Army Bob: We are not just tribes, we are Americans

Political holy grail is that the Republicans are practicing “tribalism.” What constitutes tribalism is once more what people want it to be.

“Tribalism is the state of being organized by, or advocating for, tribes or tribal lifestyles. Human evolution has primarily occurred in small groups, as opposed to mass societies, and humans naturally maintain a social network. In popular culture, tribalism may also refer to a way of thinking or behaving in which people are loyal to their social group above all else, or, derogatorily, a type of discrimination or animosity based upon group differences.” — Wikipedia.

The Socialist/Democratic left is not tribal — got it. Being the advocate for and a member of the “communities” (a word for tribes), African Americans, Native Americans, gays, lesbians, women, illegal immigrants, the poor, South Sea Islanders, LBGT, Hispanics, the incarcerated and more are not tribal — really?

The whole tribal issue causes one to wonder just how the Socialist/Democrats (SD) are not dividing us. The SD is outraged that the Republican party advocates that people join American society and the American nation; just how that divides us puzzles me. Being a member of the SD means not making sense, but actually dividing us into smaller tribes or special interest groups to pit against the nation and not become an integral part of that nation. Loyalty to tribe is more important than loyalty to the nation.

The propaganda message hammered over and over is that the special interest group or tribe you belong to is being short changed, thus we need a new nation based on our differences and not our common interests. No one is an American; we are all hyphenated Americans.

I took one of those DNA tests and in the initial results it marked me as 2% South Sea Islander. Later the company reduced that percentage, still a larger percent of minority blood than SD presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has Cherokee blood. So, now do I hyphenate my identity? No, I am an American, born and bred, and proud of it. Being an American has no race, color, creed, or national origin. The French have a saying that he/she may be French, but they are not of French blood. We have no such saying as we are all Americans, regardless of our origin.

For the SD to win they must divide us and make loyalty to tribe more valuable than to the nation. Traditionally native tribes were small groups that came together to help each other. The optimal number was around 35 to 75, as that was what the land around a stone age hunter gather tribe could support. As the number of tribal members increased or decreased, tribal loyalty changed.

Native nations were mostly inventions of war, people in tribes coming together for the common defense or offense. Once again, the propaganda arm of the SD, the media, tells us that tribalism is bad and practiced by the evil Republicans, while in fact the SD are working hard to divide us into as many tribes as possible. Go figure. Senator Elizabeth Warren worked hard to be called a member of the Cherokee nation; we must wonder if she had read the history of slave ownership by that nation.

“Prior to European contact, the Cherokee had a practice of enslaving prisoners of war from other Indian tribes. In the late 18th century, some Cherokee set up European-American style plantations on their Cherokee Nation land, which occupied territory near parts of Georgia and Tennessee. They purchased African-American slaves to work this land. In 1819, the Cherokee Nation passed slave codes that regulated slave trade; forbade intermarriage; enumerated punishment for runaway slaves; and prohibited slaves from owning private property.” — Wikipedia.

Senator Warren was a Harvard professor; she must be able to read. Her working overtime to be called a member of a slave-owning community is puzzling, but as an old unhyphenated man I must be too stupid to understand.

Interesting how in covering her the media forgot to look at the whole slave owning, trading, abusing, raping, torturing history of her self-identified tribe. Being an SD means getting a free pass from the oppressive history of her chosen ancestors’ African American slave ownership. We apparently had politically correct and incorrect slave owners — got it.