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.