“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”
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Author: Redactor
Americans too often forget how ugly politics used to be. In the 19th century, “tarring and feathering” was just one terrible way among many of “making a point.” Drenching somebody in hot tar is painful; putting feathers on that someone and sending them running was humiliating, as well.
And a sign of horrid cruelty.
Politics, which (we should remind ourselves) is how we publicly decide who gets to use the awesome and awful powers of the state (itself known to be the cruelest of cold monsters), can’t help but conjure up hate and violence. We must remain vigilant against that tendency.
So the recent killing of a Democratic campaign manager’s cat — actually, his child’s pet — and its desecration with the word “liberal” marked on it, has a context.
But that context is no excuse. It’s an incredibly sick, deranged, hateful act. We should all hope justice prevails.
The campaign manager responded reasonably, condemning whoever did it without casting blame about blindly. Too bad I can’t say that about the comments to the article on ThinkProgress.org. Many commenters there blame all “conservatives,” right-wingers, Rush Limbaugh, et al.
Like racist rhetoric, this paints blame with a wide brush, holding a whole group of people responsible for what one person in that group does. Shameful. But it’s even a bit worse in this case, since the guilty person has not been caught, so we don’t even know who did it or whether that person was actually a “conservative.”
Isn’t it time to get past blind hatred of the “they”?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On April 10, 1778, Commander John Paul Jones and his crew aboard the USS Ranger set sail from Brest, France, headed toward the Irish Sea to raid British warships, the first mission of its kind during the Revolutionary War. Jones is remembered as a “Father of the American Navy.”
On April 10, 1942, the day after the surrender of the main Philippine island of Luzon to the Japanese, the 75,000 Filipino and American troops captured on the Bataan Peninsula began a forced march to a prison camp near Cabanatuan. During this infamous trek, known as the “Bataan Death March,” the prisoners marched 85 miles in six days, with only one meal of rice during the entire journey. By the end of the march, which was punctuated with atrocities committed by the Japanese guards, hundreds of Americans and many more Filipinos had died.
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Gen. Douglas MacArthur
“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency.”
“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”
Thank goodness the CIA didn’t investigate my preschool drawings. I went wild with pencil and pen, drawing such mayhem that surely my parents should have been hauled into a klieg-lit interrogation room.
But they weren’t. Such dystopian dynamics had to wait a few decades and befall 4-year-old Nevaeh Sansone and her father, Jessie Sansone, of Kitchener, Ontario.
At school, Nevaeh drew a picture of her father holding a pistol. What was her father doing with the gun? Reportedly, little Nevaeh informed adults, and I use that term loosely, her dad was “getting the bad guys and monsters.”
No wonder, then, that when Jesse Sansone came to pick up Nevaeh and his other kids at school, he was picked up, instead, by police.
The child’s concerned teacher had tattled to school officials, who then contacted Family and Children’s Services, who brought in the, uh, big guns — who arrested and strip-searched the child’s father.
Waterloo Regional Police Inspector Kevin Thaler informed reporters that Nevaeh and her siblings told police where in the house the gun was stored and that the children had accessed it.
“It is a four-year-old that we’re taking the information from,” Thaler explained, “but the fact is that this disclosure was very descriptive and very alarming to the officers investigating this.”
He elaborated: “The kids were scared.”
Yeah, I’ll bet they were.
After several hours of harassing the children, humiliating the father and scaring the pregnant mother, the cops figured out that the gun was a toy. According to the father, it was “completely transparent. It doesn’t even resemble a real gun, at all.”
Fake gun. Real panic. Foolish, fear-ridden officialdom.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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David T. Dellinger
“Our experience of the governments of the world, our knowledge of the weapons at their disposal, and our awareness of our own limitations justify pessimism. But some mysterious factor deep in the human psyche has produced a countervailing conviction that educating, organizing, uniting, and acting will make a difference.”
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Chicago 8 plead not guilty
On April 9, 1969, the “Chicago Eight,” indicted on federal charges of conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, pled not guilty. The eight antiwar activists were David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee (NMC); Rennie Davis and Thomas Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party (“Yippies”); Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers; and two lesser known activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines. The defendants were ultimately found not guilty of conspiracy, but the jury convicted all but Froines and Weiner of intent to riot. Though the others were each sentenced to five years in prison and fined $5,000, none of the defendants served time because in 1972 a Court of Appeals overturned the criminal convictions.
Did you catch my column this weekend? It’s called “Nonsense, Precedented and Petrified,” and it takes on a common mistake, this time made by one of the better columnists out there.
Here are links in my column worth checking up on:
- Obama and the Mother of All Tyrannies(David Harsanyi in Reason)
- Obamacare (Wikipedia article)
- Liar in Chief (Common Sense)
- Do you trust the people? (Townhall)
- National Popular Vote (website)
Have a Happy Easter!
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Jomo Kenyatta, Kenyan Mau Mau leader
“If Africans were left in peace on their own lands, Europeans would have to offer them the benefits of white civilization in real earnest before they could obtain the African labor which they want so much. They would have to offer the African a way of life which was really superior to the one his fathers lived before, and a share in the prosperity given them by their command of science. They would have to let the African choose what parts of European culture could be beneficially transplanted, and how they could be adapted …”
On April 8, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized almost $5 million to implement work-relief programs, hoping to lift the nation out of the Great Depression, after Congress allowed the president to use the funds at his discretion. FDR created the Works Progress Administration from the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, one of several New Deal programs he hoped would relieve massive unemployment. (Like recent efforts, it didn’t work.) After 1935, FDR lobbied Congress annually to continue funding the ERA Act. In total, the act allocated approximately $880 million in federal funds.
On April 8, 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt froze wages and prices, prohibited workers from changing jobs unless required by the war effort, and barred rate increases by common carriers and public utilities to check inflation.
On April 8, 1952, President Harry Truman called for the seizure of all domestic steel mills to prevent a nationwide strike.
On April 8, 1953, Mau Mau leader Jomo Kenyatta was convicted by Kenya’s British rulers and sentenced to seven years imprisonment with hard labor and indefinite restriction thereafter.