Beck & Sharption in a Nation Divided

Beck & Sharption in a Nation Divided

To see the nation divided, watch the people who gather on August 28th at the Lincoln Memorial to hear Glenn Beck and the people who gather at Dunbar High School to hear the Rev. Al Sharpton. Beck and his group want to restore the principles of the founders; Sharpton and his group want to transform America into a progressive utopia.

Beck’s demonstration, dubbed “Restoring Honor,” was planned months ago to celebrate the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. Sharpton’s coalition was outraged by the audacity of a white man — especially Glenn Beck — attempting to hijack King’s dream. They immediately sent out a call to black organizations to come to Washington to out-demonstrate Beck’s event with their own competing event they named “Reclaim the Dream.”

Beck has used his national television program to promote King’s idea that all people should be measured by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin. Were Sharpton and his colleagues following King’s teachings, they would be attending Beck’s event, not trying to belittle it by scheduling dueling demonstrations. King worked to achieve a color-blind society; Sharpton and his followers are working to secure special status for blacks. King worked to remove the social bonds that enslaved black people; Sharpton and his colleagues are working to enslave black people to ever-more government handouts.

Skin color, however, is not what divides Americans. Americans are divided by different visions of how society should be organized. Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” demonstration seeks to restore the vision held by the founders of this great nation. Theirs was a vision of sovereign individuals, voluntarily selecting representatives from among their neighbors to create a government to do only those chores enumerated in the Constitution they wrote.

Sharpton and his crowd see another vision. They see a government empowered to take whatever resources it wants from the people who have resources, to make sure that all people have at least a home, adequate food, a job with a livable wage, health care, and an education.

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