Morality, Money, and a North Star … Every Nation’s Need

    Morality, Money, and a North Star … Every Nation’s Need

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 11/11/18

            If I had to choose between my children and grandchildren being good or smart, I would choose good.  Smarts can be acquired; good is a condition of the heart.  Today the world needs far more good than it does smarts.

            People and nations are now such close neighbors that what affects one of us affects all of us.  In America we speak of “the common good.”  We are better known than any other nation for being Good Samaritans to each other. 

            Whether or not our political divide grows wider and begins to test friendships and community spirit, there are moral principles that will ever stand, even if we don’t stand by them.

            If your house is on fire, do you care what political party or religious persuasion your assisting neighbor clings to?  No, you care only about the size of his water bucket and how fast he can run with it.  Therein, somewhere, lies a moral principle, one to which Americans have adhered since our woodsy New England days and later our little houses on the barren prairie. Americans help each other.

            Americans don’t believe in killing the infidel or in the divine right of kings.  Neither the religious teachings that sprung from the lower Middle East nor the centuries-old monarchy/royalty of Europe define us.  It’s America and the American ethic that still remains a beacon to the world.

            Morality is merely the adherence to particular principles.  Worth of the individual is a principle, one that monarchy, communism, and socialism oppose.  Marital fidelity is a principle, one that America has let slide.  Like the old slide rule and the level, which crooked walls don’t like, principles are unchanging goal posts that tyrants and lusty men don’t like.

            “Don’t steal” is a principle, and I shall never forget my father’s contribution to my embracing it.  After a supper table discussion of a local theft, he drably remarked, “Well, even if you’re hungry, starve to death and go to heaven, but don’t ever steal.”  While some might smirk at such absolutism, I was inspired by it.

            Morality matters.  It certainly beats tooth and claw, and has kept many a family and nation together.  Without the “civil” in civilization, there would be no civilization.  Moral principles foster civilization.  They are the do or die for the home and the nation.

            Money matters also, if you desire a roof and some food.  From the beginning of time to the late 1700s every nation was poverty-ridden, with only the thinnest level of wealth and wealthy people at the top.  That changed with the rise of capitalism.  How strange that a growing number of Americans could oppose a system that took hold not yet 300 years ago and began to increase wealth and food at every level. How is it that Henry Ford and even Mitt Romney are scorned as “capitalists,” and why are today’s capitalists so inept in defending capitalism?  What makes it hard to defend a system that has acquired a roof and food and even a yacht for some?

            Again, a principle is needed.  Sociologist Charles Murray, who after taking the stage was forbidden by students to speak at the University of Michigan and Middlebury College, provides one: “Capitalism is the economic expression of liberty.”  Some, of course, would reject this principle, but if they know history at all, they could never replace the word capitalism with socialism.  Socialism equalizes.  Free enterprise does not.  It rewards work.  Socialism is supposedly compassionate.  If so, it is coerced compassion which is no compassion at all.  It is government taking from Peter to give to Paul, even if Peter does the producing and Paul sits at home.

            Business moguls like Andrew Carnegie believed that government has a role in capitalism, but they didn’t favor stymieing or killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

            Whatever the system, there must be a method for perpetuating it.  America’s method is participatory, representative democracy arrived at through elections.  Many opponents of Donald Trump still refuse to acknowledge his election, claiming he is “not legitimate.”  If Republicans refused to acknowledge the Democratic takeover of the U.S. House (they wouldn’t) and called the new House membership “not legitimate,” it would be hypocritical for Democrats to criticize them.

            If Americans start rejecting the outcome of elections, we will be taking the civil out of civilization. An enduring moral order, a North Star, is necessary for American civilization to continue.  One can find a North Star path in an ancient book called “The Exodus” (Section 20), and in a famous 1^st century sermon called “The Sermon on the Mount.”  Check them out.

Roger Hines

11/7/18

Tom-A-ta, Tom-MAH-ta ... Patriot, Nationalist … What’s in a Word?

Tom-A-ta, Tom-MAH-ta ...  Patriot, Nationalist … What’s in a          Word?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 11/4/18

            Oh, the stir recently created by a simple, easy to understand word.  Words are the vehicles on which our thoughts ride.  The rub comes when someone takes exception to our choice of vehicles.

            Boldly – how else would he do it? – President Trump at his Houston, TX rally used the word “nationalist.”  That unknowing, uncaring fellow even declared, “I am a nationalist.”

            Well, so am I.  And so is anybody else “who is devoted to his or her nation” (Webster’s New World Dictionary), “who advocates for national independence” (The Merriam-Webster 2004 edition) and “who is patriotic, favoring an independent nation” (my smart phone).

            And how did the chattering class respond?  They threw onto the President’s verbal vehicle a load of fake definitions.  “Nationalist,” one media star pouted, means “white nationalist.”  Another self-appointed lexicographer insisted that the word means “nativist,” and “nativist” is an ethno-centric expression that no President should use.

            Of course the President was using the word “nationalist” in the context of and in opposition to the word “globalist.”  The semantic path he was taking he had taken before.  During his first year in office he stated, “I’m the president of a nation, not of the world.”

            It’s true that “nationalist” has become a pejorative term, that is, one that has moved at least partially from respect to disrespect.  Consider the word rhetoric which means “the art of oratory.”  Today in common usage it has come to mean “hot air” (“The politician was merely engaging in rhetoric,” we say), but not so in formal usage.  So is it with “nationalist.”  The word long pre-dated Hitler, had a noble meaning, and the chattering class knows it.  Even so, CNN and MSNBC used the word’s pejorative meaning as a weapon to associate the President with Hitler. 

So it goes.  Mind readers are everywhere these days, claiming the occult power to read our minds and hearts.

            Please.  Family, tribe, nation, globe.  This sociological arrangement has been with us from Day One.  Free sovereign nations with borders are a good idea, partly because they are typically a coalition of tribes.  I don’t believe I would like living in a white nation.  My black friends are too big a joy to be without.

             Is American liberalism, which in times past fostered lofty ideals (integration, voting rights) so exhausted that it fusses about vocabulary words and searches for the President’s every imagined slight?  Martin Luther King, Andy Young and other icons of the 1960s dressed up in coats and ties to march and lead the way for a cause that was just.  Their dignity and eloquent, precise words contributed to their success. 

            Contrast these fearless, rhetorically skilled men to the leftist protestors of today who dress like the homeless, scream in anger, and hurl vulgar words that do nothing but turn ordinary people off.  To these people and the progressive elites behind them, nationalism and populism have become unacceptable words. 

            In a span of 25 years the focus of liberals has shifted from the working class to the themes of multiculturalism and globalism.  The constituency whose support they could always count on is now the deplorables they can’t corral.  This working class is now the “populists,” another term that repulses and frightens political elites.  These populists, of course, are also nationalists, and as Salena Zeto puts it in her highly acclaimed book, “The Great Revolt,” these Trump-supporting populists/nationalists are “a culture craving respect.”     

            This Tuesday, the nationalists/populists will know how much political power they hold.  Will Joe Lunchbox prevail in the midterm election?  Or will victory go to the media and to Target, Delta, Google, Dick’s Sporting Goods and other corporatists who have turned their backs on regular folks, siding with the cultural left instead of their customer base?

            Regular folks rejoice that Donald Trump has flustered the previously untouched news media, driving them to distraction.  They crave action on several fronts, particularly the growth of the administrative state with its bureaucrats and unelected executive branch agencies that actually run the country.  They also desire proper response to migrant mania.  If this makes them “nationalists,” they proudly wear the label.

            Trump has won the hearts of the Democrats’ base, creating a blue collar revolution.  If his personal negatives, which are many, don’t prevent a midterm victory, we can assume that the word “nationalist” wasn’t a bad choice of words after all, and that normal, hardworking folks, the demographic that keeps the nation humming, are back in play.

Roger Hines

10/31/18