- I want to pose a framing question that starts with something basic:*
Under normal conditions, how hard is it to breathe?
Usually not hard at all. We take it for granted, even though that breath becomes oxygen in our blood, quietly sustaining us whether we’re thinking about it or not.
So here’s the analogy-question: if breath is received, not manufactured, could identity be similar? What if our true identity is also given, not something we get to predetermine based on fear, tribe, or the mood of the era, and the first “work” is simply accepting what’s true about ourselves regardless of circumstance?
Isn’t that what the First Amendment is protecting at a basic level?
The right to conscience, speech, worship, association, and petition, giving space where a person can exist as a person, not as a state-approved person, but as who they are.
Then the harder question:
If “being the best you you can be” is difficult not only because of internal work, but because you also have to resist outside forces pulling you off your path—including monetary policy that can erode savings (which is why some people seek ‘hard money’ like Bitcoin)—what are the political and legal systems (and incentives) that deliberately try to interrupt that process?
Isn’t that what the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments are for?
Due process and equal protection as guardrails against power treating people as categories, scapegoats, or collateral damage, forcing the state to justify itself with law, not preferences, and correcting the original contradiction in the Constitution that counted some human beings as three-fifths of a person.
In other words: which parts of our culture-war politics have become an identity-capture machine, turning citizens into categories, turning fear into belonging, and turning law into a tool for enforcing a tribe’s story, rather than laws, systems, and branches of government that primarily protect the conditions people need to breathe, live, and be the best they can be?