Living in Never-never Land

            Living in Never-never Land

                           Published in Marietta Daily Journal June 26, 2016

One by one they have come.  Clothed in self-righteousness they have expressed concern for their country while no doubt thinking about their own hides.  Senators, representatives, governors, mayors, and even conservative political commentators apparently think we all want to know for whom they “cannot” and will not vote. 

            Posing as moralists and patriots, they tell us why they must obey their consciences and withhold their support from their party’s nominee.  With pained facial expressions they assert that the nominee is destroying his adopted party and that the world will end the moment he is inaugurated.  Therefore, they could never vote for him.

            Essentially, the Nevers are arguing that the nation can continue business as usual: ignoring the national debt, Islamic terrorism, squishy borders, oppressive regulations, anemic economic growth, and shrinkage of the middle class.  To them, a known enemy is better than a brash friend.

            Yes, the “Never” people are saying never to their party nominee because he speaks bluntly, has never held office, refuses to buckle, and refuses to play the game.  (That’s not refreshing?)  The game is kicking the can down the road and talking middle class issues on the campaign trail but joining the buddy club, once elected.

            The Nevers claim their party’s nominee would foolishly walk away from bargaining with other nations, forgetting that Ronald Reagan walked away from the Russians at Reykjavik and won the day.  They claim that being president isn’t the same as being a real estate deal maker, forgetting that Thomas Jefferson brokered a massive piece of real estate referred to as the Louisiana Purchase and that President James K. Polk didn’t do poorly in acquiring the entire southwest.

            The Nevers simply don’t believe that business experience would be better than the continuation of community organizing.  They must not know or don’t care that while a senior at Wellesley College, Hillary Clinton wrote her thesis on another community organizer, Saul Alinsky, the author of “Rules for Radicals.”  According to William McGurn of the Wall Street Journal, Clinton continued to correspond with Alinsky while in law school at Yale.

            I am a Christian, but I would not have refused to vote for Thomas Jefferson because he wasn’t one.  The record (letters, public speeches) shows that Jefferson boldly defended religious freedom, including that of Christians.  Not an atheist, but a deist, Jefferson talked and walked the talk of a true believer in freedom of thought.

            Today’s Nevers would probably have withheld their support of the imperfect Jefferson.  But Jefferson’s mortal enemy Alexander Hamilton didn’t.  Given the choice of Jefferson or Aaron Burr, Hamilton chose his lesser nemesis.  Unlike today’s “Never” moralists, Hamilton accepted the fact that sometimes we are handed two stark choices.  We can either flee them, pretending there is a third option or we can, like Hamilton – the founder of America’s financial system – face facts.

            Nevers are also afraid of the nominee’s masculinity that presents such a contrast to today’s androgyny.  To them his resoluteness and forthrightness are scary.  This is not only quite a pity; it’s a recent development.  Nobody ever wondered or had to figure out what Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, or Ronald Reagan was saying.  To the Nevers, their nominee is too “street.”  He’s too close to all of those who didn’t go to college.  Lord knows we don’t need working people picking our president.

            The “Nevers” are big proponents of political consultants.  They dislike the fact that their party’s nominee won’t listen to consultants, even though consultants have never run for office themselves. Many of the “Nevers” are part of the consultant class.

            The Nevers are sore losers.  They are political elitists deeply offended that an outsider has crashed their party.  So long have they enjoyed their perch that they are in shock that the nominee has eviscerated 16 other candidates, winning the hearts and support of many an average Joe.  They don’t realize that our average Joe’s long ago grew tired of consultants, talking points, polls, tele-prompters, promises, and blah, blah, blah.

            As the saying goes, Grandma was slow but Grandma was old.  The Nevers are slow to accept a political reality.  For almost a year they have been saying that the nominee’s next speech, next debate, next comment will do him in.  Now it’s the big one, the presidential election that will surely bring him down.  That could be the scenario if the nominee’s supporters waver.

             So far, however, supporters are standing like a stone wall, including hundreds of non-self-righteous evangelical leaders who met with the nominee this week.

            More and more, the Nevers are looking just plain politically inept.

Roger Hines

6/22/16

Public Schools on Trial

                Public Schools on Trial

                                                Published in Marietta Daily Journal June 19, 2016

I’m trying hard to hold on, but it’s getting more difficult every year.

 So many insanities are promoted, if not required.   An insider and defender for 5 decades, I’m moving closer to abandoning my post.  It’s simply getting too difficult to defend public schools.

            The reason I hold on is I admire the good people who are doing their best to make things work, personal friends like state school superintendent Richard Woods and state school board member from Cobb County, Scott Johnson.

            I’m holding on because of state senator Lindsey Tippins who, as chairman of the Senate Education Committee, can be counted on to propose practical measures.  My great friend, school board member Randy Scamihorn helps me hold on.  Like Woods and Tippins, he has little use for rose-colored glasses and faces education and the world realistically.  The same is true of school board chairman Susan Thayer, of my unforgettable former student and school board member David Chastain, and of the respected Marietta superintendent, Emily Lembeck.

            All of these educational leaders have tough minds, good hearts, and steady hands.  Add to their names all of our tireless classroom teachers and you have an impressive list of troops.

            Why, then, are public schools so besieged?  Why has one critic described public education as “a sinking ship that won’t sink or sail either”?   A little history of my discouragement follows.

            Until 1965 when the federal government became deeply involved in education, it could be said that America did not have an educational system.  Such was not and is not constitutional.  America had 50 educational systems.  Effective localism ruled the day until federal aid to education and Jimmy Carter’s new Department of Education changed everything.

            Initially the federal department was a paper tiger, a mere money-dispensing mechanism like its predecessor, Health, Education and Welfare.  Eventually it began flexing its muscles, leading to more and more federal involvement.  Now, education is Bureaucratic City.  Between parent/child/teacher and the feds, there are at least 10 governmental entities with fingers in the pie.  Local school board decisions are driven by federal funding and regulations to such degree that school boards are, in effect, agents of the federal government.

            Recall President Bush and No Child Left Behind (with its testing craze) and President Obama’s directive that all schools must allow boys in the girls’ restroom (one of the insanities referenced above). 

            Compare this picture to the private school scene that doesn’t have to worry – yet – about the long arm of the Justice Department, constant curriculum change, restroom issues, suffocating testing requirements, and presidential directives that violate parents’ beliefs and common sense.  Compare it to the much safer homeschooling scene which is growing 7 times faster than public school enrollment.

            All I need to teach your child English is your child.  Teachers of other subjects would need some hardware, but you get my point that complication breeds complication.  Learning isn’t aided by federal regulations.  It’s hindered.    

  Schools have become the hub station for societal transformers.  Obama’s restroom directive is but a start.  The so called LGBT community is emboldened and will be knocking on the schoolhouse door again.

The human dimension of learning decreases yearly.  Testing and the overuse of technology are dehumanizing everything.  Preach technology all you want, but its misuse/overuse is diminishing students’ eye ball to eye ball communication skills. Screens and the absence of human interaction at school are taking their toll.  The word zombies comes to mind.

Since 2014 the federal Department of Education has been investigating school districts to sue or withhold federal funds wherever there is no “racial equality” in punishment for misconduct.  Too many black students and too few white students are being suspended, say the feds.  This potentially affects even good performing schools like Cobb County’s.

Despite the creation beliefs of Isaac Newton, former NASA head Wernher von Braun and over 500 Ph.D. science professors in America, evolutionary theory is the dogma in science classrooms.  This violates your beliefs?  Tough.

The task assigned to schools is absolutely daunting.  Teachers are having to parent instead of teach.  No wonder, when 71% of black children are born out of wedlock and 29% of white children.   We now have a culture too far out of control for teachers to teach its children.

Unless my friends can pull me back fast, I’m ready to say let those 10 governmental entities have their schools and do what they want.  There are still some of us who desire standards in manners, language, and conduct.  Dare I add dress?  Private schools and home schoolers attend to these matters.  

 Public education’s monopoly must end.  Its faltering status is no fault of teachers.  It’s the fault of absentee parents, a coarsening culture, and Bureaucratic City for whom teachers work.

Roger Hines

6/15/16            

Driving Ethnicity into the Ground

Driving Ethnicity into the Ground          

                            Published in Marietta Daily Journal June 12, 2016                                 

“For ethnos shall rise against ethnos,” the King James scholars should have written.  Not “nation against nation.”  Nations as we have known them since the 1700s were not yet fully formed, certainly not widespread, when the King James scholars completed their Bible translation in 1611.  But “kingdoms,” and “dukedoms,” ever so small, certainly were; therefore “kingdom against kingdom” is more precise and true.

            National boundaries as we know them today are fairly newfangled.  Historically, they have been political conveniences, drawn by the victors of wars and not always honored by the losers.  Ethnicity, though, like gender (yes, gender), is one of life’s realities.  You cannot change it.

            Ethnos against ethnos is exactly what best describes so many of the world’s conflicts and wars today.  When President Clinton began to speak of sending troops to the Balkans to advance stability and restrain the ethnic cleansing occurring there, my Italian born sister-in-law who grew up in nearby Trieste, remarked in her broken English, “He no help matters there.  They be fighting no matter what.”

            Think about it.  For what do most peoples of the world feel the most loyalty, a geographical area with a certain name or the ethnic or language group to which they belong? (Consider the increasing presence of Mexican flags throughout the country.)  We know what we should do, no matter where we live.  We should love our neighbor no matter who he or she is, but the truth is many people don’t love their neighbor.  Hence our present conflicted world.

            Language is at once the most unifying and dis-unifying cultural distinction that exists.   We herald so-called multiculturalism, denying that across the globe it has been the disruption of cultural groups and the forcing of other cultures on them that has caused conflict after conflict.  We thought that well-drawn Yugoslavia was stable with its various ethnic groups and indeed it was under the heel of Communist dictator Marshall Tito.  But when Communism fell, we saw that it was Tito’s brute force, not brotherly love, that held the concocted “nation” together.  Absent that brute force, ethnic loyalties emerged, leading to the disunity over which Mr. Clinton attempted to preside.

            Closer to home, we often forget the “Quebec problem,” the French-speaking Canadian province with its Separatist Party which more than once has brought Quebec to the brink of secession.  Yes, it is French that makes a Frenchman a Frenchman, not to mention French food, French dress, and other customs.  Shakespeare argued it was English that makes an Englishman an Englishman.  So it goes.  Name one corner of the world where multiculturalism (though pressed in many cases by good people with good intentions) has worked.  Seems that borders, language, and culture matter after all.

 Other things beside language differences prompt and promote disunity.  In American political discourse we’re calling it identity politics.  News reporters and analysts project a candidate’s potential success by how well he or she will do with blacks, whites, Hispanics, women, age groups, soccer moms, and I’m sure, dog owners.  The media is forever dividing people, even as office seekers try to unite them.

The glorious truth is that America has come closer than any other nation in bringing people of different cultures together.  The reasons are obvious: freedom and an ethic that says “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Several times every week of my life I see people of different races and nationalities being kind and cordial to each other: at church, at the gas pump, in line at the grocery store, and elsewhere.  At home in front of the television I see the opposite.  I’m tempted to call a television reporter and ask him or her to follow me around for just two days.

But television doesn’t want to show that.  Television wants and delivers conflict.  Recently when Donald Trump said he could not get a fair trial from a judge with a Mexican heritage, he was only echoing what Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor said at her confirmation hearing: that her cultural heritage would indeed influence her decision making.  How could it not in some measure?

Mr. Trump brought attention to our inherent racism and for it was called a racist.  Racism and ethnic politics have been the province of the Democratic Party, not Republicans.  Bill Clinton’s hero and mentor, Senator William Fulbright, was not a Republican but a Democratic segregationist.  Abraham Lincoln was not a Democrat, but a slave-emancipating Republican.

And are class references any less indecorous than ethnic ones?  Recall President Obama’s cautioning us about those who “cling to guns and religion.”

If we’re going to forgive Justice Sotomayor and President Obama for driving ethnicity into the ground, we’ve got to forgive Mr. Trump.

Roger Hines

6/8/16    

A Few Questions for Consideration

                 A Few Questions for Consideration

                                                

                        Published in Marietta Daily Journal June 5, 2016

                                                

            The following questions are neither posed nor framed to evoke any particular response.  They are merely questions I have asked myself over the past few weeks.

            If temperament is to be an issue in the presidential race, who is more arrogant, Donald Trump or the conservative intellectuals, columnists, and talking heads who are faulting Trump for not being “intellectual” enough?

            Who is more vulgar, Donald Trump or Bill Maher on whose television show the anti-Trump conservatives often appear and yuck it up with the best of the show’s vulgarians?

            Who better understands and genuinely cares more about the vast middle class, billionaire Donald Trump or the “movement conservatives” who, while in control of the Congress and the White House, extended the scope of government, and who, while in control of Congress only, demurred and lost battle after battle to President Obama?

            Who speaks plainer, unpretentious, non-trite English, Donald Trump or the career politicians who can’t open their mouths without saying “disingenuous,” “resonates,” “participatory,” “you know what,” “at the end of the day,” and “Let me be clear”?

            Who appears more authentic and trustworthy, Hillary Clinton’s defenders or Mike Huckaby, Ben Carson, Ed Rollins, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Phyllis Schlafly, and Dr. Robert Jeffries?

            Who sounds more serious about unifying the Republican Party, Trump supporters former Senator Scott Brown and Congressman Duncan Hunter or Speaker Ryan who speaks daily of party unity but did not even endorse his party’s nominee until last week?

            Whose positions and rhetoric have been more faithful to conservative Republican orthodoxy, Trump supporter Senator Jeff Sessions or Senators McCain, Corker, Graham, Coats, and Flake?

            If both of this election year’s presidential nominees are highly disliked, how did they reach the status of nominee?  If Trump and Clinton are our only actual choices, which one is a known whose political philosophy I disagree with and which is the risk, chance, or possibility that my philosophy of government will be followed?

            Which of the nominees is Wall Street’s darling?  Is either Trump or Hillary diametrically opposed to Bernie Sanders’ socialism?  Who has the better understanding of and deeper appreciation for capitalism?  Have the two candidates read Adam Smith or Milton Friedman?  Which departments of the federal government is each willing to get rid of? 

            What are the thoughts of each nominee on where same-sex marriage will take us?  To polygamy?  If not, why not or how not?  To acceptable incestuous relationships?  What is each nominee’s full disclosure of their thinking on sexual mores?  On faithfulness in marriage and the importance of the home?  How do they view the Christian minister who must preach against homosexuality because his Bible forbids it?  Will they oppose him, try to shut him down or jail him? 

            Wherein each nominee has changed his or her mind on an issue, why the change and when did it occur?  What was the chief impetus for the change?

            Does either nominee think it is ok to allow men to go into women’s restrooms?  Or ok to let something so obscure and trumped up as “transgender rights” become a cause célèbre for the federal government?  Which one will always be looking for a new “right” to champion?

            Is Trump or Clinton hesitant to use the expression “states’ rights”?  Can they deliver at least a two-minute monologue on what the U.S. Constitution has to say about the role of the states in our government, particularly what the Constitution grants to the states?

            Do Trump and Clinton believe there is such a thing as western civilization? Do they believe that its most distinctive marks are opposition to monarchy, advancement of human freedom, and the worth of the individual?  Is their belief in “tolerance” and “diversity” absolute?  Is their belief in multiculturalism so multi that the center will not hold?  Do they believe that there are those who are leeching off of America instead of legally becoming Americans and contributing to America?

            Which nominee will rein in the IRS?  Which will acknowledge that Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and other Christian groups have built almost half of our hospitals and many of our finest universities? Which will protect America’s pulpits?

            How does each nominee feel about abortion?  What is their definition of abortion?

            Finally, which candidate will cease sending our troops to fight in prolonged wars unless the goal is to win?  Which one believes the essential purpose of the Constitution was to limit government?

            I, for one, have answered these questions.  I am now resolute regarding for whom I can vote.  Also, it’s clear to me that any third party candidate will only aid either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton.

Roger Hines

5/31/16