The Rise of the American ISIS: Cultural Cleansing Gone Wild

The Rise of the American ISIS: Cultural Cleansing Gone Wild

               Published in Marietta Daily Journal May 28, 2017

            There he dangled from a crane, dishonored in mid-air, the distinguished Southern gentleman, Robert E. Lee.  On Friday, May 19, the city of New Orleans removed the statue of Lee from Liberty Place on Lee Circle. 

 New Orleans has besmirched a historical figure whose 20-foot tall statue has stood since 1884.  Lee was no Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.  He was a gentle, honored military man, a product of his own times as we all are.  A West Point graduate, he also served as West Point’s Superintendent.  But he was a Confederate, and although respected by Union General Grant and President Lincoln as well, he had to go.

            That’s the mood of the cleansers and revisionist historians these days.  Deny history, delete memory, destroy artifacts and statues if you don’t like whom they tell of.

            Lincoln was disappointed that Lee would not accept his offer to lead the Union army, but never questioned the sincerity or the reason for Lee’s refusal.  Grant admired Lee as well.  Practically all biographies of Grant and Lee describe their conversations at Appomattox as cordial and respectful.

             Lee inherited slaves but freed them after his father’s death and before the Emancipation Proclamation.  Grant owned slaves too and kept a personal slave.  Shall our cultural cleansers, then, go to Point Pleasant, Ohio and smash the Grant museum?  Or to D.C. and put the crane to the magnificent Grant Memorial? If you’ve noticed, cultural cleansing is always selective.

            Incidentally, under dark of night New Orleans also removed the statues of Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard.  Davis I have studied extensively.  He was not an evil man.  Ask any major historian about Davis, a U.S. Senator, Secretary of War, and distinguished soldier in the Mexican War.

            On my desk in my home sit two small flags extending from the same small black stand.  One is the American flag to which I pledge total allegiance and which reminds me daily that representative democracy is still an experiment. 

The other is the Confederate flag.  It reminds me of ancestors, mere “boys” at the time, none of whom ever owned a slave, never personally defended slavery, but fought for the region they lived in and loved.  I doubt that young Rebs felt passionately either way about slavery.  Many of them were dirt poor and viewed rich landowners and the plantation class as their oppressors.

On my bookshelf lined with biographies of our presidents is imminent historian William Cooper’s biography of Jefferson Davis.  It’s where it belongs chronologically, right between Lincoln and Andrew Johnson.  Davis was my great-grandfather’s president for only a short time, but a president still, as surely as was Lincoln and all the other presidents under whom my great-grandfather lived.  Facts are facts.

            If my Confederate flag and my Davis biography placement make me a racist, why did I as a 23 year old teacher volunteer to teach at a black school to help advance integration in Meridian, Mississippi?  Why do I admire Martin Luther King?  If my home state hasn’t made great strides in race, why does Mississippi have more black elected public officials today than any other state in the nation? As was the case with the election of President Obama, those officials had to get a large percentage of the white vote to get elected.

            The word “racist” is the label for anyone who doesn’t agree with the labelers.  It has also led to ISIS-like cultural cleansing that defies belief. 

            Part of ISIS strategy has been the removal or destruction of artifacts, libraries, and statues that celebrate history ISIS doesn’t like.  This strategy is exactly the same as that of those who are bent on ridding the nation of all things Confederate.

Of course New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu delivered the fashionable, obligatory apology.   As the Lee statue was being removed, Landrieu apologized for slavery. This business of apologizing for something you never did is absolutely self-righteous and self-serving.

            New Orleans has always been known for its diversity, but not so much now.  Turns out there is some diversity the city won’t allow.

            The same is true for Henry County, GA whose commission recently required the removal of Confederate flags in a county Civil War Museum!   Not to compare the stars and bars to the swastika, but don’t the cleansers know that some Holocaust museums display the swastika for educational purposes?

            With apologies to Edmund Burke, cultural cleansing will continue as long as good people do nothing.  And to any and all memory erasers, my own response is NEVER!

Roger Hines

5/24/17                                                          

Remembering Barry: Trump’s Prototype

                    Remembering Barry: Trump’s Prototype

               Published in Marietta Daily Journal May 21, 2017

            Congressional Republicans are now hiding under their desks.  How I wish they were either old enough or courageous enough to recall and imitate the man who foreshadowed our current president.

            That man was 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater who drew the wrath of his political foes with these words: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

            Twenty years old at the time, I still had to read the famous line several times to take it in.  It was a beautifully balanced and clear sentence.  It made a claim that was thought-provoking and honored the words, “liberty” and “justice,” words which though treasured in America, are not so beloved in every corner of the earth.

            The wrath the line evoked came primarily from U.S. Senator Goldwater’s opposing party,  but scared many Republicans as well.  Have we noticed that Democrats don’t scare too easily but that Republicans do?  Republicans, unlike the ’64 GOP presidential candidate and our current president, are still scared of the media.  Why else would they slink from a president who was duly elected and who still holds the hearts of those who voted for him?

            Barry Goldwater was a Trump-like figure.  Like Trump he was not impressed by power.  His satisfaction came from saying what he truly believed.  No doubt it was his word “extremism” that raised shackles.  America in 1964 was very much under the influence of supposedly (I repeat, supposedly) extremist organizations.  Most of these organizations tilted to the extreme right.  We know so because the only media big boys in town at the time – ABC, CBS, and NBC – said so.

            The John Birch Society was supposedly extremist.  All Republican Texas billionaires were extremist as well. William F. Buckley and his fellow New England conservatives were.  Goldwater’s supporters were. The South was.  And on and on it went.  The ACLU, of course, was not extremist.  Nor were Americans for Democratic Action, Students for a Democratic Society, Jane Fonda, nor – get this! – the rising Black Panthers. Again, the news anchors and reporters of the three New York-based networks told us so.

Get this as well! Neither was Nikita Khrushchev extremist.  Can you believe there was a time from 1917 (the year of Russia’s Communist Revolution) to 2017 (the year of you-know-who-and-what) when America’s “news” elites defended all things Russian?  Since November 8, 2016, however, Russia has become the mortal enemy of America’s “news” elites.

As an ordinary but lifelong political observer, this is the most revealing thing about the news industry I have ever seen.  It was wonderful for Nixon to visit Mao Zedong, exhilarating for Carter to physically embrace Brezhnev, and unbearably joyful for Obama to love on the Communist Castro brothers, but it’s sheer ignorance of geopolitics and a mortal danger for Mr. Trump to even go near Putin.  Methinks the media doth show its own bias.  And ignorance of history.  And hypocrisy.

  For 100 years America’s news commentariat felt Russia was just hunky-dory.  But in the last six months Russia has become a pariah.  Like Goldwater and Reagan, like Trump.  The media’s apoplexy toward Trump is exactly what Goldwater and Reagan endured.  Anyone who cannot see media hypocrisy and ideology in this picture is probably watching too much television, the medium of “Just in” and constant “Media Alerts.”

             Goldwater, Trump’s personality forerunner,  carried only 6 states in 1964.  But  Goldwater’s loss birthed Ronald Reagan’s victory.  In “the speech” that defended Goldwater, Reagan, forsaking his typical cheer, showed that anger has its place and that a politician can stand for something. 

After his loss, Goldwater labored on in the Senate, never the camera-loving moderate or closet Democrat like his successor John McCain.  Libertarian on the social issues, he took aim at Rev. Jerry Falwell (another supposedly right wing extremist), calling him an ugly name.  Falwell’s reply was, “Senator Goldwater can never call me anything that will diminish my appreciation for what he has done for America.”

            Goldwater’s famous line, of course, was intentional overstatement.  It was akin to, if not a re-cast of Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.”

            And guess who picked nits and faulted Goldwater for his use of the word “extremism.”  Yep, ABC/CBS/NBC, those yesteryear bulwarks of fairness and objectivity. Supposedly.

            There is probably no storm that our new president won’t survive, even when timid, disloyal Republicans fall away.  He is too much a populist hero, hated by a shocked, embarrassed media, but loved by the people.

            Beneath the blue sky and soil of Arizona, Barry Goldwater is smiling. He admired leaders who, like himself, were fearless.

Roger Hines

5/17/17

What’s Next for the Poor and the Rich as Well?

            What’s Next for the Poor and the Rich as Well?

             Published in Marietta Daily Journal May 14, 2016

            The good editor of the Marietta Daily Journal would call me in if I submitted a column that contained only 6 words.  If I could persuade him to accept one such, however, I would title it “The MDJ Melvin Fein Column of May 8, 2017.”  My column would only read, “Amen, and Thank You, Professor Fein.”

 Apparently the professor and I both believe that the perpetuation of a culture’s values always hinges on the next generation’s acceptance and transmission of those values.  Perhaps, having spent decades amongst youth, we both know that even older teenagers and younger 20-somethings are still malleable and still shaped by influences of all stripes, influences that often undermine the very values that hold us together.

            Whatever the reason, Professor Fein’s column, “The War on Poverty Revisited,” rang every bell and lit every fire in my social consciousness.  It highlighted the failure of government programs, particularly the War on Poverty, to alleviate poverty.  It asserted that certain dynamics in American culture today such as divorce, dependency, and a diminished respect for marriage are weakening the nation.

              A divorce here and there might not affect the nation as a whole, but a divorce rate that hovers at 50 to 52 % certainly will and has.  A divorce is a broken home, no matter how “amicable” may have been the break.  In great numbers, broken homes rupture the nation, leading to sad children, angry teenagers, and aimless young adults.

            Think about it.  If half of us are divorced, half of our homes (with children) could well be fatherless, motherless, or in a setting of blended families.  We may think that children who have known nothing else get used to it.  I say they do not.  They bear scars.  They know there has been a rupture.  Apparently there is planted in their hearts an inherent understanding of family, the need for family, and even family structure.  I could not count the number of teens who, having been raised by divorced parents, have said to me, “I will never divorce.”  Some have proclaimed, “I will never marry.”

            Dr. Fein addressed unwed parenthood, rightly stating it is rife.  He dubs the War on Poverty as “misguided compassion” that has “provided the financial resources for people to have children without cooperating with a spouse.”

            It was President Lyndon Baines Johnson who initiated the War on Poverty.  Johnson did not die poor, but neither did he at all grow up rich.  His FDR-like programs were aimed at the poor.  If Georgia’s esteemed U.S. Senator Richard Russell could defend Johnson’s sincerity of purpose and genuine interest in the poor, I will grant Johnson the same.  On Russell’s word, I will accept that Johnson wasn’t just seeking votes.

            The problem with his War on Poverty, however, was that in addressing material poverty, it increased spiritual poverty.  Poverty of spirit is far more serious than lack of material goods.  When “benefits” from the government make even one citizen lazy or make that citizen feel entitled, government has done its people a disservice.

            None other than Dolly Parton (now reportedly worth $500 million) and Loretta Lynn have testified that in their childhood poverty there was no lack of love and family cohesion.  They were neither spiritually poor nor bereft of faith, nor of – as Professor Fein puts it – “the personal confidence to compete for success or to make independent decisions.”

            Ah!  Competition.  Independence.  This too is something government programs do not foster.  Neither does government ever concern itself with fostering self-restraint or discovering one’s gifts and putting them to use.  “Equality” is more important to government.

            Like the two country icons, Parton and Lynn, and millions of other Americans, I can testify that material and spiritual poverty are two different things.  Holes in one’s shoes, lack of indoor plumbing, and shortage of money cannot kill one’s spirit when one is also taught to do your best, to never steal, to esteem others higher than yourself, and to obey the magistrates.

            What’s next for the poor is continued poverty unless they are taught that there are different kinds of poverty.  What’s next for the rich and for the political class is societal chaos – peasants marching toward the palace with pitchforks – unless the rich and our government also learn something, namely that “misguided compassion” and government largess only creates more peasants.

            The American family stands at a precipice.  I fear its future far more than any nation’s bombs.  And I pray for a renaissance and a revival, as well as for more academicians like the good professor.

Roger Hines

5/10/17

“Scientific Freedom”: How the Left Politicizes Weather, Sexuality, and Babies

    “Scientific Freedom”: How the Left Politicizes Weather, Sexuality, and Babies

           Published in Marietta Daily Journal May 7, 2017

            This year’s Earth Day, April 22, brought us the usual parades and protests as well as a new expression.  Around the globe, advocates fanned out in support of increased spending for science (ok) and “scientific freedom” (not ok).

            By “scientific freedom,” the protestors meant freedom from “ideological interference,” that is, freedom from the views and influence of those who deny or question global warming.

            Well, true science is one thing; varying opinions about unsettled science are another.  Today, global warming is considered settled science by those who marched on Earth Day and by many on the left of the political/cultural center.  Question global warming and you are injecting your ideology into science.

              The same is true for the transgender issue. Resist transgender orthodoxy and you are living in the past where we were all defined as male or female.  You need to get with the new information.  Of course, there is no new information, just new ideology from the cultural left.  The same is true of the abortion issue.  If you resist the pro-abortion position, you are denying a woman’s right to do with her body what she chooses.  The unborn baby part of it doesn’t matter.  That’s just your ideology.

            Let’s deal with weather “science” first.  In 1975 the front cover of the April 28^th issue of Newsweek Magazine bore a picture of a vast iceberg with the heading, “The Coming Ice Age.”  The lead article was titled “The Cooling World.”  It stated that a survey completed in 1974 by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had revealed a drop of half a degree in average ground temperature in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968.

            The cause? Human beings. At least human beings and their aerosols.  This cooling, we were warned (one-half a degree in 23 years?), would lead to short growing seasons which in turn would lead to reduced food supply. Calamity, calamity!

            That was then.  This is now.  Newsweek is now defunct.  So is the global cooling gospel.  It came to pass that “men and women of science” debunked all notions of a coming Ice Age and began preaching global warming, though with one similar claim: humans are to blame. Calamity, calamity! One must ask if the predictive power of scientists is reliable since it is ever changing.

            On to sex. Comes now, as recently as March 27, 2017 an issue of Time Magazine (a journal not yet defunct but appearing ill) whose cover bears a picture of a young adult who looks both male and female.  The heading reads, “Beyond He or She.”  The lead article inside is titled “A New Identity.”  It states that “a growing number of young people are moving beyond the idea that we live in a world where sexuality and gender take only two forms.

            “Beyond” male and female?  Yes.  On college campuses across the country T-shirts are proliferating with such messages as “Gender is dead,” “No gender,” and “My gender is fluid.”

Note the illogic of the “scientific freedom” enthusiasts.  They dub global warming deniers as anti-science while denying the reality of gender and the viability of an unborn baby in the womb. 

In a recently published book titled “The Unholy Trinity,” author Matt Walsh argues that life, marriage and gender are the three fronts on which the ideological left has set its sights.  To the left, Walsh asserts, life, marriage, and gender are by no means sacred.  Nor are they settled realities, either. 

Thanks to Barack Obama, the definition of marriage is now changed.  Although homosexual marriage is a contradiction of terms, it is now legal.  Marriage, by definition, is between a man and a woman.  “Traditional” has nothing to do with it.  Marriage is simply reality.  How so?  Because only nature’s man-woman relationship can produce children and properly teach them to live and function well in the larger society.  (Think absent fathers.)  This isn’t tradition. It is human science, the natural order.  “Scientific freedom” is a weasel expression for rebellion against nature.

And where is transgenderism leading?  To denial of human science and to sexual confusion for children who hear about it at school and on television.  While dysmorphia – delusions about one’s body – is a sorrowful disorder, changing public policy (marriage), vocabulary (male, female), and definitions (science) to accommodate it is preposterous.

We will get little help from political leaders on this.  They view such “social issues” as an annoyance.  Even though minority groups like the LGBT community are bending culture to their will, most of our leaders just don’t care.

Cultural conservatives best remember that whoever wins the culture wars (and establishes definitions) gets the prize: our children.

Roger Hines

5/3/17

Graduate Marietta – a Public Education Success Story

       Graduate Marietta – a Public Education Success Story

         Published in Marietta Daily Journal April 30, 2017

            No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.  (John Donne, 1624)

            These words from another century ring truer today than ever.  Playboy turned minister John Donne must be smiling down out on Whitlock Avenue, there where students are taught by example that we’re all in the boat of life together.

Across town at the Marietta Board of Education, community leaders and citizens gathered on April 18 to celebrate success.  The event was a celebration of the first full year of the Graduate Marietta Student Success Center of Marietta High School.  Donne would call it “celebrating the family of man.”

Remarks from state Senators Lindsey Tippins and Michael Rhett as well as state Representative Sam Teasley were affirming.  Senators Judson Hill and Hunter Hill, state school board member Scott Johnson, and Georgia’s former First Lady Marie Barnes were also present. The director of the center, former Marietta High School principal Leigh Colburn, gave an overview of the center’s first year. 

 Graduate Marietta’s mission is to help students stay on track in order to graduate.   The program was birthed by Leigh Colburn, a dynamo of energy and ideas who is driven by a love for Marietta High School students.  No wild-eyed visionary, Colburn was motivated by facts and worked forward from those facts. 

The facts, according to a student survey, were that many students were failing to graduate, not because they couldn’t measure up to academic requirements but because home conditions and family dynamics were literally preventing their success at school.  While serving as principal at MHS, Colburn was charged by the school board and superintendent to create a program that would address the low graduation rate and the social conditions that were contributing to it.

Colburn’s survey further revealed that a large number of students were coming to school from poverty, single-parent homes, and situations of drug abuse, transiency, and mental health issues.  Seeing the magnitude of student needs, Colburn took the bull by the horns.  Resigning from her principal’s position, she molded an idea into a physical reality and became the center’s director.

Graduate Marietta has its own “wing” at the high school.  A walk through it will reveal the good results that can come when school and community work together.  Because of over 50 partners and donors (corporations, churches, service clubs, small businesses, and various organizations of all stripes), the center houses a counseling area, computer labs, a food pantry, ESOL classes for parents, a school supply closet, a tutoring area, and a café.  Because of after school programs, the center provides for a second, later bus route for students who need transportation.

Student testimonies indicate that the center is not taken for granted.  The school’s creative efforts to produce a helpful academic setting are appreciated.  One student wrote, “If I need help, I know someone in the center will help me. Out of all the schools I went to, this one has helped me the most. I don’t feel alone or lost.” 

Attending to social needs has neither altered nor diminished the center’s academic purpose.  During its first year Graduate Marietta has held more than 7,000 tutoring sessions.  Test preparation classes are held three afternoons a week.  The center has hosted 262 students for college recruitment visits and aided 35 students in meeting military recruiters.  The center’s  amount of student assistance would be impossible at the typical school.  Donors, partners, community leaders, volunteers, and a staff of 15 members make it possible.

It was said of the turbulent French Revolution that what was lacking for France was a Washington and a Jefferson, because passion without intelligence produces chaos.  Leigh Colburn’s passion is matched with intelligence and practical wisdom.  “Our vision must always be for the next generation,” she stated.

The splintering of the American family has placed untold burdens and unfair blame on the nation’s educators.  Charged with teaching subject matter, they must do so amidst conditions which sociologist Charles Murray described best in his book, “Coming Apart.”

Colburn and company, however, are refusing to curse the darkness.  Their task and their joy is to light candles of action and push back the darkness. 

For the four decades I’ve lived in Cobb County, its “county seat,” (Marietta) has remained a vibrant city.  I say it’s largely because of good leadership, particularly that of people like Leigh Colburn who believe that no man is an island and that a sense of community is what all of us, especially youth, need so badly.

Check out Graduate Marietta soon.

Roger Hines

4/26/17