Like it or not, our country has placed itself under the threats I mentioned in Part I, and I can only hope that the mitigating factors of Part II will enable me to say, at the end of four years, "That wasn't so bad." Regardless, although I believe the results of this election will make life more difficult, the important things do not change. Here's some of what I believe we need to do in the coming years.
Who is the "we" in the following ruminations? Mostly I'm speaking for myself, to myself, but often there will be a more general application, anyone who wishes to come along for the ride is welcome.
Part III — How We Can Sing the Lord's Song in a Strange Land
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"
How can we sing the songs of the LORD
while in a foreign land?
Psalm 137:1-4
First of all, we pick ourselves up with as much dignity as we have remaining and give respect and support to our new leaders. "Fear God, honor the king" (I Peter 2:17) applies in a democracy, too. Humor has an important place in discourse, but mean-spirited mockery does not. I may have crossed the line with my "Obamanation" comment in Part I—at least two of my respected readers think so—though I'm not convinced it's inappropriate, given the messianic adulation accorded Obama by many of his followers. Still, I'm extremely uncomfortable with the abuse heaped on George W. Bush, just as I was when it was Bill Clinton on the receiving end, and will accord Barack Obama the respect due the President of the United States, as well as that due a human being created in the image of God.
We pray for Barack Obama, and for all "who bear the authority of government." If the Apostle Paul could write, per I Timothy 2:1-2, "I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made....for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness," while living under the Roman Emperor Nero, we can do the same living under an elected president who is not likely to include among his alternative energy polices the burning of living, human torches.
We attempt to live our lives in the best, most honest, most noble, and most loving way possible. Back to I Peter again (2:15-16): "[I]t is God's will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men. Live as free men, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God." The Republicans would do well to remember that scandal and wrong-doing among office holders has done more than anything else to bring them down. Granted, it's not fair that the Democrats mostly get a pass for their equal or greater sins—although it's actually a compliment that better behavior is expected of Republicans—but the reality is that Republicans were hurt badly first by misbehavior and even more by not visiting swift and sure justice upon the miscreants. To live purely and act rightly, with justice and love and in quiet confidence, will win more hearts than the most reasoned argument.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.... Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:17-18, 21)
Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe. (Philippians 2:14-15)
[L]et your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:16).
We attend to the wisdom of the serpent as well as the harmlessness of the dove. Now is not the time to retreat from the political process, but to be all the more involved that we might be alert to dangers that threaten what we hold dear, and to how we might best meet those threats. History has proven that when we are caught unaware we react hastily, badly, and often ineffectively.
We don't flee to the hills, or to another country (as many threatened after losing the 2000 and 2004 elections), or withdraw from the system in sulky silence. It's not time, yet, for "those who are in Judea to flee to the mountains." If we feel like exiles in our own land, it is time to remember what God said to his people at the time of another exile: "Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper" (Jeremiah 29:5-7). We continue to live our lives wisely and without fear. The administration may have changed, but the basic rules of life have not. There's still the Big Ten—don't steal, don't murder, don't mess with someone else's spouse, and all the rest—and the sound-bite version provided by Jesus: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, [and] love your neighbor as yourself."
Many of us are accustomed to feeling alienated from the general American culture; it may even be easier—or at least clearer—when there's no pretense that "our guys" are in charge. Whether it's financial responsibility, ethical behavior, or wise decision-making, in a democracy the citizens get no better from their government than the majority lives out in their lives. True progress, then, requires that we balance a deliberate counter-cultural structuring of our own lives, families, and communities with a creative engagement of the larger culture. That is how we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land.
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Category Politics Random Musings
Part II — Some Mitigating Factors
As I said in Part I, the prospect of the next four years under Barack Obama and a strongly Democratic Congress disturbs me greatly. The following are some of the reasons why the outcome of the election might not matter as much as I fear.- The President of the United States never has as much power as we fear—or he would like. Presidents acquire both credit and blame they don't deserve, for events set in motion long before they took office, or determined by forces over which they have no control. Their campaign promises may tell us about their philosophies and their hopes (or they may not), but presidents by and large are at the mercy of legislators, judges, the press, public opinion, and a host of natural phenomena and international situations beyond their purview. This is a good thing.
- I have yet to find a strong positive correlation between a president's apparent potential and his performance. Ronald Reagan was an actor, once uttered the infamous statement, "A tree's a tree; how many of them to you need to look at?" and his wife consulted horoscopes, yet his presidency encompassed some of the best years in my experience, both domestically and internationally. Bill Clinton's sexual proclivities made a mockery of the office, he lied under oath, and he threatened to take the country on a far-leftward swing complete with nationalized medical care, yet if you look at reality rather than rhetoric you could make a case that George W. Bush was the more liberal president. True, some of Clinton's success came from riding on the coattails of what was accomplished under Reagan, and his administration is probably to blame for some of the conditions that led to our problems with al-Qaeda, and certainly much of the reason he was not the Liberal success many had hoped for lies in Republican opposition in the Legislature—still, the point is that his time in office was not the unmitigated disaster many—including me—had feared. Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, are stellar examples of how good men, with strong morals and a determination to do the right thing in all of life, from the bedroom to the war room, can still be really lousy presidents. I may yet look back on an Obama presidency and say, "This wasn't as bad as I had expected." I doubt it, but you never know.
- George W. Bush did not want to spend most of his presidency embroiled in a war, and whoever wins today's election did not want to spend most of his presidency weighed down by economic woes, but such realities arise and force presidents to set aside their own agendas. Unfortunately, they can also be a smokescreen through which really bad policies are slipped past our distracted eyes, so vigilance is still the order of the day. Our next president must deal not only with the troubling economic situation at home and abroad, but may face political and military challenges most of us would rather not contemplate. Any hopes that our only significant threat comes from Islamic terrorists and rogue dictators of minor countries are foolish at best. Russia is beginning to flex its muscles in a way more frightening than at any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and as for China—J. R. R. Tolkien said it best: It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations. We attempt to elect the best person for the job, yet the job rarely turns out to be what we expect. Sometimes presidents rise above themselves when the occasion demands.
- One of the advantages of being a Christian is knowing that God's plans can never be thwarted, not by the President of the United States and not even by the Supreme Court. The election results may make our paths more difficult, but they won't change the ultimate direction, and God will be with us through each turning. But that is the subject of Part III.
If I'm going to make a political post before Election Day, I'd better move quickly. This won't have as much as I want to say, nor as much careful crafting as I want to put into it, but it will still be too long and take too much time. It will be in three parts, reflecting my three conflicting and complementing moods as I contemplate the next four years.
Part I — Why This Election Is So Threatening
It is far too tempting to begin this section with a slight alteration of Mark 13:14.
When you see 'the Obomanation that causes desolation' standing where it does not belong—let the reader understand—then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.
I don't actually think that an Obama presidency would be the end of the world, but this was too good to pass up. And I do believe my friend—a calm, rational, wise friend, not given to radical statements—who said the other day, "The world as we know it is about to change drastically." She did not mean for the good. Those whose rallying cry is "Change!" would do well to remember that derivatives can be negative as well as positive.
Why am I so worried about an Obama presidency? First, let me state that if there were a solid Republican majority in both the House and the Senate, with every prospect for a super majority of Republicans in the Senate, I would probably support the Democratic candidate for president: no party should have that kind of control over both the Executive and the Legislative branches. We all—Democrats, Republicans, and Others—are fallen human beings and without effective checks and balances (especially checks) on our actions, we are likely to make bad decisions. Add conditions of confusion, fear, and anger, and we can expect very bad decisions. Thus I find the perfect storm of financial and political chaos with a Democratic President, House, and Senate frightening indeed. If you think the panic after the September 11 attacks caused us to accept significant compromises to our freedoms, just wait till you see what the combination of an activist government and financial insecurity will do.
For several elections now, one of the primary determiners of my choice has been the possibility of openings on the Supreme Court. I'd love to be able to believe that the Supreme Court Justices are above politics and look at the Constitution objectively, without regard to their own social, political, and religious beliefs, but I know better. Leery as I am about having both the Presidency and the Legislature strongly on the Left side of the political spectrum, when I think about a Leftist Judiciary completing the triumvirate I see Category 5 damage coming that may never be undone. I suspect there are several Liberal judges who have been hanging on by their fingernails just waiting for the Democrats to be able to control the nomination and confirmation of their replacements. Skewing the Supreme Court in the direction of further judicial activism and greater regard for social engineering than for the Constitution they are interpreting will do more damage to America than anything else our president and legislators can do. Elected officials and parties can be voted out; Supreme Court justices and their decisions are out of our hands.
On the other issues of concern I can barely touch, for each is worth a post (or several) in itself. Foreign policy? Whoever wins this election is in for a rough ride. Obama may find himself in what appears to be a honeymoon for a while, but he's neither experienced nor stalwart enough to avoid being at a substantial disadvantage in the diplomacy game and weakening our country significantly. Believe me, I'm not saying Bush is doing well—anyone who can "look into Putin's soul" and not see the KGB ought to leave the negotiations to someone with better eyesight—but I fear we are about to go from bad to worse. Domestically? Whether it's economics, education, health care, or any other issue in which freedom of choice is our best hope, we are looking at disastrous policies ahead. Our country is experiencing a strong slide towards socialism and I'm afraid a McCain presidency can't stop it, but he might slow it enough for us to get our bearings again, while with Obama I see wild careering in that direction. The Democrats claim to be the party for "choice," but just as with "change," we must look beyond the mantra. Although many homeschoolers and home birthing families are Democrats and vote accordingly, the party itself appears committed to creating, supporting, and enforcing educational and medical near-monopolies. While I believe that there are some functions that governments do best, making life decisions for individuals and families is not one of them. I mention these topics specifically because they are close to my heart and I know more than most about them, but the general principles, policies, and attitudes apply widely.
It is now Election Day itself, and I'm splitting off Part II and Part III so I can get this posted. I'll close Part I with an observation. I've said before (for example here, and here) that one thing that frightens me about Barack Obama is that he is so charismatic he might actually accomplish some of his goals. Lately I've come to realize that the danger goes beyond that. What I'm hearing from so many of Obama's followers has gone far beyond what they like about his ideas to an open adulation of the man himself. Adolf Hitler was before my time, and I don't know enough about Chinese and Islamic cultures to understand the attractions of Chairman Mao or the Ayatollah Khomeini, but I'm old enough to remember the adoration inspired by John F. Kennedy and later Robert Kennedy. No, I'm not saying that Obama is another Hitler! But we would do well to remember that we are in no way morally superior to the Germans of Hitler's day who responded to political humiliation and a severe economic crisis by embracing a charismatic leader who made them feel better about themselves. If Barack Obama is elected today, as I believe he will be, we would all do well to keep our eyes wide open and consider well the probable effects of his policies and proposed actions rather than being swept away by rhetoric. Come to think of it, that's a wise idea no matter who wins the election.
Having read this analysis of what the next U.S. president (and other members of the Executive and Legislative branches) must face, I have two questions.
(1) This job clearly requires someone of superior intelligence, knowledge, skill, courage, and moral grounding. Where in our political process is the ordinary voter given the opportunity to evaluate the candidates on those qualities?
(2) Why would anyone in his right mind want the job?
Read the article. It's scary, but it's well-written and reasonably non-partisan.I like to ignore politics as much as possible. I want to be a well-informed voter, but I don't believe that political propaganda—whether in the form of paid advertising or news commentary—serves that purpose well, and I'd rather change a dirty diaper than listen to a presidential debate. But as Pericles said, Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you. And economics even more so.
In the last month I've changed many diapers, and the worst of them did not smell as bad as the current state of our economy and what it might lead to. I've lived through several economic downturns, and haven't yet found them worth the worry they engender, if one has adhered to a policy of regular savings, avoided the get-rich-quick mentality, stayed out of debt for depreciable assets, and been willing (and able) to take a long-term view. "This too shall pass" has always been an effective philosophy.
Our current financial situation, however, looks to pass with all the ease of a monstrous kidney stone. I'm afraid it was easy, at first, to take a rather self-righteous attitude to the subprime mortgage debacle. Sure, I was sorry for people who were losing their homes, but some of them had been downright crooked in the acquisition of their mortgages (taking on debt they knew they could never repay) and most of the others had violated very basic rules of money management (purchasing homes out of proportion to their incomes). What's more, the financial institutions that facilitated such loans were either crooked or stupid themselves.
Be that as it may, when they take you away from the accident scene in a stretcher, it doesn't make a bit of difference that you had the right of way. The many cannot avoid paying for the sins of a few. No one can say, "It's not my problem." If you have not a penny in the stock market, if you don't need a mortgage or a car loan or other credit, you still need a job, gas for your car, and food on the table—and all of these are threatened by the economy's convulsions.
For an insightful look at why we should be worried, yet with minimal political spin, check out what John Mauldin has to say in yesterday's InvestorsInsight. I tried to boil the article down to a few excerpts, since I know many of you will not read the whole thing, but I gave up. It's worth reading in its entirety. The excerpts below (with my own emphasis) will only give you a taste.
[Most people] don't understand why taxpayers should spend $700 billion to bail out rich guys on Wall Street who are now in trouble. And if I only got my information from local papers and news sources, I would probably agree. But the media (apart from CNBC) has simply not gotten this story right. It is not just a crisis on Wall Street. Left unchecked, this will morph within a few weeks to a crisis on Main Street.
First, let's stop calling this a bailout plan. It is not. It is an economic stabilization plan. Run properly, it might even make the taxpayers some money. If it is not enacted very soon (Monday would be fine), the losses to businesses and investors and homeowners all over the US (and the world) will be enormous. Unemployment will jump to rates approaching 10%, at a minimum.
Banks can lend to consumers and investors about 12 times their capital base. If they have to write off 20% of their capital because of losses, that means they either have to sell more equity or reduce their loan portfolios.... At first, banks were able to raise new capital. But now, many banks are finding it very difficult to raise money, and that means they have to reduce their loan portfolios.... [But now] the credit markets have stopped functioning. Because banks and investors and institutions are having to deleverage, that means they need to sell assets at whatever prices they can get in order to create capital to keep their loan-to-capital ratios within the regulatory limits.
[P]art of this started when banks and investors and funds used leverage (borrowed money) to buy more assets. Now, the opposite is happening. They are having to sell assets into a market that does not have the ability to borrow money to buy them. And because the regulators require them to sell whatever they can, the prices for some of these assets are ridiculously low.Last week, I wrote about a formerly AAA-rated residential mortgage-backed security (RMBS) composed of Alt-A loans, better than subprime but less than prime. About 5% of the loans were delinquent, and there are no high-risk option ARMs in the security. It is offered at 70 cents on the dollar. If you bought that security, you would be making well over 12% on your money, and 76% of the loans in the portfolio of that security would have to default and lose over 50% of their value before you would risk even one penny. Yet the bank which is being forced to sell that loan has had to write down its value. As I wrote then, that is pricing in financial Armageddon.... And guess what? There are no buyers.
One of the real reasons these and thousands of other good bonds are not selling now is that there is real panic in the markets.... We are seeing massive flights of capital from money market funds, including by large institutions concerned about their capital. What are they buying? Short-term Treasury bills. Three-month Treasury bills are down to 0.84%.
It gets worse. Last week one-month Treasury bills were paying a negative 1%!!! That means some buyers were so panicked that they were willing to buy a bond for $1 that promised to pay them back only $.99 in just one month.
[T]here is a silent bank run going on. There are no lines in the street, but it is a run nevertheless. It is large investment funds and corporations quietly pulling their money from some of the best banks in the country.... Any whiff of a problem and an institution that is otherwise sound could be brought low in a matter of weeks. And the FDIC could end up with a large loss that seemed to have come from out of nowhere.
There is something called the TED spread, which is the difference between three-month LIBOR (the London Inter Bank Offered Rate which is in euro dollars, also called The Euro Dollar Spread, thus TED) and three-month US Treasury bills. Three-month LIBOR is basically what banks charge each other to borrow money.... Quite literally, the TED spread is screaming panic.
Credit spreads on high-yield bonds that many of our best high-growth businesses use to finance their growth are blowing out to levels which make it impossible for the companies to come to the market for new funds. And that is even if they could find investors in this market! There are lots of other examples (solid corporate loans selling at big discounts, asset-backed securities at discounts, etc.), but you get the idea. Suffice it to say that the current climate in the financial market is the worst since the 1930s.
We are in a recession. Unemployment is going to rise to well over 6%. Consumer spending is going to slow. This is an environment which normally means it is tougher for small businesses and consumers to get financing in any event. Congress or the Fed cannot repeal the business cycle. There are always going to be recessions. And we always get through them, because we have a dynamic economy that figures out how to get things moving again.
Recessions are part of the normal business cycle. But it takes a major policy mistake by Congress or the Fed to create a depression. Allowing the credit markets to freeze would count as a major policy mistake.
Why do we need this Stabilization Plan? Why can't the regular capital markets handle it? The reason is that the problem is simply too big for the market to deal with. It requires massive amounts of patient, long-term money to solve the problem. And the only source for that would be the US government.
If we act now, we will start to see securitization of mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, and business loans so that the economy can begin to function properly.
What happens if we walk away? Within a few weeks at most, financial markets will freeze even more. We will see electronic runs on major banks, and the FDIC will have more problems than you can possibly imagine. The TED spread and LIBOR will get much worse. Businesses which use the short-term commercial paper markets will start having problems rolling over their paper, forcing them to make difficult cuts in spending and employment. Larger businesses will find it more difficult to get loans and credit. That will have effects on down the economic food chain. [We] will see stock market investments off another 25% at the least. Home prices will go down even more. Consumer spending will drop. What should be a run-of-the-mill recession becomes a deep recession or soft depression.
A properly constructed Stabilization Plan...should ultimately not cost the taxpayer much, and maybe even return a profit. The AIG rescue that Paulson arranged is an example of how to do it right. My bet is that the taxpayer is going to make a real profit on this deal. We got 80% of AIG, with what is now a loan paying the taxpayer over 12%, plus almost $2 billion in upfront fees for doing the loan. That is not a bailout. That is a business deal that sounds like it was done by Mack the Knife.
This deal needs to be done by Monday. Every day we wait will see more and more money fly out the doors of the banks, putting the FDIC at ever greater risk. Panic will start to set in, moving to ever smaller banks. Frankly, we are at the point where we need to consider raising the FDIC limits for all deposits for a period of time, until the Stabilization Plan quells the panic.
I understand that this is a really, really bad idea according classical free-market economic theory. You know me; I am as free market as it comes. But I also know that without immediate action a lot of people are really going to be hurt. Unemployment is not a good thing. Losses on your home and investments hurt. It is all nice and well to talk about theories and contend the market should be allowed to sort itself out; and if we have a deep recession, then that is what is needed. But the risk we take is not a deep recession but a soft depression. The consequences of inaction are simply unthinkable.
I've quoted much more than I meant to. I hope some of you are still with me. What it boils down to is that this has the potential to have consequences—not only here, but around the world—far worse than we dreamed of in the Y2K panic. I know people who stockpiled food and water for that one...yet this is receiving a "ho, hum" from most of us.
I'm hardly a fan of most governmental intervention, and one of my greatest fears in all this is that in our panic we will subject ourselves to measures with disastrous long-term consequences, as happened with the Great Depression. We need to analyze the causes of our woes and how best to prevent them in the future. We probably do need a serious restructuring of how our society handles debt. When Mauldin says, "Cheap loans with small down payments are the life blood of the auto selling business" my reaction is to see that as a major part of the problem, and something that needs to be changed. But not now, not so drastically. The patient needs surgery—not amputation. Above all, let's not let the patient die on the table while we argue about who's to blame and who should wield the knife.
In the meantime—where are my old Y2K notes?
We, meaning our family and friends, were talking about the Y2K problem at least 20 years before it happened. So how did it become such a big deal? If we peons knew, why was it an apparent surprise to the U.S. government and business world? Why were we caught so off guard that we needed a drastic increase in programming staff, which necessitated reaching overseas to Indian programmers, which in turn sparked the subsequent massive exporting of American Information Technology jobs?
We've known for at least as long that our economy was headed for a difficult, possibly even disastrous "correction." Some borrowing is healthy and makes financial and economic sense—reasoned, careful borrowing with every expectation of timely repayment—but an economy as dependent on foolish borrowing as ours is only a house of cards waiting to crash. The wonder is that the fall has been postponed so long, even if our current troubles are the needed correction. (I'm not sure they are; we've weathered disruptions before, and the media live off of doom-and-gloom, making everything seem worse than it really is.) We've buttressed our card house by extending more credit; then putting mothers to work to bring in more cash; then extending more credit; then putting our teenagers to work, not to support their families but to support the economy through foolish consumerism; then pushing credit on those who are least wise in their spending and can least afford to repay; then putting our homes to work through home equity loans; then stretching credit to the absolute breaking point as those in the highest places of most responsibility began behaving like the most foolish neophyte with a brand-new credit card. And all, from the dirt-poor to the wealthiest, expecting the government—which, may I remind you, is you, and me, and all those who still believe in responsible spending—to pay for their mistakes.Enough ranting. The point is, we could see this coming. So why couldn't we find a solution before the crisis point? Are we all so short-term focused that we can't consider long-term implications and actions? Are we so dependent on the whims of voters and stockholders that difficult measures can't be implemented because the bearers of bad news will be kicked out before anything can be accomplished? On an individual level, are we so stressed by getting from one day to another that we can't take action for the future? Is it because neither families nor the government nor business can agree on the prudent course of action?
No answers this time, only questions.Permalink | Comments | Edit
Category Politics Random Musings
When an article from my "to blog" backlog, a recent post from one of my blogging contacts, and an article from the most recent issue of a magazine I respect all converge, I can take that as a good suggestion for today's post.
Jennifer Fulwiler writes the Conversion Diary blog (formerly "Et Tu?"), which I've featured before (here, among other places). This is her article in America. John C. Wright is a science fiction writer. It was his blog post that alerted me to the First Things article. Read his introduction, but don't settle for his summary of the article. Instead, read Mary Eberstadt's The Vindication of "Humanae Vitae" yourself.This is bound to raise the blood pressure of a number of readers...but very thought-provoking. I can testify from experience to the coercive pressures of the Malthusian movement. It was the Global Warming of its time: part valid concern, part bad science and worse economics, all hype and politics, but a nearly irresistable force.
Perhaps it will turn out to be no more than a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy to blame so many of the problems that now beset us on the great sea change half a century ago in societal attitudes toward the purpose, meaning, and regulation of sexual activity, fueled by the availability and use of contraceptive technologies. But it certainly bears investigating, for those who can bear the thought.Permalink | Comments | Edit
Category Politics Children & Family Issues
Whatever you think about John Edwards, he isn't stupid, and choosing to admit his adulterous affair while our attention was focused on the Olympic opening ceremonies was probably a smart move.
Russia isn't stupid, either. They couldn't hope to invade another country without generating some controversy, but doing so while the eyes of much of the world and even more of the news media are on events in Beijing gives them a good chance of being ignored, at least long enough to accomplish their purposes.
Jim Balk was my World Cultures teacher in high school. I don't know what was supposed to be covered in a course with that title, but we didn't learn much about the cultures of the world. Somehow I would have expected a broad survey course, which this wasn't. Whatever I've learned about ancient Greece and Rome, Chinese history, African civilizations, and the history and culture of almost anywhere else in the world—which isn't much—I had to learn outside of school.
What Mr. Balk did instead was cover in detail two areas of the world of special importance in the late 1960s: the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. No doubt he figured that if his students were going to have opinions on the events of the day they might as well be informed by the history, religions, customs, and politics of the region. He was also big on current events, and tried to make us lazy, self-centered teens pay attention to events of significant import, such as the American civil rights movement, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
I wasn't one of Mr. Balk's greatest successes, I'm sure. Oh, I got A's in his class—I knew how to do homework and take tests—but didn't develop an appreciation for history until long after I graduated, and am not much better than I was back then at paying attention to the news. (To be fair to myself, I think I might do better with the latter if news reporting were less about hype, gossip, entertainment, sensationalism, and trivia.) But I actually learned in his class, learned both facts and ideas that are with me to this day, which is a lot more than I can say about any other of my history classes.
Therefore it is not surprising that the Russian invasion of Georgia made me think of Mr. Balk. If I were in his class today I know he'd be making me keep a diary of the event. He'd force me to turn my eyes from the Olympic glories and pay attention to an event that may turn out to be as significant as Germany's pre-World War II acquisition of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.
John C. Wright's post about his discussion with a utopian communist awakened memories of my own encounters with people who look back with affection to the time of the 1960s and 70s. It's probably good, in general, that human beings tend to forget the sorrows of the past and remember it with a golden tinge, but when it's the sufferings of others, rather than our own, that we ignore, we are in danger of making grievous mistakes.
No age (nor philosophy) has a monopoly on evil, and I'm the first to admit both that my own life was largely insulated from the pain of that time and that some good things came from it, but the era was one of selfishness, incivility, and disastrous policies unequalled in my (admittedly limited) experience. Worse, it was the spawning-ground for much future harm.
Perhaps if more people remembered those decades with suspicion, rather than admiration, the present age wouldn't be as likely as it threatens to repeat them.Mike Thomas, an Orlando Sentinel columnist, has had a special place in our hearts ever since he interviewed Heather for a magazine article about her summer camp experiences. That I often disagree with his opinions in no way keeps me from appreciating his intelligence and writing skills.
His recent column, The Sea Is Coming, makes the excellent point that, whatever we do or don't do about global warming, or global cooling, we in Florida are fighting a losing battle against natural forces. Florida's coastline comes and goes, advances and retreats, and the worst thing we can do is to cover it with lots of big, expensive buildings. The second worst is to encourage that overgrowth, as we do, with government-subsidized property insurance—considered necessary because real insurance companies know how foolish it is to build one's house upon the sand while standing in a hurricane's path.Mike also takes the time to explain to younger generations why some of us older folks refuse to take too seriously all the global warming hysteria. We've lived long enough to see theories come and theories go, and hear the cry of "Wolf! Wolf!" once too often. That doesn't stop me from being in favor of fuel-efficient cars, public transit, and non-motorized transportation, along with recyling, sustainable agriculture, water conservation, and other ways to make our envionmental impact more beneficial than harmful. But my opinions and actions in these matters are more in spite of the hype than because of it.
[I]n 1975, Newsweek ran a story warning climate change could cause famines and political unrest. This was based on growing scientific evidence Earth was cooling. There even was a proposal to keep the polar ice cap from expanding by covering it with black soot.
Mike's article was on my "possible blog fodder" list for a while, but Mallard Fillmore's comic of yesterday pushed it to the top of the list.
Sophie Scholl: The Final Days is a simply made but powerful German film (with English subtitles) about a young woman arrested for treason after distributing some anti-Nazi leaflets. Don't expect a happy ending; the setting is Nazi Germany, where happy endings were few. Nonetheless I recommend the movie highly. Such depictions of goodness and heroism are rare—much less without resorting to graphic violence or sentimentalism.
Four things struck me in particular:
Sophie's courage, while lamentably rare, was of an everyday kind. She is no saint, no Mother Teresa, no doer of grand deeds. Initially, she seems less like a serious member of an underground resistance movement and more like a young college activist with no serious understanding of the dangers of the game she is playing. Indeed, as the scenario works out, she is often dazed, as if she can't believe what is happening. Yet this is where her courage shines: she is calmly, grimly, and articulately faithful to her beliefs. Whether or not Sophie Scholl's actions made a bit of difference in ending the Nazi insanity is debatable; what is clear is that her kind of heroism is within reach of everyone, and comes not from being especially saintly, but from character established and nourished over the years, resulting in a well-ingrained habit of doing the right thing despite the cost.
The horror that was Nazi Germany did not happen overnight. Ordinary people, attempting to live ordinary lives—working, playing, learning, raising families—found themselves gradually entrapped by a system which multiplied minor evils into great obscenities, rewarded playground bullies with power and authority, and convinced normal folks that compromise and complicity were necessary for survival.
One reviewer (I don't remember who deserves the credit, or the blame) noted that Sophie Scholl: Die letzten Tage is a German film, and remarked with pleasure that it was good to see Germany dealing with its darker history. I'm not so sure. It's awfully easy to repent of other people's sins. Sophie Scholl is now a hero in Germany, especially among young people. From the Wikipedia article: [I]n 2003, Germans were invited by ZDF Television to participate in a nation-wide competition to choose the top ten most important Germans of all time. Voters under the age of 40 helped catapult Sophie and her brother Hans Scholl into fourth place, winning over Bach, Goethe, Gutenberg, Bismarck, Willy Brandt and Albert Einstein. If the votes of young viewers alone had been counted, Sophie and Hans Scholl would have be[en] ranked first. No one under 40 could have participated in the Nazi terrors, and it's quite unlikely that their parents did. Repentance is a grand thing, but it's important not to let our horror at a past regime distract us from similar evils, extant or potential, in our present lives.
Without negating one bit of the evil that Hitler perpetrated, it's hard not to detect a bit of racism in our treatment of Nazi Germany. The 20th century alone is filled with insane dictators and horrific blood baths: Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu.... You can add plenty more to the list, yet Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust are put forth again and again as the ultimate evil. It is almost as if we look at Asians, Africans, and even Eastern Europeans and expect them to be uncivilized...but Germany? How could such horrors arise in Western Europe? I know, it doesn't take much knowledge of European history to find plenty of evil in the West—which is why it smacks of racism to give Hitler such prominence.
Perhaps one reason we are so shaken by Nazi Germany is that much of the harm that was done was within the law. The purpose and the glory of the law is to protect the people; when ideologues use it instead as a weapon against a country's own citizens, we are right to be frightened.
I don't recall the era of the 1960s with fondness; it wasn't all bad, but it was a messy, unkind time that accelerated our culture's decline in the areas of civility and decent behavior. However, there must be more of the 60s in my make-up than I thought: I'm finding good reasons to distrust The Man. :)
Just as the National Education Association adamantly opposes home education, the American Medical Association, unnerved, perhaps, by Ricki Lake's popular home birth movie, The Business of Being Born, has taken direct aim at home birth.* Reaction against yet one more threat to personal freedom has come from across the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right. Congratulations to the AMA for provoking agreement between pro-choice and pro-life groups.
Naturally one would expect professional associations for doctors (and teachers, and plumbers for that matter) to fear and oppose anything that threatens to take even a small amount of business away from their members. This conflict of interest, however, does make it difficult to believe that the driving motivation for their actions is altruistic. They would do better, I think, to consider the advice of wise Gamaliel to the Sanhedrin (Acts 5:12-39) when they threatened to kill Peter and the other apostles who were disrupting Jerusalem (and the Sanhedrin's business) with their stories about Jesus:
Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.
*If you follow this link to the U.S. News and World Report article, some of you will be particularly interested to note the first comment.
In considering the Supreme Court's nullification of Louisiana's law that allows a death sentence for one convicted of raping a child, I asked, Shouldn't the question before the Court be, "Is there anything in the Constitution of the United States that prohibits the State of Louisiana from imposing this sentence?"
The Court's subsequent decision on the District of Columbia's ban on individual ownership of handguns addressed the issue in just that way: Is there anything in the Constitution that prohibits the city from imposing such a law? "Yes," they concluded— although the vote was shockingly close. The Second Amendment confers a right to gun ownership that this law attempts to take away. I applaud the decision, not because I like the idea of a gun in the hand of every irresponsible idiot, but because it was the right answer to the right question. If our society has diverged so much from our origins that the "right of the people to keep and bear arms" is no longer tenable, we, the people of the United States, have the right and power to take it away via a new Constitutional amendment. The Court's job is to examine the law in light of the Constitution as it stands
I have not taken the time to read the entire, lengthy decision, but even a cursory glance shows how critical to sound decision-making is a good understanding of not only law, but also history, grammar, linguistics, and above all logic.
