An Introduction To The Positive Support Transition Plan An Introduction To The Posit: Fill & Download for Free

The positive cultural influence of the Christian Church is too vast to enumerate in detail in less than a series of books. Its influence is not limited to the West, as it spread beyond the Western Empire in the days of Rome, in its first centuries, and has continued to spread around the world in the centuries since. For the most part, its influence has been more good than not wherever it has gone, and attempting to even list it all would be a very long list indeed.However, in answer to this question, I have chosen to limit a sampling of examples to the West, and to the limited time period of Early Christianity up to the Middle Ages. I have picked a few examples of influence I see as the paradigm altering, watershed, kind.The Christian church has continued, to this day, to be a cultural influence for good all around the world, but the history from the 1400s on is even more extensive—and complex—than what preceded it, so please accept—these limitations I have imposed are my limitations—and not the limitations of the church.Christianity altered the paradigm concerning:SexWomenCharityPreservation of literacyMonks and NunsBenedict’s RuleSkills and EducationSocial StructureCharles Martel Stopped IslamScienceArts and HumanitiesPainting, sculpture and architectureMusicLawHuman ValueHuman RightsSlaveryDemocracyFirst to Fourth Century (30–500)Sex — Let’s talk about sex—not just because it’s fun—but because changes here are among the most powerful, yet most overlooked, of all the many positive changes Christianity brought.“The gradual transformation of the Roman world from polytheistic to Christian marks one of the most sweeping ideological changes of premodern history. At the center of it all was sex.”[1]Historian Kyle Harper says:"...the triumph of Christianity not only drove profound cultural change, it created a new relationship between sexual morality and society...The legacy of Christianity lies in the dissolution of an ancient system where social and political status, power, and social reproduction (passing on social inequality to the next generation) scripted the terms of sexual morality."That ancient system was built on status and used shame to enforce itself. Shame was not personal guilt so much as a social concept: breaking the rules had profound and far-reaching social consequences. Aristocratic men had status; women had little, and slaves had no status at all, therefore, as far as the Romans were concerned, slaves had no internal ethical life and were incapable of shame. This permitted Roman society to find both a husband's control of a wife's sexual behavior as a matter of intense importance, and at the same time, see his live-in mistress and sex with young slave boys as of little concern.Paul wrote that the body was a consecrated space, a point of mediation between the individual and the divine. His over-riding sense that gender—rather than status or power or wealth or position—was the prime determinant in the propriety of the sex act was momentous. It was a transformation in the deep logic of sexual morality.The Greeks and Romans said our morality depends upon our social position which is given to us by fate; that there is inequity in that is not a moral issue that concerned them. Christianity "preached a liberating message of freedom.” It was a revolution in the very image of the human being as a sexual being, free to choose, and personally responsible for that choice to God alone. It created a revolution between society and the individual, limiting society’s rights and claims on the individual as a moral agent.Whether or not Paul’s particular teaching on gender is still agreed with or not, the historical facts show that the Christian view that the powerful should be held to the same standards of sexual accountability as those without power has since become the norm of a just society.Appearance of Jesus Christ to Maria Magdalena (1835) by Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov.Women [2]Early Christianity — Some historians hold that the Church played a considerable part in fostering the inferior status of women by providing a "moral justification" for male superiority. However, the Church has also made enough positive contributions toward women that, on balance, I am going to say the overall impact has been more positive than negative.Understanding that involves understanding context—what was there before, and without, Christianity.In antiquity, there were no Near Eastern societies that were not patriarchal, so patriarchalism and male superiority were not unique to the Old Testament. All around the Mediterranean, patriarchy was established as the norm in all of the multiple different societies before 3000 BC and they did not change for millennia—until Christianity.[3]Women were seen as intellectually and physically inferior to men and as "naturally dependent" by Sumerians, and Babylonians, by the Hittites, the Greeks and the Romans—all of them. Some philosophers speculated that women were a different race not fully human like men. Athenian women were legally classified as children regardless of age and were the "legal property of a man at all stages in her life." Women everywhere, including the Roman Empire, had limited legal rights and could not enter professions.It was common in the Greco-Roman world to expose female infants because of the low status of women in society. Many exposed children died, but many were taken by speculators who raised them to be slaves or prostitutes. Female infanticide and abortion were practiced by all classes. The church forbade these practices to its members.Christians did not believe in cohabitation, so if a Christian man wanted to live with a woman, the church required marriage; the pagan double standard of allowing married men to have extramarital sex and mistresses was forbidden. This gave women far greater security.It was not rare for pagan women to be married before the age of puberty and then forced to consummate the marriage with her often much older husband. Christianity established a minimum age for marriage.Husbands could divorce their wives at any time simply by telling the wife to leave; wives could not. In the code of Hammurabi, a woman could sue for divorce, but if she couldn’t prove she had been an exemplary wife, she was drowned for making the request.Roman law required a widow to remarry; 1 Timothy says a woman is better off if she remains unmarried. Widows in Greco-Roman society could not inherit their husband's estate and could find themselves in desperate circumstances, but almost from the beginning the church offered widows support.Women were an important part of Jesus’ inner circle, and there is no record of him ever treating a woman with less than respect. He spoke to women in public, assumed they had responsibility for their own choices, taught Mary of Bethany, admired, forgave, accepted and approved them. Christianity never fully lost sight of this as a fulfillment of God creating humans in His image as both “male and female.” Along with Paul declaring a Christian is a Christian, male or female, in Galatians 3:28, this produced a kind of “metaphysical” equality found only in Christianity at this point in history. [4]The church started out trying to practice this at first. The extra-biblical evidence is strong that women played vital roles in Christianity’s beginnings. Many women began choosing to stay single and celibate, and they spread the word, but this “female initiative” stirred up vehement opposition from the Romans.According to Margaret MacDonald, accusations that Christianity undermined the Roman family, which was built upon male authority, were used to stir up hatred of Christianity. Along with many other rumors and accusations, this led to the persecution of the early church.[5]Some of the later New Testament texts reasserting traditional roles for women are seen by many scholars as an accommodation to the danger involved with this Roman response.Within the church of the second and third century, tensions between the existing fact of women's leadership in Christian communities, and traditional Greco-Roman and patriarchal biblical views about gender roles, combined with persecution, produced controversy and challenges to women’s roles within the new church. Several apocryphal and gnostic texts provide evidence of such a controversy.Middle Ages — Once the early days of Christianity were past, the status of women declined. Women were routinely excluded from scholastic, political and mercantile life in society, however, women were not fully excluded from service in the church. [6]Medieval abbesses and female superiors of female monastic houses were powerful figures whose influence could rival that of male bishops and abbots: “They treated with kings, bishops, and the greatest lords on terms of perfect equality;... they were present at all great religious and national solemnities, at the dedication of churches, and even, like the queens, took part in the deliberation of the national assemblies...” Such powers had never been, as a rule, available to ordinary women in previous Roman or Germanic societies.[7]There was a rite for the ordination of women deacons in the Roman Pontifical, (a liturgical book), up through the 12th century. (But by the 13th-century Roman Pontifical, the prayer for ordaining women was removed, and ordination was redefined as applicable only to male Priests.) [8]The popularity of the Virgin Mary secured maternal virtue as a central cultural theme of Europe in the middle ages and helped form the concept of chivalry. Kenneth Clarke wrote that the 'Cult of the Virgin' in the early 12th century "taught a race of tough and ruthless barbarians the virtues of tenderness and compassion".Woman-as-witch became a stereotype in the 1400s until it was codified in 1487 by Pope Innocent VIII who declared "most witches are female."The European witch stereotype embodies two apparent paradoxes: first, it was not produced by the "barbaric Dark Ages," but during the progressive Renaissance and the early modern period; secondly, Western Christianity did not recognize the reality of witches for centuries, or criminalize them until around 1400. Sociologist Don Swenson says the explanation for this may lay in the nature of Medieval society as heirocratic which led to violence and the use of coercion to force conformity."There has been much debate ...as to how many women were executed...[and estimates vary wildly, but numbers] small and large do little to portray the horror and dishonor inflicted upon these women. This treatment provides [dramatic] contrast to the respect given to women during the early era of Christianity..."Women under the Law —Church teaching heavily influenced the legal concept of marriage. In a departure from societal norms, Church law required the consent of both parties before a marriage could be performed. No more kidnapping and forced marriages.The elevation of marriage to a sacrament made the union a binding contract. The Church abandoned established tradition by allowing women the same rights as men to dissolve a marriage. (However, in practice, men have been granted dissolutions more frequently than women.)Women, in Conclusion[9]The church’s behavior toward women has been both positive and negative, but all in all, Christianity’s contribution has been more positive than negative.If nothing else could ever be said, Christianity’s treatment of women was a big improvement over what existed before it, and its belief in the spiritual equality of both genders before God, altered the paradigm for women forever.Historian of hospitals Guenter Risse says the Church spearheaded the development of a hospital system geared towards the marginalized.Charity/Hospitals — Prior to Christianity, there is little to no trace of any organized charitable effort anywhere in the ancient world. After centuries of Christian influence, charity has become a universal practice.[10]Albert Jonsen, historian of medicine, says:“the second great sweep of medical history begins at the end of the fourth century, with the founding of the first hospital at Caesarea in Cappadocia, and concludes at the end of the fourteenth century, with medicine well ensconced in the universities and in the public life of the emerging nations of Europe.” [11]That hospital was founded by Basil, Bishop of Caesarea. He established the first formal soup kitchen, hospital, homeless shelter, hospice, poorhouse, orphanage, reform center for thieves, women’s center for those leaving prostitution, and many other ministries. He was personally involved in the projects and process, and gave all his personal wealth to fund the ministries.Basil himself would put on an apron and work in the soup kitchen. These ministries were given freely regardless of religious affiliation. Basil refused to make any discrimination when it came to people who needed help saying that “the digestive systems of the Jew and the Christian are indistinguishable.”His example spread throughout Christianity continuing to the modern day.In the modern day, across the world, various Christian denominations are still the ones largely responsible for the establishment of medical clinics, hospitals, orphanages, soup kitchens, and schools of all kinds.The Catholic Church maintains a massive network of health care providers. In 2009, Catholic hospitals in the USA received approximately one of every six patients. Catholic Health Australia is the largest non-government provider of group-health, community care, and aged-care services, representing about 10% of the health sector.Women have played a vital role in running and staffing these Christian care institutions. In Methodist hospitals, deaconnesses who trained as nurses staffed the hospitals, and in Catholic hospitals, religious like the Sisters of Mercy, the Little Sisters of the Poor, and the Sisters of St.Mary kept their hospitals focused on serving the needy. The New York Times noted that nuns were trained to "see Jesus in the face of every patient."In the West, these institutions are increasingly run by lay-people after centuries of being run by priests, nuns and brothers, and while the profit motive has stepped in, it does mean more people are taking responsibility for caring for the poor than ever before. In Western nations, governments have increasingly taken up funding and organization of health services for the poor. In 1968, nuns or priests were the chief executives of 770 of America's 796 Catholic hospitals. By 2011, they presided over 8 of 636 hospitals.[12]All over the West, charity is now a societal standard that simply didn’t exist prior to Christianity’s existence.[13]"After the Battle of Gravelotte. The French Sisters of Mercy of St. Borromeo arriving on the battle field to succor the wounded." Unsigned lithograph, 1870 or 1871.Dark Ages and the Early Middle Ages (500–800) [14]Preservation of Literacy — After the Fall of Rome, culture in the west returned to a subsistence agrarian form of life. Church scholars preserved literacy in Western Europe at this time, saving and copying Greek and Roman texts in their scriptoriums. For centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, small monastic communities were practically the only outposts of literacy in all of Western Europe.…all through Europe, matted, unwashed, barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, when the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all western literature – everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed. Without this Service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would be unthinkable.[15]Monks and Nuns [16]Benedict’s Rule — The period between 500 and 700, often referred to as the "Dark Ages," could also be designated the "Age of the Monk." Christian aesthetes, like St.Benedict (480–543) vowed a life of chastity, obedience, and poverty, and after rigorous intellectual training and self-denial, lived by the principles ‘work and pray’ following the “Rule of Benedict.” This “Rule” became the foundation of thousands of monasteries that spread across what is modern day Europe; "...certainly there will be no demur in recognizing that St.Benedict's Rule has been one of the great facts in the history of western Europe, and that its influence and effects are with us to this day."[17]Spread Skills and Provided Education— Monasteries were self-supporting models of productivity and economic resourcefulness teaching their local communities animal husbandry, cheese making, wine making and various other skills. They were havens for the poor, hospitals, hospices for the dying, and schools. Medical practice was highly important in medieval monasteries, and they are best known for their contributions to medical tradition, but they also made some advances in other sciences such as astronomy. These monks had impact on every level of society both directly and indirectly since all leaders of this period were educated by monks.[18]Changed Social Structure — The monastic movement also changed our social structure in ways that continue to affect us today. The formation of these organized bodies of believers, free from the political authority and familial authority that normally had the power to control an individual’s choices, gradually carved out a series of social spaces with some amount of independence and autonomy, thereby revolutionizing social history.Charles Martel Stopped Islam — (c. 457-751 CE) and his family played a crucial role in Western Europe’s transition from “ancient” to “medieval.”[19]By 727, Charles — “the Hammer”—has become King of what will one day become the nation of France. Charles wages long campaigns against the pagan Germanic tribes who constantly raid his northern and eastern borders - Frisians, Saxons and Bavarians. He also lends strong support to the missionary activities of St. Boniface hoping that conversion to Christianity will tame the heathens enough to stop this raiding. It is not fully effective, but it sets the stage for his grandson’s actions that do change the landscape of Europe.The Hammer’s main positive role involves the Arabs who, since their arrival in 711, have gained a toehold on the European continent in the Spanish peninsula. The Arabs advanced rapidly northwards in their planned takeover of the continent and were soon beyond the Pyrenees. Narbonne was taken in 720 and an extended raid in 725 brought the Arabs briefly into Burgundy. There was a lull until 732 when a Muslim army took Bordeaux, destroyed a church near Poitiers and rode on towards Tours. Here the Arabs were confronted by an army of Franks led by Charles Martel and were stopped.It was a turning point in the attempted Muslim takeover of Europe.The Middle AgesSet of pictures of notable Scientists who self-identified as Christians: Isaac Newton (top left), Robert Boyle (top right), Francis Bacon (bottom left) and Johannes Kepler (bottom right).Science [20]Early in the eleventh century, the full writings of Aristotle were reclaimed in the West by intrepid monks who traveled to Spain to work with the Jews there translating Aristotle’s writings into Latin. (These writings had been mostly lost in the West but not in the East, and when the Muslims came to Europe, they brought their books.) The church’s study of these texts laid the foundation for the beginnings of modern science as well as our modern university system.Historians of science, including J.L.Heilbron, A.C.Crombie, David Lindberg, Edward Grant, Thomas Goldstein, and Ted Davis, have argued that the church promoted learning and science during the Middle Ages. Critics will raise the Church's condemnations of Copernicus, Galileo, and Johannes Kepler as evidence to the contrary— which is a valid criticism—but it should also be considered that these same men all considered themselves Christian, were influenced by their faith in their work, and were originally sponsored by their respective churches.The sheer number of scientists and the amount of scientific work and discovery done by Christians, (many of them funded and supported by the church), supports the assertion that, taking its failures into consideration, the church’s overall impact on science has still been positive.Saint Thomas Aquinas was one of the great scholars of the Medieval period.Thomas Aquinas—the friar—opened the door for the church’s promotion of scientific and intellectual development by arguing that reason is in harmony with faith, and that reason can contribute to a deeper understanding of revelation.[21] The church put that into practice. Churchmen such as the Augustinian abbot Gregor Mendel (pioneer in the study of genetics), the monk William of Ockham who developed Ockham’s Razor, Roger Bacon, (a Franciscan friar who was one of the early advocates of the scientific method), and the modern Belgian priest George Lemaître who was the first to propose the Big Bang theory, and others, have been among the leaders in astronomy, genetics, geomagnetism, meteorology, seismology, and solar physics, with many becoming the "fathers" of these sciences.Christians who influenced Western science include such notables as Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle, Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Nicholas Steno, Francesco Grimaldi, Giambattista Riccioli, Roger Boscovich and Athanasius Kircher.[22]Henri Becquerel, discovered radioactivity; Galvani, Volta, Ampere, and Marconi, are pioneers in electricity and telecommunications; Lavoisier is the "father of modern chemistry"; Vesalius is the founder of the modern study of human anatomy; and Cauchy, is one of the mathematicians who laid the rigorous foundations of modern calculus.According to 100 Years of Nobel Prize (2005), (which is a review of Nobel prizes awarded between 1901 and 2000), 65.4% of all Nobel Prize Laureates have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference (423 prizes). Overall, Christians have won a total of 78.3% of all the Nobel Prizes in Peace, 72.5% in Chemistry, 65.3% in Physics, 62% in Medicine, 54% in Economics and 49.5% of all Literature awards.[23]It is not too much to say that modern science may never have begun without the influence and support of the Christian church, and it most certainly would not be what it is today without it.[24]Universities - The church of the middle ages helped found and build the university system, which grew rapidly in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries. Today, there are more universities in the West than any other part of the world and almost all of them were founded as Christian institutions.[25]Map of mediaeval universities established by Catholic students, faculty, monarchs, or priestsArts and Humanities [26]Painting, Sculpture and Architecture — Artists like Michaelangelo, Da Vinci and Raphael produced some of the most celebrated works of art in history sponsored and supported by the church.[In the West] with a single exception, the great artists of the time were all sincere, conforming Christians. Guercino spent much of his mornings in prayer; Bernini frequently went into retreats and practised the Spiritual Exercizes of St.Ignatius; Rubens attended Mass every morning before beginning work. The exception was Caravaggio, who was like the hero of a modern play, except that he happened to paint very well. This conformism was not based on fear, but on the perfectly simple belief that the faith which had inspired the great saints of the preceding generations was something by which a man should regulate his life.The cathedrals of the Late Middle Ages are among the most iconic feats of architecture ever produced by Western civilization.Music — Catholic monks developed the first forms of modern Western musical notation; there would be no modern music as we know it without this.An enormous body of religious music has been composed for the church, with its support, and this sacred music led directly to the emergence and development of European classical music, and its many derivatives.Ludwig van Beethoven, composed many Masses and religious works, including his Ninth Symphony Ode to Joy.Law and Human Rights [27]Church laws were the single Universal Law common to the different jurisdictions and peoples throughout Europe for much of European history.Human Value[28]If we turn to the roots of our western tradition, we find that in Greek and Roman times not all human life was regarded as inviolable and worthy of protection. Slaves and 'barbarians' did not have a full right to life and human sacrifices and gladiatorial combat were acceptable... Spartan Law required that deformed infants be put to death; for Plato, infanticide is one of the regular institutions of the ideal State; Aristotle regards abortion as a desirable option; and the Stoic philosopher Seneca writes unapologetically: "Unnatural progeny we destroy; we drown even children who at birth are weakly and abnormal.” And whilst there were deviations from these views..., it is probably correct to say that such practices...were less proscribed in ancient times. Most historians of western morals agree that the rise of ...Christianity contributed greatly to the general feeling that human life is valuable and worthy of respect.[29]Human Rights — Christian theology has strongly influenced Western philosophers and political activists in many ways, but nowhere more than in the area of human rights. Howard Tumber says, "human rights is not a universal doctrine, but is the descendent of one particular religion (Christianity).""...one cannot and need not deny that Human Rights are of Western Origin. It cannot be denied, because they are morally based on the Judeo-Christian tradition and Graeco-Roman philosophy; they were codified in the West over many centuries, they have secured an established position in the national declarations of western democracies, and they have been enshrined in the constitutions of those democracies." [30]Saint Peter Claver worked for the alleviation of the suffering of African slaves brought to South America.Slavery — The Church initially accepted slavery as part of the social structure of society, campaigning primarily for humane treatment of slaves but also admonishing slaves to behave appropriately towards their masters.[31] However, historian Glenn Sunshine says,Christians were the first people in history to oppose slavery systematically. Early Christians purchased slaves in the markets simply to set them free.Later, in the seventh century, the Franks..., under the influence of its Christian queen, Bathilde, became the first kingdom in history to begin the process of outlawing slavery....In the 1200's, Thomas Aquinas declared slavery a sin.When the African slave trade began in the 1400's, it was condemned numerous times by the papacy.[32]The British became involved in the slave trade in the late 1500s, and by the 1700s, most people accepted slavery as a fact of life, until gradually, from the mid-1700s onwards, a Christian abolitionist movement began to take shape. It began with American Quakers.Slavery was also coming under attack from Enlightenment philosophers like Montesquieu and Rousseau, but it was Christian activists who initiated and organised an abolitionist movement.By the 1770s, Evangelicals were waking up to the seriousness of the issue – the British Methodist John Wesley and the American Presbyterian Benjamin Rush denounced the slave trade in influential pamphlets. Once the British Abolition Committee was established in 1787, abolitionism quickly became a mass movement. Within twenty years, the slave trade had been abolished throughout the British Empire. [33][34]Christianity was instrumental in stopping slavery. If you don’t think it was Christianity that made the difference, read this: John Dewar Gleissner's answer to What are some mind-blowing facts about slavery?Consistent with Calvin's political ideas, Protestants helped create both the English and the American democracies.Christianity is criticized for many things, some of them justly. David Gushee says Christianity has a "tragically mixed legacy" when it comes to the application of its own ethics, using the examples of three cases of "Christendom divided against itself": the crusades, and Frances of Assissi’s attempt at peacemaking with Muslims; Spanish conquerors and the killing of indigenous peoples, and the Christian protests and fights for Native rights; and the on-again, off-again, persecution and protection of Jews. [85]But we have also gotten a few things right here and there.I have borrowed from the article Role of Christianity in civilization - Wikipedia but I did attempt to limit myself to those sections of the article I wrote myself. Here are some of my references:Footnotes[1] From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Revealing Antiquity): Kyle Harper: 9780674072770: Amazon.com: Books[2] A Short History of Christianity: Geoffrey Blainey: 9781442225893: Amazon.com: Books[3] Amazon.com: Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome (9780521859431): Rebecca Langlands: Books[4] The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism: Timothy Keller: 9780525950493: Amazon.com: Books[5] Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion[6] Amazon.com: Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia (Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages) (9780415969444): Margaret C. Schaus: Books[7] CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Abbess[8] Get the facts in order: A history of women's leadership[9] Society, Spirituality, and the Sacred: A Social Scientific Introduction, Second Edition: Donald S. Swenson: 9780802096807: Amazon.com: Books[10] Christian Charity in the Ancient Church - Kindle edition by Gerhard Uhlhorn. Religion & Spirituality Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.[11] A Short History of Medical Ethics: 9780195134551: Medicine & Health Science Books @ Amazon.com[12] Nuns, a ‘Dying Breed,’ Fade From Leadership Roles at Catholic Hospitals[13] Giving: Charity and Philanthropy in History: Robert H. Bremner: 9781560008842: Amazon.com: Books[14] A History of Orthodox, Islamic, and Western Christian Political Values: Dennis J. Dunn: 9783319325668: Amazon.com: Books[15] Amazon.com: How the Irish Saved Civilization (Hinges of History Book 1) eBook: Thomas Cahill: Kindle Store[16] Amazon.com: 9783319325668: Books[17] Benedictine Monachism[18] Christian Community in History: Volume 1: Historical Ecclesiology: Roger D. Haight: 9780826416308: Amazon.com: Books[19] Charles Martel : the Military Leader and Frankish Defender: History and Civilization Collection: 9782366593624: Amazon.com: Books[20] 100 Scientists Who Shaped World History[21] St. Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law Tradition: Contemporary Perspectives: John Goyette, Mark S. Latkovic, Richard S. Myers: 9780813213781: Amazon.com: Books[22] Faithful to Science[23] 100 Years of Nobel Prizes: Baruch Aba Shalev: 9780935047370: Amazon.com: Books[24] 50 Nobel Laureates and Other Great Scientists Who Believe in God[25] Amazon.com: A History of the University in Europe: Volume 1, Universities in the Middle Ages (9780521361057): Hilde de Ridder-Symoens: Books[26] The Western Humanities: The Complete Edition: Roy T. Matthews, F. Dewitt Platt: 9780874847857: Amazon.com: Books[27] Amazon.com: The Routledge Companion to Early Christian Thought (Routledge Religion Companions) (9780415442251): D. Jeffrey Bingham: Books[28] The Sacredness of Human Life: Why an Ancient Biblical Vision Is Key to the World's Future: David P. Gushee: 9780802844200: Amazon.com: Books[29] Text, Cases and Materials on Medical Law and Ethics: Marc Stauch, Kay Wheat: 9781138024021: Amazon.com: Books[30] The Routledge Companion to Media and Human Rights[31] The Truth About the Catholic Church and Slavery[32] Why You Think the Way You Do[33] The abolition of the slave trade: Christian conscience and political action by John Coffey - Jubilee Centre[34] The Abolitionists

Yes. This was something I had to do to a number of people in a company who were not performing to the corporation’s standards. The psychological “scam” we played on ourselves was that we weren’t cutting someone from the team; we were taking them off the mound after a good game.To us, that worked, but our little collective of hatchet-managers was not seen as the approach of a kindly coach to give a pep talk and a pat on the ass before a shower. It was a big deal to these hard-working employees who then had to turn around and work alongside the people they used to lead and agree to accept leadership from a stranger taking their jobs.For the most part, the dozen managers we saw knew it was coming and the meeting we set up was accepted as their last day in their job. The meetings were two-fold - a formal communication of demotion with a pep talk about new beginnings and opportunities (as well as the blessing of not getting kicked to the street) and then the introduction of the new site manager and a conversation about crossing things over.There was sadness and resignation, disappointment, and even relief we weren’t firing people. But one manager went down hard. He thought our meeting was a final appeal for his position, despite the clear message that we were going to talk about transition and next steps.This was in Ohio, in a small site that just didn’t have the business to sustain the numbers corporate imposed on it, the victim of detached financial planning and forecasting where previous year numbers were not reviewed carefully. In this store’s case, they had a ridiculously successful year due to local and regional political spending on signage and communications through their site. Obviously, there was no comparable or sustainable event the next year but the site was given impossible growth goals and, despite exceeding normal growth, didn’t come close to the swollen numbers handed to them by some blind bean-counter in Texas.The manager was understandably upset and had appealed both the financial goals and his discipline for failing to achieve them. When we arrived, he was so fired up that we couldn’t keep to our script and spent an hour listening to his passionate defense of his team, their sales efforts, and pristine cost controls to maximize revenue.We had no control over it. My boss, who led these meetings and the initial transitions, told him he should pursue external legal means if he felt unfairly treated. That was a HUGE no-no from a corporate suit to someone with a grievance. But it was a human thing to do because no one could look at the situation and credibly say he was fairly treated - except, obviously corporate leadership.The manager looked at the salary offer, which was the highest end of someone in an Assistant Manager job, but per policy 1% less than the General Manager. The new General Manager was hired “on the cheap” against the outgoing manager who was making six figures, so the cheap math done by the bean-counters insulted him with a salary cut of about sixty percent.He said. “If I wiped my ass with this offer, it would be insulting to my ass.”My boss, who had already tried and failed to prevent corporate from being short-sighted and stupid, resigned to being the bad guy in the situation and applied the required ultimatum. “It’s this offer or we do not have a position for you here.”He nodded, silently and stood up. He appeared to be resigned to the circumstance but stressed that my boss didn’t ask him to sign the paperwork right away. The new manager of the store was walking through the front door as the old boss exited his office and onto the sales floor where he greeted several customers. It was impressive that he had such a busy site on a Tuesday morning. His interaction with customers spoke to how he had cultivated business with the community. The new boss made a march toward the office like the young and eager boss he imagined himself to be. The outgoing boss raised his voice to the assembled group of customers and addressed them like a familiar friend making an announcement.“Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you all for your support and loyalty to our location these years. You brought us your business even though we all know we weren’t the cheapest option. I’m glad to know we earned your loyalty. Unfortunately, I will be turning this store over to someone else because the people I work for cannot find it in themselves to offer me anything remotely as kind and generous as what you’ve given us over the years. I will be leaving today and these gentlemen…”He pointed to us standing like suited goons with carpetbags.“…have come to remove me and offer me pennies on the dollar for all my hard work. I wish them well and I hope you will consider giving whoever they bring in some consideration so that the staff that took care of you can continue to do so. Thanks again.”To a surprisingly loud and sustained round of boos and raspberries, the outgoing manager fished into his pockets, pulled out a ring of keys and tossed them over the crowd at my boss. He missed them and fumbled to scoop them off the carpet. The new boss tried to intercept him and had a mean scowl prepared, but I gave him the secret sign to “stand down” and he let the man punch out and say his goodbyes to the crew on the floor. He said nothing to us on his way out, though my boss was busy for the next half hour explaining himself to a mob of upset customers.It sucked and we earned the suckage. It was the last time I served on one of those panels and the beginning of the end of my love affair with the company. I was out less than a year later and it saved my life.

Two important questions were never asked by supporters of the kneeling protesters. Had they been asked, just asked, it would have started a conversation that spelled out one obvious conclusion — that the protests were doomed to failure.Those questions were:What if millions of people upset about the protests aren’t motivated by ignorance or racism, but have good, informed reasons for their positions?What if the protesters themselves, and myself for supporting them, are basing my beliefs on bad information and incorrect assumptions?You can boil that down further. Many people failed to ask the crucial question any critical thinker must always ask:Do the people I disagree with have a point?To begin, we aren’t just talking about one protest. We’re talking about two.The first is the one most of you are aware of, #takeaknee and all things related. That had numerous motivations and messages which I will address in turn, but there was another.It was not patently anti-whatever the players were protesting. It wasn’t, “we’re protesting against racism, therefore you must be for racism.” Conservatives aren’t anti-black or pro-racism; they aren’t for the killing of blacks, or championing the cause of police brutality, whatever that means. They may disagree with specific points with what the protesters believe, but at no point would any reasonable person believe that anyone was pro-hate.However, many unreasonable people; those motivated by spurious political agendas, pundits doing favors for bigger interviews with more ratings, and your everyday ideologues, were serviced by declaring exactly that: that the only explanation for anyone to disagree with the protesters is that America is simply a deeply racist nation. It should be obvious that no one was protesting for racism or the repression of anyone. The counter-protest was saying something completely different.The message of the counter-protest was simple:“No matter what your problem is, you don’t disrespect the United States, it’s flag, or its sacred traditions.”It’s also important to understand that while the motivations of the counter-protesters may have been obscured and vague to those who supported the kneeling, those protesting in support of the flag and the nation weren’t ignorant to what the kneelers were advocating. Those who kneeled had the support of the news media, Hollywood celebrities, the Democratic party, the universities, and even social media outlets. Their point of view was inescapable. It was practically the default. Yet having full access to this information, they still counter-protested in defense of respecting the flag.When people you disagree with know all your arguments and you know none of theirs… you should take pause.So what we really need to do is outline the context of how the #takeaknee protest started, and by whom, as well as what else was going on at the time, and then we’re going to need to talk about the actual protest itself from a conservative standpoint.The context:To provide context, I feel that many on the left need to understand what the flag means to the Americans who stood against #takeaknee. That’s such a massive question with so many layers to it, that I needed to write two separate answers to unpack America’s seemingly irrational commitment to a brightly woven piece of cloth.Jon Davis's answer to Why do Americans feel so passionately about the national flag?Jon Davis's answer to Why are some Americans so offended by NFL players kneeling for the national anthem when they aren't doing it to disrespect positive and treasured aspects of the US like the veterans?I’ve copied some of the relevant information here, but to understand the emotional gravity of the symbolism of the flag, something that is fairly necessary to understand this post, I highly recommend reading at least the first.Beyond that, we need to talk about the specific context of what was going on just before Kaepernick began the protest.Timing was a serious issue.Colin Kaepernick’s protest began with the third preseason game of the 2016 season against Green Bay on August 26. On July 7th of that year, a Dallas, TX Black Lives Matter protest ended when Micah Xavier Johnson ambushed and assassinated five Dallas police officers. Following that, on July 17th in Baton Rouge, LA, 6 more police officers were ambushed, and three killed by Gavin Eugene Long. In the months leading up to those killings, Black Lives Matter’s rhetoric had become stronger and more violent. Crowds of protesters were recorded chanting “What do we want? Dead Cops!” and “Pigs in a blanket. Fry’em like bacon.” While the official Black Lives Matter organization put out a tweet saying they don’t condone violence, the movement they started had grown out of control. As many Americans saw it, that’s what led to the assassination deaths of over 11 police officers in two years, eight in the month of July 2016 alone.I’m not holding Kaepernick responsible for that. Not in the slightest. I’m not saying he in any way supported the police officer’s slayings or approved of the shootings of those police officers in any way. But the timing of his protest was incredibly poor.Following July’s events, the general view of Black Lives Matter as a movement had shifted. This wasn’t the view given a microphone, but the view on the streets, over dinner with friends, in the churches, the school parking lots between moms waiting on their kids, and the post office lines, the view of average people. Millions of Americans viewed that whatever its original aims may have been, their stated goals of bringing attention to police brutality towards black men had taken a backseat to a culture that virally spread misinformation among their liberal supporters for political gain, and the atmosphere they created, whether intentionally or not, fomenting murderous hatred for police officers everywhere.Then, after one of the worst months for police officers in recent US history, an NFL protester sits through the National Anthem repeating similar rhetoric. For those many Americans rejecting BLM after the bloody events of July 2016, Kaepernick’s original protest was a resurrection of the BLM movement rebranded after the two police shootings that took the lives of eight American police officers. They were raw and angry from July before Kaepernick’s sit down protest in August.But they weren’t allowed to voice that anger. No one from the mainstream media to Main Street were allowed to bring up Dallas or Baton Rouge because that was supposedly irrelevant and to do so probably meant that you were a racist.Then there was the way in which the kneeling started.The context in which his protest began wasn’t kneeling. It was Colin Kaepernick sitting through the anthem. In the United States, sitting through the National Anthem is not something unprecedented. The act has a specific and well-understood meaning which you can’t re-contextualize or put your own meaning to it. It’s like spitting on someone or dancing on someone’s grave. We all know that it is an explicit sign of disrespect towards the nation. By sitting, not kneeling, through the anthem, he made a very loud statement demonstrating his view of what America is. He established a deeply anti-American context to the protest that has followed it ever since and which is now inseparable from it.I’ll be honest, I don’t think he is a person who understood the majority of football fans or at least their patriotic fervor, and how massive is the gulf between their definition of America and his own. I don’t think he possibly understood what the flag and the anthem meant to so many of his own fanbase and how divisive of a move it was. For that matter, I don’t think many of his non-football fan supporters understand either, or respect how egregious it was for so many people, or how much it deeply hurt and angered millions of people.Having said that, we need to talk about Kaepernick, in particular.Since beginning the protest, the question of Kaepernick’s patriotism has been in question. If we look at the evidence, what Kaepernick has specifically said and done, he does have specifically anti-American biases. I don’t think I’m generalizing because this is based on his, “I’ll never stand for a flag that oppresses black people and people of color,” statement as well as other messages he intentionally put out, most notably through his choice in apparel.His clothing choices have not helped him shed the appearance of anti-American sentiment, namely by choosing clothes for high profile events and press conferences that communicate specifically anti-American causes, beliefs, and figures. If I wore a Ronald Reagan T-Shirt, you’d probably be pretty wise to assume I was a Republican and what many of my political beliefs were. You’d probably even be pretty correct in assuming I’m trying to make a statement with the shirt. That said, Kaepernick is now famous for the “Cop Pig” socks, which the media tried to play defense that it wasn’t directed at all police. They’ve had less success with his other choices, such as shirts that glorify the communist dictator Fidel Castro, the Black Panther Party that committed numerous acts of violence against the police in their advocacy for black power, and even one with Huey P. Newton (the Black Panther Party’s founder) made to emulate the famous visage of Che Guevara.It’s obvious that Kaepernick has an appreciation for an extreme left-wing neo-Marxist revolutionary attitude that is, frankly, distilled anti-American sentiment. What’s less obvious is how such a person espousing far-left communist figures and protesting against the oppression of people of color ended up being paid millions to represent one of the world’s most powerful international corporations and specifically the one that charges blacks $300 for a pair of sneakers made exclusively through the underpaid labor of third-world Asian sweatshops. But that’s probably a conversation best left for another day.If we take the views of the people Kaepernick is directly honoring as probably representative of his own, the flag represents the oppression of blacks and people of color, the embodiment of institutionalized racism, and a memorial to a history overcome with hatred, racism, and oppression.And nothing more.Liberals need to understand this because at no point was anyone allowed to say that this protest was started in the wrong way, at the wrong time, and by the wrong person without some very powerful force in the media shaming them for being a racist. That’s why America couldn’t ever be brought to supporting #takeaknee and why it would always, always have an anti-American message attached to it.That entire teams stayed in the locker-room, in effect, boycotting the National Anthem itself…I don’t know how the players protesting could possibly recover a sense that this protest didn’t have an overwhelming anti-American air to it.Don’t get me wrong, they tried everything and even had the media backing them every step of the way, but the context had been set for millions of Americans and nothing was going to change that perspective. If anything, in the minds of conservative Americans, it only carried an anti-American message over into a non-objectionable act of kneeling.From then, their outrage was directed at the treatment towards the flag and towards the nation in the name of getting attention to a particular cause. Whether the protest was rebranded in some other form by way of kneeling, standing with crossed arms, or whatever else may have been attempted, before, after, or during the National Anthem, these new displays immediately absorbed the anti-American context of Kaepernick’s original protest… and America was having none of it.Now that all that is said, now that there is a reasonable case for why conservatives have to be angry, we need to actually talk about the merits of the counter protesters’ arguments directly.Just because you protest doesn’t mean the debate is over. You have a point of view, and that point of view is still something that needs to be critiqued. How outraged a person is is not the test we use for determining policy. It’s answering the questions of if the facts support the point of view, and if we have a solution that will fix it. We don’t just “take action” because people demand it. We take action because it is clear to a majority of people specifically what actions will cause the most benefit and do the least harm. You don’t get there by celebrating any and all protests, you eventually have to listen to people they disagree with, come to terms with the idea both of you are probably wrong on some things, but you could be wrong on a lot. But that isn’t what is happening. Instead, what is happening is the goalposts are being moved.What angers conservatives is what happens next. When an argument is debated and disproved by conservatives, the intelligentsia, those in academia and the media don’t perform their actual roles in society and report that to better inform the public. Instead, three things happen:The facts are ignored while the sources are discredited on ideological lines. In this case, any criticism to the protest was a denial of the axiom that racism explains all suffering endured by blacks, and therefore rejected patently because the only people who would raise criticisms must be motivated by their own racism.Instead of holding accountable liberal claims provably false, the intelligentsia plays defense. They make excuses to explain false or even hateful statements made by key figures (such as defending Kaepernick’s pig cop socks.) Then, at the point where the academic criticism to their claims becomes too much, rather than admitting some level of a fault, they change the narrative to something related, but very distant to the original points of the protest. Most people in support of “the protest” and plugged into mainstream media channels aren’t made aware of this transition, are never informed of good arguments by conservatives … or worse, intentionally frame them to be “racist dog whistling”… such as by Thomas Sowell.This reframing the narrative is what Conservatives are most angry about because it creates a perpetual cycle where they feel, rightly so, like a national conversation can’t possibly happen, because a left-leaning intelligentsia has already decided that whatever they say is racist (Thomas Sowell, people) and will only mask times their arguments fail by changing the subject without informing their own liberal viewers. Meanwhile, those liberal viewers become more outraged by what they can only perceive as overwhelming hate on the right because they never get the message that, “yeah, what we said three weeks ago was actually wrong.” Bad narratives built upon themselves, leading to ever increasing hate and resentment closing them off to the actual views of conservatives. All this while the right is getting outraged about people not listening to what they actually believe.But the conservatives had one thing the left doesn’t. New media channels allow conservatives access to many different points of view and arguments that go against the mainstream media narratives, but since they also have access to a now obviously biased media, they also know the opposing views. Given that fact, and that so much of the media seems to support the protest, but far more Americans don’t, it should concern many people what information they’re missing.That said, the narrative has been changed, by my count, at least 6 times. So let’s run through them. Since we are talking about conservative views on #takeaknee, we need to also have a conversation about the positions themselves. That not just the question of if players should have knelt or not and why many conservatives disagreed with why Kaepernick was protesting in the first place. We’re going to talk about that starting with the first thing he said once the protests started and where the protests evolved from there. You can agree or disagree with my take on any of these arguments, but it should bother people that when all the arguments I’m bringing up, that so few people actually saw, but were instead directed somewhere else.Most people reading this right now do not remember the first thing that Kaepernick said he was protesting. As I write, most of you will come to some idea, probably, you’re drawing from one of the later evolutions of the protest, not realizing how much variance there is between one person’s answer and another.According to Kaepernick’s own statements, he did it because he refused to stand for the flag of a racist nation. To quote him:"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," Kaepernick told NFL Media in an exclusive interview after the game. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."[1]So that’s the first reason given for the protest. Note I said first, because there will be others.America is a racist nation.The first argument is that America is a racist nation. This specific statement has been echoed again and again not just by Kaepernick, but also media pundits, celebrities, and even high ranking politicians. The problems with this argument were immediately apparent.First, it makes the claim that because there exists racism in America, that America is racist. This definition of racism doesn’t just include when races are specifically and intentionally treated differently, but whether there exists any statistical disparity between groups. This takes a bird’s eye view of race in America and attributes every source of inequality between whites and blacks, or whites and any other race, to white racism. Statisticians know that when comparing only the group averages in any test, there will always be disparities which are usually caused by many factors; so racism shouldn’t be the first and only explanation for why there exists disparity.It also ignores the reality that across many studies and personal accounts of world travelers, America ranks among the least racist countries in the world. While not a deeply scientific study, this map created by the Washington Post, an outlet which has anything but conservative biases, gives a snapshot of how Americans honestly rank among the world. The survey asked respondents to answer the question, “what groups of people would you not want as neighbors” and see who said “people of another race.”This isn’t even accounting for the size of population and actual ethnic diversity in the United States, which dwarfs most other blue nations on the map.So again, if America is a racist nation… what is the standard on which we’re basing that on? Exactly who isn’t a racist nation which we are to compare ourselves to? Is there some real-world example to point to, or is America a “racist” nation until we meet some unrecognizable perfection.This isn’t saying that racism has never been a problem.Traditionally, this was the story in the United States. No one is denying that slavery was an important driver of our nation’s development, as it was for most the rest of the world up to that point since the beginning of recorded history. And no one is saying that slavery didn’t also create a legacy in America, requiring at least one century to put those prejudices behind us. The United States wasn’t unique in this regard. Also, no one is denying that racism wasn’t also a part of our history through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and into the Civil Rights era.But the Civil Rights era was rather special in US history because it did something few other nations have. Its victories weren’t about radical redistribution to formerly oppressed people groups. History outside of the United States has proved that to be detrimental and counterproductive more often than not. What it provided was a legal framework in the law that allowed minorities to challenge a law or corporate practice that intentionally targeted people based on racial identity. Through this process, it allowed blacks to challenge powerful institutions, including the government itself, on all levels on specific policies and have those policies removed, leaving the institution as a whole to continue serving society in some meaningful way, but now unable to selectively ignore or oppress ethnic groups. It was a process for gradual, but perpetual reforms across society.Note that I said process. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not end racism. It didn’t come close to it. But it created a process to chip away the power racist mentalities had without smashing the structure as a whole. It’s as if you had a statue, a masterpiece like a David or even The Statue of Liberty. But say they are living things, and say there is a wart or a tumor. It doesn’t make sense to smash the statue for an imperfect growth. You want to chip it away, leaving that which is beautiful and useful, while removing that which is wrong. That’s how our legal process works, and now works for blacks and other groups. It requires a problem to exist, and the way we determine that is for a victim of an injustice to come forward with a case that they experienced it. Then, when that injustice is investigated and uncovered, the problem isn’t just solved for that individual; the law requires that all similar injustices no longer occur for everyone else. This times many years and many cases, each time chipping away the imperfections a little more. And the bigger the problem, the longer the process will take. With something like racism in America, it would be no wave of a magic wand.But by the 1980s, we started to see this process working. At the same time, we also started to see something else coming to play. Inequality remained in the black neighborhoods. Why?Alongside the legal reforms of the 1960s came social reforms in the way of those redistribution policies being created to lift blacks, and other American poor, up out of poverty.The theory was that with numerous layers of safety nets, it would be easier for blacks to escape poverty, or impossible to fall into it. The problem was that many of these programs instead made concrete patterns of decisions that keep people trapped in poverty. This was true of all people, and not just blacks, but compounded especially hard for urban black communities. Here are three examples:Breakdown of the family - Because many of the Great Society programs of the time provided benefits for single mothers, a sizeable minority of these women never sought fathers to help in the raising of their children. Children raised by both their biological mother and biological father are the single greatest predictor of long-term success for a child. Fathers are important for imparting values children will need for adulthood. Around 20 years later, towards the end of the 1980s, there was an explosion in the crime rate among black neighborhoods that wasn’t present in earlier decades, save for much of the violence due to the Civil Rights movement itself.Many black conservative historians, including economist Thomas Sowell, argue that the 1980s crime rate was due to the number of now fatherless young boys entering the age of their lives when they are most apt to commit violent crimes, between 15 and 30, only put under control by the tough-on-crime policies of the late mid to late 1990s. This did stem the tide of crime, but also kept more fathers out their homes and creating generational patterns.Welfare dependence - Because the Great Society programs also were built off improving various New Deal ideals, it also included generous welfare payouts to those unable to work for various reasons. Another sizeable minority again used these programs as a means to make bad life choices, this time to avoid work, instead opting for a subsistence lifestyle off government aid. In so doing, this population did not attain the entry-level employment where many get their start in an industry, develop skills and begin the climb up to higher pay and a higher standard of living.Just as much, there were many honorably working poor caught in the welfare gap, or rather welfare trap, a point where a moderate increase in earned income meant a greater decrease in government aid, meaning a net loss on regular income that many living on the margins couldn’t afford. Because the temporary hurdle was so great, many working poor denied themselves advancement through promotion or better jobs which would have eventually led them out of poverty.3) It’s important to note that these last two programs also affected many whites, but I’ll get to that in a moment. The third seems to have affected blacks specifically.3) a) Poor Housing Practices — Included in this era of progressive economic reforms was the creation of the Federal Housing Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. One of the goals of these departments was home ownership for all Americans. This being the 1960s, however, they did it very differently for whites than for blacks. For whites, development was directed towards moving in large numbers of migrants from the rural farmlands to the outskirts of major cities. This later evolved into the suburbs we all know today. For blacks, the plan was instead to create high rise low-income apartments which they could own to serve as an introduction to home-ownership. These would later become known as the Projects.3) b) Collapse of Industrial Labor Markets — The Projects made reasonable sense for a time. It placed many, many low skilled workers near factories which they could work. That it was specifically designed for blacks is obviously dubious, but for a while, regardless of that fact, it worked.However, once a rise in crime began and once a globalized economy made it more profitable to move factories overseas or to automate processes requiring less workers, piling on thousands upon thousands of low-skill, low education working class people into just a few small city blocks became a powder keg waiting to explode. Quickly, the areas devolved as jobs became scarce and the inner city was no longer a place where investors were willing to start new ventures.Given what I’ve already outlined, one should have expected crime in black neighborhoods to be worse than other parts of the country, as by the 1980s, they have every socioeconomic predictor for high crime, regardless of race.The high crime rates necessitated increasingly high incarcerations, and worse yet, harsher police tactics to deal with the increased violence. While you can show studies that demonstrate an all-white jury is harsher on blacks than a mixed jury, this native effect is true of all populations and all demographics, so how much white racism explains the overall justice system is questionable. Better explanations for the justice system’s apparent mistreatment of blacks are as follows:While racism historically caused black inequality, since the 1960s, compounding the effects of these other factors produced the outcome where blacks, in particular, suffered since Civil Rights. Since that point, the inequalities were due more to bad governance than white racism. Though there is a good argument that actual racism in programs like HUD created generational poverty, the majority of the disparity between blacks and whites was owed more to misaligned altruism and poor oversight into whether the programs were actually achieving their goals at the Federal level. We also have the problem that you can’t undo HUD, where the effects we see today were caused by decisions made 60 years ago.Next, and this is something liberals get right, is that local income inequality leads to yet more increases in violence.While we don’t know exactly why this happens, places with high Gini-coefficients, a measurement used to test income inequality, usually also have high crime. Perhaps the reason is that even in places where a poor person has a reasonably high standard of living by world standards, seeing people far better off near them creates resentment. In places like New York City, which remains one of the most racially segregated areas in the countries (each color of the map below representing a different racial group) being face-to-face with radical inequalities would be unavoidable.Move out to rural areas and the story is different. We have less crime, but here, generally, most people are collected on the lower end of the income strata. Given what we know about the clustering of blacks thanks to various housing policies in the past, it should make sense that crime rates are higher in urban black neighborhoods if, in fact, high local income inequality leads to more violence.Of course, once the crime existed, no matter how it came about, it had to be dealt with.The “strong on crime” stances first came from local leaders. Locally elected black representatives, mayors, councilmen, police chiefs, judges, all campaigned to end the crime in their neighborhoods and on that promise, they were elected by a population wanting it. But if there is that kind of policy variance, where black communities are policing their own neighborhoods more strictly than the rest of the country, would that not appear as a racial inequality when measured against the rest of the nation?Various other inequalities in the treatment of blacks and whites by the justice system are explained on a case-by-case basis. For example, the fact that blacks on average receive harsher sentences for the same crimes as whites is explained by blacks having a higher rate of repeat offenses. Repeat offenses still falling in the same category, but with much greater punishments. Why blacks commit more repeat felony crimes is explained by the same reason there is more crime from black areas in the first place, being due mostly to the economics of black neighborhoods more than anything wrong with blacks per se, or even black culture, and certainly more than white racism.Others are more difficult to explain, such as a Harvard study [2]which showed police are more likely to escalate force against blacks than whites in similar circumstances, but to the surprise of even the researchers, less likely to shoot a black person than a white person, all else equal.What we see from these numbers is that the police are treating blacks differently on the streets than whites, but not with the extremes that the common narrative seems to assume. But the real surprise of the study was that the evidence showed that blacks were less likely to be killed than whites as a result of police intervention.This answers Kaepernick’s second half of his “bodies in the streets” argument which is built on the argument that blacks are more likely to be targeted for police killing than whites. According to the same Harvard study, a school not known for its conservative biases, that is demonstrably false. While the assumption is those police killings are out of control, the truth is that they are at all time lows.(Harvard Public Health Review)The last point focuses on a group that is usually ignored in this discussion, poor whites. This is the roughly 20 million whites who live below the poverty line, enthralled in welfare traps, and lacking the economic opportunities to attain the American dream. By most accounts, these poor whites have no more privilege than any other race. It’s hard to see this, again, if you live in the very cloistered cities where inequality is obvious, but most of America’s poor aren’t people of color.Because the white population on average is richer than other races, and because reaching the rural areas for academic surveys and media reports involves more work than visiting nearby recessed urban areas, these whites are ignored, but the fact remains that they outnumber poor blacks by more than 2:1.This isn’t a pissing contest. It’s saying that as bad as blacks have it, for every one of them there are at least two more whites who have it bad, too. Furthermore, once these facts are accounted for we realize that the history of blacks in America since the Civil Rights era is due less to racism and oppression than to other factors, and most importantly, that most of the problems that actually hold blacks back are the same as those of a much bigger population of poor whites, meaning that solving one will solve the other. [3]These arguments to the narrative that America is simply a racist nation oppressing people of color are not new, and a majority of these arguments come from one man, economist and historian Thomas Sowell.Yep.And he’s been saying these things since the 1980s. Conservatives quickly cited these arguments — all of which were still applicable in 2016 — to counter much of Kaepernick’s very vague original blanket criticism of the United States. After Kaepernick’s original argument was given at least credible evidence that it wasn’t factually supported, the narrative changed to one that past racism informs current racism, by way of memorializing a racist anthem.The anthem is racist.This argument blew my mind when I heard it, but the argument shifted not long after the original “racist nation” statement began being dissected. The new mainstream narrative was that what Kaepernick really meant was that the anthem itself was racist and singing it was celebrating a racist time in American history. How this was possible took a lot of jumping through hoops to pull off.The Root, a media company well known for… well, it has a reputation… wrote a hit piece on the anthem and Francis Scott Key which sums up the arguments for “Star-Spangled Bigotry.” That’s really the name of the article. Star-Spangled Bigotry: The Hidden Racist History of the National AnthemThe author argues that the National Anthem is racist because its writer, Francis Scott Key, was a racist. As evidence, he cites that Key was “a white guy,” but also a son of a slave-owning family of aristocrats in Washington, D.C. As a prosecutor, he also took a case against an abolitionist, and a slave accused of attempted murder of his owner (which history has since shown was probably not the case) during an 1835 riot called the “Snow-Storm.[4]” He also opposed the abolitionist movement and supported shipping black freedmen back to Africa.The author also points to what he views as the Star-Spangled Banner’s racist third stanza.And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusionA home and a Country should leave us no more?Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.No refuge could save the hireling and slaveFrom the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth waveO’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.“No refuge could save the hireling and slave.”Well, that’s all there is to say, right?Sorry, not so fast.Looking to the statements of the anthem itself, there are numerous arguments to be made. First of all, no good historian would apply the common meaning of a word in 2016 without first consulting the meaning in 1814 when the anthem was inspired. There, “hireling” most likely referred to mercenaries working for the British army, but more importantly, “slaves” could have meant one of a number of things, as well. There isn’t much logic in saying that the line simply meant that slaves, meaning the common modern understanding of chattel slavery, should beware an American victory. The British weren’t fighting to free them, as they wouldn’t end slavery in the UK until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.What was more likely was that “slave” was a derogatory term for the British themselves. The United States prided itself for its independence, a novel concept at the time, both nationally and as individuals. Citizens of the UK and primarily the British Army, were viewed as subjects of a tyrannical monarch, no more free than slaves themselves. In some ways, even less, since they couldn’t even buy their way out of such a relationship like many American slaves.It’s my belief, however, that the “slaves” reference was owed to a group the Root article also references, the Colonial Marines. Being that the only people who would call the United States “colonial” were the British, the Colonial Marines were units composed of runaway slaves promised freedom if they served the crown. From the perspective of the Americans, the Colonial Marines were traitors. Key witnessed a defeat of American forces, in part due to the Colonial Marines, so it was likely he held no small grain of resentment against those he viewed as turncoats. That being the case, their inclusion in the anthem likely referenced vengeance on slaves who rebelled against their nation.That it was glorifying chattel slavery for the purpose of white supremacy seems the least likely interpretation of the line.Next is understanding Key himself.Early in his career, Key prided himself as a humanitarian who happily defended individual blacks to the point that he earned a reputation as “the Blacks’ lawyer.” While he supported slavery during most of his career, most people of the time did too, as had always been the case everywhere. It wasn’t until the 1820s that emancipation became a noteworthy movement in the United States and it wasn’t until the 1830s that wide scale support of it had taken hold in the North. From Key’s thinking of the time, support for slavery was support for law and order in the United States more than the celebration of the institution of forced servitude based on skin color, or otherwise. We can see this in the “Snow-Storm” of 1835. While prosecuting a slave who historians now believe to be innocent, he also prosecuted the rioters who set out to kill him in jail and who also accosted a free black businessman. Later, he prosecuted the abolitionist on the same grounds of disrupting the law and order he attempted to ensure for the city. Key also wasn’t the only white man to support establishing a colony of freedmen in Africa. Most notably, Abraham Lincoln also at one time supported the idea. It was viewed as an outlet to avoid civil strife by allowing freedmen to go return to Africa if they wished, while also promoting American interests abroad by competing directly with the European empires at their own game. This is actually how the nation of Liberia was founded.So the arguments with the Star-Spangled Banner and Francis Scott Key were valid to have a discussion, but so are the defenses that center around two key premises:You can’t judge people of the past based on contemporary viewsandContext mattersThe example illustrated an important criticism of the progressive view of history, which seeks to rebrand American history as deeply flawed and uniquely hateful, disregarding the norms of any of the rest of the world at the same time. Moreover, by applying the context of today’s beliefs to persons of the past, it paints every person who ever lived prior to 1960 as an unredeemable bigot unworthy of appreciation or respect, and certainly not admiration or to be emulated by future generations as role models.How conservatives feel about this is that it’s patently an attack on American history and American culture. By applying an impossible standard to people, events, and institutions, where if they acted in any way normal for the time in which they existed or where they began, they must have encoded in them a bigotry that can’t be unwritten without the complete removal of the institution. This is to say that say that nothing they did within their lives had any value unless they can be proved absolutely perfect by today’s standards.The most extreme example being the case where the joke was made that they want to take down statues of George Washington and destroy Mount Rushmore because he too owned slaves. Viewed as ridiculous at the time, but only a few months later that is exactly what happened. Activist pressure forced the removal of plaques dedicated to George Washington in the very church he helped to establish.“The plaques in our sanctuary make some in our presence feel unsafe or unwelcome. Some visitors and guests who worship with us choose not to return because they receive an unintended message from the prominent presence of the plaques,” the church leaders said in a letter to the congregation that went out last week.This sense that people now feel “unsafe” because a church which had the most prominent member of our founding fathers as a founding a member and that they honor that is patently absurd… but it happened.Many took the attacks against Key and The Star Spangled Banner as an attack on far more, which it was. Justifying the idea that Key is now unworthy of admiration or to take value from the lessons of his life because he also held common ideas of his era sets a dangerous precedent. If that argument is allowed to become a cultural norm it applies to literally everyone who has ever lived, and if that is the case, no history, no role models, no traditions, and no acts of heroism or character can ever be used to inform our thinking today. Even worse, it justifies arguments against modern institutions which have roots anywhere in the past, such as banks which existed in some distant form during the Civil War, or state governments even older. By making an argument that Key is to be rejudged and punished, you make a case that these institutions which we need to live also are responsible today for things that happened before anyone alive today was born.When this modern judgment is applied to major institutions, such as the government, corporations, or even social institutions like the Church or the family, this is what is meant by “institutional bias” that it is institutionalized in a way that is almost impossible to even define, let alone reform.So why conservatives protested this new argument coming from Kaepernick’s supporters attacking the National Anthem itself and its writer was that it changed the nature of Kaepernick’s protest. What was originally a protest about something currently happening in America became a proclamation of historical bigotry and that this history is the cause of current bigotry. This is not the way things work.Our institutions such as the Constitution of the United States were specifically written to be amended when reforms were necessary. At times, they were necessary. Because of that, we have a system which allows people of any color to challenge racially prejudicial practices. That power is now written into the Constitution itself and protected by the Supreme Court. So it does not make sense to purge American culture of anything which had some history existing prior to those reforms.Further, arguments that past bigotry informs current bigotry are non-falsifiable accusations holding all future generations in a status of guilty until proven innocent for crimes they didn’t do. As the flag protest shows, the only way to resolve that is to sacrifice something viewed as sacred to many for symbolizing exactly what is good about America because a very small minority within a minority view it differently — a racist anthem of a racist nation.Finally, any argument that past bigotry informs present bigotry leads to a very obvious point — what will future generations say about us?This was a point brought to the table on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience. Joe, a voracious meat eater and hunter, brought up the point of a future society where all meat might be grown in a lab, where future meat is cheaper, healthier, and doesn’t come with the ethical burden of raising animals for slaughter. Would that all the good work most of us do today in all the areas of our lives that have nothing to do with our food, were wiped away by our descendants because we enjoyed a good bacon cheeseburger. This isn’t making a moral equivalency between the owning of human beings and eating meat. It’s simply making the point that values change, but people who have been dead for two hundred years don’t. So protests geared around deleting history to signal your own virtue doesn’t hold well with Conservatives.But then the narrative changed…“It was never about the flag. It was about racism.”That was the entire point of the article that inspired this question: #TakeAKnee Isn't About The Flag. It's About America's Racism.As the name states, the writer of this Huffington Post article is trying to reframe the narrative again that what Kaepernick’s protest was really protesting was racism in America, namely by the Police because he believed they were unjustly killing blacks and getting away with it.From the article:Racism is why oppression in America continues to function, creating a societal hierarchy that places black people at the bottom. Racism is why discrimination exists and why “black lives matter” must be said. … This is bigger than Trump and the flag. Yet it’s still easy for the narrative around the protests to derail into a debate about free speech, the right to protest and respect for the flag. … Calling out racism by name is important; it’s what Kaepernick’s protest intended to do. If we lose sight of this, we stand the risk of losing the momentum and power the movement has built so far.The article follows the line of the last two points. One, it restates that America is a racist nation because police disproportionately kill blacks and that racism is deeply embedded in our American institutions. This is a stance based on things which can be proven, and the facts do not support the narrative of racist white cops disproportionately killing blacks. There is too much evidence disproving that notion, or at least providing enough information that people should question the axiomatic belief that it is so true we no longer have an obligation to test it.The article continues to say that “it was never about the flag”.To many conservatives, it’s impossible to say that. Kaepernick’s original protest was sitting through the National Anthem, a deeply symbolic act which is explicitly an act of disrespect. This was followed by his words "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color."It was exactly about the flag.People need to understand why so many Americans care so deeply about the flag and its symbolism. To understand the gravity of that emotion, I had to write a whole other piece dedicated to exactly answer that question, so those supporting the protesters could fully fathom why counter-protesters were so offended by what Kaepernick did.Jon Davis's answer to Why are some Americans so offended by NFL players kneeling for the national anthem when they aren't doing it to disrespect positive and treasured aspects of the US like the veterans?The key take away for our purposes is that to millions of Americans who honor the flag, it is symbolic of a massive framework of ideas, memories, values, emotions, and history, informing their entire view of the United States and which they psychically share with all other patriotic Americas. This construct of ideas is so massive and so complex that is difficult to communicate as simple “patriotism”, but borders on the sacred. Humans are deeply symbolic so they project that idea onto objectively meaningless artifacts, creating meaning in them where there was none. This is why honoring “the flag” is really something far more. It’s honoring literally everything good about America, it’s people, and the emotions of people who love it.People act as if this is not a serious notion, that it’s irrational to attach so much meaning to a piece of cloth, but I bet you that the same people who argue the point are also people who would be offended by this flag.It’s just cloth, right? There’s no objective meaning to it at all, yes?Kaepernick knowingly made a protest by sitting through the anthem. That communicated profound disrespect towards the flag, which is the totem symbol of everything good in America.As I said, it was always about the flag.Alright, fine, but then he knelt. Doesn’t that count for anything?You might be saying that it was an American veteran who came up with the idea of kneeling in the first place because that’s what they do to show respect for their fallen and that this fact alone exonerates any argument of anti-Americanism. It doesn’t. It really doesn’t change anything.The real story wasn’t what most people. The popular narrative is that a friend of Kaepernick’s who was in the military and who supports all his views wanted to give his friend a better way to reach people. That’s not the case.Nate Boyer, an Army Green Beret with combat experience in Africa and deployments to Afghanistan, originally came on the scene disappointed in Kaepernick’s original protest; the 49ers being his favorite team. He also had a history of playing in the NFL, first playing in college and then suiting up for the Seahawks in an exhibition game. He’s even tried out for the 49ers. He didn’t make the final cut for the season, but he had a unique perspective on both sides of the issue. Because he had that experience, the Army Times approached him for his take on Kaepernick.He expressed that he was angered at first by what Kaepernick did.The only time I got to stand on the sideline for the anthem was during my one and only NFL preseason game, against the Denver Broncos. As I ran out of the tunnel with the American flag I could feel myself swelling with pride, and as I stood on the sideline with my hand on my heart as the anthem began, that swelling burst into tears.I thought about how far I’d come and the men I’d fought alongside who didn’t make it back. I thought about those overseas who were risking their lives at that very moment. I selfishly thought about what I had sacrificed to get to where I was, and while I knew I had little to no chance of making the Seahawks’ roster as a 34-year-old rookie, I was trying.That moment meant so much more to me than even playing in the game did, and to be honest, if I had noticed my teammate sitting on the bench, it would have really hurt me.In his August 2016 letter, he also made many compromises with Kaepernick showing that at least he was listening. Boyer hinted at a very liberal upbringing, though he said he wasn’t political. This is probably why Boyer was extremely charitable from the view of most veterans, as few in the military and veteran community were as kind.After that, he was summoned by Kaepernick to meet at a hotel lobby where he asked the veteran how to better communicate his message after it became obvious that America was becoming outraged at the sitting.Boyer suggested kneeling.From the perspective of many, it appeared to be little more than a publicity stunt, bringing in one honorably serving Army Veteran who agrees with enough of Kaepernick’s message for photo-ops and interviews. The military is one of the most functionally diverse organizations in the world, mixing not only ethnic and cultural diversity, but also diversity of ideas to produce powerful outcomes. That said, all types come in, and all types come out. It’s easy to find the “right” veteran to communicate whatever message you want. But Boyer’s inclusion in the story appeared to suggest that the veteran community as a whole are okay with the protest and that there isn’t disrespect in the act. That isn’t the case.Had the advice of kneeling been sought before the protest, it would have established a very different context, but instead, Kaepernick sat through it which did show profound disrespect to the flag, to the troops, to the country, and established that context to all other acts of protest following it.Yes, it was fine to bring up an argument about racism in America, but at the point that Kaepernick began his original protest, the sitting, Americans voiced a counter-protest that no matter what your problem is, you don’t disrespect all of America, all of its people, and all of its sacred symbols.But then the narrative changed…It’s about police brutalityInterestingly enough, this narrative of the police unfairly targeting blacks also subtly changed. Did you notice it? That was when the narrative shifted from “racist cops killing blacks” to “police brutality.”Remember there was evidence that showed that cops weren’t killing blacks disproportionately, and it wasn’t bad science. It was done by a Harvard team, led by a black researcher, who expected to find the opposite result. So objectively, blacks weren’t being specifically being murdered.But police brutality is a subjective term because two people may view the exact same incident where one person would call it brutal and the other would call it unfortunate but justified. Usually, when all we see is an iPhone video (and a highly edited one at that) with none of the supporting details of what happened leading up to the moment, we see something that is horrifying and unsettling. In the Marines, we were trained to have many limits on what we could and couldn’t do. These were the Rules of Engagement. Understanding that gave me an appreciation that there are lines that are crossed and officers must take action. Many of the high profile cases classified as “police brutality” don’t meet my personal definition of brutality once you account for the specific details, as was the case for most of the juries in these cases.Again, that’s the problem. It’s my personal opinion. The public had a very different opinion. That’s because “brutality” is not an objective term. I could look at many cases and view them as justifiable where social media might see the edited video and call it murder. Neither of us would be right because we’re arguing about a subjective term.Objectively speaking, most police officers are very well trained to handle situations appropriately. When all information is taken into account, very few of the high profile cases actually resulted in an objective failure on the part of the police officer.Yet people do become outraged and demand actions corresponding to how they subjectively feel about the case. They viewed most of these cases as brutal because the sources they were presented with said they were brutal. Most civilians have no personal experience gauging what is and isn’t an appropriate use of force. Most never account for how fast and how chaotic deadly force encounters with the police are, how little time there is to weigh options or to react. Instead, they watch videos from the comfort of their homes and think about the outcomes without a hint of stress or worry in their minds. Millions declare how they would have done things differently, never really considering the fact that wrong answers leave you dead. And the sources where these stories become popularized are usually surfaced by a feed algorithmically created to confirm whatever biases you already have. So if you believe that police brutality is a problem, or follow any left-leaning issues, you’re probably going to be presented with posts that show “another case of police murder.”The “insanity of the crowd,” as put by one of Facebook’s own board members Peter Theil, has a way of obscuring vital truths and amplifying passions. If you’re on the wrong end of one of the internet bubbles, you’ll probably never be presented with the details around the case unless you go looking for it, or in some cases, wait months for the details to surface through a thorough investigation. By then, you’ll have moved on, but your outrage will remain. When that case returns with a “not guilty” instead of an indictment against the police officer, that case which you remember from months ago as being one of obvious police brutality, you’ll think it was unjust too, just confirming the bias you began with, that injustices by our police is common, the police are unnecessarily brutal, and corruption in the criminal justice system are widespread.In most high profile cases, the facts did not support the popular belief of wrongdoing on the part of the police. Once one case fell apart with specific details, another would immediately be brought back up. Eventually, you can’t know every case and volume serves as the evidence. That’s why tweets like this started to appear, the same one that appears in the article.MURDERED BY POLICE = NO CONVICTIONS #TakeTheKneeTake A Knee has NOTHING to do with the FLAG or the TROOPS, That's a GOP False Narrative pic.twitter.com/Df97uwHIN6— MICHAEL DOLLAR (@MICHAELDOLLAR) September 24, 2017I want to be clear, some of the names have no good explanation that justifies the police officers. When you have an institution consisting of some 760,000 people, a few will do terrible things. It’s a statistical absolute.But then there are other names. Case in point, Michael Brown.Michael Brown was the subject of an August 2014 shooting in Ferguson, Missouri by police officer Darren Wilson. Not long after the shooting, video of Brown’s body by a bystander’s cellphone went viral. Dorian Johnson, a friend of Brown with him during the shooting, described the scene as Brown with his back to the officer, on his knees and with his hands in the air. Brown screamed, “Hands up! Don’t Shoot!” He was then violently murdered, gunned down by a hate-filled police officer abusing the power entrusted to him by the people. According to the Johnson, Wilson “gunned him down like an animal,” to quote a piece by the Huffington Post.Less than a day after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri, a story began circulating about how he was trying to surrender peacefully to the police officer who shot him. This story incited the nation at the injustice of what people called the murder of Michael Brown. “Hands up; Don’t Shoot” became a national protest. The story went viral and could be seen everywhere, from protests and student groups, football players in pregame, the floor of Congress and the desk of CNN.Months later, the Department of Justice under then President Barrack Obama completed an investigation which proved conclusively that the whole “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” story, was actually a lie. Michael Brown was not the victim of a police execution, but the culprit of a strong arm robbery an hour prior to the shooting, and attempted to assault a police officer, which led to his death. The story was fabricated by Johnson, who took part in the robbery immediately before the shooting. It was an attempt by one of the guilty to redirect attention from himself and cast the wrath of a nation on a police officer completely justified in his actions. A meme that affected the way the entire nation viewed BLM was based on a lie. Few responsible for popularizing it have done anything to amend or acknowledge and no one was held accountable for the failure of many news agencies to report the truth of what happened, or to better inform the population once the error was discovered.You know how we know this? Check the dates.The tweet above, which is featured in the article sourced as the inspiration of this question, happened in September 2017. The Department of Justice reporting making clear that officer Wilson, the police officer who shot Brown, did so under completely justified circumstances, was released in March of 2015, a full two and a half years before. Yet the population was still unaware of the facts of the Michael Brown case and they still didn’t know that “Hands up; Don’t Shoot” was a lie told by the accomplice in an attempt to avoid punishment for his part in the crime.How many of you reading right now, who remember “Hands up; Don’t shoot” are just hearing this information for the first time?That “#MikeBrown = No Conviction” still appears both in a tweet shared by thousands and in the article informing this question speaks volumes about the credibility leading the outrage toward police brutality.Again, I’m not saying some of the names aren’t legitimate cases of bad cops acting badly. With nearly 800,000 police officers in the United States, I would expect some. For example, the cases of Oscar Grant, Ramarley Graham, Corey Jones, Walter Scott, were all cases of police officers who acted poorly, but also, where the cops were fired or investigated for murder. Kathryn Johnston appears to be reprehensible behavior by the police, but here’s the thing… those cops went to prison.All this to say that the idea of the widespread brutality of the police against a defenseless population simply didn’t have the evidence to back it up. Repeating provably false cases of police abuse to add volume is actively causing whatever protests continue to become more divisive and further polarize the nation. Furthermore, as more people make arguments showing the context behind the shootings which shows how often the police were justified, but when those arguments are ignored, it makes it less likely that people will be willing to believe the cases where bad cops were wrong.This is a problem, as I said before, because when numerous exaggerated accounts of police murdering black men for things like “selling CDs, stealing cigarillos, or going to a party,” when the facts of the cases prove much more damning for the victim than the police officer, it justifies the desire for retribution. When the police’s side of the story is not taken before an internet mob forms comes to own conclusions, it dehumanizes all police. The next step in this is for many to make the logical conclusion that because the police are without accountability and murdering people, they should themselves be murdered. This led directly to the events of July 2016 where eight police officers were assassinated.Following Dallas and Baton Rouge, there was a major push to support causes like Blue Lives Matter. The cases where police officers were justified became widely known, at least within conservative circles, but instead of acknowledging this and saying, okay there were good and bad on both sides, we should really cool it for a while and collectively get our facts straight…Then the narrative changed…It’s about unityAfter numerous narratives supporting the protest become less justifiable upon closer inspection the narrative shifted to one simply of “unity.”As I’ve shown, many of the supporters of the protest could not give a good explanation of what exactly the protest was about. Most people gave differing answers that fell along the lines of the previous points I’ve outlined already, that it was about a racist America, racism in America, the racist anthem, police targeting blacks, or police brutality in general. When a protest expands to the point that it means many things to many people, it must adopt a new mantra to keep it from unraveling or getting confused. At that point, whatever movement exists will not only suffer criticism from without, but also within, and it will eventually crumble.Calls for “unity”, “solidarity”, “togetherness” usually happen when numerous narratives begin to unravel or become confused. It binds those protesting or their supporters in the idea that, “We have to stand together.”But stand together for what, exactly? As I said, the protests already had no clear message of what they were about, so supporters were filling in the gaps with conflicting messages.What #unity stood for was a unifying ideology combining any parts of these various previous stances, and to create the appearance of a single stance, the stance of the “good” or moral, and that all opposed are the “evil”.You’re either with us, or you’re against us.Case in point, Alejandro Villanueva.This is a former Army Ranger and veteran of the Afghanistan War, Alejandro Villanueva, Offensive Tackle for the Pittsburgh Steelers. After the kneeling began to outrage many Americans and picked up steam, whole teams boycotted the anthem entirely by sitting it out in the locker room. The Pittsburgh Steelers were one of those teams.What the picture shows is one man, a veteran no less, defying his team’s call to boycott the national anthem and stand proudly for his nation. He remarked that being a Soldier Field, a stadium named as such as a memorial to U.S. soldiers who died in combat following the First World War, he was receiving texts and messages from veterans and wounded veterans that he had to stand. So he did.After the picture became famous, his jersey became one of the most popular that month immediately following what appeared to be his counter-protest.But from the other side, Villanueva was viewed as a traitor to the cause. In a press conference later, it was clear that Villanueva had been shamed and forced into a public apology for his “selfish act” of supporting his country. By not standing with his team, he “threw them under the bus…”Jonathan Haidt, a noted social psychologist, states that morality binds and blinds, meaning that a common definition of right and wrong will solidify a group into a common ideology and blind them to any other points of view which might contradict the accepted axioms and narrative. What we saw with Villanueva is that anyone who goes against the movement will face harsh criticism from players and the media even if the fan base and most Americans support it.It also discredits the numerous displays of unity, where we saw players, coaches, and owners with arms interlocked. When someone knows the story of Villanueva, they really have to ask what consequences a player who sides with the fans would face, if there is any debate in the locker rooms, or if they are all just making a choice of least resistance to avoid being the next one publically shamed for expressing their views.The second part of Haidt’s morality statement is that once a group crosses over into ideology, it blinds itself to other points of view. In the aftermath of #takeaknee, anyone who sided with the counter-protestors was immediately labeled as racist.According to Haidt, this is a mental trick people play on themselves to explain behaviors which they find emotionally or cognitively unexplainable. It may just be that they lack certain information, views, or values; but because they are ignorant to the actual motivations of people who disagree with them, they presume some evil. This is a mental trick we play on ourselves when dealing with the possibility that it might be us who are wrong. According to their worldview and their morality, there should be no good reason to be against the protestors. So the only way to explain this failure to process based on views they lack of the other side is to erect defensive cognitive walls around their own viewpoints by saying that someone who disagrees is either stupid and uninformed, or evil.When this is intentionally done, when someone purposefully tries to show someone’s view to be something other than what they mean, it’s called framing. This comic demonstrates what it feels like to be on the wrong side of it.With #takeaknee, the question would be asked if you support the protestors. Any of the arguments I’ve presented could be brought up, but by simply being on the “wrong side of history”… well, there you have it, folks. All my arguments aren’t arguments in and of themselves. They are really “dog whistles”, phrases that are non-offensive on the face, that code words to signal to all my racist friends that I’m really one of them.Yes. I’ve literally been accused of using racist code words to rally support for a white nationalist agenda.Black Lives Matter was even more problematic in this regard. There, many people experienced the trap of being asked if they supported Black Lives Matter.“Well, honestly there seems to be a lot of incorrect information coming out of the protests. I’ve also seen some troubling chants that BLM protesters are making.”“So what you’re saying is, you don’t think black lives matter?”Because America in 2018 isn’t America in 1965 or 1865, no one wants to be labeled a racist… because they aren’t. So most people shut up when accused of a moral evil. But they felt resentful. They had real grievances that were unaddressed, but instead, their character was attacked. And it happened again, and again, and again, and again.This didn’t just happen to conservatives, but to liberals as well. Anyone who didn’t follow the “unity” stance, be it with issues like #takeaknee or #Imwithher, was castigated by the rest of the “team” until they got back in line.At some point, it didn’t feel like the good guys anymore, but a mob. The mob mentality created a great deal of simmering outrage. That outrage was something one man knew how to use. He didn’t need the media’s influence because he had a direct line to the public, could hear their fears, concerns, and knew how to make an issue that most Americans were upset about a history-making event.So this time, he changed the narrative.It was about TrumpEarly on in the protests, even before Donald Trump made his famous, “Sons of b******” line or called for the firing of NFL players, the protests became conflated with anti-Trumpism. I remember trying to find somewhere where one of the players explained why they were protesting.His words floored me.“It’s because of Trump’s tyranny.”Again, this was before Trump made much of a stance on the anthem. I was dumbfounded that someone could be making such an absurd claim. To accuse any US president of tyranny, Trump or not, shows a profound lack of understanding in how the US government works.But besides that, since when was this about Trump? The protests began in August of 2016. When did they metamorphose into something anti-Trump? I honestly don’t know how that happened unless it was bleed over from the last point, where the assumed position of Trump was always racism, because he was the result of America’s “white-lash” from President Obama.In keeping with the general tone of a media pundits fundamentally disconnected from the American population and completely unable to understand the majority of American views, the only possible explanation for why people would support him must have been that America was a deeply racist nation. So of course, a protest around African American issues must also become a protest against a “racist” president.That was a mistake.Most Americans were already against the protests from the beginning for all the reasons I’ve listed already. And most of those who supported the counter-protest were also people sympathetic to Trump’s message. The very anti-American context established in the beginning of the protests only made the new “unity” message seem to do little more than galvanize liberals around the protest.The protest, which already had an anti-American shadow hanging over it, had now started to align itself against President Trump. That only validated the notion that this wasn’t about equality in America as much as yet another politicized battlefield of intolerant liberals bashing conservatives. I doubt anyone would disagree that Trump is nothing if not able to spot an opportunity.So what did Trump do? He exploited that fact and told Americans that it was okay to be upset about the protests and to hitch his wagon to America’s outrage, and to give it a voice.Love him or hate him, this was a major win for Donald Trump. In one move, he made it clear to millions of Americans that Trump was pro-America where the other guys weren’t.How did the Left respond?By just making it easier for him.Take statements many are now making, such as Democrats like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, that “America was never that great,” which only solidify this view that the idea of America is something unworthy of praise. My view on Kaepernick was opinion, but when you add the many on the left now saying it, especially people of power and authority like Cuomo, it makes it very hard to say that they aren’t distinctly anti-American from the conservative perspective.Many Democrats and left-wing figures are now getting behind the kneeling in intentional bids to signal their virtue to a base that is now fanatically supportive of it. This is true even if they are more supportive of the idea of the kneeling than able to clearly articulate what the points of the kneeling are. It’s a ticket to instant fame and moral authority, but what many aren’t yet realizing is that most Americans view the kneeling as an inappropriate way to bring attention to a cause and un-American. By aligning themselves with such a protest, they’re validating every argument that Democrats and the left are themselves un-American in the eyes of millions, while making the opposition — Trump — the only choice for people who support the “real” America, as they see it.What this means is that many people on the left are losing touch with mainstream America simply because they are so obsessed with resisting Trump and appealing to a fanatical base, that they will make him look like the good guy if it means taking an opportunity to oppose him and be seen doing it.I’m not judging here. This is just communicating popular support moving the President’s direction because Democrats are backing a protest that long ago became wildly unpopular. Trump may be divisive, but he simply doesn’t have the power to control what people do or what comes out of their mouths.As it became clear that people who opposed Trump were for kneeling and all that it had come to mean, all those who supported the President took to protesting what they viewed as disrespect to the flag, it became a waiting game. With football, one side obviously knew their demographic better, and that became clear once stadiums were filled with nothing but empty seats and ESPN lost 600,000 subscribers in a single month.As it quickly became clear the narrative behind the protest was not only losing steam, but that the owners of the teams were going into full panic mode to respond to fan outrage…The narrative changed once again…It was about the right to protestThis is the current narrative.Following the show that Americans cared more about the flag than the NFL, enough that the NFL had to react and that the owners had to silence the protests, the clearest sign that the protest lost, the narrative changed again.“The players should have the right to protest.”This is another example of framing. Now, if you disagree with any of the previous narratives and motivations for the protest, or if you simply feel that it is inappropriate and un-American to protest during the National Anthem, then you are really against Free Speech. It’s now being said that by having a counter-protest, conservatives are “silencing” the kneelers.Part of this is because President Trump called for them to be fired for the act, which many are saying equates to an official demand by the President on private companies to take a specific action.In either case, this has now become a Free Speech debate.But it has holes, too.The first is that people are upset that the protest was silenced by owners, and that a platform was deprived of people trying to make a legitimate protest. First of all, being that it is now two years later and I only feel safe enough saying this now, who was really silenced?Second, “legitimate” is the keyword. In America, we take Free Speech very seriously. It’s literally the first thing we say in our Bill of Rights. What it means is that the government won’t legally intervene to silence any lawful protest. That means that no men with guns from the government were going to ever haul off Kaepernick or the other protesters. But, that’s it.What the Freedom of Speech outlined in our Constitution doesn’t do is require someone else to provide you the resources to exercise your rights.This is a conflict of rights versus duties.Duties are created when someone’s right requires some forfeiture of time, property, or resources of someone else to fulfill them. For the person who is making the forfeiture, or put another way, when someone’s rights take away the rights of another, we would call that a duty.In the case of the NFL protests, the rights of the players to make a protest conflicted with the rights of the owners and the NFL, in that it dramatically drove down fan support toward the teams and damaged their brand value, and it required the NFL to host a protest by way of providing the stage. Both of these are business entities that are obligated to do what is best by their customers, their shareholders, and their employees before taking sides in a political matter.I put it this way in Is NFL players' ability to take a knee at games a constitutionally protected right?If a UPS driver walked up to your house wearing a MAGA hat, does he have that right?The military solved this long ago. You can protest anything you want, but you can’t do it in uniform and you can’t do it on official time or with government resources. While in uniform, you are a representative of the organization you belong, being the US military, which tries very hard not to take political stances that don’t directly involve it.Now apply that rule to MAGA and UPS. Would you be okay with someone walking into your home wearing such a hat? Most people wouldn’t care that much, or at the most be annoyed. Now, look to the way that some people have treated all things Trump since 2015. Do you think everybody would be okay with it?No. There would be many, many people who would take to Twitter, a twitter mob really, who would attack UPS for supporting him, and if we’re being honest, it would probably work. I think most of us know he would probably be fired or face some sort of punishment for the choice of supporting the currently elected president of the United States. In fact, most people reading would probably agree that some of the loudest supporters of #Takeaknee would also be some of the loudest voices calling for the UPS driver’s job.“But it’s different. #Takeaknee was about…”It’s not different. We’re talking about people having constitutional rights to express themselves. Whether you agree with a particular issue and disagree with this hypothetical example isn’t the point. It’s about Free Speech, which was the core of the question. If it applies to views you champion, then it also applies to something you find repugnant, and absolutely everything between that spectrum.But UPS would still be in their right to fire him. My hypothetical protester used the company’s resources to inject his views into the faces of people who didn’t want a political statement with their packages. Sure, it was the way he could personally magnify his own message the greatest by causing the most agitation (an excuse proclaimed as the best kind of a protest) and starting a much larger conversation than if he protested in a “nicer” way. But in so doing, he greatly damaged the value of the company and hurt his employer, which will hurt others when enough money is lost that people have to be let go. To ensure that the company doesn’t suffer more losses because of his actions, they would probably bend to the protesters.This applies to the NFL and the individual teams, as well. They suffered greatly for allowing and even encouraging the protests because the people who disagreed with Kaepernick’s original message cared more about the symbolic value of the flag and the anthem than they did about their NFL teams. Those are private organizations and they have a responsibility to do whatever is right for their companies, their shareholders, and most of all, the employees who rely on them to make wise decisions so that they have a job tomorrow.That’s why Kaepernick and other protesters should have exercised their constitutional rights in a way that didn’t put others at risk. It so damaged the companies that made them multimillionaires that other people, the people at the bottom of the organizations which the media doesn’t care about, could have lost their jobs. And at the very least, the brands were damaged for it. He could have said anything he wanted to, but on his time, and with his resources. But he didn’t. He used borrowed time and borrowed resources and because of that, the people he borrowed those resources from had to answer for him.So does he have a right to say whatever he wants? Yeah. The Constitution allows people to say generally anything they want. No men with guns from the government will ever drag off an NFL protester for what they’re saying. But the Constitution does not provide a platform and demand others to aid you in your protest. Kaepernick’s boss and the companies he works for do not have a constitutional duty to provide him the specific podium he wishes.Many people had problems with that argument, redirecting it to be about uniform policy. So I brought up one more, the very real case of James Damour.James Damore was a manager at Google. He was asked to give a mandatory review of mandatory bias training. He responded with an inter-office email to the few people he worked with and the people who did the training. His response was a series of arguments against specific claims made during the training, and against the training itself as being more likely to cause prejudice than prevent it. His arguments were scientifically informed, but more importantly, he was required to give them honestly.One coworker leaked the email to the press because they were offended as it did not follow a politically correct narrative. His words were then taken out of context, and used to make an argument for claims the Google employee didn’t make. Once the full document was released, any objective reader would agree that his views may be correct or incorrect, but they weren’t bigoted and were scientifically informed. However, in the weeks after the “Google Memo” started circulating, he was fired from Google for the negative attention his private memo brought the company, the same one which was publicly shared against his wishes and which he was required to give.My answer basically says that Google was arguably within their rights. It was completely immoral since they put him in the situation. It was also stupid because it basically said that no Google employee from that point on better ever have a dissenting opinion again, but the company does have the right to fire whoever they want. I don’t like that they fired him because I think it was wrong to put him in that situation and then punish him for doing exactly what he was told to, but that’s just how it goes.Now here’s the uncomfortable reality, so many of the people saying that Kaepernick and the NFL protesters were silenced either supported or said nothing when a much worse (by their own standards) event happened to James Damore. And that’s not even the worst of it. When liberal groups tried to hold Free Speech protests last Summer, the left took the term “Free Speech” as a dog whistle for hate groups and the Alt-Right, so tens of thousands of people showed up to protest that. By the thousands, counter-protesters silenced liberals arguing for free speech, all on the assumption that they were actually fighting the Alt-Right and signaling what virtuous people they were.That told a lot of conservatives that what the left is willing to fight for isn’t about rights to protest, but whether you protested the right things.Closing: We need to have a discussionThroughout the eight years of the Obama administration, one phrase was repeated endlessly:“America needs to have an honest discussion.”Any time a social issue came up, we would need to have a conversation. Okay, that’s fine. We’ll have a conversation. That doesn’t bother conservatives. We have some of the best minds out there who would love to have a respectful, honest, discussion, where their facts are presented alongside yours. We can look at whose vision most closely aligns with reality, or if we’re both wrong. Then we get to decide what to do, or even if doing nothing is the best option.But that’s never what happened.What happened was that some social justice identity debate would flare up, usually from so far out of left field… so to speak… that most of America was left with its head spinning. Then what do we hear? This was due to America’s deep-seated racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamaphobia, hatred of the poor, hatred of disabled people, hatred of the different, wanting kids to die in school shootings… hatred of clean air and water. How deep does the pathology go for someone to accuse half of America of hating water, let along believing, honestly believing there are people in this world who want children to die? It was absurd. But this was the norm. The news media, Hollywood, academia, the President of the United States… all saying the same thing:“America is a hateful place. Now do these things to fix it, and fix yourself because we definitely can’t be the problem. And that’s all there is to say.”That’s not all there was to say. America is the freest country in the world to say whatever it is you have to say, but sometimes you’re going to say things that are wrong. If you discover a problem, one we all agree exists, but misdiagnose how that problem happened, then your solutions won’t work either. They’ll probably just make things worse. If you’re making sweeping calls to change the nation to suit a belief you have that isn’t supported by evidence, you better expect people to disagree. Big changes cause huge problems down the road that people zealous for progress for the sake of progress never see coming.So people disagree. If we lived in a polite society that cares about actually solving problems that can be solved, those people who were critical would have been listened to. But were they?Nope. Not once. Instead, they were branded with dirty names attacking their character. And when their facts started surfacing that dismantled the current narrative, well… the narrative changed. It was complete chaos. The information was out there but never presented to the broader public. Instead, the opposition was evil and the goal posts were moved.There’s a graph that I want people to really think about the implications of it. It’s a graph done by Pew Research. It asks survey takers if racism is a ‘big problem’ in the US.If you go back to the start of the Obama administration, less than half of blacks thought it was. By the end of it, over 80% thought racism was a major problem. How did that happen? With Democrats, that increase was even greater. Even whites and Republicans viewed racism as more of ‘big problem’ by 2017. So what changed? How is that under the first black President, every demographic unilaterally agreed that somehow racism was now much worse than at any time since the 1990s?We can assume a lot of possibilities, but many of those possibilities, such as those that argue that it got objectively worse for blacks in any measurable way, can’t be supported with facts. Blacks, like everyone else in America, had lives that measurably improved with regard to crime, poverty, education, opportunity. But… there was something that happened. Something very important that we can’t forget about.Remember the sub-prime crisis? Yeah, we’re going to need to explain something about that really quickly. That was a cluster and everyone remembers what a failure it was, but what most don’t remember was who sub-prime loans targeted. It wasn’t blacks specifically, but the poor in general. Best practices for many banks which turned away risky loan seekers were told just to go ahead by the US government. When the banks said, “But what about if they default?” the government replied, “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it.” Yes, that’s a gross oversimplification, but most economists won’t tell you a story much different.Part of this was due to the suggestion that the banks were acting in a racist manner because they were turning away a higher percentage of blacks than whites. But as it turns out the banks were turning away blacks and whites who didn’t meet the qualifications for a quality loan. That policy was pulled back, and something very dangerous happened… people who couldn’t afford loans were given them.Then the foreclosures began, and they kept going, and going, and going. Then look at the recession and one of the slowest recoveries in our history. In part because of many policies that came out during the Obama administration, the Affordable Care Act in particular, and because of new technologies that replaced many workers, it became harder to get good jobs, but easier to get trapped in numerous crappy part-time jobs for the working poor. Because of the phenomenon of the welfare trap, many on welfare who could get better jobs made the short term priority choice to avoid getting better jobs or promotions so as not to suffer a net loss. It’s important to understand that this affected everyone, but because black poverty in urban areas is more visible to wealthy and connected liberal whites, that’s who they noticed, not seeing that this was a truly universal problem of the entire working class in America.So what’s the point? Bad things were happening in black neighborhoods. That much was undeniable, but they were also happening to others who weren’t black. So they weren’t specifically due to racism. That’s a much bigger problem because if racism wasn’t what was causing modern inequality, but we were obsessed with fixing racism (to the point that correcting for racism actually led to the crisis in the first place) then we are solving the wrong problem, and as the 2008 Housing Crisis shows, creating new ones.So why was it that everyone thought this entire time that the problems happening to blacks, which were also happening to a very large minority of whites, was due to racism? Had we suddenly regressed back to being more racist in 2008, when we collectively elected the first black president in our history, then we were in 1985 when I was born? Then we were in 1965 when my mother was a small girl? Then we were in 1865 when my Great-Great Grandfather fought in the Civil War?No.Anyone who suggests that we are more racist than any of those times is completely delusional. Are there problems? Yes, but are they getting continually better? Also yes.So what is the problem?It’s the conversation, or rather the lack of one. In the Marines, there was a saying, “Perception is reality.” If people perceive something to be true, then that truth is what dictates the reality everyone else must deal with. It’s actually a really terrifying idea for anyone who places men into dangerous positions based on objective facts, but it’s also terrifying if you’re trying to hold an entire population responsible for problems that are difficult to even articulate, let along prove. Yet the completely one-direction lecture never stopped, and that was the problem because it would never have got this bad if people like Thomas Sowell had just been listened to in the beginning.Again, this guy. Not me. That man.I believe that if people had listened to him, then people would not be this overwhelmed with the belief that hatred and racism are the leading cause of all bad things in America. There would be no reason for the outrage we see today. They would have been confronted with the reality that there are too many facts that disrupt the theory that racism explains why America is the way it is today. Am I saying racism doesn’t happen? No. Thomas Sowell wouldn’t say that either. It’s just that there are better explanations for why blacks face disproportionate suffering in America than racism.And honestly, wouldn’t you want that to be true?If someone could prove to you that the problems in your life weren’t the result of people you’ve never met wanting to oppress you, but instead due to well-meaning programs from the 1960’s that didn’t actually do what their designers thought they would, wouldn’t that be better? It’s extremely liberating to find out that your situation is not the cause of some distant evil pulling the strings to keep you oppressed. You don’t have to be angry at anyone. You just look at the programs that don’t work and fix them. Those are problems you can solve. You can’t solve some anonymous hate with the power to ruin your life. That’s hopeless, but when you find out that there is a real path available to you, that’s empowering. And when you find out that there are good arguments that the facts support the empowered view, rather than the one of victimization, isn’t that an argument you would want to hear?“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”I feel like if people would honestly listen, or if their sources of information would honestly describe the other side of the story, people would hurt less.So why don’t you hear it? It’s a good question. Perhaps it would be fair to blame the media. They never tell both sides of the story. They tell the one that doesn’t anger their base. That’s true. Or to be more clear, they direct outrage specifically intended for their base. When caught in a lie, they never say, “Yeah, we botched that one,” and they’ll never admit, “Yeah, most of us are Democrats, and we’re trying to earn more Democratic viewership… so, you know. It’s just how it is.”Instead, the moment that the good arguments surface that there is more to this story, the story changes … moving the goalposts, as it were. No one is more informed than they were before, and all their loyal viewers are now angrier, more bitter, and even less aware of the truth than before.And then we get Kaepernick. Colin Kaepernick is this entire process distilled down to one person and one event.Kaepernick had typical views that many American blacks did in 2016, that the police across America targeted blacks especially and that the practice of cops killing blacks without impunity was common and widespread. It would have been easy to ease the burden of these fears that many blacks faced, but that information, the proof that was easily researched, was never made the leading headline. Instead of calming fears with information, the media played on those fears to get more views.Then Kaepernick protested. His views were extreme, even for the time, but his personal extremism was covered up or not discussed, he was defended when he gaffed or intentionally did outrageous things, and never was it mentioned that maybe, just maybe he was the wrong person, protesting the wrong things, at the wrong time, in a completely inappropriate way.No, and when good arguments came out that what he was doing was wrong, either that the facts on which he built his views needed to be questioned or that sitting through the national anthem, and later kneeling by extension, the subject just changed. And it changed. And it changed. And then it changed again, and again.So Kaepernick is a really good lesson. The outrage many people are facing right now is because they’ve been trapped in a one-sided conversation where they assumed nothing they said could ever be wrong, that disagreeing with them was tantamount to a hate-crime. If more people had listened to us in the beginning, if more people had said, “You know… they have a point,” many people on the left wouldn’t be so outraged right now. They wouldn’t have a reason to be outraged. They’d find out that racism and prejudice are not the primary drivers of why people disagree with them. They’d find out that racism and prejudice aren’t our drivers at all.So now we need to have another conversation. Except this conversation needs to be different. It won’t be about racism, or football, or kneeling, or free speech. It’s just going to be a conversation about conversations, and how we need to get back to having real ones again.Liked this? You might also like my YouTube Channel. You can also connect with The War Elephant on Facebook. If you want to help me make more content like this, please visit my Patreon Page to find out more.Footnotes[1] Colin Kaepernick explains why he sat during national anthem[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399.pdf[3] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/?dataView=1&currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D[4] Francis Scott Key and the Slavery Question - The Globalist