Decency?

Young children are easily frightened.  They tend to believe what they are told. (Years ago my daughter spent a few days at her Montessori pre-school in stressful worry because one of the neighborhood brats had told her that her parents would drop her off at the school one day and never come back to get her. It was all we could do to get her to tell us what was bothering her.) Unnecessarily frightening a kid intentionally is repulsively wrong.  Doing so  and then exploiting that fear for some sort  of gain or advantage  is worse.  

That is what leftist politicians, school teachers, and media people are doing to children to promote and get publicity for their schemes to deal with “climate change”.  Whatever one thinks about  much the climate is warming and how much human activity is responsible for it, the world is not about to end. No Armageddon is upon us. We will not all be dead in one, ten, twelve or, according to some green prophecies, minus several   years.  Yet the lefties are scaring ignorant kids to death with apocalyptic nonsense and then using them as props for political theatre.

It is time to remember a question from history and ask  them “at long last, have you left no sense of decency?”.  On the evidence the answer would be no. They should be ashamed, and they certainly should be called out. Politics is a nasty game, and we should not expect its players to behave honestly or  honorably, but it is not too much to demand that they pick on people their own size and  leave the poor kids alone.

Beto O'Rourke, Gun Enthusiast

It is unfair to Bobby Frank O’Rourke and his associates  Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Pete Buttigieg to charge them with being “anti-gun”. These people love guns. They need guns.  They depend on guns. The things they want to do to the country are accomplishable (if at all) only at gunpoint. They are not in the business of inspiring or persuading other Americans  to do what they want. They don’t expect people to go along with them voluntarily. They plan to use the government to  force us to do so, and government power comes - in the words of a famous advocate of strong,vigorous central government -  from the barrel of a gun.

What they object  to is guns, and thus the means for self-defense, in  the hands of private citizens. Helpless and defenseless people are likely to do as they are told. People with options and capacities for exercising them may decide not to obey orders.  Americans are stubborn enough about not  following the dictates and wishes  of their assorted  would be masters in the political and bureaucratic classes.  Knowing that they have the ability - as a last resort if things ever get bad enough to justify it -  to resist very effectively and having the would be masters know it as well only tends to make them more so.

Millions of Americans who own firearms are peaceful people who are no threat to their neighbors or public safety. The leftist politicians who want to disarm them know this. Yet they persist in trying to disarm them. There probably are various reasons for this. However the safe assumption for people to make is that anyone who wants to make you helpless may have something unpleasant in mind for you.  It is also the natural one.

Gone with the Wind

Gone With the Wind is best known now as  the famous movie from 1939, but before being made into a movie, it was a very popular novel  by Margaret Mitchell. I picked the book up a few days ago after not having read it since I was in junior high.  Then, as well as I remember, I paid attention mainly to the colorful story of the two main characters. This time I noticed some of the ideas and opinions.

The book was published in 1936. Appomattox was nearer in time to that year than the end of World War II is to today.  Strong feelings and even passion about the events of the Civil War and reconstruction were common among people in the south. The author was a southerner, a Georgian, and she peppered  the book with propaganda and apologetics  for the old south and its “glorious cause”.

Some of it is plausible or accurate. The life of some plantation owners was elegant and genteel. There probably were some dashing cavaliers and charming ladies. Some of the northerners who came south during reconstruction were shifty crooks on the make.  Some freed slaves did become criminals.

However much of it is false and/or wrong and  often offensively so.  There is the old claim  that the southern states left the union over states’ rights. Andersonville is excused and even blamed on President Lincoln for ending the practice of exchanging prisoners of war in 1863 without mentioning that  the Union army  stopped exchanging prisoners because the confederates would not exchange black Union soldiers – seeing them as slave property rather than prisoners of war.  Slaves are almost uniformly presented as well treated, content,  and devoted to their owners, and the  liberated  black people during  reconstruction usually  presented as lost, shiftless, alienated, often dangerous, and generally worse off and less happy than when they were in bondage.  The author justifies the Ku Klux Klan as a beneficial force for law and decency, necessary to protect southerners and especially southern women from the depredations of black ex-slaves, carpetbaggers,  and Union soldiers.  The Georgia legislature’s refusal to ratify the 15^th Amendment is hailed as a gallant and bold  though futile act honorable defiance.  She bemoans the fact than many ex-confederate officers were not allowed to vote during reconstruction, ignoring that  these men were traitors and as such were handled leniently by victors who refrained from hanging or imprisoning them.  She treats the planters’ post war loss of wealth as sad and almost tragic rather than a  consequence of the war the confederates started and a natural  result of freeing the human beings who produced and made up much of that wealth.  

The author seems fine with the institution of slavery and definitely nostalgic for a society based on it.  The book was a bestseller (and won both the national book award and a Pulitzer Prize for fiction), and the ideas and opinions  it displays were  held by many people, both at the time of its publication and later. The story is  colorful, and Rhett and Scarlett are interesting  characters, but the pleading and propaganda do get in the way.  All in all it can make a person even more appreciative of William Tecumseh Sherman.