Homeschooling? Don’t Knock it if You Haven’t Tried It

        Homeschooling? Don’t Knock it if You Haven’t Tried It

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/30/20

Elizabeth Bartholet is a law professor at Harvard University. She is also the faculty director of Harvard Law School’s Child Advocacy Program. Nice. This means Bartholet advocates for children. And advocate means to plead in favor of.

            Unfortunately Professor Bartholet’s advocacy has taken the form of an outrageous attack on homeschooling. She recently stated that homeschooling violates a child’s right to a meaningful education. To the professor, who has long been advocating a limited ban on homeschooling, Christian conservatives who homeschool their children may be “extreme religious ideologues” who are “crippling their students’ capacities.” She so stated in an article titled “The Risks of Homeschooling,” published last month in Harvard Magazine.

              After the nation’s homeschoolers erupted, the professor doubled down, this time in an interview with The Harvard Gazette. In the Gazette article she blames (my word not hers, but it fits the text and tone of her article) conservative Christians for the rapid growth of the homeschooling movement. Noting that other countries have far more restrictions on homeschooling, Bartholet asserted that the government should step in.

            Her language is not guarded: “Homeschoolers are committed to raising their children within their belief system, isolated from any societal influences.” Well, yeah! So are Catholics, Jews, the Amish, Quakers and others, though “isolated” is the wrong word. Such groups simply have certain beliefs, practices, and intellectual levels which they believe they can better transmit or reach than can public education. More than protect, they wish to advance. One would think the professor just recently learned about homeschooling, unmindful that it is as old as America.

            The professor continued, “Society may not have the chance to teach homeschooled children the values that are important to the larger community such as tolerance of other people’s views.”

            Dear Lord! Could the Harvard professor not see that with her very own words she was showing her intolerance of homeschoolers?

            My wife Nancy and I have had experience with homeschooling and are more than pleased with its effectiveness and possibilities. For his first four grades our son Reagan attended a private school where Nancy was teaching high school English. When Nancy left the school, making Reagan’s transportation there less convenient, we decided to homeschool him since he had only one more year of elementary school left.

            I might never have walked into the childhood home of Martin Luther King, had we not become homeschoolers and taken Reagan there. Or learned of the effective networking that homeschoolers benefit from, whether it’s an engineer dad teaching math to 20 or so students on Saturday morning, or a mom who offers homemaking classes in the evening.  I know. Bad word, homemaking. But homeschoolers care more about reality and honest language than political correctness.

             Except for Reagan’s first 5 years our 4 children attended public schools. For her own children our oldest daughter Christy has combined public education, private education, and homeschooling. Although her 4 children went to a strong public high school, in their childhood years they attended a private school that required students be homeschooled at least two days a week.  All 4 of them were well educated.

            Our other daughter Wendy who has a degree in elementary education has homeschooled her 3 children ages 10, 12, and14 from day one, even while working in their restaurant. Years ago just after Wendy graduated from North Cobb High School, I asked her what she had enjoyed most about high school. “My teachers” was her quick reply. “What least?” I asked. “The cigarette smoke in the girls’ restrooms,” she replied. Her answer is no doubt emblematic of many homeschoolers who desire a school setting where influences are positive and discipline problems of a few don’t hold back the progress of everybody else.

            Our son Jeff has a 13 year old daughter. Why have he and his wife chosen to privately educate her? “It’s just more serious and not as many problems as regular schools,” he said awhile back. Our youngest child Reagan has 2 preschool children. I’m guessing he and his wife will opt to homeschool and/or privately educate their children as well.

            And how does old Dad feel about their choices since he spent 37 years in public school teaching? He feels grateful for the opportunity to teach public school students and work with outstanding public school teachers. He’s appreciative of public school board members, and school staffs.

            More importantly he feels that homeschooling does not remove children from mainstream culture, that government has no business telling citizens how to educate their children, and that Professor Bartholet should stick to teaching law and try to be a bit more tolerant.

Roger Hines

5/28/20 

Man Cannot Live by Experts Alone

                        Man Cannot Live by Experts Alone

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/24/20

            I submit that neither our government’s policy nor the news media’s coronavirus coverage shows enough concern the financial hardship and the emotional distress that small business owners are experiencing. Nor has enough attention centered on the plight of the 36.5 million who have lost their jobs, thanks to the nation’s shutdown.

            So far what has been emphasized night and day is the number of cases and deaths, both of which are low compared to population.

            The small business owner is the sacrificial lamb in our intentional crisis. My heart goes out to the countless young adult married couples who were brave enough, self-confident enough, and trustful enough of America’s free enterprise system to start a small bakery, a fitness business, or a restaurant. Let’s say their dream was to work for themselves and teach their children what entrepreneurship and hard work are all about. Let’s say they’ve been in business for four or five years and were beginning to see their dream fulfilled.

            But now that dream is dashed. More importantly their sole income has been stopped in its tracks. By design. Their employees are laid off and there appear to be no prospects for starting over. Financially and emotionally what state of mind do you suppose our young couples are in?

            Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick was ridiculed recently for saying he was willing to die so that younger adults could survive economically. I watched two multi-millionaire television commentators mock Patrick though he clearly was not playing the martyr.

            “I’m not being noble and brave. I just believe there are lots of grandparents like me who care more about the country and our grandchildren than anything else,” Patrick stated.

            Understandably, in our free society response to the crisis has created two sides, those who cry, “Follow the science and the experts,” and those who simply plead for common sense and the personal liberty to make their own decisions.  Slavish proponents of the experts believe the medical technocrats should call the shots. The common sense proponents see the dangers of overreach. They acknowledge that unelected experts can help but that they should not replace our duly elected leaders. To them bureaucratic tyranny is as onerous as any other.

            Citizens who insist we blindly follow the science should recall that some scientists, including the good Dr. Fauci, at first asserted that the coronavirus would probably not spread around the globe. Duke University researcher Dr. Wang Linfa in late January said the same thing. His words were, “I have a gut feeling it won’t spread.” 

            Ah! So scientists do have gut feelings. Nice to know.

            The crisis has pretty much paralleled the Trump/anti-Trump divide. Deplorables – the faceless, hardworking Americans, ordinary folks – are anxious, actually desperate to open up the economy. Their pantries are emptying. The elites – the experts, media stars, totally comfortable retirees, stubborn governors – are holding out for safety. They haven’t been hurt. Columnist Peggy Noonan put it best: “The working-class people who are pushing back have had harder lives than those now determining their fate.”

            Design is destiny, and the present design is supposedly to let so-called science lead the way. But science has always held both beauty and terror. Re-read “Frankenstein.” In that famous novel a smart doctor created a man, but things didn’t turn out too well. What he got was a monster. Our monster today is a created, wrecked economy. A wrecked economy means young and old alike are suffering, especially those in the nation’s lower-income households. According to the Wall Street Journal, almost 40% of households earning less than $40,000 experienced a job loss in March versus 19% of households earning between $40,000 and $100,000.

            Our political divide has deepened.  To me it’s obvious that Democrats – ok, some Democrats, or certain Democrat leaders – are doing all they can to prolong the shutdown in order to decrease the chances of President Trump getting re-elected.

             There is even a medical profession divide, but who would know? The media isn’t broadcasting it, but some medical experts disagree with Dr. Fauci.  Dr. Knut Wittkowski, former head of epidemiology at Rockefeller University is one. Wittkowski has stated that social distancing prolongs the virus’s existence. “Without distancing,” the virus would have “created herd immunity,” he argues. In effect, the media has told Wittkowski to hush.

            Given the medical profession’s divide, perhaps when someone says, “Trust science,” we should reply, “Whose science?”

            I’m with Governor Mike Huckabee: “No elected official who orders a lockdown should get a paycheck as long as we’re shut down.”

            The nation needs to get to work. Now.

Roger Hines

5/20/20

           

Politics, Coffee, and Odd Couples

                      Politics, Coffee, and Odd Couples

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/16/20

            It might surprise most people to know how well politicians of different parties actually get along with each other. Legend has it that Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy often told his Republican colleagues from the South to go slam him while campaigning if they needed to. He didn’t mind. We can be sure the Lion of Liberalism was speaking to Republicans who had no Democratic opposition. Or perhaps they did and the Senator needed the Republican colleague’s help on a bill now at hand. So politics often goes.

            Politics is much like marriage and home life. It’s close living. You best learn and abide by the old adage, “In some things, unity. In all things, love.” Members of legislative bodies do more than sit in a large room of beautiful, classical architecture, listen to speeches, give speeches, and vote. Legislators serve on several committees which is where the nitty gritty of legislative work takes place. They also often share offices with fellow legislators of a different party. They do business in hallways, elevators and at traffic lights while waiting for the walk signal.

            If there’s one place where politics ceases and normal friendships reign, it’s in the break room just off the House or Senate floors where the biggest draw is the coffee. Gotta have coffee early in the morning, during an interminable presentation of a simple bill, and whenever the clock is moving on toward 10 PM. Coffee and the loud, crowded break room generally restore everyone’s common humanity.

            The legendary former Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives Tom Murphy didn’t like the break room. One morning during the 2002 session Murphy scolded House members for going back and forth to the break room during debate. He thundered forth, “If ya’ll would eatcha’ some breakfast before you come here, you could stay away from that coffee and donuts and we could get some work done.” Murphy was powerful but he couldn’t keep House members from their coffee and their place for common humanity.

            During the 2000 decade I was typically the second member to reach the House floor every morning. Nobody could beat the former and now deceased state representative Bobby Franklin of east Cobb County who arrived early and mastered every bill. Truth is many reps of both parties leaned on Franklin for bill information without reading the bills themselves.

            Speaker Murphy was early too. It was his quick visits to the floor each morning between 8:00 and the 10 o’clock convening hour that allowed us to become friends. One morning my two grown daughters were with me. When the aging speaker came by I introduced him to my daughters. He quickly turned to them and said, “Now how can an ugly man like him have two beautiful daughters like you?” He then recalled a visit I paid him years before with a Cobb County friend, Carolyn Sanford, to plead for his support of the so-called “creation bill.”

            “So you’re a Southern Baptist, I believe,” he said one morning with his famous half smile. “Well, you Southern Baptists are just about as primitive as us Primitive Baptists.”

            Murphy was totally clothed in gruff but his heart was tender.

            It was in the break room of the Georgia House that I met and became friends with state representative Tyrone Brooks, one of the House’s most well-known black members. Brooks was an activist, always in the forefront of the civil rights movement. During the lunch hour Brooks and I often found ourselves on the break room couch. Only one year apart in age, we reminisced about the sixties. I related my sorrow over segregation and the benign neglect toward blacks that enshrouded my growing up years. He reached to shake and squeeze my hand when I told him about volunteering to teach in a black school to help the city of Meridian, Mississippi get desegregation underway.

            One year Brooks finally convinced Republican House Majority Leader Jerry Keen and me to march with him at Selma. As fate would have it, Brooks was unable to make it to the Selma march the year we were set to join him.

            Tom Murphy died in 2007 after 28 years in GA politics. The state, particularly its capital city, bears the stamp of his contributions.

            Tyrone Brooks resigned from the House in 2015 and pleaded guilty to federal tax fraud and no contest to federal wire and mail fraud charges.

            I’m glad I knew both the cantankerous cigar-chomper and the formidable civil rights leader. As Brooks put it, “You and I might be proof that a Democrat and a Republican can love each other.”

Roger Hines

5/14/20

The Mess We’re In

                                  The Mess We’re In

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/9/20

             “We’re all in this together.” When spoken in reference to the coronavirus, these words are meant to be comforting. Comfort is a wonderful thing, but a clear understanding of a situation can afford far more comfort than bumper sticker phrases.

            The mess we’re in is multifaceted. It’s political, medical, and economic. Politically, individual liberties are being violated, an election year is being muddled, and reformers are gleefully anticipating a new and different America. Medically, people are dying, the living are drowning in uncertain information, and unelected experts are running the show. Economically, joblessness abounds, small business is being crushed, and socialists are frothing at the mouth over the possibility of seismic social change.

            Yet another facet that undergirds all of the above is a philosophical one. Globalists like Bill Gates, Theresa Heinz Kerry, George Soros, and Bernie Sanders view our mess as an argument for “global solutions.”  Let’s give the globalists credit for sincerity. Bill Gates certainly doesn’t need money. Neither do Kerry and Soros. Sanders? Let’s not grant him sincerity until he spreads around the book money that made him a millionaire socialist.

            What globalists have in common is a political philosophy quite unlike the one from which the American experience sprouted and grew, producing economic prosperity and individual liberty. Prosperity and liberty are the reasons Americans don’t have to risk their lives to flee to other countries for a decent life.

            We once called globalists one-worlders. Pat Buchanan adroitly referred to them as trans-nationalists. Whatever they are called, their view of the world includes no borders, international law, a cashless society, climate change (formerly global warming), love, joy, guaranteed income, and for background music, “We are the world / We are the people.”

            Are these goodies what Joe Biden was referring to when he said the coronavirus gives us an opportunity to transform the United States?  One thing is certain. If the globalists need a flattened America on which to build their paradise, the nation is just about as close to flat as it has ever been. Emotionally, millions are distraught. With few dreams because of low incomes, their goal has been to pay rent and get enough food. They’re not lazy. They’re the working poor and our small towns and rural America are full of them. By the way, they’ve just been laid off.

            Such is the situation, the mess, brought about by a planned economic lockdown not justified by the numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths. Somebody divide 75,000 (deaths) by 333,000,000 (U.S. population). Stand the answer beside the economic hardship and violation of constitutional rights. Then ponder.

            The government has never before taken so much control over our lives. First the restaurant booth was forbidden then, unbelievably, the church pew. Do we not see the slow progression of the loss of liberty and how it edges closer and closer to our everyday personal lives?  If a vaccine is ever required of all citizens – Bill Gates is pushing that very idea – it will be time to echo Patrick Henry and Martin Luther King with a “Just send me to jail.” Who wants the government requiring them to put something into their body?

            The most egregious prospect to which the present crisis could lead is that for which globalists yearn. That would be central planning carried out by Big Brother. Doing away with the Electoral College is mild compared to ditching federalism and creating an all-powerful central government.

Since Woodrow Wilson, there has been a drip-drip move toward global governance. Examples abound. Wilson’s League of Nations failed, but FDR’s United Nations did not. Neither did the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the International Court of Justice, and the World Health Organization. One reason for President Trump’s election was his opposition to the United States contributing so heavily to these entities.

            Does anyone remember the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?  Russia swallowed 14 nations, but her experiment, called the Soviet “Union,” collapsed after 69 years of central planning. Even the communist leader Gorbochev could see and acknowledged that centralized government – socialism – wasn’t providing enough groceries.

            Don’t think that mention of a socialist America or of world governance is stretching the coronavirus issue too far. Bernie Sanders raised a vast army of 20-somethings and presidential candidate Biden is already promising them the moon. Europe’s 20-somethings are socialist to the core. If individual liberty is always just one generation from extinction, it’s wise to take note of what the younger generation is thinking.

            Our mess is shrouded with the ideals of the globalists, the collectivists, the socialists. If their party wins the November election, centralized government is our future. Federalism will be our past.

Roger Hines

5/6/20   

           

           

Education the Oakwood Way

                                          Education the Oakwood Way

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/3/20

            It was Cobb County’s summer school of 1992. While my senior English class did research in the library, I sat and graded papers. Soon Dr. Carla Northcutt, the summer school principal, walked in and took a seat at my table.

            “I’m looking for a good, hardworking English teacher to join us at Oakwood,” she said.

            Twenty-eight years later I’m still surprised that I replied, “Well, I’m hardworking.” My answer surprised her as well since it implied interest. Oakwood was an alternative high school, Dr. Northcutt its principal. Its faculty was a creative bunch who knew how to engage students with diverse methods. Northcutt knew I was a traditionalist. For many years I had been the English department head at Wheeler High School and she was one of the department’s most effective teachers and the most non-traditional.

            Northcutt knew that I required – and that students enjoyed – modest amounts of memory work. She knew I required students to teach a lesson, engage in formal debate, write constantly, and read regularly. She knew that students understood the second bell was for starting class, not for last minute dashing into the room. She well remembered that, regarding literature, I was a strict constructionist, that is, I taught that an essay means what the essayist meant (just as the U.S. Constitution means what its writers meant and not what history scholars say they could have meant). She knew I believed that Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s rightful status was just below the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. How then could I fit in at an alternative school with those abundantly creative teachers?

            “So you are interested?” Northcutt pressed.

            “Oh, I’ve thought about Oakwood a few times, but you know me. I’m probably not what you need.”

            Northcutt began to insist that Oakwood students needed traditional teachers too. I relented, and although the new school year was fast approaching, my North Cobb principal, Dale Gaddis, was very kind to release me from North Cobb.

It’s August of 1992, my first day at Oakwood. Three very pregnant girls and two pink-haired ones walk into my classroom followed by a young man clad not in a T-shirt but a doggone for real undershirt. Uh, Dr. Northcutt had oriented me on certain alternative school issues, but a boy coming in wearing an honest to goodness, old fashioned undershirt wasn’t one of them. I must be true to myself. I ask him if he perhaps had left his shirt in his car. “Naw sir, but I can find me one.” He leaves and within minutes returns properly dressed.

The school is small; the classes are small; teachers are granted much latitude. Wise school board members, realizing that students have varied educational needs, had continued to fund the low-enrollment school. While this first class of 15 enters, I’m sitting at a desk in the back. After the last bell rings, the deep-seated mischief in me rises up. I try something.

With elevated voice I spoke. “Please rise while the teacher proceeds to the front.”  Every student stood up, even the pink-haired girls! I never let on that I was messing with them.

 Early on I learned that two girls in the class had been in Advanced Placement classes at their home schools. Why did they choose the alternative school? “I got tired of the morning announcements that didn’t pertain to me,” one testified. That response is illustrative of so many high schoolers who are “drifting on the periphery of the pack” as C. Bradley Thompson puts it in his book, “Our Killing Schools: How America’s Schools are Destroying the Minds and Souls of our Children.”

To see how I managed at an alternative school for 11 exhilarating years, see paragraph 4 above. My teaching changed not a whit, though my pace did. Students who had come to Oakwood didn’t need a different curriculum, just a little more time and attention. They wanted academics and a diploma, not socialization or football. Frankly, they needed love.

The pregnant girls, the pink haired ones, the recovering druggies, the rebels, and all the rest inspired me, but nothing was as uplifting as the sparkling teachers, males and females. Among them was Marietta’s current First Lady, Jean Alice Tumlin who particularly showed this traditionalist how to be himself, enjoy students, and still be … a strict constructionist.

Our current pandemic lockdown is altering educational methods. Ideally it will lead to more innovation – more Oakwoods, perhaps - where teachers and students can be closer, where high tech doesn’t kill high touch, and where fewer students are on the periphery.

The departed Dr. Northcutt would smile down on that.

Roger Hines

4/29/20

  

Givers, the Sick, and the Dispossessed

                      Givers, the Sick, and the Dispossessed

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal,4/25/20

            Think about it before you dismiss the next sentence. Never have newspapers and television been so full of good news. Who would have thought it? I didn’t say that the bad news has been diminished. It hasn’t. But example after example is being given in the news of givers – groups and individuals as well – who are attending to the needs of others.

            “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world,” chortled Barbara Streisand, quite beautifully, 56 years ago this summer. People who help people are also lucky, if you believe in luck. Some people don’t. They view luck as the meeting of preparedness and opportunity. Currently across our country millions are prepared to receive. That includes the sick, the families of the 48,061 who have died from the coronavirus, and the 26,000,000 who have lost their jobs.

            One of the best examples of givers I’ve heard about is Freedom Church in Acworth. This past Tuesday the Marietta Daily Journal reported that Freedom Church has raised $1.6 million to wipe out medical bills of over 1,000 families in Cobb and two nearby counties. I’ve been told by a friend who attends there that the loud music at Freedom “rocks the Highway 41 traffic as it zooms by.” Even so, it must be music that inspires members to love God and serve people. What with the loud music, the majority of the people there are probably on the left side of 50. If that’s the case, it’s younger adults with families who have so commendably committed themselves to being givers. Kudos to them.

            Both the sick and the 26,000,000 need our attention and concern. Unfortunately we have been thrown the question, “What’s more important, the economy or lives?” The premise behind this question is flawed. It pits the sick against the 26,000,000. It implies that one can live without commerce, that is, without creating and marketing, buying and selling, and working. It’s commerce that builds ventilators, allows us to purchase medicine, and provides pay for dedicated doctors and nurses. Without commerce, capitalism in action, how can we continue to meet the needs of the sick?

            “Stay at home” has undoubtedly checked the spread of the coronavirus. It has also led to the 26,000,000 who are virtually dispossessed and who come overwhelmingly from small businesses. It’s easy to forget that small business is the backbone of our economy. According to Entrepreneur Magazine, there are between 25 and 27 million small businesses in the United States that account for 60 to 80% of all U.S. jobs. Does it take brain surgeon smarts to realize that with so many small businesses shut down the economy will continue to crumble?

            Yet, the mayors of Atlanta, Savannah, of other cities, and CNN have blistered Governor Kemp for his plan for opening up, slowly, our state’s economy. The governor’s critics should be asked if their own incomes have come to a halt. They are among the elites showing contempt for the protestors who cry for the economy to open up. The protestors, however, are refusing to yield to their betters. They probably understand that not all doctors agree with the shutdown strategy, one of the most prominent being Dr John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University. Ioannidis has stated, “Risks are much lower than has been hyped.”

            Many who are not hurting economically are pushing village-guilt on us. Governors and members of Congress are not hurting. The commentariat is not hurting. Speaking of which, why are the glitzy commentators on the networks and cable stations, along with academics and other elites, so critical of the several governors who have begun opening up their states? The bulk of the pro-shutdown group is progressives, Democrats, liberals, socialists, and leftists. Repetitive synonyms, I realize, and their abstract love for the village has blinded them to the concrete reality of individual villagers. That’s why some of us never liked the nice-sounding expression, “It takes a village.” It takes more than a village. It takes some individual villagers who are job creators.

            Democrats can’t deny that their ideas and policies since the days of Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society have been socialism-lite, or worse. Their presidential candidate Joe Biden is huge on keeping the country closed down, further hindering the dispossessed. It’s not conspiratorial, but reasonable to conclude that a leftist cabal is trying to level what we have so they can build what they want.

            Meanwhile as the lockdown rebellion builds, givers like those at Freedom Church will attend to those in need, those so often neglected in our great war.

Roger Hines

4/23/20

           

The People versus the Experts

                          The People versus the Experts 

              Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 4/19/20

In our current age of relativism when people speak of “my truth” and “your truth,” a little absolutism can be refreshing. Not the kind offered humorously by former U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen and quoted recently in the Marietta Daily Journal feature, “The Thought for Today.”

            Dirksen’s quote read, “I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.”

            Dirksen’s playful “unbending principles” were not as unbending as those of my father or of the American patriot Patrick Henry. After a family supper table conversation about a rare robbery that had occurred in my hometown, my father ended the discussion by saying, “Well, starve to death and go to heaven, but don’t ever steal, not even for food.”

            That’s absolutism. Patrick Henry’s famous speech that revealed his moral absolutism was more eloquent than my father’s but no more strongly held. Unfortunately we typically quote only the last sentence of Henry’s famous words. His four preceding sentences actually power his famous utterance.

Addressing the Virginia Convention in 1775 and arguing that Virginia “be immediately put into a posture of defense” against England, Henry spoke the following: “What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it Almighty God. I know not what course others may take but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.”

Not often does one fiery speech catapult someone from obscurity to fame, but this is what happened to the 29-year-old Henry, a representative in the Virginia legislature. After listening to several speeches that favored compromise with the British, Henry rose to present his resolution to prepare for war. With manifold conviction akin to that of fellow Virginians Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, Henry persuaded the Virginia House to take up arms against England.

“Is life so dear … ?” Already Henry is implying that life is not (to him at least) the most precious value. What husband/father reading this column would not rise up at 3 AM and defend to the death his wife and children from an armed intruder? How much does his own life matter to him in that moment?

“… or peace so sweet …?” With these words Henry expands his scope of affection. He is not referring now just to his own life or his own brood, but to all Virginians. It is civil peace that Henry mentions here.

Decisions that America’s president and governors now face are not too dissimilar to those of the colonies who were being oppressed by the British. Though ours is not a military war, it is a war still and voices of reason and courage are needed. Instead of 13 rural colonies against the western world’s third greatest empire, we now have the people versus the powerful proponents of consensus science. Consensus science has its experts, numbers, charts, graphs, and prognostications. The people have common sense and arithmetic. But they lack a Patrick Henry to point out that small business owners and employees are suffering most. Those with microphones and power – the media, politicians, government officials, and corporate heads – are doing quite well. The “little man,” the real creator of wealth and the sustainer of our economy, is the frontline foot soldier in our current war. What will he go home to?

Our president and governors are receiving counsel from doctors and numbers crunchers. The people are hesitant to criticize doctors, realizing that medical workers are sacrificially saving lives. Still, our healthcare system is a distinct part of our free enterprise economy and indeed flows from it. Yet, the two have been pitted against each other: saving lives versus saving the economy.

What a false and dangerous dichotomy the president and governors have embraced. Let’s recast Patrick Henry’s questions. Is life so dear that the world’s most successful anti-poverty program – capitalism – must now be socialized? That’s what government largesse leads to. Is peace so sweet that we cannot speak out against the statistical calisthenics of medical experts? Is our collective intelligence in such throes of death that we cannot figure out how to medicate the sick and allow those well to go to work? Whence comes healthcare if the well from which it is drawn runs dry?

There are different kinds of death, financial and emotional among them. As for absolutism, we are absolutely causing deaths of different kinds, all because we have shut down the country. Many livelihoods have already been destroyed. The “little man” is sick and suffering, all because of a wrongheaded war strategy.

Roger Hines

4/15/20