This piece will be appearing, as a newspaper op/ed, in my very red congressional district (VA-06).
I live in very red rural Virginia Trump country, with 2nd Amendment “militias,” right-wing trolls and hostile impulses of the “anything to defeat the enemy” and “own-the-libs” variety. All the basic signs of what the Republican Party has become in our time.
It is the once-conservative people among whom I live that I have in mind when I write my messages to that world through my newspaper platforms. (Appearing once a week in the main newspaper in my area at the upper reaches of the Shenandoah Valley, and once or more a month in the newspaper for Lynchburg, Virginia, where Falwell’s Trumpian Liberty University has dominated in a very unChristian way.)
With those op/eds, I give it my best effort to have a beneficial impact — on that portion of Trump’s base accessible to me — on the balance of power between the destructive force that they are supporting — a force that advances the opposite of the values these conservatives claim to hold — and “the better angels of their nature” that I had the opportunity to get to know, doing talk radio conversations with them back in the 90s.
I never know what impact, if any, I’m having.
Like with the following op/ed “message” to Trump country.
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Patrick Henry (“Give me Liberty or give me Death”) famously presented “Liberty” and “Death” as alternatives. But in America today we find a troubled and troubling notion of Liberty in which Liberty and Death come packaged together.
How many on the right, for example, would reject that famous idea, “No one is free to falsely shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.” That question arises concerning the armed men seen recently in Michigan denouncing the lockdown – instituted to stop the spread of the pandemic -- as an act of tyranny and an infringement of their rightful liberty.
The great Supreme Court justice who penned that famous line about shouting “Fire!” was saying that the right of free speech –as essential as it is – is not so absolute that it allows one to act with reckless disregard for the public safety. (Because a false cry of “Fire!” threatens to panic a crowd into a deadly stampede.)
Our founders gave us rights. But they also wanted the nation they were founding to be able, when necessary, to implement coordinated strategies to protect the people’s collective well-being. (Which is why the draft, for example, has not been declared unconstitutional.)
Powers to implement quarantines have long been recognized, as a legitimate means to minimize the loss of life during a dangerous epidemic. These have been considered necessary infringements on our liberty.
(Accordingly, in response to this pandemic, virtually every free and enlightened nation on the planet has instituted some such systematic limitations on people’s freedom to spread this deadly disease.)
Yet there is a political strain in America that consistently treats individual rights as absolute, even when the nation’s collective well-being is serious jeopardy.
The same political subculture that denounces as tyrannical the necessary measures to control a deadly pandemic likewise argues that their “right to bear arms” is absolute – that it cannot be restricted in any way to protect public safety.
They reject the idea that some balance is necessary between “rights” and public safety: i.e. reject the idea that, just as the right of free speech does not extend to causing a deadly stampede, so the fact that our nation has a homicide rate ten times that of other free nations indicates the need to find an optimal balance between individuals’ rights “to bear arms” and the right of the people as a whole to be protected against wanton gun violence.
From that same political subculture, we also get consistent opposition to instituting any coordinated measures to meet the challenge of the global climate crisis.
None of these challenges – pandemic, rampant gun violence, climate disruption – can be met by people acting individually. Each, rather, requires a coordinated, collective strategy.
That’s the context in which I consider those men around the state capital in Michigan protesting against the measures required to minimize the damage to the American people inflicted by this pandemic.
I wonder: How do these people – who discount so thoroughly the legitimate needs of the society as a whole – see their relationship to society? Are they indifferent to ideal outcomes where our society
- successfully navigates the climate challenge to avoid harming our children and grandchildren and the future of our species;
- finds an optimal balance between the rights of individuals to have firearms and the need of the society to avoid that American slaughter from gun deaths that’s off the charts for free societies like ours;
- defeats the viral contagion that has invaded us, through us all acting as a team under good “wartime leadership,” to protect the vital interests of everyone.
All of which leads me to wonder: In view of this consistent discounting of the needs of the nation as a whole, what does thepatriotism of these people (like those who accuse Michigan’s Democratic Governor of being a tyrant) consists of?
What I’ve seen leads me to believe their patriotism is of the “We’re # 1” kind. The patriotism of “Make America Great Again” seems not about the “greatness” of an America that – as “the leader of the free world” -- leads the community of nations into a better future for all, but about an aggressive assertion of our nation as a dominant power that wins fights.
In other words, it seems that the “patriotic” stance toward the wider world repeats the same attitude that they have as individuals toward their wider society, i.e. an attitude of dominance and defiance that rejects whatever claim the surrounding world makes on them to help advance the greater good.
What’s at the root of such an attitude
- that seems indifferent to the common good;
- that, in the name of “Liberty,” rejects the right of society to require anything of them;
- that manifests angry defiance toward the collectively constituted authority required for effective coordinated action?
What I sense is a seriously broken relationship between self and world. Which suggests a wound that goes deep, and leads me to wonder what might contribute to that wound’s getting healed.