In our world, we individually experience rites of passage and achieve a meeting of the minds, a collective understanding that a development has taken place. Our understanding is based on knowledge of facts and ideas acquired from both mental and sensory views of life. Even according to the 1901 publication of a noteworthy, yet controversial, Continental Philosopher:
To the extent to which knowledge has any sense at all, the world is knowable: but it may be interpreted differently, it has not one sense behind it, but hundreds of senses…
Consequently, we should defer to our collective appreciation of reality and the law that governs our existence.
We may disagree, one with another, about the law and our governing leaders. If so, we must look to the role in politics and society that law and government permit us. To change law and or society, we may only participate in the specific manner we are allowed. Participation begins with the act of daily self-governance. In doing so, we will together understand and change our lives and world.
In America, we made certain promises at its founding which we are achieving gradually through many transitions in society and government. Ultimately, we seek to create a country of equal opportunity in a popular melting pot of free choice. Ideally, our schools, churches, clubs and places of employment will permit unfettered access and participation in a meritocratically ruled government and society.
In thinking of the recent transition in the American Presidency, we should evaluate governing leaders and the policies they propose by the same standards with which we govern ourselves. In no way may we hold them accountable to standards higher than our own.
Lori Gayle Nuckolls
Philosophy, Law and Politics 