The State, the State, the State

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/28/22

            Statism, not to be confused with statecraft, is typically defined as a political system in which the state has substantial centralized control over social and economic affairs. But that’s a formal dictionary definition. Denotations – dictionary definitions – are one thing, but connotations – the applied and commonly understood definitions – are another.

            Statism is a rather prissy, formal word. It’s also a strong word. Statists, those who believe in big government, don’t usually use it because it is not a weasel word that hides meaning. It clearly means government control. It places the nebulous village above the flesh and blood villagers. Those in America who like government control know that it was not government largesse that built the foundation of the American nation; it was individual liberty and free enterprise. They therefore must sneak their philosophy in and call it democratic socialism or anything other than statism, collectivism, or communism.

To best understand statism, think back to 1917, to Lenin, and to the political system he and others set in motion. After barely 7 decades of forced work camps and not enough groceries, the so-called Union of Soviet Socialist Republics fell. How could it not? It was a forced union, not at all social but autocratic, and as far from being a union of republics as a plan of governance could be.

Statism is the opposite of localism, so of course Lenin and company used the word “Republics” in their new name in order to deceive. Statism’s essence is centralism and the people are never its center. The power-hungry elites running the show are. Government elites aren’t always born into elite families. Stalin wasn’t. Neither was Hitler, Mao, or Castro. But they became elites after gaining power and availing themselves of the booty that comes with political victory. Lyndon Baines Johnson fits into this category as does Joe Biden. Born into either poor or lower middle class families, they clawed their way to political prominence.

Statism is a free man’s enemy. It is bureaucracy gone wild. It is the refuge of those who are either too lazy, too soft, too afraid, or too lacking in confidence and faith to venture out and risk or to work for themselves. They need the safety of the village. Can anyone picture Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, John Kerry, Al Gore, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, or Joe Biden joining a wagon train heading to the uncharted west? Can you see them surviving in a little house on the prairie? 

Yet it was the frontier spirit, the “Go West, young man” calling, the Midwestern ruggedness, the hardworking farmer’s sweat, and the inventor’s trial and error that made Americans different from the many European lands they or their parents left. Had they climbed up onto a covered wagon, Sanders and Warren would have immediately begun to plot regulations regarding how the wagons should be covered. Kerry and Gore would have spent their time wiping trail dust off their pants legs. Obama would have written a pointless treatise on the journey, Biden would have kept asking “Where are we?” and Harris would have chuckled at it all until realizing that they all had actually left for a new place, never to return.

Statism tells us we can be safe and comfortable if we stay with the village and obey its rules and regulations. It claims it can provide us with health care (still a soft, modern, over-promising term, to me), protect us from those mean capitalists, give us free medicine, help us fight against evil employers, and make people stop saying things that hurt our feelings.

Statism is a philosophy. Statists are those who adhere to it. Currently America’s statists are far, far away from the Berkley free speech movement of the ‘60s. Today’s statists believe in canceling speech they don’t agree with and insist that the state do the canceling. Statists blame all horrendous shootings on guns, ignoring the weakened family caused by fatherlessness. Statists like signs that say “Gun free zone,” apparently failing to see that such signs are open invitations to evil people. They clamor to take guns from law-abiding folks who justifiably intend to protect their families from those whom the ruling statists won’t subdue.

Statists rejoice over the corporate world’s desertion of Middle America and its new love affair with the political left.

This coming November will tell us how American voters feel about statism. If voters choose statism, the American spirit will most likely be dead forever. If they reject statism, giving the original American spirit new life, their children will bask in the liberty our founders had in mind.

 

Roger Hines

May 26, 2022

 

 

                        Have We Forgotten We’re Westerners?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/21/22

I believe it can be said of practically 100% of my colleagues in the teaching profession that they were future-oriented. Of course teaching itself is all about the future and even though its subject matter is the past, the task of the teacher is to point students forward.

            To teach is to hold a grip on the pulse of the times. The interests, values, goals, and conduct of teens and college students are a reliable cultural indicator of what the nation’s future will be like. They are also a measure and indicator of how parents are parenting. In a sense every teacher is a history teacher as well as a futurist.

I fault modern education for a particular failing, one for which the creators of curriculum are chiefly responsible. That failing is the diminishing instruction in the meaning and significance of Western culture. Western culture is being put to death by multiculturalism and diversity and so few seem to know or care.

My personal beef lies in the field of history. While schools teach and most require a passing grade in American history to graduate, their teaching of history too often fails to connect America’s history to that of Europe. Today most Americans are of European or African descent, and while we might hail “the American experience,” we feebly if at all show students what it is that makes America “exceptional.” That exceptionality is based on what our founders detached us from – Old World monarchy – and on what they put in its place, a written constitution that reached the peak of what middle and lower class Europeans had been yearning for. That constitution epitomizes Western values as opposed to the persistent autocracy of the Middle East and the Far East.

The teaching of literature doesn’t present this failing. Most high schools across the country teach America literature to 11^th graders and English literature to 12^th graders. Many school systems offer World literature or Literature of the West. Therefore, in literature classes students can see clearly what birthed and fed America’s political, social, economic, religious, and literary life. They can also see how America’s first writers exalted the New World (America) with its personal and religious freedom and rugged individualism. Although Britain, steeped in kings and queens and “the divine right of kings,” did not always honor these specifically American ideals, like all of Europe she was steadily moving toward them. Perhaps a required semester in European history would bridge this informational gap, showing us the good and the bad of the Old World and how Western culture spread.

It was the Greeks, the Romans, and the British who set personal liberty in motion, even if in small degree. Who considers the Chinese people a free people? North Korea? Saudi Arabia? How about Russia? Even if Sarah Palin and other Alaskans can see Russia from their living room window, and even if Putin was “elected,” Russia is no Western nation.  Western civilization or “the Western world” always refers not to geography but to those nations that cradle and nourish liberty. Interestingly enough the geographical East has long been short on personal freedom.

We Americans are heirs of the “classical” Greeks and Romans. Without their innumerable contributions we Americans could not be what we are. Each of those civilizations had their monarchs, but they also produced a Pericles and a Cicero, from whom came a high regard for the individual as opposed to rule by the elite.

How fares America in all of this? Today the word “classical” is considered snobbish and so yesterday. We honor the “contemporary” be it in music, dress, or thought. Our greatest fear, as C.S. Lewis put it, is “our fear of the Same Old Thing.” Yet, to cut a plant or a civilization from its root is to kill it. America today is chiefly run by those who promote self-loathing. Unlike Pericles, Cicero, and more recently Churchill, our ruling party scoffs at deep love for country. We are all racists. Repent of it. We are all sexists. Accept the New Sexuality. Localism is passé. Trust central government. Parents, schools know what your children need. Let us have them. Equity is the highest goal. Get out of our way. The family is a little paradigm that doesn’t work. Forget it. The past is over. Pull down the statues.

Forgetfulness, thy name is contemporary America. And wherever they lie buried, Socrates, John Milton, James Madison and other such “classicists” are shaking their heads.  Abolitionist John Brown, while being escorted to his execution atop his coffin through the Virginia countryside, muttered “This is a beautiful country.”

And it still is, whatever the self-loathing deniers of our past may say. Yes, we’re Westerners.

 

 

Roger Hines

May 19, 2022

 

 

Roe v. My Mother: A Personal Story

Roe v. My Mother: A Personal Story

Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/14/22

“Imagine being upset that babies will live.” So read a Facebook post that I ran across recently just after arriving home from my five-year-old grandson’s baseball game. At the ball park my wife and I had sat beside the young wife of one of our grandson’s coaches. With a two-year-old at her knee and a five-week-old in her arms, the young wife and mother had her hands full.

            Well into the game the two-year-old fell over and underneath the bleachers. Quickly my wife reached to take the five-week-old. Although the infant cried at first, my wife soon worked her magic. Within minutes the beautiful, fresh-looking pajama-clad baby was asleep.

            All I could think of as I kept staring at the baby was the ongoing, so recently intensified  abortion debate. The five-week-old’s face kept bombarding my mind with the question: How. Can. Any. Woman. Support. Abortion? If any pro-abort woman could have looked  into the face of this precious baby, would it perhaps have melted her and made her think about what she’s actually advocating?

            My mother married at age 15. Her first child was born when she was 17. From age 17 to  47 she was having a baby approximately every two years, seventeen in all. How shameful! No woman should have that many babies. Thirty solid years (1917-1947) of childbearing plus 17 additional years of rearing her last child? Were there no health services in Scott County, Mississippi to explain to my mother and father their lack of knowledge or wisdom? Were they even minimally educated? Sounds like a typical situation of white trash, doesn’t it.

            No, it was an atypical situation of joy and beauty. It was laughter galore. It was tenant farmer hard work and training in responsibility. It was parents who so loved their children that we dared not do anything that would disappoint them. It was faith in God and learning to put others before oneself. It was learning early in life that language is the vehicle on which our thoughts ride and that if our language is ugly, our thought world must be ugly. It was do your best, not only in school but also in the fields. It was the glorious acquaintance with soil, the woods, and cows. It was meals together three times a day that fed our minds and spirits, not just our bodies.

            If my mother’s thirty years of childbearing had led into the ‘60s instead of ending in the late ‘40s, Planned Parenthood would have encouraged her to murder some of us. Yes, murder. Does abortion not intentionally end a life?  To crush an unborn baby or to suction it out of its mother’s womb is barbaric. I wish former Governor Northam of Virginia (a pediatric physician, for heaven’s sake) could have sat beside my wife and stared at the precious five-week-old she was rocking back and forth in the bleachers. You think he might have repented of saying what he said about keeping an already born baby comfortable while the mother and doctor discuss what to do with it? God help us! Did the doctor not know that “fetus” is a Latin word for offspring and does not refer to tissue?

            Abortion defenders have moved from “safe, legal, and rare” to “abortion on demand.” The Democrat Party is not alone in pushing this morally abhorrent position. The World Health Organization, in its “Abortion Care Guideline” calls for abortion through the ninth month. The WHO calls for free abortions paid for by taxpayers in all nations as well as for allowing non-doctors to perform them.

            Weasel words abound in the pro-abortion crowd’s lexicon. A fetus isn’t life, they say. It is “potential life,” a term that a 10^th grade biology student could successfully refute. But abortion promotes “equality for women.” No, most women who seek abortions are not well-situated women exercising their own “choice.” Most are desperate single women who need the help that pro-life groups try desperately to provide, those like Norma McCorvey, the real “Jane Roe” who ignited our 55-year-old abortion debate.

            Recently in Mississippi we buried my mother’s 6^th child and 3^rd daughter. She would have turned 96 in July. She was the mother of four beautiful children and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  Her life was as vibrant, joyous, and rewarding as our mother’s. She joins six other siblings in death. How do you suppose we remaining ten children feel about abortion?

            “Settled law,” like “settled science,” is a squishy, arguable term. I’m glad that Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson were finally un-settled. As the purloined brief of Justice Alito insists, Roe v. Wade needs to be un-settled as well.

              I’m a proud Georgian now, but proud also that my home state of Mississippi got the ball rolling for overturning Roe. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe and Republicans take Congress, let’s see if Republicans will finally walk their talk and cut off Congress’s generous funding to the abortion lovers at Planned Parenthood.

            For the political left, abortion, an act of violence, has become orthodoxy. I’m grateful to God that my ten sisters, six brothers, and I were conceived and birthed before such incredible religious fervor for an act of violence emerged. If I may say so, such evil fervor, had it been applied to my siblings, would have shorted the world of one good farmer, two career soldiers, one pastor, one mail carrier, one insurance agent, one teacher/legislator, three executive secretaries, two registered nurses, and five incredible domestic engineers, none of whom were defined by their line of work but by their love of God and of life and by the fact that they were “all those Hines kids.”

Roger Hines

May 9, 2022