(ThyBlackMan.com) We know well the maxim “divide and conquer”, and we are living in a time of stark divisions: Republican versus Democrat, women versus men, white versus black, America against the world. But which is the greater power, division or unity?
There is certainly power in division. The splitting of the atom, or fission, unleashed the awesome power that demolished Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ended World War II. The nuclear power that fuels our electrical grid is based on fission. Identity politics is based on pitting interest groups – gender, racial, class – against each other. “Us against them” can be a winning political strategy, to a point. But the thing about fission is that, that power is finite. Once the bomb has exploded that power is done. Civil wars ultimately burn themselves out. As Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided cannot stand.”
That means the divisions we are experiencing today will come to their logical conclusion. The question is, like an atomic blast, how much damage will it cause? Will the damage be irreparable, or will there be something left to heal? Like a cut. If not too deep, even though a scar may remain, the wound will close. Some chasms, however, like the Grand Canyon, rock worn down over eons, are too wide, too deep to breech.
Then there is fusion, atoms joined together: unity. The greatest power in our universe is the sun and its source of energy is fusion. A source seemingly inexhaustible. It has burned for billions of years and is expected to burn for billions more. That is the challenge before us. We have unlocked the power of fission but fusion, the natural power that is everlasting, is still beyond our comprehension.
Everything that we see as divisions – race, class, gender – is an illusion. All is one. Among all living things there is the Creator and the created, nothing else. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27). Like the rest of creation, no cow taken from the bull’s rib as in the revisionist version of our creation, but male and female created together, as a biological unit: unity in diversity.
The male, female division is the most troubling of today. We, males and females, are the nucleus of the family, the building block of human society and ultimately all civilizations. We are different, yet made from the same stuff at the same time: equal in every way. And it is the same throughout the rest of creation, the yin and yang of our physical existence. We can’t allow the misogynistic actions of a minority of men to pit one half of the human race against the other.
Unity is the divine order. The connectedness of all life. When we fully embrace that, we will finally claim our inheritance as the children of God.
Staff Writer; Harry Sewell
