the answer to all our problems

The Democrats have had the power in Washington for three months, and I have to say that I am impressed.

There is no problem too big for them to tackle, and solve.

They are absolutely brilliant.

I don’t know why nobody has thought of this before. 

All you have to do is print money.  Ingenious!  No more burdensome tax hikes.  Oh, sure, tax the evil corporations and those really rich people.  They don’t deserve to be rich, or at least that rich.  And besides, they don’t need all that money anyway.

Whoever made that stupid statement about not being able to have your cake and eat it too obviously had no idea what they were talking about. 

One of the major things that has divided our country so much is the idea that the past is a repository of the wisdom of the ages and the idea that the people in the past were pretty much racist dolts who were for the most part bound by all kinds of religious nonsense and traditional thinking.

Well, folks, we have seen the light, and there’s no going back.

Seriously, how can you charge people for things when the things are basic human rights and not everybody can afford them?  People have a right to live without the fear of how am I going to be able to afford all these essential things? 

I can’t wait to see what’s coming next. 

Do you realize that we can end poverty overnight?  Incredible!  It won’t end overnight, because we still have too many people tied up into that thinking from the past, but we’ll get there.  When everybody sees the amazing changes to our society.

I am sure that our leaders in Washington are hard at work identifying other essential things that we can provide for people to make their lives better.  When you think about it, isn’t it really absurd to charge people for food?  People need food to eat, and you put this basic obstacle in their lives?  You want to eat?  Well, then you need to work so much to pay for that.  Whoever made up stuff like that was undoubtedly a rich person who only wanted to get richer.

Hang on, folks!  The future has arrived, and it never looked brighter.

Should kids be afraid of police in their schools?

Where are the adults in our kids’ lives?  Where are the adults in the lives of our students?  (After shooting, students say no to CPD in CPS, April 23)

Our kids are afraid of cops in schools?  Where are the adults who explain that the same fire that cooks your food can burn your house down?  The same car that takes you to school can run you over.  That same cop that you’re afraid of will risk his life to save yours if a shooter comes to your school.

After all, that is why they’re there.  They’re not there if case you misbehave or are rude to a teacher.  They are there to save your life if need be.

They’re not the ones you should be afraid of.  Be afraid if you have friends in gangs.  They may try to recruit you, and then your real troubles will begin.

 

The War in Afghanistan

War is hell.  I get that.  I don’t remember why Japan attacked us to start a second front in World War 2, but the first front was in Europe against a German ruler gone mad. 

If Hitler had merely focused on purging his land of all those deemed undesirables, I wonder if there still would have been a war there.  But we didn’t need to ask that question, because he invaded Poland, France, and some other small countries in an attempt to control all of Europe. 

In those days, nations fought nations.  Armies wore uniforms.  And wars were fought until one side was either vanquished or surrendered.  In the first World War, though, they didn’t do that.  They just agreed to stop fighting.  And twenty years later, they started fighting again until one side was vanquished and surrendered.

Then we had the Geneva Conventions, which demanded that the world fight kinder, gentler wars, and the whole war making process was thrown on its head.  We ended World War 2 in the Pacific by dropping 2 nuclear bombs on Japan.  It was either that or invade the island at the cost of maybe 200,000 of our own soldiers.

If we fought that same war today, they might still be fighting.  Invading Japan would risk the lives of civilians, and we wouldn’t want to risk the lives of that many of our soldiers.  It would be even more today because of the revised rules of engagement. 

And then there is Afghanistan.  The enemy is not a nation.  They wear no uniforms, and they don’t follow the Geneva Conventions.  Under the current rules of engagement, the world’s leading superpower could not defeat a military force that didn’t abide by the rules. 

However, we were able to distract a number of military groups there from spreading their malice around the world.

The mistake is that we are trying to judge this war by all our previous ones.  We expect wars to take a certain amount of time, and then it’s over.  We think no struggle can be worth that much time and money. 

Like World War 1, which ended because the combatants just agreed to stop fighting, though in this case, it was only the one side that decided to stop fighting, they came back to fight again another day.  And we will too.

Our enemy has been fighting this same war for 1500 years.  And they are patient.  And they believe they have a cause worth fighting for.  And we don’t.

smarter gun laws

It seems that I am writing letters on gun violence as often as the Sun-Times is printing editorials on it, which is about every other day. 

I understand the frustration that people are feeling about gun violence.  Heck, any violence.  A D.C. cop was killed the other day by a car driven by a man intent on killing him.

Our country once banned the sale, manufacturing, and use of alcohol.  That only spurred the growth of crime syndicates.  We already have bans on a lot of drugs.  Is it really that much harder to buy them? 

If guns can be purchased legally or even with a slight difficulty, they will.  Make them illegal or harder to buy, and that only creates opportunities for the illegal gun market.  We already have laws against killing people. 

Will we at least save some lives by restricting gun sales?  Sure, just like lowering the speed limit to 50 mph on all highways and 20 mph on all local streets will save lives too.

But nobody is asking why we are killing or wanting to kill people in the first place.  The Second Amendment is the SECOND Amendment.  It has been there from the beginning.  That is not the problem.  There is a reason it is there.  And, no, it is not so people can hunt more often.  It’s essential to a people being or remaining free.  Read Federalist Papers no. 29 and 46. 

I keep saying the problem is that we as a nation have turned our back on God and religion.  We used to teach our kids to love their neighbors and not to kill people.  But, no, we’re smarter than that.  We don’t need to talk about God or religion.  We can get along quite well without that.

Well, I say we’re not.

police, protests, and killings

I don’t know if this was intentional or just ironic, but right next to a story (Chicago Tribune) about protestors decrying the shooting of a 13-year-old boy at 2:30 in the morning after a police foot chase (Video ‘made my blood boil’), there was an article about a teenage girl shot dead riding in a car.  (Teenage girl shot dead riding in car in Little Village, April 17)

I’m guessing the protests for her death will start some time soon. 

We’re told that minorities are afraid of the police, that police are out to get them, yet it’s not the police that the people are afraid of actually. It’s not the police who shoot into people’s homes and kill them while they are in bed or watching television.  It’s not the police who shoot at people on the expressways while you are driving. 

When police cars drive by in minority neighborhoods, people don’t run and hide.  There does seem to be a problem, though, when police are investigating a crime or possible crime and people do everything possible to fight them or resist them in the process. 

Then there is a problem.  And the problem is not the police.

Why do we even have a Second Amendment

Guns have been in the public consciousness a lot lately.  Not sure why.  I suspect it has to do with what the media decides to focus on. 

While the focus is usually on what can we do to stop gun violence or at least cut down on it, almost no attention is paid to why we even have the Second Amendment in the first place.  Is it so people can go hunting? 

The answer to those questions is found in the Federalist Papers, no. 29, 46 primarily.  The Federalist Papers were a series of papers written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay to make the case to the America people, but particularly the people of New York state, for our present Constitution before it was ratified.

It talks about “the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation,” and how many “governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”

“A well-regulated militia [is] the most natural defense of a free country.”  And a militia was all the able-bodied people of the state joining forces, like with Britain but also against any federal government that sought to restrict the rights of the people. 

The Founders applauded the fact that Americans were “armed” and free, unlike people living in Europe who were unarmed and ruled by kings.

 

Thoughts on the gun violence in our country.

The United States is a unique country in the world.

It was founded on freedom, which essentially meant that it believed that human beings were endowed with unalienable rights from God.  These rights precede and supersede government.

And as our second President John Adams noted, “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.”  In other words, you can’t give people real freedom unless those people are responsible people with a high moral code who actually care about the other people in their society.

Without that moral code, the government will continually need to make and enforce more and more laws to curb human behavior.  But in reality, that enforcement generally only comes after the evil deeds have been done.

For almost 200 years, the United States saw itself as a Christian nation.  We taught our kids the Ten Commandments (e.g. Thou shalt not kill), the Golden Rule (Do unto others as you would have others do unto you), and the You shall love your neighbor as yourselves.  All this is from the Bible, and we taught this to our kids even in our public schools.

But then we started saying and teaching that we are a secular nation and that we cannot bring God into our public lives, schools, and government. 

But secularism can’t get people to love each other or even care for each other.  The best it can do is to encourage tolerance for each other, which can mean no more than to ignore other people.  Other people become obstacles in our lives rather than companions on the same journey.

So the problem in a nutshell is that we are trying to impose secular values on a nation that was founded as a religious one.  We are used to the freedoms of a religious nation but no longer have the moral code that supported it.

Speaking specifically about guns, our Founders applauded the idea that the American people were “armed,” unlike the people in Europe who were unarmed and ruled by kings.  But take away the moral restraints of religion which actually teaches us to love our neighbors, and guns then become a convenient way to vent our anger and hatred on an uncaring world.

 

What should we do about the filibuster?

The Senate for a long time has had a thing called the filibuster.  No need to go into details, but essentially it means that most bills in the Senate require at least 60 votes to pass. 

When the Democrats were the minority party in the Senate, they were strong advocates for the filibuster.  The filibuster made it sure that any bill had wide support.  Now that they have the slimmest possible majority in the Senate, they think it’s evil and must be got rid of. 

If you pass a major bill that changes the country in a major way but with the slimmest possible majority, that means that half the country doesn’t support it. 

If we no longer think that uniting our country or at least trying to get our country more in agreement on things is important, then we are in serious trouble.  Political officials who believe that uniting our country is important should be asked to resign immediately.  They are not working in the interests of the country.

One simple thing Congress can do that would make it easier to get more unity in the Senate would be to submit smaller bills.  All these massive bills contain a lot of good things that everyone can unite around, but they are always packaged with very controversial parts that stymie the whole thing.

tax cuts, deficits, and debt

A response to a recent Sun-Times reader is appropriate and for two reasons: 1) he made a few mistakes that the public should be aware of; 2) I think the Times agrees with him.  (Magical worries about the deficit, April 6)

The reader says that the Trump tax cuts added a trillion dollars to the federal deficit.  No, government revenues actually went up, as is usually the case with tax cuts.  Deficits occur because the government no longer worries about government debt.  They will always spend more than you give them.

The reader says that the tax cut mostly benefitted corporations and the wealthiest.  Certainly in actual tax dollars that would be the case, because the wealthiest pay tens of thousands of dollars in federal taxes, and I pay only a few.  So of course, the smallest percent decrease in anyone’s rate would affect more actual dollars for the rich than the rest of us.

My wife and I are both retired with modest pensions, and the tax cut was a godsend to us.  We no longer have to concern ourselves about having money for our taxes.  I think that tax cut made a lot of ordinary people very happy, but I think the people in the news really wanted to make it look bad.

The infrastructure plan is not a plan for all of us.  Certainly it is a bonanza for many of us and states and local governments, but then it is also an enormous boondoggle.  They’re trying to grant everyone’s wish list to get everyone’s support, while spending three times that much on wasteful, pet projects that only favor their favored people. 

Debt is fine when you’re buying a house or a car or starting or expanding a business.  The goal is always to pay off that debt as soon as possible.  Governments no longer intend or even want to pay off their debts.  They’re just willing to keep paying the interest on it and hope you’re not paying attention.  We are spending almost a half-trillion dollars a year on debt.  That's like burning money.  

crisis at the border

The Times editorial today left me really curious.  (No room for excuses as detention centers fill up with thousands of migrant children, April 2)

We have thousands of people a day coming to our southern border seeking entrance to our country.

Ideally, they should all be checked for diseases, TB, covid, any communicable ones.  They should all have background checks as well.  I remember as a kid watching the old westerns on tv where the bad guys would try to escape by crossing the border into Mexico.  I’m sure bad guys in Mexico today try to escape into the States. 

So we are releasing tens of thousands of newcomers into our country without any of these screenings, just because there are so many of them.  I’ve read in a number of sources that they have a high covid infection rate. 

Your editorial wants solutions from the Biden administration, but I don’t recall any specific suggestions from the paper. 

There are only three options: continue as we are, allow migrants free access to our country, or keep them in Mexico and try to process them as fast as we can.  We can’t build suitable housing fast enough for the thousands of new people each day, and it seems strange to house them in hotels when we have so many homeless people in our own country living on the streets.

Allowing unvetted, untested people into our country is never a good policy for a country to have. 

It makes sense to me to allow people to apply for asylum from their own countries before making the thousand-mile trek here, but then that was the proposal of a Republican President. 

We need to have a talk

For decades now, our politicians have been telling us that diversity is our strength, and now they are telling us that our nation is inherently and systemically racist.  This tells me that nobody ever really thought our nation was about diversity, because diversity only increases division and strife. 

At the same time all this is happening, we have removed from our society the one thing that can heal the gaps and bring people together, and that is religion.  Not just any religion, but the ones that teach their people that everybody is created in the image of God and that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. 

Everybody is getting all riled up about hate crimes and gun violence, and the only solutions that we are getting is to give people a lot of money, shame people for the slightest offenses, and try to limit some of the very rights for which our ancestors fought a war to gain. 

We need to get people to actually care for each other, and frankly you’re not going to get that without the help of religion.  And not just any one, like I said.

We keep focusing on our differences but not on the things that can unite us.  We are no longer simply Americans, but we are all parts of different groups competing for a piece in a shrinking pie and fighting for the respect of the other groups.

As a nation, we are not on stable ground, and we are moving in the wrong direction.

It seems everybody thinks the country, the government, owes them something, and the truth is there isn’t enough money in the world to give everybody everything they want, and it will only bring us down as a nation when we keep trying to do that.  It will eventually impoverish all of us. 

At the core of all this is that our country is separated by the beliefs in what our country is all about.  Some say our country is the greatest nation in the history of the world because of what we believe about freedom.  Others are saying that we are an inherently corrupt and evil nation that must be thoroughly overhauled, but then we are not told just exactly where they want to take us, what this will all look like in the end. 

We need to start talking to each other.  Real serious discussion.  About where we are going as a country and whether we are on the right path.  I have found that in having these kinds of discussions that you need to limit the conversation to one thing at a time and sticking with that one thing.   You may find that that initial topic is too broad.  Then you need to narrow it down.  You may find that there is far more to agree on than not.

But we need to get started on this now.