COVID relief and government malfeasance

Average Americans wonder why it is so difficult for Washington to help average Americans through one of our most difficult years ever. 

Our government has forced the shutdown of thousands of businesses, forcing millions of people to wonder how they will get by without a regular paycheck.

The most obvious thing Washington could do would be to increase unemployment payments until those businesses could reopen. 

Businesses that were forced to close or to work at a limited capacity should receive substantial tax relief, property and otherwise, to help them survive until they can go back to normal.

All this could and should have been done months ago.

So what happened? 

Congress refuses to pass short simple bills directed at specific problems.  Any bill it considers is an opportunity to spend money, and this in their mind is their primary responsibility. 

They combined the COVID relief bill with the general government appropriations bill, so it is now over 5,500 pages long.  There are hundreds of separate issues and items in this bill.  This is selfish, shortsighted, and even scandalous.  Instead of quickly coming to the aid of the people whose welfare they were elected to serve, they are eager and willing to put their own wishes and wants over that of their constituents. 

In reporting this fiasco, it is easy for the news media to insinuate the guilty parties, but I think they tend to miss the mark.  I could point fingers as well, but I think it’s best to blame a political culture that we have accepted for generations without resistance that sees the government as the answer to all of our problems and that answer is always spending more money. 

We need to demand that government write only short bills with one main subject and all amendments to that bill be related to that one subject.  Government aid would then be swift to those who need it, and trust would soon return to our government.

Defunding the police?

I agree with the Sun-Times article (Trained civilians, not sworn police officers, could better respond to hundreds of 911 calls, December 15) that police do a lot of things that other people could do better.

However, police in Chicago are working a lot of overtime, and that’s not because we have a shortage of traffic guards at school crossings.  When I worked in business, a lot of overtime meant that it was time to hire more people, not reduce the workforce.  

The number of police that we have is not determined by the number of 911 calls.  It’s determined by how many police we need in a crisis.  Like the holiday weekends.  The summer surge in shootings.  The rioting and pillaging that we are seeing more often.

You just can’t put an ad in the paper and have more police officers on hand for these crises and then let them go when the need diminishes.

We could use the police like we do firefighters.  We keep firefighters together in special housing units, and they only come out when we have a real emergency.  The police we use for other things.  If we don’t use them for these other things, then we have to hire a whole lot of other people, and we’ll end up spending more money on public safety than we do now.  Just what the taxpayers want to hear!

How to choose, or not choose, a President

The Sun-Times printed a lengthy letter advocating for the elimination of the electoral college.

This aligns well with the Progressive movement today which believes that America was a flawed nation from the start that must be reinvented to accord with modern enlightened thinking.

Our Founders did not believe in a direct democracy.  This is why we have a Senate and not just a House of Representatives.  Representatives serve two-year terms as well, so they can stay more attuned to the mood and needs of their constituents. 

The Founders thought the masses as being too easily swayed and needed to be tempered by speed bumps in the legislative process, thus another body of legislators, the Senate, elected under a different set of rules.  In fact, they didn’t even have Senators chosen by the public either.  They wanted state legislators to choose them, so they would best represent their states.

They also believed that the States should elect the President and not individuals, that this would be the best way that the President truly serves the interests of ALL the people.

unwise newspaper endorsements

I read the Tribune’s endorsement for state’s representative for my district.  While the current state representative had some laudable achievements, it seems none of them addressed the biggest problems facing Illinois, which is fiscal responsibility.

Her challenger’s positions and priorities were briefly mentioned but included across the board budget cuts. 

The majority party in Illinois doesn’t show any interest in even trying to balance the balance the budget.  It routinely passes budgets that require the state to borrow massive amounts of money that force the state (meaning the taxpayers) to pay increasingly larger amounts of money on interest, which is like burning money.

This same majority party just offered medical benefits not only to non-citizens but even to people who are in the country illegally.  While that sounds compassionate, it’s not compassion when you are borrowing money to do that and having to borrow again to pay it back, and it’s not really your money in the first place.  And, of course, when you borrow money, that only increases the cost of everything.  That’s a breach of the public trust. 

The Tribune will no doubt complain in the future about the financial state of Illinois, but when you endorse people who say nothing about fixing the problem over people who do, I don’t think you are showing good sense.  You can’t expect change from the same political party that created the problem over decades in the first place, especially when no one in that party shows any interest in being responsible with our money.

Republicans, debt, and tax cuts

A Tribune reader called the Republican Party for hypocrisy (Hypocrisy in GOP, September 9) for calling for tax cuts and not focusing more on the national debt.

Actually tax cuts generally increase tax revenues.  Federal government revenue has gone up every year since at least 1960, except for a few years after 2000.  Kennedy, Reagan, and Trump were all known for major tax cuts in their administrations. 

Our government debt is primarily due to Democrats insistence on trying to solve every problem and meet every need through spending money.  Yes, the Republicans like to spend money on the military.  That is one of the few things our federal government spends money on that the Constitution says it should.

Democrats resist and fight any attempts to reduce government spending.  I fault the Republicans for not standing up to them enough.  That would require government shutdowns, and the media joins the Democrats in blaming the Republicans, and they cave.

How to Fight Corruption in Congress

An alert reader made the Tribune readers aware of a bill in Congress that few people know about.  (Bill would aid democracy, September 7)

The bill is “a sweeping anti-corruption bill.” 

The writer then lists 13 specific changes that the proponents hope to effect.

And this fact highlights one of the biggest anti-corruption issues that needs to be addressed, and Congress won’t act on it.

Every bill in Congress has to be comprehensive.  The longer the better.  The more all-encompassing the better.

And this is where the problems start.  And if you want to fight corruption, this has to be dealt with.

The bigger the bill, the more things in it that people will not agree on.  Not only things that people don’t agree on, but things that would never pass on their own.  So they’re put in bigger bills which you must then accept or reject together. 

Congress should as much as possible submit single issue bills.  Then discuss them.  How can you have a debate on a bill with at least 13 specific measures? 

Many of these comprehensive bills are too large to read, yet alone discuss.  So many parts of these bills don’t even come to light until the bill is passed.

If I were a Senator, I would not vote for this bill, but not because I don’t think we need to fight corruption.  They sell it as anti-corruption, but a lot of it has nothing to do with corruption.

So if you oppose it, you’re portrayed as opposing reform.

No.  Let each bill deal with one issue at a time, and then let’s discuss it and see how much agreement there is or if the bill presents the best way of dealing with these issues. 

So What Can Be Wrong with Mail-in Voting?

Everyone seems so enamored with mail-in voting, like: why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? [Mail-in voting lessons from Oregon, the state with the longest history of voting by mail, September 4]

Obviously, we have all recognized the need for a lot of people to vote by mail for various reasons, like fighting a war overseas, but we are now talking about massively increasing the amount of mail-in voting beyond where it is necessary.

Has it been so long since we voted that we forgot what it’s all about?

First of all, with in-person voting, we know who’s voting.  A person shows up and says that they are registered to vote.  Some states try to verify that, and some don’t.  With mail-in voting, we have no idea who voted.

With in-person voting, there are no unaccounted-for ballots.  With mailed ballots, we don’t know who received them or if they were received at all.

When people vote in person, they vote in private.  Nobody knows how they voted, and nobody is influencing them how to vote.  With mail at home, we have no idea if a person is voting without undue influences.

And finally, at the polling place, the voter places the ballot into the box personally.  Again, nobody knows how they voted.

The Sun-Times showed a picture of a man putting a handful of ballots into the machine. You don’t want people handling multiple ballots where they can see how the ballots were filled out.

You may recall that on Election Day, news media are not allowed to start giving results until the polls are closed, because knowing the voting trends can influence the outcome by influencing votes not yet cast.

With mail-in ballots, we will be having ballots counted way past normal times, and many people are rightly concerned that close elections will suddenly find a surge of votes for the other candidate as mail-in ballots are counted.  And, of course, many ballots are routinely rejected for all kinds of reasons.  My registered signature is 45 years old.  I don’t write like that anymore.  My ballots would be rejected if I mailed them in.

There’s an expression we often use: an accident waiting to happen.  You don’t wait until something goes terribly wrong before you correct something that has so many indicators of potential problems.

a letter sent to a university that wants to fire a professor for things he said outside of his class

Re: academic excellence

Greetings!

I don’t think I had ever heard of the University of Central Florida until just a few days ago, when I heard that the University is trying to rid itself of a professor (Charles Negy) for things he said outside of a school context.  A psychology professor at that.

I see that psychology is your number one online bachelor’s degree program.

I am looking at the offensive tweets that the Professor tweeted, and it seems to me that the questions Dr. Negy raised are questions that are at the very heart of the field of psychology, and to dismiss them because some people are offended by them insults the entire work of psychology and dismisses even your school as a reputable source for psychological studies.

The first offending tweet I am reading questions the relationship of racism with achievement within that affected racial group.  Dr. Negy uses the example of Asian Americans (Far Eastern Asians) as a contrast. 

I have asked the question and I have questioned the common answers, whether crime is a necessary result of poverty, oppression, and / or discrimination.  Or is moral behavior independent of outward pressures but an expression of inward character?  Can poor people be moral?  Do only poor people steal, or steal more than other people?  Is crime in the black communities higher than in white communities, because . 

. . .  

Yes, because what?

That question goes to the very heart of psychology, and one that any burgeoning psychologist needs to answer. 

My wife and I were discussing yesterday about Jewish people.  From a related matter.  They have faced discrimination even outright hostility for 2,000 years, in country after country.  They don’t march and protest.  They just quietly achieve the highest standards of moral behavior and academic and business success.  Any reputable psychologist would want to understand why in the face of blatant, systemic, chronic racism and bias, one group has been able to shine, so to speak, and the other seems unable to shake off the past.

The second tweet from the professor addresses the issue of self-reflection.  The black community wants everybody to focus on a handful of black lives that were lost at the hands of police officers in a confrontation situation while ignoring the endemic of black on black violence that ravages their neighborhoods. 

Self-examination is at the heart of psychology, and any psychology student is urged to actively engage their own psyche to understand their motives, ideals, goals, hurts, and limitations.  An essential part of this is to be able to accept and assess the evaluations of others.  Dr. Negy sees the black community as unwilling to accept the necessary feedback of others.  The black community sees itself as damaged and needy, but only wants help on their terms. 

I think a psychologist’s insights here are crucial in solving some of our society’s major problems today.

Dr. Negy clearly has insights and courage that are essential in helping us make progress in solving and quelling the unrest which is racking our country. 

Frankly, the societal changes being foisted on our country by these activist groups I don’t see as solving anything or helping anybody.  We are no longer resolving issues by rational debate but with violence in our streets.  Like spoiled children who scream until they get their way, our society is letting the least experienced among us determine our future.

That is not the way a civilized world is supposed to function. 

To be honest here, dismissing Professor Negy, though ostensibly for unrelated hitherto unproblematic incidents of the long past, would in my mind irreparably damage the University’s credibility as a reliable, sure source of academic excellence, at least in but not limited to the area of psychology.

Best wishes,

Larry Craig

Who to Blame for America’s Bloodshed?

When I was a kid, we had gun clubs in our high schools.  You could buy a gun at Sears or the local hardware store like you were buying a screwdriver.  No FOID cards, no background checks, and no gun violence problem.  (Time for the gun industry and NRA to accept blame for America’s bloodshed, August 10)

So what happened? 

Our country was built on God   It was God who gave us our rights, which is another way of saying that God gave us our freedoms and liberty.  Somewhere we were told that we are a secular nation, which means that God has no place in our public life and education.  And we end up losing our rights and our freedoms.

Without God, human life is no longer sacred, and nobody’s thinking that there is a God to give account to for their actions.  Life becomes cheap, and consequences are not certain.

Our Founders called us an “armed” people (Federalist no. 46), and they saw that as a good thing, unlike in Europe where they were unarmed and ruled by kings.

The problem is that we are trying to impose a secular society over one that was created with a religious foundation.   

Imagine

Space travel and the ideas of UFOs and alien abduction have been around for a long time, though mostly in the realm of science fiction.  Recently, we sent a space ship to Mars in search for ancient life.

Imagine that Mars indeed is inhabited.  By a very advanced species of, well, Martians.  It seems they live under the ground in a climate-controlled system, because the surface of the planet is uninhabitable. 

Imagine that we sent a manned (sorry), we sent a ship of astronauts to explore the planet.

The Martians capture them and use them for manual labor, digging out more caverns in the planet for their expanding Martian population.  Many of them use them for personal use: amusement or menial tasks to make their own lives easier.

They soon realize that there are plenty more Earthlings where these came from, so they send their own ships to Earth to bring back more of them for the never-ending task of creating more inhabitable space .as well as their own personal use to make their own lives easier.

Some of the Martians, though, feel compassion for the Earthlings.  They see them mistreated and abused, and they see that underneath their strange appearance, they seem Martian in their ability to think and feel. 

So what could they possibly do to help them? 

They would buy them themselves.  As many as they could.  They would need to work, of course, to help pay for the cost of taking care of them, but at least they would now be treated as Martians.  They would be treated kindly and well taken care of.  They would teach them the Martian language and all the advance knowledge of their advanced civilization. 

Some of their Martian philosophers protested the whole thing, both the bringing of the Earthlings to Mars, taking them from their homeland, but also the using of them for forced labor as well even personally possessing them for their own private purposes. 

Others argued that it was the Martian thing to do.  If they just let them go free, other, less compassionate Martians, or the Martian government, would only take them themselves, and they would no longer be free.  Besides, how would an Earthling even get along in Martian society?  They don’t speak Martian and know nothing about life on Mars.  How would they survive?

No, they were able to protect them by keeping them out of the caverns and the hands of cruel, unfeeling Martians who would only abuse them.  Maybe someday all the Martians would recognize that these Earthlings should have been left alone.  As one great Martian teacher said, Do unto other Martians as you would have them do unto you.  Surely that would apply to Earthlings as well.

I think it would make a good book and maybe a series of movies.  People like stories of other worlds.  It can take their minds off the problems of this one.

Before you defund the police

Police are a lot like firefighters.  We regularly have emergencies that require professional help immediately, so we have specially trained people ready to respond quickly to our calls.  (What should police do?, August 6)

One big difference is that we pay firefighters to stay at the fire house between emergencies, and the police we ask to patrol the communities.  I suppose we could ask them to stay at the station until there are specific calls for their help.

But as a person who had worked in business all my life, it seems like a waste of money to just have them waiting for something to do, so to speak.  So we give them other assignments, like monitoring traffic.  We also use a police presence in our public schools as a deterrent.  For a while, we had a rash of mass shootings in our public schools, and everybody demanded we put police in our schools to protect the students and staff.

Now we have calls to shift funding from the police to other services, saying that we don’t need the police to perform these services.

The problem is that the level of police, and firefighters, that we have is determined through experience.  We base the number of personnel on how many we need during times of crisis.  When a crisis comes, it is too late to hire and train more people.  You need to have them dressed and ready to go.

So you can’t look at the other things police are doing to say that we don’t need that many of them.  The choice is whether you want your tax dollars used to keep the police actively working on our behalf or essentially inactive waiting for the emergencies.    

So, Should We Kneel or Stand?

Now that the major professional sports are starting up again, we need to answer the question: should they kneel or should they stand?  Whether it’s for the National Anthem or just the American flag.  If you think everyone should stand, you will not like watching your favorite sport when they all kneel.  If they should kneel, then what do you think when a few of them stand?  It seems that those who are standing are standing for different issues than those who are kneeling.

If you are not a sports enthusiast, I think the question is still relevant, because you will not be able to escape the sounds, the sights, and the talk about what people are doing.

Imagine that you and your spouse had an argument.  The issue was an important one.  You both got angry, and the issue was not fully resolved.  Maybe you like to spend a lot of money on your hobby, and your spouse thinks you spend too much, and you don’t have enough money for other things that your spouse thinks are important.  You know that you both still disagree, and that the issue will come up again at some point in the future.

A few days later, you get a call from your spouse’s attorney, asking you to come in to give your side of the story.  The lawyer is a divorce lawyer.  Oh, no, your spouse isn’t asking for a divorce.  They just want to document the incident.  Why?  Well, you never know if at some point they might need it.

I would say that that spouse has just put a big crack in their marriage.  The first spouse will always feel on edge, afraid to be fully honest, afraid to talk about a certain thing again.  Or anything of importance.

I worked in a business for much of my life that would often write up employees for certain infractions.  The reasoning is that if they ever wanted to fire an employee, they would need to have several write-ups before they could do that.

I was the recipient of some of those writeups, and I resented them.  Why?  To me, it conveyed the message, yes, I want to fire you, but I can’t, so I’m doing this instead. 

Now I was a manager myself for a while, and I chose not to write up my employees.  I thought write-ups were counter-productive.  I wanted my employees to be happy on the job, not just content to do the bare minimum but who would eagerly do their best. 

Now let’s look at these protests.

They say that the issues are injustice, police brutality, social justice, and racism.

We are told that these problems have gone on too long.

If this were a marriage, this is a spouse going to the divorce lawyer.  The marriage is not working.  Or at least that’s the message.  Or is it?

When you express your grievances through the flag or the National Anthem, you are saying more than that we have some unresolved issues, some disagreements. 

The flag stands for the whole thing.  The whole country, the American experiment, as some call it, the whole idea of freedom and liberty for which our Founders went to war to establish.

Kneeling for the anthem means that the whole thing is broken.  The marriage is broken. 

The person kneeling may not see it that way.  They may see it as simply protesting that one thing, albeit a big thing.  But the message that that act conveys is far more, something far different.  Imagine you asked your spouse or your kids to do something, and they gave you the middle finger.  Are they just saying no, or are they saying a lot more than that?

True communication in the world requires that both parties understand the same words in the same way.

I have learned that if I’m discussing, say, democracy, we need first to agree on what we mean by the word democracy before we can discuss it, otherwise we can be talking about two different things.  Are we talking about a system where the majority rules on everything, or do we mean simply that we are a country that is supposed to have free and fair elections?

In the protests going on today in our country, the things they are trying to say are being said in ways that are conveying something else. 

When a person kneels for the flag or the National Anthem, in their heart they may say they are protesting a particular social cause, but the message they are conveying is that they despise the whole country.   The whole idea of America.  What it stands for.  No, that may not be their intention, but that’s the message that a lot of people are hearing.

You want to protest social injustice?  Don’t express disdain for the whole country and all it stands for.  It’s like telling your spouse you are sorry you married them whenever you have a disagreement.

The Bible says that a soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.  (Proverbs 15:1)  Kneeling for the flag and the anthem are harsh words that stir up anger.  You’re offending and angering the very people you will need to solve your problems.  You may achieve some changes that are superficial at best, but you’re not going to win the hearts and minds of those whose hearts and minds you disrespect.

But there is a bigger issue here beyond just conveying mixed messages.

At the same time that people are protesting certain problems in our country, there are others who actually do want to get rid of the whole thing.  And they are using these protests over particular grievances in their cause.  They want to get as many people as possible to focus on everything that is wrong in the country such that they will no longer think there is anything good about it, that there is nothing worth defending.

The protests started out as a protest over one incident of a police interaction that went bad.  Then it went to all police, and now it’s gone into things that happened hundreds of years ago.

You may have grievances about a lot of things in our country.  But the bigger question is whether you think the country is still basically a good one or if deep down, it’s a bad country. 

There are two overlapping narratives here, and we don’t know in individual cases what the message is.  When you kneel for the flag or the National Anthem, a lot of people are understanding the message that justice isn’t really the problem.  America is.  We don’t have justice, we have racism, not because we have problems in our country, but the problem IS the country.

Until we answer that question; whether the United States is a good country with problems, or a bad country that must be replaced, these protests will only lead to more unrest and conflict and won’t solve anything.

An Open Letter on Racism and the Protests

We are told that our country is a racist country that oppresses and holds down people of color.

Yet there is not another country in the world today that any person of color who is already here now would rather live in.  And millions of people of color have come to live here by their own choice, and millions more are waiting to do so.  Should we tell them not to come?

If it had not been for slavery, all the descendants of slavery here now would still be in Africa and not in the country of their choosing.  I submit that their life here now is better than it would have been if they had never been brought here so long ago from Africa.  People of color, frankly, should be thanking God every day that they live here in spite of everything they say is wrong with this country.

There is a story in the Bible of a man whom God greatly favored whom God, you could say, caused to be sold into slavery and later unjustly imprisoned who thanked God afterwards when he realized how God was using the events of his life for a greater good.  (Genesis 37-50)  And this man forgave the ones who sold him into slavery in the first place because of that.

But we are told that people must protest and even riot about the mistreatment of black people by the police. 

The mistreatment of black people by the police was indeed the stated reason for the protests when they started, but the purpose for the protests by those who actually organized them and got them going goes far beyond problems with the police.  The mistreatment of blacks by police gave their cause acceptability in the eyes of the public.

We know that the protests are not really about the plight of black people, because 1) they say and do nothing about the much greater problem of rampant violence in black communities.  More people are shot and killed in black neighborhoods by black men in a few weeks than die at the hands of police officers in the entire year.

We know that the protests are not really about the plight of black people, because 2) they are offering nothing that is intended to improve the lives of anyone.  There is a proposal to shift funding for policing to social services.  Most people I think see that as unrealistic and even dangerous.  We are already seeing what a diminished police presence looks like in some places, and I don’t expect that to last.  The goal I believe is to reduce possible future police resistance as these protests and riots continue and expand.

We are told that we should not bring up the issue of violence in the black communities, because that is a different, separate, and unrelated issue than the issue at hand, that of racism, both personal and systemic.

But people aren’t buying that.

We are told that everybody needs to invest in black communities, but we have seen what has happened to people who have.  Not everybody is able and willing to rebuild their businesses after they have been looted and burned to the ground.

We are told that all our schools and neighborhoods need to be fully integrated.  But people who live in those neighborhoods that are said to need more integration are afraid that that violence that we read about every day in the newspapers will follow that integration.  

  

There is a lot more going on than simply protesting over the death of one man at the hands of police.

Their intention is to present a constant complaint of as much as possible about American society and life, so that they can condition the American people to see their country as broken and so that they accept these complaints as valid. 

The protests now include the issues of slavery, systemic racism, and indigenous peoples with the goal of discrediting the entire foundation of the United States and Western Civilization, so that these people will be able to demand wholesale changes to the system and that the defenders of the historical United States and Western Civilization will feel completely unable to defend it, its history, its institutions, and its practices.

They want the American people to see the whole basis and organization of our country as irredeemably flawed, such that it cannot be repaired and must be replaced.  They don’t want to fix the United States; they want to replace it.

They want to intimidate and shame the American people into silence and acquiescence such that they will not resist as these people try to reinvent America. 

I wish I could say that changes will come out of these protests and riots that will actually improve the lives of anybody.  But the protests and riots are no longer about George Floyd and the police but about bringing down the United States as we know it.

In defense of Christopher Columbus

We don’t celebrate Christopher Columbus, because we’re trying to give every identity group their own holiday and statues.

We celebrate him, because it was his venturing out on a very big unknown of a journey that ended up bringing Western Civilization and eventually the United States to the Western Hemisphere.

Yes, the Vikings discovered America 500 years before this, but nothing ever came of it.  Nobody else had even tried that we know of.

Were the indigenous peoples happy to see him and the later explorers when they arrived?  I understand that they weren’t even happy to see other indigenous peoples.  These explorers didn’t interrupt some utopian civilization which they then ruined by bringing in an outside culture. 

Did these European adventurers rob and enslave the indigenous people?  I haven’t read the firsthand accounts of what all happened, but I doubt if all those people who are up in arms over Columbus did either.

But what the modern historians call plunder and slavery, perhaps the better words are spoils of war and prisoners of war. 

All this ruckus about America’s past isn’t really about our past, getting our history right.  They are trying to get the American people so disappointed and depressed about our past that they are able to bring about major changes to the very structure and foundation of our country. 

This has nothing to do with improving the lives of black or indigenous people.  The ultimate goal is to create a socialist or communist utopia where everybody is equal, equally poor, except, of course, for those who are in charge.

They are using legitimate grievances as cover to promote as much unrest as possible, so the American people will be open to making major changes to everything.  This is why they are not proposing specific changes of things we can actually do to make life better for anyone, but they are focusing on symbolic things like statues and name changes to separate the American people from their history.  

Then when Americans no longer trust or believe that their country has done anything right, they will be open to giving away all that they have, because they will no longer believe they have anything they can offer as being better.

solving the gun violence problem in Chicago

I was eager to read the Times editorial (As violence skyrockets in city, Trump’s ‘police state strategy isn’t the solution, July 21) to see how the paper suggests we solve this problem.  After all, this is not a new problem.  We have all had years to think about it.

The paper proposes three steps to end all this senseless killing:

1)         The first step is to make it harder to get illegal guns.  It’s commonly understood that most of these senseless killings are at the hands of gang members in their dealings with illegal drugs.  Do you really think that those people who are able to ship, store, and distribute illegal drugs would have any problem obtaining illegal guns? 

2)         The second step is to spend more money to improve schools and provide more social services.  I have argued for decades about funding public schools through income taxes rather than through property taxes.  Even the newspapers won’t get behind that.   So where else will this money come from?

The paper suggests that money taken from the defense budget wouldn’t be missed and would be adequate for much of this.  The problem is that defense is one of the few things that our Constitution specifically states is a function of the federal government. 

Why is this the responsibility of the federal government anyway?   If Chicago and the state don’t do more, why should we expect the federal government to do it?

The federal government just borrowed trillions of dollars to provide some relief in this virus crisis. 

3)         The third step is to expand background checks to all gun sales.  Did we forget already that we are talking about illegal guns?  Do you think the people who deal with illegal guns are going to be deterred by the existence of another law?  We already have laws against killing people.  

So the answer to all the problems with gun violence is to spend more money and to make more laws? 

I submit that there are only two sure ways of ridding a society of gun violence:  You either need to change peoples’ hearts so they don’t want to kill other people, or you provide swift, certain, and significant punishment for those who flout the laws.

The first step can only be accomplished through religion, so we can’t talk about that publicly.  That leaves us with Trump’s solution of getting tough on the people who commit these crimes. 

a letter to the paper about the liberal arts

Mary Schmich, one of your columnists, wrote an excellent column (Gather ‘round, let us celebrate what the liberal arts taught us, July 19).

This is a portion of a note that I sent to her:

I wanted to tell you how much I appreciated your article about the liberal arts. 

I remember hearing someone say a long time ago something like, updated for today: vocational training teaches you how to make a living.  Liberal arts teaches you how to live.

I hear that schools today are more concerned with teaching you what to think rather than teaching you how to think.

Keep it up.  People today need to hear more of this.

Maybe you can delve into some of the things you learned in liberal arts days and show how valuable those things are today.

Thank you.

Why is America so divided, what it means, and what can we do about it?

Our country has never been more divided than it is today, and it is near the breaking point. 

The reason it is so divided is that we now have 3 competing narratives about the nature of our country, and there is no common ground with any of them.  That means there is nowhere to compromise or reach agreement.

The first narrative has to do with the foundation of our nation.

The Founders believed and the founding principle of our nation is that God gave unalienable rights to human beings, rights that precede and supersede government.  But those rights can only come from God, because in a secular country, there is no higher authority than the government.

The court called supreme said that our nation cannot aid or favor one religion over another, so we end up with no religion at all in our public square, we cannot mention God, so we cannot even talk about unalienable rights in our public schools.  Generations have grown up not even knowing that we have unalienable rights.

But our nation is a nation of rights, so without acknowledging God, the only rights left are those given to us by the government or the consensus of the people.  While unalienable rights are things that you can do without the government’s permission, regulation, or interference, government-given rights are things that the government owes you, things that you are entitled to.

Since our nation changed its understanding on human rights, government spending has exploded, such that there isn’t enough money in the whole country to meet all the demands for it.

The second narrative is about the character of our nation.  Actually there are two narratives here.  One, the first, is that our nation is the greatest nation in the history of the world, a nation built on freedom, that has lifted more people out of poverty and oppression than any other nation in history.

The other narrative is that our nation is inherently and irreparably flawed and must be dismantled and redone from the ground up. 

The simplest way to tell which narrative here is correct is by looking at our immigration numbers. 

No nation in the world has more people who want to move here.  Far more.  Not only that, but those who find our country so reprehensible have no plans on leaving it to find a better one.  They can’t name one country that is better.  A few countries score higher in public happiness or things like that, but there is no mad rush to go to any of them.

So half our country wants to make it better.  The other half wants to take it apart and start over.

The third narrative is about the morals of our nation, that our country is inherently racist and oppressive.  Most recently, our nation has been torn apart by weeks of violent riots and protests over these same things.

There are three problems though with all this commotion.

First, I have been following all the news closely, and I see no concrete proposals to deal with or to solve this racism and oppression.  There is a proposal to defund the police, which is interpreted to mean either a total disbanding of them or just a reallocation of much of their funding to social services. 

But that has nothing to do with the ‘inherent’ racism and oppression.

The second problem is that this isn’t really about racism and oppression. 

Why do I say this?  The killing of George Floyd brought worldwide protests and violence.  Yet every week, black communities in our big cities are battered by gun violence, killing the smallest of our children, and the protests are small, short-lasting, and peaceful.

Why the difference?

Because the major protests are organized by political groups with bigger agendas.  They want to create as much dissatisfaction, disgust, and disillusionment as possible with everything about our current system, so they can use a crisis to make basic, major changes to that system. 

If these groups were really interested in black lives, they would have been protesting the killings of our children years ago.

And the third problem with all this commotion is that it is not meant to solve anything. 

Why do I say that?

This overlaps a little with the last point.  The people who have organized these protests don’t want to fix the system but abolish it and make a new one. 

But it’s also about blaming ‘other’ people for all the problems.  They cannot tell you what they want other people to do to fix these problems.  Some say they want reparations.  Money.  So, say, we give everybody who wants it $50,000. 

After they buy that car, that flat screen tv, or maybe put a down payment on a house, what will have changed?  Will the system be fairer?  Will everybody be happy now?  Will everybody like everybody now? 

Nothing will have changed.  The money will be spent, and everybody and everything will be back where we started.

People forget that our entire current welfare system started shortly after the passing of our civil rights laws and was primarily meant to help those same people who had marched for those rights.

When the problem for everything is that other people aren’t doing enough for you, then there is nothing you can do for yourself that will make a difference.  And then people lose hope, and you’ve lost everything.

Nobody is giving any specific things that we can change. 

And actually a lot of people like it that way.  Because they want to take down the whole system.  Without giving specific proposals, they want to focus on the system itself.  That the whole thing is wrong.  Take the whole thing down and start over. 

Those people who remember history know where this is leading.  This was done before in Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, and a few other places. 

Those who remember history remember that those were countries where people have been trying for decades to leave.  They built walls to keep their people from escaping.

So what can we do to get through all this?

For decades now, our political leaders have pushed for diversity.  They said that that was our strength.  And they were wrong.  It weakened us with everybody pulling in different directions.

Instead of focusing on what divides us, we need to have something that unites us.

We would need political leaders to show the way.  Actually it doesn’t have to be a political leader, but somebody who can get the nation’s attention.  And right now, our nation is being run by whoever can make the most noise.

Our founding principle of unalienable rights given to us by God is what made our country the freest and most prosperous in the world.  I believe that should be our starting point.  That is why our Founders went to war to create this new nation in the first place.  Yes, they had particular grievances with England, but those were merely examples of how England was trampling on their unalienable rights.

The idea of our nation being reprehensible should be rejected by the mere fact that millions more people want to come here than actually can.  Maybe in some people’s minds the nation is inherently evil.  When more people want to leave here than come here, then maybe we can talk about that.

Is America racist?  Does that mean that not everybody will like you for things you can’t change?  By that definition, perhaps so.  But if you think that you cannot achieve better things for your life by living wisely, no amount of government programs or government money is going to make any difference.

fix the school funding problem

When I read and watch the news, I keep looking for specific things people suggest or demand that will actually change things.  I’m not seeing much of anything.

I made a list of four things, and I would like to offer one here.

Minorities often complain about the public schools in their areas.  The biggest complaint is inadequate funding. 

As long as public schools are funded by the property tax, schools in minority areas will probably always be thought of as underfunded.

I suggest that we fund public education through the income tax.  Yes, this will require a tax increase, but property taxes will go down substantially.  And this is far more palatable.  The value of one’s property is no indication of a person’s ability to pay taxes on it. 

Retired and unemployed people can find tax time extremely taxing, literally and metaphorically.

However, this education tax must be kept separate from the general funds, otherwise it will be spent on other things.  In fact, I would suggest tax forms and pay stubs have a separate education tax designation.

Let the state determine a base amount of spending per student, and raise that through the income tax. Local school boards should be allowed to raise and spend more, however their local community decides.

People who choose to send their kids to private schools should be able to deduct the amount spent on private schools up to the amount they would pay for public education.   People shouldn’t have to pay twice for their children’s’ education.

immigration: a forgotten subject

Can we talk about something else for a minute?  Take a break from the pandemic, protests, police, and President stories?

Sunday’s paper had an article (Maple Leaf Model, June 14) that was quick to bash the United States and to praise our northern neighbors.

Unfortunately, the author was right in some ways, but way off in others.

Imagine you owned a large company, and you needed to hire 500 people.  You put out a call to hire, and 10,000 people applied for work.

What would you do?

If our government did the hiring, they would hire everybody who showed up in person first and then mix up the rest between relatives of current employees, people who need a job the most, and top it off with a lottery, taking people at random.

That has been our country’s immigration policy for decades.  Oh, we do make room for some people who are actually highly qualified, but there’s only so much room.

Canada is praised for setting a target for immigration rather than a cap.  It is not mentioned that our cap is about 6x times higher than their goal. 

Canada is praised for not taking everyone but preferring those with “desirable” qualifications.  Our government leaders pride themselves for not turning anyone away.

The author seems confused, though, about which political party favors which immigration policies.

 

I do hope his article sparks a national conversation on something else here beyond all the current crises.

police in public schools

Have we forgotten already the reason the police are in schools in the first place?

Our nation is flitting around from one crisis to another, making laws, rules, and regulations in fits of emotion only to find that the solution to the first crisis doesn’t work in the next crisis.

We demand police in every school in the wake of a rash of school shootings, which seem to have stopped for some reason, hmmm, but now mobs demand their removal, so that suddenly sounds like a really good idea. 

We shut down the economy to enforce social distancing, but it doesn’t matter now if people are protesting.

 

In crises, the media work to rouse the emotions of the people, and our political leaders hurry to change or fix things to quell the masses, but it leads to poorly crafted legislation and kneejerk solutions that are nothing more than band aids. 

Everybody is in such a rush to change things, they will make decisions based on emotions and not wisdom.  This will only undermine the confidence of the people in our political leaders and only further the divide in our country.

After the protests, then what?

We have seen and heard the anger and frustration of so many people.  Fine.  Now what?

I really don’t expect to see much happen as a result of all of this, because there is no focus on what exactly we are to do now.  Legislative sessions will open, and they won’t know what to do.

The men involved in George Floyd’s death have been charged with crimes.  The courts will have to figure out their levels of culpability and the appropriate punishment.  The public, not being privy to all the information, likely will not be satisfied with all the outcomes, and maybe there will be another wave of protests.  The irony is that street justice is one of the very things they’ve been complaining about, and it will be very thing they will then be demanding.

So what do we do now?

Without people making specific reform proposals, nothing is going to change.

So I offer my proposals:

1.         My first thought here is that we should have thousands and thousands of people wanting to become police officers.  Somebody has to do it right, and when nobody is, the right response is for people to step up and show everybody how it’s done.

As much as possible, I would only employ minority officers to work in minority neighborhoods.  I see that as a step backward as a nation, but I see as much animosity from the public toward the police as the police are accused of having toward the public.  Maybe someday in the future we can stop seeing people by races, something like Martin Luther King talked about.

That’s going to require hiring by race, which will need to be cleared by the courts, but it seems that the conditions here mandate race as a requirement of employment in many cases. 

 

2.         I would change the method for funding schools.  We have relied on the property tax, and it’s not working.   Poor areas are not able to generate enough money for public education.  The state should determine a basic level of spending per student and raise that through the income tax.  Public education money must then be kept separate from general funds, otherwise it will be spent on other things. 

3.         The gangs must be shut down.  This decision must be broad-based in that you don’t want any one individual publicly responsible for making that decision.  The drug cartels won’t like it, so you can’t give them any particular individuals to target in retaliation.  It could lead to a real war of sorts, with casualties.  Wars cost a price, but sometimes they are necessary, and this is a necessary one.

4.         We need investment in the black community, but people are not going to want to invest there unless they can be sure their investment is safe from non-business risks.  Those who destroy or vandalize property must be punished.  There are no excuses.  They are hurting their entire community by their acts, not just the particular property owners.

 

I think this is a good start.  When I think of more, I will write again on this.

So what exactly did they die for?

It’s Memorial Day as I write this.  We as a nation pause to honor those who died to secure our freedom.

I have to ask if we still know what freedom we are talking about when we do that.  Is it the freedom to vote, to have a democracy where we elect our leaders?  Is that all?

Did our Founders go to war with England, the world’s leading superpower, over the right to vote?

The Declaration of Independence had a long list of grievances against England, but the grievances were based on more than just the fact that we don’t like them.

Our country was founded on 5 beliefs as noted in that Declaration of Independence.

The first is that all men are created equal.  Some might laugh at that, because there was slavery at that time in the United States.  Their first thought, however, was that nobody had a divine or inherent right to rule over other people, like, say, King George. 

When it came to slavery, half the colonies were against it, and half were in favor of it.  They could have created two separate independent nations, but they decided to create one and figure out what to do about slavery later.  Turns out it took a civil war, but we ended it.

The second belief is that God gave unalienable rights to human beings.  These rights precede and supersede government, such that government did not give them and government cannot take them away.  As such, contrary to what we are commonly told, ours is not a secular nation.  A secular nation cannot give you unalienable rights, because in a secular country, there is no Higher Power than the government.  The government cannot give you rights that supersede it.

The third belief is that these rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  A lot of people believe that we violate that right to life by our support for abortion.  And the pursuit of happiness would call for a small and limited government, so that people have more freedom to pursue their interests, unhindered and unburdened with obtrusive government.

The fourth belief is that government exists to secure these rights.  As our country has shifted more toward secularism, we now see the government’s responsibility as to take care of us.

The fifth belief is that when government does not secure those rights, it is the right and duty of the people to alter the government or to abolish it altogether and make a new one. 

As a side note, the Second Amendment exists, because the Founders know what it took to establish this country in the first place.  They figured people might need to do it again sometime.

what's wrong with mass mail-in voting

Everybody is in a mad rush to expand mail-in voting.  I wonder how many of them know what they’re doing, and how many of them actually do know what they’re doing.

Mass mail-in voting breaks two of the most fundamental criteria in democratic elections.

First, we have no idea who is voting with mail-in ballots.  We have no way of knowing if every ballot reached the person intended, who actually filled the ballot out. or what happened with the extra ballots.  Extra ballots?  Of course, there will be extra ballots.  Just like polling places have as many ballots as names on their lists, at least at a polling place the ballots have to go into the machine during voting hours.  Ballots will go to the wrong houses, people will have moved, there will be extra ballots at the printing company.  There will no longer be any matching of a ballot with a live person purporting to being the person registered.

And, secondly, an essential part of democratic voting is the right and the responsibility to vote in private.  That is why when we go to polling places, we don’t all fill out our ballots while seated around a large table.  We go into a private booth, not only so that nobody else knows how we voted, but that nobody else can influence our vote.

All that is lost when voting is not done at the polling place.  Heck, we don’t even allow candidates, their surrogates, or even their signs to get near a polling place.   We don’t know who’s badgering or forcing anyone to vote a certain way when they are away from the polling place.

People are complaining that people shouldn’t have to risk their health to vote.  People died to protect that right to vote.  A lot of people.  The right and privilege to vote doesn’t come cheap. 

If people have health issues, we can accommodate that.  But there are all kinds of essential businesses open, because people still have to do essential business.  Voting is an essential business.  We have 6 months to work out any potential problems if people are worried about catching something when they vote.