The Rule of Law or Power
To understand where our country is at the moment only requires a simple thought experiment and a simple question.
(A) does (B). As a result, the government does (C). Does the identity of A matter?
In an ideal world, the identity of A should not matter for C. Granted, this has not always been the case. In fact, throughout much of history, the opposite was true. The identity of A mattered a great deal to C.
One of the great achievements of civilization is the Rule of Law, the idea that the identity of A does not matter. There is more to the Rule of Law, but this part is essential; you cannot have the Rule of Law without it. Without the Rule of Law, you have simply the rule of power. Whoever has the power, rules, and those with power receive different treatment than those without it. The power can be wielded by a King, a governing body, or a mob. Still, the simple fact remains if the identity of A matters, you do not have the Rule of Law, you have the rule of power.
Sadly, at the present moment, the identity of A matters a great deal. In fact, the idea that not only does the identity of A matter but that it should matter is at the core of the social justice moment. If A is a member of a disadvantaged group, they should get special treatment. If A is thousands of protestors who are supporting a favored political group such as Black Lives Matter, then they will be encouraged. If riots break out, they are justified, the perpetrators released, and it will be the police that apologizes. Don’t think that at the moment, the identity of A matters? Ask yourselves what would be the reaction if a Neo-Nazi group took control of a portion of an American city?
In short, at the moment, we are not under the Rule of Law; the government is buckling to the mob. Some in government are doing so because they see this as a route to power. Others see a chance to accomplish goals they could not achieve within the rule of law. Still, others are just acting out of fear. Whatever the reasons, they are all playing a very dangerous game, as the mob cannot be controlled.
One of the big differences between the American and French Revolution was the influence of the mob, which played a much bigger role in the French Revolution. The early leaders of the French Revolution sought to used the mob to achieve their aims. They found the mob impossible to control. Before long, the revolution became a Reign of Terror as the former ruling class went to the guillotine before the cheering mob. But it did not end there as the mob marched its earlier leaders to the guillotine and then their successors and then their successors. The mob is very difficult to satisfy. In the end, the revolution collapsed into the dictatorship of Napoleon.
In the present day, what does the mob want? Justice for George Floyd? Who doesn’t? The polices officers involved have been charged with murder and are awaiting trial. The major claim now is to defund the police. How is that going to end? They are beginning to get their way with the predictable results of huge increases in crime, including murder.
While defunding the police is irrational, it should not be surprising. The mob does not rule by reasons and debate, but by power and fear. Law and order stand in the way of the mob. To resist the mob directly is to risk your life; many people were killed during the riots. If you object to the mob, you can lose your job, as many others have found out. It does not matter how rational or reasonable you are. It does not matter whether or not you are right. The only thing that matters is are you in the way of the mob. You are completely free to disagree all you want, as long as you keep it to yourself. What is important is that you cower and kneel when the mob demands. In short, keep quiet, stay out of their way, and give them what they want.
I will not stay quiet. Too many have died to establish the Rule of Law. To many have died to preserve it. So I will stand for Rule of Law. I will stand for the truth. I will stand for liberty and justice for all. I will gladly say black lives matter, but only because all lives matter, equally. To say otherwise is racist by definition.
History, the Confederacy, and Monuments
Recently on EDN, Robert Cornwall had an excellent article on the need to study history. On that point, I completely agree. That said, I thought the view of history in the article he recommended was a bit binary and one-sided. To be sure, there is a lot of truth in the description of Confederate monuments being linked to the “the Lost Cause.” When I was younger (i.e., the 1960s and 70s), it was still not all that uncommon to hear at least some of the older southerners refer to “the war of northern aggression.”
While there have been some attempts to remove the issue of slavery from the Civil War, instead, trying to find some sort of economic justification, ultimately those attempts have failed. Whatever other factors may have been involved, they were clearly secondary. If one could somehow erase the issue of slavery from the early history of the United States, there would have been no Civil War.
Granted, in the early part of the war, many in the North were focused mainly on preserving the Union. Any such pretext was removed with the Emancipation Proclamation. In the latter half of the war, both sides fought over slavery, the South to preserve it and the North to end it.
Slavery, the original sin of the country, ran deep, dividing it from its earliest days. It stained the Constitution, dragging it away from the goals of the Declaration of Independence, where “all men are created equal” into a 3/5 compromise. It repeatedly plagued the early years of the country like a cancer eating away at its victim. Periodically, it would bubble to the surface, resulting in yet more compromises.
While the Democratic Party was mostly pro-slavery, the Whig party was split between those who wanted to restrict or even end slavery and those who were willing to accommodate it or did not care. As the abolitionist movement grew, this split among the Whigs eventually destroyed the party, and out of its destruction emerged the clearly anti-slavery Republican Party. With the election of the first Republican President, Lincoln, the South, fearing what the anti-slavery Republicans would do, started the Civil War.
The war ended, but the stain remained. While Republicans moved more towards the idea of the Declaration, Democrats continued to view issues through the lens of race. As Republicans began to lose political control of the South, the Democrats began to impose another form of racism: Segregation, which sadly would last until the 100th anniversary of the Civil war. While there are some notable Democratic exceptions, as there were for Republicans as well, for the most part, the Democrats were the party of race, first supporting slavery, then of segregation. The KKK was the base of many Democratic politicians who were often members themselves.
I was recently asked by a young software developer how is it that this was turned on its head? I answered that in many respects, it hasn’t. Democrats still tend to see everything through the eyes of race. Republicans are still the party where the color of one’s skin just is not that important; what matters is what one does and believes.
For many Democrats, the focus on races and dividing people into groups is so strong that they have a hard time accepting that Republicans really do not care about skin pigmentation. Instead, they take the resistance to dividing people into groups as itself a form of racism. They then create myths such as the southern strategy to project their past evils unto their political opponents.
Yet a Republican can, as many did, oppose Obama and yet enthusiastically support Ben Carson because of their policies and positions, not their skin color. For Democrats, Republican opposition to Obama is frequently portrayed as racism. The explanations for Carson, when offered, range from the incoherent to the disgusting (i.e., portraying Carson as an Uncle Tom).
So, where do I come down on Confederate monuments? While my mother was from North Carolina, my Dad was from Wyoming. I grew up as an Air Force brat, an Air Force that had been desegregated by Harry Truman, a Democrat, seven years before I was born. Most of my memories as a child come from Pennsylvania and California. I now live in Wisconsin. So I am basically a northern Republican and do not view the Civil War as a lost cause or a war of Northern aggression. After all, the South started it by firing on Fort Sumter. I view the Civil War as two things: A Victory, and Over.
Something common among the military, but not always understood by civilians, is the way that true warriors can fight so hard during a war, but then see those on “the other side” as fellow warriors after the war is over, even getting together to commemorate those fallen in battle. Thus, I can read a book like Rod Gragg’s “Covered with Glory: the 26th North Carolina Infantry at the Battle of Gettysburg” and not be rooting for my side to win or the South to lose. Instead, I seek an understanding of what they went through and suffered.
Towards the end of the first day of fighting, a federal soldier, Corporal Charles H McConnell of the 24th Michigan was falling back. He took his last bullet, and aiming at a large man in gray 30 yards away, pulled the trigger. The large man was Colonel John R Lane, of the 26th North Carolina. The bullet hit Lane in the back of the neck, exiting out through his teeth. It was a horrendous wound that nearly killed him. Yet 40 years later, at the anniversary of the battle, Lane and McConnell met again and became friends. How is this possible?
Ultimately, it is because warriors realize, better than most, that in war, those on both sides are caught up in something larger than themselves. Once settled, it is time to move on and turn swords into plowshares. I can admire as tragic figures “those on the other side” like Lee and Stonewall Jackson. I can get a glimpse of the internal struggle that some faced as they came up against good friends in battle like Armistead and Harrison at Gettysburg. In short, I see them as people who suffered and not part of an issue to be fought over.
In this light, when it comes to monuments in cemeteries or places like Gettysburg, I would be very strongly opposed to their removal. As for the others, I see them as much more problematic. I do believe that some of these celebrate the military tradition of the South, something that is much stronger than it is in the North. It is a part of who they are or at least were. Note that what is often called the Confederate flag was not actually the flag of the Confederacy but a battle flag. Like it or not, it is their history. But I can also understand the difficulty in separating this from the reason for which the war was fought, the preservation of the evil of slavery.
The love of history in me would hate to see their blanket removal as something akin to how Islamic radicals seek to purge the areas they conquer of any vestige of the things they oppose. Ultimately, I wish those involved would learn to be more like Lane and McConnell. I wish we could look back on the Civil War as a tragedy that engulfed the nation, caused by our compromise with the evil of slavery.
Frankly, it should be much easier for us than it was for Lane and McConnell, after all, no one alive today actually fought in the Civil War. Maybe a solution is that, rather than remove the Civil War monuments, we should focus on the positive endeavor of building more monuments to those who fought so hard to end the legacy of segregation in the Civil Rights movement.
Memorial Day
Tom’s father had died a couple of years earlier in an accident, leaving a wife and four children. It was the middle of the depression and times were tough. Tom, being the oldest, worked while finishing High School, to help make ends meet. After he graduated, he joined the military, and after training was sent to Nicholas Army Air Field in the Philippines. There he did what most military people do: perform their normal jobs while periodically being interrupted by various drills.
Tom could see the approaching storm that would become WWII and mentioned this in his letters home. He wrote of how they had received a shipment of fighters, but that they were in crates and needed to be assembled. They were still assembling them when the war started on December 7,1941. The Japanese invaded the Philippines the next day. Tom and the rest of the troops, along with their Filipino allies, fought valiantly. With their base destroyed they, retreated to Bataan.
Roosevelt promised reinforcements, so they struggled to hold out till they arrived. In March Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to leave and go to Australia. Tom and the rest of those left behind continued to fight on, till they could be reinforced. But in the end, there was no way to win. The promised reinforcements were never sent; food and ammunition ran out; and the Japanese force was too strong. Yet still they fought to hold out. Then their positions were overrun, and on April 10, 1942, exhausted, starving, wounded and sick (most had malaria and/or dysentery), they surrendered.
But as horrible as their ordeal had been, the worst was yet to come. The Japanese commander had ordered provisions be set aside for the expected 25,000 prisoners. But he was unaware that the real number of captured Americans and Filipinos was more than 75,000. Nor was he aware of just how bad their condition was. They had held out as long as possible and so when they did surrender they were in very bad shape. In short, the provisions he ordered to be set aside were nowhere near what was needed, and the Japanese army command structure did not allow for questioning orders, even to correct mistakes in information.
To make matters worse the Japanese viewed surrender, whatever the circumstances, as a dishonor. Thus it did not matter how valiantly they fought, how long they had held out, or how low they had been on food and ammunition, they had surrendered and did not deserve to be treated honorably. Since there were not enough trucks to transport all the them, what came to be called the Bataan Death March began.
Tom was not one of the lucky few whose guards, realizing how inhumane the situation was, just let their captives go. Even though he was sick, he was forced to march the 30 miles in the blazing hot sun to the rail center. Most had no food or water for the march. There was no stopping, and many were beaten. Many just died on the road; others were shot if they did not keep up. If Tom was fortunate, he would have still had shoes. Many didn’t and their feet burned as they walked on the hot asphalt as it baked under the sun.
At the rail head in San Fernando Tom and other prisoners were pushed into rail cars. Because of the large numbers of prisoners, they were packed in as tightly as possible and in the hot sun, the metal walls of the cars burned unprotected skin. Many lost consciousness from the sweltering heat of the boxcars. Others suffocated in the cramped space. Yet they were packed in so tightly, the unconscious and the dead remained standing until the cars were unloaded at Capas.
Tom survived the trip to Capas. From there Tom was once again forced to march the last eight miles to Camp O’Donnell. Suffering from sickness, starvation, and exhaustion, Tom only lasted five days in Camp O’Donnell, dying on May 18th, 1942. He was 22 years old. Later Private Thomas A. Hushbeck would be posthumously awarded a Purple Heart.
When people ask me what Memorial Day means to me, I think of my Uncle Tom, even though he died thirteen years before I was born. For me it is his holiday, but not his alone. There were the eight who died on Lexington Green in that first engagement of the Revolutionary war, and all the others who came after them to secure our independence, along with those who gave their lives in the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, The Vietnam War, Gulf War I and now the war on Terrorism in Iraq, and which continues in Afghanistan, and that is just to name the major conflicts.
Whenever there was a need, Americans like my uncle Tom have step forward, knowing what may happen. Like my Uncle Tom, many have paid the ultimate price so that we can live in freedom. Many may consider “Freedom is not Free” a cliché, just another slogan for a bumper sticker, but the cost of our freedom was paid by my Uncle Tom, and all the others who have in the past, or will in the future give their lives in defense of this country. It is for them that we fly the flag on this day. It is because of them we can enjoy the time off and relax on this day. They have given all that they had, and suffered in ways we can never imagine so that we might live in freedom. So while I enjoy the day, I will remember them. For they deserved to be honored and remembered.
Global Christian Perspectives
Global Christian Perspectives is a new weekly show on Google Hangouts discussing world events from a broad Christian perspective. It will be hosted by Chris Eyre from England who is more to the left politically, and myself an America who is more on the right. So while we are both Christians, there is very likely to be large areas of disagreements.
Each week we will be joined by one or two guests so there should be no shortage of differing perspectives as we discuss the issues in the news. In addition we will have an in-depth section to get behind the current event and explore some of the factors that leads us to reach such different conclusions, and there will be an opportunity to ask questions.
While subject to change, currently we are planning to discuss
News Segment:
Greece: What should we do?
The Pope’s Encyclical: Are Climate Change and Capitalism really the most pressing problems facing Christians today?
In-Depth Segment:
Is there such a thing as a Christian economics?
We are looking to have a good, and lively discussion. So be sure to join us Fridays at 2:00 ET
Might Makes Right
While many are heralding the Supreme Court’s ruling forcing Same-Sex Marriage as a victory for liberty, it is in fact the exact opposite. The simple fact is that same-sex couples already could marry in the most important sense of marriage, in the sense of a commitment between two people. In fact since the 1970’s there have been churches that would perform same-sex marriages. This ruling does not change that.
What has changed is the governmental, i.e. societal, implications of marriage. It is not so much a new freedom for same-sex couples, but a mandate on those who would disagree with the perceived wisdom of the Court. As the most fundamental institution of society, while the court’s ruling will have little if any impact on individual couples, even same-sex couples, it will have a significant, far reaching, and sadly little understood impact on society.
Since marriage has historically been the fundamental basis for society, ultimately this will force a major redefinition of society. The basis for government’s interest in marriage in the first place was the belief that the best way to raise children was in a two parent family with a man and a woman. Such a society is going to be a different society than one where there is no difference between men and women and thus the combination does not matter. (Quick question, how many mothers believe that as a woman they bring nothing unique to raising of their children and two fathers would work just as well?)
The simple history of this has been pretty clear. When this became an issue the vast majority of the people strongly opposed it. When they were asked to vote on it, they rejected it. It was finally imposed by a few state courts demanding that laws be changed, and until yesterday in all but a couple of states this has been mandated by courts over the direct opposition of the people. Now the Supreme Court has mandated it on the entire country, not because the Constitution demanded it, but because five Judges were in a position to impose their personal beliefs on the country.
And that’s what they were: personal beliefs. This is a radical experiment in human history. The verdict of history is clear, despite other alternatives being tried, traditional marriage has been found to be the best way to raise children. This is not just a religious belief but is the near unanimous consensus view from all cultures and periods of history. Anyone who claims “the science says” on either side is either vastly misinformed or lying. Same-sex marriage is simply too new to make any assessment scientifically. The current push for same-sex marriage is based not on history or science but ideology; the premise that gender is irrelevant. But if science has anything to say on this subject it is that this premise is false.
While a popular belief in the 1960s and 70s, there is now little doubt that as shocking at it may seem to some, men and women are different. They think differently, they react differently, their brains work differently. Now perhaps this does not matter, but perhaps it does. The problem is that the court has through its power settled this question before it was really even asked.
What was ultimately clear in this decision is that we have lost the key foundational principle for the country, i.e., that people have the right to govern themselves. This is not an expansion of liberty, but a massive loss of liberty. It is unclear exactly how this will work itself out, but this is part of the problem. These five judges have removed this discussion from the political process. Just as Roe v. Wade did not settle the abortion debate but only magnified it into political cancer that has corrupted the political culture, so will this decision. Given the importance of marriage, probably even more so.
Rather than work towards a political consensus that rests on the majority of the governed for its authority, Same-Sex marriage now rests only on the power of the Supreme Court. Yet in making this decision, once again the Court demonstrated that it long ago cut itself off from the Constitutional basis of its own authority. Now, rather than the Constitution, the authority of the court rests on habit, tradition, but mainly on the power of the government. Rather than the right of self-government, which was the foundation for the formation of this country, we have returned to might-makes-right authority of a monarchy, a monarchy now dressed up in the black robes of a majority of the Supreme Court.
The people celebrating this ruling, are merely celebrating that the monarch has agree with them, and it is always easy to support the king, when the king make rulings you like.
The worst aspect is that this is not the end, but just the beginning of the battles that will now flow from the implications of this decision being forced into the political system. Churches are threatened and religious freedom is already under attack and will now be more so. Schools will certainly become battle grounds as textbooks are rewritten to promote and push the new definition of family, pushing even more children into private and home schooling, which will undoubtedly also come under assault.
In the normal democratic process it is often possible through give and take to form a consensus, but Court mandates do not permit consensus since by their very nature they are mandates. Court mandates allow the extremists to dominate, which is rarely a good thing. But that is where we are.
