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.