George Rebane

Democracy and Morals.  In the 17apr18 WSJ there was an exemplary letter on this topic, and it is posted below.

It is hard to disagree with William Galston’s contention in “The Perpetual Battle for Freedom” (Politics & Ideas, April 4) that in liberal democracies the preservation of freedom for all rests on a bedrock of fair opportunity for all.

One guesses that most people agree with Mr. Galston’s all-for-one and one-for-all sentiments, but we might not find as much common ground when it comes to what is necessary and right to heal our country. As we jettisoned Judeo-Christian values and “bourgeois norms,” our culture embraced behaviors that are impediments to achieving the American dream—at least without a massive helping hand from government. It now is deemed offensive to say that a path out of a cycle of poverty is to have children after getting married, finish high school (and, preferably, college) and find a job. Telling someone that religious faith is linked to happiness and personal generosity also is frowned on. Too many in the afflicted groups cited by Mr. Galston don’t want help from individuals doling out charity out of the goodness of their big hearts. They want help that they feel entitled to from a system that they think has let them down.

It is far easier to address partisan rancor than it is to settle on core values and collective responsibilities in our new secular-progressive culture. I suspect that restoring traditional values isn’t what most progressives have in mind when they define what they know in their hearts is necessary and right to heal our country. Collective responsibility for individuals and individual freedoms for the collective may be an unworkable formula for a secular-progressive society.

Jay Carter, Silver Spring, Md.

Mr Carter draws our attention to a society that just a short time ago would have been deemed unbelievable.  Political correctness expands and mutates faster than Newspeak and global alliances did in Orwell’s 1984.  I want to add to your thoughts the consideration of a democracy as a commons that must needs suffer all the weaknesses that Garrett Hardin described in his 1968 landmark essay The Tragedy of the Commons.

Reckless and criminal parents.  To go along with the above look into progressive insanity that has firmly ensconced itself in our fair land, I draw your attention to another well written summary on today’s draconian principles – enforced by the government gun and prison time and potential loss of your children – that dictate what parents can(not) do with their kids.  And we wonder where all these snowflakes came from.  Here’s an apropos letter from the 16apr18 WSJ.

Let me see if I have this correct: Contemporary American children as young as five years old are considered educated and wise enough to choose their gender, which will have life-altering affects due to the nature of how the brain hard-wires itself at such a young age, yet allowing children of any age the free range and responsibility to simply play up the street from their own home is a prosecutable crime. (“Parents, You Can Stop Helicoptering” by Lenore Skenazy, March 30).

It’s the absolute truth to say virtually everything my parents did to raise me and my four siblings back in the 1960s and ’70s is illegal and prosecutable by today’s standards. Who knew my parents and other adults in those days were so reckless and criminal?

America has become a very sick society, and if the whole of the population doesn’t take a deep introspective examination of itself then the social damage will be too deep to correct. The tragic irony is that all this child-protecting excess in today’s America is having the unintended consequence of creating the exact opposite environment to producing happy, healthy children who grow up to live as well-adjusted adults. It’s tragic.

Kevin A. Capps, Corona del Mar, Calif.

[22apr18 update]  Jonah Goldberg, editor of the National Review and Fox News commentator, has written a new book (see cover image) with an accompanying essay (here) which I just finished reading before ordering the book that comes out this Thursday.  The essay and the book are scholarly extensions of what we have been discussing on RR for over a decade – The death of Western culture, the impetus for a Great Divide, and the assault on the “miracle” of liberal-democracy and capitalism.  For progressives – especially the local liberal worthies who continue believe that all such thoughts are the ravings of the few, the old, the isolated – who really want to know the historical basis for what has rendered us into a polarized nation with no visible means of rapprochement, they should read Goldberg.  There is little/no hope of changing minds, but as we shout at each other over the growing chasm, understanding what the other thinks might be important to know.  (more here and here)

[24apr18 update]  Lack of housing for the homeless concerns the Rev Becky Goodwin in the 24apr18 Union.  After giving us her lifetime resume of good works, she laments the shortage of needed affordable roofs over the heads of Nevada County’s homeless population (indigenous and imported).  Her best advice is to have rental unit owners lower their rents to charity levels so that those needing low cost housing can afford to live there while the landlord loses money (and can’t get rid of his new found ‘permanent’ renters).  Unfortunately, the dear lady shows no understanding of the difference between market-driven low cost housing and government-mediated affordable housing.  She makes no appeal to our county’s governments to roll back regulations on developers who would gladly supply the appropriate low cost housing that would satisfy demand, and perhaps too well.  But we continue to muddle forward with California’s horrendous self-inflicted homeless problem repeating our Board of Supervisors’ mantra, ‘There’s nothing we can do about building regulations.’

The animal shelter kerfuffle.  Placer County is bidding against Nevada County’s contractor Sammy’s Friends to become our next animal care and adoption agency.  Placer County’s facility is in Auburn where you would have to go to adopt an animal should you be so disposed.  I haven’t a clue why we just don’t give the contract to the most distant bidder available so as to minimize the somewhat questionable tendency of some people wanting to bring the mutts back to Nevada County.  I suspect that many of them will be recycled into that ‘catch and release’ program when the adoptive owners go through their ‘Oh s#!t’ experience with their new critter sporting a dubious/unknown resume.  To show the unique tinges of insanity in our new progressive culture, Nevada County stores display at checkout counters about three to four contribution boxes for critters for every one for humans.  I guess that’s because it’s the gummint that’s supposed to help humans, and there’s no one else to keep the unwanted animals out of our gasless euthanasia chambers.

SacBee on the slippery slope to the great beyond.  A correspondent gives us a heads up that this much celebrated liberal rag cannot make it in the capital of America’s socialist vanguard.  The recent round of layoffs cuts through the meat and right into the bone.  Their “job cuts includes (sic) 14 journalists, 12 of whom were represented by the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Another eight positions were cut from the newspaper’s production department, said Ed Fletcher, a reporter at the Sacramento Bee and a representative of the guild.”  They have been a ‘woke’ newspaper in the heart of liberal land, and still nobody gives a crap about the pabulum they continue to spew.  All that their former readers want is more ‘social justice’ that is measured by a bigger government check.