I get a kick out of libertarians, and it’s not where kicks are well received. Libertarians preach rugged individualism and self-sufficiency and rant against Big Government like there’s no tomorrow…and in their view there will be no tomorrow as long as BG gets in the way of individual freedom.
The latest iteration of their uproar over BG is their call to repeal Obamacare because it requires everyone to buy health insurance. One of their representatives, a federal judge in eastern Virginia, recently ruled that requiring health insurance is unconstitutional. Libertarians can take care of themselves, thank you, and no government should be able to require a person to buy anything he doesn’t want. The problem with this thinking is that when the libertarian gets sick enough to go to a hospital, unless he has a lot of spare cash in his mattress, we the people who do buy insurance end up paying higher premiums because the cost of the libertarian’s stay in the hospital is spread among us premium payers. In other words, the libertarian ends up mooching off the rest of us.
Another pet peeve of the libertarians is gun control. However, thanks to them and their great lobby, the NRA, we have loose and easy gun laws in this country. This looseness enables Mexican drug cartels to sneak across the border in Texas or Arizona, but particularly in Texas, and buy all the semi-automatics and ammunition they need to add to the 30,000 of corpses they have already strewn around northern Mexico. Our libertarian-inspired gun laws or lack thereof have enabled drug cartels to assume such power in Mexico that the Mexican government can’t begin to gain control of its own country. No wonder Mexicans want to come to the United States. We have made Mexico unsafe for habitation, thanks to our libertarian gun laws. But that’s just part of the story.
Of course our libertarian attitude toward drug use in the U.S. has also provided the funds for the cartels to be able to buy the weapons to kill their people, but that would be pointing the finger at a whole different species of libertarians who think they ought to be able to ingest any substance they feel like and to hell with the law and the social and economic cost to the rest of the law-abiding public. Drug users are unwittingly willing to sacrifice Mexican lives and the health of American culture for another selfish hit toward personal oblivion. It is their liberty to do so, they insist.
But maybe there is a silver lining in this selfish behavior as other libertarians see it. If the drug-addled libertarians keep buying drugs, most of which come from Mexico, and the cartels then can buy more guns from the U.S., America’s trade imbalance is improved. Moreover, if the cartels help keep down the population in Mexico, we can make those libertarians in Arizona happy because there will be fewer Mexicans crossing the border to take American jobs. It’s a win-win for everyone, except Mexicans. But who cares about them. After all, the libertarian motto, which is featured on the New Hampshire license plate, is “Live Free or Die.” Translated, it means we’ll live free and you’ll die. But that’s your problem, not mine. After all, we’re all libertarians and should look after ourselves. That’s what “real America” is all about.
Then again, if we go back to the libertarian healthcare issue, why not let them have their way and not require health insurance. However, when they show up at the hospital with a life-threatening injury or illness, make them pay up front for any anticipated costs. It may take a while to assess their situation, but they can simply plunk down a $100,000 - $500,000 deposit, depending on the severity of the case, and any surplus left after service will be returned to them. If the libertarian can’t produce the deposit, that’s too bad. He can go take care of himself. In that case, the motto shifts to “Live Free and Die. But a “real” libertarian wouldn’t have it any other way.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
The Dream Act
The Dream Act is about to be shot down by the lame duck congress with the excuse that it takes away jobs from existing citizens and will cost too much to implement when we are looking for ways to cut the deficit. The argument FOR the Dream Act is essentially this:
Over three million students graduate from U.S. high schools every year. Most get the opportunity to test their dreams and live their American story. However, a group of approximately 65,000 youth do not get this opportunity; they are smeared with an inherited title, an illegal immigrant. These youth have lived in the United States for most of their lives and want nothing more than to be recognized for what they are, Americans.
The DREAM Act is a bipartisan legislation ‒ pioneered by Sen. Orin Hatch [R-UT] and Sen. Richard Durbin [D-IL] ‒ that can solve this hemorrhaging injustice in our society. Under the rigorous provisions of the DREAM Act, qualifying undocumented youth would be eligible for a 6 year long conditional path to citizenship that requires completion of a college degree or two years of military service.*
I have a dream. It’s bigger than The Dream Act sponsored by Senators Orrin Hatch and Dick Durbin. Why not make all teenagers apply for American citizenship as the privilege it should be rather than the natural right it is now? Of all the entitlements that cost the U.S. taxpayer money, the entitlement to citizenship is the greatest. If all residents of the U.S. were required to apply for citizenship the way they have to apply, say, for a driver’s license, we would be giving them the opportunity to earn citizenship rather than merely letting them take it for granted.
I know, it would be a radical idea no country has ever tried, but just think of what it would do to improve the work ethic and ambition among that portion of today’s youth that is lethargic, directionless, and dilly-dallying.
Here are some of the gains we would make as a society:
1. Education would take on more meaning for more students.
2. The military would have a greater and better educated supply of applicants.
3. The labor force would develop the skills industry needs to become competitive.
4. People would become more committed and informed citizens.
5. We would all truly become a nation of immigrants in that we would earn our place.
6. The sense of entitlement index would fall.
7. Productivity would rise.
8. People would be taught early on to “earn” their way.
9. People would learn to assume responsibility much earlier.
10. Citizens would also be more apt to take civic responsibility seriously as well.
The problem with this plan, you might say, is what to do with those who do not qualify. I would suggest that deporting them is not an option, unless we can find a country that would take them off our hands. That’s unlikely, unless we pay some desperate country to take them, but that won't help the long-range need to lower the national deficit, although getting rid of these slackers would cost us less in the long run. Right now the status quo has them in our midst anyway, except they are granted all the rights and privileges of citizenship. By denying them those rights unless they earn them, we would be giving them an incentive to seek citizenship or otherwise be temporarily disenfranchised in ALL respects.
When they turn 19 and have failed to graduate from high school, draft them into boarding “prep” schools and finish the job of educating them by addressing their academic deficiencies and providing the discipline and structure that they and their families did not while they were in regular high school. If this does not work, draft them into a military/community service corps that rebuilds America’s infrastructure on an ongoing basis. Make it a kind of compulsory job corps which they complete when they have their high school diploma. Any of these alternatives will be less expensive than prison, although those will continue to be needed for true criminals.
If only we had an Australia as the British did back in the 18th Century. We could ship them all off to a remote land and be done with them. (Not incidentally, that experiment turned petty criminals into successful pioneers). However, because of the lack of available real estate on the planet in the 21st Century, we will have to deal with the fallout ourselves. I welcome suggestions beyond what I have offered.
Limiting this Dream Act opportunity to a relatively small number of undocumented immigrants seems both unfair to others who might benefit from it and unfair to the productive citizenry of the United States. We need to be more inclusive and draw from a much larger pool that already is bequeathed their citizenship without lifting a finger. It is time to fulfill the dream of JFK who said: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
As an educator of at-risk youth for the last seven years of my 39 year secondary school career, I know how motivated undocumented youth can be. Many of the truly successful students I oversaw were undocumented. Unfortunately, their citizenship path is currently blocked by law. I know they would make models citizens, but currently we are shooting ourselves in the foot by denying them a path to citizenship while letting less willing youth automatically qualify by birth. That’s why I propose a much greater campaign to transform more American youth into the kind of citizens we need and want.
*http://dreamact.info/
Over three million students graduate from U.S. high schools every year. Most get the opportunity to test their dreams and live their American story. However, a group of approximately 65,000 youth do not get this opportunity; they are smeared with an inherited title, an illegal immigrant. These youth have lived in the United States for most of their lives and want nothing more than to be recognized for what they are, Americans.
The DREAM Act is a bipartisan legislation ‒ pioneered by Sen. Orin Hatch [R-UT] and Sen. Richard Durbin [D-IL] ‒ that can solve this hemorrhaging injustice in our society. Under the rigorous provisions of the DREAM Act, qualifying undocumented youth would be eligible for a 6 year long conditional path to citizenship that requires completion of a college degree or two years of military service.*
I have a dream. It’s bigger than The Dream Act sponsored by Senators Orrin Hatch and Dick Durbin. Why not make all teenagers apply for American citizenship as the privilege it should be rather than the natural right it is now? Of all the entitlements that cost the U.S. taxpayer money, the entitlement to citizenship is the greatest. If all residents of the U.S. were required to apply for citizenship the way they have to apply, say, for a driver’s license, we would be giving them the opportunity to earn citizenship rather than merely letting them take it for granted.
I know, it would be a radical idea no country has ever tried, but just think of what it would do to improve the work ethic and ambition among that portion of today’s youth that is lethargic, directionless, and dilly-dallying.
Here are some of the gains we would make as a society:
1. Education would take on more meaning for more students.
2. The military would have a greater and better educated supply of applicants.
3. The labor force would develop the skills industry needs to become competitive.
4. People would become more committed and informed citizens.
5. We would all truly become a nation of immigrants in that we would earn our place.
6. The sense of entitlement index would fall.
7. Productivity would rise.
8. People would be taught early on to “earn” their way.
9. People would learn to assume responsibility much earlier.
10. Citizens would also be more apt to take civic responsibility seriously as well.
The problem with this plan, you might say, is what to do with those who do not qualify. I would suggest that deporting them is not an option, unless we can find a country that would take them off our hands. That’s unlikely, unless we pay some desperate country to take them, but that won't help the long-range need to lower the national deficit, although getting rid of these slackers would cost us less in the long run. Right now the status quo has them in our midst anyway, except they are granted all the rights and privileges of citizenship. By denying them those rights unless they earn them, we would be giving them an incentive to seek citizenship or otherwise be temporarily disenfranchised in ALL respects.
When they turn 19 and have failed to graduate from high school, draft them into boarding “prep” schools and finish the job of educating them by addressing their academic deficiencies and providing the discipline and structure that they and their families did not while they were in regular high school. If this does not work, draft them into a military/community service corps that rebuilds America’s infrastructure on an ongoing basis. Make it a kind of compulsory job corps which they complete when they have their high school diploma. Any of these alternatives will be less expensive than prison, although those will continue to be needed for true criminals.
If only we had an Australia as the British did back in the 18th Century. We could ship them all off to a remote land and be done with them. (Not incidentally, that experiment turned petty criminals into successful pioneers). However, because of the lack of available real estate on the planet in the 21st Century, we will have to deal with the fallout ourselves. I welcome suggestions beyond what I have offered.
Limiting this Dream Act opportunity to a relatively small number of undocumented immigrants seems both unfair to others who might benefit from it and unfair to the productive citizenry of the United States. We need to be more inclusive and draw from a much larger pool that already is bequeathed their citizenship without lifting a finger. It is time to fulfill the dream of JFK who said: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
As an educator of at-risk youth for the last seven years of my 39 year secondary school career, I know how motivated undocumented youth can be. Many of the truly successful students I oversaw were undocumented. Unfortunately, their citizenship path is currently blocked by law. I know they would make models citizens, but currently we are shooting ourselves in the foot by denying them a path to citizenship while letting less willing youth automatically qualify by birth. That’s why I propose a much greater campaign to transform more American youth into the kind of citizens we need and want.
*http://dreamact.info/
Monday, November 8, 2010
Keeping Up with the Joneses
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
-Emma Lazarus
We, the people, have this expectation that by now we should have this have-have not issue sorted out by now. The truth is American life has become so compartmentalized, gated, isolated, stratified, segmented, and cocooned, two statues within close proximity of each other in New York City can have two very different takes on the concept of opportunity. I am referring to the Charging Bull on Wall Street and the Statue of Liberty in the New York harbor. The practices of Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman-Sachs, and the poetry of Emma Lazarus are worlds apart. The land of opportunity has become the land for opportunists. The opportunists, if given a chance, will own everything; we, the people, will own nothing.
At this point in American history the Wall Street opportunists see developing markets abroad, cheap labor abroad, and could care less about what happens to the American people. The American people have nothing to do with Wall Street's self-interests unless the American people can make them richer. When they can't, the Wall Streeters and their ilk turn elsewhere. Their loyalty is to their own increasing wealth. It's all about making money, never mind the tired and poor left behind.
Yes, a segment of America has gotten fat, tired, lazy, and entitled. Yes, keeping up with the Joneses has turned into keeping up with the Dow Joneses. We also became a vigilante consumer culture: buy now, ask questions later. The poor, who have nothing but TV to inform them, are conditioned to buy-buy-buy even when they have no purchasing power. However, there are those who have tried their best and still have failed. They are the ones who need help from somewhere.
If our culture and its chief agency, namely government, could better distribute opportunity rather than wealth, that would go a long way toward leveling the playing field. Affirmative correction has done that for some individuals, but the effort has to be orchestrated for whole communities, not just individuals. It does no good to remove a few rough diamonds and polish them, except for the diamonds themselves.
Teach for America is a good start. If businesses can be given tax incentives to hire and train Americans rather than ship jobs overseas, that would be an effective way out. But to rely on more taxation as the means of redistributing wealth simply won't sell. The rich hold the purse-strings of the economy as well as the government, Democrats and Republicans alike. We are kidding ourselves if we think otherwise. Therefore, tax break incentives to create and maintain jobs in America are the pragmatic way out of this burgeoning inequality.
Then again, not taxing the rich more than we currently do will leave the growing national deficit a terrible liability for our children’s future. Sooner or later, we'll have to raise taxes. Since 2% of the population earns 24% of the wealth, they should shoulder 24% of the tax burden. Currently they fall far short of that.
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
-Emma Lazarus
We, the people, have this expectation that by now we should have this have-have not issue sorted out by now. The truth is American life has become so compartmentalized, gated, isolated, stratified, segmented, and cocooned, two statues within close proximity of each other in New York City can have two very different takes on the concept of opportunity. I am referring to the Charging Bull on Wall Street and the Statue of Liberty in the New York harbor. The practices of Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman-Sachs, and the poetry of Emma Lazarus are worlds apart. The land of opportunity has become the land for opportunists. The opportunists, if given a chance, will own everything; we, the people, will own nothing.
At this point in American history the Wall Street opportunists see developing markets abroad, cheap labor abroad, and could care less about what happens to the American people. The American people have nothing to do with Wall Street's self-interests unless the American people can make them richer. When they can't, the Wall Streeters and their ilk turn elsewhere. Their loyalty is to their own increasing wealth. It's all about making money, never mind the tired and poor left behind.
Yes, a segment of America has gotten fat, tired, lazy, and entitled. Yes, keeping up with the Joneses has turned into keeping up with the Dow Joneses. We also became a vigilante consumer culture: buy now, ask questions later. The poor, who have nothing but TV to inform them, are conditioned to buy-buy-buy even when they have no purchasing power. However, there are those who have tried their best and still have failed. They are the ones who need help from somewhere.
If our culture and its chief agency, namely government, could better distribute opportunity rather than wealth, that would go a long way toward leveling the playing field. Affirmative correction has done that for some individuals, but the effort has to be orchestrated for whole communities, not just individuals. It does no good to remove a few rough diamonds and polish them, except for the diamonds themselves.
Teach for America is a good start. If businesses can be given tax incentives to hire and train Americans rather than ship jobs overseas, that would be an effective way out. But to rely on more taxation as the means of redistributing wealth simply won't sell. The rich hold the purse-strings of the economy as well as the government, Democrats and Republicans alike. We are kidding ourselves if we think otherwise. Therefore, tax break incentives to create and maintain jobs in America are the pragmatic way out of this burgeoning inequality.
Then again, not taxing the rich more than we currently do will leave the growing national deficit a terrible liability for our children’s future. Sooner or later, we'll have to raise taxes. Since 2% of the population earns 24% of the wealth, they should shoulder 24% of the tax burden. Currently they fall far short of that.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Trickle, Trickle, Little Drip
Trickle, trickle, little drip;
All I want is just a sip;
Tip the pot and you’ll be hip;
Oh a drop to touch my lip.
Wall Street, let me earn some cash;
Let me forage through your trash;
All my dreams have turned to ash;
Government’s fault there was a crash.
Throw the tea into the bay;
Keep the taxes low, you say;
Help the rich to never pay;
Keep them rich, come what may.
Wear your cute tri-cornered hat;
Austerity is where it’s at;
Drink their Kool-Aid; chew their fat;
Will you never smell a rat?
So keep the tempest teapot strong;
And keep that sense that you belong;
Perhaps you’ll wake before too long
And figure out that you were wrong.
All I want is just a sip;
Tip the pot and you’ll be hip;
Oh a drop to touch my lip.
Wall Street, let me earn some cash;
Let me forage through your trash;
All my dreams have turned to ash;
Government’s fault there was a crash.
Throw the tea into the bay;
Keep the taxes low, you say;
Help the rich to never pay;
Keep them rich, come what may.
Wear your cute tri-cornered hat;
Austerity is where it’s at;
Drink their Kool-Aid; chew their fat;
Will you never smell a rat?
So keep the tempest teapot strong;
And keep that sense that you belong;
Perhaps you’ll wake before too long
And figure out that you were wrong.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Gopher: Pioneer of Split Estate
It must have been the gopher that inspired the split estate law in the West. If you ever tried to plant a garden anywhere there are gophers, they eat it out from under you…literally. That’s what the split estate law [a combination of the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 (SHRA) and the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 (MLA)] has wrought. Today, an oil and gas company can lease the land under your garden and “drill, baby, drill” until your well, health, and property values are ruined beyond repair. Unlike the gopher, legally, the mineral leaser’s interests trump your surface rights. You can try to trap, poison, drown, or otherwise dispose of the gopher, but you can’t touch the driller.
“The business of America is business,” said President Calvin Coolidge in the 1920’s not long after the two acts mentioned above were passed. It has been business as usual ever since. That peculiar expression of hubris that resulted in the Great Depression was revived by the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street in the last decade and resulted in the Great Recession of 2007-9. But to many a capitalist the bubble and bust cycle of business is just natural, not something to fix. There are always winners and losers, so why worry about crashes and bankruptcy: they are all part of the market system that always self-corrects.
A lot of these true believers in the market-as-God also believe in property-as-God. They like to trace their arguments to the concept of natural rights. John Locke was one of the first “modern” thinkers to come up with a threesome of them: life, liberty, and property. According to Locke, men are born with certain natural rights that no government can ever take away. Since the founding fathers of the United States, taking Locke’s lead, came up with three of their own (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) this idea of natural rights has had a legacy here in the USA. What makes them “natural” as opposed to legal remains debatable, unless, of course, you see them as the equivalent of appendages or body organs as in everyone has a natural right to a liver and liberty.
What’s interesting is that the Locke natural right of property got left out of the founding fathers’ list. In its place the concept of the pursuit of happiness was added. Maybe property got left behind in 1776 because America promised so much available land at the time that the founding fathers believed land would never be an issue. Or maybe they were worried the Indians would realize that they also could “own” property and hold the founding fathers accountable for large scale confiscation of their lands. In any case, property was not highlighted as a natural (inalienable) right in the Declaration of Independence.
However, as the West was being settled thanks to the Gold Rush of 1849 and Manifest Destiny, the religious thrust behind further confiscation of land by Anglos, as well as the Industrial Revolution and the waves of immigrants that came to America starting in the 1840’s, the U.S. Government eventually came up with not only a property right but a “two fer” lease: the split estate. Maybe politicians began to feel that property was something to pay more attention to because not only did industry need more resources and ranchers more land, men were being forced by law to share political power with women the same year that the Minerals Leasing Act was passed (Women’s Suffrage, 1920). MLA passage may be just a coincidence or it may have been a way of placating the men-folk who were eager to have some kind of compensation for their loss.
The split estate seemed like a good idea at the time, just as slavery or denying women the vote seemed like good ideas at an earlier time. There was so much land out west it never occurred to the power brokers in Washington that surface use and sub-surface use could ever come in conflict. Today, now that we are beginning to see the greater interconnectedness of life through ecology, the idea of split estate is obsolete. No knowledgeable person could go along with the continuation of such a law knowing what we now know. Ecology is the thrust behind the abolition movement of the 21st Century. Sooner or later, justice and rightness will prevail. The split-estate law will be abolished, and the idea that mineral rights can take precedence over surface rights will go the way of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It is not only ecologically insane; it is morally wrong.
How can it possibly be morally wrong?
I hear a lot of talk coming from the conservative camp that the national deficit is the greatest threat to the prosperity of future generations of Americans. It is not the GREATEST threat. The greatest threat is environmental degradation by current high-impact, low-cost, expedient mining and drilling practices as well as excessive hydrocarbon use throughout the United States and the planet as a whole. Water quality, air quality, and fertile land quality are far more critical than our need for hydrocarbons. Moreover, if hydrocarbons are so important a finite resource, we should be preserving as much as we can for use by future generations. You cannot argue about the threat of national debt, a reversible liability, and ignore the conservation of resources if you are concerned for future generations. It simply does not make sense. The present generations should turn to alternative, sustainable, non-hydrocarbon sources of energy now so that future generations won’t have to use energy to cool the planet.
Meanwhile, I think I’ll go out to the garden and try to figure out how I can get rid of those gophers that keep undermining my organic dream.
“The business of America is business,” said President Calvin Coolidge in the 1920’s not long after the two acts mentioned above were passed. It has been business as usual ever since. That peculiar expression of hubris that resulted in the Great Depression was revived by the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street in the last decade and resulted in the Great Recession of 2007-9. But to many a capitalist the bubble and bust cycle of business is just natural, not something to fix. There are always winners and losers, so why worry about crashes and bankruptcy: they are all part of the market system that always self-corrects.
A lot of these true believers in the market-as-God also believe in property-as-God. They like to trace their arguments to the concept of natural rights. John Locke was one of the first “modern” thinkers to come up with a threesome of them: life, liberty, and property. According to Locke, men are born with certain natural rights that no government can ever take away. Since the founding fathers of the United States, taking Locke’s lead, came up with three of their own (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) this idea of natural rights has had a legacy here in the USA. What makes them “natural” as opposed to legal remains debatable, unless, of course, you see them as the equivalent of appendages or body organs as in everyone has a natural right to a liver and liberty.
What’s interesting is that the Locke natural right of property got left out of the founding fathers’ list. In its place the concept of the pursuit of happiness was added. Maybe property got left behind in 1776 because America promised so much available land at the time that the founding fathers believed land would never be an issue. Or maybe they were worried the Indians would realize that they also could “own” property and hold the founding fathers accountable for large scale confiscation of their lands. In any case, property was not highlighted as a natural (inalienable) right in the Declaration of Independence.
However, as the West was being settled thanks to the Gold Rush of 1849 and Manifest Destiny, the religious thrust behind further confiscation of land by Anglos, as well as the Industrial Revolution and the waves of immigrants that came to America starting in the 1840’s, the U.S. Government eventually came up with not only a property right but a “two fer” lease: the split estate. Maybe politicians began to feel that property was something to pay more attention to because not only did industry need more resources and ranchers more land, men were being forced by law to share political power with women the same year that the Minerals Leasing Act was passed (Women’s Suffrage, 1920). MLA passage may be just a coincidence or it may have been a way of placating the men-folk who were eager to have some kind of compensation for their loss.
The split estate seemed like a good idea at the time, just as slavery or denying women the vote seemed like good ideas at an earlier time. There was so much land out west it never occurred to the power brokers in Washington that surface use and sub-surface use could ever come in conflict. Today, now that we are beginning to see the greater interconnectedness of life through ecology, the idea of split estate is obsolete. No knowledgeable person could go along with the continuation of such a law knowing what we now know. Ecology is the thrust behind the abolition movement of the 21st Century. Sooner or later, justice and rightness will prevail. The split-estate law will be abolished, and the idea that mineral rights can take precedence over surface rights will go the way of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It is not only ecologically insane; it is morally wrong.
How can it possibly be morally wrong?
I hear a lot of talk coming from the conservative camp that the national deficit is the greatest threat to the prosperity of future generations of Americans. It is not the GREATEST threat. The greatest threat is environmental degradation by current high-impact, low-cost, expedient mining and drilling practices as well as excessive hydrocarbon use throughout the United States and the planet as a whole. Water quality, air quality, and fertile land quality are far more critical than our need for hydrocarbons. Moreover, if hydrocarbons are so important a finite resource, we should be preserving as much as we can for use by future generations. You cannot argue about the threat of national debt, a reversible liability, and ignore the conservation of resources if you are concerned for future generations. It simply does not make sense. The present generations should turn to alternative, sustainable, non-hydrocarbon sources of energy now so that future generations won’t have to use energy to cool the planet.
Meanwhile, I think I’ll go out to the garden and try to figure out how I can get rid of those gophers that keep undermining my organic dream.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
God in America
While watching the second part of the PBS special God in America last night, I was struck by how blindly drawn to certainty a large segment of the country has always been. Better to be dead right than maybe wrong. Both sides of the Civil War believed God was on their side, but as Lincoln concluded, both could not be right and possibly neither was. Then Lincoln went from being Deist (God set in motion this mechanism called life) to Evangelical (God told me what to do) in a sudden revelation which resulted in the Emancipation Proclamation, the just cause the North needed to win the war.
America pretends to have one God but in practice has many. There are personal gods, sectarian gods, and secular gods. What the people who believe in them all have in common is a faith that their god will deliver “the good” and sometimes the goods.
For many the belief starts with absolute trust in a text. The trust is so absolute that every word in the text is sacred. Even though the text has been translated and modernized over time, every word somehow remains sacred to those who buy into fundamentalist teaching. This tendency to see certain texts as sacred (Bible, Torah, Koran) helps explain how some also view The Constitution as a static document to be preserved at any cost as opposed to a living document that is subject to adjustment according to the needs of the people and the times. Literal interpretation of texts, it is assumed, requires no interpretation. It is simply ingesting. You swallow whole, never chew.
This tendency or proclivity to absorb wholly and directly is carried into our economic lives as well. There are those believe in the Market as if it were a god. Just trust in the Market to take care of business. We need not any tinkerers or adjusters or certainly not any government bureaucrats messing with our god. In God We Trust to these purists means In Market We Trust.
America has had an element that wants to purify or sanctify something ever since the Puritans landed in 1620. It also has had an element that has always felt uncomfortable in the stiff clothes of doctrinaire thinking and texts. Printed words and human institutions are not chiseled in stone. They are created by man, not dictated by God to man. God has never exclusively endorsed a specific text as his word and has never left a note to say he had.
Belief is a “time out” from thinking. It is the product of the anti-intellectual’s unwillingness to venture into the arduous world of reason. It is the surrender to assumption and blind belief, not the victory of truth.
True believers are inevitably skeptical of science because science is so skeptical. Science has hypotheses and theories, probability and statistics, not absolute truths. It is the very uncertainty of science that horrifies the true believer. We can’t trust science to give us truth on a platter, only carcasses of old ideas left on the dissecting table and new theories tentatively offered in their place. How messy and unsatisfying it all is.
On the other hand, moderately religious people who focus on service and helping the needy are good to have around. They keep their religion to themselves and simply do good deeds. There are no strings attached to their efforts.
However, our nation suffers from an inordinate lack of faith in the power of reason to sort out our difficulties. Instead, we have our centers of power polluted by a preoccupation with preponderant principle over pragmatic progress. Some true believers are paralyzed with fear because they consume the fast food of facile belief containing empty spiritual calories rather than exercise their mental capacities toward solutions. Thinking is hard work, but a certain portion of America has always shunned it because it might disturb the literal narrative it has always blindly trusted.
However, the chief reason Americans hang onto their beliefs is the ever broadening heterogeneity of the country. We have always been a nation of immigrants and continue to be so. We are also the most religiously diverse nation in the world, but unlike the foods we bring to the American table, we do not embrace each other’s religions the way we enjoy each other’s ethnic dishes. New foods are a lot more digestible; new beliefs are not.
True believers see other beliefs as a threat to their own, not a complement. It leaves them “thinking” that they must reinforce their own beliefs rather than question them. The notion of turning to reason simply does not occur. It’s in a different realm of being.
Meanwhile, absolutist belief will continue to be the sacred cow that wanders through and disrupts American progress such as stem cell research while engineers of growth elsewhere in the world (China, India, for example) will pass us on their freshly constructed by-passes and freeways. Their de facto separation of church and state will trump our de jure separation any day now.
America pretends to have one God but in practice has many. There are personal gods, sectarian gods, and secular gods. What the people who believe in them all have in common is a faith that their god will deliver “the good” and sometimes the goods.
For many the belief starts with absolute trust in a text. The trust is so absolute that every word in the text is sacred. Even though the text has been translated and modernized over time, every word somehow remains sacred to those who buy into fundamentalist teaching. This tendency to see certain texts as sacred (Bible, Torah, Koran) helps explain how some also view The Constitution as a static document to be preserved at any cost as opposed to a living document that is subject to adjustment according to the needs of the people and the times. Literal interpretation of texts, it is assumed, requires no interpretation. It is simply ingesting. You swallow whole, never chew.
This tendency or proclivity to absorb wholly and directly is carried into our economic lives as well. There are those believe in the Market as if it were a god. Just trust in the Market to take care of business. We need not any tinkerers or adjusters or certainly not any government bureaucrats messing with our god. In God We Trust to these purists means In Market We Trust.
America has had an element that wants to purify or sanctify something ever since the Puritans landed in 1620. It also has had an element that has always felt uncomfortable in the stiff clothes of doctrinaire thinking and texts. Printed words and human institutions are not chiseled in stone. They are created by man, not dictated by God to man. God has never exclusively endorsed a specific text as his word and has never left a note to say he had.
Belief is a “time out” from thinking. It is the product of the anti-intellectual’s unwillingness to venture into the arduous world of reason. It is the surrender to assumption and blind belief, not the victory of truth.
True believers are inevitably skeptical of science because science is so skeptical. Science has hypotheses and theories, probability and statistics, not absolute truths. It is the very uncertainty of science that horrifies the true believer. We can’t trust science to give us truth on a platter, only carcasses of old ideas left on the dissecting table and new theories tentatively offered in their place. How messy and unsatisfying it all is.
On the other hand, moderately religious people who focus on service and helping the needy are good to have around. They keep their religion to themselves and simply do good deeds. There are no strings attached to their efforts.
However, our nation suffers from an inordinate lack of faith in the power of reason to sort out our difficulties. Instead, we have our centers of power polluted by a preoccupation with preponderant principle over pragmatic progress. Some true believers are paralyzed with fear because they consume the fast food of facile belief containing empty spiritual calories rather than exercise their mental capacities toward solutions. Thinking is hard work, but a certain portion of America has always shunned it because it might disturb the literal narrative it has always blindly trusted.
However, the chief reason Americans hang onto their beliefs is the ever broadening heterogeneity of the country. We have always been a nation of immigrants and continue to be so. We are also the most religiously diverse nation in the world, but unlike the foods we bring to the American table, we do not embrace each other’s religions the way we enjoy each other’s ethnic dishes. New foods are a lot more digestible; new beliefs are not.
True believers see other beliefs as a threat to their own, not a complement. It leaves them “thinking” that they must reinforce their own beliefs rather than question them. The notion of turning to reason simply does not occur. It’s in a different realm of being.
Meanwhile, absolutist belief will continue to be the sacred cow that wanders through and disrupts American progress such as stem cell research while engineers of growth elsewhere in the world (China, India, for example) will pass us on their freshly constructed by-passes and freeways. Their de facto separation of church and state will trump our de jure separation any day now.
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