These are trying times.
Our way of life is under attack by those we cannot understand, and who refuse to understand us. Undocumented people within our borders cause uncomfortable situations, while a booming international drug business is causing problems on multiple fronts. The color of our skin can be a de facto death sentence in certain encounters with law enforcement. Our rights to self-defense, privacy, speech and religion are threatened by — of all things —our own actions.
These are turbulent times indeed, compounded by our collective difficulty grasping one key concept.
Complex problems can’t be solved by simple solutions.
A concise rational statement. But we seem to have lost all rationality these days, as many are convinced that by simply removing a set of people from our midst, we’ll make everything better.
It doesn’t work that way. Why? Because no matter how you classify us — black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, cops, businesspeople, journalists — we have rights in this country. We have rights to live and defend ourselves. We have rights to spiritual beliefs and to free expression. We have rights to moments of privacy. We have rights to public safety. And, provided we don’t unduly impinge upon the safety of others, we have a right to freedom.
Change is good. Progress is good. But when radical responses to injustice catch fire, an entire subset of our society is denied these inalienable rights — and everything that we should stand for goes up in flames.
It ain’t progress when we ostracize all law enforcement officers for the abhorrent actions of several bad ones. It ain’t progress when we propose disarming our entire society completely, even in the wake of senseless tragedies. It ain’t progress when we threaten to kick out all the Mexicans, or all the Muslims.
For when we do all this, we succumb to closed-mindedness. We regress into an ugly past where some human beings within our borders were considered three-fifths of a person based on the color of their skin. We open the doors for those with the lethal combination of ultimate power and evil intentions to order a mass exterminations of a subset of our population. We threaten to shun our societal values — the unique mixture of cultural diversity and universal rights that has allowed our culture to transform the world.
So, when it comes to pushing our culture forward in the wake of tragic setbacks, we should not let our emotions goad us into radical decisions. Instead, we should show restraint and take a more moderate, central path toward improvement.
By staying true to who we are, we can ensure that who we will be is so much better.