Putting People in Boxes

On May 2, Jay Jamison, our local columnist, wrote that I think Americans are stupid, too stupid to manage their own affairs. He didn’t mention me personally, but his column repeated several times the idea that “the left views Americans as too stupid to make informed decisions.” Since I’m sure he puts me on “the left”, I get lumped together with everyone else he disagrees with. Too bad he didn’t ask me what I really think. He might learn something.

I think that putting all your political opponents into a box labeled “stupid”, “unpatriotic”, or any other nasty characterization, is a substitute for thinking. If everybody on the other side is incompetent or evil, then you don’t have to think about what they say. All their analyses of society must be wrong and their policy proposals defective.

That easy way out leads to troubling consequences. When I was young, each side of the argument about American involvement in Vietnam created boxes for their opponents. Many anti-war protesters labeled the police “pigs” and assumed every man in uniform was a blind tool of “the system”, willing to do violence to peaceful citizens who offered legitimate criticisms of our foreign policy. But some policemen had children in the anti-war movement; others recognized the futility of our involvement in Vietnam and the duplicity of our government’s claims about how we were winning. But it was easier to call them all pigs.

Many police, and those who gave them orders, put all protesters into a different box – long-haired pot-smoking hippies who had no discipline, no ambition, no guts. So the ideas of the anti-war movement must be drug-induced fantasies, the motivations of protesters must be juvenile. In fact, the war was protested by housewives and grandmothers, doctors and professors, soldiers and veterans. But it was easier to swing a billy club at protesters, if you thought they were all unworthy.

This tendency to denigrate all political opponents led to the worst excesses of both sides. The FBI assumed that Martin Luther King was a communist, so they tried to undermine the civil rights movement. Anti-war militants planted bombs in government buildings and killed innocent people. Before the Ohio National Guard pointed their guns at unarmed students at Kent State and shot them, they put all protesters in a box labeled “dangerous radicals”.

In fact, it’s pretty easy to see that “the other side” is just like us. Some are smart and some are not. Some are motivated by a generous desire to help others, and some are just self-interested.

So does “the left” think Americans are stupid? A big claim like that needs a lot of evidence. Jamison gives exactly zero examples. He cites an article by Bobby Jindal, the Republican Governor of Louisiana, as sufficient evidence, without telling us its content. Jindal isn’t much of an authority on Democrats: he is a professional partisan and is among the nation’s least popular governors. The article that Jamison cites provides the usual Republican talking points about the Affordable Health Care Act. Maybe Jamison doesn’t actually cite any evidence from Jindal’s article because it doesn’t prove his point about “the left” at all; see for yourselves at cnn.it/1kohkdd.

Of course, it’s easy to find examples of Democrats saying things that imply they think that voters are not well-informed. Politicians do it all the time. Many positions of leading Republican politicians are founded on their hope that voters have no idea what’s going on. Think about “death panels”, or their claim that global warming is a hoax, or their contention that massive election fraud is a justification for voter ID laws.

Shall we alter Jamison’s claim slightly to say that “the right” assumes the average American is ignorant? No. That would be falling into the same we/they, evil/good dichotomy that makes his article analytically useless. Some people on both sides say dumb things or say things which imply that voters are dumb. Others say smart things and treat voters as able to distinguish true from false. Blanket condemnations of the other side, by politicians or columnists, show little respect for the intelligence of readers or voters.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, May 13, 2014

Springtime in the Garden

For a gardener, spring is the most exciting season. One day, what looked dead shows signs of life. As long as humans have understood the natural world, spring has meant rebirth. Easter, the celebration of resurrection, and Passover, the re-creation of liberation, have their origins even further back in human social development, as do Holi, the Hindu festival of colors, and Nowruz, the first day of the year in ancient Persia. Human nature celebrates nature itself.

Springtime means cleaning. Things pile up during winter, inside and outside the house: leaves, boxes, twigs and branches, dust, mud. When the house is finally opened to the air, when warmth opens dormant plants, the big mess that winter leaves becomes apparent. Once the ground thaws, the most pressing garden work is spring cleaning. One garden after another gets a face lift, a hard scrubbing, a close shave. Removing all that wrinkly brown dead stuff reveals what has already begun. Smooth bright green sprouts are pushing through to the light.

Springtime means repair. Winter is harder on material objects than on the resilience of people. Although we may come back in the spring with more weight and a painful back, the warmth and movement of spring allow our bodies to repair themselves. The roof can’t repair itself. Garden objects that stand up during the winter take a beating and need our help. This winter a small pergola that we acquired with our house many years ago finally listed too far to ignore. Broken branches on our biggest tree, a sugar maple that has never been tapped, needed pruning. Stones and bricks that mark our gardens mysteriously twist and glide a bit each winter, until they no longer look the way we want. By repairing winter damage, we impose our constructive will on the forces of nature.

Springtime means anticipation. The shoot poking through the soil and the bud swelling on the branch mean flowers will soon appear. Eight months after we first moved in, our inaugural spring displayed the gardening dreams of past owners. Pointy sprouts became daffodils, the carpet of bright green shoots grew into lilies, while magnolias, viburnum and dogwood blossomed. Since then, I have added a dozen flowering trees and spread bulbs across many gardens. Now, well before flowers open, I relish the anticipation of their color and smell. I know they will be lovely, but exactly when will it happen? Although we’ve seen it all before, the final opening of protective leaves, unveiling flowers of many shapes and sizes, is always new and renewing.

Springtime means hope. Will there be more blossoms than last year? Will life get better? Unexpected blooms and unforeseen popular movements erupt in spring. The gathering of armed rebels in Lexington and Concord in 1775, the meeting of the Estates General in Paris in 1789, and the liberalization of communism in Prague in 1968 were encouraged by the hopes of spring.

By the time spring ends, many of these hopes have disappeared. The sweet spring flowers have dropped onto the garden, leaving dead heads that call for more work. The ubiquitous garden undesirables threaten to drown their weaker neighbors that we insist are the real plants. Many of winter’s messes are still all around; humans have not repaired all the things we have broken.

We keep trying. Nature and human nature cannot be reduced to our arbitrary rules of good behavior and proper breeding. When we try too hard for perfection, we make the worst mistakes: the 19^th-century passion for perfecting human society became sterilization, mass deportations and genocide in the 20^th. But still we must seek improvement.

Gardening takes patience. Planting some seedlings this year won’t make a garden next year or the year after. A clear vision of the future must be combined with the patience to keep tending immature plants. Even more patience is needed to nurture the immature children, the immature organizations and programs and systems we create. Not every plant will survive, nor look right if it does. Not every political reform will produce the desired results. Gardening and politics require constant correction.

Maybe we can do more than produce good gardens. Maybe we can produce better societies, if we keep trying.

Spring always comes back. We get another chance.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, May 6, 2014

Politicians Who Hate Government

Cliven Bundy is a thief who steals from the public. He is a wealthy rancher, but his own lands are not enough for him. He also grazes his cattle on public lands in Nevada. Until 1993, Bundy paid the proper fees for grazing rights. But then those lands were designated protected habitat for the desert tortoise, and Bundy declared that he did not recognize federal jurisdiction. Since 1998, a series of judges have ruled that he must remove his cattle. Bundy’s reply was, “I abide by almost zero federal laws.” Last year, a federal court warned Bundy that if he did not comply, the Bureau of Land Management would remove his cattle.

Early this month, the BLM sent federal agents to round up the trespassing cattle. Bundy called for armed rebellion. He sent out for support from the militia movement, who reject the authority of the US government. Dozens of armed men arrived at his ranch to confront federal officials.

“We're about ready to take the country over with force!” Bundy said. Armed Bundy supporters shut down nearby Interstate 15, backing up traffic for three miles in both directions. In a radio interview, Bundy said, “I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing.”

Then a surprising thing happened. Elected officials from Nevada and all over the country openly sided with the man who denounced the government they work for. And they’re all Republicans.

First came Nevada politicians. Governor Brian Sandoval said, “No cow justifies the atmosphere of intimidation which currently exists nor the limitation of constitutional rights that are sacred to all Nevadans.” Nevada Senator Dean Heller called Bundy and his supporters “patriots”.

Then other faraway Republicans, especially those with big ambitions, joined in. Texas Governor Rick Perry told FOX News, “I have a problem with the federal government putting citizens in the position of having to feel like they have to use force to deal with their own government.” Texas Senator Ted Cruz characterized the armed standoff as “the unfortunate and tragic culmination of the path that President Obama has set the federal government on. . . . we have seen our constitutional liberties eroded under the Obama administration.” Kentucky Senator Rand Paul completely misunderstood the legal background of the case and asserted that “the federal government shouldn’t violate the law” by taking away Bundy’s rights. Mike Huckabee, on the early presidential campaign trail in New Hampshire, said, “There is something incredibly wrong when a government believes that some blades of grass that a cow is eating is so an egregious affront to the government of the United States that we would literally put a gun in a citizen’s face and threaten to shoot him over it.”

The stars of the Republican Party lined up on the side of a man who owes us $1 million, illegally grazes his cattle, disdains the whole federal government, and invites armed militiamen to disrupt people’s lives in Nevada. Apparently armed rebellion against the federal government is okay, if the rebels are conservatives.

Then Cliven Bundy opened his mouth again. “I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro. They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?”

Suddenly his Republican supporters jumped ship. Heller condemned “Bundy’s appalling and racist statements”. Paul said, “His remarks on race are offensive.” Cruz agreed: “Those comments are completely unacceptable.”

Embarrassing. But even more embarrassing is the hypocrisy of the Republican politicians who tied themselves to Bundy’s disdain for the rule of law. All they knew about him was that he offered armed resistance to the government of which they are a part, the powers of which they swore to uphold. Have they gone to the other side?

No. These same Republican politicians are praying for victory in the next election. They want to take over Congress in 2014, and then the Presidency in 2016. What then? Will they line up behind those who resist their powers?

Never. These fair weather friends of Cliven Bundy don’t hate government – they only hate liberal government, government in the hands of their Democratic opponents, who have won recent elections. But they are playing a dangerous game by attacking “government” in general and supporting armed rebels who reject federal authority. Those rebels aren’t conservative. They are racist militants who recognize no law and order except their own. Politicians who support them are as dangerous to our constitutional way of life as Cliven Bundy and his militia buddies.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville, IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, April 29, 2014