A Response to E-mail Forwards Blasting Obama, Environmentalists, Etc.

The following is an e-mail written recently by my friend’s dad, a university professor and respected author.  He is not a liberal, in fact he is quite conservative.  After discussing the following with him over pumpkin carving and wine the other night, it became apparent that he wrote this as a response to some of the ridiculous e-mail forwards he had been receiving as of late from his conservative bretheren. 

He, like many of us, has been the recipient of numerous emotionally-charged forwards blasting President Obama, librerals, environmentalists and various other groups perceived by some on the right to be the primary cause of all ills infecting our country.  You know the kind of e-mail, the ones that equate Obama with Hitler, scream of the impending moral destruction of our country at the hands of the left and warn that we’ll all turn into socialists/aetheists/communists at the stroke of midnight if we don’t forward the message to 10 people in the next hour.

It’s not that rigorous debate over issues should be stifled in any way, however, as a country we’ve begun to lose the ability to argue in a logical, civilized manner.  If you can’t at least imagine that those in disagreement with you 1) may have a reasonable position 2) are not the scum of the earth, than your voice in the discussion will soon become no more than a clanging gong with no value other than increased volume and noise.

I share the following e-mail simply because I believe in its underlying message.  We don’t have to all agree with each other, nor should we, but peddling half-truths and fear-based hype as something resembling reason is not what the country needs and something we should strive to do better than.

The following is fairly long, but well worth the read.  Print it off, take it with you and read it on the subway, airplane or by the fire as you enjoy a good glass of wine.

On rumored proposals to “tax the wealthy out of prosperity.”

I’ve been mulling over this quote ever since you sent it and would agree that taking something from the “haves” is a poor incentive to generate additional resources for rich or poor. However, it also strikes me that Mr. Rogers is speaking to something of a straw man argument here in the sense that for years our federal taxes hardly go to support the lazy poor relative to other government priorities–which are not by any stretch of the imagination set by low income people.

You know the federal budget better than me, but for twenty years or more the three major ticket items have been defense, social security, and Medicare, which together represent at least 60% of all monies spent. Other sizable chunks go to interest on our every growing national debt, veterans’ and federal employee benefits, etc. As far as I can tell, Medicaid and safety net programs for low income kids, foster care, food stamps, and supplements for the elderly make up at most 18%. If these groups are what Mr. Rogers means by those “receiving without working,” then I’m not sure what he wants a civilized country to do with our mentally retarded, aged, and dispossessed minors. I have seen first-hand in several countries in Eastern Europe and Asia what happens to individuals in these groups when public officials turn a blind eye to their needs and cannot fathom that happening in any nation that considers itself civilized.

Philosophers and politicians throughout the last century have variously and eloquently verbalized the ethic of a civilization’s moral value determined by how it treats its most unfortunate, but it seems to me this is also a fundamental spiritual value. Our Sunday School lesson this week was about the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and I confess that my mind drifted for a time to the matter of whether such responsibilities should be matters of personal or collective public responsibility. I concluded that to the man in the ditch, whom I take to be the focus of the story, it didn’t really matter as long as he got some help. You have probably heard me tell stories about my mother’s mother, our dear Grandma Peterson, whom we all thought somewhat strange as children. I don’t think she ever passed a hitchhiker that she didn’t insist be given a ride, and she regularly packed lunches for them whenever traveling to the city. Our family tales of her peculiar ways are legion, but she was never preachy about her various private ministries; it was simply a matter of cheerfully following our Lord’s example in spite of sorrowful circumstances. I can’t say how cheerfully she paid her taxes, but if it meant helping those in need I have little doubt it would have ranked at the top of most public priorities.

The thrust of Rogers’ argument seems to be that that taxing rich people at a rate higher than others is unfair. I think I probably agree with this, but fair doesn’t mean equal in all kinds of settings from school to business. Whatever lobbyists the poor and elderly can afford to press for their needs likely get drowned out by those of the well-heeled; thus all kinds of special interest tax breaks and benefits exist ranging from large commodity price supports to federal guarantees of excessive cost overruns by defense contractors. Of the remaining federal budget categories–scientific and medical research, international commitments, and the like, I don’t see any of that directly benefiting those who don’t work for one reason or another. We probably could have gilded the door knobs of every poor person in America for what the Iraq diversion is costing and we still haven’t accomplished the original mission in Afghanistan.

The alternative to taxes, of course, it to continue to spending mindlessly and increase the national debt as has been happening for years under both Republicans and Democrats. I realize there are all kinds of valid emendations and interpretations in matters this large, but these broad strokes occur to me.

On the matter of Obama directly addressing students in school.

You are absolutely right that “federal involvement in education is extra-Constitutional” as it has been essentially a matter for state and local governance since the inception of the Republic. However, by no stretch of the imagination  does Obama’s interest in sending a message to American students about topics related to personal responsibility approach a totalitarian effort akin to pre-war Germany. To argue otherwise seems to me to be a highly misguided interpretation of history and government policy. In the first place, our federal executive branch has no authority to compel any teacher in the country to watch or listen to anything. In American public schools, that is explicitly the final authority of a district school board of locally elected citizens. Of course most lay board members can’t be expected to know everything that might be studied by teachers and students in the course of a school year, so virtually every district has adopted board policies that outline for principals and teachers what they are authorized to view, read, discuss, etc. Even state “mandated” curriculum, like the recent HIV/AIDS education guidelines, cannot be unilaterally forced upon a local district; a school board can only be encouraged to adopt it. (To be sure, there are federal requirements attached to what we call compensatory programs like special education, but these are programs funded by the federal government which is a relatively small though important portion of any district’s total budget.)

Students at the secondary level far and wide have for years routinely watched excerpts from the presidential State of the Union addresses and related political discussions, though such audiences are not primarily students of course. If Obama’s intentions imply that he thinks all K-12 kids are “his children” as you assert, of course this would be blasphemous as you point out, and I confess that you may be more well-informed regarding his intentions than me. I had several reasons to hope John McCain would have been elected, but we all know that didn’t happen. However, the few references I’ve seen to the theme of his intended remarks relates to affirming for young people values like personal responsibility. I tend to be suspicious of most politicians so perhaps there are more sinister motives, and if this presentation takes place I guess we can analyze his remarks. However, there’s scarcely a school district in any American city that isn’t at its wit’s end trying to figure out what to do about problems like the high school drop-out rate. (The few times I’ve heard or read Obama on issues in education his remarks have tended to be in this direction.)

The national drop-out rate is presently around 33%, which means there must be lots of places in this country where it is far above that. The impact of legions of young people whose employment prospects are significantly diminished because they never finished school is an impending national disaster for reasons that also relate to other matters than just earning a living wage (like what they do when they don’t earn a wage, but that’s another story). If the president or anybody else can get even 1% of urban youth to reconsider dropping out by a twenty minute pep-talk, frankly I’m all for it, though I’m not getting my hopes up.

Whatever this upcoming address represents, it is difficult for me to reconcile any association with the Ziemer book and its context. Germany’s National Socialist agenda was rooted in militaristic racism. Hitler’s chief interest in economics was in finding ways to nationalize the war machine industry so he could annihilate Europe’s democracies and non-Aryan peoples. We know now from recent historical scholarship that he was seriously eyeing a second crusade against the United States once his plans for continental domination were to be accomplished. From my limited perch, if I see anything in the policies of the new administration, on the international front it is to be more focused, i.e., limited, in foreign obligations, and to promote greater diversity in the domestic realm.

The hands-down single greatest effort to increase state and federal authority in the public schools against local control took place ironically during the Reagan administration. He had campaigned against Carter for months with recurrent accusations that American public schools were falling behind the rest of the world, and used “The Nation at Risk” report to fuel a major effort to raise standardized test scores especially in mathematics and science. The array of “accountability” terms and acronyms in public education like No Child Left Behind (Inside?)–a well-intentioned bipartisan effort, EALR, and WASL, are direct descendants of this initiative. The story of the origin of this report and the nature of its statistical comparisons has an extensive and controversial history, but anybody who wandered around a typical American high school in the 1980s and a college-prep one in Japan or Germany could tell you that ours weren’t up to snuff. Of course American public schools have a statutory obligation to accept every child from every home—and those who don’t even have homes, rather unlike those in many European and Asian nations where students are tracked from their early teens. So when I was in Cashmere or St. John-Endicott, we routinely worked with kids whose parents had tattoos up to their neckline and whose home methinks promoted rather different values than my folks did back on the farm.

This takes us back to possible motives for the president’s upcoming remarks. Responsibility means dealing with the prospect of all these millions of future drop-outs and marginally educated citizens in this country whose home life does not especially promote their moral well-being. (NB: The two factors most influencing student academic success have nothing to do with school: 1. availability of an enriched and supportive reading environment at home, and 2. restricted access to television and electronic media.) We can ignore these kids to our peril, which many people do until their house gets robbed or next welfare budget is published, or we can hope the private schools will accept them–but the vast majority don’t (nor would most charters though I wish Washington State would permit them), or we can kick them in the rear verbally (in the case of my own I was open to other more physical means) and tell them that even if they don’t have the best home life, and the unemployment rate is 10%, and we’re fighting two wars, and on and on, they still need to buck up, work hard, and start living responsibly, because nobody else is going to do it for them.

If he says just this much to them, Obama will have my gratitude. But where he and I part ways is the apparent implicit understanding that if people don’t live responsibly, Uncle Sam will bail them out, as we have now done to the extent of many trillions of dollars for all those who needed federal stimulus monies to salvage bad investments or upside-down home mortgages. But I am also aware that for years under both Republican and Democratic administrations, by far the lion’s share of the federal budget goes to a bloated defense department (even when the Secretary of Defense pleads to cut certain programs), interest on the ever increasing national debt, entitlement programs like Medicare to the elderly, etc.

As a percentage of the entire budget, the amount that goes to social welfare programs is relatively modest, and less than virtually all democratic nations of Europe and Asia. Obama had an opportunity when he took office after the economy went south under Bush to affirm the time-honored (and I believe biblical) values of thrift, self-reliance, and hard work. Instead, he told people to go out and spend money to invigorate the economy, get a new car, buy furniture with tax rebates, etc., etc. Bush and Cheney also spent mindlessly but many of their chief beneficiaries were in the military-industrial and extra-military complex (e.g., Halliburton, Blackwater). If I wanted to give myself a headache I could probably do a little research and find out how much was spent this direction during the last administration; but I may not be able to comprehend the more disturbing value in loss of life of our valiant American soldiers or Iraqi civilians, though I read the latter is conservatively estimated to be 40,000 and many sources cite something closer to 100,000.

At some point when we have spent and shot ourselves into oblivion, both Democrats and Republicans might dust off a copy of E. F. Schumacher’s book from a generation ago, “Small is Beautiful”, or occasionally read an essay by Wendell Berry like “What are People For?”. They’ll find out we have no divine obligation to be the world’s policeman, to dam up every river for our inexhaustible appetite for energy, or to bankroll a military-intelligence-industrial complex that five-star general, supreme WWII commander, and president Dwight Eisenhower presciently warned us about. (If anything, I think a case could be made that we have an obligation not to do these things, but that would be another essay.) I say this as a proud Vietnam-era veteran and the father of an Air Force Academy graduate soon headed to Iraq where a nephew is presently serving. But my children have also heard that there is no pride in policies that spend more in two weeks on military adventurism abroad than the annual national budget for dispossessed or underprivileged children at home. You probably know that one of my sisters is a school nurse and a while back I asked for unrelated reasons about changes in the WIC program that provides nutrition and medical services to at-risk children and their mothers. She told me it had been discontinued for more than a year. I’m all for saving a buck, but it was enough to make your blood boil when not long afterward I read how a number of congressmen were strongly lobbying on behalf of a series of multi-zillion dollar defense projects Secretary of Defense Gates told both Bush and Obama were not needed.

I fear my response here may have exceeded what was invited or anticipated, friend, so thanks for your indulgence.

On the matter of global warming.

I am not a scientist but I can see. I have also been sent several email attachments lately questioning a recent National Academy of Sciences report that global warming has been taking place for some decades. This is in spite of general historic trends of temperature oscillations lasting several centuries that should have the earth presently in a cooling mode. Although a consensus of the professional scientific community has endorsed reports coming from the NAS and similar international organizations, the credentials of those who represent dissenting viewpoints seems impressive enough to elicit my confession that I can only offer a layman’s commentary on the matter, but one that has attempted to somewhat keep abreast of the issues by reading conflicting viewpoints in such venues as The National Review (conservative), Atlantic and The Economist (centrist), and Harper’s (liberal). (I also like reading Scientific American but come away from most issues feeling like I understood about 10% of what was written.)

While my limitations in understanding the matter of global warming are manifold, I can offer that our family was blessed by the presence of a scientist of some note whose work had special relevance to this topic. Willis M. Johns, my mom’s brother, served for many years as chief geologist for the Montana Bureau of Mines, professor of economic geology at Montana Tech, and surveyor for the US Geological Survey’s Northern Rockies district. Uncle Willis was also very conservative in his politics and generally suspicious of most things emanating from Washington, DC. But Willis knew intimately the Northern Rockies from living in the field for weeks on end in order to conduct USGS mapping and explorations for various mining interests.

Through Willis I was introduced to the grandeur of Glacier National Park in the 1960s and traveled through it one summer when he lived in nearby Kalispel. I remember marveling at the high peaks draped in the enormous gray-white formations for which the place is known, and journeyed through the park again via its famed Highway to the Sun in the early 1980s. I last visited Glacier two weeks ago with my 85-year-old mother with whom, incidentally, I had been on that first trip there nearly five decades ago. Our first impression upon approaching the park last month was the stunned response to each other, “So where are all the glaciers?” Of course there are still a number of glaciers girding the higher peaks and numerous snowfields, but even to amateur climatologist eyes like ours, it was clear that something significant had changed the landscape since our previous visits.

In the absence of Willis, who passed away in 1989, I made inquiry locally among other relatives who had long lived in the area and learned that it is common knowledge there that at the present melt rate, “Glacier” Park is no longer expected to have any by 2030. Of the 150 glaciers large enough to be named in the nineteenth century, only 26 exist today which explains why the summer landscape looks so different from what I observed those many years ago. The chief cause is not attributed to the lack of annual snowfall, but to a rise in daily minimum temperature that has accelerated in the last fifty years. But the most peculiar observation for me was the evidence from ice core studies reported there that the pattern of fluctuations in glacier advance and recession over millennia has been reversed for over a century. The terrestrial climate of cold and warm trends over time that continues to be the subject of so much research seems to be related to variations in Earth’s orbit around the sun.

That the evidence should suggest the planet be in a cooling trend now when temperatures are actually increasing leaves one to theorize about what variable or variables have been introduced since the 1800s to cause this change. I’m entirely open to other hypotheses regarding factors that may have interrupted the general cycle over the past century and a half. But it strikes me as eminently reasonable that nothing has been proposed that can even slightly compare to the effects of hundreds of billions of greenhouse gases and related emissions/pollutants introduced into the environment as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The benefits to humanity, of course, have been rather substantial, and I greatly enjoy traveling by car and air and using all manner of oil-based products and by-products. But to deny this has had a detrimental impact on the environment that will only get worse without forthright intervention from the lowest (household) to the highest (international) levels seems akin to infantile “me-ism”, a term used by Georgie Ann Geyer has used to characterize the attitude about life being all about self.

Many of the recent emails I have received on climate change fall into two categories: The first continue to question whether or not global warming is actually taking place. To these authors I honestly suggest a trip to someplace like northwest Montana or an examination of glacier ice core reports from there or most any other high mountain range in the world. I gather the Inuit people probably know ice better than most scientists or politicians so gleaning their perspectives might also be more useful than that of someone representing special interests in our nation’s capital. But another body of rhetoric related to this topic involves the matter of cause, and dismisses the notion that global warming is related in any significant way to mankind’s effect on the environment. What folks in this camp do see is a sophisticated ploy by a coalition of environmentalists and Third World plaintiffs seeking financial remuneration through groups like the UN for damages from industrialized countries. The implication, of course, is since humanity is not responsible for global warming; we are not accountable for its consequences, or for moderating its effects through cap and trades or other proposed interventions.

I’m not sure exactly what, if anything, I might owe the citizens of the Maldives Islands, Bangladesh, or anywhere else threatened with rising sea levels because I have and am using fossil fuels as my ancestors have since the 1800s. But it seems to me that ignoring the obvious, or at least forthrightly addressing valid differences of opinion,  is irresponsible citizenship, and arrogantly risks the wellbeing of the next generation and God’s creation for which we are to be stewards.

I suppose many people who knew Uncle Willis would have said he was not an especially religious person. He didn’t often attend church and believed the earth and solar system to have been formed through natural processes over billions of years. But I came to understand that he did not believe faith, reason, and observation to offer irreconcilable conclusions about the nature of spiritual or biological life. Rather, like John Wesley, he thought these ways of knowing all attested to the same unified truth. Willis’s far ranging interests led him to investigate truth about many different subjects, and following his retirement our uncle devoted considerable attention to biblical archaeology. He traveled to the Middle East to investigate recent discoveries of Hittite culture that he thought shed light on Old Testament history he more fully sought to understand. I’m grateful for what his honesty taught me about rocks and glaciers, truth and responsibility.

Richard Scheuerman

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