Divisions and Turn-arounds … Who’da Thoughta?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 1/16/22

            “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another …”

            So began the declaring, not the document just yet, but the verbal agreeing among our founders. That declaring led 13 separate geographical groups of British subjects to separate from powerful Britain and begin their political/governmental life anew with each other.

            One marvels at their courage. Knowing of the power of the British army (had the Redcoats not been a presence on the streets of New England’s cities?), the founders dared to believe that ragtag farmers, small merchants, and they themselves could amass an army and defeat the strongest power of the western world.

            Not all colonists desired separation. Not all of the delegates to our constitutional convention agreed at first on our constitution. That lion of liberty Patrick Henry said he “smelt a rat” and insisted it be amended. Thank him and Madison for the Bill of Rights which is always one Congressional election away from possible dissolution.

            Only one idea led to the written Declaration and its fulfilling document, the Constitution. That idea was the belief that people could govern themselves and did not need kings, queens, viceroys, and potentates to direct their lives, presumably including their personal healthcare. Indeed it was kings and such that for centuries had prevented freedom.

            But separation, division, and re-direction were all necessary for the start-up of political freedom. The same is true today. Sometimes division is not only good but necessary. Today in American politics separations are occurring that at one time in our national life would have been un-thinkable. Re-alignments are occurring.

            How could they not? For the last 13 months our federal government has been behaving like the rulers of old. Just this past week my younger brother informed me that the insurance company he works for had to issue an ultimatum for employees to get vaccinated or be tested weekly and wear a double mask at all times. He was required to give his vaccination card to the HR department to show to OSHA. His company will be fined $10,000 for each employee that is not in compliance. “Never thought government would be doing this to businesses,” he opined.

            OSHA: Occupational Safety and Health Administration. A “bureau.” Government must keep us safe, healthy, and vaccinated, you see. The mischievous Franklin and the solemn Washington would chuckle and then fight the very notion. Talk about unelected bureaucratic power! Consequently, the discord and division throughout the nation today.

            Division Exhibit A: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce – not necessarily your local chamber – deserted the Republican Party in the 2020 election. The national chamber gave higher scores to Democrats on their voting record. Today’s corporate world, instead of attending to business, is pontificating on race, homosexual rights, and “equity.” House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy recently stated, “Big Business is not welcome back if and when Republicans get back in power.” That, dear reader, is a political divide worth noting. Oh, how far the corporate world has drifted from that true Republican Calvin Coolidge who asserted, “The business of America is business.”

            Exhibit B: Traditionally, Republicans have been viewed as the friends of business and Democrats the friend of the common man. Today the common people/ordinary citizens, particularly manual laborers, still support a Republican billionaire. The Democrat Party is no longer the refuge of ordinary citizens but primarily of the intelligentsia, academia, college students, professional leftists, and socialists, a momentous turn-around.

            If politics is downstream from culture, then politics will be noble only when the culture is noble. We look at the smashing and trashing of our cities, at coarsening language, and at governmental overreach and blame it on bad politics. But youthful smashing and trashing springs from fatherlessness; coarse language springs from weakened homes; and governmental overreach springs from a belief system that simply loves governmental largesse.

            The slog which the nation now finds itself in is deeper than politics. It is a mental/spiritual/philosophical state brought on by the abandonment of that great idea of the founders, that is, individual liberty, not bureaucratic rule or executive mandates. We have allowed a virus – more precisely its managers – to ease us further into loss of freedom. We’ve also ceased “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the rectitude of our intentions,” as the closing words of the Declaration state.

            More division and re-alignment are likely. The ’22 and ‘24 elections will reveal whether we prefer the great idea set forth in New England barely two and a half centuries ago or subservience to Big Brother.

Roger Hines

1/11/22

 

 

                                Can Racism Be Cured?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 1/8/22

            Several years ago my wife and I walked to our car from a movie theater, having just viewed “The Help.” The book and movie were Kathryn Stockett‘s true-to-life account of growing up in Jackson, Mississippi in the cultural tradition of domestic Black help, particularly maids. Stockett’s family engaged in the practice that vividly illustrated the unequal world of segregation.

            The movie highlighted the utter subservience of Blacks to Whites and the cruel and silly social distancing that White women, particularly, expected of their Black help. Black maids never ate with their White employer. They set aside the plate and fork they would use so that utensils were never mixed with those of the White family they served. Actually the movie was about class as much as race.

            As soon as my wife and I got inside our car I began to weep. After getting hold of myself I managed 5 words: “That’s exactly how it was.”

             I grew up in Mississippi where segregation was rank.  I watched as Black children and teens walked from the edge of town past my family’s house to a crumbling shack called a school. I knew about the unpaved muddy streets in the “Black section” of town. That too was how it was.

            I cranked my car and drove from the theater toward the street. Just before reaching it I became emotional again and had to pull over. The memories in my pocket would not stay put. Of all things, it took a movie to make them explode.

            Why had these memories not exploded sooner? How could I at age 18 write a column for the college student newspaper titled “A Defense of Legal Segregation”? Why did I move from a sensitive child who understood and abhorred the power structure of segregation to a teenager who was a racist? The answer to these questions is that tradition is strong. Whether good or bad, it clings to us. We honor it and it shapes us. As I left childhood, I began to accept the tradition around me.

            My years of racism were from age 13 to 19. The time was 1958 to 1963. During those years I was not one bit bothered by White men calling grown Black men “Boy,” or by the fact that my brothers and sisters and I weren’t expected to say “Sir” to Black men or “Ma’am” to Black women.

            What I am describing is not “systemic racism,” a horrid expression that almost makes racism excusable. My racism was acquired. Segregation was a social order. I was no victim of a system. I was certainly no “privileged White.” I was an adherent who at the bottom of his heart knew that Blacks were not inferior and that Whites were wrong to employ an evil social order for their own benefit.

            When I was 19 something happened that changed my heart. Guess what. It was a national conference of Southern Baptist youths sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention. Did I say “Southern”? Did I say 1963? At the conference, speakers boldly approached the topic of segregation and race. Preachers and other prominent leaders challenged approximately a thousand youths to examine their hearts and minds regarding “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

            I stood convicted and I confessed. Once again I was a 12-year-old who had not been tainted by an evil tradition. I felt free from the weight of my sin and free to oppose openly the sin I had committed.

            Often when confession is made, forgiveness is needed as well. Wealthy Al Sharpton, a Reverend, has not forgiven. Neither has wealthy Jesse Jackson or wealthy, joyless Joy Reid of MSNBC. I wish they would. I believe they would experience the freedom I and so many others have experienced. They choose to rattle old bones rather than forgive and live. Countless Blacks refute them.

            My freedom led me to teach in an all Black school in my second year of teaching. The faculty at George Washington Carver Jr. High School in Meridian, Mississippi remains one of the delights of my life. Today it’s a supreme joy to live in a neighborhood where Blacks and Whites love and respect each other and to attend a church, Kennesaw First Baptist, where the same is true.

            How things have changed. Today Mississippi has more Blacks per capita and more Black elected officials than any other state in the nation. I’m told that America elected and re-elected a Black president. Someone tell the old line media.

            Last week my wife and I watched the old movie, “Sounder.” Watch it and be thankful that things have changed. Be thankful that we are not any longer a nation of racists.

 

Roger Hines

1/5/22

           

           

           

 

                         London, 1802; America, 2022

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 1/1/22

            Two hundred twenty years ago English poet William Wordsworth, who was by no means a Puritan, took pen in hand and called on the great, deceased Puritan poet, John Milton. “Milton! Thou should’st be living at this hour / England hath need of thee,” Wordsworth wrote.

            In one of his most famous sonnets, “London 1802,” Wordsworth made explicit his distress over conditions in England and all of Europe at the opening of the 19^th century. A lover of France, he was saddened that, unlike the American Revolution, the French Revolution was not successful. Indeed, Napolean was elected Consul for Life in 1802. Wordsworth was grieved by what he considered “England’s betrayal of her heritage of freedom and virtue.”

             Milton is most remembered for his classic epics, “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained.” Knowing of Milton’s high reputation, Wordsworth invoked the famous Puritan to make his point about England’s social, moral, and political climate. Not a religious man, Wordsworth still saw in Milton a strength of character that England needed.

             Patrick Henry and Jefferson and Reagan, thou should’st be living at this hour. America hath need of thee! Like Patrick Henry, I would rather be sick and free than be healthy and not free. Oh, but the Covid “crisis” has not come to such an extreme choice, you say. Yes, it has. Seems to me things are getting fishier and fishier. No matter how many cities are ravaged with violent destruction, no matter if crime statistics have shot through the roof, and no matter if the most powerful nation in the world has fled like a scared rabbit from its enemy, our president and his trusty bureaucrats continue trying to turn our minds to anything but. Even though the covid variants are real, I suspect we all know when the fear-mongering will end: well before the November election.         

Cynicism? Look, 340,000,000 citizens, 814,000 deaths. That’s .0023 % of the population, every death of which is sad beyond measure. It’s true that a pandemic covers the globe, but numbers and words often become weapons in the hands of those who need a weapon to sway people’s minds. Inside the USA, Covid has not brought death to a large number. Stating this cold fact can increase the grief of those who have lost loved ones to Covid, yet facts are facts and life can be made easier when we acknowledge them.  Covid has unnecessarily brought the limitation of freedom. Lost freedom is always difficult to regain. So are devastated livelihoods.

            My own four-week bout with Covid and the two-week wind-down that followed were as awful as the aftermath of open heart surgery five years before: incessant pain, total fatigue, and unfamiliar loneliness. My salvation was a stalwart wife, wondrous doctors and nurses, and the grace of God. I’m thankful to be alive. But my little story is miniscule compared to the many accounts of lost livelihoods and freedoms, lost because a virus has been politicized.  Compare the stats of Florida and Texas to those of New York and New Jersey. Population density differences of the south and north aside, the lockdowns in the north have devastated far more livelihoods than have the more relaxed policies in the south.  The differences between how these two southern states and the two northern states have handled lockdowns is instructive. The condescending, moral superiority of those who criticize non-vaxers is repugnant.

            Which brings us to Henry, Jefferson, and Reagan. As everyone knows, Patrick Henry thundered, “Give me liberty or give me death.” His speeches in the Virginia House of Burgesses and the life he lived show that he meant it. Jefferson said, “Law is often nothing more than the tyrant’s will and is always so when it violates the rights of an individual.” Jefferson abhorred the lingering tyranny in Europe and wished to keep it out of America. Reagan said, “Government is not the solution to our problems; it’s the cause of most of them.” This happy warrior repeated this theme in every speech he delivered.

             “Altar, sword, pen, and fireside,” (the pulpit, the government, the press, the home), wrote Wordsworth, are letting England down. So are our institutions today letting America down. Politicized pulpits, unelected bureaucracy, a sold out press, and weakened homes have rendered the nation “bereft of inward happiness.”

 Intrusive government is bringing America down far, far from the Jeffersonian ideal. We need a second opinion on Covid and its management but we’re not getting it. For instance, the 50,000 plus distinguished signers (doctors, epidemiologists, virologists, citizens) of the Great Barrington Declaration are still being ignored. Something’s fishy. What’s really scary is the acquiescence (and moral superiority) of those who swallow every word Dr. Fauci utters.

Wordsworth, America hath need of thee as well.

Roger Hines

12/23/21