The Press-Dispatch
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The Press-Dispatch Wednesday, July 3, 2019 B-3 OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg Christians are in a fight that will dictate the future of humanity. The election of 2016 swept away the notion of political and econom- ic fairness that we were taught by our teachers, the media, and our political system. Most Christians have come to realize that the sec- ular narratives we have built our lives upon are false. The cynics among us [in the likeness of H.L Menken and Mark Twain] would point out that the crassness and hypocrisy is part of our civilization, and what we have awaken to is how governments and the power elite have always behaved. Our life exists beyond politics, and we should realize that we in- teract daily with people who lie, steal, gossip, and manipulate oth- ers to do their bidding. Christianity says, "Awake, all of mankind is plagued sinfulness, and there is no antidote, except dying out to self through Jesus Christ! " To realize that sin dictates all of our actions brings about an aware- ness that something is wrong with how we relate to others. Christians must bring the world's attention to the fact that evil resides within each of us, and it needs to be checked. The Christian civ- ilization of the West gives testimony to the moral strength of the teachings of Christ that those of us over 50 grew up within. Those are quickly passing right before our eyes. Our fight is against the expression of evil and licen- tiousness within our world today. We must continue to fight for god- liness and virtue. We must encourage one anoth- er to untangling ourselves from the deceitful lusts, which have in- vaded our society. This is the most important battle that can possibly be fought. In fact, it's the most im- portant battle that has ever been fought. Progressivism is a hollow ideol- ogy that relies upon coercion and the power of the state to achieve harmony, which will never happen. Utopians and socialistic societies have been tried; unfortunately, all have failed and people died by the millions, were starved, and lost all hope of any semblance of happiness. The world around us remains danger- ous, as the recent US - Iranian crisis remind- ed us. All are to be ap- plauded for their re- straint. To weigh lives against material loss almost seems a novel approach in this era of military might. But it did happen; maybe there is yet hope. Christianity asserts that strength of their numbers and the use of force as an end to oppres- sion and evil will not work. Not be- cause people aren't interested in doing so, but because even if they were successful, it would only be for a short period of time till evil would resurface. How do we know this? The late Yogi Berra is said to have quipped, "You can learn a lot from history." Mankind's biggest hurdle is the fallacy that faith in itself [humani- ty] to solve its own problems with Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond Fighting the most important fight Continued on page 4 The Philippines My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. The Philippines. My birthplace. A fter spending a few days in Ko- rea, we left for a four hour flight and finally landed at Ninoy Aqui- no International Airport in Ma- nila. This would be my third vis- it, the first one was about 15 years ago, then 8 years later I would do a second visit, and this would be my third. Our family migrated and transplanted to Canada in the sev- enties, Rose and I were the last batch to join the Western world in 1973. A flood of memories entered my consciousness as we headed to the customs section., Mostly my focus of recollection were my schooling in the elementary, high school, undergraduate and post graduate journey of education. I guess most of my waking hours as I was growing up were spent in the schools I attended for my pre- cious education. So I began to won- der what those places would now look like. My son Lawrence who has been researching this ven- ture has been using Google earth and you tube to get an electronic view of the places where I lived, the view of my schools, the neigh- borhood where Rose grew up, my own neighborhood, and many plac- es we were about to visit. He has been doing this for months off and on and when he got it perfected, he shared it with me. I was aston- ished by the technology we now possess, because when I saw the pictures on his I phone and com- pared it with what I actually saw in real time, I could not believe how much they matched, to the most astonishing detail. Our technology has allowed us to acquire practical- ly anything we want to know. For instance, the house where Rose grew up was on that program, it even pointed out the section of her Continued on page 4 Continued on page 4 Minority View by Walter E. Williams Reparations for slavery Continued on page 4 Continued on page 4 Several Democratic presiden- tial hopefuls are calling for Amer- icans to make reparations for slav- ery. On June 19, the House judicia- ry subcommittee on the constitu- tion, civil rights and civil liberties held a hearing. Its stated purpose was "to examine, through open and constructive discourse, the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its continuing impact on the community and the path to restor- ative justice." Slavery was a gross violation of human rights. Justice demands that all participants in the trans- Atlantic slave trade make com- pensatory reparation payments to slaves. However, there is no way that Europeans could have cap- tured millions of A fricans. That means compensation would have to be paid by A fricans and Arabs who captured and sold slaves to Europeans in addition to the peo- ple who bought and used slaves. Since slaves and slave traders and owners are no longer with us, com- pensation is beyond our reach and it's a matter that will have to be set- tled in hell or heaven. Let's pretend for a moment that the rep- arations issue makes a modicum of sense. There's the question of responsibility. More explicitly, should we compensate a black person of today by punishing a white per- son of today, by taking his money, for what a white person of yesteryear did to a black person of yesteryear? If we believe in in- dividual accountability, we should find that doing so is unjust. In oth- er words, are the tens millions of Europeans, Asian and Latin Amer- icans who immigrated to the U.S. in the late 19th and 20th centuries responsible for slavery, and should they be forced to cough up repa- rations? What about descendants of Northern whites who fought and died in the name of freeing slaves? Should they pay repara- tions to black Americans? What about non-slave-owning Southern whites — who were a majority of Southern whites — should their descen- dants be made to pay reparations? Reparations ad- vocates make the unchallenged pro- nouncement that United States be- came rich on the backs of free black la- bor. That's utter nonsense. While some slave owners became rich, slavery doesn't have a good re- cord of producing wealth. Slav- ery existed in the southern states and outlawed in most of the north- ern states. Buying into the repara- tions argument suggests that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. And the Continued on page 4 Leaving a legacy Heritage Viewpoint by Edwin J. Feulner Pursuit of the Cure by Star Parker Ilhan Omar's ideological attacks on pastors Lucid Moments By Bart Stinson Self- government is not guaranteed Congressional hearings are a fixture in Washington and are sup- posedly a tool for investigation by the nation's lawmaking body. Unfortunately, too often when Democrats are in charge, it's not the case. Rather than hearings be- ing a means for seeking facts and information, they become just a platform for politicking by mem- bers of the majority party and a forum for attacking those whose views they don't like. This distortion of process was in full view at recent House Bud- get Committee hearings on Pov- erty in America: Economic Reali- ties of Struggling Families. Of eight witnesses, six were from the same left-wing organi- zation — the Poor People's Cam- paign. The other two were members of the national clergy network of my organization CURE, Center for Urban Renewal and Education: Pastor Latasha Fields, founder of Christian Home Educators' Sup- port System, and Pastor David Ma- han, founder of Frontline Youth Communications. Democrat Congresswoman Il- han Omar, a member of the com- mittee and one of three Muslims in Congress, showed up at the hear- ing not looking for facts but with her already established, prefab- ricated view of the world. Rather The Fourth of July holiday cele- brates the beginning of the Amer- ican Revolution, not its successful conclusion. And yet we probably would never have heard of the Dec- laration of Independence or Thom- as Jefferson, if George Washington and his French allies had not de- feated the British five years later. There were fairweather patriots even then, opportunistic Ameri- cans with a wet finger always raised to the breeze. And so the British commander, Lord Corn- wallis, picked up a lot of Ameri- can volunteers in the Carolinas after he had some battlefield suc- cess against the patriots. But the British and their Loy- alists were cornered and outnum- bered at Yorktown, and the French fleet blocked any potential British naval attempt to break the siege. Even in defeat, the haughty Roy- alists tried to dictate terms. At the ceremony of capitulation, the British general resisted any act of submission to Washington and at- tempted instead to surrender his sword to the French commander, Rochambeau. But Rochambeau understood the political importance of the moment, shook his head, and re- fused the sword. He gestured to- ward Washington, whose right it was to accept the British surren- der. Washington, in turn, refused to take the British sword. Lord Corn- wallis had sent a subordinate in his place, which compounded the in- sult. And so Washington called Gen. Benjamin Lincoln forward to receive the sword. It was an amazing turnabout for Lincoln who, the previous year, had been forced to surren- der Charleston and its 5,500 de- fenders to the British command- er Henry Clinton. It reminds me of when Gen. Douglas MacArthur summoned an emaciated Gen. Jon- athan Wainwright to the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri to take Japan's surrender in 1945. It's not unprecedented for de- feated generals to cling to gran- diosity even in abject defeat. As the Civil War siege of Vicksburg dragged on, starving residents slaughtered their milk cows, then their horses and mules, then their dogs. Finally they were reduced to trapping and boiling rats. Confed- erate Gen. John Pemberton wrote his Union counterpart Ulysses Grant that he was prepared to hold out "indefinitely" against Grant's siege. But Grant had learned from captured soldiers and local civil- ians that Vicksburg was starving. It was here that he cemented his nickname "Unconditional Sur- render" Grant, and he squeezed Vicksburg like a python until Pem- berton surrendered the city and its garrison on Fourth of July. Whether you're a general or a monarch, you get accustomed to deference, to having your way. You cease to think of your privi- leges and prestige as the outcome of negotiation. You certainly don't think it's up for a vote. But that's true of all hyper-entitled people. They rarely respect the process enough to concede defeat in a fair fight. The only legitimate out- come, for them, is to win. America has, until recently, been an exception to that pattern. There is a lovely American politi- cal tradition of high-minded con- cession speeches. I still remem- ber Jimmy Carter's wise observa- tion after Ronald Reagan defeated him in 1980 that "in a democracy, the people always win." Even Al Gore, not my favor- ite person, gave an honorable (if overdue) concession speech after the Supreme Court ruled against him in 2000. He joked that "it's time for me to go," which was fun- ny because it's the line he and Bill Clinton used against Republicans eight years earlier. But America has changed. Ma- ny of our neighbors don't respect election results anymore. When Donald Trump won in 2016, Dem- ocrats wanted to surrender their The more things change, the more they stay the same. That old saying came to mind the other day as I read the following paragraph: "The onrushing press of issues, combined with big government's intrusion in so many new areas, means that the Washington partic- ipant seldom has an opportunity to take a step back in calm reflection. Instead, events rush at him — and sometimes over him." That's from a book called "Look- ing Back," a collection of my week- ly columns written between 1977 and 1981. And I wrote that long be- fore the advent of smartphones and the 24-hour news cycle. It's even truer today. But one "Washington partici- pant" will soon have more time for "calm reflection": me. Yes, I'm hanging up my … well, not my spurs, but my quill pen, you could say. For the first time since Jim- my Carter was president and more than 2,000 columns later, I won't be writing every week. I'll still write from time to time, but this is my last regular weekly column. I've often said that in Washing- ton there are no permanent vic- tories or defeats. Reflecting on my time as a colum- nist has shown me yet again how true that is. Getting a win on a particular issue feels good, and we deserve to take pride in our hard work and suc- cess. But we can't af- ford to become com- placent. Your oppo- nents will try again, and if you're not careful, you'll wind up back where you started. "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinc- tion," President Reagan famously said. "We didn't pass it to our chil- dren in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same." We should put a loss in the same perspective. It hurts, no question about it. But we don't really lose unless we give up. It can take ma- ny years to win on major issues. So if we lose today, there's only one thing to do: Try again tomorrow. So where does a regular col- umn fit in the big policy fights of any given era? If you're the colum- nist, it's easy to over- estimate your impor- tance, which tempts your detractors to take a shot at you. Consider the time Newsweek's Mor- ton Kondracke noted how quickly William F. Buckley wrote his three-times-a-week column (reportedly in only 20 minutes). "That is too little time for serious contempla- tion of difficult subjects," Mr. Kon- dracke concluded. Buckley fired back: "There is no necessary correlation between profundity of thought and length of time spent on thought." It's true that over-full schedules and ever-looming deadlines make it impossible to turn every column into a contender for the next Pulit- zer Prize. You have a task, and you get it done — as well as you possi- bly can in the time allotted. But whether you hit a bloop sin-