A Birthday Homage

I posted the below tribute eleven years ago, when Thomas Sowell turned 79, and now I am re-posting it because today is his 90th birthday. Although Sowell hung up his pen and retired from writing his syndicated column in December 2016, he remains a productive intellectual titan who just published this new book and appeared on Mark Levin's radio show this very morning. America could certainly use more people like him. Happy Birthday, Mr. Sowell. You are appreciated.

In 1930, an age when the South was ruled by Jim Crow and the country was about to get plunged into the Great Depression, Thomas Sowell was born fatherless and black in rural North Carolina.

His aunt relocated him to Harlem and raised him as her own. In his teenage years, economic hardship compelled him to drop out of high school and join the workforce. Four years later, he was drafted by the Marines at the height of the Korean War.

After his military service was done, Sowell got his GED and used it as a springboard to a remarkable career as a scholar and researcher. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, master’s from Columbia, and doctorate from the University of Chicago, then went on to teach at Howard, Cornell, Brandeis, Amherst, and UCLA. He has been associated with four major research centers over the years, most notably the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

A true thinker, as opposed to one of the touchy-feely sorts who have taken over academia, Sowell has mastered the rare art of pursuing truth above all else. Unlike most people, he follows the facts and honestly reports them, no matter where they lead; he meticulously sets aside emotions and pre-conceived notions, in order to analyze evidence thoroughly and objectively; and he is far more concerned about being right than he is about being liked. These qualities led him to become a staunch and unapologetic defender of capitalism, after having started out as a Marxist.

Over the years he has penned numerous essays, dozens of books, and thousands of editorial columns. His essays have been published in magazines, and his editorials, which still average more than two per week, are syndicated in newspapers and on web sites across the land. And no matter how complex or unconventional his topic, he always makes his point in clear, unambiguous language because he understands what too many writers do not -- that the whole point of writing is for your audience to understand you.

Thomas Sowell’s writings pack a philosophical punch like no one else’s. When I read one of his works, I can sense myself thinking faster and clearer than before and it feels like I have a buzz. During the pre-Internet days, I felt let down every morning the Tampa Tribune failed to feature Sowell on its editorial page.

Though he is known mostly for his championing of judicial restraint and laissez-faire economics, he deals with all kinds of subjects and many of his writings are sociological. In one series of books he explores the phenomenon of children who begin talking late in childhood and are often misdiagnosed as being autistic.

Today is Thomas Sowell’s 79^th birthday. If you have never read any of his works before, I encourage you to do so. His web site is here, and you can read his takes on a particularly timely topic here and here. And finally, here are some of his “pearls of wisdom” that I have collected over the years:

A gullible people cannot indefinitely remain a free people.

Do not expect common sense to return to the criminal justice system by itself. The commonness of common sense makes it unattractive to those whose whole sense of themselves depends on their feeling wiser and nobler than the common herd.

All human beings are so imperfect, no matter what color wrapping they come in, that to exempt any group from the standards of performance and behavior expected of others is not a blessing but a curse.

Nature lovers marvel that newly hatched turtles instinctively head for the sea. But that is no more remarkable than the fact that people on the political left head for occupations in which their ideas do not have to meet the test of facts or results.

For gun control laws to be effective, criminals must respect those laws. But if criminals respected laws, they wouldn’t be criminals.

All across this country, the school curriculum has been invaded by psychological-conditioning programs which not only take up time sorely needed for intellectual development, but also present an emotionalized and anti-intellectual way of responding to the challenges facing every individual and every society.

Are we afraid to face a little spin to protect what others before us have faced death for?

What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?

We do not live in the past, but the past in us.

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer’s money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse.

Now matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: “But what would you replace it with?” When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?

Nobody is equal to anybody. Even the same man is not equal to himself on different days.

For evidence that private property rather than democracy is the key to prosperity and freedom, I point to India and Hong Kong. In India the electoral franchise is wide and elections have long been regular, but property rights are weak. For most of the post-World War II era, in contrast, Hong Kong had no democracy, but property rights there have been among the strongest the world has ever seen. Indians are poor and shackled by a massively corrupt state; the people of Hong Kong are wealthy and free. Private property, not democracy, is the great guarantor of prosperity and liberty. And because it decentralizes power, it safeguards us from madmen with utopian hallucinations.

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.

Sometimes it seems as if love songs are being replaced by sex songs.

Those who say that all cultures are equal never explain why the results of those cultures are so grossly unequal. When some cultures have achieved much greater prosperity, better health, longer life, more advanced technology, more stable government, and greater personal safety than others, has all this been just coincidence?

The scariest thing about politics today is not any particular policy or leaders, but the utter gullibility with which the public accepts notions for which there is not a speck of evidence, such as the benefits of “diversity,” the dangers of “overpopulation,” and innumerable other fashionable dogmas.

What is far more of a threat than the little dictators who are puffed up with their own importance is the willingness of so many others to surrender their freedom and their money in exchange for phrases like “crisis” and “compassion.”

People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge.

Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, that you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.

In Washington, the clearer a statement is, the more certain it is to be followed by a “clarification” when people realize what was said.

Flag Day

This being Flag Day, I feel like again re-publishing my post from 2011, which "illustrates" the lyrics to God Bless America using photographs I've taken throughout our country:

God bless America...

Land that I love...

Stand beside her and guide her...

Through the night...

With the light from above...

From the mountains...

To the prairies...

To the oceans white with foam...

God bless America...

My home sweet home...

Note: The final picture was taken by Kelly Noel.

Post-George Floyd America, 19 Days In

In a Facebook post two nights ago I wrote: "I've not posted anything on FB about George Floyd and the protests and the subsequent riots, simply because there are so many angles that there's not enough space in a FB post to get it right."

I deplore the present tendency to reduce complex issues and complex humanity to one-sentence memes and two-sentence declarations that those with a different perspective than yourself must be racist and/or sexist and/or nativist and/or homophobic and/or transphobic etc etc etc etc...

Fortunately, there is plenty of space in a blog post to lay your thoughts out and address opposing thoughts and get things right. Or to at least get things as close to right as humanly possible. And I am in the process of organizing my thoughts (and feelings) about what has happened since May 25th to put them in a post here in this little blog o' mine.

In the meantime I keep thinking of another post, which I wrote and published in 2016 and which I think has more than a little bearing on what we are witnessing today. Therefore I am copy-and-pasting it below.

I don't know if it is significant to point out that 2016 was also an election year and that the president in 2016 was of a different political party than the current president. But I do think it's significant, so I just mentioned it.

In any event, here is what I published 1,349 days ago on October 3rd, 2016:

"What we've got here is failure to communicate."  (Captain from Cool Hand Luke)

I could write novel-length blog posts about communication failures, both in my own life and in society at large. They are a huge deal, and can be poisonous to people both as individuals and as groups.

Not being one who likes to air my personal problems on the World Wide Web (and not being arrogant enough to think anyone wants to read about them), I am instead here to write about what I think are extremely destructive communication failures in our public discourse. Unsurprisingly, many of them turn largely on the question of race.

It has long seemed to me that if you were to place a gray boulder in the middle of a field, with a bunch of white people at one end of the field and a bunch of black people at the other and poll each group about what color the boulder is, 90 percent of the white people would say it's green and 90 percent of the black people would say it's red. This has always fascinated me, but what troubles me is that nobody asks why there is such a difference in perception. I suspect that if anyone ever did, most people wouldn't listen to the answers because they would assume they already know.

We are constantly told we need to have a "national conversation" about race. Legions of white people immediately stop listening when they hear that phrase because they think (with reason) that race gets talked about all the time and that the talking is usually a one-way monologue rather than a two-way dialogue... while on the other hand, legions of black people think (and I can't blame them) that when white people don't listen it must mean they don't care about racial equality.

Meanwhile, most white people who stop listening never stop to consider that black people might actually want a dialogue... and they certainly don't stop to consider that by not responding to the call for a "national conversation," they themselves are largely to blame for it being a monologue.

On the other side of the coin, many black people who suspect that "silent whites" don't care about racial equality never ask actual white people why it is that so many of them zip their lips whenever the "national conversation" gets recommended.

This ain't healthy in an ethnically diverse country that calls itself the United States.

*     *     *     *     *

I know black people who say "black lives matter" and not one of them is racist. I know they would be troubled by the unjust death of a white person at the hands of authorities. Therefore I don't get worked up about the whole "black lives matter" versus "all lives matter" spat -- but I do understand why so many white people start get involved in the spat, and it can be summed up in a five-word question: "Michael Brown or Eric Garner?"

I don't care for the phrase "Black Lives Matter Movement" but I don't know another one to use, so I'm gonna use it anyway; and what I'm gonna say is that one of the worst things to happen to race relations in America was that movement embracing Brown as a symbol when it got going, thereby elevating him to the level of martyr and relegating Garner to an afterthought.

Recap #1: Eric Garner was a disabled man who engaged in a non-violent, no-victim effort to earn a buck by giving another man a cigarette and accepting money in return. In response to this, four police officers were dispatched to arrest him and haul him off to jail for "violating" an asinine statute that would never -- and I'm going on record with this, never -- be enforced against my Scotch-Irish ass if I was the one taking part in that minor act of minor capitalism on the sidewalks of Staten Island.

The officers handcuffed Garner, brought him to the ground, and left him in a prone position that every cop knows you're not supposed to leave a handcuffed man in for the specific reason that it can cause positional asphyxiation. When Garner complained of not being able to breathe -- i.e., when he gave them a crystal clear indication that he was asphyxiating -- they still left him in the prone position, and he died.

Recap #2: Shortly after Michael Brown violently robbed a store, Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department approached him because he matched the description of the robber (remember, he was the robber) and asked him legitimate questions without threatening to arrest him. Then Brown, who far outweighed Wilson, charged him and tried to get his gun. With a split second to react, knowing his physical safety was in danger and with every reason to believe his life was in danger, Wilson responded by shooting Brown in self-defense at extremely close range.

In response, members of what we now call the Black Lives Matter Movement came to Ferguson and perpetuated a lie that Brown had been slaughtered in cold blood while running away from Wilson with his hands in the air pleading "don't shoot." The activists did not simply protest the shooting, they went so far as to publicly demand that Wilson be killed.

The deaths of Garner and Brown happened just three weeks apart and each received a lot of press immediately after it happened, but it was Brown (who died second and was the aggressor rather than the innocent) whose death ignited the passions of the activists, who in turn anointed him as the face of their movement.

On the other hand, Garner (who was truly innocent, and who can legitimately be said to have died because of a racially discriminatory law, and who in fact died because of bad policing) got flushed down the memory hole and forgotten by the same activists who continue to speak of Brown as some kind of folk hero.

Many white people saw that discrepancy and decided to forever close their ears to anything said by anybody who says "black lives matter." You can quibble all you want about whether they were right or wrong to close their ears, but there is no denying they had a rational reason for doing so.

Again, what we've got here is failure to communicate. Most black people know the difference between innocents like Eric Garner and less sympathetic figures like Michael Brown; but your average black person does not have access to the mass media, and the mass media is shamefully addicted to images of drama, so large numbers of white people saw only that activists were embracing Brown and ignoring Garner. And with that in mind, they withdrew from making any public comment on any racial issue, deciding it was better to remain silent than risk being branded a bigot for saying anything critical of black activists or of one of the people the activists use as a mascot.

And going back to an earlier point, large numbers of black people perceived that mass white withdrawal as a sign that white people don't care about injustice.

Pardon the cliche, but this is a vicious cycle.

*     *     *     *     *

Of course, failures to communicate exist not only between groups but within them. Consider the schism that has been convulsing the Republican Party and conservative movement ever since Donald Trump announced his candidacy last year.

Tired of leftist politicians and entertainers promoting PC fantasies at the expense of truth, reason, and common sense, some conservatives were instantly thrilled by Trump's maverick way of flipping the fantasies off with his volcanic verbiage. Let's call those conservatives the Trumpians.

Other conservatives looked at the Trumpians and thought, basically: What the hell's wrong with those guys? Don't they realize Trump has a long history of promoting liberal viewpoints, that he's a known liar, and there's no evidence that he has even one conservative bone in body?

Next thing you knew, longtime allies were at odds. Trumpians accused non-Trumpians of wanting Hillary Clinton to be president, and non-Trumpians accused Trumpians of being crass careerists who don't really care about conservatism. This division continues today and is even worse than it was a year ago.

Some conservative stalwarts like Victor Davis Hanson make rational cases for voting for Trump, while others like Jonah Goldberg make rational cases for not voting for him (at the same time stressing they wouldn't vote for Clinton either). But for the most part, those who fall into either camp talk about those in the other one as if they were morally empty chest-thumpers with mental deficiencies; and remember, the people talking like that would otherwise be allies. How can their defamatory posturing possibly help move conservatism forward and win over converts?

Isn't winning over coverts by speaking not to the choir the main point of political and philosophical writing? How can you do that if you can't even communicate amongst your own fellow travelers?

*     *     *     *     *

So how do we fix this massive communication failure that seems to inflict every aspect of our being? I don't know. All I am sure of is that we can't fix it "as a society" -- instead we must recognize it in ourselves and fix it individually, humbly, in our own lives, and discuss our fixes with others.

That is a slow process and because of human nature it will never span all of society.

But also because of human nature, it is a process that can work wonders for those who try it. And if those who try it "give testimony," it will spread, and that would be good.

A former boss of mine once gave me a steel-eyed gaze and told me to stop thinking about what I was going to say. She said to put all those thoughts aside, to listen to what she was saying and be in the moment, and then ponder what she said and respond only after thinking about it.

She later fired me. She was wrong about a number of things over the years, but was not wrong about those two things, and I've never forgotten it.

From now on, maybe we should all make a point of forcing ourselves to listen when others speak. We might be surprised what we learn by doing that.

D-Day

76 years ago this morning, human beings from the forces of eight Allied nations laid their lives on the line in ways most of us can hardly fathom. Two-thirds of them were form the U.S., U.K., and Canada.

Traveling in ships and amphibious vessels, they set sail from England in the pre-dawn hours of June 6, 1944, bound for the Normandy beaches of Nazi-controlled France. It was the first time since the 1600’s that any invading military had crossed the perilous waters of the English Channel, and as day broke tens of thousands of troops disembarked from their landing crafts and plunged into Hell on Earth.

Slogging first through waves and then through sand, they were sitting ducks for the Nazi gunners positioned on shore. Bullets rained on them amidst a cacophony of explosive reverberations. The men at the fronts of the landing crafts were the first ones to step on the beach, and they stepped onto it knowing they were likely to get shot. Each of them was acutely aware he might be entering the final seconds of his life.

Approximately 10,000 Allied men were killed or wounded that day. However, in bearing that brunt of brutality, those who were first on the scene helped clear the way for 100,000 of their fellow soldiers to reach shore and advance against the enemy, freeing occupied towns as they went. By the end of the month more than 800,000 men had done so, and the war’s momentum had swung in the Allies’ favor. Within a year the Nazis surrendered unconditionally.

In military parlance, the phrase “D-Day” refers to the first day of any operation, but in the public’s mind, it will always refer to the events on the beaches of Normandy. Now the men who braved the bullets on that distant shore are dying away at a rapid rate. Let us give them our thanks while they are still alive to hear it.

After all, we might never have tasted freedom if not for the valor of the soldiers of '44. Because of that, we must resolve to pass their story on to our children, so that they may pass it on to theirs, to preserve what Abraham Lincoln referred to as "the mystic chords" of our nation's memory.