Wishes for 2016

Wishes for the New Year—————————–

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

 

The beginning of a new year is traditionally a time for reflecting on the failures of the past year and resolving to do better in the next. We aren’t often successful at this. That’s human nature; we’re not perfect, after all. Perhaps we expect too much of ourselves and others. At this time, I usually come up with a list of suggested New Year’s resolutions for the political classes, but since they usually ignore them, I’ll just share some of my own personal wishes for the new year.

Donald Trump has shaken the Republic Party to its very foundations with his blunt, brash, anti-establishment campaign. I’m not a fan of Mr. Trump and dislike his style of personal attacks, characterizing people as winners or losers. But by defying the political correctness that stifles honest dialogue in America today and speaking his mind frankly he has served some useful purpose. I hope he soon serves another by withdrawing from the race, having made his point, and urging his many supporters to back a candidate who is more qualified to fill the world’s most powerful office.

And speaking of political correctness, here’s hoping that university presidents develop enough spine during the year to take back control of their campuses from student activists who can’t handle opposing viewpoints or, in fact, anything that upsets their sensitive natures. Perhaps the students themselves will come to understand that they are privileged to be able to attend college, that a university education is not complete without being exposed to different viewpoints and shouting down those they disagree with is indicative of a closed, immature mind.

Black lives matter, just as all lives do. No more, no less. Police lives matter, too, and they are being endangered by those who insist that police be held to an unrealistic standard of caution in confronting dangerous situations. This is the so-called Ferguson effect which is causing police to sometimes hesitate before using force to defend themselves and others. This puts them and others at greater risk. We rely on police to protect us and our property. They cannot do that job properly if their actions are constantly subject to scrutiny on the part of those who regard the police as their enemy or by a media that is clueless regarding how to combat crime.

Demonstrators in support of the Black Lives Matter movement recently tried to shut down America’s largest shopping mall at the height of Christmas shopping, causing businesses to close. They also blocked highways and airport access, inconveniencing thousands and delaying flights. During the year, riots and looting in several cities resulted in injuries to innocent people and millions in property damage. Here’s a message so simple that even mobs can understand. You do not attract sympathy to your cause by such actions. Quite the contrary; you foment resentment and even opposition. Causes are not enhanced by criminal acts and mob violence. Unfortunately, demonstrators are usually too dumb to understand this.

This new year is an election year, probably the most critical one in my lengthy lifetime. If the Republican campaign for the nomination is any measure, it will be a particularly contentious campaign between whoever survives the current GOP food fight and the Democratic lady in waiting. That is, if she’s not first indicted for using a personal server to conduct government business as Secretary of State. If she wins, it will be at least four more years of the entitlement state with high taxes, big spending and skyrocketing debt which will eventually bankrupt America and put the future of our children and grandchildren at extreme risk. We are already over $19 trillion in debt and the service on that debt consumes an ever-growing percentage of revenue.

Mrs. Clinton is extremely vulnerable and can be defeated if GOP candidates don’t first defeat themselves be destroying each other in the primary campaigns. They need to coalesce soon behind a candidate with the qualifications and political experience necessary to be president. That would not be the current frontrunner, the retired neurosurgeon or the former Hewlett-Packard CEO.

Finally, here’s hoping that Americans get involved in this election but only after learning all they can about the candidates including what their experience is and what they have actually accomplished. The best source for this is not the political ads, which are designed, not to educate you in this regard, but rather to win your vote by saying whatever it takes.

Happy New Year and may the force be with you.

December 26, 2015

Christmas, 2015

Christmas, 2015————————————

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

I grew up in Connecticut many years ago and Christmas there and then was a very special time. I actually lived before Rudolph and Frosty the Snowman (I mean Snowperson) were invented and even before the Grinch stole Christmas. To tell you the truth, I liked it better without them. We had Santa Claus, of course, but Christmas was essentially a religious holy day, not just a day for opening presents after a lengthy shopping binge. It still is a Christian celebration but you’d hardly know it today. So deeply has political correctness permeated all levels of our secular society that the day on which we commemorate the birth of Christ and the founder of the world’s largest religion, has been stripped of much of its rich, religious tradition. We are the poorer for it.

Christmas celebrations must now be called holiday celebrations or winter festivals and the traditional greeting “Merry Christmas” is spoken with great caution, lest some fragile soul take offense. The commercialization of Christmas may be a bonanza for businesses, many of which depend on Christmas sales to break even and become profitable, but to many, Christmas is all about shopping and that doesn’t leave enough time for much else. The shopping season begins earlier each year. This year, the Halloween decorations hadn’t even been put away before the sales started. Whatever happened to Thanksgiving? There was hardly time for turkey sandwiches.

Christmas Day is a national holiday. It didn’t get to be one because it happened to be Santa’s big day, but rather because it is celebrated by Christians as the birthday of Jesus Christ. Christians, after all, founded this nation and constituted all but a small fraction of the population. Even today they account for nearly three quarters of Americans, so they should be able to celebrate it openly and publically as in the past. If people are offended by this, then I think they are too easily offended. I have no problem with others celebrating their religious holidays publically, either, unless, of course, they advocate beheading people of other religions.

It pains me to see rich traditions fall victim to political correctness. To be sure, our Constitution prohibits state sponsorship of religion but it also protects the free practice of religion. I’ve come to accept, albeit sadly and reluctantly, the banning of religious displays on public property but please don’t trivialize one of the two most important Christian holy days by calling it something else. You just can’t take the Christ out of Christmas.

Christmas should be a time of peace and joy on earth but there is little joy and peace in the Middle East where religious factions wage war against each other and insist that God is on their side. I understand on very good authority that God does not look with favor on those who behead people for their religious beliefs or for any other reason. God commands us to love one another, even our enemies. I’m working on that.

Many people of various religions are victims of the fighting. While Europe and America are preoccupied with Syrian and Iraqi refugees, little notice is being given to the Christians who are being persecuted in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. Christians have been purged from their historic Christian communities and they have nowhere to go. There have been cases reported of Christian children being beheaded and crucified and Christian women raped but the world takes little notice.

`The Obama Administration dismissed a recommendation to accept Christian refugees first (since Muslim nations will not accept them at all). Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, writing in the Wall Street Journal, recommended that Christian refugees be afforded priority because they are the most at risk in the refugee camps in Arab lands.

With so much suffering and violence in the world, we who are fortunate enough to live in this great land, should give thanks and the Christmas season is a great time for doing this, especially since Thanksgiving, the traditional day of giving thanks, was preempted by early Christmas shopping. If you are now totally stressed out by trying to make sure that everyone gets everything on their Christmas list, including a lot of stuff they probably don’t need, remember the real meaning of Christmas and the reason for the season. Trigger warning: I’m about to wish you a Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas.

December 23, 2015

America Cannot Be the World’s Refuge

America Cannot Be the World’s Refuge————————-

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

                President Barack Obama has committed to welcoming at least 10,000 Syrian refugees because, as he put it, that’s who we are. It’s true that America has, throughout its history, opened its doors, not only to oppressed victims of war and persecution, but also to immigrants simply seeking a better life.

For two centuries, this policy served our country well. We were a young and growing nation in need of manpower to build the railroads, highways, bridges and other infrastructure. That was then. This is now and it is a very different world, requiring a different policy. That policy needs to be based upon America’s best interests, not necessarily the best interests of the rest of the world or the countless numbers of people who would prefer to live here.

Security is now of paramount interest to most Americans and their interests should be respected. We are, and will hopefully remain, a generous and compassionate people and we do care about the plight of those who are victims of war and persecution. But there are many ways we can help them without opening wide our doors, incurring added security risks and settling them in a very different culture half a world away from their homelands. There are many nearby Muslim nations, many of them wealthy, that could do more to welcome the victims of the fighting in Syria. (Of, course, it would probably be asking too much for them to welcome the Christians who also are victims of war and persecution in the area.) The U.S. and other Western nations could help financially and logistically.

Naturally, these countries would not be the refugees’ destination of choice. They would far prefer the United States or Western Europe where the living is easier and the benefits plentiful. But the United States and Europe cannot possibly continue to offer sanctuary to everyone who wants to live there without incurring security risks and traumatic changes to their own cultures, especially in Europe where the former colonial powers that ruled Northern Africa and the Middle East already have a large, resentful Muslim underclass from their former colonies experiencing difficulty adjusting to Western culture.

Mr. Obama and other liberal politicians take a worldview on this and other issues like climate change where they subordinate American interests to international goals. But just as America can no longer be the world’s policeman, neither can it be the world’s refuge. The security concerns are real. Most of the Syrian refugees are not likely to be sympathetic to ISIL or other radical Islamic terrorist organizations but according to one survey about one-tenth of them say that they are.  This may be a small percentage as surveys go but it is a huge number if some of them become radicalized and act on their sympathies. Some can become radicalized by social media or by Imams in Western mosques denouncing Western culture with its permissiveness and loose moral values. Their youth who experience high unemployment and difficulty adjusting can be particularly vulnerable to radicalization as we have already seen.

It is not xenophobic or racist to express concern about the risks involved in admitting large numbers of Syrian refugees and it is disingenuous of the open borders crowd to demagogue this issue. Many governors expressed an unwillingness to accept Syrian refugees after the Paris attacks and opposition has grown in the aftermath of the San Bernardino massacre.

We have a proud history of welcoming immigrants largely because it was in our nation’s best interest to do so. But times have changed and so have America’s best interests and it is the height of political correctness to pretend otherwise. Our voters did not elect a president to subordinate the best interests of America to those of others but rather to put America’s needs first and the greatest of these is security.

December 10, 2015

When Ends Justify Means

When Ends Justify Means———————–

                A commentary

                By J. F. Kelly, Jr.

In a recent column on the war against terrorism, I wrote that in a real war, it matters less how you play the game as whether or not you win. It does matter, of course, but when survival is at stake, it doesn’t trump victory. Most nations, as rational actors, will deal with an existential threat to its security by employing whatever means it takes to defeat that threat. If losing is not an option, I asked, doesn’t the end, therefore, justify the means? In response, a faithful reader and esteemed critic wrote that the answer to that is a resounding “No”, else we become as Satanic as our enemies and no one wants to go down that road.

Actually, we have, as a nation, gone down that road often in the past, and with the enthusiastic support of most Americans and our allies. A case in point would be President Harry S, Truman’s decision to employ atomic weapons to obliterate two Japanese cities, incinerating hundreds of thousands of non-combatants, including women and children and leaving countless others maimed and dying from the effects of radiation.

Touring the still-devastated areas of ground zero in Nagasaki a dozen years later, I vividly recall the horror I felt at the sight of some of the disfigured, sick survivors. I wondered then if the end justified the means. My brother, who fought in the Solomon Islands and other WW II Pacific campaigns, helped convince me that perhaps he and hundreds of thousands of his fellow soldiers owed their lives to that decision which ended the war and averted the need for a bloody invasion of Japan’s home islands. Harry Truman is revered today as a decisive leader for determining in this case that the ends justified the means.

In the fight against Nazi Germany, it became apparent that to prevail we had to destroy Germany’s industrial capacity, concentrated in heavily-populated urban areas. Attempting to do this surgically, minimizing civilian casualties, probably would have resulted in much heavier losses to allied bomber forces, already suffering heavy losses. We carpet-bombed German cities, incinerating thousands of non-combatants including women and children. Did these tactics shorten the war and save allied lives? Undoubtedly, yes. Did the end, therefore, justify the means? Ask any WW II vet or their loved ones.

Our military came under heavy criticism for employing harsh interrogation methods during the Iraq wars. Some of those measures, used during previous wars, were described by anti-war liberals and a hostile press as torture. Many critics were adamant that such methods never work in spite of ample evidence that they often did and prevented future attacks and friendly loss of life. Did the end justify the means?

It’s easy to pontificate on these matters in the safety and comfort of our living rooms. But to employ an often-used hypothetical example, suppose a group of thugs kidnapped a loved one of ours and threatened to kill her and that one of the kidnappers was apprehended and knew where our loved one was being held. Would you employ any means necessary to extract that information? You know the answer to that.

Until Islamic State, now a caliphate, and other terrorist  organizations intent on killing Americans is destroyed and can no longer inspire atrocities like the San Bernardino massacre, we will be at risk where we live, work, play, pray and go to school. We cannot live that way and still call ourselves free. That’s not the American way. That’s not who we are. At least, not most of us, I hope.

December 5, 2015