SCOTUS handed down a major decision today regarding the Voting Rights Act and race.  I’ll try and make the ruling as simple as possible – it is in line with Chief Justice Roberts declaration that “the only way to end discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating based on race.”  The ruling set me to thinking about this morning’s post on why “political violence” is on an upswing and how to prevent it.

When everything is decided tribally, whether the tribes be religious, racial or otherwise – violence becomes nearly inevitable.  Such decisions also create hopelessness – lots of it.  When your admission to an elite institutions has as much or more to do with the tone of your skin – an accident of your birth – as it does the merits of your academic performance, it will engender a hopelessness about every getting into that elite institution.  When voting districts are established on the same accidental criteria, if you do not meet the criteria, you will feel like your vote is disenfranchised.

Hopelessness turns to resentment and resentment easily turns to violence.   When one is no longer the master of his or her destiny, there is little incentive to “behave” since it does not matter anyway.

Back to this morning’s post where I talked about the nation formerly operating under a Christian ethos even if was not a Christian nation.  That ethos overrode all this identity garbage, uniting us rather than setting tribe against tribe.  Can you think of anything else that can accomplish that same task?  I can’t – and after about 6 decades of trying other stuff, maybe a return is in order.