A Few Small Thoughts About a Couple of Big Concepts
Sometimes the best I can do as a writer is refer readers to other writers. That’s the case this week, as I try to pull my act together after a week of unexpected annoyances (I deal much better with annoyances when I expect them), including a very mild cold that my disturbed imagination automatically attributes to the pandemic, even though it’s probably just a very mild cold.
I’m tempted to write about the Virginia governor’s election (maybe it’s not the end of the world for Democrats, but just a choice of one particular candidate over another), Aaron Rodgers and his misleading use of the word “immunized,” the progressives in Congress who would not vote in favor of the infrastructure bill, or the disappointing absences of two world powers from this week’s climate summit. But enough other people are writing about those things and I have nothing particularly insightful to add, at least not today.
On the other hand, Heather Cox Richardson continues to put out great content in her Substack newsletter, “Letters From an American.” If you think you might be interested in a history professor’s take on current events, I highly recommend it. The piece she published today (or was it yesterday?) makes short shrift of the right wing’s repeated refrain that the Democratic agenda represents socialism. She quotes from no less than Abraham Lincoln in explaining the proper role of government, a role that seems to be constantly under attack and little understood. I have to give Republican politicians credit - they are very good at name calling and making the names stick. Anyway, here is an excerpt from today’s edition of Professor Richardson’s letters:
Regulation of business and promotion of infrastructure is not, in fact, the international socialism today’s Republicans claim. According to Abraham Lincoln, who first articulated the principles of the Republican Party, and under whom the party invented the American income tax, the “legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves---in their separate, and individual capacities.” Those things included, he wrote, “public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.
If that’s socialism (it isn’t), then give me more of it.
And while I’m at it, could I please prevail upon members of the religious right to stop saying that bodily autonomy is a precept of Christianity? I am a Christian myself, but somehow the image of Jesus choosing not to resist death on a cross does not cry out “bodily autonomy” to me. Neither does his second commandment, “love thy neighbor as thyself.” (I reflexively put that in King James English, and kind of like it put that way.) Sometimes it seems that there is Christianity, and then there is Christianity, and one bears little resemblance to the other.
But I digress.