Elitism’s Failures

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 1/16/21

             Today our national capital is armed to the gills. Cops and troops are rightly everywhere, some even sleeping on the floor of the Capitol building. Individual states are also shoring up security for next week’s inauguration.

            As Democrats and their media outlets would cast it, more peasants are headed toward the palace with their pitchforks. You know. The unwashed, uneducated, cultish conservative thugs, those who, according to the elitist CNN “contributor” Eugene Robinson, “need to be re-programmed.” Robinson wasn’t referring only to the thugs who stormed the Capitol, however. He made it clear he was referring to all of the supporters of Donald Trump.

            How sad, how despicable, that the lengths to which the federal government has gone to protect itself were not extended to the business owners, cops, and other non-elites in Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis. Why no rage when Black Lives Matter and Antifa filled the streets and battled with police for three solid months? The answer is obvious and two-fold.

             First, simply because the little people whose shops were burned down by the radicals during “the summer of love” were not elitists but just normal folks. Neither were their places of work hallowed, columned structures of marble. Second, because Democrat mayors and governors not only turned aside from the summer violence but also defended the destructive “protestors” as well.

            Said elitist Kamala Harris, “The protestors are not going to let up and they shouldn’t let up.” This, while cars were being smashed, police stations were being burned, and even government buildings were being destroyed. Elitist-in-Chief Nancy Pelosi, when asked about the rioters, appeared to be at a loss for words then muttered, “People will do what they do.” Ponder the double standard for violence. Ponder who incited the summer violence, excusing it with the phrase, “justifiable frustration.”

            Compare these comments to the words of President Trump just before the Capitol storming took place, words I have read and watched three times. I challenge any reader to quote me a single sentence from the president’s speech that incited anyone to riot. Shortly after the storming of the Capitol, another elitist, Senator Mitt Romney, used a word that has since been seized and repeated by anti-Trumpers.

            “Embarrassing,” moaned the Senator. What, then, is the word for the action perpetrated upon the little people of the cities named above? I doubt that the ordinary citizens whose livelihoods were lost, whose lives were endangered and put on hold ever thought about embarrassment. They were thinking about food, housing, mortgages, their immediate future, and kids, things rich man Romney has never had to worry about.

            As for the dumbing down of the word “insurrection,” a word Democrats need to look up, the taking over of a section of a city and claiming sovereignty over it is far more seditious than trashing the House Speaker’s office, engaging in antics, and making fun of her. True insurrectionists don’t waste time with foolishness. Ne’er-do-wells do. And every political party has its share of ne’er-do-wells.

            Yes, the Capitol, the seat of our government, is hallowed and sacrosanct. But so is the common man’s “castle” and workbench. Even the wealthy FDR made clear his sincere belief in “the sanctity of the commoner.” That’s why he was considered a traitor to his class. Regard for the common folks far away from our storied capital city was what distinguished us from Europe in the first place. It was the far away folks whom Donald Trump aroused, the huge middle class who had been ignored by elitist, globalist Democrats and Republicans alike. The goons of January 6^th don’t represent this vast portion of America’s citizens. To be precise, the beautiful Capitol they trashed is but a symbol of what is hallowed and sacrosanct, namely our freedom.

            For four years uppity elitists in both parties have sullied every word President Trump has uttered. With overwrought language they have attacked his family, questioned his sanity, belittled his intelligence, rejected his election and impeached him twice. It is they who incited the January 6^th goons.

            Anyone who thinks Trump’s base will fall apart hasn’t followed politics and doesn’t understand the power of numbers. 74,000,000 Trump supporters are not going to evaporate. The tepid Republicans who bolted will fade. If they are truly conservatives they will regret their lack of discernment within six months. It has escaped them that because of Trump the middle class is doing better, borders are now meaningful, Blacks are exiting the Democrat party, Arabs and Jews are talking, and “America First” is gloriously infectious.

            Trumpism is not dead because populism is very much alive. To maintain their power, Democrats and their elitist Republican sympathizers might need to look up populism since it’s coming toward them. The Biden agenda will strengthen it.

 

Roger Hines

1/14/21 

           

 

                   Thank you, Mr. President, for dividing us

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 1/2/21

            C.S. Lewis, the atheist turned Christian, professor at Oxford and Cambridge, and author of great renown said it best. In his little book titled “The Great Divorce” Lewis argued that good and evil cannot co-exist. One or the other must win and will win.

            Lewis’ absolutism alarms many people today. Had he not died less than an hour before John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the world would probably know him better. And if he were still living, Lewis would still be alarming us. Lewis believed in objective truth and acknowledged that truth is always narrow.

            “Life is not like a pool,” Lewis wrote, “but like a tree. It does not move toward unity but away from it. Evil cannot develop into good. Time does not heal it.”

            Ayn Rand, having endured evil Russian communism before coming to America, wrote the following in 1957: “When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing, when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods but in favors, you may know that your society is doomed.”

            Lewis and Rand, total opposites on matters of faith, were both dividers who forced clarity.

            Division is sometimes not only preferable but essential, if the good and right are to prevail. We juxtapose ideas during a political debate in order to compare them and then embrace one and discard the other. We acknowledge that more often than not, two cannot walk together except they be agreed.

            Rodney King, allegedly beaten badly by cops but continuing a life of petty crime until his death, famously said, “Why can’t we all just get along?” Today during the corona virus visitation, many are saying, “We’re in this together.”

Well, no we’re not. There’s little togetherness in America. Too much mixed information is tossed us. Too many commands are being given. Too many unelected bureaucrats are running the show, politicizing a pandemic. Our representative democracy, if not at stake, is surely being tested. If right wingers become violent, watch for the difference between the official response to them and the non- response to the leftists who rioted and even took over portions of cities.

            Division is often good, and there are several divisions that our current president brought about. His critics have aptly called him a divider and indeed his role as a divider has been well received. Apparently 74 million voters – practically half of the voters in the November election – approve of the role he assumed. Here are just three of those divisions.

            He divided the general populace and the news media. Not that the media was deeply loved by the populace in the first place, but for the most part we accepted the fact that news had become commentary and simply shook our heads in disgust. The president would not do this. He challenged media elites and actually jerked them around on a string, displaying their disdain for ordinary folks, particularly conservatives. Consequently most media personalities are consumed by Trump-hate. Consequently Americans are now taking “news” with a grain of salt.

            He divided nationalists and globalists. For decades many Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike have been globalists. Ignoring the needs of the vast middle class, they allowed jobs to spread abroad, not to heartland America. The very words, “America First,” scare them. Globalists ignored the fact that America’s heartland isn’t New York and Wall Street but Peoria and Main Street.

It’s interesting that a New York billionaire, recently named the most admired man in the country, spoke to and won the hearts of the heartland rather than trafficking in the rarified air of entities like the U.N., the World Health Organization and the World Bank. Globalists, who definitely include most of America’s corporate CEOs, like to keep the gravy train running, fueling it with cheap labor. (Guess what percentage of Walmart’s suppliers are in communist China.) Forget that globalism destroys national, homogenous cultures. Consumerism and moo-la, not borders, are what matter to globalists.

            The president also divided secular elites from religious commoners. Secular elites, having lost their minds, have given us post-birth abortion, white-shaming, emasculated cops, and “What gender do you prefer?” Conservatives are asking, “What in the world can be next?” And they’re ready to fight it. Such division is good. 

            Division is often the price we pay for needed correction. C.S. Lewis and Rand, like Patrick Henry, Churchill, Reagan, and other true lovers of freedom, simply believed there was a time for “Yea, yea” or “Nay, nay.”

            Georgia’s senatorial election is such a time. The socialism that Lewis and Rand have disdained and the President has fought is up for a vote.

 

Roger Hines

December 30, 2020

 

 

                       

 

                            Generous Givers and Christmas Blessings

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 12/18/20

            When Baptists realize they have sinned and are grappling with the right response to that sin, we call it “being under conviction.”  A news article in the Marietta Daily Journal this past Tuesday reminded me of two times when I was convicted of not being a giver.  I felt “condemned at the bar of my own conscience,” as one theologian puts it.

            The MDJ article reported on a speech by Acworth Mayor Tommy Allegood.  At a Cobb County Chamber of Commerce gathering, Allegood encouraged business leaders to make giving a priority during the Christmas season.  Acknowledging that Cobb County is already a giving community, the mayor challenged Chamber members to dig a bit deeper this year to help the needy.

            The article pitched my mind back to the early years of married life when I almost abandoned tithing because I thought I could no longer do it.  Tithing was just too difficult, or so I thought.   In the third month of my non-tithing, I sat down to pay the monthly bills. Within moments I decided I could no longer contend with the gentle tweeting of my deceased tenant farmer father who had perched on my shoulder for the last two months.

            Beyond tithing to his church, my father would often reach into his overall pockets and retrieve a dollar for tramps at the train depot where he parked in town on Saturdays.  He would do the same for poor Choctaw families walking past our house toward town.  Before writing bills on that third month, a thought bombarded my mind: if Daddy can tithe, anybody can tithe.  The church I was attending at the time would not have missed my tithe check, but the small country church of my youth probably would have missed my father’s, despite its small amount.  However, the size of our checks was not the primary issue. The issue was the bar of our own conscience.

            Mayor Allegood’s plea also turned my mind back to 30 plus years ago when our oldest child was a freshman at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.  A private Christian college and not a cheap one, Samford was Christy’s deep desire.  She being a high achiever and a precious child, my wife and I knew we had to make her desire a reality.  We knew we would have to double up on two of our three financial principles: spend wisely and save methodically.  As for the third principle, give generously, we would just have to see.

            Toward the end of Christy’s freshman year, we received an envelope in the mail with no inside address.  It contained an anonymous note with kind words and a check for $1,000. A month later, a check for $500.  The third check was for $1,000 again.  Toward the end of Christy’s second college year and after several more checks, the total came to $10,000. I began to pray my benefactor into the choicest spot in Heaven whenever his or her time came. 

              At Christy’s college graduation, instead of giving full attention to the tremendous words of the great Coach Bobby Bowdon, I stood at the bar of my conscience.  Some voice other than my father’s was whispering: “Rich folks should give but poor folks should too.  You’ve got to give more.”

            In December of 2000, Governor Roy Barnes spoke with conviction and power to the incoming freshmen class of the General Assembly.  “I believe,” he said, “that one reason Georgia has fared better economically than our sister states is that we tried harder to do the right thing about race.”  From his words I took spiritual import.  You do the right thing; you get blessed.  Not always instantly, but eventually.  My supposedly well-off benefactor and my definitely poor father were blessed, I believe, because they blessed.  Whether with race relations or with giving, doing the right thing is rewarded, though not always materially.

            There are numerous organizations that need our support.  There are also individuals we meet daily who have needs.  Why not this Christmas an outrageous $50 bill or more for a restaurant server? Why not anonymously pick up the tab for a young family in a restaurant whose overheard conversation revealed they could use the help this Christmas?  Since Marietta has been dubbed the most generous city in America with populations above 50,000, maybe we in the county or in other Cobb County cities should emulate Mariettans.

            Those who know the Mayor and the Governor know they are givers of their time and resources.  I want to be like them and my dear old dad. 

Let’s all end this difficult year with giving.  If we do, Christmas for sure will be Merry.

 

Roger Hines

12/14/20

           

             

 

              Education: the Next Frontier for Conservatives

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal. 12/4/20

            Conservatives have cracked the media, but haven’t touched education. America’s political left still dominates almost every major institution in the nation including the judiciary, entertainment (especially comedy), the arts, fiction literature, professional sports, and most thoroughly, the university.

            How sports? By the fact that so many team owners who, instead of reminding their athletes who is the boss, have cowardly acceded to their social/political protests such as refusing to honor the American flag. Talk about the animals running the farm, professional athletes appear to have their owners eating out of their hands. In the not too distant past, one value of sports was that they took our minds off our cares and differences, but no more. Sports have been politicized and it’s a shame.

            As for the media, it wasn’t cable television or even talk radio that got the first conservative foot in the door. In the late 1950s Texas oilman H.L Hunt funded the excellent radio program called “Life Line.” The program was totally conservative, monologue commentary. It warned the nation of the spread of communism and rightly so. At the time, the Soviet Union had enveloped Eastern Europe and swallowed the eastern half of Germany.  Soviet Russia was also planting missiles in Cuba only 90 miles from America’s shore. Thus anti-communism was the main tenet of the conservative gospel.

            It came to pass that the Federal Communications Commission used its Fairness Doctrine to quiet conservative voices. The FCC compelled political commentators to give equal air time to opposing points of view. In 1987 the FCC terminated the Fairness Doctrine whereupon Rush Limbaugh in 1988 became the radio voice of conservative Americans. Mr. Limbaugh’s success is well known.

            Less well known is the success of Newsmax and One America News, two cable networks that are clearly trumpeting the conservative perspective and are growing rapidly. The conservative New York Post has also increased its presence and influence in recent years. Suffice it to say that liberal voices like CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post no longer rule the roost. They are being challenged.

            Not so the American university. Its grip is sure. Its fads go unchallenged. Its undergirding ideology is always the craze of the moment: diversity, tolerance (as the university defines it, of course), transgender “studies,” feminist “studies,” race, “rights,” sexuality (sexuality “transformed,” that is), social justice, and economic transformation (weasel words for socialism). Somewhere underneath all such indoctrination, we suppose, lie math, science, history, and language.

            What is it about the field of education, particularly higher ed, that draws people from the political left? It could be that liberals love labs and incubators, for labs and incubators are what classrooms are. In a classroom (lab) students can test their knowledge and intellectual strength and discover their deepest interests if not a line of work. In a classroom (incubator) students can receive help for their intellectual development. Academic labs and incubators are the left’s chief tools.

            But classrooms are also transmission stations. Conservatives argue that schools and universities should transmit the knowledge and values that produce good, productive citizens. Liberal educators typically push the notion of students becoming “agents of change” or challengers of the status quo.

            Says the conservative, “Give my kid the facts; teach him to read, write, think, and analyze, but don’t go indoctrinating him. And no putting down his country as you are in the habit of doing.”

            In other words liberals want our children so they can set their paths straight. Conservatives are not so willing to turn their children over to the village. According to political scientist Jon Shields only 10% of university professors identify as conservatives. California State University illustrates Shields’ research. It currently requires a course in social justice as do many other public and private universities.

            Public schools are not untouched by progressive dogma, as their lingo indicates. Consider the following inane principles: “the teacher should be a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage;”  “the best teaching is facilitating, not direct instruction”; and “facts are not as important as thinking skills” (as though facts are not essential for logical thinking).

            A Biden administration does not bode well for solid, subject matter-centered schooling. Get ready for regs from the federal Department of Education that require schools to emphasize racism, gay rights, and social justice in order to receive federal funds.

            Conservatives are no longer content being strangers in a strange land. Having taken on the media and given the fact that a down ballot blue wave didn’t happen on November 3rd, they will resist the next four years of progressivism with their frontier spirit and love of individual liberty all in tow. Their children and grandchildren are at stake   

 

Roger Hines

12/2/20

             

 

 

                      Where in the World  Are We Headed?

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 11/20/20

            Calls for unity from presidential candidate Joe Biden, if heeded, would lead only to fake unity. These are no longer the more cordial times of Reagan and Democrat House Speaker Tip O’Neil or, more locally, of Johnny Isaacson and Roy Barnes.

            Biden’s call for unity was preceded by four years of Democrat rejection of Donald Trump’s “illegitimate” presidency, not to mention name calling: Russian spy, traitor, racist, and self-serving egotist. And now we’re being urged by the oh-so-conciliatory Democrat candidate to join together and be civil?

            Come together, they say. The election is over. No, there are a few more steps between now and January. Media stars don’t get to “call” elections. Voters do. Meanwhile, as those legitimate steps are being taken, Democrats  who dragged a duly elected president through the mud, refused to attend his inauguration, and sanctimoniously looked down on his 63,000,000 unwashed, uneducated supporters are now calling for unity. And don’t forget “Russia, Russia / collusion, collusion / impeachment, impeachment and ventilators, ventilators.”  Hypocrisy, thy name is Democrats. 

Never before has politics been about so much more than just politics.  Aristotle’s definition of politics was “the affairs of the polis,” the city, that is. Aristotle lived when great city-states like Athens and later Rome were the centers of power. Nations as we know them now with distinct borders were yet to come. Localism, not distant governance, was the order of the day. “The affairs of the polis,” of course, always involved power, and power is addictive. It’s the drug of the emotionally needy.  

This is not to say that all who hold political office are power-hungry. Cincinnatus wasn’t and had to be persuaded to leave his fields to lead Rome. George Washington wasn’t, refusing all efforts of the few who wanted him to be a king (Hamilton among them, duh! Kings are what we gained independence from!).  

Yes, politics is now more than politics, far more than love of and care for the polis. It is now the ideological vehicle upon which revolutionaries have hopped and seized the steering wheel. How else do we explain the Democrat defense of the Black Lives Matter organization? (I said the organization, not the concept which, even so, has been sullied; all lives matter.) And Antifa? How many Democrat leaders have disavowed them? Had Portland been burned down by right wing thugs instead of by the Democrats’ ideological buddies, Democrats would have gone ballistic.

Leftist politics is now anchored to the notion of “transforming” the nation. Transform the police, the electoral college, the Supreme Court, health care, our narrow, out-of-step notions of human sexuality, our union itself by creating more states (guess why), and most transformative of all, the definition of free speech. The 1960’s flower children heralded free speech to the strains of Peter, Paul and Mary yet their grandchildren have turned free speech on its head. If it’s news they don’t like, that news is a “conspiracy theory.” If it’s you they don’t like, you’re canceled.

And of course the Covid “pandemic” (let’s talk about that word) has not been wasted by the President’s enemies. A pandemic is “an outbreak of disease that affects many lands.” Pan, the goat-headed Greek god of nature, darted everywhere around and outside the city. His name is always in reference to the number of nations, not the depth of a disease within a nation. Divide 330,000,000 (the USA’s population) into 11, 025,046 (the number of cases as of this writing). Divide 330,000,000 into 246,108 (the number of deaths). Then decide whether or not you really need to cancel Thanksgiving and Christmas.

So where are we headed? Toward unity with those who are ho-hum about infanticide? Toward more non-ending wars? Toward Biden-Bernie socialism/theft that takes from producers (the villagers) and gives to the village (the government)? Toward sanctimonious Christians who can’t forgive and forget a President’s past? Toward forgetfulness of a billionaire president who energized good, common sense folks?

These questions will be answered by the Georgia U.S. Senate race in January. Never has any local election determined so greatly the direction of the entire nation.

There’s hope for conservatives, however. Even though the cemeteries went strong for Biden, Black and Latino support for the GOP increased. Pollsters again embarrassed themselves. Their power to influence is waning. By 2022 for the off-year Congressional elections, deplorable strength will have increased. In 2024 if the Republican nominee isn’t Trump it will surely be a candidate who espouses Trump’s agenda.

 Re-elected or not in our still undetermined current election, Donald Trump has remade his party and the world. His army of deplorables are by no means down and out.

 

Roger Hines

11/18/20

 

 

 

           

 

                                 Newt Country No More

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 11/6/20

      

            In 1974 at age 31 an assistant history professor at West Georgia College decided to try his hand at politics. Make that elective politics. The young PhD in modern European history had already been active in teaching political history. He knew the landscape, both ancient and modern, of the Western world and held strong views about what would keep the Western world free and what would not. His run for Congress in 1974 was but a natural, predictable step in realizing his vision for the nation.

            Good teachers are learners. They like to tell others what they have learned. Good teachers are often restless. There’s so much their young charges need to know, and often that knowledge beckons even the teacher to some sort of action. Such was the case, or so it appears, with Professor Gingrich. Teaching alone could not satisfy. If forty years of Democratic rule in the U.S. House of Representatives wasn’t cutting the mustard, it was time to teach via action.

            For Professor Newton Leroy Gingrich, or just Newt as both friends and foes now call him, the foray into elective politics began in 1974 when he ran for Congress against an established Democrat in Georgia’s 6^th district. Newt lost. He lost again in 1976. In 1978 his election to the House began an18-year career in national politics. His backbencher status would ultimately become first tier, given his election to Speaker in 1995.

Brash, smart, and full of ideas about government and governing, Newt took conservatism seriously. From the start he desired and pressed for a Republican party that was aggressive and active. Eschewing the old saw that says the essence of conservatism is restraint, Newt led the Republicans with their Contract for America, a substantial document that promised and attained welfare reform. Falling short of its goal of term limits for Congress, the Contract for America still served as a rallying cry for conservatives and conservative government.

Newt’s stock rose. Orator, author, philosopher, historian, strategist, and an effective political evangelist, Newt Gingrich became a household word in Georgia’s 6^th Congressional district, the state of Georgia, and the nation. The constant simmer between him and Georgia’s House Speaker foretold the day Tom Murphy would be defeated and Democratic control of Georgia would end. Newt’s skirmishes with his predecessor in the U.S. House, Speaker Jim Wright, showed conservatives that Republicans could fight and would fight, no longer content with being a nice, quiet minority. In 1994 Newt was Time magazine’s Man of the Year.

After Newt led the Republican takeover of the House, President Bill Clinton in his January, 1996 State of the Union address acknowledged what had happened. Nearly the political genius Newt was, and knowing he was whipped, Clinton stated, “The era of big government is over.”

Well, we wish. Not only did the era of big government not end. It lingered and continues, else why is the swamp bigger and why does at least half of the nation’s voters support the presidential candidate who called the swamp creatures out?

Alas, why is Newt’s old district of northwest Atlanta/Cobb County turning purple?  Why the fate of Karen Handel, Neil Warren, Mike Boyce, and others? For Cobb County government proper, conservatives cannot deny it was a blue wave. Expect higher property taxes.

There are many different reasons why candidates lose and they are not always ideological. Personality/likeability matters deeply as does single issue voting. Yet, in recent Republican losses in Newt’s old territory something deeper is being revealed. It’s called the sweep of history.

“Now there arose a new king over Egypt who knew not Joseph,” the Exodus account puts it. Joseph, the Jew who had risen to Prime Minister of Egypt, had died. Despite his leadership, and the favor given to Jews, Joseph is now forgotten and the Jews in Egypt are being persecuted.

Newt Gingrich has fought the good fight for conservatism ever since his departure from Washington. But the 35-year-old voter of today was born in 1985. He or she knew not Reagan or Newt unless from personal reading, knowledgeable parents, or an astute American history teacher. Today’s 35-year-old has been brought up with the availability of conservative talk radio, but also with college history teachers, historians, and ubiquitous media stars who invariably bend left and religiously court our youths. “As the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.”

Whoever wins the presidential election, Newt, Reagan, and Trump are all still alive. All three esteemed the common man and common sense. If conservatism and the common man are down in 2020, they’re still not out. History sweeps both ways. And freedom lovers will fight another day.

 

Roger Hines

11/4/20

             

 

                                   Is Atlas Shrugging?

               Published in Marietta(GA) Daily Journal, 10/30/20

            Picture, if you will, the Charles Atlas weight building ads that for decades appeared in magazines across America. Charles Atlas was an Italian-American who created and marketed a popular bodybuilding course. Though Atlas’s name was actually Angelo Siciliano, he legally changed it after being told his physique resembled the statue of Atlas, the Greek titan.

            The mythological Atlas, punished for attempting to topple the head god Zeus, was confined to bearing the weight of the world and the heavens on his shoulders for eternity. Hence the statue of the bent but muscular Atlas holding up the world. Hence the commercially inspired pictures of the well-muscled Charles Atlas who taught American men how to get buffed.

            Drawing from the mythological Atlas, novelist Ayn Rand in 1957 authored her 1000-page novel titled Atlas Shrugged. A stern libertarian who unlike most anti-statists was an avowed atheist, Rand came from Russia to the United States in 1926. She became an eloquent opponent of collectivism and the leading literary proponent of capitalism. Rand had reason to reject collectivism. The Bolshevists disrupted her family’s comfortable life and confiscated her father’s business. Her family almost starved under Lenin’s socialism.

            Given academia’s ingrained leftist ideology, we can be sure that few if any universities made Rand’s books required reading. Even so Atlas Shrugged has been rated in several surveys (Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club among them) as the second-most-influential book of all time behind the Bible. The book’s central theme is the evils of tyrannical government.

A child prodigy, Rand understood what was happening in Russia. Enthralled by America’s freedom, bigness, and particularly the skyline of Manhattan, she cried “tears of splendor” upon viewing it. Contrasting America to Russia, Rand became an American citizen and an anti-communist activist.

            There is no Atlas holding up the world, but something or Somebody is. We know that physically the planet we live on is suspended in air, but that awe-inspiring reality is not of great moment in turbulent 2020. Currently we must give our thoughts to more immediate realities such as human civilization, behavior, governance, and keeping tyranny at bay.

            For ages man’s major enemy was tyrants and their tyranny. For centuries man yearned to be free but was everywhere in chains. In ancient Greece glimmers of political freedom appeared, but only glimmers. Actually not until 244 years ago did there emerge on the globe a momentous, radical, and lasting revolution that freed man from kings, queens, princes, dukes, popes and the like. 244 years is not a long time. Chronologically America is still a babe in arms.

            Americans, a freed and self-governing people, sullied their character and defiled their claims of equality when they tolerated slavery and segregation. Those ills, however, were addressed. Americans have since elected and re-elected a Black president. But even the election of a Black citizen to lead the nation has not tempered the anger of domestic, racist terrorists. Crime, particularly vandalism, rioting, and Black on Black murder, is raging. Many political, business, and religious leaders are excusing the rioting. The vandals are justifiably venting, these leaders claim.

            Figuratively, the mythical Atlas is shrugging. He cannot station himself securely and hold us up when free people reject the results of their elections. In 2016 the losers rejected election results, igniting civil unrest. They, not the winner of the presidential election, caused Atlas to shift his feet in order not to fall.

            If political conservatives lose the election next week, they must accept it and sharpen their persuasion skills during the next four years. If they follow the bad example of their liberal counterparts of 2016, incivility will persist. If liberals lose the election next week, they too had better consider the chaos their refusal has caused. To lose and then continue fighting as the loyal opposition is noble. To lose, become a crybaby, and attempt a coup is ruinous.

            The socialism Ayn Rand fled is the socialism that awaits us if Americans elect the wrong person.  Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are totally in the hands of the government. When private producers are destroyed (a la Marx, Lenin and Bernie), free enterprise is destroyed.

  Public schools and Medicare are not socialism. For Karl Marx, socialism was the transactional, interim social state between capitalism and communism, a fact Democrats don’t like to admit. Americans can have it if they wish, but choosing it will negate the courage of the ragtag farmers and small businessmen who only 244 years ago whipped the world’s most powerful empire, thereby giving a new nation constitutional government.

            If America shrugs next Tuesday, the world will shrug also, heading straight back to tyrants and tyranny.

 

Roger Hines

10/28/20