Get your own Free Home PageOrange County Chairman Linda Chapin, who seems to think she was elected County Mother, has finally pulled the gun ploy.
The gun ploy is a tactic politicians who are not doing the job they were elected to do often use to distract voters. Chapin's job is being the top administrator of Orange County government. Judging from the problems at the jail and from the results of all the referenda, she's not doing a good job.
So she comes out with the gun ploy, professing to be outraged and concerned about the rest of us allegedly having disinterest in saving children's lives. And she plays the ploy according to the script.
First she exaggerates the problem. Accidental firearm deaths are dead last, even counting adults, as a cause of accidental deaths in the United States. The big killers of children are automobile accidents and, especially in Florida, drowning. In 1993, of the 90,523 Americans who died from accidents, 1,521 died in firearms accidents, and that includes both adults (by far the majority) and children. By contrast, 3,800 people drowned; 13,000 died in falls; 7,300 died from poisoning; and 41,000 died in motor-vehicle accidents.
Second she trashes the National Rifle Association, accusing it of not being interested in keeping guns out of the hands of children and criminals. That is pure ignorance, at best, or a big, fat fib, at worst. The National Rifle Association is the premier teacher of gun safety and has been teaching gun safety and promoting stiff penalties for criminal use of firearms since long before Chapin even was born.
She includes 19-year-olds as ``children'' and lumps together three separate, unrelated categories of accidents, homicides and suicides. She resorts to falsehood to rap the National Rifle Association and its members, and ends up advocating mandatory trigger locks.
Now that's a stupid suggestion for two reasons. One, it is unenforceable unless she plans to declare martial law and conduct a house-to-house search on a daily basis. Two, someone stupid or careless enough to leave a loaded gun within reach of children would be stupid or careless enough to remove the trigger lock. You can't solve human problems with laws regulating inanimate objects.
Finally, by blaming an inanimate object for the pathological behavior of human beings she reveals herself as irrational and superstitious. Yes, Mrs. Chapin, just put on your witch-doctor suit, shake your rattles and murmur at this inanimate object, the gun, and suddenly, by magic, it will give everyone a high intelligence quotient, high morals, a sense of responsibility and a healthy mind.
Guns no more cause crimes or suicides than bricks cause buildings. A constant can never be the cause of a variable. In America, the constants are private ownership and ready access to firearms. The variable is the crime rate.
As a matter of fact, firearms are less available and less accessible today than they have been at any other time in American history.
But what liberals are really trying to do with the gun ploy is avoid facing the truth. The violent and brutish society they complain about is precisely the society they created. Everything liberals wanted they got.
They wanted sexual promiscuity, dope, disregard for the law, no censorship of pornography, no laws against sodomy or public profanity, abortion on demand (the single biggest killer of children), easy divorces, acceptance of homosexuality, civilian review boards to second-guess police, Miranda warnings and public defenders, a welfare system that paid women to have illegitimate children and a tax system that penalized marriage, work, savings and investments and subsidized non-work and immorality. And they got every darn bit of it.
It's called reaping what you sow, and it has nothing to do with firearms.
It's no wonder the television show Seinfeld, which celebrates dysfunctional and selfish people, is popular. A lot of Americans are dysfunctional and selfish, too.
It amuses me to watch the reaction to India's nuclear tests, for example. Many of the most outraged don't give a rat's toenail, of course, if 50 million Indians and Pakistanis die in a nuclear war, but they are indignant at the prospect that a bit of radioactive dust might drift their way from the battlefields.
They seem to think that it's just awful that people in South Asia aren't content to kill each other in a way that would not inconvenience them.
You see similar American outrage about the Brazilian rain forests. How dare those Brazilians, many of them half-starving, develop their own land when we Americans need their rain forests to replenish oxygen in ``our'' atmosphere and to serve as an occasional tourist destination. Besides, there might even be some plant down there that would yield a drug useful to us. How inconsiderate of those Brazilians to develop their own country for their own benefit. Don't they know how important our comfort is?
I have even run into young Americans coldly indifferent to the loss of life among American servicemen. ``They volunteered. That's what they get paid to do,'' some say dismissively, as if speaking of hired hands or inconsequential servants.
And what about those Japanese. They buy more American stuff than anybody but Canada, but it's not enough. Listen, you Japanese, even if you don't have room, buy more big American cars. You can always store them underground.
Many of these Americans, usually college graduated if not educated, would be interchangeable on any of the sitcoms in which the characters endlessly pursue their own material comfort and sexual gratification without a thought for another human being.
I would include also those libertarians who write expansively on the theoretical virtues of unlimited immigration while hiring dirt-poor illegals for a pittance to do their yardwork and housework. Their version of the American dream matches that of many chief executive officers -- an endless supply of cheap, docile labor.
The problem is, I think, that many foreigners and poor people don't understand the rules. They live under the mistaken idea that they are human beings, created by God, and have the same worth as any other.
So, here, for the benefit of foreigners and poor people, are rules written by the Seinfeld interchangeables:
Do not die or suffer in any way that might inconvenience us. Unless you live in an area with gold, diamonds, oil or cobalt, please suffer and die off camera so we will not be reminded of your existence. (An American TV crew in Iraq, in refusing to accompany a Christian missionary into a children's hospital, said, ``We've already done the kids.'')
Do not make the mistake of thinking that any valuable resources in your country should be used for your benefit. If you do, we may have to send the Army or the Central Intelligence Agency to straighten out your thinking.
When American corporations set up plants in your country, work hard, work cheap and keep your mouths shut. Above all, do not even think about unionizing.
Don't try to overthrow or resist any government that we declare is an American ally, or we will call you a terrorist. On the other hand, if the CIA asks you to overthrow a government, give it a try. When the deal goes sour, as it always does, we can still make good propaganda out of your deaths.
And if you've ever wondered what``yada, yada, yada'' means, the translation is: If you aren't me, you don't count.
The year 1937 was a lucky year in which to be born. It was the hind end of the Great Depression, which meant that it would be over before you were old enough to know what a depression was.
You would be too young to go into World War II and Korea and a shade too old for Vietnam. You would end up being a Vietnam-era veteran (a bureaucratic designation dreamed up by Congress) rather than a 'Nam Vet. You could say you served your country when it called, even though you were as safe doing the dreary drudge work of the peacetime soldier as any draft dodger.
War has a certain allure for the young because they have the capacity to believe they will survive it. Every male envies the combat veteran, whether he will admit it or not. There is something buried deep in the human male that hungers for the ultimate test of courage -- the dance with death.
A lot of summers have to pass before you get wise enough to admit that, romantic allure notwithstanding, it is good to have your arms and legs and eyes. It is good to have had the time to see your children grow up. That's when the sadness hits you, thinking about those in the wheelchairs or beds and all those 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds and twenty-somethings who lie in the ground, never having had the chance to hold the hands of their own children.
Even those who survive physically intact sometimes have problems the rest of us never have to deal with. War is such an intense emotional experience, it can, like an arc light, scar the retina and make the rest of your life look dim and dull in comparison. Then your mind keeps being drawn back to it, like a moth helpless to resist the flame.
The old cliches about defending freedom or making the world safe for democracy have the odor of government propaganda in light of what we know now about this cynical century. But it is true that all wars are, for the men who fight them, about duty, honor, country, loyalty, courage and comradeship. The soiled hands of the civilian politicians cannotreach the battlefield. Bullets make no allowances for phonies. In battle, the highest ideals of courage, honor and self-sacrifice take shape and become reality.
It's a privilege to have grown up among such a generation of Americans. I believe that the generation that weathered the Great Depression and fought World War II and Korea matches any in American history.
The message the dead of those wars have for us is that the cynics and wiseacres are wrong. Human beings can rise above petty selfishness, do great deeds and make great sacrifices. Men can and do so love others that they will give their lives for them.
A young man from Brooklyn in some frigid mountain pass in Korea refused direct orders to pull back. He chose to stay at his post and delay the North Korean attack long enough for his fellow Marines to escape. He could have left with honor. He was ordered to leave. But nevertheless he deliberately chose death in order to save the lives of his comrades.
There are thousands of similar stories in all the wars. It's odd that in peacetime we haven't been able to inspire people to such heights. It's ironic that war seems to encourage virtue and peace to encourage vice.
But that is the value of remembering and of teaching our children the true stories of the great deeds of their fellow citizens and ancestors. There are few famous people today who inspire anything more than disgust, but our history is full of heroes.
Even if the living have nothing worthwhile to say, the dead have many great lessons to teach.
A gaggle of politicians, economists and businessmen calling themselves the National Commission on Retirement Policy has come up with a solution to Social Security -- condemn the Baby Boomers to keep on working until they drop dead.
More taxes and fewer benefits is the effect of the commission's idea of pushing retirement age to 70. That would mean an additional five to eight years of taxes, depending on whether a person would have retired at 65 or 62, and, because the life expectancy remains around 72, one can infer, fewer benefits.
It won't affect me, but the idea stinks. The ``solution'' punishes people, although the problem was created by Congress. Let's go back to basics.
Congress is and has been spending the cash surpluses in the Social Security Trust Fund. It's only because Congress uses this surplus that it can purport to have balanced the budget. In fact, it hasn't. It's voodoo accounting.
When Congress says it has balanced the budget, it hasn't. When Congress says it has a surplus, it actually has a deficit. When Congress says the Social Security Trust Fund has surplus, it doesn't. Clear?
Even though Congress says the budget has a surplus, the Office of Management and Budget estimates that the federal debt will increase by $1 trillion in the next six years.
You see, what Congress does is spend the money and replace it with nonmarketable bonds. That means that, when the crunch comes, Congress is going to have to come up with the money to redeem the bonds in order to pay the retirement benefits of the Baby Boomers. So a big tax hit is coming, unless, of course, Congress cheats by condemning the Boomers to work until the day before their funerals.
Worse, this whole thing could have been avoided. The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act passed in the mid-1980s had a perfectly logical plan to fix the problem. It intended that Congress would balance the budget within five years, excluding the Social Security supluses. Instead, these surpluses were to have been used to purchase marketable bonds so that, when the crunch came, Social Security could sell the bonds to the public to raise the cash to pay the Boomers' retirement checks.
Trouble is Congress was too undisciplined to follow its own law. It never met the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings goals, and it kept extending the five-year-period out into the future until it all became a joke. Hence, instead of a pile of marketable bonds, the trust fund is stuck with nonmarketable government paper that only Congress can redeem by raising taxes.
Unless the people raise heck, Congress probably will go along with this scheme to push the retirement age to 70. That's a heck of a note. Not only may employees not wish to keep working that long, employers may not want them to. It is, in effect, a sneaky way to increase taxes and reduce benefits.
There's a lot to be said for older folks making way for younger ones in the workplace. The generation gap is more than just a phrase. I don't consider myself an old fuddy-duddy, but about half the time I have never heard of anything kids are talking about these days. My world and their world are as different as Mars and Earth. Thus, whether either generation wishes it, communication becomes more difficult.
A better solution than condemning people to a longer work career would be for Congress to give up its voodoo accounting system and really balance the budget in an honest manner, without using the surpluses in the Social Security Trust Fund. Second, they could means-test it. Millionaires don't need Social Security. Refund their contribution and call it even. And, for the twentysomethings, give them the option of opting out, completely or partially.
But I'm afraid people who pretend to balance the budget when they haven't won't be honest enough to deal straight on Social Security.
Conservatives have been saying for years that one of the failings of liberals is that they think they know better than we do what's good for us. Well, a new survey of top government officials confirms that.
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press interviewed 81 members of Congress, 98 presidential appointees and 151 top-level federal civil servants.
Guess what: A majority of them do not believe that the American people are well-enough informed about issues to make an intelligent decision.
Three-quarters of the presidential appointees and the executive-level civil servants said the American people do not know enough to make wise policy decisions. Forty-seven percent of the Congress members who were interviewed said they did not trust their constituents' knowledge of the issues.
Most blamed the press, and, although the press is owed some lumps in this respect, much of the blame resides with the government officials. Left unsaid in those interviews, I believe, is the feeling of many in government that the public should not be allowed to make policy decisions.
The evidence for this assertion is the process. Rather than attempting to inform the public about issues and invite their participation, the standard procedure in America is for the government officials to make the decision and then try to sell the decision to the people or ignore them altogether.
The press deserves some blame because it generally passively reports whatever government officials and favored special interests feed it. All too often reporters will tend to identify with the government officials rather than with their readers. It's that old allure of thinking one is ``an insider'' with special knowledge and privileges. Those of us who have worked both sides of this street know, of course, that the politicians and their paid staffs are laughing at the reporters behind their backs, even while they manipulate them into thinking they are ``friends.''
Reporters who need friends should buy a dog.
But there is blame enough for everyone, including the public. Many Americans have been lulled into the belief that government is so benign that it does not need watching. That's a good way to wake up one morning in a dictatorship.
We have to keep remembering that there's nobody in this country but us folks. And folks are folks, flawed and error-predisposed, whether in government or out. We have to be darn careful for whom we vote, just as we have to be careful about whom we hire to patch the roof or paint the house.
But as for being uninformed about the issues, that is generally the fault of the government officials who take the elitist attitude of making the decisions themselves and presenting the public with a fait accompli.
I don't know the cure for elitism. Even the most ordinary people, once they get a whiff of power, seem to get an inflated opinion of themselves.
Years ago, a lady city commissioner visited my newspaper to talk about the league of municipalities' agenda. Item One was a public-relations campaign to convince people that they should become more involved and to participate in their government. The second item was to pass a law that would allow the city council to raise taxes without a referendum.
Honest to Pete, this lady saw no contradiction between Item One and Item Two on her agenda. Apparently her idea of citizen participation did go beyond allowing people to show up and applaud her decisions.
It used to be said that what America needs is a good 5-cent cigar. Today, what America needs is a good dose of Alfred Korzybski and Zen Buddhism. Too many Americans are floating like balloons 2,000 feet above reality.
Korzybski was a Polish thinker and philosopher who developed the theory of general semantics. Zen stresses living in the present moment, being anchored to reality. Both point in the same direction.
Language is a code, a set of symbols to represent reality. But, as Korzybski stressed, the symbol is not the thing itself. The word ``tree'' is not the thing sticking up out of the ground with leaves on it. Unfortunately, people, especially people who deal in words, forget that. They construct a world out of word symbols that, in fact, exist only in their heads.
Look at all the road apples dropped over the schoolyard shooting in Oregon. Culture. Television. Movies. Guns. All of these are blamed for four deaths, but, in reality, the blame rests entirely on the shoulders of Kipland Kinkel, the 15-year-old charged in the shootings.
If you wish to understand why he is charged, you will have to talk to Kinkel. Thirty-eight million American kids from age 10 to 17 share the same culture Kinkel shared, but only he is charged in shooting up his school and his parents.
Human beings do not exist in the abstract or the collective. They exist as individual flesh-and-blood beings, each unique. Words such as ``children'' ``society'' and ``culture'' are abstract symbols that represent nothing but a generalization. They do not exist in reality. Have you ever seen a society? Have you ever touched a culture? Of course not.
What you can see and touch are individual human beings and individual works of art, entertainment or what passes for either. Each work, each book, each TV show, each movie and each painting is a product of individual human beings. The publication, broadcast or production of those products is authorized by individual human beings -- flesh-and-blood individuals with names. If you have a problem with a Disney product, you have a problem with Michael Eisner. If you have a problem with a Time-Warner product, you have a problem with Gerald Levine. And so on. Nothing is produced by abstract forces or magic. Individuals are responsible for everything you see or read.
Only when we drop the abstractions and generalizations and begin to deal with each other as individuals, accountable for our actions and non-actions, will we ever even begin to solve problems.
Of course, there is a whole industry of political demagogues, editorialists, academics and grant-parasites in the social-work industry who perpetuate this idea of groupthink and of blaming problems on abstractions. After all, there is no money to be made in dealing with Kinkel, which is why this crowd wants to blame his actions on everything but him. If you are a politician and you blame Eisner or Levine for lousy music or shows, he won't give you a political contribution. So, like Bill Clinton did, you can blame ``culture'' without identifying the people who produce the products that constitute the culture and therefore can continue to hit them up for contributions.
Even concepts such as love and compassion are abstractions and not the things itself. Too many people are loving and compassionate in the abstract but indifferent and even spiteful to the individual human beings around them.
We need to live in the world and not in our heads.
Get your own Free Home Page