“The Other” or “The Human Connection”: Making a Choice

A conglomeration of absurd comments on Right-Wing websites concerning the impossibility of co-existence with Muslim groups, mainly Syrian refugees, in our small rural communities sparks some memories from my own past.

Similar types of comments I often heard, as a child during the mid 50s to early 60s, about black people here, who often worked side by side with the racial bigots in the cotton fields on my father’s 120-acre tenant farm in SE MO.

I can see that the religious and racial bigots are out, on the Right-Wing websites–acting the same way–hinting and whispering when among a mixed group, but accusing and railing irrationally when among their “own kind”.

I suppose I first met a Muslim during my freshman year (1966) at the Univ. of MO-Rolla, a small rural town in central MO, by the way, that has accommodated a large number of international Muslim students for decades. He was from Iran, sat in front of me in Engineering Graphics class, was friendly and personable. No, I never got to know him. Such are the consequences of cultural separation or isolation. I was an 18-year-old poor farm boy, WASP, who had received a grant to attend engineering school under Lyndon Johnson’s National Defense Student Grant program. My sense was that his family was wealthy, and he was carrying his family’s expectations of him. I was, too.

I wound up back in SE MO, eventually becoming a teacher. But that was an early encounter with the other, after my very early experience (age 6) with black people in the cotton fields. I carried water to them, a dipper and a bucket, at age 8 (mid-1950s) and “chopped cotton” beside them, listening to their woes and their rhythmic expression of joy, pain, desire, and sorrow. I was the other then, but had some sense of “entitlement” because of my race and my father’s relative status–though we were quite poor–in relation to them. The invisible walls are always there.

My point is that it is early experience that can lead one to be respectful and tolerant of other cultural traditions and values. That doesn’t mean we have to accept all those values, but the human connection itelf shows us not only the differences but also the commonalities among human groups. It should not take an extraterrestrial invasion to help us understand that there are many more similarities than differences, and WHY FOCUS SOLELY ON THE DIFFERENCES?

WHAT AGENDA AND WHAT AGENTS DEMAND OR EXPECT THIS TUNNEL VISION?

Background Checks and the National Rifle Association

Since the church killings in Charleston, SC, on June 17, 2015, millions of ordinary citizens out there, like myself, have been asking themselves, “Why these needless hate killings?” And “Why on earth did this boy’s (Dylann Roof’s) father (yes, he’s a sociopathic boy, just past the age of adult accountability) give him guns?

Do some checking: What does the NRA support as a limit in terms of the types and numbers of firearms an individual may possess? What types of individuals should not be allowed access to such fearful weapons?

I agree that the limit should not be zero. And that there are plenty of responsible gun owners out there.

But why not a 10-day to 2-week waiting period, at least, while background checks are being made?

Some argue that the relevant information about the individual cannot be found. When money is involved, believe me, virtually any of this most important information can be found.

What would our revolutionary forefathers have done–without firearms–at the battles of Lexington and Concord, you ask?

These patriots were using breech-loading black powder and balls, not easily concealable handguns or rapid firing automatics, to fight a foreign army invading their land, not a group of worshipping people–in a church in South Carolina–of a different skin color. Citizen militias–clearly the concern of the second amendment–were likely not envisioned as harboring “whackos in hiding” (most aren’t in hiding anyway, but right there in front of us, though we don’t see).

You can be sure that Washington had to discipline some of these whackos during the Revolution itself. The Colonial army was disorderly enough, and harsh measures were sometimes necessary because, yes, there were a substantial number of criminals and sociopaths.

Both the Revolution and the “Wild West” (not so wild, actually) are long past, and the cultural attitudes affected by their inherent violence are no longer viable.

Even the delusions of the Hollywood Wild West of the 1930s thru 60s are defunct as well. Many of our “citizen chickenhawks”, though stuck emotionally in this era, are beginning to lose the feel for the “romance” of those inaccurate and essentially pandering notions.

Something about the devastating power of a lead slug appeals to the unconscious bloodlust in the hotheads, the psychopaths, the sociopaths, and the megalomaniacs. Lubricate this bloodlust with a little alcohol, and many of these individuals are ready to turn their illnesses into action.

After all, guns in the hands of those mentioned above create fearful lives for the vulnerable around them. And these people are often not protected, in spite of the swagger of the “righteous” gun toters who would have one believe otherwise.

The mystique of firearms and the almost religious response to the raw power they seem to confer on one have engendered irresponsible positions on the part of groups like the NRA. Do I have the “right” to mount a 50-calibre on my elevated deck in order to threaten the speeders who endanger the lives of children on my street? Sometimes I’d like to. Can I have my own surface-to-air rocket launcher in my backyard? Strictly for protection, that is.

In short, what are the limits? Answer that question, support effective background checks, and many of us will give the NRA some respect.

Owning and using a gun for home defense is an animal completely different from the apparently ubiquitous need to create a sense of personal security or power through a virtually worshipped object.

Liability insurance makes a great deal of sense–an incentive, like automobile liability insurance, to help make the irresponsible more responsible, the criminal less likely to commit spur-of-the-moment horrendous crimes, and the anti-social less likely to take innocent lives in anger. Get insurance companies (and capitalism itself) involved, and we have a whole new ballgame, likely with background checks.

Evangelicals, Theocracy, and the Enlightenment

Recently, while surfing Right-Wing websites, I came upon an interesting, though thoroughly typical, article by an Evangelical minister named Ted Weiland with an obvious polemical axe to grind. Weiland’s argument that all governments are theocracies may be summed up in his own words:

…There is no escaping theocracy. A government’s laws reflect its morality, and the source of that morality (or, more often than not, immorality) is its god. It is never a question of theocracy or no theocracy, but whose theocracy. The American people, by way of their elected officials, are the source of the Constitutional Republic’s laws. Therefore, the Constitutional Republic’s god is WE THE PEOPLE.

People recoil at the idea of a theocracy’s morality being forced upon them, but because all governments are theocracies, someone’s morality is always being enforced. This is an inevitability of government. The question is which god, theocracy, laws, and morality will we choose to live under?…

[Chapter 3 “The Preamble: WE THE PEOPLE vs. YAHWEH” at bibleversusconstitution.org/BlvcOnline/biblelaw-constitutionalism-pt3.html.]

According to Weiland, every government is a theocracy because “the source of that morality” is its god. As one who often applies the American philosopher Charles Peirce’s “Pragmatic Criterion of Meaning”–the meaning of a statement consists of the sum total of its expected practical consequences–I have to question, then, whether our own government hasn’t been serving the Great God Mammon all along. I could ask the same, I suppose, about many self-identifying Christians in our own culture.

A theocracy is a government set up expressly to promote policies that reflect a particular conception of God and a particular set of religious doctrines (a theology, like Christian theology). In the late 1700s, in spite of the Separatist Movement that had founded the Plymouth Colony over a century and a half earlier, the Church of England was poised to extend its theocratic control over all the colonies, had already largely done so in the southern colonies (including Virginia), but was prevented from extending its power over our fledgling nation by a few forward-thinking revolutionaries like Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson.

The fact that a “government’s laws reflect its morality, and the source of that morality…” is probably an inevitable one, since ethical values derive directly from the cultural background and traditions of the members of said government. Our founders’ cultural background was obviously white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant (WASP), with a few Catholics thrown in (though somewhat distrusted). Since then the integration of Hispanic cultures, northern European, Irish and Scottish, African, Middle Eastern, and East Asian (all generally invited, because of the need for laborers) in our “melting pot” has brought with it an influx of Catholics, Presbyterians, Jews, Muslims, Hindi, and Buddhists, to name the most prominent.

The beauty of the Enlightenment (also known as “The Age of Reason”) is that thinkers like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson evolved into rationalists (later called “Deists”), who eventually discounted the supernatural elements accepted by most in their own religious culture. Jefferson even created his own “secret Bible” by cutting and pasting passages of the New Testament into a work that leaves out altogether the claims about angels, miracles, and even the resurrection itself. Jefferson’s aim was to find the core of Jesus’ moral teachings and to put together a chronological life history of Jesus as a human being.

It was their ability to transcend conventional organized religious doctrine (mainly Anglican, but also Christianity in general)–through free thinking and reason–that eventually resulted in what Fundamentalists today hate so much: our nation’s adopted policy of separation of church and state (sometimes capitalized). Evangelicals today, with the power and following of the Anglican Church of the 15 through 1700s, demonstrate little understanding and even less appreciation for the liberation of human thought brought on by the Enlightenment.

My point? That religious and cultural backgrounds do not have to mandate particular policies in action–if those leaders choose what they consider to be higher principles than what organized religions like to call their “absolute truths”. But virtually all organized religions assert that there are no higher principles than their own absolute truths. Hence the distinction between “organized religion” and the “natural religion” of the individual that we see in Ben Franklin’s Autobiography.

In conclusion, two living and concurrent but disparate strands of thought about religious freedom run through our American political discourse today. Both were incubated in that hotbed of revolutionary ideas in the 1700s:

1) The WASP-oriented Evangelical argument, propelled by the “Great Awakening” and including such notions as “the white man’s burden”. This strand insists there is one set of “absolute truths” (though many denominations) and one true God (often simply equated with Jesus), which we as a nation disobey at our own peril. For this reason, Evangelicals generally support theocracy, but only if it is their own. Any competing ideas and doctrines are “of the Devil”. Transformation, even at the risk of bloodshed, trumps integration and co-existence.

2) The Enlightenment argument, with its emphasis on reason and science over faith, and its “rationalist” approach to finding “the truth”. This strand distrusts traditional ideas like the “divine right of kings”, Judaic conceptions of God, and even the supernatural explanations and elements found in the New Testament. It is concerned, instead, with the “Rights of Man”–the freedom of the individual to pursue life, liberty, and happiness…in this life. Theocracy precludes this freedom by establishing either a hierarchy of social status or a tyranny of spiritual belief.

Obamacare and the “Death Panels” Scare

In the summer of 2014, when the Obamacare issue became its most strident, Mark Halperin–Senior Political Analyst for Time magazine–chided Obama for not being truthful about how costs are going to be controlled. In an appearance on Morning Joe he even said death panels do exist and that they are needed to “bend the cost curve on end-of-life care”.

Later, I watched the entire 13 minutes of Halperin’s appearance on Maltzberg’s show. He didn’t seem “mad” at all–as several Right-Wing pundits claimed–though he did say the President had been misleading in his statements about keeping one’s health insurance policy if one wanted to. That was disturbing.

Later still, we found out that many substandard insurance plans–hardly worth the paper they were printed on–were being cancelled by the insurance companies themselves, but that was because they didn’t meet basic requirements under the new law.

As far as death panels are concerned, Halperin said that insurance companies were already making such end-of-life decisions, for cost control. This, of course, has occurred for some time–though the general public, I believe, has been largely unaware. Perhaps the unpleasantness of such decision-making and of the situations attending it led them to look away. My point here is that if one wants to blame someone for “death panels”, one should have started with the health insurance companies several decades ago.

This “death panel” idea is a logical consequence of conspiracy theories concerning world overpopulation and the donations of high-profile billionaires like Warren Buffet to Planned Parenthood and this supposed new healthcare policy designed to limit treatment at the end of life. The goal, conspiracists say, is to achieve zero population growth and eventually depopulate the planet, after the collapse of the major world economies. Individual freedom and prosperity will then be replaced with a “collectivist tyranny” that decides how much consumers are allowed to consume.

One could just as easily blame Capitalism and the Law of Supply and Demand for these limitations placed on medical treatment at the end of life. Supply of treatment is limited (Law of Conservation of Resources) and demand is steadily increasing, both of which drive up costs to the consumer. Capitalism itself decides that the wealthy get to consume more medical treatment–and the poor less. So the Right’s touting of a “War on Humanity” is more accurately a “War on the Poor”. How can one doubt that the wealthy get more and better end-of-life treatment? For the entire history of our republic, instead of “survival of the fittest” we have endured “survival of the richest”.

The insertion of health insurance companies into this equation–like the mob thugs who sell protection from harm or unforeseen calamity in their neighborhoods–means that whoever has the best insurance gets to consume the best care. Insurance companies, of course, in order to limit their own costs and maximize profit, have to make decisions concerning how much treatment a particular consumer gets at the end of her or his life. These are the “death panels” that so many naively think have sprung up because of Obamacare, but have actually been in existence for decades, at least. One needs only to speak with a friend who has dealt with an insurance company making such decisions about the survival of an elderly loved one.

Obamacare is an attempt–albeit a relatively weak one– to change this equation by forcing the insurance mob to accept less payout from lower-income people for their “protection”, with the promise that getting more of these people into the system will increase their overall profit. But the pattern of yearly record profits for health-insurance companies has supposedly dictated the “need” for substantial increases in premiums, which we are seeing now, in 2016.

Stats show that the United States consistently exhibits the highest per-capita cost for health care on this planet, yet ranks far down the list, in varying positions over the years, for the quality of that care. Data also seems to show that the opposite is true in several northern European countries, whose citizens seem to support their nationalized systems, though this inference seems not to have taken hold widely in this nation, except among some younger people, especially Bernie Sanders’ supporters. Sanders’ presidential campaign thrives, in part, because of his proposal to eliminate health insurance companies altogether and move to a single-payer government-run system.

Many of us believe that the savings in total healthcare costs alone makes this proposal viable. The questions then become: Do we trust the federal bureaucracy to fairly and effectively administer such a system?  Do we need the competition between healthcare insurance companies as well as between healthcare providers and medical-pharmaceutical suppliers in order to ensure the best care possible?

The Issue of Natural-Born Citizenship

2016 election-season squabbles over the eligibility requirements for the office of the Presidency have raised some interesting questions concerning the definition of a “natural born citizen”. Having perused many articles and reader replies on Right-Wing websites over the last few months, I believe most Conservative positions hinge on two points: 1) that our founding fathers relied on the definition given by Vattel in his Law of Nations and 2) that a new “precedent” wasn’t adopted at a later date, sometime in the history of our republic. The Constitutional legality of that adoption…well, that’s another issue.

As we have seen lately with Ted Cruz, and earlier with McCain, Romney, and Obama, these questions of “natural born” citizenship have NEVER been resolved ultimately, though it is easy to see that federal courts have “decided” this issue in individual cases.

Many Conservatives argue that we should use the definitions in Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. This approach is quite problematic but does seem to point to the common understanding among our founders that natural-born citizenship was dependent upon the “condition of the father” (his citizenship). This leads, however, to some seminal questions:

Wouldn’t it be necessary to determine the patrimony of every person–born here or elsewhere–to be certain of that person’s status as a natural born citizen? With the unreliability of records and of fathers stepping forward, during most of our history, aren’t we talking about tens of, maybe hundreds of, thousands of “Americans” who couldn’t be certain of their citizenship?

And we can’t be certain, as well. How many American presidents were “illegal”? To adhere to Vattel’s definition today, don’t we need to be giving patrimony tests for every so-called natural born citizen, as soon as she or he is born? And what about all the descendants of those illegals–through paternal lineage? Are they illegal as well? This is getting pretty complicated.

Frankly, I don’t see how this issue isn’t going to continue coming up during Presidential election seasons–at least, until the Supreme Court does its job.