The View from Right Field

How Will Their Great-Grandchildren Look at Today’s Woke Leaders?

One of the favorite activities of the woke seems to be looking back in history and re-judging our leaders of the past based on the standards today.  George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves; their statues have to come down.  Abraham Lincoln didn’t treat Native Americans right, not to mention all of the racist things he said; schools need to be renamed.  Ulysses S. Grant owned a slave¹; his statue must come down.  And so on.  It is never a matter of looking at the total of what these people did or looking at what they did in light of the times in which they lived.  Or even looking to see if they helped push the direction of history a little bit in the right direction.  If they didn’t fully live up to our standards today, their statue comes down; the school is renamed. 

Defund the Police – Or Neighborhood People and Neighborhood Police Talking to Each Other?

Because of the pandemic, we were in River Forest last month for the Fourth of July.  We haven’t been here for the Fourth all that often, and what I noticed this year was the amount of fireworks.  By 9:00 pm on the Fourth, there was a steady drone of fireworks, like a low bass humming.  You heard lots of individual fireworks, but even when there weren’t fireworks going off nearby, there was a constant drone that went on all night and into the early morning. 

There may have been more of it this year because of the shelter-at-home and social distancing orders that were just ending.  Still, it got me to thinking.  If all the fireworks and the constant noise bothered me in River Forest, where there really weren’t that many fireworks (most of what I was hearing was coming from neighboring towns), what must it be like in parts of Chicago where it’s not just fireworks and it’s not just one or two nights a year.

Abraham Lincoln on Our Founders

The new view of the United States, as seen in The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” is that United States history rests on slavery and white supremacy and that “[o]ur democracy’s founding ideas were false when they were written.”  I disagree.  I do not think our Founders were liars and hypocrites when they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  I think they were in a position where they had to compromise with a terrible evil or give up their hopes for a new country built on a new set of principles.  What they did, therefore, was to compromise, but to do it in a way that kept those ideals alive for the future.

It is easy, looking back at people in history, to judge them on today’s principles.  What at the time were principled positions now look, to some, like racism, sexism, prejudice – and worse.  I’m not going to argue that point here, though I wonder how our views will look to people a hundred or more years from now.

Plantation Weddings – And Wedding Cakes

In Thursday’s Chicago Tribune, Lesley Williams wrote that “plantation weddings” are another symbol of the slavocracy we need to get rid of.  I’m not going to go into that question.  What I found interesting in her article, rather, was the comment by a photographer (and historian) that he has, in Ms. Williams’ words, “decided he could not in good conscience continue to photograph plantation weddings.”

I understand the photographer has conscience issues with photographing weddings at former slave plantations.  But I was wondering how this view, which I assume many people would approve of, fits with the view many also have, especially on the left, that bakery owners, and photographers, should not be able to refuse to bake cakes for, or take pictures at, same-sex weddings because such weddings violate their religious beliefs, i.e., their conscience.

Hong Kong: Freedom’s Light Still Shines

Three weeks ago, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, people were wondering what went wrong.  Democracy is on the decline in eastern Europe and elsewhere, while nasty populism is rising all over the world, including the United States.

But then, when things seem dark, a tiny ray of light shines, a delicate little flower blooms.  In 1977, it was Vaclav Havel and Charter ’77 in Communist East Europe.  In the 1970s, it was Spain, Portugal and Greece leaving dictatorships behind and becoming free.  Next were Taiwan and South Korea.  In 1994, it was Nelson Mandela in the South Africa of apartheid.

Cuba’s Ladies in White Win the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty

Everybody has heard of the Nobel Peace Prize.  Over the years, it has honored people for doing great things.  Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War, George Marshall in 1953, Norman Borlaug in 1970 for the green revolution, and Lech Walesa in 1983. 

There have been deserving winners recently, too, such as Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year Pakistani girl, who won in 2014 after being shot in the head by the Taliban for going to school and writing about it, and Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese human rights activist, who won in 2010 but was not allowed to go to Oslo to collect the prize (surprise).  He also became just the second winner to die in custody.

Others, however, have been questionable, such as Kofi Annan and the United Nations in 2001.  (The people of Rwanda were not consulted.  See, inter alia, here and here.)  Three recent winners seem to have won mostly because they weren’t George W. Bush: Jimmy Carter in 2002,¹ Al Gore in 2007 (he should have won the presidential election in 2000), and Barack Obama in 2009 (George W. Bush was finally gone).  Also, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons won in 2013.  We have seen how successful they have been.