A letter to Ben Carson

Dr. Carson

I wish you well.

I received a letter from your campaign that included a space that asked if I had any “thoughts, ideas, concerns” I wanted to share with you.  I do.   There are two matters that are on my mind a lot. 

1)         Issues

There are many issues that are very important right now in our country yet two keep jumping to the top of any lists of priorities that I make.  This by no means diminishes the importance of the others, but these are the icebergs that are sinking the ship.  The rest won’t matter if the ship sinks.

These two issues are also the ones that Donald Trump talks the most about and are probably why he is doing so well in the polls.  On the first issue, immigration, Marco Rubio is also saying a lot of the right things, but there is more.

Our government is intent on bringing into our country as many people as possible.  In most cases, it seems these people will require government assistance for a very long time.  There is no regard for job skills, English skills, or how they can either contribute to or fit into our country.  It is thought by many that the reasoning for this policy is to increase the number of government dependents to increase the voting base for Democrats.

I see part of it also as an intentional diluting of the religious character of our country.  They tout freedom of religion when it is a religion new to our country and unlike our nation’s heritage.  This is a part of the globalist, politically correct, relativistic philosophy that says all religions are equal, all cultures are equal, all nations are equal.  So any thought of the United States being exceptional, great, Christian, a world leader is based on a false, out-moded, obsolete values system and worldview.

We no longer know what made America what it is.  We are teaching our kids in our public schools that America is a deeply flawed nation, and the government wants to correct this by flooding it with third world peoples so that eventually all the nations will be equal.  Equally poor and oppressed, but at least equal. 

When all these new children attend our schools, they aren’t taught anymore those things that are uniquely American.  They are not becoming American, but we are slowly changing into a different nation from the one we grew up in.  Lower expectations; lower achievements; lower standard of living; lower level of community, trust, and cohesion.  Those of us who believe that the United States was and can still be a great nation feel powerless to stop this onslaught on our country.

We are a nation of immigrants, but we are being asked to accept millions of people without even knowing who they are.  In the past, we had a right of refusal.  I have a government textbook from 1949 that says that immigrants were refused admittance for a number of reasons, including illiteracy, certain illnesses, mental capacity, likelihood of becoming publicly dependent, physical defects affecting their ability to work, and many other.

We don’t even have enough jobs for our own people, and all these new people will only add to those dependent on the government, meaning, everybody else; and these will all vote for those who promise to keep the money coming.

Donald Trump is the only candidate who is showing the passion and urgency to fix this.  Rubio is also very strong on this, but Trump conveys better the disgust that many of us feel in the face of this abuse of power.

The second issue is jobs.  Jobs are the number one way to deal with the debt, the deficit, the standard of living, the number of people on government assistance, lowering taxes, saving Social Security and Medicare, and probably a lot of other things.  Trump is the only one talking about bringing the jobs back.

One of my biggest disappointments with the Republican Party is their almost universal support for free trade.  Taxes on imports almost paid for our entire federal budget for more than the first half of our nation’s history.  We didn’t even have an income tax until 1916. 

When we made all of our own stuff, our nation prospered.  As the population increased, so did the jobs, because the demand increased as well.

When the jobs left, so did our prosperity.  I wrote several articles on free trade on my blog: poligion1.blogspot.com.  I am trying to be brief here.  But to try to build a nation’s prosperity on exports is tying our prosperity to the prosperity of the other nations.  They have to prosper first before we will, and when they falter, we falter with them.  The globalist’s dream.

Everybody knows that Trump will deal with immigration and jobs.  We are not so sure about the others.  Rubio will do something about immigration.  But only those two show the urgency and pluck to actually do something about it and do enough.

2)         A Presidential team

The Republican field of candidates, including those who already dropped out, include some the best and most motivated people we have to fight for our nation’s survival and prosperity.  If I became President, I would hire Trump to build my wall, and I would try to find a major role for as many of these candidates as I could in my administration. 

If you look at them, each of them probably has a passion or an area of expertise that sets them apart from the others.  I would identify them and as early as possible let it be known how I would use these other people in my administration. 

I could support a lot of these candidates, and choosing between them is difficult.  I think I give Trump a slight edge, in spite of some shortcomings, because of his passion and plans for immigration and jobs.  I think a candidate who early on expresses his desire to incorporate as many of these candidates as possible in his administration will gain a lot of support from the public as well as from the other candidates.

Thank you.

Larry Craig

Ben Carson on abortion

USA Today (Oct. 26) shared some of Ben Carson’s remarks about abortion but left out the most important ones.

A number of people are telling their stories today that Carson thinks everyone needs to hear: mothers who kept the child conceived in rape, children conceived in rape, and those born through botched abortions.  Uniformly they attest to the value of that life, their lives.  Abortion is too quickly thought to be the best course of action in a difficult situation. 

Trying to Understand Why Things Don’t Get Done in Washington

A reader of the Herald (Oct. 15) wants to show us how Washington is broken, but he missed the point entirely of the article he used to illustrate and prove his case, and he misunderstands the nature of the divide in Washington.

Suppose your spouse had maxed out all your credit cards and was borrowing money to pay the minimum balances of them every month.  Your spouse won’t stop, so you go to marriage counseling, and the counselor advises you to compromise.  But what would a compromise look like?  A new credit card with a lower spending limit?

A compromise in Washington in such a situation is to lower the rate of spending increases.  If interest rates were to go back to normal, we will be paying almost a trillion dollars a year in interest alone.  Some people in Congress believe that this has to stop.  A compromise will only mean that spending increases and borrowing won’t end; they will just increase more slowly.

The writer also apparently missed the point of the reference in the article to Article 1.  That’s the part in the Constitution that spells out the role of Congress.  The Federalist Papers, that were written to explain the Constitution in order to help get it ratified, states that the powers of the Federal government are few and defined.  A lot of Congressmen believe that the federal government is doing a lot of things that it is not authorized to do, which is one of the reasons for its massive spending.  

They believe we need to follow the Constitution better, otherwise our country won’t be the country we started out with.  When we followed the Constitution more closely, things have worked out quite well.  If we start a new course, it’s not likely to be an improvement, seeing already this massive debt we have incurred so quickly.

There is strong opposition to our President and his administration, because many in Congress see an eager willingness on their part to bypass the Constitution and a continual failure on the President’s part to execute the laws of the land.  He chooses which laws to obey, and he has often just changed laws as he sees fit.  So, while there may be some Republicans who oppose Obama for political or other less noble reasons, there have been too many instance of this lack of regard for the Constitution to make general opposition to the administration justifiable.

And, finally, Republicans want to be more aggressive with the media, because the media are painting a picture of Washington that the Republicans assert is false.

For example, the House is supposed to control the spending, but if they don’t fund everything the President wants, he threatens a veto.  The government could then shut down for a lack of a budget, or authorized spending, and the media and the Democrats blame the Republicans.

The House could fund everything but one thing, like, say, Planned Parenthood, and the President threatens a veto, and the Republicans are accused of wanting to shut the government down over something as silly as this.  Everything else is fully funded, but the President won’t accept it, and the whole government shuts down?

Years ago, the House used to fund the government piecemeal, approving appropriations for different parts of the government at different times.  If the funds are approved, there is no reason to shut anything down.  The choice to shut the government down is the President’s, not Congress’.  But the media and the Democrats will blame the Republicans.  And the public seems to buy it. 

So the Republicans see that they need to be far aggressive in telling the public how things are supposed to work, because they are not hearing it from the media or the administration. 

As I see it, our country is going through an identity crisis.  We used to have a consensus on what America is all about.  Now we have differences of opinion, so we need to be patient while we all work this out.

What's missing in these gun control debates

We are missing something in these gun control debates.  Having a lot of guns is not a new phenomenon in our country.  Before our Constitution was even ratified (1789), James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers to explain and defend the proposed Constitution in order to gain the necessary votes to ratify it. 

In one of the papers it was noted that we are an “armed” people.  And this was touted as a good thing because it preserved our freedom and protected us from dictatorships.

If guns are now a problem in our society, after almost 225 years, then society has a bigger problem.  Our people have changed.  They have changed from being responsible people who cared for each other to angry people filled with hatred.

How did this happen?  It happened because we have removed God from our schools and our public life, and there just isn’t anything to replace it that encourages personal responsibility and positive regard for other people.  We keep invoking tolerance, but we fail to provide a reason why we should tolerate anybody or anything.  Tolerance itself only encourages people to put up with or simply to ignore people we don’t like. It doesn't deal with anger and hatred. The Bible taught us to love our neighbors.

The court called supreme got it wrong when they said that government cannot aid religion.  Our founders including George Washington often spoke of religion and morality as being essential to a happy and prosperous people.  (Read his farewell speech and the Northwest Ordinance as examples.)

Our schools used to have rifle clubs.  Now they have metal detectors.  

How ‘the Separation of Church and State’ will destroy the United States and Western Civilization

We are constantly being told that the United States was built on the idea of secularism, that is, that religion is something that can and should exist entirely separate from government and public life, that religion is something private and personal, like your taste in music and your taste in clothes.

The obvious problem with this thinking is that it has only been the last generation or so that this principle has been identified and applied to our public life.  It was only in 1947, 170 years after our nation’s founding, that we were told by the court called supreme that government cannot aid religion or have anything to do with religion.  Since that time that court has expanded on that ruling to apply it to such things as the use of the Bible in public schools, public prayer, Ten Commandment displays, and any other mention of God in public and by government and its representatives, like public schools.

Some public mentions of God have remained, for now, like having ‘In God We Trust’ on our money, ‘under God’ in our Pledge of Allegiance, and retaining Christmas as a national holiday.  That only remains for later versions of that court and further challenges before those disappear as well.

So exactly how will this secularism destroy our country and Western Civilization?

We first need to ask what a religion really is.  We are told that it is our beliefs about God and our duties to Him.  True, but that is only part of it.  A religion is a worldview.  It encompasses all of life and answers life’s biggest questions, like what is the meaning of life, what are the rules, are there any rules, what is right and what is wrong.

Secularism is also a worldview, and it also has answers for life’s biggest questions.  Where Christianity teaches that we are accountable to God, secularism teaches that man is the highest being.  There are no rules but what we decide for ourselves or as a society.  Some recent examples of how this can go are Germany, Russia, and China, where millions of people were killed in the attempt to create a perfect society.

Christianity taught us to love our neighbors.  Now we are taught to tolerate them.  The first requires an active caring for them, helping them in need.  The second simply means to ignore them. 

Christianity taught us to set aside a day of rest to honor God and to, well, rest.  Now society is all 24/7, and people don’t have time or opportunity to think and reflect to maintain balance and perspective.  This makes a people less aware of the bigger picture and more easily swayed and manipulated by media and government. 

Christianity taught us not to steal or to covet.  This was the basis for the idea of property rights.  Now we feel that the government has the right to appropriate as much of that as it wants and give it to whoever it deems worthy.  Nobody has the right to own any more than anyone else.

Speaking of the poor, Christianity taught us to care for the poor.  And in the past, millions of Christians volunteered and generously gave their time and money to help people in need.  Now the government has assumed most of the responsibility for this, but at a much higher cost.  And instead of voluntary contributions, they take and borrow whatever they want to give to those most likely to vote for them to keep the benefits coming.

Christianity taught us that God is our security.  Absent God in public life and government, government now feels responsible to be our benefactor and security.  We have traded our prosperity for our security.  Where the American Dream was that our children would have better lives than we and that there is no limit to one’s success, now government takes whatever money it can from those who have it to give it to those who have less.  Better that nobody be rich than anybody be poor. 

 Christianity taught us not to go into debt.  Now everything is run with borrowed money, including our government.  Borrowed money always costs more than it would have otherwise, and we keep devaluing our money to hide the true cost of this debt.  Except that only increases borrowing.  And the whole thing is due to collapse.

Our entire value system can now be described in four words: tolerance, equality, fairness, and diversity.  Our only responsibility as a people is tolerance.  The rest is the responsibility of the government. 

We already mentioned tolerance, which breaks down or eliminates the bonds that hold us together as a society.  We no longer have any responsibility to our neighbors.

Equality means that we discourage high achievers.  It is just as important to deter those with the most potential as it is to help those with the least.  Better to have everybody at the same level of achievement than to have some more successful than others.  We also need to lower our standards to ensure that more people meet them.

Fairness applies equality to society, working to eliminate anything in society that might seem to favor one group or individual over another.  If, for example, an industry, field, town, occupation, school is perceived as having too many white males, too many whites, or too many males, it is concluded that discrimination has to be in play, so the government has to work to remedy this.  If the remedy requires lowering standards, reverse discrimination, or government subsidies to make it happen, the government does what it has to do.

Diversity means that we encourage differences between people so that there remains very little to unite us.  People generally make friends with people with whom they share common interests.  Now we want to have the widest range of differences everywhere we can so that we no longer have a united society, but only small clusters of different groups with nothing in common with the others but their dependency on government   It is a plus if all of your neighbors don’t speak your language.  You might actually talk to them and develop attachments.

If our new enlightened society does not first collapse from spending itself broke, it will collapse as people who do not share our values, old or new, migrate here and try to create here the society they left, and we feel powerless to stop them, because we feel we don’t have the right to or a better alternative.  We then become a different nation very unlike the one we grew up in and the kind of nation our founders fled from to start this one.

Many people are promoting the idea of a secular nation mainly because of their dislike of the religion that was prominent in our country for so long, Christianity.  Often these same people have a disregard for all religions, mainly because they reject the concept of a Higher Power to which they are subject. 

The irony here is that they have merely substituted one religion for another, one that at least purports to have revelation from God as to how life is supposed to work for another religion run entirely by human beings who are still figuring out all the new rules that apply in a secular state. 

Nations have always had their gods.  People in secular nations have the same need for a higher power to protect, guide, and care for them.  Government now assumes these roles.  Those who seek to remove religion from society have only changed religions but now with human beings like themselves playing the role of the all-wise, all-knowing lawgiver and judge.

You would think that a religion in existence for thousands of years would have all the kinks worked out by now, but now we have ventured on a new path, making new rules with no hindsight to give us a clue if we are on the right or even a viable path. 

As a society, we no longer know what made Western Civilization and the United States what they are.  So when changes occur, we have no way to judge whether they are improvements or not.   So we are in a mad rush to change our country according to the latest cultural trends, like walking in the woods without a compass.  We are lost, but we are enjoying the scenery.

If our economy doesn’t collapse first from the unsustainable debt we have incurred trying to meet every need and protect against every misfortune, we will find ourselves living in a country very unlike what it was like or what it was intended to be like.  The tragedy is that most of us won’t even know that, because we have accepted a much lower and different vision of how things should be. 

We won’t hear on the evening news: “In national and international news, Western Civilization collapsed today.  Tomorrow officially the entire world will be third world countries.”

The United States will still exist in name, but it will be one where if our Founders were alive today, they would either look for another country to flee to or there would be another revolution.

Ending the gun violence in Chicago - a response to an editorial

I agree with the Sun-Times and the people of Chicago that this senseless gun violence must stop.  But I think we are missing something so obvious that it borders on the comical that we aren’t talking about it.  But we need to talk about it before we will ever achieve a lasting solution.

We are blaming illegal guns and the lack of background checks for all these shootings, but we are not saying anything about why this is basically a problem only in the black community.  The only time we talk about or are allowed to talk about blacks as a group is when we deplore how badly they are treated by white people or by the police. 

But the violence we are so concerned about here is not white on black shootings or even black on white shootings.  It’s not even police on black or black on police shootings.  It’s black on black shootings. 

And again, something so obvious here, we are careful not to blame them for this.  It’s the fault of those evil people who sell them illegal guns or the fault of the system for not doing thorough background checks or for allowing people with mental problems to legally own guns.

You want an answer.  I will give it to you, but you won’t like it.  The problem is the lack of families where the father and the mother live together and raise their children together in a loving environment.  Children need role models.  We all recognize this when we talk about mentoring programs for disadvantaged youth, but we don’t talk about why they are disadvantaged in the first place.  Their mentors should be their parents, their fathers and their mothers. 

We don’t want to use the word ‘should’ anymore, because we are afraid of hurting people’s feelings. But fathers and mothers should be married to each other and raise their children together, and the violence will cease.

If you want the government to do something for blacks, get them to bring the jobs back to our country.