successful?

They have succeeded in turning us against our friends and neighbors. They have succeeded at convincing us that Republicans want to take away your right to an abortion. They have succeeded at convincing us that Democrats want to take away our right to bear arms. The have succeeded at polarizing the nation to the point that a part of our identity is now our political party. When you identify yourself as a Democrat or Republican, a whole slew of generalizations are instantly attached to you. How convenient it is to have a ready definition of all my beliefs that someone else plugs into their database as soon as I disclose my political leanings.

I'll tell you right now...I am what is called in Utah, Undeclared. I was a member of the Republican party for many years. I felt the beliefs of the party most closely resembled my beliefs, and I had to choose. That is part of our identity, you can't be neither. A few years ago, things started changing for me. I started noticing the way politicians were successfully dividing us in order to stay in power. I noticed that when your party is in the minority, they promise to change everything about the way things run in Washington...no more corruption, we will work with the other party when WE are in power, etc. I then noticed that once that party was successful in obtaining the majority, it didn't take long for them to imitate all the worst behaviors of the previous party. Could this really be happening over and over again and we as citizens never notice? I couldn't believe it, yet there it was, right before my eyes. I researched, I read books, looked on the internet, talked to others. This pattern has been going on for many decades. Politicians in certain areas always promising the same thing, yet 30 years later, they are still in power and have not done anything to fix the problems that they promised to fix 30 years ago.

I have wondered for a while now if there was even the possibility that we can ever agree on anything for more than a day. After the attacks of September 11th, we seemed to put away the partisan bickering for a while. We were all Americans, we had been attacked, all of us. Not just the thousands in NY or the Pentagon or in a field in Pennsylvania, we as Americans had been attacked. We rallied together in a way that we had not done for 60 years. I wondered at that...why is it that in order for us to pull together and remember that we are Americans before we are Democrats or Republicans we have to feel threatened externally? Why is it that the only thing that seems to unite us is war? Why can't we realize what is happening and start uniting our country without these external forces pushing us to do it?

I fear that we have not learned our lesson in the past, so we will not learn our lesson this time. I fear that the country has been irreparably harmed and divided. The politicians have succeeded in polarizing this country in a way that our external enemies only wish they could have done.

Then, I read this article. I don't usually agree with Pat Buchanan. He is not somebody I have looked to as someone who wishes to unite us. But on this topic, I find myself agreeing with him...read it and then come back...

Well, I tried to link to this story, but it didn't work...here is the article:

Is America coming apart?
Posted: September 10, 2009
7:53 pm Eastern
Patrick J. Buchanan
http://www.wnd.com

© 2009

Flying home from London, where the subject of formal debate on the 70th anniversary of World War II had been whether Winston Churchill was a liability or asset to the Free World, one arrives in the middle of a far more acrimonious national debate right here in the United States.

At issue: Should Barack Obama be allowed to address tens of millions of American children, inside their classrooms, during school hours?

Conservative talk-show hosts saw a White House scheme to turn public schools into indoctrination centers where the socialist ideology of Obama would be spoon-fed to captive audiences of children forced to listen to Big Brother -- and then do assignments on his sermon.

The liberal commentariat raged about right-wing paranoia.

Yet Byron York of the Washington Examiner dug back to 1991 to discover that, when George H.W. Bush went to Alice Deal Junior High to speak to America's school kids, the left lost it.

"The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props," railed the Washington Post. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander was called before a House committee. The National Education Association denounced Bush. And Congress ordered the General Accounting Office
to investigate.

Obama's actual speech proved about as controversial as a Nancy Reagan appeal to eighth-graders to "Just say no!" to drugs.

Yet, the episode reveals the poisoned character of our politics.

We saw it earlier on display in August, when the crowds that came out for town hall meetings to oppose Obama's health-care plans were called "thugs," "fascists," "racists" and "evil-mongers" by national Democrats.

We see it as Rep. Joe Wilson shouts, "You lie!" at the president during his address to a joint session of Congress.

We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally, racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others' throats.

One half of America sees abortion as the annual slaughter of a million unborn. The other half regards the right-to-life movement as tyrannical and sexist.

Proponents of gay marriage see its adversaries as homophobic bigots. Opponents see its champions as seeking to elevate unnatural and immoral relationships to the sacred state of traditional marriage.

The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?

Yet, today, Mexican-Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a skirmish in a French-Mexican war about which most Americans know nothing, which took place the same year as two of the bloodiest battles of our own Civil War: Antietam and Fredericksburg.

Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.

Where we used to have classical, pop, country & Western and jazz music, now we have varieties tailored to specific generations, races and ethnic groups. Even our music seems designed to subdivide us.

One part of America loves her history, another reviles it as racist, imperialist and genocidal. Old heroes like Columbus, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are replaced by Dr. King and Cesar Chavez.

But the old holidays, heroes and icons endure, as the new have yet to put down roots in a recalcitrant Middle America.

We are not only more divided than ever on politics, faith and morality, but along the lines of class and ethnicity. Those who opposed Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and stood by Sgt. Crowley in the face-off with Harvard's Henry Louis Gates were called racists. But this time they did not back down. They threw the same vile word right back in the face of their accusers, and Barack Obama.

Consider but a few issues on which Americans have lately been bitterly divided: school prayer, the Ten Commandments, evolution, the death penalty, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide, affirmative action, busing, the Confederate battle flag, the Duke rape case, Terri Schiavo, Iraq, amnesty, torture.

Now it is death panels, global warming
, "birthers" and socialism. If a married couple disagreed as broadly and deeply as Americans do on such basic issues, they would have divorced and gone their separate ways long ago. What is it that still holds us together?

The European-Christian core of the country that once defined us is shrinking, as Christianity fades, the birth rate falls and Third World immigration surges. Globalism dissolves the economic bonds, while the cacophony of multiculturalism displaces the old American culture.

"E pluribus unum" – out of many, one - was the national motto the men of '76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?

Is America, too, breaking up?

I end tonight with the final words from this article...

"E pluribus unum" – out of many, one - was the national motto the men of '76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?

Is America, too, breaking up?

I fear it is...I fear we as Americans don't have the courage or strength any more to make this article something that we look at in 20 years and think..."wow, I can't believe we ever thought this was a possibility". I hope I am wrong. I know that for my part, I am going to try very hard to invalidate the claims in this article.

I hope that many of you will join me in becoming Americans again, not just Republicans or Democrats.