Posted on 04/09/2004 6:26:23 PM PDT by ParsifalCA
You know it is the political season when your children start to rate you and discuss your family poll numbers. Yesterday my darling children got up early and produced a five page manuscript covering my family tracking numbers for 2003 and the year to date. You will be pleased to hear that my job approval rating is up. However, this follows a trip to Toys R Us, which proves that you can indeed buy votes. The data was not all good news. As my six year old put it, “I was really down on you over the whole clean-your-room thing.”
As a philosopher, I draw one political lesson from this. Helping people do the right thing can be politically costly. Our president has discovered this fact, if he did not know it already, and I am not sure there is any national equivalent of Toys R Us, perhaps Tories R Us?, at which We the People can be placated.
There are many competing visions for the future of our nation. John Kerry represents at least five himself. Opponents of the President have one thing in common: they believe times are hard, too hard, and they long for peace.
Now peace is obviously a good thing. Peace is something everyone wants, but like all goods it has a cost. Is peace worth any price? My favorite news weekly recently ran a cover story on the elections in Spain. Hundreds of people stood in the rain with signs that my high school Spanish assures me read, “Peace.” What is the peace these Spanish voters want?
Peace for the socialists of Spain is not the good that any of the world’s religions or great philosophies seek. Peace for the socialists is the placated, drugged peace of the nursing home or of the government day care center. Too many people are like the woman commenting on the death of a seventy year old relative who said that it was tragic to see this man cut down “in his prime.” Life itself is at war with these people who want the “beautiful feeling that everything is going their way.” They fantasize that heaven has already come and the struggles have all ended.
This is the peace that values personal safety and affluence above God and country, above right and wrong. It is often difficult to tell from cowardice and selfishness. It is the spirit that led British university students to vote that they would not die for King and country in the 1930s. It is Neville Chamberlain coming home from a meeting with Chancellor Hitler waving a peace of paper in the air and proclaiming “peace in our times.”
Chamberlain was echoing the words of the Book of Common Prayer service. He was forgetting that this prayer for peace, this dream, is preceded by sacrifice and passionate giving of self for the sake of others. To evil, Christianity says, “Rise up O Men of God” and not “big hug.” The Bible has a special condemnation for those who cry “peace, peace when there is no peace.”
The modern Chamberlains, who lack the grace, education, and dignity of the original, are utopians. Having dispensed with reality in some post-modern fantasy, they live in a world as they wish it were not the way the world is. They look at one of the most robust economies of the last twenty years and mutter about Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. They see two nations liberated from barbarism and see only quagmire and chaos. They are utopians with some new crack brained scheme to create jobs while robbing the job makers.
These utopians cry for peace in this life, because the give and take of conflict soon exposes their fantasy. Free markets find their values wanting. Biology renders them impotent and nature’s God is at war with their values. Stress tests a person or a nation and they dread even the notion of a time of testing for their ideas are build on nothingness.
Plato once wrote of men who sat chained looking only at flickering images on the walls of a cave. These modern Chamberlains have done Plato one better for they wish to chain themselves to their lounge chairs and watch endless television. The peace of slavery, which makes all men equal, is their fantasy. The nanny state will care for them and help their unnatural desires and fantastic schemes seem plausible and real.
And then came an event like 9/11. It forced them to see reality. And they hate reality. Like children who resent being awakened for school, the utopians, living in a perpetual adolescence of extreme sports and video games, are angry not so much at the terrorists after the first shock, but at the adults who want them to get out of bed and do something about terrorism. You hear it in politicians who reserve their fiercest words for Bush and not for Bin Laden. You see it in voters who would turn out the victor of the Battle of Baghdad for the boater of Massachusetts Bay.
Grown ups know that dreams of personal peace are fine, but peace won without struggle is usually bought by compromise and promise of future tyranny. Grown ups know that Mr. Hitler will not go away by wishing he would. They understand that Stalin cannot be defeated by votes at the United Nations. They see that radical Islam will not be brought to book by finding the right placating French word.
Instead, of personal peace the adults seek peace for the family, long term peace, won by hard labor. In the nineties, we benefited from the sacrifice of the generations that came before us. World War II and the Cold War were won. Clinton could spend the peace dividend in a party that seemed endless while hiding from the challenges ahead. The White House was one long late night frat party, but the bill came due. After Clinton came the deluge.
Now the time of struggle has come, but this is not a cause for despair. In any challenge, the worst thing that can come is death. But death comes to us all and the only death that is really a tragedy is the death that comes at the end of a life spent only on self. Better to die in Kabul securing justice and so gain immortal fame, than to die choking out a last breath in a nursing home, having bought time with the freedom of our children and grandchildren.
The call for this generation is to seek justice for the Middle East. It is to stand with Israel and rebuild Iraq. This justice will not come easily.
It cannot be legislated or wished into existence. It must be fought for and earned. Our standard of living may suffer just as it did in the Second World War and the Cold War. It will come following days spent on the bitter cold plains of Afghanistan and in the humid mud of Iraq. It will come by dealing American justice to the terror networks of Falujah. The American army has never failed to secure the victory when the home front remained strong. It will not fail at this task, though it take great time and treasure.
If their will were made law, the people carrying the signs for peace would guarantee only the peace of slavery. Instead, we are called to pick up the tools of war so that at the end of our labor we reap the real peace that comes from doing one’s duty. Americans know this. They will not return children to the White House. To paraphrase my favorite poet Blake, “we will not cease from mental fight. Nor shall our sword rest in our hand, ‘til we have built Jerusalem” in this green and pleasant land. CRO
copyright 2004 John Mark Reynolds
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