Posted on 10/31/2011 3:18:06 PM PDT by ventanax5
One day back in the late fifties, when I was ten or eleven years old, there was a moment when I experienced myself as an individual--as a separate consciousness--for the first time. I was walking home from the YMCA, which meant that I was passing out of the white Chicago suburb where the Y was located and crossing Halsted Street back into Phoenix, the tiny black suburb where I grew up. It was a languid summer afternoon, thick with the industrial-scented humidity of south Chicago that I can still smell and feel on my skin, though I sit today only blocks from the cool Pacific and more than forty years removed.
Into Phoenix no more than a block and I was struck by a thought that seemed beyond me. I have tried for years to remember it, but all my effort only pushes it further away. I do remember that it came to me with the completeness of an aphorism, as if the subconscious had already done the labor of crafting it into a fine phrase. What scared me a little at the time was its implication of a separate self with independent thoughts--a distinct self that might distill experience into all sorts of ideas for which I would then be responsible. That feeling of responsibility was my first real experience of myself as an individual--as someone who would have to navigate a separate and unpredictable consciousness through a world I already knew to be often unfair and always tense.
(Excerpt) Read more at cir-usa.org ...
This is the crux of the whole problem. The US is founded on individuals; the racist laws and habits that existed in our past rejected the individual. But all of the beliefs of the left, from their beginning until now, also reject the primacy of the individual and subjugate him to a class or group (conveniently defined by the left).
Brilliant article.
Brilliant synopsis.
Great article, Ty for posting it.
Excellent point!
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