“Three Gs and an E-flat” was how composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein described perhaps the most famous string of four consecutive musical notes — the opening fanfare for the Beethoven Symphony No. 5.
I borrowed a little bit from that when I tried to explain what the Republican Party did over the last 50 years to become so successful in elections. I came up with four Gs and an A — God, Guns, Guts, Gays and Abortion. Now I’ll have to add climate change and wage disparity. These are the seven deadly sins, the seven wedge issues that are tearing this country apart. And I don’t see any solution on the horizon.
Even worse, columnist Coleman McCarthy once observed, “If violence really solved problems, what a peaceful world we’d have.” He was right. The Civil War, with its more than half million dead, didn’t really settle the race issue that still plagues us today.
So, here are the seven plagues that suggest that “divided we fall” will overcome “united we stand.” All you have to do is examine the impeachment hearings, which bring to the front the eighth example of the gulf between us.
- God — When the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition became involved in the political arena for the first time, it created a new dynamic in the Republican Party. The fundamentalist and evangelical approaches see the world in black and white and “you’re either for us, or against us.”
- Guns — An issue that affords so many of us a first-rate example of division. You’re either pro-gun or anti-gun. One side won’t let anybody take away their guns. The other side wants to regulate which guns are legal and illegal. Any middle ground?
- Guts — For me, this hones in on bullying and toxic masculinity, which are so commonplace in modern American society that we don’t recognize it even when it’s in our school, communities and neighborhoods.
- Gays — I had hoped the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage would help, but there still is plenty of evidence LGBTQ folks are suffering from discrimination, perhaps in similar ways to the Jim Crow era.
- Abortion — Few issues have been more divisive over nearly a half century and one side is using clever means to make the process so difficult and cumbersome to obtain that it’s become a stretch to assert the U.S. permits abortion on demand. Any middle ground? Consult the Laura Dern movie “Citizen Ruth.”
- Climate change — One side insists that we’re going there in a handbasket because we’ve polluted and poisoned our planet, eventually making it uninhabitable. The other side accuses them of being Chicken Littles doing the economic bidding of a new aggressive industry, overlooking the economic benefits for fossil fuel industries preferring the status quo. Consult columns in this publication by Ranger Rick and Army Bob.
And toss in the caveat — if climate deniers are wrong, the consequences will be catastrophic for all of us.
- Income inequality — A phenomenon that has been in the making for four decades in what once was called the most prosperous country in history because of a strong and healthy middle class. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, something I’ve been claiming for 30 years, but “friends” told me it just isn’t so. The say unemployment rate is at historic low levels.
Now comes the spectacle I’ve been watching on TV for the last several weeks — the impeachment hearings. There on full display for the American public is the chasm between Republicans and Democrats, between red and blue. We know there is a chasm between us as well.
Democrats, along party lines, will impeach President Donald Trump. Then Republicans, along party lines, will acquit him in the Senate trial.
So it will be up to the American voters, en masse, on Nov. 2, 2020. Regardless of the result, we will be horribly divided still.
As Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Chris Hedges said in his column this week:
“There is zero chance Trump will be removed from office in a trial in the Senate. The Democratic Party elites have admitted as much. They carried out, they argue, their civic and constitutional duty. But here again they lie. They picked out what was convenient to impeach Trump and left untouched the rotten system they helped create. The divisions among Americans will only widen. The hatreds will only grow. And tyranny will wrap its deadly tentacles around our throats.”
As President Abraham Lincoln warned us more than 150 years ago: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
