October Editorial Winner

An American Frankenstein

By Zeke Lay, Choctaw Times

Anthropologists believe there are three fundamental requirements to launch a civilization. Two of them seem logical, a domesticated animal food source and a domesticated plant food source. The third is striking; the surrounding environment must be hostile. In other words, people can't leave. Deserts surround the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates etc. In other words, people have enough to eat, and no option to leave; so big government prospers no matter how tyrannical.

The option to that, civilization below the level of a city-state, is tribal. In a tribal environment almost everyone is related in some fashion to someone else in the tribe. Resources needed for conflict resolution, police and even written laws, are non-existent. At the end of the last Ice Age, most of the world population lived as tribes roaming freely in a given geographic area. As recently as 1500 A.D. less than 20% of the world's land area was restricted in boundaries claimed by city-states.

After both World Wars, the elite thinkers disregarded any tribal concerns. Yet these tight-knit groups have no concept of 'country' and have continued to be a big impediment to world peace. The tribal mindset was on display recently by the horrible violence of the Rwanda civil war where the Hutu tribe slaughtered half a million members of the Tutsi tribe; neighbors living among them.

Our universities will teach that Western colonialism is the source of all these problems. Easy and simplistic, it is the preferred half-story that Left-leaning campuses want to spread to our young. Colonialism struggled to solve tribal warfare because the only thing that appears to work is ruthless subjugation by tyrants ala Libya and Khadafy, Iraq and Hussein, Uganda and Amin, Syrian and Assad, etc. And then only by a level of violence we can hardly imagine or tolerate in the West.

Conversely, in America our greatest strength as anation has come from being a melting pot for all. By fits and fights, starts and stops, we have grown into the universal God-given freedoms promised by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Yet the Left wants to push us backward with 'identity politics'; the modem day tribalism. The Left would cut us up into competing pieces; victims by gender, race, sexuality, religion; even political affiliations. No longer judged by the content of our character as Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed, the Left has become the overlords and definers of our new tribes.

This year Halloween has a special symbolism. No longer filled with scary monsters from our collective consciousness, it has become full of repugnant psychos and serial killers; images of real humans from the feverish minds of a sick Hollywood. Instead of scaring our youth with fantastical beings from our imagination, we are scarring them with the worst possible versions of the worst possible human aberrations.

Yet the most frightening monster of all is a vision of an American Frankenstein. While the strength of our nation is the unity of the American people, we are being systematically divided into artificial tribes of victimhood. The Left redefines America as so fundamentally flawed it must be rebuilt completely. They would use these unnatural pieces to sew together a truly horrendous monster; an American Frankenstein.