By Stephen Macaulay
“They’ll be spandex jackets, one for everyone.”—"I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World),” by Donald Fagen
The “hate that remains on the soul of America.”
Those words were spoken by President Joe Biden in response to the fatal shooting of 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo by what he described as “a lone gunman, armed with weapons of war and hate-filled soul.”
This is America one fifth of the way through the 21st century.
One would have imagined that we are more advanced, more sophisticated, more understanding that things are changing. We aren’t.
But like it or not — and there seem to be plenty on the not side — there is a simple fact of America in 2022: Demographics are changing.
As William H. Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, pointed out, “there is an unprecedented stagnation in population growth, a continued decrease in Americans’ geographical mobility, more pronounced population aging, a first-time decline in the size of the white population, and rising racial and ethnic diversity among millennials, Gen Z, and younger groups, which now comprise a majority of the nation’s residents.”
To quote Dorothy: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
And some people don’t like it. Some of those people include those who have had some of the biggest jobs in Washington.
There have long been racists in Washington. They haven’t gone away. It seems as though they’re not going away.
But it would be an exaggeration to even imagine that the alleged 18-year-old shooter paid a whole lot of attention to what’s being said in Washington.
It would also underestimate the state of affairs were we not to recognize that if political, social and cultural leadership don’t believe in the second paragraph of the Constitution — "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” — but only the Second Amendment, there will continue to be trouble as we continue into the future.