Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Politics

  • Eleanor Swift on Cheney and Iraq

    Some time ago I blogged on the danger of using insufficient force and of not completing the solution to a problem. The result of that procedure, used all too often in goverment and international relations, is that people suffer and die, but there is no real cause and no conclusion.

    Now in a column Eleanor Swift (Holding Pattern — Rumsfeld’s Senate testimony underscores that there are no good options on Iraq. Meanwhile, where’s Dick Cheney?) evaluates Rumsfeld’s testimony before the Senate armed services committee as indicating that there are no good options:

    The best any of this trio of apologists could come up with is that U.S. forces need to keep doing what they’re doing to keep from losing. They offered no strategy for victory, only a holding pattern to prevent a worse defeat than that America is already experiencing. An honest reckoning would acknowledge there are no good options in Iraq and that the road to failure began with Rumsfeld’s bullheaded determination to keep the number of invading troops to a minimum.

    She’s right on part of this, but I actually think she hasn’t gone quite far enough.

    (more…)

  • Freedom of Expression is Important

    Ed Brayton has a wonderful post today titled Answering Ancient Brit on Thought Crimes. I could not agree with Ed any more completely and forcefully. Europe’s response to “thought crimes” is itself extremely dangerous.

    I would add a note for my fellow-Christians. When you pursue religious liberty and the rights of religious expression, you need to also pursue freedom of opinion and expression generally, especially for those you dislike the most. You need protection from people who truly despise you and are willing to engage in violence to put their opinion into action.

    Christians should be front and center in fighting for the rights of Muslims, Jews, Pagans, and any other religious group. In fact, that effort should be extended to non-religious groups. Freedom needs to be protected for everyone. Freedom of religion is not the freedom for Christians to do what they want; it’s the freedom for everyone, Christians included, to practice their faith as they see fit.

  • Paying for Education: Class Size

    In 2002 Florida voters approved an amendment ordering the state to reduce class size. As with so many such amendments, the state was left to look for a way to provide the teachers and pay them. The story in my home county, Escambia, and in neighboring Santa Rosa county is in today’s Pensacola News-Journal. In a fit of journalistic optimism, it’s titled New teachers filling void, but the bottom line is that the local schools have a bit of a problem filling the necessary teaching slots with qualified people.

    Some of the available solutions are good, such as providing an accelerated pathway for people with degrees, but who are not certified in education. But a great deal will have to be done to fill these classrooms with teachers who will help prepare our young people to be productive citizens.

    And that puts the burden back on the voters. Will we pay for this? It’s a good thing; we voted to mandate it. Will we be as responsible when we find out that smaller classes cost more money?

    I’m firmly convinced that the results will be worth it.

  • Innovative Health Care Option

    For years, ever since I first heard of nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants, I have thought that our health care profession could be improved by using less expensive–but not necessarily less effective–professionals to provide primary care. Now, in an article Want Treatment With Those Pills?, Newsweek is describing just such a revolution in progress. Small, walk-in clinics staffed mostly by nurse-practitioners, are popping up all over the place. What they provide is more consumer oriented medicine, including greater convenience, better service, and lower prices.

    Right now the target is primarily those without insurance, for whom the lower cost is the focus. But one clinic, according to Newsweek, reports that more than half of its patients are insured. Quoting the article:

    “The time for this concept has come,” says Brian Jones, CEO of MedXpress, which is opening its first clinic this summer in Texas and expects to have 500 locations nationwide by 2010. “We expect this to be almost a revolution in terms of the delivery-care model,” he adds.

    I agree! I certainly hope that this will be a revolution in how health care is provided. Medical science continues to advance, so that physicians have to have more and more training just to get past the starting gate, and must spend a good deal of their time in maintaining their skills. A good thing, the improvement of medical treatment, becomes a negative because it makes simple treatment much more expensive. If I have a cold that seems a little more persistent than normal I have two options–delay treatment, or bite the bullet and pay the price, most likely just to be told that I have a cold, and have to wait it out.

    Now in my household, with a wife who is a Registered Nurse, and MD/RN parents who are a phone call away, I can often avoid the dilemna. But others don’t have the family resources I do. Because of high cost, they may delay treatment until things become much worse. With a nurse practitioner available, someone surely well-equipped to tell the patient whether their condition is routine or requires more complex handling, anyone can avoid these extra expenses. Most medical conditions don’t require the time of a specialist, and these can be handled much more effectively.

    With standards established for electronic medical records and the means of sending them quickly to a primary care physician’s office, referral can be quick and efficient. There is some discussion in the article of consultation and supervision by physicians, and that would provide an additional layer of safety, again using quick transfer of medical records and test results.

    I think this is a wonderful innovation, and I’m glad to see that it’s catching on in a big way. It doesn’t solve the problems of health care, especially for the uninsured, but it certainly helps. It will not only reduce the total bill for health care, but allow resources to be shifted from routine care to case where more complex care is needed.

  • Fear and Human-Animal Hybrids

    In an article titled Raising Beast People, subtitled “Science is blurring the line between humans and animals, Lee Silver has pointed to some of the aspects of science that raise our greatest fears. All of the science fiction stories of humans turning into monsters, all the stories of alien interventions, and all of our nightmares are brought to the surface by the kind of research described by this article.

    The main subject of the story is some mice. Biologist Fred Gage is experimenting on these mice to learn about how human neurons degrade or die as in Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s syndromes. As silver says,

    Inside their brains are living human neurons that help them to see, hear and think.

    And there the fear awakens. As we’ve watched various horror movies that involve humans being slowly changed into some horrifying monsters, or animals becoming intelligent, but remaining basically hostile, we’ve had that certain knowledge that what we were watching was imaginary, that science would never progress to the point where it could do what we imagined. But science keeps on progressing, and there’s no end in sight to the possibilities of genetic research.

    Quoting Silver again:

    Many people, however, are deeply disturbed by this research. U.S. President George W. Bush believes that scientists like Gage have stepped across a moral line that must be defended, even at the cost of biomedical progress. In his 2006 State of the Union address, he implored Congress to “pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research [including] creating human-animal hybrids,” because “human life is a gift from our Creator” that should never be “devalued.”

    “Deeply disturbed” may be an understatement. But I think that President Bush is going overboard by suggesting that this kind of research devalues human life, or lessens the gift of life from the creator. Each new scientific discovery, especially in biology, makes some people nervous. There have been repeated fears that just around the corner there would be some scientific discovery that would take us that one step too far, and have us stepping over some unknown boundary set by the creator.

    I’m not particularly overjoyed by the sound of this type of research, but I think that my visceral reaction is one that is emotional, and not based on reflection. It’s the “ooh ish” reaction of someone seeing an autopsy for the first time. It’s not that the autopsy is actually dangerous, or that it is more threatening than many other things. It’s just that it gets to some of our most basic emotional reactions. Human organs growing in test tubes just don’t seem, well, nice.

    I would suggest two things. First, this is not the most threatening scientific discovery that we’ve made recently. If I thought anything would step over some invisible boundary set by God, I would suggest it would be the invention of the atomic bomb and its successors. Human beings have been managing the capacity to destroy all life many times over for several decades. Even now, when the cold war is over, and we could afford to destroy much of our arsenal, there is little effort made to do so. Why? We’ve grown used to it. It was done in secret and out of necessity, and we’ve simply gotten used to it. But in silos in the United States and Russia it’s still there.

    We’ve had to work on some standards, some ethics for living with nuclear weapons. Personally, I think we need to improve those standards considerably. The science was there. Once the science is there, someone is going to use it. The best thing to do is to learn how to make use of it and to live with it. We are not going to be able to prevent such knowledge from coming into existence.

    In the case of nuclear weapons it was the necessities of war. Now it’s the necessities of deteriorating human bodies. This science is going to happen, and in the end we’ll find a way to live with it. God’s glory will be undiminished, because after all he’s the source of all of it in any case. We’re going to be much better off working on reasonable safety standards and appropriate controls on this type of research so that it can be done as safely as possible.

    I’m not certain of all the ethics. I’m not an ethicist. Bioethicists need to look at and discuss this. But we won’t prevent it. One more scary category of “thing” has come into the world, and we’re going to learn to live with it. Set aside the fear, think constructively, and move forward. Otherwise the world will do so without you.

  • The Search for Ideological Perfection

    The Washington Post has a story about conservative intellectuals who are becoming infuriated with what they see as inaction in recent foreign policy decisions by the Bush administration. In the article, Bush faces backlash on the right, they quote a number of people in this category, but this one summarizes it:

    “It is Topic A of every single conversation,” said Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that has had strong influence in staffing the administration and shaping its ideas. “I don’t have a friend in the administration, on Capitol Hill or any part of the conservative foreign policy establishment who is not beside themselves with fury at the administration.”

    These conservatives–and the article points out carefully that this is not a consensus of all conservatives–are angry that Bush is seeking diplomatic, multilateral solutions on North Korea and Iran, and now on the clash between Israel and Hezbollah as well.

    What these people are seeking is ideological perfection. Within their ideology, the perfect foreign policy action is one in which the result comes both quickly and with finality and in which the United States achieves all of its goals. The time taken to talk and build consensus is wasted or worse. After all, why should we spend time talking to people who are so obviously wrong?

    Now let me be clear that I don’t believe that diplomacy alone will solve problems. There are those whose solution to every problem is to talk about it, and if talking fails, we should talk some more. But then there are those who think ordinary human relations are really unnecessary, and who think that violence is the one best answer to everything. Diplomacy, backed by sufficient force to deal with those who refuse to behave as part of the world community is the formula for succes in international relations. Of course there is a great deal of room for disagreement on the precise balance.

    But it’s not merely the foreign policy issue that I want to comment on here. These particular conservative intellectuals, and their counterparts on the left, pursue ideological perfection. They want a candidate who agrees with them on all issues and will keep all of their issues as a priority. There is no room for timing, no room for strategy, no room for compromise. It doesn’t matter that the vast majority of the American people are somewhere between these extremes, many of them very close to the center. They’re going to dump on, and in extreme cases abandon, office-holders and candidates who don’t fulfill all of their goals.

    In an election, that means that a center-right or center-left candidate has great difficulty succeeding because the so-called “base” refuses to stick with them. The simple fact is that those of us with strong convictions–and I count myself as one, even though my strong convictions are moderate–need to realize that in order to live in society we will not get everything we want, and that this is simply a part of living in society.

    I think we would be much better off if we could just acknowledge the necessity of compromise. What actually seems to happen is that people try to claim that they are carrying out their own convictions. We think there is something wrong with a politician admitting that he wanted one thing, but by the time negotiations were over, he got something else, and he thinks that’s the best he can do. The ideologues, of course, would jump all over such a statement and demand greater commitment, but commitment and determination are not always the greatest values.

    Which leads me back to the starting point. This all goes back to priorities and strategy. Would it be possible for us to carry out a military strategy in response simultaneously to Iran, North Korea, and Hezbollah in Lebanon? I’m not saying that none of these situations justifies a military solution, though the question of what practical military solution might be available for each, but to solve all of them simultaneously, working unilaterally? That’s an idea that could only find root in the head of a someone who only has to comment on, never to solve, problems. And yet at the same time they are complaining that we have placed insufficient troops in Iraq to accomplish our goals–on which point they are probably right. (Perhaps that suggests more that we should examine our goals than add more troops.)

    To live in community requires give and take, both in foreign policy and in our political life. Politics, conducted openly is not a bad thing. It’s a necessary thing.

  • The Middle East: Solving and Appearing to Solve

    The headline today on MSNBC drew my attention back to the middle east after an overnight rest from it. It says: Israel targets Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut, which is, of course, no surprise due to the course of this conflict. In the narrow sense, this conflict is following the pattern of many before it. There are numerous attacks by guerillas–in this case Hezbollah–on Israeli targets. Israel retaliates. The conflict escalates until the international community finally gets mobilized into some semblance of action, after which all sides agree to put a bandaid over the problem.

    I’m not claiming to have a solution to the many problems of the middle east. One thing I do want to point out, however, is that only a very small number of people actually care to solve the problems, especially those involving the Palestinian people. What the world leaders want to do is to appear to provide a solution, hopefully one that will appear to work long enough for them to get people’s attention elsewhere. Other leaders are invested in having the problem there to distract from the very real problems of their own countries.

    Let’s face it. A real solution to this problem is going to involve several things, many of which the Arab countries don’t want to support, and some of which Israel doesn’t want to support. The west, I’m sorry to say, seems to find any solution acceptable that keeps the violence off our TV screens. Palestinians can keep living in misery and dying, and Israelis can continue to live under constant threat and also die, just as long as they do it quietly and the supply of oil is not threatened.

    • Many Palestinians will never return to Palestine or live in Israel. They might as well plan to get assimilated wherever they are living. It’s nasty, but it’s a fact, and the sooner they start working on it, the sooner things will actually be solved.
    • Israelis need to give some on land–which they have–but also on rights and equal treatment of their Palestinian citizens. While it would not be practical for all Palestinians, both those displaced in the various wars and their descendants, to return to Palestine, those who can and do return need to be treated with dignity and respect.
    • Arab countries need to control terrorist activity within their boundaries. That’s going to be hard. It’s going to be unpopular. But none of this works without a stable legal framework.
    • The west, especially the United States, needs to recognize that we cannot impose western style democracy and western values on Arab countries. I’m not saying that they are too immature or stupid for it, as though I can arrogantly impose a goal on them of becoming just like us. What I’m saying is that they are different, they are them and we are us, and we should accept that.

    The reason the problem is so intractable is that none of the parties are really ready to accept the elements that they need to accept. Palestinians do not want to give up the right, however impractical, of returning to Palestine, which they consider their home. Some Israelis and their Christian allies in the United States are anxious not to give up any of the “Biblical promised land,” and so oppose any land placed under the rule of the Palestinians. Other Israelis are not anxious to create a state in which the Palestinians are actually full citizens with equal rights, because in practice that is contrary to the Jewish state. In a Jewish state, non-Jews are not quite as equal as everyone else. Arab governments would generally prefer to keep their population’s anger focussed outward, and truly stepping on their terrorists would bring the anger on them. Further, many of them are in sympathy with the terrorists anyhow. The west, especially the United States doesn’t want to allow middle eastern countries to solve their own problems because they won’t solve them our way.

    In this way, in one paragraph I destroy my previous one paragraph solution. The motivation simply isn’t there to actually solve these problems. In the meantime, Lebanon continues to burn because they cannot control the activities of what is effectively a foreign army in their territority.

    Real peace won’t happen until all sides are willing to give something up, until peace becomes more important than the largely symbolic goals–this land versus that land and where precisely do we live.

    I tend to think we generally get what we really want, and in this case peace hasn’t come to the top of the priority list. In the meantime, politicians can continue to claim to want it, but the rest of us should watch what the politicians actually accomplish, not what they claim.

  • Minimum Wage and EITC

    I got this link through a comment on my previous post on the minimum wage, but I want to make sure to call everyone’s attention to it. David Prenatt, Jr., on his blog Net Esquire, made a number of posts on the minimum wage debate, and particularly on the Earned Income Tax Credit as an alterantive to it. You can start with his latest, Simplifying the Minimum Wage Debate, and work your way from there.

    I had not previously thought of the EITC as an alternative to the minimum wage, which simply illustrates the dangers of keeping one’s thinking inside the box. A little more flexibility allows me to see this as a viable alternative.

    I wanted to underline this point because it illustrates my major point, which was that Christians can agree on the moral issues whilst disagreeing on the strategy. We can be in support of a living wage, and yet disagree on the strategies to accomplish that goal. Equating the strategy with the goal in a moral sense will simply prevent us from finding new and better strategies.

  • Christian Ministries and Politics

    CNN.com has published a commentary by Bishop T. D. Jakes titled Commentary: No political party can contain us. My wife called my attention to it as a blog topic.

    Bishop Jakes is explicitly addressing his comments to the African-American community. To what extent should black churches use the pulpit for politics? How much should they depend on a single political party to accomplish their goals. Often ministers disagree on this issue. Bishop Jakes says:

    I do not believe that African-American ministers should allow their political views to dictate the subjects and tone of their sermons. Some believe their calling is to consistently petition society to address its role in depriving African-Americans of the full benefits of citizenship. Others believe they are called to inform, encourage, coax and propel people of color to provide for themselves, shape their own reality and build institutions to better their communities.

    I’ve encountered both types of ministers, and often they can be very impatient with those who have a different emphasis. Their goals are generally very similar, yet the debate over strategy can get in the way of recognizing the similarities. Bishop Jakes suggests a solution:

    If we as African-American ministers allow anyone to script our sermons for us, where will it end? I respect each minister’s views and recognize his right to tout them, but it is dangerous to try to force all members of any group to align themselves with anyone’s viewpoints, including my own. Each of us must answer the call that he or she receives from God, not the direction of any man.

    Now I don’t feel qualified to comment on how the African-American community deals with politics, but I think he has some very good ideas for the rest of us. We all face issues of how politics relates to our spiritual beliefs and activities. Should a preacher use his pulpit to deal with social issues? If so, just how specific should he get about the solutions to such problems? Should we, as Christians, look primarily for temporal solutions to our problems, or is our focus on another world, if not to the exclusion of this one, certainly to its diminishing?

    There are two temptations for the preacher or church leader involved in politics. First he may get so involved in political solutions that the good news about Jesus gets lost. Second, just as he can with doctrinal issues, he may make peripheral matters, or issues of strategy or tactics become central, and thus divide the body over non-essential issues. Both of these problems occur in the church as a whole.

    For many Christians, good goals get confused with the specific strategy for accomplishing them. Using the issue of abortion as an example, I believe we have farily widespread agreement amongst Christians that reducing the number of abortions in this country is a good goal. As a matter of strategy there are various mixtures of education and legal sanctions. For many, the strategy becomes the actual goal. Thus many conservatives accuse liberals of actually desiring abortions to take place, and believing they are good things, because those same liberals do not support particular laws against abortion. Liberals, on the other hand accuse the conservatives of a lack of concern for the health of women, for individual choice, and for the needs of the children who are born. Now while the priorities may differ, I suspect that the vast majority of liberals are concerned with life, and do not regard abortions as a good thing, while the vast majority of conservatives are concerned with the health of women and with the care of born children, and not just the unborn. While the priorities differ, the hopes are similar.

    Solving this sort of issue in a political way, through the action of the law, can interfere with the gospel way, which is the transformation of people one by one through the power of the Holy Spirit. Such transformed people would be much less likely to have unstable families, and much less likely to be having unjustified abortions. The point here is not to condemn one form of politics over another, but rather to suggest that we can get together on the more basic issue of the gospel, while we differ on political strategies.

    The second problem, making the political strategy part of the goal, is one that was first called to my attention in reading the United Methodist social principles before I joined the United Methodist Church. The social principles struck me as material written by impractical idealists–in many cases (but not all) admirable goals, yet rarely well-considered strategies for attaining those goals. Conservatives are generally likely to agree with me here, though they will often consider the goals themselves less than admirable. Liberals may wonder why I object to the social principles at all.

    Recently I wrote about the minimum wage, so let me use it as an example. I had a very pleasant exchange with a commenter on this blog who disagreed with me on the topic, yet we found that we agreed on the goal: a just, living wage for all. Now we disagreed profoundly on the strategy for implementing that goal. Politicians of all stripes seem to forget that simply because you say some strategy is for the purpose of accomplishing some goal, doesn’t mean that it actually will accomplish that goal. I believe that increased funding of education and infrastructure will tend to improve wages and go further toward creating a living wage than will the minimum wage. Others disagree. It is important to note that we are disagreeing not on the goal, but on the strategy. I think there is little doubt that Jesus would want his followers to support a living wage. But he didn’t tell us how best to accomplish that in 21st century America. That matter of strategy is left to us to decide.

    Even greater confusion results when a pastor allows himself to be identified with a particular political party. The American political parties do not represent a coherent ideology, and certainly neither one can claim the allegiance of Christians in all areas. Those who suggest otherwise are in grave danger of obscuring or drowning out the message of the gospel. This error is again something that can happen from either side. In these cases church leaders would do well to talk about principles and goals, and allow church members to choose strategies for themselves.

    In all cases, however, Bishop Jakes’s advice is important. Each of us must follow the calling of God in what we say and do. Let’s just make sure it’s not our own political and social agendas we are following, and not God’s calling.

  • Celebrating our Country

    July 4 is a time to celebrate our country and the things that made it great. It will be a day of fireworks, parades, parties, picnics, and speeches. I believe it’s incredibly important that we learn to celebrate the values that maintain our freedom, and do so in a principled and consistent way. Too often freedom means permission to do whatever one wants, without consideration for the freedom of others.

    So I’d like to suggest some ways to celebrate the 4th of July in deeds as well as in words, sort of like a July version of New Year’s resolutions.

    Let’s try to:

    • Celebrate and support our troops, but also be careful to make sure that our politicians use them effectively and appropriately. As a veteran myself, I have always believed that a functioning democracy needs a non-political military to carry out the policy of the civilian government. The most important thing you can do for the soldiers is to see to it that the government uses them appropriately, allocates adequate finances to support them, pays them appropriately, trains them well, and provides them with effective command. Don’t stop sending letters. Don’t stop praying. Don’t stop writing.
    • Be effective citizens. Get to know about all the candidates you will have to vote for or against, and all the issues. Don’t be guided by political slogans. Study it out for yourself, and then vote. In 2004, only 60% of the voters turned out in a presidential election that was decided by less than 3% (statistics from the United States Election Project). In 2002 without a presidential election, the turnout was just under 40% of eligible voters. That’s not patriotism; that’s apathy.
    • Be more interested in what our symbols stand for than in the symbols themselves.
    • Become educated about what makes our nation work and what is happening to our freedom on a daily basis. Learn and do!
    • Be ready to fight, but also have the courage to forgive and to make peace.
    • Find a way to accommodate people who are different than you are, instead of demanding that they become more like you.

    Perhaps I could summarize with a national goal similar to what Paul suggested to the believers in Philippi: Don’t look just after your own interests but look after the interests of others (Philippians 2:4).