Does the West Have a Future?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 12/25/21

            Christmas is here and we should experience it with gusto. Who but the most hard-hearted doesn’t take joy from seeing children made happy or from sensing the general spirit of joy that clings in the air? Such joyous spirit, however, doesn’t last throughout the year. It eventually succumbs to forgetfulness as our thoughts turn to a new year and to hope for a better one.

            The last two years have been challenging for Americans. The coronavirus has been no more disruptive than the nation’s political and cultural divide, a reality that is sometimes necessary. For two years cities have been plundered and the plunderers ignored. Language such as “transforming America” indicates that many citizens simply don’t like America. The right to bear arms is seriously questioned. Science has been politicized. Scientists, formerly objective searchers and researchers for the truth, have become bureaucratic whisperers into the ears of the king. We are tasting tyranny. Thankfully, the discontent of the American worker poses a challenge to the ruling class of both political parties.

            Yes, it’s 1776 all over again. The Tea Party isn’t dead. It’s very alive, infiltrating the body politic under different names. But back up beyond that. It’s 1215 when the very king of England was forced to sign the Magna Carta. Even before then, everywhere man yearned to be free, as in ancient Rome where Cicero passionately defended the rights of free men under law. Alas, back before Rome, the stalwart Greek, Pericles (a Trump-like figure in that he was a man of wealth who energized the working class) advanced democracy and the participation of commoners.

            The Greeks were the first westerners. One would have found no glimmers of self-rule in ancient Babylon, or China, or Russia. What America’s founders gave us was the full flower from a root, a stalk, and a bud that grew in Greece, Rome, and Britain. Its soil and nutrition was the Judeo-Christian ethic.

            We call it western civilization, one quite unlike that of the lands east of the Mediterranean.  Most American students study it for the first time in 10^th grade World History. College students study it under the simple title, “Western Civilization.” Fundamentally the values of western civilization have been representative democracy, the worth of the individual, liberty, equality, freedom of thought, capitalism, private ownership, and freedom of religion. One doesn’t typically associate these values with China, Russia, tribal Africa, or the small Southeast Asia nations.

            How do these values fare today?  “Western Civilization” was once a required course in virtually every American university. This requirement ended by 2010 when it became voluntary or was replaced with a course called “World Civilization.” And what was wrong with teaching the history and values held by western nations? According to Jesse Jackson what was wrong was the “Euro-centric, white male-domination” which these values led to. In 1988 at Stanford University, Jackson led a demonstration around the campus with students yelling, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s gotta go.” Caving to Jackson, Stanford opted for “multiculturalism,” catapulting the term to prominence and replacing “Western Civilization” with “Culture, Ideas, and Values.” Call it the birth of cancel culture.

            The Twentieth Century was the American Century. America led the world economically and militarily. Her confidence was wrought of victory in two world wars and an ever growing economy. However, since 2010, the Trumpian interlude notwithstanding, that confidence and leadership have waned. How could it not when political and corporate leaders defend every crazy notion that comes along (cultural Marxism, “equity,” transgenderism, guaranteed income, unabated globalism)? How could it not when America’s military is chased from Afghanistan by ruffians?  How can universities yield knowledgeable, productive citizens while yielding to students’ demands for a warm, mothering environment?

            Western civilization’s greatest achievement has not been art, philosophy, or even scientific advancement. The marvel of the West, particularly America, has been the preservation of individual liberty and respect for the common man. The deplorable common man knows something is wrong when a guy says he is a girl, or when parents become the target of the FBI for speaking out about what their children are being taught.

            Cicero wrote, “Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever.”  The Bible states, “For lack of knowledge the people perish.” If western civilization dies, America dies. But there’s hope. Over half of the nation’s governors are conservative Republicans, most of whom are speaking out boldly for localism and common sense. The 2022 election is looking better every day for conservatives.

 It wasn’t debt forgiveness, guaranteed incomes or one nation under therapy that our founders sought. It was freedom wrung from bold risk, ruggedness, and common sense, qualities that must be reclaimed and reclaimed fast.

 

Roger Hines

12/23/21

           

           

           

 

                                A Tale of Two Christmases

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 12/18/21

            On Christmas morning of 1965 my father, my younger brother and I followed my mother’s casket out of a small, rural church in Mississippi. The crisp Christmas Day air was a welcome relief to our tear-streaked hot cheeks. The sunshine as well was a Godsend.

            I was 21, my brother Carlton, 18. Our mother was 65. We thought she was so old. Actually, age 65 truly was older then than it is now, especially for a country woman aged by Southern summer suns and over 45 years of childbearing and childrearing. It wasn’t children and hard work that did her in, however. It was kidney stones.

            For years kidney stones had plagued her. Several times a year Dr. Baker Austin would come from town with his gawky medical bag to administer a shot to ease the pain from the stones.

            Our mother’s death had not been sudden. Shortly after Thanksgiving the urologist at St. Dominic’s Hospital in Jackson had told us that her kidneys were embedded with stones and that the resulting uremia was quite advanced. The closer we got to Christmas, the more hopeless her condition became. It was one of those long good-byes.

I arrived home from college to be with her at the hospital the week before Christmas. All of my older 15 brothers and sisters had families of their own, but those living nearby had taken care of her.  

            Death is one thing; dying is another. During the week of her observable dying, my mind raced back repeatedly to my childhood. As a small child I was a big worrier. Knowing my mother was so much older than the mothers of my elementary school classmates (their mothers were the age of my older sisters), I was afraid my mother would die before I grew up. The doctor’s visits to our house reinforced my fear, often driving me to the vast Bienville National Forest behind our house to cry privately.

            Please understand, but at some level I think our mother willed her death. Despite her characteristic strength and joy of life, she expressed no such bravado as “I’m gonna conquer this.” In fact, at the height of one of her worst attacks when Carlton and I were the only children still at home, she looked at us with a forced smile and said quietly,” If God will let me live until my baby boys get grown, I’ll be ready to go.”

            Her “baby boys” were now grown. With my eyes glued to her casket, I began to grieve anew, complaining to God with those oft-raised “why” questions we’ve all felt, heard, or expressed. Within a couple of hours, however, two things not only alleviated but obliterated my grief.

            The first thing was the cool Christmas Day air. As it patted my cheek it seemed to say, “Your mother was strong and you can be too.”  The second thing was the Christmas Day noon meal (“dinner”) our family shared. Our laughter and storytelling, so characteristic of all our gatherings, were not lessened by the loss of our mother. Our joy amidst sorrow was no indication of anyone’s super-spirituality. Rather, it was a testimony to the power of what our parents and pastors had pointed to in the Bible: “Oh Death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?”

            On another early Christmas morning, this time in Georgia in 1981, I drove from my home in Kennesaw to Northside Hospital, not because of a death but because of a birth. Our new, second son and last child, Reagan, had been born on Christmas Eve. Driving south on I-75 and atop I-285, I saw only four vehicles. Ah, Christmas does slow us down, I mused.

            A week later Reagan came home in a Northside Hospital Christmas stocking to join his siblings, Christy, Wendy, and Jeff, his countenance as fresh and happy as his grandmother’s was right up to the week of her dying. Reagan made this Christmas a Thanksgiving as well.

            Since even Herod the Great couldn’t suppress Christmas, I pray that no reader of these musings will ever allow life’s setbacks or man’s evil to suppress it either. The Christmas message is still the same: God put on an earth suit. Wherever this message has gone schools, hospitals, and orphanages have followed as have peace and joy to the world.

            As it turned out, my own two favorite Christmases weren’t so different after all. They both ended in peace and joy. Ever wondered, along with Elvis Pressley, “Why can’t every day be like Christmas?” We know that every day should be. The Christmas message says they can be.

            Merry Christmas! And peace to you amid any sorrow.

 

Roger Hines

December 15, 2021

 

                                  The Dying Villager

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 12/4/21

            In 1976 at the Republican national convention Barry Goldwater said of Gerald Ford’s opponent for the presidency, “Jimmy Carter’s future is Lyndon Johnson’s past.” This past week Stacy Abrams announced her intentions of running against Brian Kemp for governor of Georgia. For the same reasons – policies – that Goldwater was referring to, we can be sure that Stacy Abrams’ future is Joe Biden’s present.

            And what is Biden’s present? It too is Lyndon Johnson’s past. To Biden’s present and Abram’s future, add steroids. Never has our nation moved so swiftly from representative democracy to executive and bureaucratic power, from local government to the administrative state, and from capitalism to giveaway programs as it has in 2021. Hem and haw and call it what you will but what we’re talking about is socialism. What’s “in” is the village; what’s being forgotten is the villager. What’s “in” is diversity; what’s passé is freedom of speech for those who don’t embrace diversity as defined by progressive politicians, the university, Hollywood, the media, and of all things, corporations and the military. Remember General Milley?

            The waltz being performed by diversity troops and socialist true believers is a sad and dangerous one. Both groups of dancers know where their waltz leads. Many villagers apparently do not. When diversity was first mentioned, it generally referred to the effort to hire more minorities. This noble goal was soon overshadowed by the demand that we embrace trillions in giveaways, so-called equity, transgenderism, homosexuality, and critical race theory. Diversity has become tyrannical. “Think as I think,” it yells. Diversity’s claims should remind us of the old saw, “An open mind is like an open mouth. It accepts everything, rejects nothing, and becomes an open sewer.”

            Don’t be close minded. Be inclusive. Or so the progressive argument goes. Diversity today would have us to accept the welfare state and call it “democratic socialism,” an utter contradiction of terms.

            What LBJ, Biden, and Abrams all have in common is their acceptance of big government and socialism. Socialism is legalized theft. Like capitalism it is an economic system, but unlike capitalism it takes by force. It tells producers that they must surrender a particular portion of what they have produced or built so that it reaches the hands of those who have done neither.

            Socialism places the individual beneath the society, that is, the nation, the village. It imbues the village with a power which it denies the villager. To the socialist the village is supreme, thus the cry “It takes a village.” Not a family, understand, but a village. Hillary Clinton’s book of this title is about the role of government, not the strengthening of families.  The village giveth and it taketh away. And of course parents must turn their children over to the village school and then get out of the way. What do parents know?

            It’s ironic that so many socialists are wealthy. One wonders if Bernie Sanders was embarrassed when his recent bestselling book made him a millionaire. Did he give away an amount equal to what he claims we should give in taxes? Why has Congress always opted for humongous ideas like “the Great Society” and “Build Back Better” that leave villagers in the lurch, not really helping the poor, not really advancing anything. LBJ’s Headstart sounded wonderful but somebody please assess where the family stands today and tell us why youths destroyed cities for four solid months last year. How goes the village today?  What good have the billions flowing from village headquarters done?

             To fully understand socialism is to first understand the socialist. The socialist, whether sincere or a wolf in sheep’s clothing, is always a do-gooder or is playing the role of do-gooder. The insincere ones are desirous of the power socialism brings them. Does anyone think that Castro, Lenin, Mao, Hitler, or Mussolini were not socialists? Do we not remember that the UK was sinking until Lady Thatcher emerged?  Political tyranny doesn’t thrive where capitalism thrives. It thrives where tyrants seized power or where, in a formerly capitalistic country, citizens sell their souls and plop their rear-ends down to wait for checks, thus creating a labor shortage and a far less functional and happy village.

            Death is one thing. Dying is another. Many villagers around us are dying, some socially because they choose to, opting for checks in the mail rather than honorable, invigorating labor. Others are dying economically because their businesses were closed down or because the children of socialism smashed in and destroyed them.

 And that’s why it matters who will be America’s next president and Georgia’s next governor.

 

Roger Hines

12/2/21