Hey, let’s just get it over with
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
TOMMY MOORE was right to refuse to go to Georgia for the annual meeting of the South Carolina chapter of the NAACP. By refusing to go, he sent the message that no one who wants to lead a state should participate in a boycott intended to hurt that state.
Mark Sanford was right to go to Georgia to deliver the message he did — that if you think your boycott is going to get us any closer to moving the Confederate flag off the State House grounds, you’re deluding yourselves.
What neither man said, but what anyone who would lead South Carolina should say — and to all South Carolinians, not just the NAACP — is this:
“Yep, the NAACP should see that they’re going nowhere with this and drop it. But they probably won’t. So what you should do is ignore the boycott, and do what you would do if it didn’t exist, if it had never existed. That shouldn’t be hard; you’re ignoring it now.
“That is, you ignore it until someone says, ‘Hey, why don’t we go ahead and move this flag; it’s got no business here.’ Then a loud bunch of you start howling, ‘No, we’ll never give in to the NAACP!’ As if the NAACP were the reason to remove it. That’s what the NAACP wants everybody to think — that it’s up to them. Well, it isn’t. Never was, never will be. It’s not up to any national organization. It’s up to us, the people of South Carolina — black and white, young and old. Or at least, the sensible ones.
“We came together off and on for six years back in the ’90s to talk about getting the flag off the dome. It was a truly wonderful thing to see, as church after business group after civic organization, black and white, joined the effort. That process culminated in 2000, with a compromise that got the flag off the dome, but that created a new problem. Some think the flag came down because of this boycott, which was started right at the end of the process. But you know what I think? I think we would have come up with a better solution — a permanent solution — if the boycott hadn’t happened.
“Sure, it created an additional urgency. People who already wanted the flag down thought, ‘this is getting crazy; let’s get something done now.’ But in that atmosphere, the only kind of plan that had any chance of passing was one that did not please the NAACP. So better ideas — such as replacing the actual flag with a bronze historical plaque or such — were shoved aside, and we got a nonsolution-solution. This had the desired effect — the NAACP was mad, and stayed mad. And all of the reasonable people walked away, leaving the NAACP and the Sons of Confederate Veterans in possession of the issue.
“Well, we’ve let them have it long enough. Those State House grounds are ours, not theirs, and we have a lot of important issues that we need to come together there to solve. Hear that? Come together. We must do that, or we’ll always be last where we want to be first. A symbol such as this doesn’t bring us together; it achieves the precise opposite.
“You tell me I should be talking about more important things — education, jobs, taxes and spending, reshaping our government, the Two South Carolinas? I agree, which is why those are the things I talk about most of the time. You say the flag is a distraction? You’re right. So let’s get it out of the way. Why not just ignore it? Because if we can’t get together to agree to move past something this pointless, we’ll never solve any of the hard stuff.
“So let’s put this behind us, roll up our sleeves, and get to work.”
Neither of them said that. But someone should have. So I did.
Related Posts
This guy has got it right. I’m surprised that the Chamber of Commerce hasn’t got rid of him yet.
Here is what corporatism does for poor states:
Debt woes in S.C. worst in nation
Late loan payments, home foreclosures increase at rapid rate as economy staggers
By JIM DuPLESSIS
jduplessis@thestate.com
To understand why such egregious levels of wealth inequality are statistically built into capitalism, and to learn what to do about it-click HERE
I’ve been here my entire adult life and love South Carolina and the people here. Flying the flag on the capital grounds is not something I support.
While I am proud to be from the South, I don’t understand why this must be part of our official identification. This flag was created as a symbol of a rebellion against the US with the purpose of breaking up the country. Why should we revel in this?
I find it hypocritical that many of the same people who support and even fly this flag are the same ones who bash immigrants and “America haters” in the name of patriotism.
It was originally flown in the early 60s for reasons other than heritage so why is this the argument for it now?
Randy,
You’re probably a nice, well-meaning person. Let a native South Carolinian briefly explain this situation to you. Brad is bringing this up right before the election because Brad in effect works for the Chamber of Commerce, and the Chamber of Commerce is controlled by big money in both parties (i.e., today, mostly by the Republican Party). This topic is meant to divide working class voters (black and white) into separate camps. Otherwise, ordinary people might vote for their economic interests. Brad has cleverly written the escape clause into his piece. Don’t be fooled by it.
Pardon me for saying this…but I would rather take a bullet to the head than hear about this flag. Up, down, burn it or enshrine it…I don’t care, and I am convinced most other people don’t care either.
For goodness sake…can’t we just leave it be…can’t we just pretend we don’t see it.Exactly who long do u guys intend to pick at this scab?
There is nothing new or clever to be learned from this. Only pain and argument. There is nothing uplifting or life enhancing…only strife. So why persist?
Chris, “pretending we don’t see it” is something Americans are generally pretty good at when it comes to a whole host of problems in this country. Truth is, you and I can probably both pretty easily pretend we don’t see the flag, but I can certainly understand how a great many African-Americans cannot so easily do so, especially when the flag is so prominently placed at the governmental heart of our state.
The Third Reich was a part of German history, too, and many regular German citizen-soldiers gave their lives on behalf of it in the Second World War. But could you imagine how Jewish citizens of Germany would feel if, on pretense of honoring part of its history and culture, Germany still flew the swastika on government grounds? Hard to pretend not to see.
I thought this issue was resolved when the flag was taken off the top of the capitol dome. Some will never be satisfied. Let’s NOT purge our history so that we all can learn from it. What next, removal of the Confederate soldiers memorial in Abbeville, where the first secession planning meeting was held? Then maybe we can move on to outlawing the name Robert E. Lee in any public place. When does this purging of history stop?
Philip,
Firstly, I have NEVER met one ordinary black person that cared one wit about the flag. In my occupation I work with many blacks and they just giggle at the nonsense bandied about by the “leaders” of SC, for the “benefit” of blacks.
Secondly, “pretending we don’t see” is not an American condition…it is a human conditions. As we speak, the Europeans don’t see problems in N. Korea, or Iran and the Russians don’t see a problem with genocide in Darfur, etc. etc. Why liberals insist that all bad portions of the human condition are particularly American traits is beyond me. (assuming you are a lib, my apologizes if not…but my comment stands on it own).
Thirdly, when u see a resolution that is agreeable to those involved, and enhancing to the general public, send up a flare and I will come running. Till then it is the same ole bla bla bla that serves to divide us, not bring us together. Money is made off of this issue. Political careers are launched…the only thing that does not happen is that rank and file blacks are not benefiting from the controversy.
This is a freaking post about the FLAG. People will blog about the FLAG.
I give Brad more credit than being a stooge for the Chamber. He seems to evaluate critically. Of course he will try to stir up the hornets nest, he is the Editorial page editor after all!
Dave, it’s a tired reply to extrapolate an issue to involve other possibilities. While some extremists may want to get outlaw the flag and rid us of confederate day, many in the general public takes issue with the flag issue in of itself.
I don’t particularly enjoy having to explain to my wife’s best friend who visited from Connecticut last weekend why we have this flag flying. It reflects on us as a people.
“Purge our history?” Jim Crow and bathrooms for white’s only are part of our history. So was slaughtering indians. Should we honor that history as well?
Why was the Confederate flag raised over the capital to begin with?
The Confederate flag represents Limited Constitutional Federal Government, States Rights, Resistance to Tyranny, and Christian Values and principles. Thus it represents the same principles as the Betsy Ross U.S.flag–the principles America was founded upon. As America experiments with Globalism, Socialism, and Secular Humanism it is important for every patriotic American to fly the Confederate flag as a reminder of these basic principles. America has 2 choices–1.Reclaim our heritage or 2.we will eventually surrender our Constitution and Sovereignty to the one world government–a Godless Socialist Unired Nations.
“Why was the Confederate flag raised over the capital to begin with?”
Because racist Democrats saw it as a way to resist desegregation.
Why doesn’t Brad stir up the hornets nest about the right to unionize? That would help most workers here, black and white? Why don’t I have the right to form a union with my coworkers without being fired from my job? Why is SC a right to work state? Why hasn’t The State ever addressed the issue? Why are the other editors hand picked by Brad? Why does Brad use virtual talking points from Chamber of Commerce literature in his writings? Who pays Brad’s salary? Why was Brad’s former boss on the board of the Chamber of Commerce?
I’m sorry about the poorly written previous sentence. It should be written as follows:
Why doesn’t Brad stir up the hornets nest about the right to unionize-that would help most workers here, black and white.
The South is the most Christian Conservative part of the nation. Liberal socialists have two goals for America 1.Destroy Christianity and replace it with Secular Humanism and 2. replace what is left of Democracy with total Socialism. Once they destroy the Christian conservative South the rest of America will fall in line like sheep behind Secular humanism and Socialism. That is the real reason they want to destroy Confederate principles and values. The infamous Communist Karl Marx said “a people separated from their heritage are easily persuaded”. So under the “Moral High Ground” guise of black civil rights they have carried forth their propaganda campaign. They are using black activists to unknowingly do their “dirty work” for them. They also use what the infamous Communist Lenin called “useful idiots” to help accomplish their agenda. Those who are helping destroy Confederate heritage fit in this group– “white liberals with a guilt complex”. Liberalism is all about “feelings” as opposed to “fact”. These “useful idiots” also include Southern politicians who help remove Confederate flags which are a symbol of the principles and values America was founded upon.
The politically incorrect 752 page book “The South Under Siege 1830-2000” explains in detail what has happened and is currently happening in America. It is available from Amazon.com or from myself jkingantiquearms@bellsouth.net
The Confederate Flag and the United States Flag are judged by different standards and criteria, and are not held to the same levels of accountability. In analytical science and weights and measures, comparisons are made against known standards. However, in politics comparisons are never made in a fair and impartial manner.
In order to understand the hypocrisy, ignorance, and bias that have been directed against the Confederate Flag, it is necessary to use the U.S. Flag (Stars and Stripes) as a standard of comparison. The purpose of this comparison is not to berate or disparage the U.S. Flag, but rather to prove that the Confederate Flag has received unfair and unequal treatment.
The genocide and racial cleansing of the American Indians took place under the U.S. Flag. The U.S. Flag flew over an unconstitutional and criminal war conducted against The Confederate States of America. Abraham Lincoln conducted this war for the benefit of wealthy Northern industrialists. Slaves were imported from Africa to America primarily by five Northern States: NY.,MA.,CT.,NH.,and RI. The Confederate Flag was not involved. The U.S. flag flew over the concentration camp incarceration of loyal Japanese citizens during WWII while some of their sons, husbands, and brothers fought and died for America as American soldiers. The U.S. flag flew as part of Allied WWII raids that firebombed Dresden Germany which was a cultural and population center and not involved in the war effort. Thousands of innocent children were burned alive. The official flag of the KKK is the U.S. flag. Finally, the U.S. Flag flies over a nation that has murdered an estimated 50 million babies by abortion.
Political Correctness has been used to attempt bans of The Confederate Flag from schools, parades, public and private property, and even historical monuments and sites.
The Confederate flag represents Constitutional Limited Federal Government, States Rights, Resistance to Government Tyranny, and Christian Values and Principles. These are the principles America was founded upon. To say that it represents racism and bigotry is a negative and shallow interpretation comparable to saying the U.S. flag represents the genocide of the American Indians and abortion. Both flags should be respected for positive reasons.
Contact me at jkingantiquearms@bellsouth.net to request my article “The 10 Causes Of The Civil War”.
Mark, you are so 1950’s. Do you realize we are in a global economy now? Going on strike in SC to gain huge wage increases and benefits is a thing of the long gone past. Here you have Delta’s pilots accepting huge pay cuts to stay competitive and your theory is, let’s form a union and go on strike. How about starting up your own company? That would be interesting. If your workers wanted more money than you could afford to stay in business, what would you tell them as the owner? Would it be, yes, you can have all that money, and we will happily go out of business together?
The flag was a phony issue the first time around, cooked up by the NAACP as a distraction from their treasury being looted by the leaders. The second string Knight Riders at The State paper saw an ideal story line to show management how they could cook up big crusades like the Philadelphia Enquirer and the Charlotte Observer.
Tourism in South Carolina has INCREASED every year since the NAACP boycot. 2005 was up 12% and 2006 is looking at another record increase.
Governor Ernest Hollings,(1959 to 1963), signed the legislation,( a House of Representatives Resolution), ordering the Confederate Flag to be raised over the state capital to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the War Between the States.
When the South raised its sword against the Union’s flag it was in defense of the Union’s Constitution!
The flag was raised above the State House in the 1960’s as a celebration of the Civil War and those who fought it and those who suffered from it as well. (NOT those who profited from it, though, and most of these were non-southerners). This was a NATIONAL event, not a South Carolina event nor a southern event. The President who made this happen was _______ ?
Unfortunately, the South Carolina “PRCs” (pronounced pricks as in “don’t prick your finger with that pin!”) left it up and so we are embroiled in this needless controvery after forty years of squalling, whining and crying about it.
And no one will do anything about it (or anything else). Next month we’ll all head to the polls and vote for our favorite PRCs, or perhaps the ones who will screw us the least. Nothing will change because “the more things change, the more they remain the same”.
Oh, yeah. PRCs. Politicians, the Rich and Celebreties. “No matter who wins the elections, the government still gets elected” — to paraphrase one Mr. JG.
Dave,
My parents grew up during the Great Depression and they understood what free market capitalism had done to the US. After the war, my dad was one of the few people in the South that benefited from a good, blue-collar, union job. After the war, there wouldn’t have been another Honea Path because the vets wouldn’t have tolerated it-even the mill owners would not have dared to try it again. The Communications Workers of America negotiated decent pay and benefits for all its members at A&TT, and similar negotiated agreements by other unions across the US improved worker living standards and wages greatly. The big difference between now and then is that the tax burden has been shifted from the wealthy (from the end of WWII to the mid seventies the capital gain tax rate was in the 70%-80% range) to the middle class (through property taxes) and the working class (through sales taxes). Additionally, America now is a virtual plutocracy with bought and paid for elections and gerrymandered congressional districts. A country with a 97% congressional incumbent re-election rate isn’t democratic.
Unions have existed now for many centuries (as has capitalism) and they perform a vital function within capitalist society. It’s wrong to think that somehow the “Global Economy” has evolved beyond the union concept so as to make unions obsolete. Globalization is just the same ole capitalism in new clothes, with new buzzwords and new victims. In the future, we’ll need strong national unions to deal with global corporations. It’s going to happen.
Despite my 50s style respect for unions, perhaps you can appreciate a very 21st century idea born right here in SC: huge levels of wealth inequality are statistically built into capitalism and they can be verified using stochastic programming methods with large arrays of numbers in a model economy. Here are a few other observations that will one day be accepted:
* Wealth is a conserved quantity-currency fluctuates to conserve wealth.
* The wealth distribution is neither a Pareto distribution nor a Boltzmann-Gibbes distribution. However, certain portions of the curve can be approximated using these distributions. It’s not log-normal either (a log normal distribution is pretty close though). The wealth distribution follows the Woods-Saxon potential curve (i.e., the log of wealth vs. number of entities)
* The personal wealth distribution and the stock market capitalization distribution are the same distribution.
* Both personal wealth and market cap have a shell structure that follows a pattern similar to nucleon shell structure (of all things!) at any given instant of time.
* To generate correct wealth distributions, you have to put an investment hierarchy into place in conjunction with exchanges and wealth conserving currency fluctuations.
* Wealth inequality can never be totally eliminated-even without capital investment. Monetary exchange necessarily produces an exponential (Boltzmann-Gibbes)
distribution.
How do I know this is right? There is no way I could otherwise consistently generate correct distributions using totally random numbers with equal chance.
Simple solution. Let the people decide.
Put a question on the 2008 ballot that says “Should the Confederate flag be flown on the grounds of any state government property?”
Why is this so complex an issue that we can’t allow the residents of the state to decide?
At the very least, it would probably increase the percentage of registered voters who actually show up at the polls
by a fairly sizable percentage.
My guess? 60% of voters would choose to remove the flag. Maybe higher.
Any red-blooded/necked South Carolinian can fly the Confederate flag on their property whenever they’d like. Why isn’t that good enough?
Take it down.
Hell, Mark, I am rich, make half a million dollars a year, and all along I thought it was hard work, integrity, and long hours that let me achieve. If only I had known…just think how much easier it would have been…
In hindsight, cheating the poor and unwashed has been so easy.
Steve, in time this is exactly what will happen. With each passing year South Carolina will be increasingly made up of those who moved here from other parts of the country or indeed are foreign-born themselves. Even the SC-born citizens will be further removed generationally from some of the attitudes that a few (as we see above) still cling to. Brad and Woody both talk about the ineffectiveness of the NAACP boycott, which is really pointless if you’re talking about taking the moral high ground on this issue. The NAACP boycott will continue, the flag will fly for a few more years, 5 or 10, then it will be gone. The final impetus will come from the business/corporate community, which will realize that the transformation of South Carolina into a 21st-century place to do business cannot be complete with such a potent symbol of its lingering 19th-century-ness remaining.
Mark W,
you are right on one thing but dead wrong on everything else. The one you’re right on is this:
– a 97% congressional incumbent re-election rate is absolutely pathetic and we need to come up with a way to force our politicians to change this. Obviously they like it just the way it is so the only way to force this change may be through a referendum, term limits, constitutional amendment or other ways to bypass the usual “looking out for # 1” system.
The tax burden has NOT been shifted from the wealthy. On the contrary, they pay more than they’ve ever paid before, both absolutely and on a percentage basis. You need to learn the difference between tax rates and tax revenue. Don’t feel bad! Most lefties have that same problem. They think the higher the rate the better, never mind that the higher the rate the less actual revenue there is. Most of the wealthy didn’t become wealthy by being stupid and that’s something lefties don’t usually understand. If you take away 90% of their earnings most will simply stop making money and instead live a life of leisure. So would I, and I only make a tiny fraction of a percent of what Bill Gates makes. Even if you take it all away, you won’t win the class struggle. Sure, Bill Gates would be just another Bill but I have to confess that I’ve never seen a regular Bill employ anyone – only rich Bills do that. Then how would you unionize?
“Unions have existed now for many centuries (as has capitalism)”
My foot. Both have existed less than 2 centuries, far from “many”. Before that it was feudalism, mercantilism, serfdom, slavery and misery.
“[unions] perform a vital function within capitalist society.”
No, they don’t. They might have done that decades ago but not at all in today’s society. At this point the only function they perform is to make companies uncompetitive and to lose their members’ jobs. Not for nothing are only 7% of private companies unionized. Even workers realize that the quickest and surest way to lose their jobs in a global marketplace is to unionize. Almost without exception the unionized companies are also the worst economic basketcases in the country. Some might be that way even without unions but there can be no doubt that unions made things much worse.
“To generate correct wealth distributions”
What the **** is “correct” wealth distribution? Who decides what’s “correct”? We’ve already lost 100 million people to that preposterous conceit in the last century. Do we need to lose even more before we realize that capitalism, for all its faults, is vastly preferable for humanity (even income distribution) than any other currently existing system? Personally, I think if one guy works his butt off and makes $1 billion while another guy sits on his butt and makes $10K that’s perfect income distribution. You get what you work for.
“How do I know this is right? There is no way I could otherwise consistently generate correct distributions using totally random numbers with equal chance.”
So you say, but how do we know? Even if you are right in predicting these numbers, so what? The distribution probably still is correct, even if you don’t agree with it.
The only way to change that 97% rate (above: Mark W.) is to elect those who are NOT “Dumbs, Repugs or Incums”. Ain’t no referendums, amendments or term limits gonna happen. The only way is a groundswell of the people voting for non-politicians. It could happen, but ain’t likely.
What about the guy who DOES WORK HIS BUTT OFF, but STILL only makes 10K per year? Somehow, $500,000 per hour for a year’s “work” doesn’t seem right. And, no millionaire or billionaire ever makes that kind of money simply by the sweat of his own, personal brow.
Capitalism may be just dandy, but it’s not the answer. Neither are unions. Somewhere in between, I would think. But, CHANGING THIS ain’t gonna happen either.
The only correct wealth distributions are those produced by bargaining in a free market which has minimal fraud and coercion. Only in such a situation can both parties to a transaction achieve a bargain for themselves and maximize their satisfaction and financial benefit.
The relative wealth of someone else is not that important to the wealth of another person. It is not important that everyone have almost the same level of wealth. In fact, it is detrimental to all of their economic prosperity, because they will all be near a subsistance level, and unable to invest and create new wealth and employment for others.
The important thing is that the lowest level of of society are workers – that they have jobs, are literate, are skilled and are moral, so that they will show up and perform those jobs.
High wage jobs are overrated.
If the Confederate Flag is offends you, then why aren’t you grossly offended by the U.S. flag? After all, the Stars and Stripes flew over legal slavery for 89 years until Dec. 1865, 8 months AFTER the end of the War Between the States. It flew while the U.S. government waged a genocide campaign against American Indians. It flew over the wrongful internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. It’s the official flag of the KKK and must be present at all their meetings. It continues to fly over the slaughter of over one million unborn children every year. If you’re offended by the Confederate Flag, quit the double standard crap and demand removal of the U.S. flag wherever it flies!
Way to go, Mr. Russ.
Re: “cheating the poor and unwashed has been so easy”. Yes, it has. At least you’re “honest”.
By the way, how about a MAXIMUM WAGE??!!! Wouldn’t the rich love that!
Why was this article about the flag even published? What the hell brought this subject back to the surface?
Leave the Flag alone. It is there to honor its history. American history, if you don’t understand. If the NAACP wants to be mad at a flag , then it ought to be mad at OLd Glory. It stood proud for over 80 years and long after the civil war for slavery.Get over it. Its time we leave our history alone. The war was not fought over slavery, it was State rights. Get a history lesson.
EVERY South hater and flag hater I ever met or heard or read about
demonstrates one thing, IGNORANCE, regarding history in general and
Southern history in particular.
They have been programmed like robots to hate ALL things Southern.
Their PC program, operating in government schools, TV and “mainstream
press” for fifty years, has been very successful in transforming the
youth of Amerika to PC cannon fodder in their campaign to “win the
hearts and minds” (and souls) of the nation.
They need a scapegoat to put all blame for all evils on, and since there
was a cultural difference WE, Southerners, are chosen to be hated and
reviled and blamed. This gave them the added benefit of demagoguing the
“race card” and creating a voting bloc close to a hundred percent in
their total control.
Thus, all Northeastern elitists and their indoctrinated PC converts
everywhere rewrote history into the phony fable that Southern Whites
invented slavery and that our sole aim in seceding was to perpetuate
slavery forever, and that if the South had won, African Americans in
the South would all be beaten and abused bond slaves today, in 2006. We
say that is utter nonsense and nobody could believe such foolishness. Oh no? Just listen to them.
How did they accomplish this coup? It has been called the “dumbing down
of America”. Books have been written on it. After dumbing down,
vacating the brain, their control enabled them to fill the vacuous minds
with their PC fables. Thus today numerous studies have shown that our
“education” system and information systems has produced an appalling
ignorance of every subject except technology, and even there we’re told
we are not producing enough graduates to meet our needs and are forced
to import graduate brains from abroad, from poorer countries, since we,
the richest nation on earth, have fallen behind in education. Is it any
wonder?
Our politicians tell us we must pour more and more billions of our tax
dollars down the PC rathole to catch up in education.
Now, the liberal marxist socialists all hate us and want to destroy our flags, our
monuments, our place names, our speech, our manners, our identifying
clothing, our very identity and any memory of us. Don’t be surprised if
they start digging up our graves and burning our bones. The
indoctrinated South haters will accept nothing less than our total
annihilation
Eisenhower letter regarding Robert E. Lee
President Dwight Eisenhower wrote the following letter in response to one he received dated August 1, 1960, from Leon W. Scott, a dentist in New Rochelle, New York. Scott’s letter reads:
“Dear Mr. President:
“At the Republican Convention I heard you mention that you have the pictures of four (4) great Americans in your office, and that included in these is a picture of Robert E. Lee.
“I do not understand how any American can include Robert E. Lee as a person to be emulated, and why the President of the United States of America should do so is certainly beyond me.
“The most outstanding thing that Robert E. Lee did was to devote his best efforts to the destruction of the United States Government, and I am sure that you do not say that a person who tries to destroy our Government is worthy of being hailed as one of our heroes.
“Will you please tell me just why you hold him in such high esteem?
Sincerely yours,
“Leon W. Scott”
Eisenhower’s response, written on White House letterhead on August 9, 1960 reads as follows:
August 9, 1960
Dear Dr. Scott:
Respecting your August 1 inquiry calling attention to my often expressed admiration for General Robert E. Lee, I would say, first, that we need to understand that at the time of the War Between the States the issue of Secession had remained unresolved for more than 70 years. Men of probity, character, public standing and unquestioned loyalty, both North and South, had disagreed over this issue as a matter of principle from the day our Constitution was adopted.
General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle. Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his belief in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.
From deep conviction I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities, including his devotion to this land as revealed in his painstaking efforts to help heal the nation’s wounds once the bitter struggle was over, we, in our own time of danger in a divided world, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.
Such are the reasons that I proudly display the picture of this great American on my office wall.
Sincerely,
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The Yankee Problem in America by Dr. Clyde Wilson of South Carolina
Since the 2000 presidential election, much attention has been paid to a map showing the sharp geographical division between the two candidates’ support. Gore prevailed in the power- and plunder-seeking Deep North (Northeast, Upper Midwest, Pacific Coast) and Bush in the regions inhabited by productive and decent Americans. There is nothing new about this. Historically speaking, it is just one more manifestation of the Yankee problem.
As indicated by these books (listed at the end), scholars are at last starting to pay some attention to one of the most important and most neglected subjects in United States history – the Yankee problem.
By Yankee I do not mean everybody from north of the Potomac and Ohio. Lots of them have always been good folks. The firemen who died in the World Trade Center on September 11 were Americans. The politicians and TV personalities who stood around telling us what we are to think about it are Yankees. I am using the term historically to designate that peculiar ethnic group descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people around. Puritans long ago abandoned anything that might be good in their religion but have never given up the notion that they are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own image.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, raised a Northern Methodist in Chicago, is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee – self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing. Northern Methodism and Chicago were both, in their formative periods, hotbeds of abolitionist, high tariff Black Republicanism. The Yankee temperament, it should be noted, makes a neat fit with the Stalinism that was brought into the Deep North by later immigrants.
The ethnic division between Yankees and other Americans goes back to earliest colonial times. Up until the War for Southern Independence, Southerners were considered to be the American mainstream and Yankees were considered to be the “peculiar” people. Because of a long campaign of cultural imperialism and the successful military imperialism engineered by the Yankees, the South, since the war, has been considered the problem, the deviation from the true American norm. Historians have made an industry of explaining why the South is different (and evil, for that which defies the “American” as now established, is by definition evil). Is the South different because of slavery? white supremacy? the climate? pellagra? illiteracy? poverty? guilt? defeat? Celtic wildness rather than Anglo-Saxon sobriety?
Unnoticed in all this literature was a hidden assumption: the North is normal, the standard of all things American and good. Anything that does not conform is a problem to be explained and a condition to be annihilated. What about that hidden assumption? Should not historians be interested in understanding how the North got to be the way it is? Indeed, is there any question in American history more important?
According to standard accounts of American history (i.e., Northern mythology), New Englanders fought the Revolution and founded glorious American freedom as had been planned by the “Puritan Fathers.” Southerners, who had always been of questionable character, because of their fanatic devotion to slavery, wickedly rebelled against government of, by, and for the people, were put down by the armies of the Lord, and should be ever grateful for not having been exterminated. (This is clearly the view of the anonymous Union Leaguer from Portland, Maine, who recently sent me a chamber pot labeled “Robert E. Lee’s soup tureen.”) And out of their benevolence and devotion to the ideal of freedom, the North struck the chains from the suffering black people. (They should be forever grateful, also. Take a look at the Boston statue with happy blacks adoring the feet of Col. Robert Gould Shaw.)
Aside from the fact that every generalization in this standard history is false, an obvious defect in it is that, for anyone familiar with American history before the War, it is clear that “Southern” was American and Yankees were the problem. America was Washington and Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase and the Battle of New Orleans, John Randolph and Henry Clay, Daniel Morgan, Daniel Boone, and Francis Marion. Southerners had made the Constitution, saved it under Jefferson from the Yankees, fought the wars, acquired the territory, and settled the West, including the Northwest. To most Americans, in Pennsylvania and Indiana as well as Virginia and Georgia, this was a basic view up until about 1850. New England had been a threat, a nuisance, and a negative force in the progress of America. Northerners, including some patriotic New Englanders, believed this as much as Southerners.
When Washington Irving, whose family were among the early Anglo-Dutch settlers of New York, wrote the story about the “Headless Horseman,” he was ridiculing Yankees. The prig Ichabod Crane had come over from Connecticut and made himself a nuisance. So a young man (New York young men were then normal young men rather than Yankees) played a trick on him and sent him fleeing back to Yankeeland where he belonged. James Fenimore Cooper, of another early New York family, felt the same way about New Englanders who appear unfavorably in his writings. Yet another New York writer, James Kirke Paulding (among many others) wrote a book defending the South and attacking abolitionists. It is not unreasonable to conclude that in Moby Dick, the New York Democrat Herman Melville modeled the fanatical Captain Ahab on the Yankee abolitionist. In fact, the term “Yankee” appears to originate in some mingling of Dutch and Indian words, to designate New Englanders. Obviously, both the Dutch New Yorkers and the Native Americans recognized them as “different.”
Young Abe Lincoln amused his neighbors in southern Indiana and Illinois, nearly all of whom, like his own family, had come from the South, with “Yankee jokes,” stories making fun of dishonest peddlers from New England. They were the most popular stories in his repertoire, except for the dirty ones.
Right into the war, Northerners opposed to the conquest of the South blamed the conflict on fanatical New Englanders out for power and plunder, not on the good Americans in the South who had been provoked beyond bearing.
Many people, and not only in the South, thought that Southerners, according to their nature, had been loyal to the Union, had served it, fought and sacrificed for it as long as they could. New Englanders, according to their nature, had always been grasping for themselves while proclaiming their righteousness and superiority.
The Yankees succeeded so well, by the long cultural war described in these volumes, and by the North’s military victory, that there was no longer a Yankee problem. Now the Yankee was America and the South was the problem. America, the Yankee version, was all that was normal and right and good. Southerners understood who had won the war (not Northerners, though they had shed a lot of blood, but the accursed Yankees.) With some justification they began to regard all Northerners as Yankees, even the hordes of foreigners who had been hired to wear the blue.
Here is something closer to a real history of the United States: American freedom was not a legacy of the “Puritan Fathers,” but of Virginians who proclaimed and spread constitutional rights. New England gets some credit for beginning the War of Independence. After the first few years, however, Yankees played little part. The war was fought and won in the South. Besides, New Englanders had good reasons for independence – they did not fit into the British Empire economically, since one of their main industries was smuggling, and the influential Puritan clergy hated the Church of England. Southerners, in fighting for independence, were actually going against their economic interests for the sake of principle.
Once Southerners had gone into the Union (which a number of wise statesmen like Patrick Henry and George Mason warned them against), the Yankees began to show how they regarded the new federal government: as an instrument to be used for their own purposes. Southerners long continued to view the Union as a vehicle for mutual cooperation, as they often naively still do.
In the first Congress, Yankees demanded that the federal government continue the British subsidies to their fishing fleets. While Virginia and the other Southern states gave up their vast western lands for future new states, New Englanders demanded a special preserve for themselves (the “Western Reserve” in Ohio).
Under John Adams, the New England quest for power grew into a frenzy. They passed the Sedition Law to punish anti-government words (as long as they controlled the government) in clear violation of the Constitution. During the election of 1800 the preachers in New England told their congregations that Thomas Jefferson was a French Jacobin who would set up the guillotine in their town squares and declare women common property. (What else could be expected from a dissolute slaveholder?) In fact, Jefferson’s well-known distaste for mixing of church and state rested largely on his dislike of the power of the New England self-appointed saints.
When Jeffersonians took power, the New Englanders fought them with all their diminishing strength. Their poet William Cullen Bryant regarded the Louisiana Purchase as nothing but a large swamp for Jefferson to pursue his atheistic penchant for science.
The War of 1812, the Second War of Independence, was decisive for the seemingly permanent discrediting of New England. The Yankee ruling class opposed the war even though it was begun by Southerners on behalf of oppressed American seamen, most of whom were New Englanders. Yankees did not care about their oppressed poorer citizens because they were making big bucks smuggling into wartime Europe. One New England congressman attacked young patriot John C. Calhoun as a backwoodsman who had never seen a sail and who was unqualified to deal with foreign policy.
During the war Yankees traded with the enemy and talked openly of secession. (Southerners never spoke of secession in time of war.) Massachusetts refused to have its militia called into constitutional federal service even after invasion, and then, notoriously for years after, demanded that the federal government pay its militia expenses.
Historians have endlessly repeated that the “Era of Good Feelings” under President Monroe refers to the absence of party strife. Actually, the term was first used to describe the state of affairs in which New England traitorousness had declined to the point that a Virginia president could visit Boston without being mobbed.
Yankee political arrogance was soulmate to Yankee cultural arrogance. Throughout the antebellum period, New England literature was characterized and promoted as the American literature, and non-Yankee writers, in most cases much more talented and original, were ignored or slandered. Edgar Allan Poe had great fun ridiculing the literary pretensions of New Englanders, but they largely succeeded in dominating the idea of American literature into the 20th century. Generations of Americans have been cured of reading forever by being forced to digest dreary third-string New England poets as “American literature.”
In 1789, a Connecticut Puritan preacher named Jedidiah Morse published the first book of American Geography. The trouble was, it was not an American geography but a Yankee geography. Most of the book was taken up with describing the virtues of New England. Once you got west of the Hudson River, as Morse saw it and conveyed to the world’s reading public, the U.S. was a benighted land inhabited by lazy, dirty Scotch-Irish and Germans in the Middle States and lazy, morally depraved Southerners, corrupted and enervated by slavery. New Englanders were pure Anglo-Saxons with all virtues. The rest of the Americans were questionable people of lower or mongrel ancestry. The theme of New Englanders as pure Anglo-Saxons continued right down through the 20th century. The alleged saints of American equality operated on a theory of their racial superiority. While Catholics and Jews were, in the South, accepted and loyal Southerners, Yankees burned down convents and banished Jews from the Union Army lines.
A few years after Morse, Noah Webster, also from Connecticut, published his American Dictionary and American spelling book. The trouble was, it was not an American dictionary but a New England dictionary. As Webster declared in his preface, New Englanders spoke and spelled the purest and best form of English of any people in the world. Southerners and others ignored Webster and spelled and pronounced real English until after the War of Southern Independence.
As the books show, Yankees after the War of 1812 were acutely aware of their minority status. And here is the important point: they launched a deliberate campaign to take over control of the idea of “America.”
The campaign was multi-faceted. Politically, they gained profits from the protective tariff and federal expenditures, both of which drained money from the South for the benefit of the North, and New England especially. Seeking economic advantage from legislation is nothing new in human history. But the New England greed was marked by its peculiar assumptions of moral superiority. New Englanders, who were selling their products in a market from which competition had been excluded by the tariff, proclaimed that the low price of cotton was due to the fact that Southerners lacked the drive and enterprise of virtuous Yankees! (When the South was actually the productive part of the U.S. economy.)
This transfer of wealth built the strength of the North. It was even more profitable than the slave trade (which New England shippers carried on from Africa to Brazil and Cuba right up to the War Between the States) and the Chinese opium trade (which they were also to break into).
Another phase of the Yankee campaign for what they considered their rightful dominance was the capture of the history of the American Revolution. At a time when decent Americans celebrated the Revolution as the common glory of all, New Englanders were publishing a literature claiming the whole credit for themselves. A scribbler from Maine named Lorenzo Sabine, for one example among many, published a book in which he claimed that the Revolution in the South had been won by New England soldiers because Southerners were traitorous and enervated by slavery. As William Gilmore Simms pointed out, it was all lies. When Daniel Webster was received hospitably in Charleston, he made a speech in which he commemorated the graves of the many heroic Revolutionary soldiers from New England which were to be found in the South. The trouble was, those graves did not exist. Many Southern volunteers had fought in the North, but no soldier from north of Pennsylvania (except a few generals) had ever fought in the South!
George Washington was a bit of a problem here, so the honor-driven, foxhunting Virginia gentleman was transformed by phony folklore into a prim New Englander in character, a false image that has misled and repulsed countless Americans since.
It should be clear, this was not merely misplaced pride. It was a deliberate, systematic effort by the Massachusetts elite to take control of American symbols and disparage all competing claims. Do not be put off by Professor Sheidley’s use of “Conservative Leaders” in his title. He means merely the Yankee ruling elite who were never conservatives then or now. Conservatives do not work for “the transformation of America.”
Another successful effort was a New England claim on the West. When New Englanders referred to “the West” in antebellum times, they meant the parts of Ohio and adjacent states settled by New Englanders. The rest of the great American West did not count. In fact, the great drama of danger and adventure and achievement that was the American West, from the Appalachians to the Pacific, was predominantly the work of Southerners and not of New Englanders at all. In the Midwest, the New Englanders came after Southerners had tamed the wilderness, and they looked down upon the early settlers. But in Western movies we still have the inevitable family from Boston moving west by covered wagon. Such a thing never existed! The people moving west in covered wagons were from the upper South and were despised by Boston.
So our West is reduced, in literature, to The Oregon Trail, a silly book written by a Boston tourist, and the phony cavortings of the Eastern sissy Teddy Roosevelt in the cattle country opened by Southerners. And the great American outdoors is now symbolized by Henry David Thoreau and a little frog pond at Walden, in sight of the Boston smokestacks. The Pennsylvanian Owen Wister knew better when he entitled his Wyoming novel, The Virginian.
To fully understand what the Yankee is today – builder of the all-powerful “multicultural” therapeutic state (with himself giving the orders and collecting the rewards) which is the perfection of history and which is to be exported to all peoples, by guided missiles on women and children if necessary – we need a bit more real history.
That history is philosophical, or rather theological, and demographic. New Englanders lived in a barren land. Some of their surplus sons went to sea. Many others moved west when it was safe to do so. By 1830, half the people in the state of New York were New England-born. By 1850, New Englanders had tipped the political balance in the Midwest, with the help of German revolutionaries and authoritarians who had flooded in after the 1848 revolutions.
The leading editors in New York City, Horace Greeley and William Cullen Bryant, and the big money men, were New England-born. Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania steel tycoon and Radical Republican, was from Vermont. (Thanks to the tariff, he made $6,000 extra profit on every mile of railroad rails he sold.)
The North had been Yankeeized, for the most part quietly, by control of churches, schools, and other cultural institutions, and by whipping up a frenzy of paranoia about the alleged plot of the South to spread slavery to the North, which was as imaginary as Jefferson’s guillotine.
The people that Cooper and Irving had despised as interlopers now controlled New York! The Yankees could now carry a majority in the North and in 1860 elect the first sectional president in U.S. history – a threat to the South to knuckle under or else. In time, even the despised Irish Catholics began to think like Yankees.
We must also take note of the intellectual revolution amongst the Yankees which created the modern version of self-righteous authoritarian “Liberalism” so well exemplified by Mrs. Clinton. In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson went to Germany to study. There he learned from philosophers that the world was advancing by dialectical process to an ever-higher state. He returned to Boston, and after marrying the dying daughter of a banker, resigned from the clergy, declared the sacraments to be a remnant of barbarism, and proclaimed The American as the “New Man” who was leaving behind the garbage of the past and blazing the way into the future state of perfection for humanity. Emerson has ever since in many quarters been regarded as the American philosopher, the true interpreter of the meaning of America.
From the point of view of Christianity, this “American” doctrine is heresy. From the point of view of history it is nonsense. But it is powerful enough for Ronald Reagan, who should have known better, to proclaim America as the shining City upon a Hill that was to redeem mankind. And powerful enough that the United States has long pursued a bipartisan foreign policy, one of the guiding assumptions of which is that America is the model of perfection to which all the world should want to conform.
There is no reason for readers of Southern Partisan to rush out and buy these books, which are expensive and dense academic treatises. If you are really interested, get your library to acquire them. They are well-documented studies, responsibly restrained in their drawing of larger conclusions. But they indicate what is hopefully a trend of exploration of the neglected field of Yankee history.
The highflying Yankee rhetoric of Emerson and Hillary Rodham Clinton has a nether side, which has its historical origins in the “Burnt Over District.” The “Burnt Over District” was well known to antebellum Americans. Emersonian notions bore strange fruit in the central regions of New York State settled by the overflow of poorer Yankees from New England. It was “Burnt Over” because it (along with a similar area in northern Ohio) was swept over time and again by post-millennial revivalism. Here preachers like Charles G. Finney began to confuse Emerson’s future state of perfection with Christianity, and God’s plan for humanity with American chosenness.
If this were true, then anything that stood in the way of American perfection must be eradicated. The threatening evil at various times was liquor, tobacco, the Catholic Church, the Masonic order, meat-eating, marriage. Within the small area of the Burnt Over District and within the space of a few decades was generated what historians have misnamed the “Jacksonian reform movement:” Joseph Smith received the Book of Mormon from the Angel Moroni; William Miller began the Seventh Day Adventists by predicting, inaccurately, the end of the world; the free love colony of John Humphrey Noyes flourished at Oneida; the first feminist convention was held at Seneca Falls; and John Brown, who was born in Connecticut, collected accomplices and financial backers for his mass murder expeditions.
It was in this milieu that abolitionism, as opposed to the antislavery sentiment shared by many Americans, including Southerners, had its origins. Abolitionism, despite what has been said later, was not based on sympathy for the black people nor on an ideal of natural rights. It was based on the hysterical conviction that Southern slaveholders were evil sinners who stood in the way of fulfillment of America’s divine mission to establish Heaven on Earth. It was not the Union that our Southern forefathers seceded from, but the deadly combination of Yankee greed and righteousness.
Most abolitionists had little knowledge of or interest in black people or knowledge of life in the South. Slavery promoted sin and thus must end. No thought was given to what would happen to the African-Americans. In fact, many abolitionists expected that evil Southern whites and blacks would disappear and the land be repopulated by virtuous Yankees.
The darker side of the Yankee mind has had its expression in American history as well as the side of high ideals. Timothy McVeigh from New York and the Unabomber from Harvard are, like John Brown, examples of this side of the Yankee problem. (Even though distinguished Yankee intellectuals have declared that their violence was a product of the evil “Southern gun culture.”)
General Richard Taylor, in one of the best Confederate memoirs, Destruction and Reconstruction, related what happened as he surrendered the last Confederate troops east of the Mississippi in 1865. A German, wearing the uniform of a Yankee general and speaking in heavily accented English, lectured him that now that the war was over, Southerners would be taught “the true American principles.” Taylor replied, sardonically, that he regretted that his grandfather, an officer in the Revolution, and his father, President of the United States, had not passed on to him true American principles. Yankeeism was triumphant.
Since the Confederate surrender, the Yankee has always been a strong and often dominant force in American society, though occasionally tempered by Southerners and other representatives of Western civilization in America. In the 1960s the Yankee had one of his periodic eruptions of mania such as he had in the 1850s. Since then, he has managed to destroy a good part of the liberty and morals of the American peoples. It remains to be seen whether his conquest is permanent or whether in the future we may be, at least to some degree, emancipated from it.
Yo, if the southern states are so much better than the non-southern states in morals, culture, and productivity, why is it that the statistics for the southern states are so much worse than those of the non-southern states in all measures relating to health and morality? Why does the South lead the nation in divorce, out of wedlock births, drunkenness, obesity, teen pregnancy, and nearly every other measure of misery and immorality?
And why is it that the South depends on handouts from the rest of the country in order to survive?
Brad,
Your editorial is well-argued.
The flag issue generates so much heat (and so little light) that the sooner we can find an appropriate resting place for it the better. Several reasonable approaches have already been suggested (a circle of flags on the side of the State House grounds seems an appealing option- the Confederate monument should be moved to the same location).
We should move the flag not because the NAACP wants it moved but simply because it makes sense. To have the Confederate Flag be the first thing you see when you look down Main Street toward the front door of the State House elevates the flag to a higher stature than it deserves.
The boycott highlights how out of kilter the NAACP’s priorities are. The NAACP of the 50’s and 60’s was a proud and powerful organization. Thurgood Marshall is one of my heroes. But the NAACP is a shadow of what it once was. Bill Cosby’s Pound Cake speech told it like it was: the biggest obstacle to black achievement is no longer discrimination. You’d never know that by listening to today’s NAACP.
In Chairman Julian Bond’s address to the 2006 NAACP convention he offers such tripe as “The history of racial struggle in America is a hymn to self-help and an acknowledgement that white Americans will not and cannot voluntarily end discrimination.”
I’m a white general internist in Marion who serves a population that is mostly poor and black. I have a great love for my patients and a deep respect for their daily struggles. I never refuse to see someone based on ability to pay and have worked hard to improve my patients’ health and our community.
Since 1994, I have been a board member for our local Habitat for Humanity chapter. In that time, we have built 27 homes representing about two million dollars in equity, almost all of which has gone to my black brothers and sisters.
Yet Mr. Bond has decided that my white skin prevents me from seeing the light of racial justice. What ever happened to MLK’s call to judge people by the content of their character? That, and much more, apparently has been forgotten by the leaders of the NAACP.
Racism continues to wane in my white brethren. Are all hearts pure? Surely not. But what is growing is a deep sense of frustration that blacks are not grabbing the brass ring of education that their grandparents fought for and risked their jobs and sometimes their lives for. We all know that is the way out of poverty.
And what of the abysmal single-parenthood rate in the black community that approaches 70%? This is the issue that must be reckoned with or all else is lost. The NAACP is virtually silent on this critical issue that is destroying the hope of millions of children like an invasive cancer.
Every child deserves two parents in the home. If you don’t have the guts to stand up for that proposition and fight for it, I don’t have much use for you.
The NAACP is still in the protest and sue mode when overwhelmingly the problems they want to solve call for honest acknowledgement of both the successes and failures of the past decades and a willingness to work with rather than against police, educators, business leaders, etc.
The sooner the flag issue is settled, the sooner we can hold the NAACP’s feet to the fire and ask them to address (with the white community’s help) the real problems that plague poor and black people. Right now, they can hide behind the flag, saying (with some merit) that whites can’t possibly be serious about treating blacks as equals when they festoon the walkway to the State House with a symbol of their enslavement.
Does anyone know how much USC paid Mr. Bond to violate the boycott? Transportation cost?
JW,
Good writings. It will take some time to read it all in full, but I will. Speeding over your entry I noticed that you separated Scots-Irish and Southerners as though they were two distinct peoples. But, wasn’t the South actually populated by the Ulster-Scots who migrated down the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road from Phil, PA through Lancaster, PA — some westward into the Pittsburgh and Ohio, Kentucky areas? Others down the eastern side of the Appalachians into Tennessee, South & North Carolina, and then westward toward Arkansas, Texas and upward toward the Big Sky states? (The big “L” of red states).
Just curious. You sound like a historian.
Thanks.
PS
Oh, yeah, the Ulster-Scots were big in the Vermont area weren’t they, with their decendants still there today?
FLASH: Jullian Bonds fee is in the $12,500 range…does anyone know if USC paid him???
Did he break the boycott…or work for free?
Dear All,
Both the American (U.S.) flag and, also, the other American flag(Battle Flag) have been abused by bad folks. However, for most Southern Americans the Starry Christian Cross of Saint Andrew represents state’s rights, honour, chivalry, Christianity and heritage. May God Save the South! Deo Vindice
If anyone has a problem with any of the Confederate flags, then he or she needs a history lesson.
I submit that the Confederate flag is more honourable then the US flag since 1861. Here’s why: The US flag flew over almost nine decades of slavery, and slavery wasn’t made unconstitutional till eight months after the so-called Civil War; the Confederate flag flew over four years of slavery, but slavery was in the process of being phased out in the South. The US flag flew over many slave ships; the Confederate flag flew over no slave ships. The US flag flew over atrocities committed against Southern civilians during the war. The US flag flew over pillage of the South during so-called Reconstruction. The US flag flew over the attempted genocide of American Indians, including women and children. More often than not, the flag of choice for white supremacist groups is the US flag. The US flag is flying over 44 million murdered unborn babies (and counting) since abortion became legal.
People who hate the Confederate flag simply because its how they’ve been brainwashed since the cradle can either do some research with an open mind, or they can continue to be good komrades in ignorance.
Don’t we get any credit for the African-American Historical Monument on the
Statehouse Ground??????
.
South Carolina State House
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_State_House
.
“The South Carolina State House is the only state capitol in the nation to have a monument dedicated to the contributions and history of African-Americans on its grounds.”
.
Another link below on the African-American Historical Monument
.
http://www.discoversouthcarolina.com/files/smiles-pdfs/Af._Am._Mon.pdf
Y’all c’mon down heah and eat a moon pie and stare at the good ol’ Dixie flag with all us intellijent southern folks. It sho will cause your brain to get right smarter. Jethro Bodine done tole me so. Shoot, when we gets dun lookin’ at the flag, we can go shoot some possum and watch Dale Jr. ride around in cicles for three hours.
Git Er Done!
I guess I missed where all the high technology jobs are in South Carolina.
New York’s got Wall Street. Columbia’s
got Maurice’s Piggy Park.
Hey, I understand. Getting your butt kicked in a battle to keep blacks in chains would tend to scar the collective psyche of a region.
And there’s two words that will deflate any debate over the relative intelligence of the garden variety South Carolina native:
Strom Thurmond
Case closed.
idiot
Here is what we should be talking about:
Dobbs: Are you a casualty of the class war?
By Lou Dobbs
CNN
NEW YORK (CNN) — The Dow Jones Industrial Average has hit an all-time high and Wall Street firms are posting some of their best earnings ever. For the first time in our nation’s history, the Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans includes only billionaires. In fact, having only a billion dollars means you’re not on the list. As a group, the Forbes 400 has a collective net worth of $1.25 trillion.
So the rich are doing well. But how about the middle class?
More Americans than ever are living in poverty, living without health care, paying more for housing and for the costs of our public education. And real wages are falling.
I work for the company founded by one of the top 10 people on the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans. We just had our annual salary increases approved. Mine
was 2%… some got 1%… others got zero.
Our CEO made $26 million last year.
And that billionaire created your job out of thin air. What would you be making if he hadn’t created your job?
How about a “maximum wage”?
Paul, welcome back! Good to hear from you, Doc.
And welcome — I think — James W. King. While he does show potential to become a sort of neoConfederate version of Mary Rosh (please, Mr. King, no more chapter-length posts; they put people off), I’m please to see people use full names. Assuming that’s his real name, of course.
I’m glad he brought up Robert E. Lee. I’ve always thought that two of the most admirable men to crop up in American history happened to be contemporaries, and to play THE critical roles, on opposite sides, in the bloodiest event by far in our history.
Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln were men of great moral force and unshakeable integrity. And yet the blood of hundreds of thousands is on their hands. It’s a great irony.
Without Lincoln’s ironclad will to do whatever it took to keep the Union together, the North would have abandoned the struggle much earlier. The alternative would have been the “leadership” model of a McClellan.
Without “Marse Robert,” the Confederacy would never have held out as long as it did. His decision to act in accordance with HIS principles and put his state ahead of the union he had served all his life (an unconscionable notion for an Army officer in our day, but not in his) prolonged the war and the misery.
Imagine how quickly the war would have been over if Lee, instead of McClellan, had commanded the vastly superior resources of the Union from the start. But that was not to be.
Each of these phenomenally moral men acted in accord with his strongly held principles, and the result was an unprecedented bloodbath.
“[W]e made a great mistake in the beginning of our struggle, and I fear, in spite of all we can do, it will prove to be a fatal mistake. We appointed all our worst generals to command our armies, and all our best generals to edit the newspapers.”
– Robert E. Lee
Back when we had a 96% income tax, we did have a maximum wage law. The economy sputtered, because entrepreneurs could not accumulate enough savings to expand their businesses.
Then Reagan lowered the top bracket to 28% and we are still enjoying the properity, except for a few dips due to oil prices and Clinton tax increases.
NINETY-SIX PERCENT!!!?? Surely you jest.
I do understand that extremely high income taxes and capital gains taxes stifle economic growth. But, I’m not talking extreme nor necessarily taxes.
Thanks.
Here’s a link to data from the Congressional Budget Office showing effective Federal Tax rates from 1979 through 2001. The lowest 20% of wage earners paid only 5% tax rate in 2001 versus 26% for the highest 20% of wage earners. The top 1% of wage earners paid an effective 33% rate. Think about that. For every single dollar, 33 cents went to the government. These are people who will create jobs if the tax rates were lower.
http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=5324&sequence=0
Here are some excerpts from an interview with Edward Wolff, one of the foremost experts on wealth inequality in the US.
An Interview with Edward Wolff
May 2003
“In the United States, in the last survey year, 1998, the richest 1 percent of households owned 38 percent of all wealth.”
“Wealth inequality in the United States has a Gini coefficient of .82, which is pretty close to the maximum level of inequality you can have.” (Zero being total equality, and one being total inequality)
“We have had a fairly sharp increase in wealth inequality dating back to 1975 or 1976.
Prior to that, there was a protracted period when wealth inequality fell in this country, going back almost to 1929. So you have this fairly continuous downward trend from 1929, which of course was the peak of the stock market before it crashed, until just about the mid-1970s. Since then, things have really turned around, and the level of wealth inequality today is almost double what it was in the mid-1970s.”
“The top 5 percent own more than half of all wealth.
In 1998, they owned 59 percent of all wealth. Or to put it another way, the top 5 percent had more wealth than the remaining 95 percent of the population, collectively.”
“The top 20 percent owns over 80 percent of all wealth. In 1998, it owned 83 percent of all wealth.
This is a very concentrated distribution.”
“The bottom 20 percent basically have zero wealth.”
“The average African-American family has about 60 percent of the income as the average white family. But the disparity of wealth is a lot greater. The average African-American family has only 18 percent of the wealth of the average white family.”
“We are much more unequal than any other advanced industrial country.”
“Perhaps our closest rival in terms of inequality is Great Britain. But where the top percent in this country own 38 percent of all wealth, in Great Britain it is more like 22 or 23 percent.
What is remarkable is that this was not always the case. Up until the early 1970s, the U.S. actually had lower wealth inequality than Great Britain, and even than a country like Sweden. But things have really turned around over the last 25 or 30 years. In fact, a lot of countries have experienced lessening wealth inequality over time. The U.S. is atypical in that inequality has risen so sharply over the last 25 or 30 years.”
“One reason we have such high levels of inequality, compared to other advanced industrial countries, is because of our tax and, I would add, our social expenditure system. We have much lower taxes than almost every Western European country. And we have a less progressive tax system than almost every Western European country. As a result, the rich in this country manage to retain a much higher share of their income than they do in other countries, and this enables them to accumulate a much higher amount of wealth than the rich in other countries.
Certainly our tax system has helped to stimulate the rise of inequality in this country.”
I’d rather have a fairly high level of income inequality than to live in a country where everyone is equal. Equally miserable, that is, except the party bosses. We’ve already tried that approach in a number of communist and socialist countries, with absolutely horrific results.
I don’t think most of you realize that the NAACP could care less about solving any problems in the black community. There is support for the Confederate flag within the black community, but it is stiffled out of fear of the supposed leaders, the NAACP and others who live off keeping tension between races. I’m tired of hearing of this, too. So leave the flag, teach true history instead of the victimizing socialist garbage that the government spreads, and work together to make life better for all citizens. We’re all God’s children. But the NAACP wants blacks to leave South Carolina, as that is what a boycott is. Wake up before it’s too late.
Mr. Grant:
The problem is that the less productive members of society never think it is extreme to use taxes to reduce better men to their level.
The economic reality is that our taxes are at the very edge of being too high. The proof of that is how quickly economic growth stops with just a slight increase, and how quickly prosperity returns with just a slight reduction.
Bush’s tiny tax cut for the middle class in 2001 spurred an instant recovery from the last Clinton recession which began in November 2000.
When California or South Carolina bumps up a property tax or income tax just 1%, businesses and individuals flee to better states.
Top Marginal Tax Rates for USA 1913-2003
http://www.truthandpolitics.org/top-rates.php
Lee, great link. I don’t think anyone is proposing a 90% marginal tax rate in the near future. The very high rates began during WW-1 and remained high through the 60s. Except for the depression years the nation’s economy advanced steadily most years so there must be more to economic growth than marginal income tax rates.
You know, I try to get us back to the topic at hand, and I keep finding myself in the middle of a shouting match between Karl Marx and Adam Smith.
I thought we had settled all this, in the favor of capitalism. The only countries even trying Marxism any more are small, totalitarian personality cults — which means they aren’t truly Marxist after all (Cuba, N.Korea). Even the Chinese are trying to beat us at our game.
I think we all agree that more-or-less free markets (there will never be a PURE free market, short of a return to a state of Nature, red in tooth and claw) beat a planned economy all hollow.
But as soon as I say that, I see the bizarre excesses of those who try to defend capitalism from imagined threats. Lee especially. C’mon, Lee — the richer man is the better man? That’s what you just said.
And then there’s the weird one that you always hear from libertarians about how high taxes make people not want to be rich. Huh? So Bill Gates would rather live on my salary than give up 33 percent of his billions? I don’t THINK so.
Thomas Ravenel was in here spouting that line recently, and I had to ask him: Do you really think that having only MOST of your fortune after taxes would have made you not seek your fortune at all?
He had to stop and think, and he put forth a middle ground that I find reasonable: Entrepreneurs who are NOT yet wealthy would not lose their desire to succeed in a high-tax environment. But folks who are already sitting on their pile would be somewhat less inclined to risk their capital on the entrepreneur’s dream, if they were going to get a diminished return.
THAT I can take, with a sizeable grain of salt. But don’t try to say that the truly CREATIVE people — you know, the ones who create those jobs — would be less motivated because they’d have to pay more taxes if they were rich. That’s ludicrous. It MIGHT be a little harder for them to raise capital. But I suspect they would still find enough rich folks who would accept two million in profit, even if that meant paying a third million in taxes.
I can’t say I know, because I’ve never been the kind of person who seeks wealth. But if I were, I think I’d be pretty stupid not to go ahead and pursue it just because I didn’t get to keep more than two-thirds of it. Come on.
Now, how about the subject we were talking about?
Brad,
How about trying to get someone from the NAACP to weigh in. Do you have Lonnie Randolph’s email?
Obviously the NAACP leadership has weighed the pros and cons of the boycott and decided the former outweigh the latter.
I wonder if Mr. Randolph would be willing to enlighten us with the thinking that went into that decision?
Other questions I’d have for him are:
1) Why is he so unwilling to acknowledge the huge increase in opportunities for blacks in the past half century. I couldn’t find much about him on the web but in an interview with The Gamecock in 2003 he says, “Our school systems are almost as segregated as they were 50 years ago. And in some school districts in SC, the conditions are as bad as they were when the Brown decision was rendered.” Wow. Is he living in the same state I am?
That completely ignores the fact that today any child of any color who wants a decent education can get it at any public school in the state. Although Marion is one of the poorest counties in the state, we have good schools (in which my children are enrolled) and the opportunity for a fine education is there for the taking. And if you graduate with merely a 3.0, the state will give you a HOPE Scholarship which is $2,650 for your fist year in college (which is more than enough to pay for tech school). The LIFE and Palmetto Fellows Scholarships offer even more money for higher achievement. There it is, a well lit path out of poverty, begging to be trod and Mr. Randolph supposes we’re still in 1954
2) Why doesn’t the NAACP criticize the corrosive hip-hop culture and outlets like BET that thrive on it when it is so clearly hurtful to so many black children?
3) Ditto for the out-of-wedlock birth rate. I believe the NAACP could marshal the resources for a nation-wide campaign that could have a significant impact on this rate, if they would only face up to the problem.
How about we use this blog as it was intended and debate the real issues for a change?
Paul, add to your facts that a vast majority of financial need scholarships for college bound students are dedicated to minorities and the opportunities for minorities today are limitless. But, there is an entire industry of people, including most of the Democrat party, that find it advantageous to promote the fallacy that minorities are victims in our society. I.e., you are a victim, vote for me, and the intention is to help the victim. Problem is, after each election, who cares about victims.
Stop the race-baiting Paul. Why don’t you get out and look at reality. I’ll be happy to show it to you.
My kid goes to Dent Middle School and his classes are segregated as hell. I know because he’s practically the only white kid in all of his classes. Where are the white kids? They’re either in single gender or magnet program classes-or in private school. Look at what happened on Decker Boulevard-classic “white flight”-Olive Garden gone, Red Lobster gone, Kroger gone-off to Spring Valley. Perfectly viable, profitable businesses took off as the area became predominantly black.
Take a drive to anywhere in rural SC and look at the conditions. It is as if one is looking at a war zone. Perhaps you’ll notice that many of the people who are not doing so well are black. Many of these people used to work manufacturing or mill jobs that now do not exist.
You talk about equal opportunity, but what does equal opportunity mean in a system that is so skewed to begin with-in a system that unequivocally and exponentially redistributes wealth to a privileged minority? You blame black people for their circumstances-hey, I wish that you could miraculously become black for a few years and start with nothing and see how you feel then. Heck, if you can’t relate to black people, then why don’t you hang out with poor or working class white folks. Let’s negate that college degree and set you up in a trailer with a bag boy job at Food Lion, and see how you do then. No loans from momma and daddy now-no networking. Let’s base your perceived merit on how hard you work and let’s see where you get. If you work really hard, then maybe we can get you a second shift job at the Waffle House-that should peak your interest. But I suspect that you’ll fail-statistically I have every reason to think so. And people will say: Damn, if only Paul hadn’t have listened to that corrosive Rock and Roll music. If only he would have kept his pants up. Why can’t Paul pull himself up from his bootstraps-why is Paul a meth addict-there must be something wrong with Paul.
Mark, I am told (seriously) that Waffle House managers are paid as much as $60,000 a year. Many people have started out as stockboys and now manage supermarkets at more than that. Carly Fiorina (ex CEO of HP) started out as a secretary. The head of Global marketing at Coca Cola began as a secretary/typist. That is the free market.
Who’s advocating Marxism? Is Sweden Marxist? Are the other Nordic countries Marxist? To a lesser degree, are Germany, France, and Italy Marxist?
It’s normal in other Western democracies for people to have the right to form unions. Other western democracies have national health care. Other Western democracies have multiple, viable political parties and proportional representation. Other Western democracies are much more equal concerning the distribution of wealth (as the US once was). Other Western democracies actually care about their own people. What happened to us?
Well, the corporate control of the news media happened, for one. When moneyed interests control the editorial pages of practically every major newspaper in the country, then you’re bound to get pre election debates on such issues as the Confederate Flag, for example. Even when The State does actually address the real problems, the proposed “solutions” are insular and just more of the same “stay the course” non-solutions that will only facilitate even more degradation. It should be obvious to everyone by now that that the “ownership society” with its neo liberal/neo-conservative variants has been a dismal failure for most people-especially for people in poor states such as South Carolina.
Social Democracy, on the other hand, does have viable solutions. If Marxism and capitalism (and capitalism’s derivative: fascism) are failures, then why not look to other systems that do work. Sweden is a social democracy and undoubtedly their system does work. Check out the following on the Nordic News Network for new possibilities:
Better than Money
The Nordic Alternative
Those nations with socialist medicine are sham democracies, where the citizens have almost no constitutional rights.
The received inferior medical care, and many receive none at all, simply left to die in order to save money for The State.
Yes, America could compete with 90% tax rates when England had rates of 104%, and crooked Congressmen had riddled the tax code with deductions and trusts for the rich.
The purpose of high income taxes is to protect the very rich from those who are trying to become rich. If you are just trying to get by in a job, you don’t care about entrepreneurs being screwed, until you lose your job. Wise up.
I will readily admit that the “socialist” system in Germany has gone too far in places, and is not ideal. I will also admit that the tax rate is so high that it does stifle productivity to a certain degree.
But Lee, I really, really get tired of this “no constitutional rights” and “left to die” stuff. If you expect anybody to take you seriously, you need to stop writing what is obviously untrue. I served as a pastor in Germany, and went to visit people in the hospital on a regular basis during that time. I never once saw anybody “left to die.” I can’t remember any German I met wanting to imitate the American medical system, either. Most of them are shocked at the number of uninsured people here, and would never want our medical system, judging by what they hear. I usually had to end up explaining why our medical system is not as bad as it sounds.
I traveled around Europe a lot, and saw different medical facilities at times, not because I wanted to, but because the kids were sick, or somebody under my responsibility needed help. I never had to wait in an emergency room in Europe like I have had to wait here. I could make up a story about “being left to die” here in the U.S., but that would be just as fair as your make believe stuff.
Please write accurately.
Tax cuts have been the primary reason for economic growth around the world. Economic stagnation is primarily due to oppressive taxation.
• Israel is cutting its corporate rate from 34 to 25 percent and its top individual rate from 49 to 44 percent.
• Greece is cutting its corporate rate cut from 35 to 25 percent and is considering a flat *tax* for individuals.
• Austria cut its corporate *tax* rate from 34 to 25 percent in 2005.
• Netherlands reduced its corporate *tax* rate from 34.5 to 31.5 percent in 2005 and is considering further cuts.
• Germany’s new conservative chancellor wants to cut *tax* *rates*, but even the former leftist chancellor had planned to cut the corporate rate to boost growth.
• France is planning to cut its top individual income *tax* rate from 48 to 40 percent, because workers have no incentive to work more than 35 hours a week.
• Belarus is considering adopting a low-rate flat *tax*, like the one in neighboring Russia.
• Slovenia’s leader plans to enact a flat *tax* after being inspired by Estonia’s success.
Herb, on CSPAN yesterday I caught a few minutes of a European Health expert. He said, for example, that there is a 2 year waiting list in England for cancer treatment AFTER a person has been diagnosed by a doctor. The French doctors routinely strike and do sick-outs over lack of pay and opportunity. Unfortunately, I missed his takes on Germany but very interesting stuff. These are medical systems Americans would not tolerate.
Trying to get back on the flag topic… wondering what Herb’s opinion of the Civil War would be in regards to his interpretation of the “Render Unto Caesar” passage?
Mark,
I’m puzzled that you would take me to task for not understanding what life is like in an impoverished rural area since I live in one. Marion County is always near the top of the state’s unemployment figures, but despite that, it’s not a war zone, as you suggest.
The majority of my patients are poor and black and as a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity I make home visits so I have seen at close range how my poor neighbors live.
You misunderstand. I’m not race baiting. I want poor and black people to escape poverty and willing to help. My frustration is that there is no state or national figure that is talking about the things that one must do to escape poverty. The silence of the NAACP, the Urban League, etc. on personal responsibility is deafening.
My grandfather immigrated from Sicily in the early part of the century. Neither he nor my grandmother graduated from high school. As Italians, they likely faced more discrimination in the 1920’s than blacks face today.
My grandfather worked as a barber and my grandmother as a bank clerk with one overriding concern: send my father to college so he could get a better job and have a more prosperous life than they did.
As I watch students in Marion file into the high school I am struck by the great waste of potential. These are good kids who are not being taught at home about discipline, the work ethic or the importance of education. I had the opportunity to send my kids to private school and instead kept them in the public schools where they are doing beautifully.
Unfortunately, being white, whenever I talk about this I’m accused of racism. Why in the world would I be living in Marion if I were a racist? I have no family in Marion and could leave at any time for Charleston or Columbia where I do have family. I’m here because I’m trying to serve an underserved population and I’m watching so many of them make choices that will needlessly perpetuate their poverty.
Believe me, if I thought the deck was stacked against the poor, I’d argue for them. The reality as I see it (at close range) is that it’s easier to escape poverty than its ever been.
My barber in Marion lost his partner and is having difficulty finding another. If I was in the situation you describe (no money, no prospects) I’d ask him if I could help around the shop until I could get my barber’s license. Then following my grandfather’s example, the next generation would be on their way to college.
I understand the way globalization has hurt Marion’s textile industry and agree that corporate interests are trumping the interests of the working class as jobs leave for overseas. But despite that, you can make it in Marion with a little drive and a good education, which is available in our public schools.
Mr. Spencer Gantt. Your post above was half-correct. Only Robert E. Lee was a moral and honest man. Abe Lincoln was a tyrant who started a war for big business and to control the remaining USA by fear… sound familiar?(fast forward to 2002 and GWB)
Read Thomas D Lorenzo’s new book… Lincoln Unmasked and learn the real truth on Dishonest Abe–Not what our state run propaganda public schools teach.
PS Brad.. Let’s abolish the VietNam war’s monument in Columbia. They lost a war , too.
Herb’s cursory good experience with welfare medical care in Europe gave him a false impression of a brutal system which routinely denies care to the very ill, in order to cut costs.
Until a 2001, Columbia had more CAT and MRI scanners than all of Canada.
In Holland, doctors routinely kill patients by lethal injection, without their permission or the permission of the families or legal guardians.
Dave, the British health system is certainly the sick man of Europe, and my experience with it, and talking to others, has always been that it is very poorly administered. Anybody who is there gets free treatment, is basically the bottom line. It is socialism gone amok. I broke my leg playing soccer there in 1997, and had to go into the hospital (out-patient); I got free x-rays, free cast, and free crutches, and proceded to drive back to Germany (well I didn’t drive, somebody else had to!) the next week. The doctor’s comment: “well, we keep giving away all our crutches to tourists.”
My experience there, and talking to others over many years, was that non-emergency operations were indeed a problem–long waiting list. Not so with emergencies. I suppose it may depend on which part of the country one is in.
Germany administers its system much better than that, and strictly speaking, it is not national health. The problem there is that they built far too many perks into the system. Germans love to take a “Kur”, which is basically a great time of sometimes several weeks at a health spa to rejuvenate. Some people who are really sick need it, but the system is abused.
Lex made some good points in answer to Mark. We can’t afford the Swedish system here, and I don’t think we want it. The Swedes concentrate on themselves pretty much; the U. S. has taken a larger role in the world. Besides, when you make things too nice and easy for people, as many have pointed out here, incentive drops. Then there is our immigrant problem. We would really have a heyday if we did the Swedish thing.
Actually, you can tell I am not really arguing for the European model here. I’m just calling Lee on his extreme points, because when you aren’t accurate, it doesn’t help your cause.
And the problem of assisted suicide in HOlland isn’t one of health care, it is one of ethics.
When the health care system allows and encourages doctors to kill patients, the ethics problem becomes a healthcare problem, because elderly people are afraid to seek treatment at government clinics for fear of homocide.
It makes no sense to make any large changes to American healthcare until we evict the 22,000,000 freeloading illegal aliens who are bankrupting many hospitals, further denying medical care to American citizens.
Well, then, if you’re still reading, please answer some questions.
1) Just what is/was the original intent of this blog?
2) What is a “real issue” IYHO?
3) Please define “debate” as it exists on this blog. Is it simply people yakking back and forth, throwing flames at each other, showing their astounding knowledge about certain subjects?
4) What good does it do to debate in this format or any other when no resolution or solution for any matter takes place.
There are lots of good ideas on this blog, even some of the goofy ones. Still, absolutely nothing is accomplished.
Oh, yes, I’d still like to know why Mr. Bwarthen stuck this editorial in last Sunday’s news. Out of the blue it came.
I’ve no problem with the subject, but why was the column even written? At this time?
Spencer,
Good questions. I thought this thread was about the wisdom (or lack of same) of the NAACP boycott. The gubernatorial candidates differing responses to it were interesting and I thought Brad’s comments were germane.
However, of the 76 comments on this thread, only 28 constitute an attempt to deal with the issue raised. I did a quick review and categorized them as follows:
Economics/Health care 30
On Point (Flag/NAACP) 28
Southern History 12
Miscellaneous 6 (ie, Brad is a lackey of the C of C, etc) Total 76
Even if you include the Southern History comments, that’s barely half of the commentary even remotely related to the topic.
Maybe the problem is that most folks don’t find this a worthwhile topic. Although, since race is ingrained in everything we do in the south, it seems we could generate lots of good discussion about it.
It does look like we ought to have a debate about health care, however. Lee’s comments show a severe lack of perspective. He seems very comfortable with a system in which more than 40 million people have no insurance which means they get very little preventive care and live one serious illness away from financial ruin.
I don’t have an answer about how to make our blog more effective except to exhort people to stay on point and to remember that the blog, if well used, is an opportunity to enlighten each other and maybe even solve a problem or two. In the current hands it most often resembles a mud pit.
Well, Paul, I’m going to go off the point again, because Steve asked me a question, and I’m flattered and I want to answer it. Sorry, but then nobody has to read this. I’m really not making them . . . .
Steve, that is a very good question. Whole treatiseshave been written (by all means follow that link to a much better treatment than mine here!) on such subjects, so I’m obviously not going to be able to improve much on that (tongue in cheek)! But hopefully without making too big of a fool of myself, a few thoughts, but first a couple of presuppositions:
1) For the Christian, there is always a biblical tension. As I’ve said before, Martin Luther captured it best in his teaching on the Zwei Reiche, or two realms. This sort of applies well Jesus’ teaching, “render unto Caesar . . . .” It’s obvious that Jesus doesn’t resolve the tension, and it’s obvious that He doesn’t intend to. He is simply pointing out that we have to live in it—we have obligations both ways. He is sort of saying, among other things, “get on with it.” His apostles, whom He personally commissioned, developed the thought further, and for a serious Christian, apostolic authority has weight.
2) That being said, the whole issue of the “just war” comes up, and I believe that apostolic authority allows for it, to a certain degree (see Romans 13:4 ), though my Mennonite friends would disagree with me. But the New Testament also sets some parameters for the idea. I don’t think nuclear war could possibly fit within it.
3) War is generally, according to Scripture, the result of sinful man’s desire to have more than his/her fare share, in other words, it is the result of fear, because we can’t trust God that He will take care of us. see, for example, James 4:1-4 So a Christian always has a natural aversion to war; it is never good in an ultimate sense. If she/he takes part, it is because other factors pull us in. We know that “he who lives by the sword will die by the sword,” which happened also to good people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Which leads me to say about the civil war, that if I remember my history (and the historians out there are welcome to chime in and correct me): Shelby Foote shows very well that it was not first of all about slavery, but about economics. Cotton was the South’s livelihood. Abolitionists were the perceived enemies of that. And economics are a people’s jugular vein (hopefully I won’t get blasted too much for using a worn-out analogy to: why did Hitler come to power in Germany?—because of economics, primarily; he promised and delivered jobs, prosperity, and law and order to allow for it—at least for a few years).
First, the easy one: Was the Revolutionary War justified from a Christian perspective. I doubt it. George the III was simply not that bad, certainly no worse than Nero, and Christians are told not to resist the Roman government of the early 60s A.D. Christian patriots will disagree with me, but we’ve been disagreeing for 200 years. John Wesley left North America because he did not support the Revolutionary war, but many of his Methodist followers did.
Now to the point, the Civil War. From this point in history, I’d say it didn’t have to happen, but I don’t think, contrary to what I’ve read by some others on this blog, that Lincoln really wanted it to happen. But basically, most Christians don’t have the level of influence to decide whether its going to happen, all we can do is join the side we think is more or less in the right, or protest and go to jail, if need be. When it comes to an issue like this, I think each Christian has to stand or fall before their Lord alone; each of us is responsible for the decision we make, because of the light we’ve been given. There are not pat answers. I could never share Robert E. Lee’s convictions, but then I was not there, and I do not understand all the ins and outs of it. Robert E Lee, thankfully, does not answer to me, either. But I respect greatly his convictions. I think I would have sided with the abolitionists (but not with the John Browns), but then that’s easy to say from this perspective.
To use the German analogy again, Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have never gone to war for Hitler. For one thing, he knew too much—his family had a lot of friends higher up in Berlin, and they knew what the Nazis were up to from the beginning. But many pastors who trained at his seminary went to the Russian front. They saw their duty as a citizen. Both Bonhoeffer, and many of his students, died for their convictions. And both, in a way, are a lesson to me.
Ramble, ramble, ramble. If anybody is still reading, maybe just to say that from what I can tell in the New Testament, there are a lot of other issues where God also doesn’t really take sides. Probably because He is not really all that interested. I think He is more interested in our getting in on His side, and that doesn’t really include blowing people to bits.
Herb, I can’t resist chiming in even though it is off topic. Of course God doesn’t want people to blow other people to bits but in the face of evil God is on the side of good. With the Muslim terrorists, we are up against a similar form of evil that we faced with the Japanese in WW2. The Japanese were a cultlike, brainwashed, suicide oriented enemy. Sound familiar. An enemy that glorified torture, decapitation, and every other evil including rape. I think God celebrated with us when Truman ordered those atomic bombs to be dropped on the Japanese. It was fully justified and the right thing to do to stop the evil. And let’s not forget that when the Lord flooded the earth to eradicate the evil that man had proliferated, that may have been the equivalent of a nuclear event.
Yeah Dave, but “vengance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” The tension still exists, especially when we are the ones who start meeting out judgment. God sent the Flood, not the Bush administration. If we set ourselves up as judges, we had better make sure our own house is in order, and all I have to do is watch a smithereen of prime-time TV, and I am pretty sure it isn’t.
It occurred to me in the middle of my sleep-deprived night that one of the reasons we do not understand Robert E. Lee is because we have little concept of solidarity that they had back then. The idea of loyalty to our own family is foreign to too many of us; we’re all out for individual happiness. We don’t even honor contracts, let alone covenants. “The pursuit of happiness” in full bloom. I’m not sure that is what the Founding Fathers meant by the term . . . .
By the way, for what it’s worth, that last link above doesn’t work. Here is what it was supposed to be.
OK, still doesn’t work. Here is the verse:
MYTH OF THE UNINSURED
Socialists persist in the lie of 40,000,000 uninsured Americans (or 35,000,000 or 34, depending on which liar is making up the number ).
Here are some facts compiled by insurance companies and federal agencies:
* Everyone in America has access to the best care in the world, even if they have no money to pay the bills.
* Most of the uninsured Americans at any given moment are only uninsured temporarily because they are changing jobs and insurance plans.
* Most Americans without insurance for a long time can afford it but choose not to buy it. They are usually young people, in good health, with household incomes exceeding $50,000.
* The rest of the uninsured are illegal aliens who are working illegally at low-paying jobs which offer no benefits.
Thanks, Paul D. Unfortunately, enlightenment doesn’t do much for me. Action does. But, action’s not going to happen on this blog nor probably on any other. Maybe there’s one out there or one to come which can be a force in making improvements in our government and how we live. Maybe.
Lee,
A few points:
1) You’re partially right about emergency care. We probably have the best system in the world for acute care. The problem is that although no one is denied care in an ER, many people without insurance delay care because they know that they will be billed on the back end. As they wait the bronchitis becomes pneumonia, the mini-stroke becomes a devastating stroke, the warning signs of angina become a full-fledged heart attack before people are willing to come to the ER.
2) Lack of insurance is not a myth and not just healthy people who decide to forgo insurance they otherwise could afford.
You need to spend a week in my practice (I’m a general internist in Marion) so you could see up close the toll lack of insurance is taking on my patients, almost none of whom are illegals. Many of them had decent jobs at factories that left for overseas. There aren’t many prospects for a 50 year-old with only a high school education who has been working all his life at a textile job that is now gone.
In my practice I see patients who have heart attacks or limbs amputated that would have likely been prevented if they would have had insurance.
Besides the uninsured, there are millions more who are underinsured who don’t get the medical care they need or their medication because their insurance deductibles or co-pays are too high.
Certainly a single-payer universal health care system would have its problems, but I think a well-designed system would be vastly preferable to the patchwork we have now which rations health care by ability to afford insurance.
Thanks Paul. Excellent post. I left the Goldwater side years ago because I saw who supported him (the priviliged class), and got to know a little bit of what it means on the other side. A nation that leaves its weak over to the wolves is a sick nation, just as much as one that destroys personal incentive.
I have seen a universal health care system work, but the key to it seems to be is two-fold: 1) everyone has to pay into it (it won’t work if people want to wait to get insured after they get sick; 2) the fat has to be kept out of it. Providing “Kur” for everybody who wants to spend a few weeks at a health spa like the Germans do is a recipe for bankruptcy.
But how do we prevent the politicians from turning such a system into an opportunity to build in fat giveaways in exchange for votes? It has to be kept trim.
And the health provider needs to encourage regular check-ups. I got a voucher every year in Germany to go in for a routine check-up. Evidently they figured it was worth their investment (Germany’s system is not national health, it is run by state regulated providers; you can choose your provider–I chose one that concentrated on teachers like myself.)
I couldn’t afford insurance when we came back here, working for a non-profit company. Insurance companies wouldn’t take me (if you’re over 50, or you’ve lived in Europe, they don’t want you), and COBRA was way out of sight. I don’t have any signs of Creuzfeld-Jakob disease, by the way, and I’m not overweight. The only thing I really suffer from is Restless Leg Syndrome. So I had to settle for a Christian group that shares needs. But even they don’t encourage regular check-ups, which they should, and everyone should be able to take advantage of.
UNINSURED BY CHOICE
The Census Bureau recently reported that the number of Americans without health insurance rose in 2002 to around 43.6 million, up from 38.7 million in 2000 but below the record 44.3 million who were uninsured in 1998. With health care costs increasing, many public health advocates are worried that this number might rise further. Why do more than 43 million Americans lack health insurance? Who are they?
Income and Insurance.
A common assumption is that most uninsured Americans simply cannot afford the cost of coverage. However, the evidence points to other factors in many cases. For example, during the last decade, the ranks of the uninsured have increased among affluent households and decreased among low-income households. [See the Figure.]
* From 1993 to 2002 the number of uninsured people in households with annual incomes above $75,000 increased by 114 percent.
* The number of uninsured in households with annual incomes from $50,000 to $75,000 increased by 57 percent.
* By contrast, the number of uninsured people in households with incomes under $25,000 fell by 17 percent.
About three-quarters of the rise in the number of uninsured over the past four years has been among households earning more than $50,000 per year, and almost half of that has occurred among households earning more than $75,000 per year. In fact, almost one-third of the uninsured now live in households with annual incomes above $50,000 and one in five live in households earning more than $75,000 annually.
– there’s more… at NCPA
“Single-payer system” is a dishonest euphemism.
It’s use seeks to obscure the fact that socialized medicine is a MINORITY PAYER system, where the few productive members of society pay for everyone else’s medical care.
The non-payers abuse the system at every opporunity, which forces the State to ration care, degrading care for everyone except those with political connections and enough money to fly to the USA for treatment.
Herb,
You are a great guy, but man, we live in different worlds. I live in the paycheck-to-paycheck world. I live in the have to use credit cards to eat world. I live in the two people working to pay the mortgage (and still be behind) world. I live in the rotating shift world. I live in the haven’t had a real vacation in ten years world. I live in the not having insurance half of the time world. I live in the fix the overhead crane at 3:00 am in the freezing cold world. I live in a world where we use things like come alongs, wiggys, wrenches and saw zaws. Believe me, my fellow coworkers and I could use a little “Kur”-a little nice and easy for a change.
Until recently, clergy were exempt from paying FICA taxes, so I don’t pay much attention to the ones who claim to be for “saving” the Social Security welfare programs, or wanting socialized medicine for the rest of us.
This nation as a whole is so wealthy that you read constantly of how hospitals and doctors and foundations fly children in from Croatia, Peru, Bangladesh, etc. to receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in free medical care. Heart transplants, liver transplants, neurosurgery, you name it. The Robert Wood Johnson foundation gives hospitals and doctors millions for free care. A personal friend of mine who bounces from chef job to chef job as he feels likeit was between jobs, had stomach pains, went to emergency, and ended up with a $40,000 hospital bill. As he lay in bed preparing for discharge 4 days later, the hospital came and told him it was all scot free. RWJ funding would cover it. He went home, and in two weeks started a high paying job, again with no health insurance. This whining about lackof health insurance for all gets real old to me.
When I was a president of Rotary in the late 1980s, we provided more free heart operations for children than all the government programs combined.
As wealthy and generous as Americans are, the minority who produce that wealth cannot support the endless wants of those who don’t work, or are employed in the Overhead Class of government employees, much less the tens of millions of illegal aliens.
Nice try, Lee, but I paid Social Security taxes, to the U.S in Germany, until I was able to go on the German system the last few years. (They don’t let you do both.)
And Mark, I’m not so sure we are so different. Both my wife and I work to make ends meet, too, though in an office, for the most part. No, I don’t have to work outside. And I did get a week’s vacation in last year though, but not this year.
The problem is, Mark, if you start this kind of thing, there is no end to it. But our differences are primarily philosophical. I assume the selfishness of man, because it’s true. Give him an inch, and he’ll take a mile. That is why the Swedish system just won’t work. Even the German one is bankrupt; you can’t fund this kind of thing. It has to be lean and mean.
By the way, I never had a “Kur” either. A lot of people use it for an excuse to go and stay in a health spa and sleep around. Which is one of the reasons the theologian Eugen Drewermann is so popular in Germany. He got his start at a “Kurort,” giving talks to people to reassure them that they aren’t guilty if they have an affair. They should always feel good about themselves. In the meantime, the Catholic church has taken away his right to teach, but he is still a popular radio speaker, at least he was when we left there in 2001.
Herb, are you claiming that the clergy, public school teachers, and government employees were not exempt from paying Social Security taxes until recently?
If so, you need to study up on that welfare program and why it is bankrupt now.
No, I am not claiming that. I am saying that I chose to stay in the US Social Security program out of my own free will. But the US does not want you to pay into two programs at once (e.g., U.S. and German); that’s why Social Security treaties have been established between the U.S. and most European countries.
Envy is sin, plain and simple. Sadly, the leftist socialists in this nation base most of their policies on class envy. Mark is the king of envy on this blog from what I see. He envys others vacations, envys others health care, others jobs, envys others homes, and on and on. The socialists want to drag the achievers of society down to their miserable level. Havent we seen that tried and failed in the Soviet Union, Cuba, Red China, and elsewhere? The one constant within that approach is that the “leaders” of the socialists somehow manage to live in splendor. Lush vacations, excellent health care, the best foods, travel to exotic locations. All of that while the worker’s lives are ruled by strict regulations on what you do, how you do it, when you do it, and where. No thanks, let’s keep the socialists policies out of the US.
Socialism is materialistic, anti-Christian, and immoral. It is a reactionary movement trying to turn back the clock of freedom brought about by free enterprise and its technology.
“All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.” — Acts 2:44-45
“Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. Then there will be equality, as it is written: ‘He who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little.’ ” — 2 Corinthians 8:13-15
‘ ‘What should we do then?’ the crowd asked. John answered, ‘The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same.’ “– Luke 3:10-11
“Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming upon you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workmen who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter.” — James 5:1-5
Mark, you have brought out some good, basic teaching from the New Testament (I thought yu didn’t regard Paul as authoritatiave though?), and it ought to give Lee pause to think before he labels anything “anti-Christian.” He and Dave seem to do lip-service to Christian teaching, while not allowing any checks on the greed which is inherent in unbridled capitalism.
The problem we have is the broader one. How do we apply principles of Christian discipleship to those, who unlike Lee and Dave, make no claim to follow Christ, or regard His teachings as authoritative? At some point, we have to “seal up his teaching among the disciples,” (see Isaiah 8, and it’s fulfillment in Matthew 13). You can’t “teach them all things I have commanded you,” if they aren’t Christians. Outside of the circle of committed Christians, how much should we expect? As long as you are quoting Paul, remember the first part of Galatians, chapter 6 (verse 10). Our responsibility begins with those who are of “the household of faith,” and only secondarily to those outside of it. (That age-old problem again — how much do we legislate righteousness for unbelievers?)
A good application of this principle, I think: You mentioned the problem of affording health insurance. If you are an active member of a church, and I think you are, check out this link. It is Christians getting together to practice, to some degree, what the early Christians did in Acts 2 and 4. Our monthly shares are less than half of the premiums that BCBS would have charged us (but they didn’t want me, anyway). You do have to promise to pray regularly for the medical needs of other members. It is not technically insurance, so there is no legal leverage against them, but we found them to be fair and very helpful, and trustworthy.
Oh, Mark, and by the way; I have yet to hear the first part of James 5 preached on in any church I have ever been in, whether liberal or conservative. I am reminded of something I read in Martin Luther’s works a few years ago (and I stupidly did not write it down, and have been unable to locate it since), but it goes something like this, in essence: “if we are not preaching Christ in such a way as to apply His truth the very situations where our congregations are living in disobedience to His Word, well, then we are only deceiving ourselves, for we are not preaching Christ, however loudly we may think that we are preaching Christ.
James’ letter needs to be basic teaching for the whole evangelical Christian community in North America today. Thank you again for quoting it.
I left out a preposition, please read “. . . apply His truth to the very situations . . .”
Herb, Whatever happened to “The Lord helps those who help themselves”? Envy, laziness, and sloth are all sins to Christians. A businessman who risks all he/she has to venture into a business, and then hires workers as the business grows, is doing God’s work. Then, you may get an employee like Mark who really doesn’t want to work, but who instead wants to “organize” fellow workers to take over the company. That is real Christian gratefullness if I ever heard of it. I strongly believe in helping those who want to help themselves, but the lazy and slothful, no way. We happen to have many like that in society today.
You’re welcome, Herb-it’s the least I can do.
That’s one reason why I like the church so much that I’m attending now-it’s half Gospels and half Epistles. In Sunday School we’ve been talking about “Spiritual Gifts” and prayer, and the sermons have been from Matthew, Mark, and James. Last Sunday the sermon was on divorce and the preacher did a good job on a difficult subject without sugar coating it. We’ve got some experts on Paul who teach Sunday School who really understand Paul on a level way above my head. I try to do a lot of listening. These people are for real Baptists too. It reminds me so much of the church that I grew up in that I want to jump for joy. We were singing, “Jesus Loves Me” today, and man did I have a good feeling.
Christianity teaches us to show genuine charity towards those less fortunate than ourselves.
The state taking tax money by force and spending it is not charity, but an arrogant and elitist perversion of charity.
Nothing happened to that quote, Dave. It isn’t from the Bible, and there isn’t really anything Christian about it. It is basically totally opposed to Christianity. We don’t experience the Lord’s help until we get to the end of our rope and let Him take over. God doesn’t help anybody who has already decided what he wants to do, and asks God to help him do it. God once said to Joshua, (paraphrased) “I’m not here to take sides, I’m here to take over.”
I guess I am not advocating socialism, and I am not advocating capitalism. The Bible doesn’t advocate either, as far as I can tell. There is a sense in which either system can work, if enough people are living under God’s authority enough to be “salt and light” in their society. God stands over all of us, and we have to answer to Him for how we live, how we treat other people, and the choices we make.
The problem with extremists of any sort, is usually that they almost always ignore the truth on the other side of the spectrum. We have to keep a balance, which is not easy. God speaks to businessmen, and to employees, both. I’m not saying I have all the answers. I’m just say that I’m sure extremists have even less of the answers.
And Dave, how do you know Mark doesn’t want to work? You may be jumping to conclusions, and taking him out of context. He is emphasizing one side of human responsibility, and you are emphasizing the other. In a sense, both things are true. And you didn’t really say how you would deal with James chapter 5.
The truth is that I love to work. My boss likes me. My boss’ boss really likes me. He sometimes calls me “whiz kid” (I’m 43 years old). So why the term of near endearment? Well, it’s basic capitalism at work here. You see, before I got there they were being charged $95/hr for what I do now for $18.25/hr. They have real trouble finding people who understand the older electronic CNC equipment as well as modern programming for PLCs (Programmable Logic Controls) and motor drives. I also program in LabView, C, C++, Java, and BlitzBasic (3D). I also do the wiring (correctly) and all the electrical/electronic troubleshooting. I go nonstop from 7:00am to quitting time (excluding breaks) and every time I turn around there’s one of my bosses looking over my shoulder getting an update and making a new project for me to do next. My desk is buried in schematics and manuals. I’ll never be able to finish. The thought of unionizing where I work now has never crossed my mind because the company, as far as I have seen, tries to treat people fairly and tries to provide good benefits and decent pay. Our problem mostly has to do with cheap imports undermining the company and the industry altogether. I give the company maybe two or three years max. Then we’ll all be out of jobs.
For most of my work life though, I’ve been an industrial electrician. I still do a lot of mechanical work too. You can look at my hands and you can tell that I work.
Mark, Good C# programmers who also understand the MSoft framework (not necessarily MS certified) are pulling $60 to $100 per hour right here in South Carolina. Why work for $18.50 when you can get that?
Herb,,,
Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress. Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.
1 Tim 4:15-16
That quote about “The Lord helps those who help themselves” came from the Apostle Paul in his email to the Corinthians. :}
Thanks Dave; I’ll have to see if I can hack into St. Paul’s e-mail. I wonder what kind of security system heaven uses?
Dave,
You had better get your Congressmen and Senators to stop bringing in droves of mediocre Indian programmers, because American management is being sold the false promise that you can be replaced with a foreigner at $8.00 an hour.
They don’t want to admit that a football stadium full of ordinary musicians cannot collaborate to create an opera that Mozart could write in a month.
American industry can compete on level ground, but our politicians are selling us out, by bringing cheap labor here, and using foreign aid to subidize competitors abroad.
Lee, from direct experience the programmers in India are fairly mediocre and jump jobs every 6 months. Most programming outsourcing is a futile waste of time. Mgt is using it to unload future pensioners (Americans) and dont care how much budget money is wasted. The most talented INdian programmers have come over here to experience real quality of life.
Herb,
I just took a look at the Medi-Share web page. Let’s talk about it later.
Thanks.
Herb, rumor has it Jesus used a Psalm Pilot. Oooooooooooooh that’s bad, I better get to work after that one.
Dave, I agree. I think GE, Microsoft and other companies who post fake job requirements ( PhD, 10 years, very specific skills $35,000 ) in order to bring in foreign temp workers is just to depress the overall wages they have to pay superior American workers. They can lose money on the Indians and toss they useless work in the garbage. The real savings are on the $20,000 less they paid the skilled American employees.
Mark, you can e-mail me if you want at herbbrasher@yahoo.com Just put something in the subject line from our previous discussions that makes it plain it’s you, as I obviously don’t open mail when I’m not sure who sent it.
That is a pretty low wage for what you are doing, but then I pretty much do the same for a non-profit. But hey, I pay at least $50 an hour for someone to help me with the network when it goes bonkers (and that’s bottom line, I am sure), and I had to pay almost $100 an hour to get someone to process MS Access files for me last year. I tried to learn Access well enough to do it, but decided it just wasn’t worth my time.
Mark’s wages for CNC and PLC programming is a bit above average for Columbia. That is what is holding back manufacturing in South Carolina. A skilled person can move to Atlanta and make 50% more, or to Charlotte and make 30% more. They both cost the same to live as Columbia, but management has a national and world mentality of competition.
Columbia management mostly just pays enough to hire less-experienced local workers from local businesses, not enough to attract someone here from another city with a good economy. Those who can, and want to, leave Columbia after getting a little experience.