Illinois public pensions

I’m happy to read the Tribune acknowledging the public pension problem in Illinois (Will a 6^th  year of population loss jolt voters to change?, Dec. 31), but I can’t believe what they said.

The Tribune is quite willing to keep the current pension system in place as long as we can change it for future retirees. 

The current pension system is already bankrupting the state.  If it stopped paying any future public employee retirees, the state will still fall deeper and deeper in debt. 

Why can’t the state admit that it made a mistake?  The current pension system is unsustainable. 

They won’t admit it, because they don’t have to.  Residents need to keep writing Springfield telling them to fix this.  And the Republican Party needs to step up and offer alternative candidates for those who won’t fix this.

atheism

The Sun-Times ran a major article on atheists (Why some people distrust atheists, December 27).  While the article was insightful, I think it missed a few significant details.

In the early years of our country, atheists were generally refused as witnesses in court cases.  It was felt that any person who did not believe in a God who held people accountable for their actions, even those done in secret, could not be trusted to always give reliable testimony. 

An atheist’s value system comes from within.  Oh, they may accept the value system of somebody else, but they decide ultimately if it becomes theirs.

A Christian believes that God created the world, or, you could say, invented the world.  He knows how it is supposed to run, how life is designed to function.  We admit God knows more than we do, so we trust His judgement over our own. 

So when God tells us to forgive and to love our enemies and pray for those who do us wrong, it’s not always easy.  But we try, because we believe that God wants us to. 

Love your neighbor as yourself.  Another thing we are taught to do.  It’s easier, because we see people as created in the image of God and so everyone has enormous inherent value.  I consider that a marked improvement over tolerate your neighbor, the best a secular value system can come up with.  If people are just accidents of nature, maybe they don’t deserve to be loved. 

In the 20^th century, we had our first glimpse of an atheistic nation.  Several actually.  And they all found it necessary to eliminate millions of their own people to make things better.

The greatest example of love was Christ sacrificing Himself for the sins of the world.  Christians have often sacrificed their lives for others, because they believe that death is not the end, and what happens after is related to what happened before.  I have an atheist friend.  I’ll have to ask him about this.

Christians and Trump

I am a Christian.  Christians are being criticized a lot lately for their support for the President.  When did supporting the President become such a controversial thing?

Remember, we only get two choices for President.  Our current system makes it almost impossible for a third-party candidate to win.

Democrats, in general, believe the Founders gave us a country that is highly flawed and in serious need of a major transformation.  They think they have the answers and can improve greatly on what we were given.

I submit that most people today don’t even know what we were given by the Founders.  We haven’t taught it in our schools for almost 50 years, and we certainly haven’t taught it to the millions of people who have moved here in that time either.

People keep saying that the separation of church and state means that the government must be neutral toward religion, so that public schools must not even talk about God lest it be seen as promoting religion.  Yet the founding principle of our country’s founding is that God gave unalienable rights to human beings.  A secular country cannot give you unalienable rights, because there is no Higher Power than the government. 

According to the Declaration of Independence, governments exist to secure these rights.  Because we no longer talk about unalienable rights, because that means talking about God, now rights are things that the government does for people, things that people have a right to.  And we have been discovering that there isn’t enough money to pay for all these things.  Governments all over the Western world are in debt, because they don’t have the money to pay for all the things they feel responsible for.

The Founders believed helping people was voluntary.  Love your neighbor as yourself.  Democrats believe that it is the role of government to do that, and they are forever in search of more money to pay for all of that.

I thought picking a President was an easy decision.

the electoral college

The Founders were astute students of history.  In the Federalist Papers, which were written to explain and make the case for our Constitution, they refer constantly to governments throughout history to show the shortcomings of each, and one that earned their particular disdain was a direct democracy.

This is the main reason we have a Senate.  With a direct democracy, we would only need a House of Representatives.  They saw the masses as too easily swayed and too easily shifting in their views.  That is why Representatives are elected every two years and Senators every six years.  The Representatives would be closer to the current mood of their constituents.  They could be changed as quickly as the mood changed.

Senators were originally chosen by the state legislators, not the people.  We are the UNITED STATES of America.  They saw the states as unique territories with their own governments which were closer to the people they represented rather than having a national government that made uniform laws for everyone. 

And the Presidents weren’t even directly elected by the people either.  That was the responsibility of the electors.  No, it wasn’t due to the slowness of communication of the day.  It was because of the gravity of the decision.  They would definitely not be in favor of daily polling and politicians making decisions based on them.

Under the electoral college, the states essentially elect the President.  People complain how so few votes in a ‘swing state’ adversely affect the results, but what about huge differences in our larger states?  The difference in the popular vote in California was more than 3 times the difference in the entire country. 

The problem today is not that the electoral college is out-dated or out-moded.  It’s that one political party sees that the popular vote is favorable to them at the present time and given the current immigration system for the foreseeable future as well.

Christmas

Christmas is a national holiday, unlike other December holidays which are either religious or ethnic.  And most people get a paid day off from work on Christmas.

So I say unabashedly, Merry Christmas to all!  Or, maybe you would prefer, Happy Christmas!

Maybe the United States isn’t for Everybody

Our national anthem calls our country “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”  Every country has brave people in it, but to say that this is the home of the brave is saying something different, something more.  It means that bravery is an essential part of what it means to be an American.  

And why would that be?

Because America fought its first war against its own government, and the Founders thought they might have to do it again.  Which is why we have the Second Amendment.

The Declaration of Independence says that God gave unalienable rights to human beings, and governments exist to secure those rights.  And when they don’t, the people have the right to change it or make a new one.  And that’s what the Founders did.

America is built on the idea of personal freedom.  The average person today probably couldn’t tell you what they meant by freedom, because we haven’t taught that in our public schools for decades, and we haven’t taught it to the millions of people who have moved here in that time either.

Why not?

Freedom has to do with people having unalienable rights.  Unalienable rights come from God.  A secular nation cannot give you unalienable rights.  They require a Higher Power.  In a secular nation, there is no higher power than the government. 

And not just any Higher Power.  Islam, for example, does not believe in unalienable rights.  Neither does Hinduism.

It was the Christian God who the Founders saw gave them unalienable rights, and it was the Bible and Christianity that informed them of that.

But all that talk about God was deemed to be religious, and religion was deemed to be something not fitting in public discussion let alone public schools. 

But since unalienable rights come from God, and God was banned from public life and schools, rights are no longer seen as unalienable but government-given, and the whole idea of rights has changed.

While unalienable rights are things you can do without the government’s permission, regulation, or intrusion, government-given rights are things the government is required to give you.  Why?  Because you have a right to them.  So essentially government-given rights require other people to do things for you and often at enormous expense.  Which is the exact opposite of freedom. 

Somebody argued recently online that abortion was a constitutional right.  I wrote back and said, Actually, no.  Constitutional rights are things you can do without government intrusion.  Abortion is something that requires somebody to do something for you.  If nobody is willing to give you an abortion, the government would then have to compel somebody to do it, which is the very definition of slavery.

This is the short answer why our government is now $23 trillion in debt.  With every election cycle, the list of new rights keeps growing.  The government cannot take in enough money to pay for all the things that it wants to give to people.

People don’t need to be brave anymore.  The government is there to protect you, even if people say unnice things about you.

The most common idea of America today is that America is a nation of immigrants, that the Founders wanted to create a nation that is defined by ideas and not culture, race, or ethnicity, that they wanted a nation where everyone can come here and create a rich potpourri of diverse cultures. 

Except that our Founders did not go to war with their own government over its immigration policies.  The fact that our country is a nation of immigrants is not because our Founders thought the diversity of the world would create the society they desired, but because the kind of nation they created was a kind of nation that many people wanted, and so they came.

Much is being made today of the inscription on the Statue of Liberty:

"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!"

People yearning to breathe free were invited to come here, but it doesn’t say what will happen to them when they get here.  They weren’t invited here so we could take care of them.  They were invited here so they could make what they could out of their lives.

There was no SNAP, TANF, or CHIP.  What we had was the freedom to pursue your happiness with the minimum of government interference.  When people were in need, there were thousands of churches and charitable organizations, usually affiliated with churches, who were there to help.  It wasn’t done at public expense through taxpayer dollars.  It was volunteers who worked with money that was voluntarily contributed.  What we call welfare today used to be called charity. 

What’s the difference? 

Charity is voluntary.  When the government does it, it’s mandatory.  The government has no money but what it takes from the people.  When the government makes its people do things for other people, that’s the definition of slavery. 

When a government has an expansive system of financial assistance, you don’t need to be brave to come here. 

I have a 1949 textbook on our government.  There were 11 requirements for immigrants to be admitted to our country.  Now the only requirement is to show up.

Kamala Harris and what is wrong with our electoral process

As I write this, Kamala Harris became the latest Democratic hopeful to drop out of the race for the Democratic nomination for President.

She is I think the fourth candidate to do so, and this is before anybody had even voted in the primaries.

Does anybody see the problem here?

In all the polls, people are asked to pick one candidate.  When the Republicans had 17 candidates running for President in 2016, I could have supported about 8 of them. 

The polls are asking the wrong question.  It shouldn’t be the one person you want to be President, but which candidates can you support in the election?  I’m sure most Democrats would be happy with any number of candidates. 

This current system is too dependent on candidates having or raising money and doesn’t show a candidate’s true support.  This is just plain wrong. 

endless wars

On Veteran’s Day, we stop to think of those who have died serving their country in the military.  We ask the question: was it worth it?  Was the conflict worth the lives of those who gave it? 

Wars have changed in my lifetime.  Now we must fight kinder, gentler wars so that we don’t run the risk of being accused of war crimes.  If we had fought WW1 or WW2 under the new rules, we would have lost.  If both sides fought by the new rules, we would have had another endless war. 

War is hell.  I get that.  I missed my chance at war.  It would have been Viet Nam, but then that was one of those wars where we weren’t really trying to win it.  We wanted somebody else to win it, and we would help them.  And that is one of the reasons we get endless wars.   A short war requires going all out.  You have to defeat the enemy decisively, so that they surrender unconditionally.  Otherwise, you’re going to end up fighting the war all over again in a few years. 

This is what is happening in the Middle East.  Israel and its neighbors have been at war for 70 years.  Two of them experienced a major defeat, and they  signed peace treaties with Israel.  The others in most cases simply endured imposed cease fires, and the war just keeps going on and on.  They won’t end until one side defeats the other, so that they surrender.  Then the war ends.

Germany and Japan suffered tremendous losses in World War 2.  Frankly, that was the only way that war would have ended.  And it did.  And now we are friends and allies with both nations.  As horrible as war is, it almost seems necessary at times to resolve the issues. 

Now a new thing has emerged, yet it is actually an old thing.  Islam has been at war with itself and the non-Muslim world for 1500 years.  That’s not going to end soon or ever.  And this is a different kind of war.  The soldiers don’t wear uniforms and in many  cases do not have defined borders to their realms.   And they probably won’t surrender as easily as Germany and Japan did. 

If you don’t want an endless war if you were involved with one of these, you will need to use incredible power but you will need to warn everybody else to get as far away from the enemy as possible, because their safety cannot be guaranteed.

This is the simplest reason why wars take so long today.  We are trying so hard to protect people who not directly our enemy that we are not able to hurt our enemy hard enough that they would want to quit.  You quit; they win.  You keep fighting, and you have an endless war.

some advice for the Democratic Party and those candidates who are thinking about dropping out

The Democratic Party is in the process of choosing its next Presidential candidate.  Now we are hearing that one candidate has dropped out and another is close to dropping out, and nobody has even cast a vote yet.

But you may say, they are low in the polls and don’t have enough money to continue.  Nonsense.

The problem is that our current political system is not suitable for too many candidates at one time.  In a poll and even in the primaries, you must choose only one candidate.  Do you choose your favorite or the one you think will have the best chance of winning? 

Right now you have about 20 candidates running, and only one will win the nomination.  So you have people voting for 19 people who will not win.  You need to know who they would vote for if their candidate was out of the race.  That’s the only way you will know who the best candidate is. 

In the primaries, every voter should be able to vote for, say, up to 5 people.  You could rank them, but it probably isn’t necessary here.  That would give you a much better idea who the best candidate would be, who the majority of the voters really want.

Beto and Harris should not give up now.  As long as they can stay in the debates, they will have a chance.  But they should be fighting now to change the way votes are cast in the primaries.  The current way is not only not fair, but it won’t give them the best candidate.

religion and politics

I can sympathize with Steve Chapman’s concerns (Barr to nonbelievers: go to hell, October 17), but I think he misrepresents the role of Christianity in the founding and nature of our country.

Our country was founded on 5 beliefs as noted in the Declaration of Independence.  The second belief is that God gave unalienable rights to human beings.  An atheist cannot argue for unalienable rights, because there is no higher authority than human beings.  Same for a secularist or an agnostic.

 

And then too, not all gods recognize unalienable rights.  Allah does not, neither does Krishna.  The most fundamental human right is to live according to your conscience.  Islam does not recognize that.  You are not free to leave Islam for another religion.  Those unalienable rights include the pursuit of happiness.  Hinduism does not recognize that.  Everybody is a permanent member of a caste, a station in life from which there is no exit.

It was the God of the Bible who was the creator referred to in the Declaration.  And how did the Founders know that God gave unalienable rights to human beings?  From the Bible and Christianity.  The courts would call a religious opinion.  The Founders called it a fact.  Without Christianity, you don’t have unalienable rights, and without unalienable rights, you don’t have the United States of America.

The court called supreme was wrong to say that our government cannot favor one religion over another.  The very essence of our country depends on it.  What the Founders expressed was that our country cannot favor one Christian denomination over another.  That is what was meant by establishing religion in the First Amendment, like in England where the Anglican Church is the Church of England.

In the early years of our nation, people who didn’t believe in God were routinely rejected from juries and political office.  They felt that any person who did not believe in a future judgement before God could not be trusted to tell the truth. 

slave owners

I would like to take issue with the Sun-Times Fact Check (Fact-check: They signed Declaration of Independence – but nearly three-quarters also owned slaves, September 11).

It’s not just a matter of finding facts but understanding them.

For example, the article states that “in 1776, slavery was legal in all 13 of the new states.”  It fails to note that the United States was still a colony of Great Britain in 1776, and King George was responsible for most of their laws.  The colonies then spent the next 7 years at war, so slavery was not the first thing on their minds.  However, the northern states did begin enacting laws soon after such that by 1804, all of them had either abolished it or were in the process of doing so. 

The new Constitution wasn’t ratified until 1788.  The very next year, Congress had to deal with the question of new states coming into the Union.  They passed the Northwest Ordinance, which said that any new states would be free states, i.e. no slavery would be permitted.

But imagine that you lived at that time and were opposed to slavery, what would you do?  

You knew that any person who was put on the auction block would be bought as a slave.  You knew that many (most?) of them were treated harshly.  You knew also that if you bought a slave and then set them free, their future could be very uncertain.  You could pay their way back to Africa, but the same people who enslaved them the first time could maybe do it again.

So what do you do?

If I were wealthy and lived back then, I think I would secure as many people as I could.  Yes, they would work for me.  Everybody works.  But they would be treated kindly, housed, fed, and educated.  In the absence of legal freedom, they would have security and care.  Of course, in future generations, I would be branded a slave owner. 

But what would you do?

Solving Chicago’s Budget Crisis

I am a long-time Tribune reader and subscriber.  I still don’t understand the thinking of the people who run this paper. 

Today you run a major article on how to solve the Chicago budget crisis.  (September 9, “Forget property taxes. Forget Springfield.  Here is the one way to solve Chicago’s budget crisis.”   Here is the one way to solve Chicago’s budget crisis”).  I’ll accept your printing of this article as your endorsement of the writer’s view.  And, of course, the only possible answer is another tax.

The article notes right away that “the pension benefits of public employees are constitutionally guaranteed.”  But so is a flat tax for the residents of the state, but the politicians don’t see a problem with changing the Constitution on that.  A raise in a flat tax affects everybody, while a graduated tax only affects a portion of taxpayers at a time, so it’s easier to pass. 

Public pensions are bankrupting the state of Illinois and most of the communities in the state.  It is easily the number one problem facing Illinois today, and the only solution is to change the State Constitution. 

Yet both Chicago newspapers are silent on this issue.  Why aren’t you leading the way in saving our state?  You’re supposed to be the defenders of the people, the watchdogs, the ones who hold our leaders accountable.  You’ve watched this crisis develop for generations, and you’ve done nothing. 

Shame on you!  You should have weekly articles on this demanding that the necessary changes to the Constitution be put on the ballot for 2020.

Protecting our kids from smoking

The Sun-Times ran an editorial about protecting our kids (September 9, “For kids’ sake, Illinois should ban flavored e-cigarettes”).  I have several.  They are adults now, but they are still my kids.

But the kids in this editorial are “teens,” “young people”, and “under 21.” Adults don’t need this protection, because it is their right to smoke and they should know the risks.

But these same people who we need to protect, because they don’t have the maturity, knowledge, or wisdom to make responsible decisions for themselves are able to vote for people who will be making decisions for the people of our entire country. 

How can people who can’t make good choices for themselves be able to make good choices for the rest of the country?

The Illinois State Constitution

The Illinois State Constitution contains the following lines:

1)      Membership in any pension or retirement system of the State, any unit of local government or school district, or any agency or instrumentality thereof, shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.

2)      A tax on or measured by income shall be at a non-graduated rate.

My question is: why is one considered a promise that cannot be altered and the other not?  State pensions are bankrupting the state, Chicago, and who knows how many other communities, but politicians refuse to address this, because they call it a promise. 

Does a promise mean that nobody can say, “Hey, we made a mistake”?  Or, circumstances have changed.  We are now broke.  We cannot afford this.  I’m sorry.

But the same wording is used to say that an income tax shall be at a non-graduated rate. 

Isn’t that a promise too? 

But the state wants to change one but not the other.  I’m sorry, but that is wrong.

The Constitution also says that:

3)       The State has the primary responsibility for financing the system of public education.

Two thirds of public education funding is done at the local level through property taxes.  The state is clearly acting in defiance to the state Constitution.  Who holds the state accountable for this?  The state could easily raise the income tax to pay for schools and reduce property taxes all across the state.  That would have no problem passing, because it would reduce housing costs substantially.

4)      Appropriations for a fiscal year shall not exceed funds estimated by the General Assembly to be available during that year.

Our state routinely spends far more than it takes in in revenue.  Nobody is surprised by this.  They pass the budgets knowing full well that they will have to borrow money to pay for everything. 

Does nobody pay attention to the State Constitution?

5)      The State militia consists of all able-bodied persons residing in the State except those exempted by law.

Our country fought its first war against its own government.  Many of the Founders were concerned that this new national government might at some point try to limit or infringe on the people’s unalienable rights.  In the Federalist Papers which were written to encourage the passage of the new Constitution, they talk about states being able to resist the power of this national government through their militias. 

A semi-automatic gun is modern engineering applied to guns, like an automatic transmission on a car.  Gun violence is a lot more than a gun problem, which is beyond the scope of this letter.  To prohibit semi-automatic guns is essentially rejecting the whole concept of a militia. 

My last question is: who can and will confront the state and hold it accountable for not following the Constitution it is based on?

curbing gun violence

The Sun-Times (Americans want new laws to curb gun violence, August 21) is dismayed that Congress hasn’t passed more laws to curb gun violence.

CURB gun violence?

Houston, we have a problem!   And nobody’s getting it.

We used to go to Sears and buy guns like we were buying a new screwdriver.  We used to have gun clubs in high schools. 

It’s not the easy accessibility to guns that is the problem.  It’s the people that are the problem

.

We have lost our collective moral foundation.  We used to believe in and teach our kids: Thou shalt not kill, Love your neighbor as yourself, Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  But that was deemed religious and unsuitable in public conversation.

The best we can teach our kids today is tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.

I’m sorry, but that won’t work.  It doesn’t work.  It won’t stop the violence. 

When we were a religious nation, we could live with a couple hundred million guns, and we felt safe.  Now we don’t feel safe anywhere anymore.

The Statue of Liberty and Trump

There is a lot of talk today about the Statue of Liberty and its inscription about tired, poor, and huddled masses and recent talk and policy changes from the Trump administration.

A little context is needed here.

Our country has changed a bit since that statue was erected but not in the way you’re thinking.

Our country was built on freedom, the freedom of the people here to pursue their dreams.  Our government existed to protect those freedoms.  And people came to live here for the same reason.

In the 1800s, when the Statue of Liberty was erected with its famous poem about the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, there was no TANF, SNAP, CHIP, EITC, or HA.  There was, however, a myriad of voluntary usually church-supported charitable organizations to help people in need.

But the role of our government has changed.  Instead of existing to protect our freedoms, it now exists to take care of people.  This comes at an enormous expense to the public, and it certainly attracts far more people to our country than who would have come here otherwise.  And, frankly, we no longer know or care who is coming here to live free or who is coming here to be taken care of. 

Our country is over $22 trillion in debt, and that’s just at the federal level.  This is not a situation that can end well. 

The President thinks we don’t have enough money to take care of everybody who wants to come here and who also needs to be taken care of.  We are adding 2 -3 million new immigrants a year, legal, refugees, or otherwise.

gun laws and gun violence

The Sun-Times is demanding more laws to curb gun violence.

Isn’t there already a law against that?

Oh, you mean laws against guns.

We have laws against the possession of all kinds of drugs.  How is that working out?

You’re looking for band-aid solutions and not trying to solve the real problem. 

If there’s an epidemic of headaches, you don’t subsidize Tylenol tablets and require everybody to take two in the morning.  Something is going on that you need to find out what it is.

If the problem is hate, you can’t fix that with new laws.  If the problem is just too darn many guns floating around, you need to find out why that is.  This didn’t just happen a few years ago because of some legal loophole.

Guns have always been an essential part of the American identity.  We have always had a lot of guns.

Why?

Because we fought a war against our own government to protect our liberty, and they figured we might have to do it again.

If we’re turning against our own people now, then we need to take a good long hard look at what has happened to our society.  A few feel-good gun law changes won’t fix the problem.  

Why we have the Second Amendment

Read the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers.

Our country had just fought a war against its own government.  The Founders thought we might need to do that again. 

Governments exist to protect the unalienable rights that God gave to the people.  When they don’t, the people have the right to change the government.

The Founders figured that any state would be able to amass far more troops than any national army would have.  The people were already “armed”, unlike the people in Europe who were unarmed and ruled by kings and tyrants.

But what about all the gun violence today?

The Founders knew that our rights come from God, and that people had a corresponding responsibility to God.  Our nation has rejected God, and secularism knows no corresponding responsibility toward God.  Secularism cannot restrain hatred and evil.  That requires the fear of God.

The Immigration Myth

Anyone who talks about immigration is required to begin by saying something like: Both my wife’s and my grandparents were immigrants, and my wife’s grandfather had the proverbial $5 in his pocket when he came here.  He went on to start a business and built several apartment buildings.

There are almost 7.5 billion people in the world who do not live in the United States.  That means that there are over 7 billion possible immigrants to the United States. 

According to modern immigration thinking, every single one of them would make a positive contribution to our country, simply by virtue of not living here already. 

Our modern immigration system is like a job fair where there are no job interviews or resumes.  Everybody who can make it here is accepted.  We have no requirements; we make no demands. 

The words on the Statue of Liberty are often quoted when discussing immigration:

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-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Do you know what’s missing here?  It doesn’t say what happens to them when they get here.  It doesn’t say that we will take care of you.  You have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  You have the freedom to pursue your dreams, and our government will not stand in your way.

The United States has always been a compassionate country, but it’s the people who are compassionate.  Government cannot be compassionate, because it is not spending its own money.  It is spending other people’s money.

The fact is that the rule about immigrants being self-sufficient has been around at least 100 years.  Our government has just been loosening the definition of self-sufficiency over the years.  We are essentially paying people to come here.  Would they still come here if we weren’t so generous with our government benefits?

speeding up baseball games

 I have seen a lot of articles lately about speeding up baseball games, the most recent was a letter to the Tribune (Limit foul balls to cut time, August 10).

The only rule change I think that that has merit is a clock for batters and pitchers.  It shouldn’t rush them, but there are some players who definitely take way too long.

But nobody seems to be asking how much time is being set aside for commercials.  Baseball keeps statistics on everything.  Surely, they know.  

Commercials are killing baseball as much as anything.  Some will argue that you need more commercials to pay these exorbitant salaries.  Well, exorbitant is right.  If commercials were limited, maybe it could curb salaries a bit.  And maybe that might even curb ticket prices a little.  And then maybe more average people could go to baseball games again.

guns and the Constitution

A reader (August 11) wondered if the right to bear arms is reconcilable with the Constitution’s directive to our government that it exists “to insure domestic tranquility” and “to promote the general welfare.”

The Tribune printed the letter, so I’m guessing he wasn’t the only one who’s wondering the same thing.

The same people who ratified the one ratified the other.  The Second Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights which a lot of the people who ratified the Constitution wanted included, because they were afraid that the new national government might try to limit their unalienable rights, and the right to bear and carry arms was no. 2.  So that was very near and dear to their hearts.

The difference between then and now is that they were not hesitant about their belief in God and the importance of God’s laws for the moral foundation of our country: the Ten Commandments, Love our neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

Guns were always a big part of our country, and gun violence only became a problem when our country decided to become a secular country, and all things religious were considered unimportant, irrelevant, and shunted off the public square.

stopping mass shootings

A NU researcher has studied mass shootings in our country, and she has a lot of answers for all of us (NU researcher urges fighting hate speech: ‘killing follows’, August 11).

Now I’m against mass shootings as much as anyone.  I’m just not sure about the solutions that people are offering to stop them. 

Like many people who are trying to provide answers, she strongly recommends banning semi-automatic weapons.  She, like so many others, calls them military-style weapons.  That’s not really accurate.  Making a gun semi-automatic is just a simple improvement in engineering, like an automatic transmission in your car.  Calling them a military-style weapon is just using language to frame the argument. 

Certainly, restricting access to different things, like guns, knives, baseball bats, explosives, trucks, will reduce the incidence of people using those things to commit crimes, but it won’t reduce the hate that drives the crimes.  Resourceful people will find alternatives to act out their hatred.

She also recommends preventing people from having large capacity magazines for their guns.  I heard that it took the police 57 rounds to stop the killer in Dayton, Ohio.  And those were trained law enforcement agents.  It would be morally indefensible to limit people in this way in protecting their homes, property, family, or, in many cases, other people.

She’s worried too that we must stop all hate speech, because that spurs people to violence.  But violence comes from hate.  Did the hate speech cause the hate or just precede the act of hate?  Hate speech would not find an audience unless people had already felt the same hate.  And what prompted that hate in the first place could later prompt it into an outward act.

People are either forgetting or never learned that our country has always been a nation of guns.  The Founding Fathers applauded that, because they saw that as essential to preserving our liberty. 

Mass shootings have only become a problem since our nation removed the moral code that had undergirded our country since its founding: the Judeo-Christian ethics of the Ten Commandments and the Love your neighbor as yourself, and the fact that there is a God in heaven to whom we will all have to give account after we die.

racism and immigration

OK, let’s say for the sake of argument that all white people are racist.  Inherently, subconsciously, blatantly, in whatever form, let’s say that all white people don’t like minorities.  I’ve certainly read enough to know that there are a lot of academics, politicians, and very vocal public people who believe this.  They say that America is a racist nation and always has been.

If this is true, or even if there is a good possibility it is true, or even if there is just the perception that it is true, then I would contend that the government has no business or right to bring 2 to 3 million more minorities into our country every year.  That would only increase the division and turmoil that already exists in our country.  And this has been going on for more than 50 years.

Since 1965, our immigration policy has favored minority immigrants almost to the exclusion of white immigrants.  This was changed partially or maybe even entirely as a response to the Civil Rights Movement, which was certainly a very contentious time in our nation’s history.

The opening lines of the United State Constitution, you know, the document that tells us how our country is supposed to function, says that “We the people in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility,. . . , promote the general welfare, . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution to the United States of America.”

Establishing justice could apply to the civil rights laws that had just been passed, but I see the government doing nothing to form a more perfect union, ensure domestic tranquility, or promoting the general welfare.  On the contrary, I would say that it is hellbent on promoting division, strife, and turmoil.  It is putting the welfare of foreign citizens over the welfare of its own.

I am by no means trying to justify or condone racism.  I am just saying that the government has no right to force things on the American people that can promote division, strife, or turmoil, and if our country is racist, then the government is wrong to keep pushing diversity.  It should stop all immigration then until our country as a whole can agree on a policy that it can fully support.

solving the problems of the black community in Chicago

I like Father Pfleger.  (How to encourage more Chicagoans to work with police to solve murders, August 8).  I also have a lot of respect for him.  He sees his responsibility as not only speaking to the people who come to his church on Sundays but speaking to the whole society at large as well.

Having said that, I must say that I was greatly disappointed in his recent article about helping the police to solve murders.  His article covered a lot more ground than simply public relations with the police.  He also went into what he saw as all the underlying problems in the black community that contribute to the current violence so rampant there.  And this is where he, and so many others, is missing something, and a big something at that.

His list of problems in the black community was long.  And serious.  But,  he missed something.

Everything was somebody else’s fault.  Everything depended on other people spending money on programs, businesses, and monetary assistance for people in these communities.  Everything involved waiting for someone else to ride in and rescue them.

 

I won’t deny that the city and some of those other people can and should do more where they can to improve the lives of the people in this community, but Pfleger said nothing about what the people themselves can do to end this seemingly endless cycle of violence.  I won’t offer any suggestions here, because I am an outsider.   But the first step in solving any problem is figuring out what I can do before thinking about what other people can do.

white supremacy

This was written in response to an article in HuffPost about white supremacy.

The article equates white supremacy with white nationalism.  They’re not the same.  White supremacy says that white people are superior to other people. 

A white nationalist, and I admit there are probably varieties out there, says that when the United States was mostly white (90% when I was a kid), we did pretty good.  We were the richest nation in the world, we felt safe, and we had the best schools in the world.

Since 1965, our immigration system has focused almost entirely on bringing minorities into our country, about 2 million a year and that’s just those who came legally.  Now we are over 40% minority.

We are also now $22 trillion in debt, just at the federal level, we don’t feel safe, and our schools are average or mediocre on the world stage.

White people in general don’t hate blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims.  They do reject the government’s attempts to make this a black, Hispanic, Muslim country.

Mark Steyn is quoted very briefly.  I’ve read some of his books.  I would really like to see his quotes in context.  But he raises a good point.

If you read the Preamble to the Constitution, it says that our government exists to form a more perfect union and to insure domestic tranquility for We, the people.  Our government exists for the sake of the citizens of the United States.  It is to seek and promote their welfare first.  Just like you take care of your family before all the other kids on the block.  It doesn’t mean that you hate all the other kids, but your first responsibility is to your own family.  You wouldn’t give your kids’ college fund to provide housing for the homeless.  Is that bad?  Our government is more concerned about citizens of other countries than the citizens of its own.  That is wrong.

Lastly, your article quotes the SPLC as an authority on hate groups in our country.  I have read of a number of organizations that are definitely not hate groups that the SPLC thinks are.  It also says that there are 148 documented hate groups devoted to white supremacism, an increase of 50% since 2014.  Maybe each group has three members.  The left likes to charge people and groups with hate in an effort to stop them from talking.  It’s hard to defend yourself when the media generally takes the side of the accuser. 

Guess what?  In a free country, people are free to hate.  The only antidote to hate that I know of is Christianity that gives people a command and a reason to love other people.  Our country has officially turned its back on religion and declared itself a secular country, but secularism has no answer for hate or evil.  It can only make more laws and hire more police.

finding an answer to mass shootings

In the wake of two mass shootings, politicians and the public are scrambling for answers.   I’m not sure they will be looking in the right places.

In many parts of the world, the weapon of choice for mass violence is explosives.  Japan and China have had a number of incidents of mass stabbings, while London had to crack down on knives, because so many were being used to kill people.  And let’s not forget the 80-some people who were mowed down by a truck in France. 

It wasn’t the wide availability of explosives, knives, and trucks that made all these atrocities happen.  It was evil from the human heart. 

Guns have always been a major part of the American way, but so were the Ten Commandments, with its Thou shalt not kill.  We also had Love your neighbor as yourself, and Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  All of these were from the Bible, the same Bible that informed our Founders that God gave people unalienable rights, the founding principle of our country.

A secular society has no answer for evil and hatred, except laws that restrict everybody’s behavior, the addition of thousands of law enforcement officers, and billions of dollars on government agencies devoted to protect us from each other. 

thoughts on God and religion

I wrote this in response to a Facebook post.  I could just delete it, but I thought maybe somebody else might find it useful.

If you went to Mars and found a computer lying on the ground, you would conclude immediately that somebody had been there.  You would not conclude that random forces over billions of years put it together.  The human body is thousands of times more complex than a computer.  You can’t explain life without an intelligent being doing it.

The next question is whether this God has a relationship with what He created.  Has He tried to communicate with human beings?  I assert that if He had, by this time, it would have to be one of the major religions in the world today.  They are all mutually contradictory so they all could not be true.

Confucianism and Buddhism aren’t really concerned with God, don’t claim to be, and are essentially only confined in a small part of the planet.  Islam is new on the scene, relatively speaking, and has grown almost entirely through the use of violence.   

That leaves Christianity and Judaism, with Christianity claiming to be Judaism 2.0.  The one claims to fulfill the other.  Is that true?  Judaism is a religion based on a priesthood and animal sacrifices.  All that ended in 70 A.D.  There is no historical, logical, empirical, or theological reason to think that God’s program, system, or way of communicating to human beings changed into what exists today.  And, besides, there is no interest among Jews to carry their message to the rest of the world.

Then there is Christianity, which is the most widespread religion in the world, where people have sacrificed everything to take the message of God’s love for people to every end of the earth.  The Bible is the most widespread book in history and has been translated into every major language and maybe about 4,000 of the not-so-major ones.

in the wake of two mass shootings

Every so often, and now would be a good time, we as a nation need to look again at our founding principles.  Right now, many people in our country are experiencing grief, anger, and/or confusion in light of these two recent mass shootings.

In our pain, anger, and confusion, we want answers and solutions, and we want them now.  And politicians may do something, and we hope they did the right thing, enough, to prevent the next one. 

Now the big push is for universal background checks, but nobody has figured out yet if that would have made any difference in these two shootings.  Would these two shooters have passed a background check, and were their guns recent purchases that a time delay might have cooled heated emotions?

The fact is that guns have always been a big part of what America is.  The Second Amendment is a part of the Bill of Rights, rights that our Founders believed to be unalienable and given by God.  Guns were also a big part on why we are a free nation.  We were an “armed” people, unlike those in Europe who were unarmed and ruled by kings and tyrants. (Federalist Papers no. 51)

But with freedom comes great responsibility.  John Adams, our second President, said that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” 

The court called supreme was wrong to remove God from the public square and public schools, it was wrong to say that our government must be neutral toward religion, and it was wrong to remove the Ten Commandments from public life. 

We used to teach our kids to love your neighbor as yourself, and do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  It takes religion to love your neighbors, because that tells you that this other person is created in the image of God.  And it takes religion to stop people from killing people, because religion makes people aware that they will give account of their lives to their Creator when they leave this one.

If after almost 250 years of being a nation, guns are now a problem, we have to look at what has changed in our country.  And the answer is not; semi-automatic.

In God We Trust - child abuse?

South Dakota has ordered that every public school post in a prominent position our nation’s motto: In God We Trust.  The Freedom From Religion Foundation co-President thinks that it’s “a terrible violation of freedom of conscience to inflict a godly message on a captive audience of school children” (South Dakota GOP reminds students: ‘In God We Trust,’ July 31).

Maybe somebody should tell her that our nation was founded on the belief that God gave unalienable rights to human beings.  She might call that “a godly message;” the Founders called that a fact.

Unalienable rights require a Higher Power.  A government cannot give unalienable rights, because it cannot take them away.  Without unalienable rights, you don’t have the United States of America.

If we don’t teach our kids that we have these rights from God, they won’t know they have them, and they will give them away, and we will be right back to where we were before the American Revolution.

protecting our elections

I am happy to see that the Tribune (Has the U.S. bulletproofed its elections? NYET, July 27) is concerned about foreign influences in our election.

I am concerned that we have more citizens of other countries living in our country that at any time in our history, and nobody seems to want to ensure that they don’t vote.  We don’t even want to know how many there are.  The census could have told us that by telling us how many citizens we have. 

Is that really a problem?  We don’t know.  How would we know?  But nobody thinks we can have tens of millions of foreign citizens living in our country and that that could be a problem? 

A big complaint about the Russians was fake ads to hope to change people’s opinions.  You don’t think tens of millions of foreign citizens living here won’t have any influence on people’s opinions? 

We welcome millions of foreign citizens into our country every year, and we have no idea how or if they might influence our elections.  The biggest way they would influence our elections is probably by voting, but we make no attempt to see that they don’t.  I would call that criminally irresponsible.

a tax exemption is not a government subsidy - a response to George Will

George Will is a conservative, so we should agree more, but his latest article is dead wrong, in my opinion, not so much in what it said but what it assumes.

Will assumes that anything that could be taxed and isn’t is a government subsidy.  That assumes that the government has a right to our money, and it only allows us to keep what it does through mismanagement.  When the government does not tax non-profits, that is not a subsidy. 

Not taking money from an organization or individual is not the same as giving them money.  Not taking money means that the government is not involved in your organization or your life.  Giving money means that the government has the right to control a part of your organization or life.

His article assumes that we have a deficit and debt problem, because the government is failing to collect taxes that rightfully belong to it.  We have a deficit and debt problem, because our government now assumes that people can’t take care of themselves, and it’s the government’s job to do that.  And that takes enormous amounts of money that tax revenues will never cover.

Will talks about relatively wealthier people using the phrase ‘income distribution,’ as if money is doled out by fate, and whatever is given to one leaves less for everybody else.  That just encourages resentment and class warfare and discourages people from thinking that they can actually improve their lives.

Will also did say something that he should have caught and rejected.  He said that the Cadillac tax of Obamacare “is integral to the structure and financing” of it.  How can a tax that doesn’t start until 10 years after the passage of a law be integral to its structure and financing?  I think they only said that to get that tax into the law.

 

Will should be happy they repealed a new tax.  He should focus his energies on what the government thinks its role is in society.  Promote the welfare of the people with unlimited opportunity or promote the welfare of the people by giving them money?

election meddling

The Sun-Times is rightly concerned about Russian meddling in our elections, but we have between 11 and 40 million citizens of other countries (but who’s counting?) living in our country, and nobody apparently wants to make sure that they don’t vote in our elections.  That sounds to me like potential for some serious foreign meddling in our elections.

True equality in America

True equality in America means that you can be criticized by a person of a different race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation without calling that person a phobe, a bigot, or some kind of -ist, and you are free to criticize a person of a different race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation and not be called a phobe, a bigot, or some kind of -ist.

trying to understand the President

A reader (July 24) thought it was important to write a letter bashing the President.  It seems that letters that do that get prioritized for publishing.

I would like to defend the President against this reader’s complaints.

1)         Yes, Trump has been hard on John McCain.  This reader, like so many others, judge McCain’s life entirely on events that happened 50 years ago when he was in the military.  John McCain was in Washington for 35 years.  I believe he was a major factor in denying the President some things that he wanted, and he did so by being one of a very few Republicans who sided with Democrats against him.  It’s Trump’s comments that get publicized, while we know little about McCain’s side in their relationship.

2)         He praises dictators, because he wants to negotiate with them.  He’ll get far more if he comes to them with a smile than with threats. 

3)         He thinks Trump wants NATO disbanded.  Hey, NATO exists for the sake of Europe, not the United States, yet they want the US to carry the burden of protecting them.  By Trump saying NATO perhaps should be disbanded he is telling Europe to figure out what they really want and step up in taking care of themselves. 

4)         I read both Chicago newspapers and watch news on the mainstream media.  They all try to portray the President in a bad light any opportunity they get.  If I want to get a letter printed in the papers, bashing Trump will raise my odds considerably.  The President thinks the press is abusing its freedom by acting irresponsibly.  I agree.

5)         Attacking the judicial system?  Our government has three EQUAL branches of government.  The judicial branch believes it has more power over the other two.  Why should one unelected judge have more authority than the President of the United States?  It seems nowadays that a lot of judges are guided more by politics than justice or law.

6)         He doesn’t treat migrants as criminals.  Anyone who enters our country to live should be screened medically, vaccinated, and have a criminal background check before they are allowed to roam free in our country.  When our borders are flooded with 3 and 4 thousand new people every day, there’s no time to do all that or build luxury hotels.  You make do with what you have.  Criminals can’t just walk out, but the migrants are free to leave any time they want.

Frankly, I am tired of the newspapers and media continually bashing the President.  Go use your space and time in actually trying to solve our problems instead of just complaining about them.