Kneeling for the flag: A different perspective

Here we go again. Football season is nearly upon us. With it comes a batch of politics that the fans, in general, do not want. Attendance is lower. Ticket sales are cheaper. Pretty soon the players who are protesting their unfairly bad treatment at the hands of their customers are going to find that their customers aren't paying enough money to give them those multi-million dollar salaries.

Ok, that was a bit of a dig at the process, and perhaps an unfair one, considering the point I've come to present today. We seem to have two sides to this issue. One side says that these players are doing something utterly necessary and justifiable, because of the problems that those who share their ethnicity face every day in this country due merely to being of that ethnicity. The other side says that no amount of problems justify disrespect to the country itself and its national symbols, as if the players are protesting, not their problems, but the very fact that America exists. They also may downplay or deny any problems being faced by this ethnicity and point to the powerful and wealthy football players themselves as proof that these one-percenters have nothing to complain about.

But let's step to the side for a bit and look at this through a different lens.

There's no denying that there is still injustice for black people, particularly black men, in this country today. A very carefully-done bit of research shows that they are less likely than whites to be shot by police (the very thing that the football players mention the most) in equivalent situations. However, in equivalent situations, police use unnecessary force on blacks, especially black men, more than upon whites. They are more likely to be searched, more likely to be stopped, and more likely to be treated poorly when they are stopped. Now many whites have one, maybe two "this policeman was an idiot" stories to gripe about. Blacks have more, and I can see how a tipping point is reached in which "this policeman was an idiot" becomes "policemen themselves have it out for me".

I can understand this because one of my great-grandfathers lived the same life, only worse. Because of his ethnicity, he lived in the poorest parts of town. Because of his ethnicity, he faced violence as a daily possibility. In a world that was getting electricity into regular homes, he lived in a dwelling no more sophisticated than an African tribal hut. He and his family often lacked for the simplest necessities - food, clothing - and faced, at best, a level of threat from others that was similar to the worst threat faced by blacks from the KKK. Even more so, his was the first generation that, due to government reforms, was actually permitted to go into town and learn a trade so that he could actually have a job; his parents worked very hard to sell a few meager supplies here and there, but were not allowed to be actual legal employees, due to and only due to their ethnicity.

Now that's notable. The country was changing. The threats were beginning to wane. The opportunities were starting to come in. Things were improving. But he wanted more and better, and he started engaging in protests against the government. Instead of working within the system to secure further liberties, he chose to speak against the system and wish it to be changed to a new one. Like the football players' message - and if they want to convey a different message, they really need to find a different method - he wanted a change of government rather than for the government to use its existing powers to bring about the change he wanted.

Ok, granted, I don't know to which extent this specific man wanted this specific goal. But I can tell you that, whether he wanted it or not, he got it - and the same people who are pushing the black football players' protest got into control in his own country. The same ideology that leverage black racial struggles into fuel for the revolutionary fire leveraged his racial struggles into fuel for their own revolutionary fire, and he twigged on very quickly (a survival trait, in this case) as to the purpose and eventual fate of fuel.

He fled Eastern Europe, Russian territory, for the U.S. right 'round the neighborhood of 1905.

I'm not going to praise the Russian Imperial Government. I don't have a strong favorable or unfavorable opinion of Tsar Nicholas II, though I question whether his children really deserved to be hunted down and shot in the dirt like dogs. I'm not even sure if the rights my great-grandfather was looking for would have been attainable through the system, though I have to say that it looked like they were on the right track. But I can say this: the Bolshevik Communism that replaced it had no inherent human rights (even during periods when the government temporarily conceded privileges that we in America would call 'rights'), and had no love for Jews. My great-grandfather and his people were tools, and fools, for a political system that didn't care about them beyond what could be profited from their blood, sweat, and tears.

It is from that perspective that I see the football players kneel. I don't try to minimize the struggles of their people or claim that they have no grievance. (Though I include a few grievances that they seem uninterested in, like the government funding of an organization originally created to target their babies for death due to despising their ethnicity.) Neither do I believe that their particular form of protest is good and honest and totally justifiable. I believe they have the freedom in this great country to engage in their protest, just as they have the freedom, should they choose to leverage it, to use this system to correct the problems they face. My issue with their behavior is that they are targeting the system itself, and looking for changes that remind me strongly of my great-grandfather, the tool, the fool, for a political party that neither favors nor esteems them.

About ten years after my great-grandfather fled to New York City with little more than what he could carry, in hopes of avoiding the fire that would have burned him up, the young woman who would become my great-grandmother joined him. Her family had actually been, despite her shared ethnicity, as wealthy, powerful, and esteemed as those football players who are kneeling on the field. She had learned quickly what the football players will learn if they succeed in their protest; the new system is no kinder to them than to the people for whom they kneel.

Conservatism and Slippery Slopes

It took some doing to figure out what to title this thought. After a while of thinking it through, though, I realized that a repeating theme through this post is going to be the "slippery slope". I am going to say some things, and people are probably going to initially react in horror. That's because of "slippery slopes" that are etched in our own brain. You use certain words - liberals like to call them 'code words' - and people who don't understand you are going to slide right into a set of well-worn tracks and assume your meaning based on the continued motion of well-trodden path. I'd like my readers to take a moment to shake themselves loose of the well-trodden paths, and not assume the meaning of my statements until I explain them.

First statement: The more I deal with liberals and children, the more I understand why not everybody is going to Heaven.

Yeah, I started out with the inflammatory-looking one on purpose, just to wake everybody up. I want to make it excruciatingly clear that I am not talking about sin. I am not making any particular person out to be evil. I could already hear the cries of "I work a job and I am nice to people and how dare you say I don't deserve" or whatnot. Yeah, cut that out, ok? I don't deserve Heaven. It isn't because I'm some sort of rotten and mean person who is worse than you. It's because I could be better than you and still not deserve it. This has nothing to do with whether you are a nice person, or even a good person. It has to do with heart and will.

Here's a second statement to add to the first one. Both Christianity and American Conservatism require by their very nature enough hearts and minds willing to follow it from their own free will.

The reason for this is that you can't force someone to follow a philosophy except by means of an oppressive authoritarian dictatorship. This is something liberals do understand all too well; it is why virtually every implementation of socialism thus far has been authoritarian. I'm about to hear the "Social Democrats" fuss at me over certain European countries that do not meet some sort of mystical requirement for being full-out Communist. Knock it off. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must know that "Social Democrat" is a form of socialism that is only halfway implemented, and that the areas in which it is implemented do indeed easily meet the definition of "Communist". I'm going to get back to that thought in a moment.

Now I mentioned Christianity and American Conservatism for a reason. Both of them spring from the same root. To be more clear, Conservatism sprang from a period of reformation of Christianity, and Christianity sprang from the root of the One God, previously known by the world as the Hebrew God, and now known to be open to all takers. This is important, because this is the source of my point: To truly grasp and follow either, you have to be willing to do so.

You may have noticed - I certainly have - that a great many political topics have seemed to become needlessly complicated. So many of the minutiae being argued about nowadays seems blindly simple to the uninvolved. So many easy solutions lie by the wayside. This is because liberals are trying to rules-lawyer their way to forcing us to acknowledge that they have some sort of right to what they want. This in turn forces people to go on the defensive and enact laws meant to prevent authoritarianism, but ironically increase it themselves, pushing the government into places where it shouldn't have had to go. The only way you can force someone to follow a philosophy is by means of an oppressive authoritarian dictatorship.

I've mentioned in a previous post that I believe there to have been two Civil Rights movements. In the first, Democrat governments tried to get the government involved in "race" by Jim Crow laws in the South. In the second, Democrat politicians tried to gain power and get the government involved in "race" by Reverse Discrimination laws on the Federal level. Though you will never hear me disparage the overthrow of a single Jim Crow law, I must say that the true winners of the entire era were the Democrats. Considering disparate levels of fatherlessness, joblessness, jail population, poverty etc. we can hardly say that the true winners were actually the blacks. Like I said, liberals understand that the only way to force a philosophy on someone is by authoritarian dictatorship; their goal was to get the government involved in race, which is why the leadership was able to so quickly switch their allegiances from one race to another.

I believe that this is a very important point to make because there are elements in the Republican Party who have taken on that liberal point, muddying the actual definition of Conservatism. Their ardent support of President Trump, whom I do not oppose - this is not anti-Trump sentiment being expressed here - has confused people, especially since he ran as a Conservative. That is at the heart of why I, in a "safely" blue state, voted Johnson. (Before anybody jumps on me for this, the election results bore out what I had suspected; all of Johnson's votes in my state would not have defeated Hillary had they been Trump's votes instead. Sad to say, that's the way it was.) I'd also like to specifically call out Dominionism, which is at times conflated with Conservatism. Dominionism - trust me, I know what I am talking about here - is not a Conservative philosophy. It harkens back to pre-Reformation Christianity, in which unwise people violated the spirit of God's Laws and the message of Salvation by falling back upon that bastion of liberalism: oppressive authoritarian dictatorship. (Granted, even so, they were gentler than most... the more Biblical you get, the more you are protected against it, hence the rise of the Reformation in the first place.)

Back to my core point, to make sure it is understood. At the core of Conservatism is an understanding that we should hold to principles of guarded liberty, personal responsibility, and a very real sense of our government as something that must be under our control: not only for the people, but also of the people and by the people in a very real sense. We must be active individuals in our homes, in our workplaces, in our communities as well as in our government (as voters, for most of us), careful, and self-disciplined, because a government of an undisciplined people will never fail to establish its own discipline over them, and that is how the authoritarian dictatorship starts.

I do believe that the "silent majority", found in every corner of the country from the much-discussed 'heartland' to the simple New England farmer types from which I partly descended to the grateful Cuban refugees to the black families who still remember the pre-Reverse Discrimination mandate to be articulate, clean, and responsible, are willing and able to return to a time when our salvation depended more on our personal lives than our Federal laws.

Now I said I was going to get back to a point about the Social Democrats, and I'd like to close with it. I've been linking Conservatism and Christianity throughout this post. I do not want to make the same mistake as the Dominionists. I do not believe Conservatism to be especially blessed by God in the same way as God blessed the Nation of Israel or anointed King Saul, whom later-King David refused to cut down even when Saul was corrupt and oppressive in his later years. I do not believe Conservatism to be the only Christian-derived form of government, nor do I believe it to be necessary in any way to be a Christian, though I confess I suspect that Christians will find themselves living it in their personal lives no matter what their political affiliations. Conservatism is a derivation, a lesser production, a philosophy meant to address the here-and-now, and it is not especially favored by God aside from the natural benefits of working alongside the laws of nature rather than against.

I could picture some sort of unusually eloquent and gentle-thinking Social Democrat asking me, "Perhaps you might think the same thing of this philosophy as well? You do want to make it clear that Conservatism can be derived from Christianity without leading to an oppressive authoritarian theocracy. Think of Social Democracy in the same way; it is derived from socialism, but it is not going to lead to full-on Communism." To that, I would like to return to the concept of the slippery slope. You start at a point and fall into well-worn tracks that take you off the very edge of the precipice. In Conservatism, particularly American Constitutional Conservatism, there are a set of Human Rights very clearly enumerated. These are stops, barriers between us and an authoritarian theocracy. How firm are they? Whether any given Conservative personally believes in God or not, those who set up the barriers understood them to have been fixed by a Supreme Authority, quite out of their hands and well beyond their 'pay grade', and so the philosophy demands that they be treated that way whether you are a Christian or not. This, then, is the question to ask the Social Democrats: Where are your stops? What are your stops? Who laid them down, who keeps them steady, and under what circumstances could you violate them? In the area of health care, as we have seen with cases like Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard, the part of the country that follows Communism does so to the point where that particular country's government has the power of life and death over innocent citizens. So what *can't* Social Democrats allow the government to do, and why?

Or are the stops nothing more and nothing less than the current will of the people in charge, to be kept, discarded, violated, or worshiped at their desire?