I came to America as an immigrant, now a citizen. The stories of the American Revolution absolutely fascinated me, especially as a little girl who came from a culture of corruption and oppression. I saw America's founding fathers as men and women who risked everything for freedom. . .
That curiosity was missing from Joe Biden's recent "Soul of a Nation" speech. No cultured curiosity scratched beneath the surface of what's driving division in our country. There was no vision inspiring people to search deep within their souls for a common human belonging. Instead, President Biden's words drummed the language of war, language rooted in harsh polarities that leave no oxygen for common ground, a necessary foundation of peace-building.
What deeply disturbed me in hearing President Biden give his "Soul of a Nation" speech wasn't that he didn't understand what extremism meant. I've been hearing his and his cabinet's blunders on that all along.
Just ahead of his speech, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre gave a press briefing in which she said, "When you are not with what majority of Americans are, then, you know, that is extreme. That is an extreme way of thinking." In other words, it's "extreme" to think differently. More to the point, it's now considered "extreme" to have a different opinion than Democrats.
Twenty years after 9/11 and a year after Biden disastrously handed Afghanistan to the Taliban, I know our elected leaders are still uneducated about extremists and ideological warfare. They were too lazy to understand Islamist extremism then - handing an entire nation and the fate of our allies over to the very people we went to war with - and they're too unwilling to study the broader nature of extremism now.
via unsilencednews