Words, words, words

There are many things which no one seems to oppose. We're all for peace, correct? Education? The environment? Observing the Golden Rule, perhaps, if such references are not too religious? Yet so often these claims ring hollow. They must, you see: for peace and education are just words. By themselves, they really mean nothing.

It is critically important that we bring up and discuss the questions which must follow these words if our actions are to mean anything; indeed, if the words themselves are at some point to be of value, of good use. WE must ask: peace under what circumstances? Peace for whom? Because of course peace in the sense of a lack of war was very useful for Hitler yet was a rather poor mantra for Austria.

Simply put, the next time someone asks you if you are for peace, or education, or the environment, ask them relevant questions before you answer. Ask them, peace under what conditions? Education to what purpose and in what manner? The environment for whom and how? Before these issues are addressed we have nothing but a shallow and insipid pool of vacuous semi-thought. Yet afterwards, we may actually accomplish things.

Paved With Good Intentions

"Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?" -C. S. Lewis

This isn't the quote we were seeking. Yet it will have to do, and is a decent enough lead in to the subject we wish to address today. The quote we wanted, and we confess right off that this will be a horrible paraphrase of it, dealt with Lewis, speaking through his famous character Screwtape, on the power of bureaucracy. Lewis seems to fear not the Hitlers of the world, but the mousey little bureaucrats who actually run so much of it. He despises the small, well manicured, spectacled man in an office who will not allow another man, a fellow citizen, the right to chop down a tree on his own land to make boards to fix his own steps (or outbuilding or some such) without the proper permits and permissions.

Such folk can so easily be made to appear comic; indeed, Douglas Adams (if we may cross reference the views of a devout Christian with those of a rabid atheist) makes light of them rather well in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Unfortunately, such an interpretation isn't so useful as that of Mr. Lewis. The bureaucrat is far more dangerous than funny. And the government is brimming with them.

We have witnessed both attempts and triumphs by similar elected politicians (and all too often merely appointed civil servants) to force people to drink no more than 16 ounces of a soft drink at a time. We see leaders who don't want to find any trans fats in our food. We find officials who don't want us mowing our lawns or filling our cars with gas on ozone action days. And you don't even have to go to the newest suburbs to hear wails against urban sprawl. Yet what might these all have in common with Hitler?

Only the simple fact that they're all arguably tyrannical people committing arguably tyrannical actions.

Liberals cannot, or choose not, to see this. Overt and powerful evil, yes, they recognize quite readily. But who wouldn't? Hitler, Mao, Stalin; only a true fool could not the threats they were. Yet our leftist friends do not see the petty tyrant. The truth is, they encourage him. Or her, lest the speakers of the v-word be insulted by a mere masculine reference made with no intention to offend.

To be sure, any one of these actions seen by itself doesn't seem so bad. Some of them indeed may not be bad. Any one by itself might even simply be a misplaced emphasis, may only be mere stupidity, or may even be honest good intention. It is all too easy to say of any individual person or instance, they mean well. Still, the question rarely asked is whether any of them ought to be the province of government and the bureaucracy at all, and if so, which ones really.

What is also overlooked is that no matter what they mean, they may be a symptom of a greater disease. Every petty action by every petty official seen against the big picture demonstrates that small evils may lead to larger ones. Little Hitlers may one day become big Hitlers. It may well be, in fact, it likely as not is, that not a one of these people understand that their little sin against their fellow man can lead to far worse sins against him.

Skin cancers by and large are the most curable of cancers. Yet if one ignores the blemish on their arm, thinking that it's nothing and could not possibly come to harm and thus pays it no mind, what will happen? Several years later doctors will telling him that they can do nothing for him. But if he had done something about it when he first noticed it...

This is not to say that every bureaucrat or indeed every liberal thinker (in the modern American sense of the word anyway) is an evil person, or that every act of theirs must lead to tyranny. But it is meant to caution us that sometimes things do go in directions which we cannot immediately envision, that we are responsible not only for the direct effects of our actions but also for the sometimes unpredictable consequences of them, and that the road to Hell is indeed paved with the best of intentions.

None of that will matter when and if an American or Canadian or British Hitler rises to power. Yet the truly sad thing is, should that actually happen, no one will claim to have seen it coming. They will be all too correct.

Legal Doesn't Always mean Moral

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. Never forget that everything the Founding Fathers did was not.

-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Much hay is made over the idea that legality equals morality. Yet one moment's reflection by any person of serious thought can demonstrate that such is not necessarily the case.

We must be very careful with any premise which asserts that simply because the leaders of any given nation at any given time or in any given place say something is okay that it is in fact okay. The supporters of atrocities such as abortion regularly and flippantly assert that as it is legal it is moral. Well, as the old saw goes, slavery was once legal. Does that mean slavery, when legal, is moral?

Of course not. Only a fool would build a system of right and wrong on such an axiom. It would result in nothing short of an ethical house of cards, subject to the violence of the summer breeze and the whims of the short sighted and thoughtless soul.

Still, we have essentially done just that in the United States today. The issues involved are not even so heinous as abortion or national health care, either: it is patently immoral to take one man's money to give to another man so that that man can buy a car. Period.

The problem is that when we stray in one area it is too easy to stray in another. To avoid this, we must begin doing what is right because it is right and avoiding wrong because it is wrong. Until we can make that distinction and act properly, we are on the high road to political and social extinction.

The first step in recognizing that is accepting that the best laws are in fact also moral. The first step away is thinking that the legal changes the moral. That is nothing less than Orwellian, and marks nothing less than our doom.

Embryonic Stem Cell Research

Note: The other day we wrote about selective sex abortions. We received a criticism that, while abortion is abhorrent, why not use the stem cells of the aborted for research anyway, and they are already aborted? This is our response. -Charles Martin Cosgriff

The trouble with allowing research with the stem cells of aborted babies when and where abortion is legal is that it allows us to profit from the abortion industry. Any profit from any immorality must itself be seen as immoral, as the 'good' (so to speak) is coming from a bad (abortion).

Good coming from bad: well, first, true good cannot come from bad. It must be tainted if it came from an evil, and as such must be itself bad. But more, a presumed good created in a bad manner must in fact alter the intended good. It must affect that good somehow and, quite frankly, make it bad.

If for example we allow such stem cell research and it saves lives or allows for physical gain (being able to walk for a paraplegic, for instance), what might those saved lives and repaired bodies think? That they were saved by a miracle? Or will they consider, even for a moment, that they were saved through the death of others? Will they in fact have greater respect for human life, or less? Will they think for a moment that they live or walk by Divine inspiration, or by mere human will?

My guess is by human will. They will forget that human will in such areas has led to the attitudes of Adolf Hitler more quickly and readily than the actions of Mother Teresa have led to positive action for the true good of humanity. They will forget that selfishness and indulgence tend to mean more to the individual than to the greater humanity. And they won't consider for a moment that perhaps they might be the selfish ones.

Somehow that doesn't sound like a recipe for a better world. Yet every brick on the road to Hell bears that selfish imprimatur.

The President and Adolf Hitler

A group of South Dakota legislators have proposed that every one in that fair state over the age of 21 own a gun. The most immediate response is to jeer, and dismiss the move as a typically conservative reaction in protection of the Second Amendment.

But that would be wrong. What they are doing is showing the downright stupidity of certain government mandates on a level which even the most stouthearted liberal could understand. South Dakota State Representative Hal Wicks explains it best: "Do I or the other co-sponsors believe that the state of South Dakota can require citizens to buy firearms? Of course not. But at the same time, we do not believe the federal government can order every citizen to buy health insurance."

The action illustrates the inanity, indeed the total threat to personal freedom, which is essentially behind the Affordable Care Act. If the government can order the individual to get health insurance, what else might the government order them to do? Eat right? Exercise? Because, of course, eating right and exercise would help curtail health care costs and would be good for you. And isn't it about what's good for you?

But therein lies the trouble: it quickly becomes not about what's right for you but what's right for the general society. Not that the individual should not have a proper general concern for society (for a stable society best makes it possible for him to enjoy proper freedoms) but that, ultimately, the person must, under reasonable circumstances, have the final say on his or her daily choices. Otherwise, we may as well become the Borg, and allow ourselves to simply be plugged in where everyone else thinks best. We may as well become the robots of the state.

That is what liberals, in the end, want. They want to tell us where to live and what type of transportation to use and what to eat and what to do with our lives. For to the left, it's all about the state. Your freedom ends where their desires begin. And they want it all.

That's why the Affordable Care Act is totalitarian, plain and simple. If the government can tell us to buy a certain something, a certain anything, it lays the groundwork for the government to control us all the way down. At the risk of feeding the vitriol which has so many folks distraught these days, that's why it's okay to portray President Obama as Hitler. The jewel of his Presidency is simply dictatorial.