A breakdown in the chain of command?

The following is a summary of what occurred prior to the battle, during the battle, and the impact on US actions following it.  It comes from several detailed articles reviewing the situation.  I have also included my recollections of what occurred and what was discussed by the staff officers of the Joint Staff, primarily those assigned to the National Military Command Center (NMCC) and the Joint Reconnaissance Center (JRC).  At the time of the battle, I was assigned as the Reconnaissance and Single Integrated Operations Plan officer (RSO) on Operations Team 1, NMCC.  I was assigned to Ops Team 1 on 20 January 1993 and served there through 1993. I then served in the Joint Reconnaissance Center until February 1996.

Two of the NMCC’s primary tasks are to monitor worldwide events of defense significance and to coordinate a crisis response as needed.  Much of the monitoring function entailed reading intelligence and operations reports sent in by overseas commands and forwarding the information to upper levels of military and civilian decision makers.  As the RSO I was tasked to comment on numerous intelligence reports and asked about possible reconnaissance operations that could confirm the information. 

While assigned to Ops Team 1, the Battle of Mogadishu occurred, 3-4 October 1993. Ops Team 1 was on duty during a portion of the battle and forwarded situation reports (SITREP) to the Secretary of Defense (SecDef).  Unfortunately, there was little we could do to coordinate a crisis response since we had no troops or aircraft, not assigned to the forces already in place, to task for support.  All we could do was monitor the response by the 10th Mountain Division Quick Reaction Force (QRF) and the Malaysian and Pakistani forces in Mogadishu.

Before looking at specifics of the battle, I want to set the stage for US involvement in Somalia.  Most of this comes from various sources as indicated.

“In 1992, clan-based civil-war fighting and one of the worst African droughts of the century created famine conditions that threatened one-fourth of Somalia’s population with starvation. In August 1992, the United Nations began a peacekeeping mission to the country to ensure the distribution of food and medical aid, but it was largely unsuccessful. With U.N. troops unable to control Somalia’s warring factions, security deteriorating, and thousands of tons of food stranded in portside warehouses, President (George H.W.) Bush ordered a large U.S. military force to the area on December 4, 1992. Five days later, the first U.S. Marines landed in the first phase of “Operation Restore Hope.”” (1)

“With the aid of U.S. military troops and forces from other nations, the U.N. succeeded in distributing desperately needed food to many starving Somalis. However, with factional fighting continuing unabated, and the U.N. without an effective agenda to resolve the political strife, there seemed no clear end in sight to Operation Restore Hope when President Bill Clinton took office in January 1993.”(1)

“…, Clinton was anxious to bring the Americans home, and in May the mission was formally handed back to the United Nations. By June 1993, only 4,200 U.S. troops remained. However, on June 5, 24 Pakistani U.N. peacekeepers inspecting a weapons storage site were ambushed and massacred by Somalia soldiers under the warlord General Mohammed Aidid. U.S. and U.N. forces subsequently began an extensive search for the elusive strongman, and in August, 400 elite U.S. troops from Delta Force and the U.S. Rangers (Task Force Ranger (TFR)) arrived on a mission to capture Aidid. Two months later, on October 3-4, 18 of these soldiers were killed and 84 wounded during a disastrous assault on Mogadishu’s Olympia Hotel in search of Aidid (and/or high level advisors). The bloody battle, which lasted 17 hours, was the most violent U.S. combat firefight since Vietnam. As many as 1,000 Somalis were killed.” (1)

“Three days later, with Aidid still at large, President Clinton cut his losses and ordered a total U.S. withdrawal. On March 25, 1994, the last U.S. troops left Somalia, leaving 20,000 U.N. troops behind to facilitate “nation-building” in the divided country. The U.N. troops departed in 1995 and political strife and clan-based fighting continued in Somalia into the 21st century.” (1)  As discussed later, the withdrawal did not occur until all the resources originally asked for to conduct the operations were deployed to Mogadishu in order to cover the withdrawal.  President Clinton issued orders that military operations would only be for self-defense. (3[81]) 

This deployment and engagement of US forces in a combat situation was the first such action directed by President Clinton and SecDef Aspin.  There was a great deal of discussion at the Joint Staff about the number of troops deployed to Somalia and the kind of support they needed.  Our direction from the SecDef and presumably the President was that the US would deploy the minimum amount of force necessary to support the troops and the ongoing humanitarian operations, and we would not deploy armored units.  The idea was that they weren’t needed based on the threat and we wanted to keep our footprint small.  This position was made very clear in a meeting between Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Colin Powell and SecDef Aspin, “In September 1993, General Powell asked Aspin to approve the request of the U.S. commander in Somalia for tanks, armored vehicles, and AC-130 Spectre gunships for his forces. Aspin turned down the request and didn't take Powell's request seriously.  … While Powell presented to Aspin (the need for) additional tanks, armored vehicles, AC-130 Spectre gunships air-support to support the U.S. Troops that were about to be deployed for Battle of Mogadishu and discussing the battle preparation. instead of paying attention to Powell’s recommendation, Aspin was more focused on wolfing down his salad, causing Powell to grow more irritated towards Aspin (many people) believed (this) to be the primary reason of Powell ‘s early departure as Chairman of The Joint Chiefs of Staff.(3[24])”  Keep in mind, deploying armored units also requires the deployment of a significant logistics unit to support them.  As discussed above, as time went on and the clan attacks increased on UN/US forces, the mission for the military shifted from protecting the humanitarian aid efforts to hunting down General Mohammed Aidid and his militia.  Unfortunately, as these operations were conducted, a number of Somali civilians were killed and this turned the population against the military operations and also caused the general population to support Aidid over the foreign invaders.

Several different US military units were in Mogadishu conducting various missions.  10th Mountain Division with helicopters from the 101st Airborne Division in support of UNOSOM II humanitarian operations. Task Force Ranger (TFR) under MG William Garrison with Army Rangers, Delta Force Special Operators and helicopter support from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment were tasked with capturing General Aidid.  There were also forces there from Malaysia and Pakistan and they had armored personnel carriers and medium tanks. (2)  These were the primary troops engaged in the battle of 3-4 October 1993.  The following is a description of what occurred.

(Extracts from Source 3, references from Source 3 shown in[ ]) “On 3 October 1993, special operations forces consisting of Bravo Company 3rd Battalion, the 75th Ranger Regiment, the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, and the 160th Aviation Battalion, attempted to capture Aidid’s foreign minister, Omar Salad Elmer and his top political advisor, Mohamed Hassan Awake.[36]” 

“The plan was that Delta operators would assault the target building using MH-6 Little Bird helicopters, and secure the targets inside the building. Four Ranger chalks under Captain Michael D. Steele's command would fast-rope down from hovering MH-60L Black Hawks. Rangers would create a four-corner defensive perimeter around the target building to isolate it and ensure that no enemy could get in or out.[37]” 

“A column of nine HMMWVs (High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle) and three M939 five-ton trucks under Lieutenant Colonel Danny McKnight's command would arrive at the building to take the entire assault team and their prisoners back to base. The entire operation was estimated to take no longer than 30 minutes.[38]”

“The ground-extraction convoy was supposed to reach the captive targets a few minutes after the operation's beginning, but it ran into delays. Somali citizens and local militia formed barricades along Mogadishu's streets with rocks, wreckage, rubbish and burning tires, blocking the convoy from reaching the Rangers and their captives. Aidid militiamen with megaphones were shouting, "Come out and defend your homes!"[39]”

“At 13:50, Task Force Ranger analysts received intelligence of Salad's location. The soldiers, vehicle convoys, and helicopters were on high alert stand by until the code word "Irene" was echoed across all the radio channels by command. The code word "Irene" was the word that began the mission and sent the helicopters into the air.[40]”

“At 15:42, the MH-6 assault Little Birds carrying the Delta operators hit the target, the wave of dust becoming so bad that one was forced to go around again and land out of position. Next, the two Black Hawks carrying the second Delta assault team led by DELTA officer Captain Austin S. Miller came into position and dropped their teams as the four Ranger chalks prepared to rope onto the four corners surrounding the target building. Chalk Four being carried by Black Hawk Super 67, piloted by CW3 Jeff Niklaus, was accidentally put a block north of their intended point. Declining the pilot's offer to move them back down due to the time it would take to do so, leaving the helicopter too exposed, Chalk Four intended to move down to the planned position, but intense ground fire prevented them from doing so.”

“The ground convoy arrived ten minutes later near the Olympic Hotel target building [41] and waited for Delta and Rangers to complete their mission. During the operation's first moments, Private First Class Todd Blackburn fell while fast-roping from Super 67 while it hovered 70 feet (21 m) above the streets. Blackburn suffered numerous head injuries and required evacuation by Sergeant Jeff Struecker's column of three Humvees. While taking Blackburn back to base, Sergeant Dominick Pilla, assigned to Struecker's Humvee, was killed instantly when a bullet struck his head.[42] The Humvee column arrived back at base, full of bullet holes and emitting smoke from the damage.[39]”

“At about 16:20, one of the Black Hawks, Super 61, piloted by CW3 Cliff "Elvis" Wolcott and CW3 Donovan "Bull" Briley, was shot down by an RPG-7. Both pilots were killed in the resulting crash and two of the crew chiefs, Staff Sgt. Ray Dowdy and Staff Sgt. Charlie Warren, were severely wounded. Staff Sergeant Daniel Busch and Sergeant Jim Smith, both Delta snipers, survived the crash and began defending the site. [43]” 

“An MH-6, Star 41, piloted by CW3 Karl Maier and CW5 Keith Jones, landed nearby. Jones left the helicopter and carried Busch to the safety of the helicopter, while Maier provided cover fire from the cockpit repeatedly denying orders to lift off while his co-pilot was not in the Bird. Maier nearly hit Chalk One's Lieutenant Tom DiTomasso, arriving with Rangers and Delta operators to secure the site. Jones and Maier evacuated Busch and Smith. Busch later died of his injuries, having been shot four times while defending the crash site.”

“A combat search and rescue (CSAR) team, led by Delta Captain Bill J. Coultrup, Air Force Master Sergeant Scott C. Fales, and Air Force Technical Sergeant Timothy A. Wilkinson, were able to fast rope down to the Super 61 crash site despite an RPG hit that crippled their helicopter, Super 68, piloted by CW3 Dan Jollota and Maj. Herb Rodriguez. Despite the damage, Super 68 did make it back to base. The CSAR team found both the pilots dead and two wounded inside the crashed helicopter. Under intense fire, the team moved the wounded men to a nearby collection point, where they built a makeshift shelter using kevlar armor plates salvaged from Super 61's wreckage.[44]” 

“Communications were confused between the ground convoy and the assault team. The assault team and the ground convoy waited for 20 minutes to receive their orders to move out. Both units were under the mistaken impression that they were to be first contacted by the other.[45]” 

“During the wait, a second Black Hawk helicopter, callsign Super 64 and piloted by Michael Durant, was shot down by an RPG-7 at around 16:40.[46] Most of the assault team went to the first crash site for a rescue operation. Upon reaching the first crash site, about 90 Rangers and Delta Force operators found themselves under heavy fire.[47] Despite air support, the assault team was effectively trapped for the night. With a growing number of wounded needing shelter, they occupied several nearby houses and confined the occupants for the battle's duration.[48]” 

“At the second crash site, two Delta snipers, Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart, were inserted by Super 62, piloted by Mike Goffena and Jim Yacone. Their first two requests to be inserted were denied, but they were finally granted permission after their third request. They inflicted heavy casualties on the approaching Somali mob. Super 62 had kept up their fire support for Gordon and Shughart, but an RPG struck Super 62. Despite the damage, Super 62 managed to land at New Port safely.” 

“When Gordon was eventually killed, Shughart picked up Gordon's CAR-15 and gave it to Durant. Shughart went back around the helicopter's nose and held off the mob for about 10 more minutes before he was killed. The Somalis then overran the crash site and killed all but Durant. He was nearly beaten to death, but was saved when members of Aidid's militia came to take him prisoner.[46] For their actions, MSG Gordon and SFC Shughart were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the first awarded since the Vietnam War.[27]”

“Repeated attempts by the Somalis to mass forces and overrun the American positions in a series of firefights near the first crash site were neutralized by aggressive small arms fire and by strafing runs and rocket attacks from AH-6J Little Bird helicopter gunships of the Nightstalkers, the only air unit equipped and trained for night fighting.”  

“A relief convoy with elements from the Task Force 2–14 Infantry, 10th Mountain Division, accompanied by Malaysian and Frontier Force Regiment of Pakistani U.N. forces, arrived at the first crash site at around 02:00. No contingency planning or coordination with U.N. forces had been arranged prior to the operation; consequently, the recovery of the surrounded American troops was significantly complicated and delayed. Determined to protect all of the rescue convoy's members, General Garrison made sure that the convoy would roll out in force.”

“When the convoy finally pushed into the city, it consisted of more than 100 U.N. vehicles including Malaysian forces' German-made Condor APCs, four Pakistani tanks (M48s), American HMMWVs and several M939 five-ton flatbed trucks. This two-mile-long column was supported by several other Black Hawks and Cobra assault helicopters stationed with the 10th Mountain Division. Meanwhile, Task Force Ranger's "Little Birds" continued their defense of Super 61's downed crew and rescuers. The American assault force sustained heavy casualties, including several killed, and a Malaysian soldier died when an RPG hit his Condor vehicle. Seven Malaysians and two Pakistanis were wounded.[32][33]”

“The battle was over by 06:30 on Monday, 4 October. U.S. forces were finally evacuated to the U.N. base by the armored convoy. While leaving the crash site, a group of Rangers and Delta operators led by SSG John R. Dycus realized that there was no room left in the vehicles for them and were forced to depart the city on foot to a rendezvous point on National Street. This has been commonly referred to as the "Mogadishu Mile".”

“In all, 19 U.S. soldiers were killed in action during the battle or shortly after, and another 73 were wounded in action.[49] The Malaysian forces lost one soldier and had seven injured, while the Pakistanis also lost one soldier and suffered two injured. Somali casualties were heavy, with estimates of fatalities ranging from 315 to over 2,000 combatants.[2] The Somali casualties were a mixture of militiamen and local civilians. Somali civilians suffered heavy casualties due to the dense urban character of that portion of Mogadishu.”  

“On 6 October 1993, a mortar round fell on the U.S. compound, injuring 12 people and killing Delta Sergeant First Class Matthew L. Rierson, the 19th U.S. soldier killed in the battle. That same day, a team on special mission Super 64 incurred two wounded.[50] Two weeks after the battle, General Garrison officially accepted responsibility. In a handwritten letter to President Clinton, Garrison took full responsibility for the battle's outcome. He wrote that Task Force Ranger had adequate intelligence for the mission and that their objective—capturing targets of value—was met.[51]”

From the article “What You May Not Know About 'Black Hawk Down'” (2), “Michael Durant, the lone survivor of the second Black Hawk that was overrun by Somalis, was captured and held prisoner for 11 days. Robert Oakley, Special Envoy to Somalia, issued a rather blunt ultimatum to Durant’s captors while negotiating his release, stating:

…there’s going to be a fight with your people. The minute the guns start again, all restraint on the U.S. side goes. Just look at the stuff coming in here now. An aircraft carrier, tanks, gunships… the works. Once the fighting starts, all this pent-up anger is going to be released. This whole part of the city will be destroyed…”

“The White House backed up the threat with the deployment of a mechanized infantry unit – including Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles – an additional 10th Mountain battalion, AC-130 Spectre gunships, a new special ops team, and the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier battle group. UNITAF had more firepower than ever before at its disposal, and the president had bluntly expressed a willingness to use it if Durant was not released immediately.”

“How serious the Clinton administration was about escalation is a different matter. As reinforcements were deployed, Washington had already settled upon withdrawal. There was considerable political and public pressure to wrap up things in Somalia and another battle, even for the sole purpose of rescuing an American servicemember, would have complicated matters even further. Fortunately, the Somali warlords took Oakley’s threat seriously and immediately released Durant, facilitating an end to U.S. involvement in Somalia.” (2)

Finally, in looking at the end results from the battle, from source 1, “In a national security policy review session held in the White House on 6 October 1993, U.S. President Bill Clinton directed the Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral David E. Jeremiah, to stop all actions by U.S. forces against Aidid except those required in self-defense. He reappointed Ambassador Robert B. Oakley as special envoy to Somalia in an attempt to broker a peace settlement and then announced that all U.S. forces would withdraw from Somalia no later than 31 March 1994. On 15 December 1993, U.S. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin stepped down, taking much of the blame for his decision to refuse requests for tanks and armored vehicles in support of the mission.(3[81][82]) Garrison would write, however, that Aspin was not to blame for the events in Mogadishu.  It's also since been noted that the equipment may not have arrived in time to make a difference.(3[83]) A few hundred U.S. Marines remained offshore to assist with any noncombatant evacuation mission that might occur regarding the 1,000-plus U.S. civilians and military advisers remaining as part of the U.S. liaison mission. The Ready Battalion of the 24th Infantry Division, 1–64 Armor, composed 1,300 troops of Task Force Rogue, including the bulk of 1-64 Armor and Infantry troops from her sister battalion 3-15 Infantry. This was the first time M-1 Abrams tanks were delivered by air, using the C-5 Galaxies, which delivered 18 M-1 tanks and 44 Bradley infantry vehicles,(3[84]) while the balance of Task Force Rogues equipment and vehicles were delivered via a roll-on/roll-off ship sent from Fort Stewart (Garden City), Georgia, to Mogadishu to provide armored support for U.S. forces.”

“The Clinton administration in particular endured considerable criticism for the operation's outcome. The main elements of the criticism surround: the administration's decision to leave the region before completing the operation's humanitarian and security objectives; the perceived failure to recognize the threat al-Qaeda elements posed in the region; and the threat against U.S. security interests at home.(3[87]) Critics claim that Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qaeda provided support and training to Mohammed Farrah Aidid's forces.  Osama bin Laden even denigrated the administration's decision to prematurely depart the region, stating that it displayed "the weakness, feebleness and cowardliness of the US soldier".(3[88])  The loss of U.S. military personnel during the Battle of Mogadishu and television images of American soldiers being dragged through the streets by Somalis evoked public outcry. The Clinton administration responded by scaling down U.S. humanitarian efforts in the region.(3[88][89])”

“Fear of a repeat of the events in Somalia shaped U.S. policy in subsequent years, with many commentators identifying the Battle of Mogadishu's graphic consequences as the key reason behind the U.S.'s failure to intervene in later conflicts such as the Rwandan genocide of 1994. According to the U.S.'s former deputy special envoy to Somalia, Walter Clarke: "The ghosts of Somalia continue to haunt US policy. Our lack of response in Rwanda was a fear of getting involved in something like a Somalia all over again."(3[91])” 

From what I recall from the after-action report and discussions, one of the significant problems was that TFR and other US and UN Units had not trained together to any great degree and the units/countries were not cleared for the same level of classified intelligence.  It was also noted, that in an effort to keep operational security as tight as possible, the attempted capture of Mohammed Aidid and/or high-level advisors was not discussed outside of TFR and as a result, there were no plans in place to support or come to the aid of the assault force in an emergency. Also, as noted above, the whole operation was only expected to last 30 minutes. When a rescue operation was found to be necessary, the 10th Mountain did assemble their Quick Reaction Force and sent it out to rescue the assault force; however, it was badly shot up on its first attempt and had to return to the main base to await support from the Malaysians and Pakistanis.  In addition to not having US armored units, support from AC-130 gunships was not available having been denied by SecDef Aspin. The AC-130 could have provided day and night visual intelligence collection and massive firepower against forces in the open.  

Keep in mind, UAVs, such as Predator, for video intelligence collection were still in development and not available for operations.  Electronic intelligence for this kind of engagement was very little if any and to my knowledge wasn’t requested.

As discussed previously, TFR did not have dedicated US armor support.  Again a political decision to keep our presence in Somalia at a low level.  There were also several military considerations to take into account.

• Use of Armor in a city is difficult and dangerous.  The Somalis had RPGs that could destroy a Bradley Fighting Vehicle (BFV) and could disable a M-1 Abrams tank by damaging its tracks.

• The roofs of buildings were above the turrets of the armored vehicles and this would allow the Somalis to fire RPGs and throw Molotov cocktails at the top of the vehicles, the least armored portion of a tank or BFV.  The loss of armored vehicles to Somali attack was viewed as helping to increase Somali morale.

• The M-1 did not have an anti-personnel round for the main gun.  It’s only viable armament would be it’s .50 caliber and two 7.62mm machine guns.

• Use of armor to destroy buildings indiscriminately would cause more Somalis to join the rebels.

One other question discussed in the reference documents: how was a relatively untrained militia in Somalia able to shoot down and damage several helicopters during this engagement?  As described in reference 3, al-Qaeda provided training to the Somalis on how to fire RPGs at helicopters and had participated in the attack by firing RPGs themselves.  There was also an unconfirmed report that al-Qaeda may have provided RPGs with proximity warheads.  This would have allowed damage to the helicopters without actually hitting them.  There are numerous diagrams online showing how proximity fuzing could be accomplished.

One final recommendation that came out of the Joint Staff, was that these kinds of operations cannot occur in isolation.  Higher headquarters must know what’s being executed, and what the contingency plans are for emergency situations, they must be planned and coordinated.

Citation Information

Article Title

1. President Bush orders U.S. troops to Somalia, History.com Editors, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bush-orders-u-s-troops-to-somalia, February 9, 2010

2. What You May Not Know About 'Black Hawk Down', Edward D. Chang, October 03, 2018

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mogadishu_(1993) 8/25

[2.] Human Rights Developments (https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1994/WR94/Africa-08.htm), retrieved on 10 November 2009. 

[4.] Bowden, Mark (16 November 1997). "Black Hawk Down: A defining battle" (https://web.archive.org/web/20070701164119/http://inquirer.philly.com/ packages/somalia/nov16/rang16.asp). The Philadelphia Inquirer. Archived from the original (http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/nov16/rang16.asp) on 1 July 2007. Retrieved 25 June 2007.

[24.] Bailey, Tracy A (6 October 2008). "Rangers Honor Fallen Brothers of Operation Gothic Serpent" (https://web.archive.org/web/20100304072529/http://shadowspear.com/special-operations-news/rangers_honor_fallen_brothers_of.html). ShadowSpear Special Operations. Archived from the original (http://shadowspear.com/special-operations-news/rangers_honor_fallen_brothers_of.html) on 4 March 2010. Retrieved 13 October 2008.

[27.] Willbanks, James H. (2011). America's Heroes: Medal of Honor Recipients from the Civil War to Afghanistan. ABC-CLIO. p. 308. ISBN 978-1-59884-393-4.

[32.] IBP USA (2007). Malaysia Army Weapon Systems Handbook. Int'l Business Publication. pp. 71–73. ISBN 978-1-4330-6180-6.

[33.] Musharraf, Pervez (2006). In the line of fire: a memoir (https://archive.org/details/ inlineoffirememo00mush/page/74). Simon and Schuster. pp. 74–75 (https://archive.org/details/inlineoffirememo00mush/page/74). ISBN 978-0-7432-8344-1.

[36.] "To Fight With Intrepidity" (https://web.archive.org/web/20070516095147 /http://www.johndlock.com/tfwi/somalia.php3). Archived from the original (http://www.johndlock.com/tfwi/somalia.php3) on 16 May 2007. Retrieved 29 January 2007.

[37.] "This Ranger fought in Mogadishu before becoming a country music star" (https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/mogadishu-ranger-country-music-star/).  We Are The Mighty. 6 July 2020. Retrieved 10 January 2021.

[38.] Casper, Lawrence E. (2001). Falcon Brigade: Combat and Command in Somalia and Haiti. Lynne Rienner Publishers. p. 39. ISBN 978-1-55587-945-7.

[39.] Bowden, p. 34.

[40.] Eversmann, Matt, and Dan Schilling. The Battle of Mogadishu. Novato, CA: Presidio, 2004. Print.

[41.] Bowden, p. 70.

[42.] "Blackhawk Down" (https://web.archive.org/web/20180513005149/http:// inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/who.asp). The Philadelphia Inquirer. Archived from the original (http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/who.asp) on 13 May 2018. Retrieved 25 August 2013.

[43.] Bowden, p. 70.

[44.] Eversmann, Matthew (SSG) (2005). The Battle of Mogadishu: Firsthand Accounts from the Men of Task Force Ranger. Presidio Press. ISBN 0345466683. p. 129.

[45.] "On this Day, October 3, 1993, Battle of Mogadishu (Black Hawk Down)" (https://sofrep.com/specialoperations/day-october-3-1993-battle-mogadishu-black-hawk/). SOFREP. Retrieved 25 May 2020.

[46.] Eversmann, pp. 34–36.

[47.] Bowden, p. 70.

[48.] The Independent, 12 January 2002, "Black Hawk Down: Shoot first, don't ask questions afterwards" (https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/black-hawk-down-shoot-first-dont-ask-questions-afterwards-662919.html), retrieved on 14 December 2006.

[49.] Ambush in Mogadishu (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ ambush/etc/synopsis.html) 29 September 1998 (Original broadcast date), retrieved on 10 November 2009.

[50.] Casper, Lawrence E. (2001). Falcon Brigade: Combat and Command in Somalia and Haiti. Lynne Rienner Publishers. p. 95. ISBN 978-1-55587-945-7.

[51.] Moore, Robin.; Michael Lennon (2007). The Wars of the Green Berets: Amazing Stories from Vietnam to the Present (https://archive.org/details/warsofgreenberet0000moor/page/28). Skyhorse Publishing Inc. p. 28 https://archive.org/details/warsofgreenberet0000moor/page/28). ISBN 978-1-60239-054-6.

[81.] Warshaw, Shirley Anne (2004). The Clinton Years: Presidential Profiles Facts on File Library of American History (https://archive.org/details/clintonyears0000wars/page/16) (2 ed.). Infobase Publishing. p. 16 (https://archive.org/details/clintonyears0000wars/page/16). ISBN 978-0-8160-5333-9.

[82.] Johnson, Loch K. (2011). The Threat on the Horizon: An Inside Account of America's Search for Security after the Cold War (https://archive.org/details/threatonhorizoni0000john_w1u0). Oxford University Press. pp. 7 (https://archive.org/details/threatonhorizoni0000 john_w1u0/page/7), 19, 26. ISBN 978-0-19-973717-8.

[83.] Just Security, "We Shouldn't Forget the Lessons of Black Hawk Down: Part I", Luke Hartig, 8-29-2017

[84.] Leland, John W.; Wilcoxson, Kathryn A. (May 2003). Office of History Air Mobility Command (ed.). The chronological history of the C-5 Galaxy (http://www.amc.af.mil/Portals/12/ documents/AFD-131018-052.pdf) (PDF). p. 73.

[87.] Miniter, Richard (2004) Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror. Regnery Publishing, p. 44, ISBN 0-89526-048-4

[88.] Thornton, Rod (2007) Asymmetric Warfare: Threat and Response in the Twenty-First Century, p. 10, ISBN 0-7456-3365-X

[89.] Dauber, Cori Elizabeth. "The shot seen 'round the world': The impact of the images of Mogadishu on American military operations." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 4.4 (2001): 653-687 online (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cori_Dauber/publication/236815694_ The_Shot_Seen_%27Round_the_World_The_Impact_of_the_Images_of_Mogadishu_on_American_Military_Operations/links/576941a708ae2d7145ba7bbe.pdf).

[91.] "Ambush in Mogadishu: Transcript" (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline /shows/ambush/etc/script.html). PBS. Retrieved 27 October 2009.

Have you ever felt like you just can’t do it one more time? Maybe you have helped a friend or family member so many times before that you can no longer summon the energy to care. The compassion you once had is gone. 

It seems reasonable that everyone has their limits because caring hurts. Caring for those who are suffering often has a cost. It is almost like our bodies know that we cannot handle those powerful emotions anymore. Just like external cuts and bruises on our bodies, our emotions get wounded too. We inherently know we have had enough, and those emotions barely register anymore. 

Imagine being in a profession where you go into work every single day and it requires countless compassionate interactions. Each of these interactions takes its toll. Sometimes it can hurt, a lot. It can hurt so much it never leaves you, an emotion so powerful it cannot be shaken. I don’t know about you, but at some point, I might just decide to go ahead and walk away. Stop the pain. I might just leave compassion for the rookies. They don’t understand what the world is really like, yet. The vital profession that has to decide to make that decision each and every day is the police force. 

Each interaction we have with a police officer has a certain level of danger for both parties. Police have guns and can use them if threatened. Police can ruin others’ careers. Innocent until proven guilty can still be detrimental, even if you were wrongly accused. 

The emotional state of an officer can determine the rest of someone’s life. The FBI asserts in a bulletin put out in April 2020 that when emotions such as compassion are repressed they “may reemerge in multiple problematic ways for officers’ health and well-being, including isolation from family, alcohol abuse, and difficulty controlling frustration and anger during interactions with others.” 

When your teenager decides to take their first set of wheels out to that abandoned road, just outside of town, to see how fast 100 mph really feels; and the officer who pulls over your child is already emotionally fragile from a career full of heartbreak, they decide to do anything possible to teach this kid a lesson.  After all, they have seen these little punks before and they are “all the same.” Better throw the book at them, so they learn their lesson. Besides, compassion hasn’t been working for a long time. Maybe they have tried for years and have just finished working a homicide for one of those kids who received countless efforts of compassion. What good is it? They don’t listen anyway.

Police have one of the most important jobs in American society. They show up when no one else will. They are called to suicides, murders, domestic disputes, rapes, child abuse cases, mental health cases, and everything in between. It’s impossible to show up to any of those and walk away unscathed. That same FBI bulletin says, “Compassion fatigue may adversely impact officers’ relationships with family and friends because its effects cannot be left at work and may disrupt the adaptive transition from shift work to family environment. If police officers or their supervisors continue to ignore the signs, symptoms of compassion fatigue can accumulate over time, ultimately leading to debilitating effects on officers' health and well-being.” 

Maybe the police inadvertently hurt us because the job is literally destroying them. 

Justice and mercy oversee important administrative functions interpersonally and socially.  We learn about them as first lessons and can offer them as a last lesson to others weighing decisions about life and death, from military commanders counting the cost of a looming battlefield or families huddled with a doctor around a grave sickbed. Truly, justice and mercy are with us all our days.  At times, right must prevail.  At other times, wrong needs charity. Wherever two or more are gathered, standards for behavior invariably arise.  It’s how games are enjoyed and communities develop security and confidence.   The child must understand right and wrong if he or she is to move forward living amidst others. But wise parents and leaders realize that mercy is sometimes required for the child to grow or the community to be whole.

Justice seeks a maintenance of what is right, of what conforms to a good, proven standard.  Mercy is a compassion-driven forbearance of the standardization, even of the punishment that justice warrants.  If justice is the hook on which we hang the law and prophets, mercy is the hope and patience that makes room for more time and more resources.  Mercy and justice have long histories with beloved stories elevating their importance in every culture.  They are why we have hospitals and armies, counselors and cops, priests and prophets.  Notably, the Christian hegemony has been built on the notion that Heavenly Justice has been satisfied by God’s Mercy – that the just punishment of the Perfect Man for the many non-conformities of we imperfect is good and welcome, divine resources coming to our folly in a grand display of justice and mercy settling a grave matter.

A number of years ago, I carefully took a cue from the apostle John -- who declared in the first chapter of his gospel that God Incarnate was “full of grace and truth” -- and I scoured the four gospels for all of the words and actions of Jesus Christ in which he was extending mercy to someone or speaking justice, often uncomfortable or unsettling.  Many examples can be found for both attributes.  For example, in the second chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus was told that the wine had run out at a wedding party.  We’re not sure on what day of the party (they could last a week or more) the minor crisis arises, but one could assume that much drinking had been going on. Evidently, the local supplier was sold out.  To turn water into wine is a stretchful mercy that some on the Right today try their best to mitigate.  But, for reasons perhaps known and unknown – probably no two sermons alike – the “friend of tax collectors and sinners” restarts the party and with “the best” that was served.  However, after the wedding, Jesus heads down to Jerusalem for a major festival. The sellers of religious merchandise and sacrificial offerings are making a killing.  A whip is woven, tables are toppled, and these words ring forth, “Take these things out of here.  Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”  Yes, mercy and justice are woven throughout the Good News.

Having been waiting for the resumption of the free trolley that runs for a few miles only on Douglas Avenue in hopes of increasing customers for local shops and restaurants, I rode the route last weekend.  My expectation was of a slow, open-air ride, with a festive, if not indulgent, feel.  That trolley has been replaced by a small, fully enclosed, malodorous city bus. However, what struck me was this: the route was not just for festival seekers, it was a working bus with room for merciful service.  After only a couple of blocks of travel, the bus stopped for a wheel-chaired man whose rant and rambling would have alarmed me if he had had use of his legs.  The loading and unloading required quite a bit of our time and special effort from the driver (assembling a lift and other machinations), who was doing his best to perform cheerfully.  I thought, Americans do not have to look hard for the administration of mercy.  It’s everywhere.  Even unexpectedly. Thank God.

I have it from Much Higher Authority that grouping into broad dualistic categories is not unwarranted (sheep and goats, life and death, e.g.).  Taxonomies are also what minds do with lots of data.  And two categories often suffice for lots of meaning – is/isn’t, can/can’t, should/shouldn’t, . . .  All the sorting leads to stereotype and generalizations (not hasty, of course), and overarching principles. Without them, we wouldn’t appreciate the exceptions and anomalies.

The categories of Left and Right fascinate me more as I return to the Center. What is at the root of those who speak from the Left and from the Right? The political issues on which the two separate and hold disparate opinion from year to year and crisis to crisis change over time, but the separation endures. The American system promotes only two parties (unlike the multi-party system of other democracies) and highlights our general differences and dualist perspectives. Depending on individual circumstances, proclivities, tendencies, upbringing, temperament, genetics, most of us lean to one side or the other.  Some of us more than lean.

The Right sets high standards and the Left marvels at how high.  The Left offers more help and the Right worries if we’re teaching anyone responsibility.  The Right are usually more careful followers of lawfulness. The Left has more of those who more often say, “Have mercy on me!”  Some would know to add “. . . a sinner.”

The Left is more merciful, better able to “walk in another’s shoes,” especially if the walk has been hard. The Left believes more faithfully that progress requires tearing down old things, that inequality is a function of oppression and institutional harm, that more power comes from cooperation than competition.  They have a kinder view of human nature.  Felt needs are real needs.

The Right is more appreciative of the cleansing power of a just punishment, believes more faithfully that tearing down what time has taught to be true weakens essential foundations, that inequality is more a function of virtue lacking.  They believe more in the power of competition, that individual talents and assets are expected to “get to work.” They have a less kind view of human nature, but that we are own worst enemies and “reap what we sow.”

However, peaceful pluralism in diverse human societies – without authoritarian assurances (God keep us from dictatorships of the proletariat or human kings claiming a divine right to rule!) – requires middle ground, where mercy and justice meet, and policy is crafted.

Currently relevant, we have troubles when people who are more immersed in wrongdoing than most of us are being arrested by those who are more zealous than most of us to enforce what is right.  Some people are hard to arrest.  Some people should not arrest anyone. 

From my analysis of our current milieu, The Right is too right/merciless on minimum wage, the cost of health care, the ease in buying high-powered guns.  

The Left is too merciful when it comes to weighing the political intentions of the Muslim religion, trusting people with governmental authority, disciplining the incorrigibly criminal, ending inconvenient or pain-surrounded pregnancies.

We all have our own taxonomy and casuistry, of course. Try parsing the next political controversy by attending to, What does justice require? How much mercy can be given?  Do you find yourself in a middle position? At the expense of the extremes, build from there!

A response to Dan Snyder’s “Reading Books in the Time of Censorship”

I respond to this not to nitpick but because, when we discuss censorship, speaking factually is key to the dialogue; after all, something demonstrably false is not censored if called out for what it is.

The phrase "in reference to an illusory free press" suggests, to this reader, that "alternative facts" (as coined by Kellyanne Conway in defense of Sean Spicer) might refer to something truthful that was not reported by so-called mainstream media. I fully own that I might be misinterpreting the author's intent through this turn of phrase, but the "alternative facts" in this case were not "alternative" because the "illusory free press" refused to print or share them; they were alternative because they were simply not true--in this case, inflating the number of those who attended Trump's inauguration.

Additionally, I disagree that the Dr. Seuss debacle is a worthy example of censorship unless "self-censorship" (an intriguing concept) exists, for the holding company of Seuss' books (Dr. Seuss Enterprises) willingly pulled the six troublesome tomes from their publications rather than in response to public outcry. Whether or not the images causing problems are actually offensive is up to the reader, but to uphold this situation as an example of censorship is also simply not true.

George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, the Hebrew prophets, and Socrates all had something in common: They worried about the future. Socrates, in observing current trends in technology, worried about the emerging world of books that used the new fangled alphabet. Perhaps sensing that philosophers would become obsolete, he complained that no matter how many times you asked a book a question, it always gave the same answer.

Conversely, and owing to the adage that, “things could always be worse,” Ray Bradbury in his book Fahrenheit 451 worried that a future where no one reads books, where they have technologies which simulate the pleasures of reading without its profound effects. The resultant triviality in both cases serves to spoil society.

In the ironic case of Socrates, who as far as we can tell wrote nothing down, his reported dialogues by side kick turned scribe Plato, particularly Republic, have become bedrock testaments of the West. In Republic we learn that the worst of lands is ruled by lawyers (written laws), and physicians (rote treatments of disease), producing a place of the perpetual scheming and sickly. We expel a sigh of relief and mutter, “thank goodness that never came to pass,” as we write large checks for health care we can’t use and taxes we can’t understand. 

Bradbury worried over a land that had schools whose primary duty was to make sure students didn’t say certain things or read books, librarians who not only hid books but discouraged you from finding them, and “firemen” who, like modern civil libertarians that specialize in the suppression of civics, actually start fires rather than putting them out. Bradbury’s concern that seems opposite that of Socrates regarding books is rooted in the same place. In trusting our thoughts to another medium, in Bradbury’s case to screens controlled by committees (!), and perhaps in Socrates’ case on paper controlled by editors and progeny, we lose memory both private and communal, as unquestioning members in a consensus, as society with dementia; a dystopia. 

George Orwell’s dystopia haunts the present in his 1949 novel 1984, creating an indelible memento of the destruction of public memory by the corruption of meaning in language. Terms like “newspeak”, the reduction of language to what may only express the interests of the consensus, “Big Brother”, the disembodied and uncanny power that cancels people and removes their thought from public conversation, “thoughtcrime”, the disagreement with consensus, and perhaps the most lurid term of all, “Orwellian”, all stand as mental boundary stones which the ignorant or partisan often shift in the dead of bad rhetoric’s night. Can those who have read his book not say that Orwell envisioned a time when titles of agencies like “Planned Parenthood” stand for groups that plan the opposite, when invisible authorities can remove people and words from conversations, or when the capital city of the “free world” is a barricaded outpost of martial law? Can we not have realized an “Orwellian” reality?  Words are like footballs, and the defense must always rise against the side trying to move that ball down the field, doing this best when they can take the ball from the other side.  “Orwellian” is such a term and such a cultural football, a word that anyone can drop when things aren’t going their way - but it has a distinct meaning.

Orwell’s thoughts are persisting in his book, even though the center of the Orwellian theme has always been the “memory hole,” a drain in the ironic “Ministry of Truth” that serves to erase history and introduce nonsense into language, a viral attack on meaning that dulls the conscience and encourages us to stop thinking about or challenging the consensus. And while Socrates’ worry that we might not think for ourselves in only repeating what we have read may have merit, Bradbury’s antidote for public dementia is effective. The remedy for the shifting dunes of modern social media are the steadfast rocks of literature. 1984 is one of the shoals upon which surging tyranny breaks.

Sales of the septuagenarian 1984 spiked in 2013 during the revelation of extensive US government spying upon its own citizens, again in 2017 when a spokesman for President Trump coined the term “alternative facts” in reference to an illusory free press, and now is a top 10 Amazon best seller for the year 2021. Following years of intensified government spying, unaccountable “Big Brothering,” and the dawn of a supposed popular government barricaded against its people, the sales of this book are surpassing the marks of prior surges.

This is good news, but in another Orwellian turn, this phenomenon has not been widely reported, as was its prior high demand, this fact falling down the “memory hole”. Whereas sales surges of 2013 and 2017 especially were broadcast universally and incessantly, should you consult your social monitor screen and “google” this subject today you will note an absence of “facts” (alternative or otherwise) about this book’s current popularity. You will, however, find articles from proper editorial authorities telling you that the current purchasers and quoters of this book aren’t smart enough to really understand it (so don’t look in those pages, proles!). You will also read in a modern socialist online magazine alarmingly called “The Jacobin” that 1: Orwell was a socialist (he was), therefore 2: everything he says must always be understood to mean who he was, not what he meant; a fallacy known as ‘Bulverism’. In summary, “pay no attention to “Orwellian” fears, and you don’t understand them anyway” (as ordered by the mysterious power that controls what you may know or say in public). 

Read books. Insist on letting the books speak. In the senile modern West, old documents are like friends we are supposed to know, so our helpful orderlies tell us who they are and what they mean to us when they occasionally visit in cultural hospice to avoid any unpleasantness.  Don’t lie there gumming the tapioca of current literacy. When choosing between Orwell and “Orwellian” go to the author, buy and read the book. You’d be surprised if you looked into the visitors lounge and saw the authors who’ve been denied even a visit. Right now, there are some teachers and librarians, orderlies in our hall of memory, trying to turn away a visit by our old friend Dr. Suess, since apparently he might upset us.  I can hear some yelling in the hall.  Check the current best selling books list at Amazon (you won’t see this on the NY Times) and join the literate.

More books to read that are anxious to talk to you today:  The Rise of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt:  The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: History in English Words, by Owen Barfield

Please respond to any or all of the sections in Candor by emailing us at editor@candor.news

Growing up in Nebraska is an experience I would recommend to anyone who might, somehow, get a second chance at life. Our heritage was farming, but my dad is a CPA. He wore a suit and went into the office five days a week, six during tax season. Both of my grandfathers were farmers, and I am proud to be a part of that heritage. 

I never planned to grow up and own land, ride horses, butcher chickens, or do the many other activities that encompassed my childhood. However, I did plan to carry on the legacy of the hard work that I learned as a kid. I also grew up in a strong Christian context, of which I am still a part and of which I am still proud. While Christianity has had many failures, I believe that Christianity in its best form is something that I can be proud to perpetuate. A final aspect of my heritage is the dedication to a conservative, pro-life view of the world. I have never really identified as strongly with particular political views as I have with my Christian faith or rural background. But my continued dedication to being pro life, specifically, has always been something to which I have planned to continue to identify. Recent events, however, have caused me to question the heritage I come from and what it really means.

I moved to Wichita, Kansas over ten years ago. It is similar to my childhood stomping grounds in Nebraska in many ways, and I have found it to be a great place to live. I served as a pastor until right before the pandemic hit. I stepped down as pastor because I was planning to move into a more educational setting since I had recently finished my PhD in Theology. After the pandemic began, education as we knew it changed drastically. Universities were in a hiring freeze. I had to rethink my career goals, for the next year at least. 

I saw a posting for a job as a year-long Chaplain Resident at one of the two regional hospitals in the Wichita area. I decided that this could be a great opportunity to serve in ministry during a particularly challenging time that hospitals were facing. I was offered the job. For the last six months, I have served people during some of their darkest moments, as they suffer all kinds of loss. I have primarily worked alone, during the evening/overnight shift. The most difficult times at the hospital were at the height of the pandemic. 

Every evening when I stepped through the hospital doors, I knew there would surely be a COVID death that I would walk through with an unknown family. Would I be standing at a patient’s bedside while they are hooked to a ventilator, unable to respond; holding a tablet to allow their family one last desperate chance to express their love and say their goodbyes, forever? Or would I be standing with a family in the ICU, outside of the room, peering through the glass doors as they say their goodbyes; confirming, once again, that they are not allowed into the room? Maybe I would be reading Scripture, clothed in a thin plastic gown, an N95 mask, face shield, and rubber gloves, an act that I hoped would bring comfort to the patient as they take their last breath, with no family or friends of which to speak?

While those were hard nights, sometimes the days were even harder. I was hearing ideas from a large number of my hard-working, Christian, pro-life tribe that I just couldn’t understand. In the beginning, I thought I understood where they were coming from; but I also thought, once I, a hard working, Christian, pro life, midwesterner told them how so many people were dying from the pandemic, they would surely change their minds. Maybe they didn’t believe the Italians or the New Yorkers, but they would surely believe me. I was wrong. 

I was reminded instead that the economy was more important. It was just the “old and sick people” that were dying anyway. What I grew up learning in the church and what I preached from the pulpit was that money never made anyone happy. I would preach with conviction that the love of money was the root of all kinds of evil, and this message would be received with affirmation. But when the loss of money actually came into question, I was suddenly hearing that maybe we should consider sacrificing the weak and elderly at the altar of the economy. 

How could this be? If it could be proven that an increase in the death of unborn children would increase GDP by 5%, should I consider it worth it? What about 10% growth? Imagine how fantastic 20% would be! It was my conviction that I should never consider money more important than someone made in the image of God. Was I wrong? If I was wrong about that, how else have I been wrong? 

Do I work hard primarily to see the increase in my bank account? I thought I was doing it because it was the right thing to do. Am I only against abortion as long as it doesn’t cost me too much money? Maybe I didn’t understand what the Bible says about the love of money after all? Or maybe my greatest fear of all is true: the fear that I don’t come from where I thought I did. Maybe a hard-working, Christian, pro-life background is not my heritage after all.

This last election season solidified sentiment in me that the American electorate is sliding further into the devaluation of careful parsing of complicated issues and the arguments that attend them.  Chains of conversation that I followed on tweet after tweet, blog after blog, column after column, evidenced a willingness to strike opponents almost immediately while committing one informal fallacy after another – principally attacking people and not their arguments; condemning the argument because of who presented it; presenting the opponent’s argument in its weaker forms; arguing from small, unrepresentative samples; suggesting someone can never be right if he’s ever been wrong; and so forth.  I wish the problem were confined to Twitter.

Who hasn’t noticed the growing unwillingness of major and longstanding newspapers, journals, and media outlets to fairly expose the complexities, competing forces, and ameliorative challenges in the systems that envelop us all – especially if the other side might actually have a more sound idea?  In my lifetime, going across the aisle has never been so far.

As I remember my generation’s arguments with those on the other side of issues 50 years ago, both sides meritoriously gathered evidence (statistics, expert testimony, the weight/lessons of history, and rationale galore) to merit their positions.  That’s how we were taught and rewarded.  Why the waning of classic argumentation? Could its devaluing be more than unwillingness, even the learned rewards of outright lying, and be rather an inability, something insufficiently developed?

Having been a life-long, secondary-school educator – public and private – I can say with some authority that, generally speaking, the current curricula and teaching corps are not sufficiently preparing the young to evaluate the controversies and disputes that pop up across our daily paths . Learning disabilities have and are receiving attention and understanding – which is good, of course -- but what about teaching disabilities? Easy, nearly instantaneous access to multiple angles and positions on most any topic is at arm’s length.  Needed are those who can help students weigh information, judge the credibility of sources, discard falsehoods, and be humbled by the deep complexities of economic, socio-political, and scientific issues.  But, the young are overwhelmed by indoctrination—what to think and not how to think.  Relatedly, the American education system is at the root of Socialism’s growth in this country.  Obviously.  Systematically.

If you’re a teacher in a state-run school who had a special year or you’re a parent whose child leaped forward in that environment, rejoice!  However, the data for the aggregate is not good and has not been for a while.  We are in decline.  And have test scores to prove it. The establishment significantly re-centered the college boards in the mid-90s to hide the decline. The state school systems subsequently developed their own tests of student progress, separating themselves from comparison with the private sector.  Now many notable universities are ending admissions tests.  The scores don’t fit their narratives!

Fixing it? Well, are monopolies by nature noted for correcting themselves?  The creative destruction resulting from a robust competitive environment would be a function of many schooling models catering to/leading out the broad diversity of learner-types and skill sets, ones that we are increasingly able to measure and catalog (think new scales and measurements in every discipline of a university – genetic, neurological, psychological, aptitudinal).  Let’s set people free.  Let’s create an environment where the consumer of education models is being recruited by a grand variety of producers. Give us real, affordable choices. 

In Kansas, 60% of the state’s budget is for their education system – at $16,000 per student annually.  Though in a competitive market the cost would likely come down, if parents had that current amount to offer competitors for the education of their children, we would see a panoply of new schools started by folks whose education philosophies (metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics) fill the spectrum.  Free markets raise quality and lower price.  The education market would realize the same, if it were freed.

And the cost must come down.  Recognizing the earlier onset of puberty, we changed junior high (grades 7-9) to middle school (grades 6-8) but made high school last 4 years instead of 3.  College should begin at grade 12 – and does for many in dual credit courses – and then last only 3 years  (so much wasted time; the length of semesters and breaks in between keeps widening.)  Let’s get kids out of college – and some on to professional schools – by age 20.  We need industry to be more responsible for the costs of training and apprenticing their future employees.  The financial burden we have become willing to strap to the backs of our young people before they are “employable” is shameful.  In 1970, I paid $155 for 15 hours of instruction at the University of Kansas.  Yes, we’ve had some inflation in the last 50 years, but nothing close to what we require students to pay for the skills they need to fit into the larger culture.  Again, shameful!

The young are rarely ready by age 18 to move prosperously into the larger culture.  We need to pay for their development through grade 14 (high school should be grades 9-11 and the baccalaureate degree earned in grades 12-14).

The schools that will win students’ hearts and be seen by others as the ones who “taught that kid to think” will be those schools that:

• Don’t tell the student what they need to know but make them think it through.

• Don’t do for the student what they can learn to do for themselves.

• Don’t let the student hold a position they cannot defend.

• Don’t give the student an ease in dispatching other viewpoints at will.

• But rather teach the student thinking, writing, and speaking skills that will make them persuasive and winsome to read or listen to.

Given our increasing understanding of the diversity of learning styles, skill sets, goals, and the means to measure humans individually – and not as a collective! – we must recognize that “leading out” (the literal meaning of education from Latin) the young requires many education models, far more than a monopoly has incentive to provide. Until then not much is going to change in the products of our state school systems.

Is school choice a likelihood?  No.  The forces – local, state, and national – against it are strong and covered in money.  The only solution short of physical violence – God forbid – would be for thousands upon thousands of taxpayers to withhold state and local taxes (keep the IRS out of it), thereby demanding state funds for education be distributed as a voucher to parents and guardians.  Then, watch a free market work wonders.

“Coming together” in America is a nice thought, but without it resulting in “intelligent” actions, it will be little more than holding hands on the deck of the Titanic … which is better than dying in bloodshed. So what is “intelligence” generally and what is it now for us?

Will Rogers said intelligence BEGINS with this: “When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging.” In other words, STOP the dumb things we have been doing. As I see it, too many Americans are in a hole … and, for starters, that hole is economic. Even if we are lucky enough to have a job or two or even a business, our wages and earnings fail to make ends meet … especially if the kids are home due to lockdowns. Mortgage, rent, tax and other debt moratoriums plus repeated stimulus payments promise to delay collapse and seem like the ONLY intelligent thing to do.

 But, as harsh as it sounds, MORE HELP that makes us MORE DEPENDENT on WASHINGTON will only produce MORE SUFFERING. WASHINGTON is the hole we dug … and it is now a swamp full of the disease and destruction that is killing us. It is never too late to stop digging … even if doing so will not save us. We must BEGIN to act intelligently as Will Rogers reminded us … even though it hurts.

Those who openly speak out against WASHINGTON will be branded by the elites and their mouthpieces as traitors and seditionists. It is doublespeak deception as BIG BROTHER culls those who oppose its grasp on power. So how do you fight an enemy that is depositing stolen and laundered money in your bank account? Guns and violence are of no use against such cruel wickedness. What can we do?

Reject their money … do it for your kids and grandkids … for the working poor of the world who wonder about America. Don’t spend it on more stuff like they want you to do. Don’t give them the hyper-inflation they want to lighten the burden of their monstrous and perverted debts while increasing the burden on your neighbors. Give it to a charity or an organization that honestly supports those who are nearer the bottom of the pit than you are. Let it find its way into empty stomachs and broken hearts rather than further filling the already overflowing accounts of the corporations and banks who exploit us through their pimps masquerading as our representatives in WASHINGTON.

Help save the republics of Wichita, Kansas, America and the world which are made up of us all working and living together … keeping our promises to each other … locally and globally … across town and across borders … caring for one another … and ridding ourselves of those parasites. Break their power over us which is based on our willingness to be deceived by pleasure . . . to receive stolen goods and laundered money from them in return for our consent and promise to keep digging.

Granted, this action may not seem intelligent, but we must BEGIN somewhere. And we may just be surprised at how good it makes us feel … and at how powerful an antidote it will quickly become to the poison WASHINGTON would have us continue to swallow in ever larger doses.

For two-thirds of my 68 years I have believed that in some fantastic manner unknown to us, God created the heavens and earth – and, most importantly, man (male and female).  He made them “in His image,” that is, he made them to rule, to have dominion (cf. His first chapter; the interpretation is clear).  From this foundational principle, I can deduce that man (male and female) -- as a function of their very being/ “makeup”/essence/created-ness – can enter easily into competition, ownership disputes, and multiple factious behaviors, which explains so much of what I see and have seen all around me – and certainly within!

The unfolding of this grand competition (many vying for dominion), that God has, in part, DNA’d from the beginning, has been as beautiful as it has been ugly: the wondrous creativity, inventiveness, and systems building juxtaposed with destruction, loss and carnage; the love and kindness, but also the hate and meanness.  The resolution?  The God of mysteries provisions His Spirit (“wind” or “breath” in the Hebrew and Greek; i.e., Something not easily brought into our dominion, nor possible for us to rule over). That Spirit brings us the character and virtue necessary to rule for the good of others.  We will always seek dominion; otherwise, we would not be human beings. But, who couldn’t use a greater measure of gentleness and self-control – two of the fruits that God seeks to grow in those whom He rules?

"Rather than seeking to liquidate the national debt, Hamilton recommended that government securities pay sufficient interest to be traded at par promoting their perpetual circulation as legal tender equivalent in face value to hard currency." First Report on the Public Credit, made by Alexander Hamilton to Congress, 1790.

“As often is the case with addictions, the fanciful notion of a gradual discontinuance only provided a comforting pretext for more sustained indulgence.” ― Ron Chernow [on Alexander Hamilton's life of marital adultery] 

Fiat credit IS monetary adultery

All adulterers know [or soon learn] that each successive act of deviance makes the real thing worth less ... until it finally becomes worthless ... incapable of functioning as it was originally intended. And this is true whether the "real thing" is marriage or money.

And although history has not provided us with an account of the first act of marital adultery, it does provide us with ample evidence that the practice of monetary adultery ... [mixing public credit in with the public's money until there is no practical difference left between the two] ... was well known and in continuous circulation in Europe [along with syphilis and small pox] prior to the American Revolutionary War. And furthermore, it reports [in careful accounts like William Hogeland's Founding Finance] that Alexander Hamilton, America's first Secretary of the Treasury officed in America's first national capital on Wallstreet NYC, heartily embraced the deviant practices of European elites and coveted every opportunity to introduce them to Americans.

Subverting subsidiarity

Eager to experiment with adultery on a grand scale, Hamilton [in what was euphemistically disguised as The Compromise of 1790] seduced Jefferson and Madison [and the South] by promising them that all future acts of American monetary adultery would be officially performed in the District of Columbia ... although everyone understood that they would continue to be orgasmized on Wallstreet ... a sordid, bifurcated practice that continues to this day with the Federal Reserve doing the official act in Washington but Wallstreet [always under the Fed's lustful gaze] transmitting the stimulation to an eroticized cadre of financial insiders who, it is said, are frequently so overwhelmed with bliss that at least some of the good feelings trickle down to a long deprived public. [The amorous George Washington needed no persuasion ... he had long ago turned West ... away from Virginia as his first love.]

In the Compromise, which John Calhoun [only a boy of 8 at the time] would come to rue along with all the Southern States, the federal government assumed the revolutionary war debts of the still-sovereign states ... mixing them with the federal war debts ... in the first official act of American federal financial adultery ... a practice preserved in the form of federal grants to all 50 states [among many other financial trysting partners] and which is set to explode again as states face a world that is increasingly tax-intolerant thanks to the widespread assurance that federal fiat credit is free and unlimited.

Of course, some principled persons will proudly proclaim that they [and the civil or corporate bodies in which they serve] have "balanced their budgets" and that Washington needs to do the same. But this is  nothing more than empty talk, for without the benefits of Washington's deficits [directly or indirectly] most of them would cease to exist overnight. They will be quickly and rightly dismissed as unfounded and provincial in their thinking.

Institutionalizing the delusion ... "fiat pecunia" Gen 1:3

"In the beginning" the adulterer thinks [s]he can stop before any lasting harm is done and can thus get away with it. But adultery is hard to stop and, for this reason, hard to hide. And so most adulterers persist until caught in the act and faced with the prospect of judgment and/or cessation. And although some repent in shame and others offer ambivalent excuses, the truly brave [with consciences fully seared] double-down and redefine the real thing to include their deviance. The deviation becomes normative.

Modern Monetary Theory is an example of the redefinition approach to deviance. Its premises have become "self-evident" [veritable natural laws] after two centuries of Hamilton's financial adultery. The federal government, via its sovereign monopoly powers, can forever alternate between being

• a net issuer of fiat money in the form of either currency OR credit for the goods and services it purchases and consumes [or doles out] until a continuously-redefined inflation [the only possible unwanted result] rises too high and 

• a net collector of taxes until a continuously-redefined unemployment [the only possible unwanted result] rises too high.

What could be simpler than formally declaring fiat money to include fiat credit ... extinguishing once and for all the distinction between money and credit ... Hamilton's adulterous dream come true ... and NO NEED TO PAY INTEREST ON THE FEDERAL DEBT ... EVER AGAIN. What could possibly go wrong?

That this accommodation of perversion could ever produce other unwanted and unexpected effects has not yet occurred to today's enlightened, elite adulterers [marital and financial]. Their dulled minds [Democrat and Republican alike] are now fully reprobate and can no longer be sociologically reclaimed ... only destroyed in the inevitable, coming collapse of the societal and environmental structures on which civilization currently rests ... the "great reset".

Surely, stagflation is a logical impossibility ... a world of unemployed people facing a rising cost of living ... where robots [owned by an oligarchy of capitalist-elites-in-luxury] do the work while the marked masses fight one another for a share in an increasingly expensive subsistence existence. Rev 6:6

The rise of crony capitalism ... and the fall of democracy

"As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. ... The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of [sociological] destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. ... [T]hese Governments are fast rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order ... [b]ut they have no plan for replacing it." 

- The Consequences of the Peace, JM Keynes, 1920

One order cannot fall without chaos ensuing unless there is another already usurping its place ... and so the seamless collapse of distributed democratic capitalism into centralized crony capitalism was to be expected. That FA Hayek predicted this in his 1944 reflections on Nazi Germany is now little more than an historical anomaly forgotten by some but never known by most.

The future can no longer be in doubt. Deferred repentance has become not only unimaginably painful but ideologically inconceivable. Full-on authoritarianism [monetary and political], with a managed chasm insulating the rich elites from the poor masses, is already taking place.

All that remains is to see if this "brave fiat world" will be taken seriously by God ... or not. Psalm 2

I enjoy keeping up with the local news in Wichita.  Recently, I heard of something new, a panel that the Mayor has deemed necessary because of a social problem much in the spotlight – the lack of diversity.  Diversity is a word that cannot exist on its own, but describes the variety in something else.  A panel, like a choir, is organized by a director, and produces a cant, a litany for some edifying purpose.  I will pitch in, casting what is not the first stone, but one from without the circle of diversity that this particular panel describes.

One of the great tautologies in human experience lies in the observation that other people do things that are wrong, whether it be the direction they choose to walk down grocery store aisles, the colors they paint their houses, the kinds and numbers of animals they keep in their yards, the types of masks they wear (both for halloween and modish hygiene), even the sorts of churches they do or don’t attend.  If we each had our way, certain things would not be permitted (and other people don’t forbid or permit the right things anyway).  Those with the freedom and power to deny or allow often purpose incorrectly.  This is a tautological certainty.  The “land of the free” has become the land of constant transgression. 

A certain French Emperor, who believed that Europe was doing wrong things, observed that society was impossible without peace, that peace was impossible without government, that government impossible without law, law without authority, and that no-one would submit to authority without religion.  Of course that self-styled Emperor could not enforce the religion required for peace without buckets of blood, since people kept doing things wrong.  In his case, people insisted on belonging to various duchies and kingdoms that weren’t French, an alarming and messy diversity, egged on by the pesky British.  We, of course, observing that the French “did it wrong,” congratulate ourselves upon observing that religion and government don’t mix. 

 ‘Bleeding Kansas’ refers to the armed conflicts that characterized our struggles in this territory to become a state, whether free or slave, under the principle of sovereignty, the idea that if you can get enough people together who believe a smaller group of people are “doing it wrong,” you can put a stop to their doings.  This principle, which replaced the Missouri Compromise regarding accession of new states to the union --where one new slave state was allowed for one new free state (a sort of parity) --  made the struggle for statehood in Kansas one of ideological (religious) persuasion rather than constitutional order.  People interested in forbidding others from doing wrong things flooded into the territory of Kansas to make sure others would do things right, both Northern abolitionists and Missourian slave holders.  A bloody fight broke out, and to make things brief, we now live in a free state in a free nation, ascending to the stars in the national flag’s field of blue through our “difficulties.” 

This fight was religious, because it dealt with the purpose of man itself, and no one who makes a pronouncement as to what others should be doing is free of religion. 

When differences of religion exist, resistance, rather than submission, to laws will inevitably break out.  You may say, “That’s where you are doing it wrong! We separate Church and State in these territories, sir!”  I would reply that you are doing it wrong, since I never said Church, but merely religion.  Religion is the question of purpose, what we should be doing with life.  It is wrong to assume that since church attendance is down among us, that there aren’t as many people who think everyone else is living the wrong way.  Here in the land of euphemism, we detect religion that relies on mystification in order to avoid its positive implications. 

“Ah, but what about Cotton Mather?”  The Hawthornian view of the sins of our fathers would have us meditate upon the horrific Salem Witch Trials.  Fascination with witchcraft led to trials at law and subsequent executions of people who may actually have been victims. A crime looking for a perpetrator is one of the touchstones of those who proclaim, “I thank thee, oh Lord, that I am not as them.”  We are fascinated that so many others would join in this vicious pursuit of new criminals, people so wrong as to seek league with the devil himself.  Though insane to court the hosts of fallen angels, doing so could be a very handy benchmark for singling out those so wrong they must be blotted out of the public square.  A social consensus organized a community to pursue wrong doers, creating policy that engaged and enraged citizens.  We vilify Cotton Mather and his community-organizing effort -- and feel better about ourselves.  (Witches also feel much better about this.)

Mather was wrong, so wrong that even today pastors, preachers and priests are wrong to tell us who is wrong, and they certainly shouldn’t make laws.  This is our agreement about religion.  Unfortunately, it is impossible to coerce obedience to laws without religious assumptions of some kind amongst the governed.  After all, “man does not live by bread alone.”  If religion is necessary, but people aren’t in Church, then how are they to know who is doing wrong things?  Fortunately, a preacher doesn’t need an ornate setting, a collar, a crucifix.  A preacher needs a congregation though, and our Mayor, Brandon Whipple, seems to be building one around the discovery that others are doing something wrong.  In the vacuum of moral instruction by the clergy and schools, a young man with mild experience of the mundane takes up the mitre. 

The Mayor’s “Diversity, Inclusion, and Civil Rights Board” has been, if we are to pay attention to words and meaning, “ordained” by means of a city ordinance.  This seemingly harmless empaneling is in actuality more like the installation of the Dominican Order or the Knights Templar, or for those of us in a happier mood, perhaps “The Justice League” or “The Avengers,” all in order to pursue wrong doings.  One of the first acts of this “inclusion” group was to disinclude a member who was a bit too diverse.  Hopefully he won’t be burned at the stake, but it is clear that he is not to be tolerated in the public square defined by this group.  Any assemblage that identifies heresy has an orthodoxy, and this is religious.  Apparently there is a right kind of unity, of diversity, and of who should be included and excluded.

This entanglement that leads to strife has customarily been avoided by our constitutional arrangements, even the arrangements of our city government in Wichita which features a relatively weak office of the mayor, so that people may enjoy maximum freedom in our social arrangements.  This may be annoying to those who see others using this freedom to do wrong things.  In the past, this border, this wall of right and wrong has been relatively well defined by things we call laws.  These have devolved from something like “Honor your Father and Mother”and ‘Thou shalt not covet,” giving us both the line of authority for submission to instruction, and the warning against worrying that other people are doing wrong things.  It seems now that the law isn’t enough, that we must realign our religious understanding into a unity and inclusion.    The restless tendency in current politics to foment movements -- where before there was peace -- and to cry “justice, justice!” as we warp law, should be understood as religious.  Religious goals always bring the sword, and if you do not realize this, you are doing history wrong.  Sometimes the sword is inevitable, necessary and purgative.  Often, the sword is merely the means to organize guilt and self justification, often for the assurance that numbers declare righteousness.  We call these last goals political. 

How many times have you used or heard the phrase “1984-esque” or “Orwellian nightmare”? So many believe something is being censored, kept back, or some variety of loaded game is being played at the expense of the wider population. Others are convinced that they alone are in sovereign possession of the unassailable Truth.  From the intellectual elite, we expect to hear them assail the “foolish, stupid, ignorant, primitive, uneducated, and pitiably misguided.” From the moral elite, the God-and-Country crowd, you’ll hear charged language like “seditious, morally bankrupt, un-American, evil and godless.” Both groups, yes, most of us, languish about the rims or depths of the great canyon that is current American discourse, and we hear these labels; maybe, regrettably, in our own voices. 

The combined knowledge of the human race is floating a few keystrokes from the hands of nearly all. Everyone has a voice, and the voices are raised. Therein, regrettably, is the problem. The proliferation of sources and explosion in accessibility make not languishing difficult. 

We may have different metrics for assessing sources. Some of us rely upon peer-reviewed sources. Some of us don’t trust the peer-review process, and go with the Ancients. Some of us trust affiliated news, but others only third-party, unaffiliated. 

The issue isn’t that the truth doesn’t exist. The issue is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to assess where to find it. In the modern era, an “appeal to the facts” is laughable, when each party suspects the other of tampering with the evidence. The pursuit of truth has been occluded by the shouting, arguing, hysteria, and proliferation of sources that mask, obfuscate, bend and reinterpret. We are not, I’m afraid, in the business of shaping our opinions to fit the facts. We are in the business of seeking the pleasure of being right over the difficulty of seeking what is true. 

Aldous Huxley has the distinction of being one of the three pillars of dystopian literature: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1984 by George Orwell and We by Yevgeny Zamyatin -- the triumvirate of the poisoned future. While the control of thought and discourse in society is the great interest of every elite, Huxley was specific regarding how that control would occur. Unlike other dystopians who saw the method of control flowing from heavy-handed tactics like fear, historical erasure, and torture, Huxley saw societal control in a single word -- pleasure. He believed that instant gratification, drugs, a life of ease, free love, the accessibility of diverting activities, and pornography would prevent all but the staunchest dissent. 

His brave new world is summarized neatly in a scene wherein Mustafa Mond, the “Controller of Europe,” engages in a philosophical debate in his office with the “Savage” on the subjects of god, morality, and social place. The “prop” used in this scene is important: Mustafa Mond opens his safe, and takes out several of the “banned” books. The metaphor is transparent: the truth, locked away, is in the hands of the knowingly complicit elite. 

But the means of greater understanding is the willingness and ability to expand the mind and encompass as much of the world as possible. I wonder if we haven’t entered unknowingly an artificial limiting of scope. Consider the following from That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis:

[It’s] the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips all the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything. 

When there is data to suit every persuasion, every iteration of human motivation—from atheism to Christianity from holocaust denial to White supremacy — is not the truest metric of morality in the 21st century, the driving notion behind Aldous Huxley’s most famous work, as simple as personal decision? The machinations of society bend us toward the pleasure of being right and “othering” the opposition, but the fastest way to avoid Huxley’s vision of a society controlled by pleasure and the burying of the truth is to bow out. Ignore society. Vastly overcomplicating an issue with an infinite series of tailor-made sources has hardly bought any one of us peace of mind.

The appeal to the intrinsic morality of the human spirit, “I know it’s wrong, so I won’t do it,” is more powerful than finding excuses for our behavior. In literary fiction we see truths by navigating with the heart and the instincts. A careful study of the immediate, actual repercussions of our actions tell us more than a thousand opinions. I’m making a conscious decision to limit my scope to things upon which I can have an immediate impact, to reduce the scope of decision making all the way back down to an egoistic “myself and my immediate kin or neighbors.” 

The best way to avoid Aldous Huxley’s projected future is to walk out of the canyon of howling voices and focus on individualistic notions of happiness.  It is everyone’s duty to nail their ninety-five theses to the oaken doors of power and disregard  the faux authority of the bloated establishments. We are responsible for our lives and our choices. Leave the argumentation and the accusations to others. After all, sometimes the fastest way to win a fight is to not start one. Or, failing that, walk away from it. In the deepest of ironies, Huxley’s Brave New World may ultimately be prevented by nothing more than a little personal bravery.

The Left insists on fragmenting us into disparate identity groups. As our loyalties attach to these emphasized identities, — race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation — the fragmentation only increases. Hyper-focusing on race is so divisive; do we really want the unveiling and unfolding of smaller units of identity — tribalism and clannishness? My concern rests on the deep reality of how easily humankind can return to tribalism and ever-smaller units of mutual respect and “ease of life” because it is hard to “just all get along.”

Nationalism and globalism are losing fans, Trump and Biden notwithstanding, respectively. How much “country” can you keep together without a pride-building national narrative? How long can an American electoral system be respected when highly significant, intentional fraud has been widely afoot? To the powerfully placed, hasn’t the global village essentially been about more money for their oligarchies?

The oneness of the whole world requires a narrative greater than the promises and prospects of free trade, to be sure. Regionalism and localism currently play well to many hearts and seem so wonderfully retrogressive and reactionary, even panacean. But they both head in the direction of smaller units of identity — tribalism and clannishness. To say one is a tribalist will one day be more polarizing than saying one is a racist. Happy times are not ahead if we stay this course of fragmenting the nation by emphasizing and adulating our many differences as human beings. I too can easily feel and be energized by my clan’s history and new prospects of family/ethnic tribe. If those sentiments capture too many of us, who and what will pick up after the collapse of nations? The historical record and current world-wide milieu should not encourage you.

Answers lie about: the journalistic class must pursue truth wherever it leads and not merely reinforce preconceived notions and agendas; the state educational system must get over its disaffection for America — a flawed nation, but arguably the greatest political-economic system created in all of human history (yes, I’m thinking the greatest combination of liberty and justice the world has ever known); the Church must return to its Reformed roots — that God is not merely kindness and love, but “plays rough” when not pleased. How long will the path back to affectionate nationhood remain traceable?

Photo courtesy of University of Indiana via Wikimedia Commons

Picking up my copy of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, I little expected to be inspired, having forgotten the fiery invective he was capable of, but was thinking more of the availability of a contentious point from which to chart out an interesting debate.  I found both: an inspirational rhetorical figure who could stir the martial spirit with his printed words, seeming to draw a voice from the pages, and a distinct philosophical difference which may characterize revolutionary America but perhaps not the land that we know, post Abraham Lincoln.  

“Some writers have so confounded society with government as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins.”

In reading this opening position from his revolutionary tract, I was reoriented to something truly unique to the American founding documents and in this popular call to action, obviously living a rhetorical life in the late eighteenth century:  The clear-cut division of social life into the possibility of mutual benefit through association, or society, and the distinct function of government as the antidote to human vice.  Society is a sign of our success, government of our failure, one a jewel, the other a manacle.

“Society is produced by our wants, government by our wickedness.”  

This, one of a salvo of antithetical clauses, rips down the page, leaving no ambiguity in the proposition which will build the argument of Common Sense.  We read that a King is nothing more than an overgrown descendant of original ruffians, ones grown strong enough to subdue an otherwise peaceful society and perpetuate themselves by merely having children.  King George was the descendant of a Norman bully, and since a lion often gives birth to an ass in the royal line of succession, we can understand that a government that produces more vice than it prevents is an abomination.  Frequent elections then are the weed poison to keep this kind of crabgrass down.  We read these things from Paine, a sort of American Revolutionary folk hero.  Some think revolutionary thoughts today.  Are they like Paine?  But what of the basic proposition, further illuminated with:

 “Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil . . .”

I have in my lifetime heard American politicians at every level and of every party speak of “reaching across the aisle” in order to produce prosperity in some way.  Would Paine think this was something that should even be done at the political level?  Perhaps on a deeper level, is there a society that responds to our wants? -- and what is our government restraining?  If we listed our wants, which would be the things we spend the most time and money on, and listed our vices, the things which we accuse each other of, would these fall cleanly into categories headed by society and government, respectively, or would they end up on the opposite side of the page?  Returning to the proposition, should they?  The hard part to think of finally might be, Why or why not?  

Dan Snyder, Instructor of Rhetoric, Classical School of Wichita

---

Paine’s Pain is Mankind’s Blessing

Bob Love

Dan Snyder’s thoughts on Thomas Paine’s definition of and distinction between “society” and “government” provoke an important 2-part question:

• Which came first … society or government?

• And which does/should take priority in case of conflict?

Paine seems to believe that society came first followed by government as “a necessary evil” to address society’s occasional failure.

• But what if government came first and is the foundation for society?

• And if this is true, what does it imply about Paine’s [and our] notion of “liberty”?

In his 1958 speech examining, among other things, society and government titled “Liberty and Property”, Ludwig von Mises, using a method of analysis known as praxeology which is free from the partisan constraints of early American revolutionaries like Paine, argues as follows:

“Romantic philosophy labored under the illusion that in the early ages of history the individual was free and that the course of historical evolution deprived him of his primordial liberty. As Jean Jacques Rousseau saw it, nature accorded men freedom and society enslaved him. In fact, primeval man was at the mercy of every fellow who was stronger and therefore could snatch away from him the scarce means of subsistence. There is in nature nothing to which the name of liberty could be given. The concept of freedom always refers to social relations between men. True, society cannot realize the illusory concept of the individual’s absolute independence. Within society everyone depends on what other people are prepared to contribute to his well-being in return for his own contribution to their well-being. Society is essentially the mutual exchange of services. As far as individuals have the opportunity to choose, they are free; if they are forced by violence or threat of violence to surrender to the terms of an exchange, no matter how they feel about it, they lack freedom. This slave is unfree precisely because the master assigns him his tasks and determines what he has to receive if he fulfills it.

“As regards the social apparatus of repression and coercion, the government, there cannot be any question of freedom. Government is essentially the negation of liberty. It is the recourse to violence or threat of violence in order to make all people obey the orders of the government, whether they like it or not. As far as the government’s jurisdiction extends, there is coercion, not freedom. Government is a necessary institution, the means to make the social system of cooperation work smoothly without being disturbed by violent acts on the part of gangsters whether of domestic or of foreign origin. Government is not, as some people like to say, a necessary evil; it is not an evil, but a means, the only means available to make peaceful human coexistence possible. But it is the opposite of liberty. It is beating, imprisoning, hanging. Whatever a government does it is ultimately supported by the actions of armed constables. If the government operates a school or a hospital, the funds required are collected by taxes, i.e., by payments exacted from the citizens.

“If we take into account the fact that, as human nature is, there can neither be civilization nor peace without the functioning of the government apparatus of violent action, we may call government the most beneficial human institution. But the fact remains that government is repression not freedom. Freedom is to be found only in the sphere in which government does not interfere. Liberty is always freedom from the government. It is the restriction of the government’s interference. It prevails only in the fields in which the citizens have the opportunity to choose the way in which they want to proceed. Civil rights are the statutes that precisely circumscribe the sphere in which the men conducting the affairs of state are permitted to restrict the individuals’ freedom to act.”

For Paine, men have “natural rights” … including liberty … which form the basis for their “civil rights” which Mises claims are the only “rights” men really have. So “conservatives” like the “give me liberty or give me death” Paine-ians raise the cry for “primordial liberty” without worrying too much about “civil rights”. Indeed, Jefferson [and later Bastiat] claimed

• the individual’s “right to liberty” was “inalienable and self-evident”,

• derived solely and necessarily from the individual’s God-given “right to life” and

• followed by the individual’s “right to property” which Jefferson [deceitfully?]  euphemized as “the pursuit of happiness” to obscure the obvious contradiction that African humans had been “property” in America since 1619 … the year white American capitalists first imported black African slaves.

Accordingly Bastiat made crystal clear what Jefferson [and Paine] only [but still elegantly] implied … that individual liberty [and collective society] comes before and supports law [and government]:

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” Bastiat, The Law, 1850

So is Mises really questioning the sacrosanct [even religious] properly basic belief … that

• liberty is a natural right given by God directly to each individual

• which forms the only real basis for functioning society

• which then institutes government as a “necessary evil” to cover its short-comings

• implying “the lesser the better” when it comes to government?

It would seem so, but how can that be?

The key to understanding Paine’s [and most Americans’] logical fallacy may be quite simple:

• ecology [ie. Mises’ “nature”] precedes economy [Bastiat’s “labor/liberty/property”].

However, the practical consequences [sociological and ecological] to which this simple fallacy has led may be quite complex and serious … to the point of being fatal to American democracy and the republic itself.

To learn more about this vital issue, consider engaging in Northfield School’s annual spring lecture-discussion series titled: “In Search of Law and Order: Ecology as the Basis for Economy” … you might just be glad you did.

Postscript

• “Pride goes … before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18

• "What in the world has God done to us?" Gen 42:28

• “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good [a]nd what [is] require[d] of you:
  To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Micah 6:8

• "We’ve got to be humble in the face of nature.”
  Boris Johnson announcing 2nd virus lockdown in England. Oct 2020

Teachable moments are often accompanied by [local or even global] duress which evokes different emotions in different people … one of which is humility which alone transforms teachable moments into learnable moments.

• How are we reacting to what God/nature is doing to us?

• What will we learn … and when will we learn it?

The following thoughts were initially prepared after reading [at the prompting of a friend] this article on historian and author Christopher Lasch: Local Culture 2.2: Christopher Lasch, by Jason Peters - August 28, 2020, Front Porch Republic

I subsequently looked for a copy of Lasch’s last book which, I was told, he found the time to finish by deferring urgent cancer therapy. His choice resulted in his death from the cancer soon after his work on the book was finished. I thought I wanted to read a book that was more important to its author than modern science’s latest life-enhancing therapy, and so I looked for it … in vain.

Finally, the local Wichita public library found a loaner copy for me in the White Library at Emporia State University which [according to the “Due Date” slip] was checked out only 4 times … 1995 [the year it was published], 1997 [twice] and 2001. And so, during an October snow storm with green grass on the ground and green leaves in the trees all covered with snow and ice, I settled in to read what few apparently had … Lasch’s last thoughts.

The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy [TROTE] was a revised [I think] and edited collection of Lasch’s writings over the years which begins with this line

“Most of my recent work comes back in one way or another to the question of whether democracy has a future.”

… and ends with this one

“But now that we are beginning to grasp the limits of our control over the natural world, [mastery] is an illusion - to invoke Freud once again - the future of which is very much in doubt, an illusion more problematical, certainly, than the future of religion.”

The book is immense in scope but focused [even repetitive] in theme. It is timely and timeless, critical and affirming, repressive and liberating, complex and common. It is worth having for its bibliography alone, even if you never read it. I hope you encounter it soon.

Education is a recurrent theme throughout TROTE. Chap 4 presents a wide-ranging discussion of why Horace Mann's vision [in 1840-1850] for public education [which was generally implemented] has been followed by [if not actually producing] the very sociological curses which Mann feared would fall on American democracy if it failed to implement his vision … including “violence, misrule, licentiousness, debauchery, political profligacy and legalized perfidy [breach of trust].”

“[Horace Mann] would be horrified ... with our educational system as it exists today [1995].

• We have professionalized teaching by setting up elaborate requirements for certification, but we have not succeeded in institutionalizing Mann's appreciation of teaching as an honorable calling.

• We have set up a far-ranging educational bureaucracy without raising academic standards or improving the quality of teaching. The bureaucratization of education has ... substituted the judgment of administrators for that of teachers ... incidentally discouraging people with a gift for teaching from entering the profession at all.

• The periodic rediscovery that intellectual training has been sacrificed to "social skills" has led to a misplaced emphasis on the purely cognitive dimension of education, which lacks even Mann's redeeming awareness of its moral dimension.

If there is one lesson we might have been expected to learn in the 150 years since Mann ... it is that the schools can't save society. ... Meanwhile, our children, even as young adults, don’t know how to read and write. Maybe the time has come - if it hasn't already passed - to start all over again." TROTE, Chap 8: The Common Schools

In the chapter Lasch presents “education” as just another chapter in “life” which, although it occurs in the school instead of on the street, is subject to same tension between:

1. our understanding of ecology [nature] revealed in the interplay of

a. debatable standards of religion/morality/belief which impersonally differentiate and socially segregate us with

b. common dialogue via cognition/intellect/reason which personally equalize and socially integrate us and

2. our practice of economy [the state] revealed in the form of

a. unequal capacities/capabilities for achieving comfort and convenience which personally divide us into classes which

b. common markets nevertheless conjoin complementarily [even if exploitatively] but impersonally.

The controversy is over which approach [1a, 1b, 2a, 2b] prevails when.

• The extreme positions are 1a and 2b.

• The moderate positions are 1b and 2a.

• Mann preferred 1b in schools to achieve the personally equalized social integration [aka democracy] which he believed people need to flourish.

• In 2b life generally, the money not the individual is the basis for equality.

In TROTE, Lasch generally argues that

• “The elites” abandoned their progenitors’ pursuit of 1b in favor of 2b [what Mann called the replacement of morality with materialism] while simultaneously dismissing 1a as irrelevant/unhelpful and 2a as inevitable.

• But that without 1a, 1b stands alone and becomes meaningless and unusable, since “it is debate alone that gives rise to the desire for usable information [which permits us to] master the knowledge that makes us capable citizens”.

• This is a Lasch paradox that embracing our differences enhances our strength as people [demos-kratos = people-power].

• And finally, the unconditional embrace of 2b causes 2a to become increasingly exaggerated in the form of income and wealth inequality which leads to social collapse in what Mann called “the revenge of poverty.”

• For Lasch, we must embrace both 1a and 1b simultaneously … in our schools and in our lives … so that we are collectively willing and able to moderate the inevitably detrimental effects of growing 2a inequality in a will otherwise run solely on 2b. 

What Lasch seems to imply is that the failure of Mann’s model of education led the elites to revolt.  And although his TROTE chapter on “The Common Schools” is organized as a criticism of Mann and not a coherent statement of his own thoughts on education, we might infer that Lasch would agree that

• The institutional “bureaucratization” of education [ie. its formal, monopolistic [1] and public segregation from the rest of life including the family, the street/neighborhood and even the market] disturbed the wider natural “ecology of education” setting in motion multiple causes of deteriorating effects.

• The simultaneous pedagogical embrace of 1b AND the exclusion of 1a eventually starved 1b of the very source of its energy and vitality … dooming democracy.

• It was the starvation of 1b that led to the revolt of the elites who, still seeking meaning, turned to 2b [as noted above] as the only game in town setting in motion the  exaggeration of the destructive 2a forces unabated by either 1a or 1b.

• With 2a exaggeration set in motion, Mann’s prophesied “revenge of poverty” became inevitable but would take place in a society without the social stamina or skills of 1a or 1b … leading to civil violence, totalitarian suppression and collapse.

Although there is more that could and should be said … both about Lasch’s view of education and about the forces at work in this sociological tale, I hope this attempt to simplify Lasch’s wide-ranging and thought-provoking discussion of education is helpful in framing some issue for further discussion.

Bob Love

            The university, according to the word’s Latin roots, is a whole entity that “turns as one.” What over-arching principles held together and moved forward the universities you attended – or currently steer those that your progeny do? The men’s basketball team?  Sorry.

            Ideally, universities are held together by a willingness to work hard at intellectual labor, by an admiration for the process of honest inquiry and the ability to parry with academic prejudice, by separating what is being said from who is saying it, and by not missing out on answers from failure to ask questions. “Test everything.  Hold on to what is good,” advised that first-century architect of faith and practice, Paul of Tarsus. 

            By his principle, progressives and conservatives could work together more kindly and fruitfully.  Both emphases have much to teach us. The histories of enduring human societies are highlighted by progressive discovery of new knowledge and its advancing applications – and by conserving what had already been proven to be good. Who isn’t pleased with the advances in medicine and mechanics, transportation and telecommunications?  Who hopes we will conserve long-held, cherished values (equality under the law, freedom to speak what one thinks, respect for duly appointed authority, honest empirical study, gratitude to forebears , and humility before truth come to mind)?  

            The national conversation needs a re-awareness that progress without conservatism leads to misguidance and coercion and that conservatism without progress causes discouragement and rebellion.

Michael R. Witherspoon

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Illustration: Candor Visuals

This section solicits responses to the “Question of the Month” proffered by the editors of Candor.

The question for October: What will be the lessons, the takeaways from the 2020 presidential campaign?

You are free to read and respond. Responses received may be included in Candor. Send all responses to: editor@candor.news

A response by Michael Witherspoon:

When I ponder the intensity of civil anger and violence in America from 1861-65, I have to think that the anger and violence we are experiencing today is at a considerably lower level than then. And may it remain that way!  Yet, don’t we seem, communally and societally, a little extra on-edge?

America’s 2020 presidential campaign evidences, soberingly, an increasing polarization of views regarding the best future of the country.  Does anyone else miss the days when every person had not become a journalist via something we all carry on our persons all day, every day?  Or miss the days when Big Stories, meta-narratives, kept us gathered -- religiously: “Faith in God is foundational to America’s goodness” -- and secularly: “America is the great melting pot”? 

The Greek word ethnos translates into English as “nation.”  Nations in the Ancient World were distinct people groups sharing lots of genetics, language, knowledge, customs, symbols, laws, and so on.  As humankind developed sociologically over time -- families grouped into clans and clans into tribes and tribes into nations and nations into countries and countries into a global . . . (oh, the point of stasis --- and more than a little pushback). Many nations could be not far from one another, yet warringly distinct.  Nations do not have the same hegemonies, for a myriad of reasons and causes — superior technology or wisdom, force or succor?

When nations – rooted in ethnicities -- share the same boundaries – and declare themselves to be a  country – that country will need uniting stories and a treasury of values that they agree upon.  We are having a very difficult time talking truthfully to one another about serious things.   Is it wrong to be getting tired of lawless journalism -- and the politics they write about?  Seriously, what is going to be the future of civil conversation in a highly diversifying, individualizing, atomizing and solipsistic culture?  Will there be enough people who take the time to search out the truth together – on any matter?

Also read and respond to this timely excerpt from Brookings Institute Senior Fellow Robert Litan’s October 6-released book: Resolved: Debate Can Revolutionize Education and Help save Democracy

What America Needs is Real Debating

Robert Litan

If you’ve been watching the Presidential debates – this year or in years past – you should know one thing: these are not real debates, but crafted sound bites that too often whistle past each other and the moderator, aimed at ratifying what each candidate’s voter base already believes. 

In real debates, the participants offer reasoned positions, backed by evidence, in civil discussion, without name-calling, in speeches longer than 60 or 90 seconds. Competitive debaters in high school and college not only learn how to do this well, but to argue both sides of a topic in different “rounds” of tournaments, which forces debaters to appreciate that most issues are far more complicated than they appear on social media or cable TV. 

While it is unrealistic to expect all students to become competitive debaters, incorporating the basic paradigm of debating – supporting claims with real facts and reasoning, learning how to rebut critiques, orally and not just in writing – would transform the education of youth in America, improve the skills and flexibility of workers and thus their incomes, and create a more civil, informed citizenry.  

In fact, two education pioneers and former debaters – Les Lynn and Mike Wasserman -- have been instructing teachers in debate-centered instructional techniques in middle and high schools in Chicago and Boston, respectively, for over five years. With impressive results: improved test scores and perhaps most importantly, classes that are fun, for the students and teachers alike, all of which I have witnessed first-hand. 

The idea that learning can be enjoyable and relevant to students’ daily lives is important not only for all students, but especially those in low income, heavily minority communities where too many students start out school well behind their suburban school peers and motivating them to be interested in school can be a challenge. Several statistical studies have shown that competitive debate in urban schools with high numbers of minority students improves the debaters’ educational performance, even controlling for the students who “self-select” into debate. One plausible reason why is that debate strongly motivates students to want to learn, which is true whether debating is done outside or inside in the classroom. 

Educational improvements brought about through debate-centered instruction should have lasting effects, improving students’ career earnings not only because they know more when they leave school, but because learning through debate should make them willing to learn as they age. Debate also enables students to express themselves orally, clearly and logically – skills that employers widely report that too many high school and college graduates lack.  

Debate skills should also gradually improve our politics, where too few adults have the ability, experience or willingness to appreciate arguments and evidence counter to their own beliefs, precisely what debate instills in students. Indeed, if I could wave a magic wand, all citizens would have some debate some experience now. Once trained in being able to articulate opposing arguments, with facts and reason, more people will be more tolerant of others, which would reduce political polarization and the mean-spiritedness of our politics. Elected officials would have greater incentives to cross the aisle and compromise, like spouses do in good marriages. 

Debate centered learning can even thrive through remote learning. Anyone who has children knows that they can be far less intimidated talking to others through their laptops or tablet computers than in person in a classroom setting. As for students who may struggle expressing themselves orally in person – public speaking ranks at or near the top of many peoples’ fears – debate techniques can be introduced gradually, as the teachers counseled by Lynn and Wasserman can testify.

Teachers can be instructed in debate centered learning techniques in a week of training, ideally with one mentor inside each school – such as the debate coach – to answer questions or give suggestions throughout the school year. All this can be financed by redirecting part of the money now being spent on professional development toward debate centered instruction, though foundation funding to support the training of initial cohorts of teachers would help. Thereafter, teachers experienced in delivering debate centered instruction can lead training sessions for teachers in their schools and other schools.

Local school boards needn’t wait for foundations to launch such efforts, however. They can go beyond the competitive debate initiative that Broward County in Florida has been using for all its K-12 schools successfully for several years and make debate centered instruction a central part of education itself. There is no time to waste to improve our schools, our workforce, and our politics – and real debating offers one powerful tool for doing all three.

THIS DANGEROUS VICE: The Recurring American Two-Party System

Michael Isbell

There are two methods of curing the mischief of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects. 

- James Madison 

Shortly after the founding of the republic, a controversy made root in America: the two-party system. What began so long ago with Jeffersonians and Federalists - names now foreign to many, which were once such a monumental part of American political discourse - has shimmied as much as stumbled into what are now the two prevailing party options, the Republicans and the Democrats. 

By dominating the news media nearly in its entirety (albeit with some bias throughout), and with millions of dollars of funding to run on during campaigns, the two parties have stricken down great opportunities for the American people to further pursue their options for the upcoming presidential election. 

In total, there are six third-party options which are shown in the ballots of at least fifteen states this year. With the exception of perhaps Jo Jorgensen and Howie Hawkins, all of whom garner less attention from the public than Kanye West, presidential nominee for the “Birthday” Party, currently accessible on ballots in at least twelve states. 

What is it that prevents a heavier outflow of interest for third party members? The answer might be simple. It probably is not. 

A French politician named Maurice Duverger is responsible for what is known as Duverger's Law, in short the theory that in mass majority single-ballot elections, it is unlikely to expect anything other than a two-party dominance to emerge. A person can make more difference in partaking in a choice between two options than that of three, or four, or more options. The more options available, the more thinned out support from the masses is likely to be. 

A nation-wide sense of peer pressure is perhaps just as much to blame. The “If you’re not voting for me, you’re voting for him” ideology is a rampant fallacy among the public. Friends, co-workers, family members, celebrities, and others whom we turn to and respect, all have opinions. Many will share them; undoubtedly some will push them on others. This, without mentioning the stress of having a thought singular to the individual being silenced for fear of aggression from someone else, serves to toxify the political tides.

In deepening opposition, radicalism may become a greater likelihood. The options become less gray, with voters taking a more black and white position on social matters. "One or the other" becomes the norm in any society incapable of conscious, credible, rationalized discussion absent of spite for the other man. 

The inability for third party candidates to earn acknowledgement from the public for election may further entice tumultuous partisanship on both sides. As media coverage continues to favor one over the other with more fervor, so the masses are swayed more dramatically, landing themselves farther left or right along the political scale as societal issues converge into larger, more troublesome issues. 

The true American dream is, beyond anything else, a unity of the peoples. In times of sudden crisis, this dream is often enacted into reality as survival instincts outweigh political ones. Over a historical timeline, though, with divisions deepening down into the American thought processes, affecting the decisions made and priorities handled, a snowball may begin to form, rolling along, collecting social debris and strewing it elsewhere. Without effective, transparent, united coordination, America is a snowball, heading towards a rough brick wall. 

Within the United States, it is up to the people. To better grasp what options are available that are neither mainstream nor radical, it is important to conduct one's own research, to seek out and to find as much information - hopefully from trusted sources - as possible. A controversy made root in America; it is up to the great We to determine the longevity of its influence.

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Illustration by Ainsley Christofferson

This section solicits responses to the “Question of the Month” proffered by the editors of Candor.

The question for September: “In your evaluation has interracial harmony increased during the span of your life experience?” 

You are free to read and respond. Responses are in order of receipt. The most recent are at the top of the chain. Responses received by September 19 may be included in September’s mid-month edition of Candor; those received after September 19 can be included in October’s first-of-the-month edition. Send all responses to: editor@candor.news

Response by Randy Love:

Yes, a thought that needs airing is that prejudice is a necessary part of developing moral human beings, also a necessary part of freedom. Being without the ability to express a belief or prejudice openly is a sign of slavery — maybe too strong a word — but prejudices become dangerous only when they gain the force of government or law behind them. Otherwise, they are just points of view . . . .

Response by Bob Love:

As we have seen recently, Princeton's problem is Sewanee's problem is OUR problem: How to understand racism? As a personal psychological issue or a systemic social issue or both? In that regard, you may find this summary and review of some of the current thinking on "racism" helpful: https://spectator.us/anti-racism-really-means-debate-white-fragility/

In it, I believe, the authors expose the fundamental difference between

• dialectical maturity which respects different POVs as essential in the quest for order via conformity to truth and

• political pandering which regards different POVs as fatal in the quest for order via submission to power.

For those who have read Wheelis' "How People Change", this is simply the psychological difference between freedom and necessity, where freedom consumes scarce cognitive resources while necessity attempts to conserve them thru "un-use". The irony is that the attempt to conserve them [though sometimes wise] is usually unsuccessful as disputes drag on across lifetimes and generations.

The venturesome could sociologically conclude, roughly guided by Christopher Lasch in his final compilation of essays entitled "The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy", that the contemporary American racism dispute is not about a substantive reality at all but is rather the procedural result of a dialectically immature [i.e., uneducated even slothful] withdrawal by two sides into "simulations of reality" which can never be reconciled. Using this approach, racism is not diagnosed a "disease" at all, but merely another "symptom" of the broader social/class breakdown between rich and poor resulting from what Lasch [in the 1990's] called "liberal capitalism" [which we today would call "crony capitalism"]. Concerning Lasch's final book, one commentator says something I find thought provoking:

Labeling himself a populist (part of a tradition that includes, in Lasch’s opinion, both agrarian radicals [like Andrew Lytle and Wendell Berry ?] and Southern Christian Leadership Conference freedom fighters [like ML King who later in life saw poverty as non-racist ?]), he argues that democracy must rest on individual responsibility [with a good education and the support of local community ?] rather than the veneer of [globalized] misplaced compassion and victimization politics [which are the twin results of] liberal capitalism in both its free-market apotheosis and its welfare-state apparition.

I find both the Wheelis psychological approach and the Lasch sociological approach helpful in their own complementary ways, since we are both individuals and members of society.

You will note that one of the writers of this primary article above is a philosophy professor at Portland State and the other is the founder of New Discourses ... and together they wrote a book on "How to Have Impossible Conversations" ... what a great title !!! Their helpfulness is, perhaps, simply more evidence of our need for an educational vision that brings the student to cultural acceptance [comfort in skin] with dialectical maturity [comfort in mind].

Understanding the complementary roles of culture and cognition in education seems valuable for educators and vital for students in their post-secondary lives [whether at Princeton or Sewanee . . . or in Wichita.

Response by Steve Witherspoon:

For three years, my brother and I attended L’Ouverture Elementary in Wichita, a byproduct of our mother’s desire to promote integration in the schools, and partly because it was one of three elementary schools she taught at as a roving district Art teacher. During the 1970-71 school year, according to the book A History of Wichita Public Schools, 63 white families volunteered to send their children to L’Ouverture, traditionally an all-black school, while, many black students were then bused to predominantly white neighborhood schools. The ratio at L’Ouverture for that year was 72% black students, 28% white.

A few memorable people signed up to teach us, Myrliss Hershey, noted for her aggressive attempts to divide students into groups based on the idea that faster-learning students could help others to achieve shared goals, and other times, students would work individually at self-paced projects. Few issues of racial disparity were evident to me at the time, though one black student called Mrs. Hershey a “white witch,” and that became the impetus of the title of a book Myrliss wrote in 1973. If you take the time to read it, my pseudonym is Stan, and I’m described as shy and reserved; without doubt, though, my eyes and ears were wide open during my instructive years at L’Ouverture.  

The following year, my Third Grade teacher, Connie Dietz, who later became a Wichita Public School Board member, and then Career Services Director at Wichita State, sat me down to question why I had gotten into a fight at recess with a black student who was a grade or two older. I’d said something he didn’t like, nothing egregious, but an insult, and I’d felt that I was in the wrong. Mrs. Dietz told me that I should consider the feelings of others before speaking, and that lesson has served me well since. Most students on the playground got along, we were kids, and skin color didn’t mean that much to us, at least from my perspective. Tony was a fast runner, and he and several other students would race each other, shoot hoops, and joke around. Though his skin was darker, the fact that Tony was different than me in some consequential way didn’t enter my mind. I’d like to know what happened with his life: What did he become? Where did he live? But the thing of it is, like with most people you knew in grade school, you didn’t know that much about them, and didn’t see each other outside of the context of the confines of a fenced-in school campus.

Sara Black, with matching skin color, was our principal, and one day in 1973, she gathered students into the hallway to discuss racial harmony, and subsequently offered Three Dog Night’s Black and White on one of those speaker-challenged, school-issue record players. I was much older before I understood at a deeper level what those sessions and that song really meant, but at least she was trying to unite us, and given some of the verbal and physical fights that high school students were  engaging in at that time, our students were much more harmonious. In retrospect, she was to be commended for delivering calm within a potentially caustic environment.

The following years led me back to OK Elementary, Hadley Junior High, and North High, where incidents of racial discord increased. Suddenly, skin colors mattered, and I occasionally found myself involved in taunts and threats lobbed at me, and specifically, my skin color. I was stupefied, what happened between the years at L’Ouverture, and the next several?

I can’t say that I have insightful answers to those questions today, but I do know that as an educator for the Wichita Public Schools for nearly 30 years, defining “race relations” is much more complicated. Latin American-heritage students have replaced black students as the leading minority group, and students from seemingly all over the world enter the building at East High every day, where I teach. Are language and cultural differences an issue? Yes. Do students tend to respect those cultural differences? For the most part, they do.

Is the U.S. more of a melting pot, or a salad bowl, I ask my U.S. History students; today, are we truly blended together, united in a singular vision of what is expected of us, or do we remain inseparably linked to our national/ethnic/racial identities? In my class, we learn about the horrific injustices that African-purchased Americans and their descendants suffered, the hatred spewed toward newly-arrived Irish, Chinese, Italians, Poles, Japanese . . . have we fared better over my 50+ years on this earth, in this country, in this city?

Yes, but the vibe I felt in the ‘60s and ‘70s of integration, of MLK’s dream that “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers” is different today. While we are more integrated, more aware of the different shoes that many different people walk in, an imperfect salad remains, with protests, self-segregated communities, and grievance organizations, it is manifest that the melting pot theory suffers from a weak flame. Improving the human condition is a constant worry, and interracial harmony is critical to improve that condition, but it must be an organic movement, not shallow indoctrination. I still believe we’re heading in the right direction, but I was more inspired by the messages delivered in earlier decades. Today, I gain inspiration from the diverse people who share the social efficacy of the Golden Rule, who give of themselves to make the world a better place – that should have nothing  to do with skin pigmentation.

Response by Michael Witherspoon:

“Do you remember the “junior research theme,” a capstone project in secondary education two generations ago?  (The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature was rather limiting, wasn’t it.)  My enthusiastically-pursued topic was Black Power.  Fascinated by all things reformative or disestablishing, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, H. Rap Brown, and Malcolm X helped me understand the Black anger in my generation.  I felt it too, in part. Though my high school graduating class of 645 had only one African-American, I gathered into my life during the college years several close friends of color.  As a young adult, I played on a city league basketball team on which I was the only white player.  Currently, I attend church wherein over half the congregation is darker-skinned than I and numerous mixed-race couples congregate there.  All to say, I have not been aloof to race consciousness, have tried to bridge gaps of mutual understanding, and continue to hope for the triumph of “American ethnicity” over identity politics.

“In my lifetime has interracial harmony increased?  Yes, if we contrasted the athletic heroes of my grandchildren’s generation with those of my grandfather’s! Yes, definitely, if interracial dating and marriage indicate meaningfully. Yes, if access to the same public accommodations stands for something good.  Yes, if the myriad of skin colors we watch on our screens reveals increasing harmony.

“But, what I can’t see clearly is the degree to which race and DNA and gene pool affect culture, creating subcultures with cherished distinctions (think music, language, art, literature, values).  I have often repeated the words of a local and notable Black pastor who responded warmly but frankly to the question, Why is Sunday morning so segregated? – “Brother, we just don’t like your music.” We all laughed.

“When we speak of harmony between the races, just what ought that look like?  I want it and have wanted it as long as I can remember.  But, to what degree does race differentiate culture and culture work against integration?”

The essay below is the September contribution to this section and might serve as a template of sorts for future contributors. You are free to read and respond. Responses received by September 19 may be included in September’s mid-month edition of Candor. Send those to: editor@candor.news

Equality and Diversity? — by Michael Witherspoon

I am wondering who else might be having a measure of mental turbulence from being caught in the tension of a culture that champions diversity yet insists on equality? Who among us understands and appreciates diversity but also allows for inequality? I strain to hear many. Could it be that the concept of equality is often misapplied?

America’s founders, motivated by belief and wisdom, decided to undergird the governance of the republic and its citizens with the notion that all people come into the world with divinely given rights to live and stay alive as long as possible, to freely move about commercially and leisurely, to speak and write what they think, and to work towards their own happiness. Their government would be tasked with protecting those valued rights. Freeing people to live, while minimizing the abuse of freedom — and keeping others from falling too far behind —has been a national unifier, and pacifier, for over 230 years. Studies in world history or current affairs will reveal that Americans enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness at relatively very high levels. I certainly have.

The American resolve to protect and grant me freedom warms the heart. If I should be quite ill or harmed, an ambulance will stop traffic, speed towards my care, and take me to a center laden with machinery and its expert users. As an exercise of personal liberty, I have owned or signed leases on 28 separate residences since entering adulthood, have had more job changes than some would think wise, and I can tweet or publish for broad consumption nearly whatever I might want to say to those who might “follow.” If I am feeling closed in, cars and planes transport me to other states, regions, and continents in a matter of hours. If I am bored, I am continually offered new things to read, watch, and listen to through increasingly sophisticated productions and technologies.

Whether one’s struggle to get to America involved leaving others behind, stormy seas, immigration authorities, the sheer financial cost, or the horrors of a slave ship, the journey could be difficult. But for most Americans, organizing a litany of freedom’s blessings would not be a difficult exercise. And our governments – federal, state, and local --now are and have always been under enormous pressure to do a better job of ensuring “our rights.” Regions and races, laborers and lovers, want to enjoy the same levels of protection. Understood! Government at-your-service is how “of the people, by the people, and for the people” plays out.

Yes, of course, times and episodes of unequal protection are not difficult to find. Why do some get a knee on the neck and not others? is a fair question – with disturbing answers. Bias and prejudice and neglect and ignorance can be found at times in all of us. Equal justice under the law, absolutely, would depend on one judge having the only standard and applying it without prejudice every time. (We‘re not going to have that here, unless our machines take us over.)

To my point: equality is especially meaningful when applied to human rights. (The quest for equal rights finds the nation currently and painfully seeking greater police consistency.) But, diversity is especially meaningful when applied to human outcomes.

Diversity bids us to appreciate the grand human differentiation by personality type, learning style, vocational aptitude, emotional make-up, cognitive ability, genotype/DNA, and so on. Genetically and neurologically, we are finding out how different and uniquely individual we are, different in so many ways beyond anguishing over race or gender, skin tone or sexual orientation. Each of us is a unique combination of strengths and weaknesses, some a function of DNA, some a function of nurture and environment. Who would be so unwise to announce limits to the understanding we will have of ourselves by further exploring and pinpointing our genetic codes?

Those who emphasize our diversity as a function of DNA will have increasing data to analyze, but diversity is also due to the wisdom of those who raised us in childhood (some parents resemble helicopters; some can scarcely be found by a team of sleuths), by the excellence of our school teachers, our extra-curricular experiences, coaches, and mentors, our social groups, and by the myriad of different cultural exposures. The data that promotes nurture as a crucial determinant is also impressive. But when the concept of equality is too tightly applied to human outcomes, to the working out and life application of our freedoms, equality loses its strength as a unifier – and pacifier. No two lives turn out the same.

When 330 million people seek to eat two or three times per day (oftentimes, the fruit of a sufficiently-paying job) and to have a safe bed in which to sleep after an evening of leisure, we can never expect that all will eat the same meal, have the same paying job with the same level of employee satisfaction, walk the same safe streets, or enjoy the same leisure activities. Everyone does not hit a baseball the same distance nor solve the same level of mathematical problems. We are all subject to disease and we are all educable, but equally? That level of equality is unrealistic, unfundable, and unenforceable. Even when we want the same things, some of us are more able to assemble the good life than others of us. Life is competitive. Making it non-competitive would be the grand devaluing of individual liberty. But, happy people can be found in vastly different circumstances.

I wince a little when I hear the well-intentioned and good-hearted declare that “we are all the same,” inferring that if we’re not enjoying the same life circumstances, bias or prejudice is the obstacle. My schooling revealed to me early that all do not have the same capabilities. I have recalled many times the 7th grade aptitude test in which I learned that I was a “failure” at spatial reasoning and mechanical ability (the cause for my life-long awe of those who tear apart and reassemble things). A friend, Scott, built machines from scratch for a local aircraft company, machines that even his boss didn’t understand – though Scott never graduated from high school. He and I were quite different.

Isn’t it more beneficial for us to know our uniqueness more than our sameness? To the degree to which we can help every person understand themselves – their mental acuities, their emotional strengths and weaknesses, their tendencies of personality, their vocational interests and aptitudes — schooling will be money, even big money, well spent. Testing and measurements will only increase in sophistication and accuracy as the culture advances, making us better prepared to live with less frustration, to live more happily and prosperously. Discrimination is “seeing the difference between things,” says Webster. I’d like to help change its connotation, to change it into a positive, a means to know one’s self as unique and peculiarly capable.

Problems without solutions aren’t really problems. It’s not a problem that we’re all so different. The ideal of e pluribus unum still has meaning as we focus science and education on our unequal and diverse potentialities, then build up those individual strengths – and inspire our government to protect everyone’s life and liberty equally. The outcomes will not be the same, but happiness is a highly personal and unique commodity.