OPINION:
Your editorial “Misery in the midst of plenty” (Web, Dec. 2) thoughtfully juxtaposes the vibrant American economy with our not-so-vibrant “connectedness to community.” Is this not the irony of ironies: that what sociologists call the “crisis of connection” grows in tandem with the explosive popularity of online social media?
The technology which promised to connect us all has fostered the exact opposite. (Honorable mention for “irony of ironies” goes to American-university social-justice police who are dutifully quashing free speech and alternative ideologies in the name of “inclusiveness.”)
But modern social disconnectedness is not an accident, and it is not occurring in a vacuum. It is being nurtured by the perfect storm of identity politics, multiculturalism, racial warfare, class warfare, gender rage, cultural-appropriation outrage and other divisive liberal orthodoxies. These work together to balkanize society into an angry collection of screeching factions, disconnected not only from each other, but from God and nature.
KEN BECKERT
Abingdon, Md.
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