All I Want for Christmas …

             All I Want for Christmas …

              Published in Marietta Daily Journal Nov. 27, 2016

            Sometimes it’s hard and not even right to be conciliatory.  When American colleges remove the American flag from their campuses, asserting that the flag is “a symbol of ostracism,” it isn’t the time to be conciliatory.

            Similarly, moral relativism is a viewpoint that should be opposed and defeated.  Sometimes there is a hill on which to die, a battle to be fought and won.  At times there should be no calls for unity, only victory.

            Today there are many differences among Americans, however, that aren’t this stark.  When they aren’t, we should and must give serious thought to unity.

            For the sake of unity, one thing I want for Christmas is for every city, town, and hamlet in the nation to hold a dance up and down Main Street early in the New Year.  No showing off, just fellow citizens engaging in two or three hours of pure joy, the joy of community and national unity.

Billed as a unity or friendship dance, it should be akin to a polka, a square dance, line dancing, or any kind that’s not sensual.  As if I know what those three types of dance really are.  In the home I grew up in, all kinds of dancing except square dancing were frowned upon.  We joked that the reason we Baptists opposed drinking and gambling was that they might lead to dancing. 

I say the dance should be on the same day throughout the nation and should be sponsored by the nation’s mayors.  The dancing itself should be led by people who love people, love dancing, and love crowds.

We should be encouraged to bring with us a friend of a political persuasion different from our own, but especially a friend or neighbor of a different race.

Now you see where I’m headed.  From Little House on the Prairie days, on into the 1950’s, Americans were united by a common struggle, eking out a living.  There was far more racial unity than most people today could imagine, in spite of segregation.  Stubborn soil, a depression, and two world wars had an equalizing effect.  We were poor together.

But urbanization and technology are doing us in.  Our houses have become our enclaves.  After a day’s work, we close our doors and watch television, thus entering into the darkest of wastelands.  There we get a warped picture of the world we live in, from television drama as well as from so called news.  There we see racial tension everywhere even though we have worked happily all day with colleagues and friends of a different race.   Twenty-four-hours-a-day news, of course, isn’t news.  It is stress-inducing re-hash that desensitizes all of us. That’s why we must have a nation-wide dance.

  I won’t be dancing, because I can’t.  But I can clap and holler as I watch fellow citizens set aside their differences for a few hours.  I’ll also do any of the dirty work a mayor or any other organizer asks me to do.

So let’s dance.

Another thing I want for Christmas is for churches in every community in America to plan at least three inter-racial worship services, one per quarter, in 2017.  Imagine what it would be like – the exhilaration, the emotion, the fun – for whites, blacks, and browns, to worship God in spirit and in truth, knowing that that old albatross called race is being transcended. 

Interracial friendships would be built and business relationships forged.  If the family that prays together stays together, why wouldn’t it be true of a community?  Every weekend, 40% of Americans go to churches and synagogues, enough to bring peace to chaos if that 40% has unity on their minds.  America needs more integration.  

So let’s worship – together.

I’m willing to take the following action.  I will email my new friend and philosophical polar opposite, author and columnist Kevin Foley, and schedule another coffee time.  I’ll even cave on the demand I gave him when we last talked.  I demanded that since our first meeting was at Starbucks, our next one would have to be at Chick-fil-A.

Believe me, dear reader.  If Mr. Foley and I can be civil with each other, world peace is a distinct possibility.

Public schools are no longer the leveler of our differences or the glue of our culture.  So what is the glue?  It should be freedom and our Constitution that fosters freedom.

Not any more. Because unity takes more than a document.  Neighborly love doesn’t come from a vacuum, but from a context.  That context must be built.  That’s why we had better find some ways to unify.  A nation can’t last too long when its people cannot talk, laugh, dance, and worship – together.

Roger Hines

11/23/16.

Too Many Trophies, Too Many Smiley Faces, and a Changed Nation

                   Too Many Trophies, Too Many Smiley Faces, 

                               and a Changed Nation

                  Published in Marietta Daily Journal Nov. 20, 2016

            Who among us doesn’t need affirmation?  Affirmation?  The very question reveals how far we have come in our need for praise.

            Consider the following names and ask yourself if these leaders/changers needed affirmation: Lincoln, Mark Twain, FDR, George Patton, Winston Churchill, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Billy Graham, Elvis Presley, Steve Jobs …

            The list is endless.  Do we seriously think that people who have changed the world worried about whether or not they would be affirmed?  OK, Elvis did ask his mother at one point early in his career, “Mama, do you think I’m obscene?”  Apparently, the criticism of his much swiveling – so new to the entertainment scene – reached him, but it didn’t stop his altering style.  He kept swiveling, but also blessed us with “How Great Thou Art” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

            Lincoln could be melancholy, though not from lack of affirmation, but from the weight of his office.  That weight led him to remark, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”  That’s how millions of Americans feel about abortion.

            Mark Twain was considered a literary renegade because he spelled words the way people pronounced them.  Unfazed by the rules of English, he brightened the lives of readers on at least three continents.  FDR and Reagan?  Those two cheery men were going to be happy, affirmed or not.  Mother Teresa, Thatcher, Billy Graham, and Steve Jobs?  Focused people like these aren’t thinking about affirmation. 

            Patton and Churchill?  These two didn’t need anybody’s trophies or smiley faces either.

            But today’s children, teens, and college students do need them.  Why?  Because that’s what we’ve handed them for decades.  We have trained them well to seek and to need affirmation.  Not all of them, but enough to fill the streets with “protestors” who need “safe space,” who can’t seem to grow up or to understand that “free” means somebody besides them pays for it.  Who don’t know that peaceful transfer of power after an election is one of the chief distinctives of democratic America.

            Unearned affirmation and self-esteem emphasis have produced bad fruit.  That fruit is one nation under therapy, a nation of people who are not as tough as our parents and grandparents were.  No wonder.  We’ve swallowed all the books that push affirmation instead of accomplishment.  That’s why we award “participation.”

            Everything has a history, and the Great Age of Coddling in which we find ourselves is no different.  I sensed this age easing in as far back as 1970.  Just five years into teaching, and at a well respected high school, I could tell that educational priorities were shifting.  A social-psychological agenda was displacing the time honored knowledge-based agenda.  At faculty meetings, conferences, and in educational literature it was clear a new day was dawning, a day in which learning was taking a back seat to “the learner.”

            Some things in the shift, such as more help for slow learners, were good, but learning decreased and “the learner,” with all his “needs,” became education’s central purpose.  Even so, in every class I’ve ever taught it’s knowledge that excites students.  Introspection depresses.  Students need far less affirmation than knowledge and character development.  Knowledge and character point students upward and outward.  Excessive affirmation points inward to the self.  

One mark of the Great Age of Coddling is the demise of substance.  Recently on a popular Christian radio station, I suffered through a song with 12 “Wo-ee-wo-ee-oh’s” before anything of fact or argument was given.  Mid-song, there were 2 “wo-ee-wo-ee-oh’s,” and at the end of the song, 10 “wo-ee-wo-ee-oh’s” as the song mercifully faded away.  Little content, but affirming sounds and feelings, I reckon.

            Just as so much contemporary music is low on words and high on rhythm, so are the actions of anti-Trump protestors void of idea.  Despite a national election that turned politics-as-usual on its head, college students are merely chanting vulgarities and personal attacks.  No lucid expression of their purpose; just “Adolf Trump,” “Racist Trump,” and a refusal to acknowledge the unambiguous results of a stunning election. 

            Inauguration Day may not be pretty.  Pretty or not, it will be the beginning of a four-year conflict between President Trump and his protestors who will enjoy the support of the media.  For eight years President Reagan endured the same.  For eight years President Obama, the media’s darling, had smooth sailing.

            Pampered college youths have made it clear that they want satisfaction and that they deserve it.  They’re special.  Don’t you know that?

           

Roger Hines

11/16/16

Flirting With Socialism

                          Flirting With Socialism

               Plublished in Marietta Daily Journal Nov. 13, 2016

            Maybe it came from watching (and helping) my father as he struggled to produce crops for “the other man.”  Maybe it was from reading so much Southern fiction that described the harsh realities of sharecropping and poverty.  Or perhaps it was the perplexing attitude of my father who seemed to respect all the men for whom he labored, always loving the labor.

            Whatever it was, my youthful years produced a deep interest in “economic justice,” a term I now eschew.

            Because of excellent teachers in a small southern town high school, I was introduced to Karl Marx in the 10^th grade.  Cotton was king then, and although my father had stopped raising cotton, he and I still “chopped” and picked cotton for neighboring landowners.  Securing and reading a copy of Marx’s “Das Kapital,” I found myself conflicted.  I knew what capitalism was and how it had built America; however, Marx began to get inside my 15-year-old head.  He made me feel sorry for my father.

            Secretively I began to feel a measure of disdain for the wealthy men for whom my father worked, even though they were good men.  How could they expect my father to work so hard in their fields, woods, pastures, and sawmills?  Yes, my father’s problem and society’s problem was capitalism and the tenant farmer system.

            Had not Marx asserted that “exploitation belongs to the nature of capitalism which in turn creates inequality”?  Did he not argue that only government intervention would improve the life of the poor?  And just why in 1959, a full century after “Das Kapital,” were we still living under such exploitation?  In the preface to his treatise, Marx wrote, “I do not draw the figure of the capitalist or the landowner in a rosy light.”  This Marx guy was winning me over.

            Please remember I was only 15.  Most 15-year-olds were and are malleable.  What they read, whom they listen to, and whom they trust shapes their world view.

            It’s scary to think about it now, but the writings of Marx and other socialists were shaping me.  The landowners my father worked for were the oppressors; my father and I were the oppressed.  Those landowners should have shared their wealth, and the government should have come to the aid of us, the working poor.

            Several counter influences rescued me from becoming a doctrinaire socialist. While I brooded over socialist writings, the following influences, thankfully, perched on my shoulder, tweeting ideas contrary to Marx’s: a teacher, an atheist, a columnist, my brothers and sisters, and my father also, whose lot it was that drove me to entertain socialism in the first place.

            The teacher, Margaret Richardson, laid out clearly in Government/Economics the distinction between capitalism and socialism and the path’s end of each.  The atheist, Ayn Rand, who had escaped socialist Russia for America, wrote fiction and nonfiction that laid socialism bare.  She had lived under it.  (Most anti-statists are not atheists, but at least Rand rejected government as God, unlike many socialists.)  The columnist, William F. Buckley, with his acerbic yet humorous pen, made me wonder how I could ever have been swayed by socialism.  My brothers and sisters, all 16 of them, were living joyous lives.  Blessed with few material things, they smiled, laughed, and worked hard, “waiting for the light.”  (They all found it. They all have plenty of food, clothes, a roof, nice vehicles, and are still smiling and laughing.)

            The counter influence that most affected my philosophical conflict was my father himself.  A reader of newspapers and magazines, he understood history and politics.  In retrospect, I see that he accepted his station in life nobly and heroically. Rather than embrace an outlook that others in his situation were embracing and with which I was flirting, he chose to be grateful for the “oppressors” for whom he worked.  If he did not (because he could not?) teach his children to dream, he could and did teach them to work hard, to be responsible, and to “finish up before heading to the house.”

            Don’t think that there were no socialist-leaning professors at the University of Southern Mississippi during the sixties.  There were and there are.  But those I sat under found me already inoculated and cured.

            In today’s America, the free market and free enterprise itself are still “forever on the scaffold,” as the poet puts it.  If my father were alive he would shake his head at the regulatory, nanny state tentacles of government that now reach into businesses, schools, and homes.    

            He would also applaud the election of a city boy billionaire who seemingly understands “poor man economics” better than the experienced politicians.

Roger Hines

11/9/16   

The Different Faces of Politics

                       The Different Faces of Politics

                     Published in Marietta Daily Journal Nov. 6, 2016 

            As the saying goes, “Politics is downstream from culture.”  Indeed it is.  Our politics is us.  Those in office are those we placed in office.  In a democratic society, political leaders are definitely a reflection of the people.

            Politics is also two-faced.  One face is that of winks and ulterior motives.  The other face is that of selfless, sincere people who enter politics to make things better.

            Most dictionaries define politics as the science of government, but we know better.  Politics has never been a science, though it could be called an art.  True science deals with or works from immutable laws.  Few if any things in government are immutable or “nailed down.”  Governmental policy can change in a whiff.  Political “convictions” can change even faster.

            Rather than viewing politics as having to do with governing, we best define it, honestly, as the practice of seeking and holding on to public office.

            For a large number of citizens, the very word “politics” conjures negative thoughts.  More than ever, Americans are viewing politics as dirty.  Dirt is dirty too, but it produces, directly or indirectly, every bite of food that we put into our mouths.  Perhaps this comparison is not apt, however.  Dirt can be cultivated, fertilized, and prepared for producing good food, and is seldom resistant to the preparation.  The heart of the politician is not always so receptive to such preparation mixture.

            Nobody should think that dirty politics is of recent vintage.  Read of the presidential campaigns – almost any of them – that stretch back to Adams and Jefferson.  Re-read what was said about Andrew Jackson’s wife Rachel.  And don’t forget Richard Nixon’s VP and attack dog, Spiro Agnew, who called Nixon’s media critics “nattering nabobs of negativism.”  To me, Agnew’s alliterative words were not only amusing, but true.

            One ancient writing reads, “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth.”  That means don’t talk ugly.  Surely it also refers to lying.  Politics has always been a land in which corrupt communication abounds, whether lies, insinuation, or slander.  Why? Because some office seekers and office holders are willing to employ it to win or keep office.  They enjoy orbiting around the powerful so much that corrupt communication is no big deal. 

            Politics is also the land of weasel words.  Consider the concoction, “reproductive freedom.”  It actually means abortion.  It is the most ironic and deceptive weasel word of all.  It references reproduction when its objective is the halting of reproduction.  “Reproductive freedom” actually means the freedom and legality to get rid of a totally helpless, unborn baby.

            There are others.  “Undocumented worker” happens to be a technically accurate expression, but it is meant to tone down the more precise term, “illegal immigrant.”  In that sense, it is deceptive.  Everybody knows that “revenue enhancements” are taxes and that “to evolve” means to change one’s mind or position purely to get votes.

            But consider the other face of politics, that of men and women in politics in whom there is no guile.  They are far too few.   One of their prototypes is William Wilberforce, the passionate British evangelical and member of Parliament who effectively ended slavery in the British Empire.

            Wilberforce did so with the support of several fellow Parliament members who openly lived immoral lives.  Because of a deep sense of justice, Wilberforce was willing to lay aside his disdain for the vile lives of his colleagues in Parliament and work with them in order to alleviate the horrible suffering of African slaves.  It is doubtful that the British Empire would have ended slavery had not Wilberforce worked with people whose behavior he detested.  Strange bedfellows, we call it.

            Politics is one thing.  Statesmanship and effective statecraft are another.  For those who find themselves in a conundrum regarding for whom to vote for President, Wilberforce’s own conundrum is instructive.  He studied his realistic options, chose sides, and took action.  Britain and the world were made better because of it.

             Regarding this week’s election, if voters consider Donald Trump vile, they should also consider the words, views, and behavior of Hillary Clinton.  Perhaps our guiding question should be how much government do we want.

            Biographer Eric Metaxas in the Wall Street Journal recently wrote, “We already live in a country where judges force bakers, florists, and photographers to violate their consciences and faith, and Mr. Clinton has zealously ratified this.”

            The time is close.  As Metaxas added, “Not to vote is to vote.”

Roger Hines

11/3/16