[Mr Sauer is a retired lawyer living in Nevada City who currently serves on The Union’s editorial board. He drafted the following reply to a commentary by Ms Cheryl Cook, also a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, that was published in the 9sep14 issue of The Union. For readers having difficulty accessing Ms Cook’s commentary – ‘“To insure domestic tranquility” vs The Second Amendment’ – I have reprinted it below Mr Sauer’s reply. This post concludes with some of my remarks on Michael Savage’s just out Stop the Coming Civil War now on the best seller lists. gjr
20oct14 – Appended now are further developments that include Ms Cook's 20oct14 letter of resignation from The Union's Editorial Board. gjr]
Norm Sauer
Cheryl Cook’s recent essay describing the authors of our Constitution as “privileged, white, male property owners who protected slave owners . . . buying and selling family members. . ,” and continuing to condemn “. . . old people . . . able to recall every statesman from 238 years ago . . ,” but unable to appreciate the continued suffering of Blacks in the 1960’s, and that the real threat to domestic tranquility is the Second Amendment’s right of individuals to keep and bear arms, disparages America and its founding documents.
This rant is known as “deconstructionism” wherein nothing respected about our history remains untainted. The deconstructionist’s ploy is the de-emphasis, or even effacement, by posing a continuous critique, to lay low what was once high.
Cook’s essay tears down the old certainties upon which Western culture is founded and the foundations on which those beliefs are based. Sadly, I read her diatribe as an attempted erosion of our God-given inalienable rights, that “all men are created equal,” individualism, limited government, an educated and virtuous citizenry, and full republicanism.
I can only scratch my head with wonder at her contempt. What purpose does she seek to serve in her destruction of American Exceptionalism?
*****
“To insure domestic tranquility” vs The Second Amendment
Cheryl Cook (from the 8sep14 online issue of The Union)
The Constitution of the United States is more than a piece of parchment that lays in state in the National Archives or the pocket-size edition that We, the Old People, sometimes carry sandwiched between our Social Security and Medicare cards.
Our Constitution was written with the broad strokes of a feathered quill pen that left ample space for future debates through the decades. It is a blueprint for America.
Like silversmiths hammering silver and gold, statesmen debated and compromised until the document melded the liberty of the individual into a collective responsibility. “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union …”
Written in the summer of 1787, our Constitution reflected the philosophy and interests of its authors … privileged, white, male, property owners who protected slave owners and rejected the rights of women.
In this Land of the Free, cotton and tobacco landowners continued to grow wealthy on the sweat of slaves and established a culture where buying and selling of family members was as customary as sipping sweet tea on the front porch. Over generations of families being bought, sold and split apart, slaves had no choice but accept a life of learned helplessness.
While we secede into our own State of Paranoia, our bifocal glasses bent toward the borders, our grandchildren are being slaughtered in their classrooms.
A mere 65 years later, seven states with cotton based economies facing the end of slavery declared their secession from that Union established under our Constitution. They imprisoned ministers who preached against slavery.
They took up arms.
The Civil War was the deadliest war in American history, with 750,000 American soldiers dead in four years time. Deadlier than the Revolutionary War that prompted the new nation. Bloodier by far than World War II, the Vietnam War, and Iraqi War combined.
Americans shot and killed their own. Americans killed Americans.
The new Constitution had replaced the Articles of Federation with a new government that established and strengthened a strong central (federal) government with a chief executive, courts and taxing powers.
Over 150 years later, instead or working toward forming a more perfect union that balances a central government with the interests of individual states, voices are once again raised against the threat of the federal government.
In the past six years, there is an almost fanatical focus on “the document” and our loss of liberty. How is it that We, the old people, are able to recall every statesman from 238 years ago, but our memory diminishes when it comes to the real loss of liberty suffered by Americans in this country within our own lifetimes?
In the 1960s, the Southern states fought integration in the schools. Black citizens in some states could not sit in the same areas on buses or in drug stores, or use the same drinking fountains. Adults were stopped at the voting booth by state troopers with batons.
That’s loss of Liberty.
Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, Robert Kennedy, John F. Kennedy … assassinated for their political views and calls for social justice in their speeches.
That’s loss of Liberty.
Today, the central Constitutional challenge in America is not the suffering of citizens whose lives may be impositioned by the amount of ammunition in clips they can purchase at one time or the possible threat from illegal immigrants coming across our borders in search of work.
While we secede into our own State of Paranoia, our bifocal glasses bent toward the borders, our grandchildren are being slaughtered in their classrooms.
The real and present danger has proven to be the threat from within: the Second Amendment right of any individual to bear arms opposed to the good of the larger community … the sake of something greater.
There is an explosion in gun and ammo sales throughout the country.
More Americans have died as the result of gunfire since the assassination of Robert Kennedy, than all the wars in this country’s history since the Battle of Lexington, according to the Congressional Research Service and Centers for Disease Control Prevention.
There is an unmistakable pattern of unarmed black teens shot and killed by armed citizens and local police.
How far will the arc of the moral universe bend in search of justice? In 2014, it bends with the brilliance of candlewicks that illuminated the first drafts of the Constitution. It grows in strength and brilliance with the lanterns of the Civil War and the torches of the Civil Rights era when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 followed by the Voting Act in 1965. It now casts its laser beam on the cold, lifeless bodies of innocent children who were not protected by the Second Amendment.
Our legislators need to pull up their big boy breeches and stand up to those forces that fight legislation promoting gun safety and responsibility.
The Preamble of the Constitution declares the pledge to insure domestic tranquility. It is time that we turn our debate toward the relevance and consequences of the Second Amendment in the year of the Lord, Two Thousand and Fourteen.
Cheryl Cook, who lives in Nevada City, is a member of The Union Editorial Board.
*****
For years that predate RR I have witnessed the ideological fracturing of America. For the last eight years I have offered my observations on the scope and advance of this rift and concluded some time ago that we are beyond the tipping point – that save some miraculous outside event, there is no returning to a nation whose range of aggregate ideologies allowed us to remain ‘e pluribus unum’. To gather and focus the ideas and commentaries on this important national issue, I set up the ‘Great Divide’ category in these pages. There readers can find articles, links, and commentaries that record the progress of the country’s coming apart.
This topic and my observations have resulted in some of our leftwing readers of the progressive persuasion to attack me personally as some kind of outlier with a fevered brain who knows nothing of the true America. I have been called "unpatriotic" and a "traitor" for expressing these observations and beliefs. As an immigrant, some have even told me to go back to my country of birth. These are the same people who have made California what it is today, and are well on their way to fundamentally transforming America as per their leader’s promise, exhortations, and extra-constitutional mandates. We shiver to think of the Amerika that will be when they finally take unchallenged control. In the interval they do all they can to silence the voices that shine a light on their progress.
That the Great Divide appears more inevitable by the day, and that major national and international publications talk about the tendentious division and possible break-up of our country for progressives is a matter of either agenda driven denial, limited reading horizons, or simply gross ignorance in our nation’s Left contingent. As documented here and elsewhere, conversations between the factions and search for some operative middle ground continues futile because both sides subscribe to vastly different logics, histories, and worldviews.
The latest to herald this national reality is Michael Savage in his Stop the Coming Civil War that is now on the country’s best seller lists. Therein Dr Savage argues, since the two sides are so cheek-by-jowl marbled, that something like my description of the Great Divide may no longer be possible. From one review of the book, we read –
“Stop The Coming War: My Savage Truth by Michael Savage reads like a legal indictment. Our gifted author wastes no time in charging Barack Obama and the Liberal Democrats with treason. Using their own words against them, along with other documentation, Dr. Savage lays out the case for the abuse of power that is running amok throughout the Obama administration and the DNC. As one reads on and digs into the heart of the book, he presents the cold, hard facts on how our ′borders, language and culture′ are being assaulted on nearly every level. From the workplace to the universities. From our churches to the utility poles. America is being attacked from within.”
While those who seek to plan and control our lives continue their denials and castigations, I will give you my own report after I finish the book, and look forward to your reactions. (BTW, if anyone finishes the book before me and wants to write a review, please email it to me and I’ll post it as your byline.)
[20oct14 update] Today The Union published Mr Sauer’s letter (above), and it did not go down well with Ms Cook. She considered Mr Sauer’s response as an “assault” on her lengthy diatribe (also above), an assault that apparently gave rise to a hissy-fit of such magnitude that it caused her to resign from The Union’s Editorial Board. From the record it appears that Ms Cook also had other problems with the newspaper’s management. And for the record, I will miss Ms Cook's contributions in The Union as a member of its Editorial Board. And as a humble compensation I offer to post her bylines on RR where there are no word count limits, all sides of arguments are welcome, and the ideological spectrum of its readership is wide. In any event, I received an email with her letter of resignation along with the response that she would have wanted to have published along with Mr Sauer’s letter. They are both reprinted below (as received, no edits) so that readers can judge this kerfuffle for themselves.
*****
Dear Union Editorial Board Members,
The Union recently changed the policy on newspaper endorsement of political races allowing Stan Meckler to write a Letter to the Editor blasting local candidate, Jim firth, who is running for Grass Valley City Council. To my knowledge, that is the only piece that Stan has submitted on his own.
His seat was not even warm when Norm Sauer used his second piece to write an libelous character assassination against a fellow Board member , accusing her of having "contempt" , "attempting an erosion of our God given rights", and the destruction of our American experience."
One tends to wonder if these men are on the board to discuss, ponder, and write opinions on issues in our community, or as henchmen for Tea party/CABPRO .
This morning, Norms assault appeared in the Union without my response.
I attempted twice to garner a discussion on these matters by e-mail and by asking for a moment at our last meeting on October 15 to clarify policy when one member opposes another member's Other Voices in print. There was no discussion. Apparently, the Board does not "censor" the writings of board members, but I was certainly censored on both occasions.
Sadly, all I ever wanted to do with the Union was write….to express my opinion in writing. You expect a certain amount of flack from community members, but when you constantly put yourself out there , you also need to trust the support you get from your publisher and editor. I have lost faith in that support being fair and balanced.
Please remove my name from the membership of the Union Editorial Board. i no longer wish to be a part of the board or associated with the Union.
Cheryl Cook
*****
My response:
A study of American history is based on facts, not selective historical revision. In the September 8, 2014 Other Voices. I chronicled our ever-widening path toward liberty and equality for all through the writing of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Era. As we look back in history, most broad-minded Americans are able to reconcile that the lofty ideals of equality and liberty were drafted in a time in history when slavery was not only culturally accepted, but necessary to economic development.
Not only do I have a deep and residing respect for all of our nation's history, but I honor our Constitution for being the strength and foundation that affords me the confidence to speak our as a Progressive lady in a Conservative county. Would you deny me that freedom?
You accused my voice of "disparaging America and its founding documents" , harboring "contempt" , and bent on the "destruction of American Exceptionalism".
Truth be told, when one American questions another American's depth of patriotism and understanding of Liberty, it is rather the accuser's actions that diminish those individual God-given American freedoms.
Cheryl Cook
rebanesruminations.com 
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