In the next 60 days petitions will begin circulating to recall our
three County Commissioners. I find the more pressing issue of a recall is the
proposed candidate replacements. Without candidate competition and a campaign
the voter doesn’t have time to fully vet the proposed replacements. So my
question would be, could we be worse off with replacements? Reasoning that they
wanted to be like other nations, the Israelites asked for a king to rule over
them rather than the Prophets. God let them have their kings – the good, bad
and the ugly.
2 comments:
Gail;
-----We all remember Rahm Emanuel’s sparkling advice about never letting a good crisis go to waste. It sat me up straight! I had recently read Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism. Throughout it, my mind hung around one statement he made early, “Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short circuits debate and democratic deliberation.” (pg 43) Neither Goldberg nor I are talking about Nazis. Although they were fascistic, fascism was not them. Fascism is much broader. It is more evil. It’s more dangerous because it comes in little packets like not paying enough respect to “candidate competition and a campaign”.
-----As it does for all competition, disagreement, opposition, and ambition to supplant underlies candidate competition. They desire their ideas to supplant other ideas so their effects will supplant other effects because they believe in them. It’s most natural, since individuals do not think alike. The differences in their thinking are their benefit. Wouldn’t it be awful if only one human mind could think up a car, computer, power grid, or electrical generation plant? Thousands of minds developed each of those respectively, and most of the other things we use, too, all the traditions we observe, and all the knowledge we know. Not much of anything we interact with came to us as the product of one mind. But product of one mind is the essence of fascism.
-----Nobody is purely wrong; nobody is completely right. Except for the simplest things a person does, none of his actions are monolithically good or evil. So his own ideas will not be completely good or evil. Generally they are sufficiently good for the living of his own life. Generally they are vastly insufficient for running three-hundred-fifty million other lives. That requires the ideas of three-hundred-fifty million other minds, an honest communication system for debate, and time for deliberation. Ideas will compete in the public square and better sift the good from the bad given an honest arena for competition and a sincere desire to do so.
-----Fascism seizes the arena by pre-loading the competitive rules with one man’s ideas (or one association’s ideas) much like loaded dice. When the public rolls those dice, predetermined answers to their questions always emerge. Oh, for sure, they suspect something is strange! Good people can faintly smell the subtlest of deceit. But it takes time for deliberating with others of different experiences to piece together the facts and evidence of the truth.
(continued...)
Love you all,
Steve Corey
(...continued)
-----But a public kept under the constant pressure of continuous crisis willingly swallows the poison pill, if only by a nibble at a time, because a panicked individual has lost his mind to do otherwise. That human frailty is quite handy to the one who’s smart enough to create both a crisis and the poison pill flavored like its solution. If the feeling of panic can be effectively personalized on a wide basis, people’s intellectual capabilities will diminish enough that the public will choose an immediate solution for sealing off the threat (throw out the commissioners now) rather than the more time consuming process of deliberating amongst themselves for ideas which might eliminate the threat (replace the faulty thinking with logical thinking come election time.)
-----It is greatly tempting to grab the solution at hand when disaster knocks at the door. But look at the principle’s spiritual application. Israel will soon be put into a position of panic. She will be surrounded by nations locked and loaded to annihilate her. Flight won’t be possible. Fight won’t be possible. Panic’s natural options will be so obviously unavailable that the only thing left to do is what God requires of all men in crises: think. Someone will remember what had been told them. “I will return again to My place, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face, and in their distress they seek me, saying, ‘Come, let us return to the Lord; for He has torn, that He may heal us; He has stricken, and He will bind us up.’” (Hosea 5:15-6:1) In them is a nature that has enough to do with God that it will search for Him when He is most needed and do only what action can then be done: prayer. You know of His help in times of crisis brought on by simply truthful prayer. Simply truthful prayer has a way about praying together. Together is the way of putting our heads to find our answers. And the societies for whom He most arrives are those who mix their prayers into their deliberations.
-----You don’t have to know the resolution He is going to bring. You only have to call on Him as the arriver. He will arrive partly because He finds in the honesty of many hearts and the patience of their faith a place to arrive. And He will arrive in time, even in crisis time, on time.
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