I’ll never forget the time I learned from my eighth grade teacher that not every student in the nation learned about Texas history the way we did in Houston. I remember thinking “they sure as hell oughta.” Then I was overwhelmed with a sense of great sadness, when I realized that not everyone in the nation was actually a Texan—or indeed could be. It still bothers me. There are just so many things to love about Texas, that I can’t imagine being from anywhere else. To start with, we definitely got the double helping of self-esteem. Man when you got it, you just don’t need it! That’s why most Texans just want to be left alone, especially by government. Beyond that, I defer to Bob Wheeler, who writes so movingly about the subject. What follows are excerpts from a speech he wrote. I’ve paraphrased and edited some:

Great things I love about Texas? Lemme let you in on my short list. It starts with The Window at Big Bend, which in and of itself is proof of God. It goes to Lake Sam Rayburn . . . . Then we can talk about Tyler, and Longview, and Odessa and Cisco, and Abilene and Poteet and every place in between. Every little part of Texas feels special. Every Texan, who ever flew over the Lone Star, thinks of Bandera or Victoria or Manor or wherever they call “home” as the best little part of the best State.

Now recently I went to Europe for the first time. All they did when they saw me was say the same thing, before they’d ever met me. “Hey cowboy, we love Texas.” I guess the hat tipped em off. But let me tell you what, they all came up with a smile on their faces. You know why? They knew for sure that I was gonna be nice to ‘em. They knew it cause they knew I was from Texas. They knew something that hadn’t even hit me. They knew Texans, even though they’d never met one. That’s when it occurred to me. Do you know what is great about Texas? Do you know why when my friend and I were trekking across country to see 15 baseball games we got sick and had to come home after 8? Do you know why every time I cross the border I say, “Lord, please don’t let me die in _______”? Do you know why children in Japan can look at a picture of the great State and know exactly what it is about the same time they can tell a rhombus from a trapezoid? I can tell you that right quick. You. The same spirit that made 186 men cross that line in the sand in San Antonio 176 years ago is still in you today.

What would make a woman say, “I don’t know if I can marry a man who doesn’t love Texas like I do?” Why do we still celebrate a holiday for what used to be a nation that is now a State? Because the spirit that made that nation is the spirit that burned in every person who founded this great place we call Texas, and they passed it on through blood or sweat to every one of us. You see, that spirit that made Texas what it is, is alive in all of us, even if we can’t stand next to a cannon to prove it, and it’s our responsibility to keep that fire burning. Every person who ever put a “Native Texan” or an “I wasn’t born in Texas but I got here as fast as I could” sticker on his car understands. Anyone who ever hung a map of Texas on their wall or flew a Lone Star flag on their porch knows what I mean. Some people were forged of a hotter fire. Well, that’s what it is to be Texan. To be forged of a hotter fire.

To know that part of Colorado was Texas. That part of New Mexico was Texas. That part of Oklahoma was Texas. Yep. Talk all you want. Part of what you got was what we gave you. To look at a picture of Idaho or Istanbul and say, “what the hell is that?” when you know that anyone in Idaho or Istanbul who sees a picture of Texas knows good and well what it is. It isn’t the shape of the State, it’s the state of mind. You’re what makes Texas. When was the last time you went to a person’s house in New York and you saw a big map of New York on their wall? That was never. When did you ever drive through Oklahoma and see their flag waving on four businesses in a row? Can you even tell me what the flag in Louisiana looks like? I damned sure can’t.

When you ask a man from New York what he is, he’ll say a stockbroker, or an accountant, or an ad exec. When you ask a woman from California what she is, she’ll tell you her last name or her major. When you ask a Texan what they are, before they say, “I’m a Methodist,” or “I’m a lawyer,” or “I’m a Smith,” they tell you they’re a Texan. I got nothin’ against all those other places, and Lord knows they’ve probably got some fine folks, but in your gut you know it just like I do, Texas is just a little different.

So tomorrow when you drive down the road and you see a person broken down on the side of the road, stop and help. When you are in a bar in California, buy a Californian a drink and tell him it’s for Texas. Remind the person in the cube next to you that he wouldn’t be here enjoying this if it weren’t for Sam Houston, and if he or she doesn’t know the story, tell them. When William Barrett Travis wrote in 1836 that he would never surrender and he would have Victory or Death, what he was really saying was that he and his men were forged of a hotter fire. They weren’t your average every day men. Well, that is what it means to be a Texan. It meant it then, and that’s why it means it today. It means just what all those people North of the Red River accuse us of thinking it means. It means there’s no mountain that we can’t climb. It means that we can swim the Gulf in the winter. It means that Earl Campbell ran harder and Houston is bigger and Dallas is richer and Alpine is hotter and Stevie Ray was smoother and God vacations in Texas.

It means that come hell or high water, when the chips are down and the Good Lord is watching, we’re Texans by damned, and just like in 1836, that counts for something. So when your chance comes around, go out and prove it. It’s true because we believe it’s true. If you are sitting wondering what the hell I’m talking about, this ain’t for you. But if one of the first things you are going to do when the Good Lord calls your number is to find the men who sat in that tiny mission in San Antonio and shake their hands, then it is. And may you be poor in misfortune, rich in blessings, slow to make enemies and quick to make friends. But, rich or poor, quick or slow, may you know nothing but happiness from this day forward. Amen.

The First President George Washington was born 22 February, albeit we’ll observe his Birthday on Monday the 20th this year. The day will serve to round out a nice long weekend for many folks, welcome time off during the hardest month of winter. Federal employees too will enjoy the day: time to enjoy with family and friends; time to rest or catch up on projects around the house. The average citizen will enjoy the day the same way, and only hope most Government employees pause long enough to remember the man whom the nation honors with its respite.

Historians now openly talk about the way America has left her Constitution behind. Certainly there is a cumulative case to be drawn, probably starting with the War Between the States. Most accounts of government growth and the accretion of power in Washington, D.C., prominently involve the Progressive Era, and of course the New Deal. Damage was done and also accumulated, but it was not until sometime after World War II when lawmakers actually stopped consulting the Founding Document, when public debates waned concerning the Constitution’s relevant meaning to contemporary public policy. Since the 1950s the Government simply uses political mandate to do whatever the Government wants to do.

Regulations and taxes pile up on people in the name of the People, imposed however by Government through a kind of modern virtual representation, which the Colonists utterly rejected of Great Britain. Just as the Constitution no longer acts as a parameter on what the Government does, neither can it be said of George Washington that he still informs young people and adults of what constitutes the ideal masculine character or responsible republican citizenship. Washington was a preeminent role model for these things until the middle of the Twentieth Century, when the study of biography receded in education and pop celebrity displaced historic heroes.

Washington might have been King but he chose elective office instead, and then he chose to leave that office after just two terms. He had more than the good judgment to quit while he was ahead! He indeed knew what was most important in his own life: his home Mount Vernon; family and personal obligations; fellowship with friends; reflection, and the study of Scripture. He also knew the nature of power and the temptations attendant to power. He knew the crucial impact that leadership can have, but he valued civil liberties and freedom in society much more. Freedom had been the object of the Revolution, not dynasty or empire.

Washington was esteemed a very wise man, but he eschewed the power to impose his wisdom on everyone else. Washington esteemed the prerogative inherent to liberty, as something more important than either physical wellbeing or scientific certainty in a particular. People run their own lives, some successfully and some not—but it is after all the peoples’ lives and theirs to run. Various environments might be comparatively cruel or limited, chimerical or privileged. An asteroid might hit the earth someday, and the sky is always falling or liable to fall to the Chicken Littles amongst us. Still, families are natural institutions that govern even before the Government does. Government didn’t give a person life or sanction the marriage between the man and woman who had the baby. Indeed, the Church never asked nor asks permission to marry two people. The legal conventions are not always the same as religious ones, albeit for most of our history they have overlapped almost completely, mainly because of the approach to Government the Founders, George Washington included, took.

It bears repeating: It is the peoples’ lives—and so it should be their private choices that govern in nearly all particulars that pertain. This is true whether the individuals choose wisely or not, whether they are wrong or right; and whether they are brilliant or certifiably stupid, handicapped or studs. Individuals possess a prerogative to live according to their lights, regardless and irrespective of circumstances so long as they do not harm anyone else! Individuals possess natural rights according to natural law, and Government must have a compelling interest to intervene and mess with things. If Government does intervene, it does so by exception; further, it should be at the level of the State where a person lives and for some good reason, i.e., to protect others or to promote the general welfare, not necessarily the convenience of society. States are dual sovereign political entities alongside the Federal Government in the construct of Washington’s Constitution and ours.

Imagine: Washington’s Constitution, the Founding Document in light of his and the Founders’ worldview—a Restoration of the Republic. This is how I shall be remembering Washington, and how Government better start remembering if I read the Tea Party through to its logical potential conclusion. Remembering Washington means a dedication to the future and to a very similar project to that which he faced in his day. As freemen and freewomen we must choose to remember him and the Revolution, as well as the Constitution, which was its crowning achievement. Heroes did and do exist. Sometimes they are celebrities, but most of the time they are people proud to call themselves American, men and women of character and uncompromising determination to be free—free to dream and succeed, free to dream and fail on their own terms and God’s. Government is not God. The Constitution as amended, is not subject to the whim of the President or the Congress, not today anymore than it was in Washington’s day. It is not subject either to the Supreme Court, in terms of decisions it has made based upon unconstitutional precedents entered in, which break the moral compact and implicit structure of federalism upon which our Union is entirely based. Government has made carrion of the so-called “living” Constitution and given us a Dead Constitution Walking. Political Revolution is in the air, or should we say brewing?

At the start of spring from early Roman times people celebrated Lupercalia, honoring the pastoral god Lupercus and memorializing the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, who were nursed by a mother wolf (lupus) at the cave of Lupercal. The celebration involved a rite of fertility, whereby adolescent couples were paired for the year by lottery. The romantic matches would often end in marriage.

During the third century A.D., Roman Emperor “Claudius the Cruel” ruled as a tyrant, waging incessant wars. The army needed men but there was a shortage, and married men did not want to leave their families, nor younger men their sweethearts. The Emperor believed such sentimentality was a weakness ruinous to empire, so he forbade marriage and annulled all existing engagements. He threatened any priest who performed the marriage ceremony with death.

But in the northern Italian town of Terni and then in Rome itself, the bishop St. Valentine continued to marry young couples in love at the temples in front of the altar and there he prayed for blessings upon their unions. The secret leaked out, however, and Valentine was seized and thrown into a dungeon. Some Romans appealed to the Emperor for clemency, and so Claudius met with Valentine to offer him a way out. If only Valentine would stop performing marriages and also renounce his Christian faith for pagan gods, the Emperor would show him mercy and spare his life.

St. Valentine professed his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and tried to convert the Emperor to Christianity instead! The infuriated Emperor left St. Valentine to languish in prison. The story goes that during the interval in prison, a young blind girl and daughter of the jailer would visit him. She sat and listened and talked to him through the bars, keeping him company. They ministered to each other, though she didn’t know it at first. She encouraged him when he felt down and alone and assured him he had been right to profess his faith, and also to marry the many grateful young couples who loved him still. Meanwhile, Valentine would pray for her without ceasing until one day miraculously, she recovered her sight and was healed. On the day he was put to death in February, c. 270 he left a note for his friend the jailer’s daughter. It was a tender note of Christian affection signed, “From Your Valentine.”

Pope Gelasius I eventually recast the pagan festival of Lupercalia as a Christian feast day (c. 496) and proclaimed February 14th to be St. Valentine’s Day. Notwithstanding the ancient pagan fertility rite associated with Lupercalia, the new holyday was focused on the martyrdom of St. Valentine for refusing to renounce Christ in order to save his own life. St. Valentine’s Day would not to be associated with romantic love again until the 14th century. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a poem in 1382 to commemorate the first anniversary of the engagement of England’s King Richard II and Anne of Bohemia. In that poem are lines, which draw explicit connection between St. Valentine’s Day and birds coming to mate. The mating season of birds in England starts later in May, but the rhyme scheme worked so well, it fired popular imagination and the connection stuck.

After his death Valentine became a Patron Saint, considered by many especially Romans, to be the spiritual overseer for notes and cards of affection. The earliest surviving Valentine’s card actually dates to 1415 from Charles, French Duke of Orleans captured at the Battle of Agincourt and imprisoned in the Tower of London. The card contains a love poem to his wife and is now on display at the British Museum. Gradually February 14th became the date for exchanging love messages and other tokens of affection; St. Valentine became the patron saint of all lovers. Americans began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s Esther Howland began to sell the first mass-produced cards in America and became known as the Mother of the Valentine in the U.S. Today a billion Valentine’s Day cards are sent in America, second in number only to Christmas.

In 1836 relics belonging to St. Valentine were exhumed from the catacombs of Saint Hippolytus near Rome, placed in a gilded casket then transported to Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, Ireland, to which they were donated by Pope Gregory XVI. Each Valentine’s Day the casket is carried in solemn procession to the high altar for a special Mass dedicated to young people and to all those in love. Other relics of St. Valentine are found at various churches in Italy, France, Austria, England and Scotland. St. Valentine’s story reminds us the way in which love and sacrifice are inextricably linked, and that giving is what you do when you’re in love.

The United States is one of the freest countries on the globe, but unless my sensibilities are entirely out of whack, I assert that this country—the country of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Randolph, Calhoun, et al—is not nearly free enough. It isn’t even as free as we think. Can a man or woman truly live here according to conscience? At one time, we could have answered “almost certainly.” Today one’s conscience must be conformed in so many ways to so many things. We are not free, except in the most abstract, academic—and ultimately irrelevant—way. Our spirits are dying: death by a thousand pinpricks. Nay worse, a hundred thousand paper cuts from a faceless bureaucracy! Since Eden, there have been so many constraints on man anyway, without the added coercion of the muscular enforcers of state, whether they enforce the will of the few on the many—or the will of the many on the few! I just wish our government were less concerned for my welfare and more concerned for my freedom. I wish it were less concerned for this collective nonentity called “the people” and more concerned for every single individual, made in the image and likeness of God. I wish the government were less concentrated, had less power and authority, and were more respectful of the natural regions and the natural differences that exist amongst us. I don’t want to cooperate with everybody else, marching off into a global abyss. I JUST WISH THE GOVERNMENT WOULD LEAVE US ALONE.

Of course, you know what they say about wishing in one hand and picking up horse hockey with the other: one hand is likely to get fuller than the other. I reckon the wish must obtain a will and the necessary resources to in fact change things. God help us. Today the federal government literally employs extortion on the States with the money it taxes from us. To make you wear your seatbelt and do a hundred other things, the feds withhold funds from sovereign States, unless and until those States pass particular laws. They did the same thing after the War Between the States: permanent military occupation unless the States would approve certain constitutional amendments. The contexts are indeed different, and there were hard historical and practical realities to settle during the Reconstruction. But is another Robert E. Lee or Jeff Davis left anywhere in this unified, chained and tethered house of ours—locked down from the inside out? Is there a governor with backbone anywhere in the country to point out and even put an end to . . . (shall I name it? Are you willing to recognize it?). Tyranny.

Some of you will say, gosh he’s gone over the top (again). So you think, “I’m free, right?” Not if you think you ought to be in charge of the money you set aside for retirement, or the age you choose to retire. Not if you think you ought to be able to choose when your child goes to school, for how many weeks he or she should study, as well as what subjects. Walter E. Williams reviewed Sheldon Richman’s excellent new book, Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State (available at www.laissezfairebooks.org and www.amazon.com). In the review, he asks “What if you think your child is capable of having a job at age 12, as I was? No dice. The government determines the age at which one can work, and for how long and at what pay.” Andrew Jackson joined the American Revolution at the age of 14, and he was a natural soldier. I’m glad nobody told him No dice, Andy. (He probably would have killed somebody on our side). Of course, I’m not advocating enlistment of child soldiers—just pointing out the arbitrariness of well-meaning rules, forced and enforced down every throat in the country—where no one possesses the slightest degree of discretion and no State retains a sovereign prerogative.

Alexis de Tocqueville predicted Americans would face this kind of despotism, to which democracies are prone—more widespread and milder than other forms, degrading men rather than tormenting them. In his masterpiece Democracy in America, he writes that our leaders are likely to become as schoolmasters. Our government will try to keep us “in perpetual childhood” and will do this by providing security and necessities, assuming responsibility for our concerns, managing our work. He foresaw government, which “gladly works for [‘the people’s’] happiness but wants to be the sole agent and judge of it.” Williams sums up his review with a very insightful comment, that “Democracy gives an aura of legitimacy to acts that would otherwise be deemed tyranny.” Moreover, my fellow tethered citizens, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe observed, there is no one quite as hopelessly enslaved, as the person who thinks he is free but is not!

Regulations exist to ensure that what people do is done a certain way. We don’t want people to erect fences, unless they are so high and made of such and such. We don’t want folks to be able to add on to their houses, unless the additions blend nicely and meet certain safety standards—for people and for wildlife. We sure don’t want someone to invent a craze or gadget that might catch on, unless we determine in advance how the paperwork should be filed, how much it ought to be taxed, who will inspect the item or activity. We don’t even want a few folks to work at all, unless we establish licensing requirements first or mandate membership in some organization.

Regulation in general costs individuals and businesses a lot of money to comply. Costs are passed on to consumers, or else taken in the shorts. Of more concern, according to ABC News reporter John Stossel, is the sheer distraction of creative power. The proverbial bar is raised by regulations, i.e., the threshold for achievement goes harder if not exactly higher. Creative impulses can in fact be thwarted, because regulations distract focus, diffuse effort, discourage risk-taking, frustrate intent, and spend a lot of (life)-time. Thus, things that could be simply aren’t, because the regulatory environment keeps them from being realized—a new engine or energy source perhaps, new medicine, maybe just a better mousetrap. The reason is that an inducement one place is a disincentive someplace else. Regulatory roadblocks and obstacles, including scrutiny, result in a comparative incentive to do something else or to go somewhere else. The implied message is certainly not one for the budding hero. Rather, regulations choke the best and instruct men and women of initiative to take the easier road, the one most traveled. Regulations don’t only depress the economy, they also depress the spirit.

The difference between something regulated and unregulated is in the measure of freedom. Stossel shrewdly observes that,

Visitors to Moscow before the fall of communism noticed a dead-eyed
look in the people. What was that about? I don’t think it was about
fear of the KGB. Most Muscovites didn’t have intervention by the secret
police in their daily lives. I think it was the look that people get when
they live in an all-bureaucratic state. If you go to Washington, . . . you’ll
see the same thing [in government agencies].

In order to get a new drug approved today, it costs $500 million and takes ten years. Thousands die waiting on the approved release of drugs that could be available now. Millions die for want of medicines that won’t be invented soon enough. The simple alternative in the area of medicine, as elsewhere, would be for the government to serve as an information agency and not as a nanny placement service. Did any of you hire the fed to be your babysitter? Sometimes I wonder who/what the government thinks it is! (It ain’t us for sure). Even if we allowed for some (albeit inefficient) government research, information alone would do more to help free people protect themselves than twenty-one warning labels on a stepladder. Indeed, that’s where we as a people may have gone wrong: we value other things now more than freedom it seems. “Give me absolute safety or give me death!”

The Clinton years accelerated a trend from the sixties, when he added 500,000 new pages to the Federal Register—a spider web of new little rules for everyone to obey. Notwithstanding the information age growth during the nineties, the US grew into an economic powerhouse in years when the government didn’t account for as much of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). For most of American history, government’s share of GDP was five percent or less, but today it’s forty percent. Some regulations are necessary, and I don’t mean to categorically denounce them all—indeed, some environmental regulations even lack alternative market incentives. But let’s get off this regulation kick that stifles innovation. Today Los Angeles has the same economic output as all of Russia. Dallas, Texas outranks the whole country of Thailand, in terms of economic output. That should illustrate plain-as-day this important inverse relationship: between the healthier, wealthier societies of the world and those that are corrupt, bureaucratic, and politically controlled. Freedom should never take a back seat to “the good of the people” divined by government. Tell our babysitter she can go home now; we’ve suddenly grown up.

The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. was born January 15, 1929. He was assassinated in 1968. “MLK Day” as it were, is celebrated the third Monday in January close to the time of his birthday. One may ask how such a short life should warrant a federal holiday. Martin Luther King, Jr. never was elected to public office. His life was controversial while he lived it. Moreover, his memory is skewed given that FBI files were sealed under court order until 2027. These records were not accessible to lawmakers, who voted for his holiday in 1983. The measure nevertheless passed with bipartisan support and by large margin before Ronald Reagan signed it into law.

Martin Luther King, Jr. still evokes an ecstatic memory from his admirers, and the man has become something of an icon too. That is to say, the representation of high ideals and idealism is separate and distinct from his actual biography. Of course the same can be said of many others, including Lincoln and Jefferson. Great men are often given a public pass on their blemishes and shortcomings. Historians are or ought to be a bit more circumspect.

The reason for the Day, and celebrating the life of MLK involves the issue of race. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work was important in achieving a Second Reconstruction so-called, i.e., the end of segregation and the application of rights past state laws based upon the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

Martin Luther King, Jr. attended segregated public schools in Georgia. After that he went to Morehouse College in Atlanta and then to Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. At Crozer he was elected president of a predominantly white senior class. He then proceeded to Boston University where he earned his Ph. D. in 1955 and met his wife Coretta Scott. They would have two sons and two daughters together.

After educational and professional preparations, King launched himself into the pastorate first in Montgomery, Alabama and then in his native Atlanta, Georgia. At the same time he dedicated himself to political activism throughout the South, in order to end “Jim Crow” discriminatory statutes. As a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) he led the Montgomery bus boycott lasting 382 days. This led to a Supreme Court decision ending bus segregation. During the days of the boycott, King was arrested and subjected to personal abuse, and his home was bombed.

In 1957 he was elected to head the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, from which he provided new leadership for the burgeoning civil rights movement. King employed the teachings and techniques of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi. His enduring success is largely attributable, however, to skilful adaptation of widely accepted American values, including the rule of law—albeit, through aggressive non-violence; as well as strong appeal to common spiritual beliefs, especially in the South, about God and the moral worth and dignity of man, and to Christian values of forbearance and brotherly love. His historicism was Lincolnesque and so helpful, in that he emphasized the text of the Declaration of Independence, characterizing that document as a promissory note as yet unfulfilled. Thus he appealed to American patriotism, while strongly criticizing social norms regarding race.

In the eleven year period from 1957 to 1968 Martin Luther King, Jr. traveled more than six million miles, gave over twenty-five hundred speeches, wrote five books and numerous articles, consistently preaching against racial hatred and injustice. His activity is largely credited with changing the conscience of America on the subject of race. In 1963 he directed a peaceful march on Washington, D.C. of 250,000 people and delivered perhaps his finest address, “I Have a Dream” from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In 1965 he led 30,000 people on a march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, where he demanded that black people be allowed to vote without unfair restrictions. The speech televised to a national audience, as well as the Selma march and various protests he orchestrated, stirred general unrest in the South and American cities, leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In 1964 he became the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize, turning over that considerable cash prize to the furtherance of civil rights. The iconic ideal he articulated at the Lincoln Memorial is still one of the highest domestic hopes in the land. It has come to define what we mean by a just equality. Speaking of his four little children, he said “I have a dream that … one day” they “will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Seems like we spend a good portion of our lives in school. The first 18 years are largely consumed by it. Besides public or private school five days a week, there is also the possibility (too often neglected) of Sunday school. Then there’s college for an ever-increasing percentage of young folks—and that’ll take you to the age of 22. Only to discover, that the highest paying jobs are reserved for Masters and Ph.D.s! So then you go after those credentials if you’re a real high flyer, and you spend another three to five years (and lots of money), when you might otherwise raise your kids, instead—or actually produce something! Then there are the other schools to learn more important stuff: a new language or job skill; the latest computer operating system; advancement related subjects, like management, counseling techniques, communication; perhaps something for complicated organizations and projects, like systems analysis or pert diagrams; oh yeah and don’t forget, how to stay married. Learning truly is a life long activity; life may in fact be a learning activity. This is true, whether in formal “school” or informed by experience and the self-teaching that comes from reading, observing, thinking, and practicing.

Let me tell you I think that life is designed a little bit like a School, so that our schools are so many artifices or classrooms inside a very big Institution indeed. You cooperate and graduate, as they say: Love thy neighbor. On the other hand, the tests are crosses to bear, and they are all your own. Cheating isn’t allowed. If you cheat, the Head Master will know about it—and anyway, you don’t cheat anyone but yourself. That is because if you copy someone else’s homework, you never learn to work the problems out for yourself—“with fear and trembling” perhaps, as the Good Book says. Learning is the point of school and the exercises in the first place. Avoid the learning, and you literally miss the point. If you make a good grade after cheating, your grade isn’t really your own but is stolen (which breaks a commandment). Then there’s pride of an ill-gotten gain, which is pure farce; or the enjoyment of something conferred that isn’t earned, which is carnal and a lie. The beginning and end of every lie is nothingness, since only truth is real. Think of a liar’s soul.

Witness the implosion of the old Soviet Union. It was an entire system based upon lies—about its economy, its military, its politics and leadership, the condition of its people, its goals and strategy, the purity of its utopian vision and erstwhile visionaries (false prophets). What Reagan rightly judged to be “the evil empire” published changes to the encyclopedia, in order to change history whenever facts diverged from official fictions and truth contradicted propaganda. Means matter as much as ends, at least in the scheme of things as I’ve presented them. That’s because my underlying assumption is that there is a spiritual purpose to life, i.e., to our being sent to School. Graduation (Salvation) waits, hopefully, but just as the cap and gown is more than clothing for a ceremony but recognizes the work and accomplishment that went on before that day! Accomplishment is inherent in any real reward. That’s why an end in itself is nothing, unless it is reached by right and honorable means. Those who don’t believe in a spiritual basis to life are likely to confuse means and ends. To them, life isn’t a School—life is more or less an inconvenience, its apparent imperfections perfectible by the star pupils for the benefit of themselves and others. Steal the bread if you’re hungry. Kill if you can give enough to everyone in need. The process isn’t integral or organic to results any longer.

Personally, I like the “Life as School” model, because I don’t have to be too hard on myself. True, there’s a lot of work for me to do. And I’m not perfect—that is to say, I don’t know everything. Heck, if I were perfect, then I’d be a Graduate already or at least in Graduate study with wings. The good Lord didn’t put me here because I was perfect—He put me here to learn something and to get better. His Son Jesus Christ is the Great Teacher. And I’ll be a Graduate, whether I die poor, disgraced in the eyes of men, having been thrown in prison, or having lost what I loved and tried to hold on to—so long as I have lived well. So long as I have tried to live the way I hoped to be—which is an old fashioned notion of integrity.

It has always been a mystery to me how some folks could think character does not matter—or rather, that it doesn’t matter enough to demand particularly high standards of our elected officials. It was the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, who instructed us that character was the defining qualification for a ruling class. A study by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia sheds light on America’s strange ambivalence. “The Politics of Character” survey was based on 1,200 telephone interviews drawn from a national probability sample representative of the adult civilian population, eighteen years and older, living in private households in the United States. The survey has a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percent. Basically, the study found that most people do think character is important (90%), but the same people aren’t exactly sure what constitutes character or how it remotely relates to politics or to public policy. Character is popular, but the concept is bereft of content! The study found our country’s commitment to character is pretty shallow—and probably inertial, a function of our history.

Indeed, character and conviction were once conjoined and esteemed. The Founders were adamant about character’s importance. Christian faith and traditional Western values supplied its content. No one doubted that people should and would choose leaders of character, and that good representatives are indispensable to good government. George Washington said, “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” Thomas Jefferson said, “A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of [a republic’s] laws and constitution.” Alexis de Tocqueville wondered how America should escape destruction, “if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed.” And James Madison, Father of the Constitution and author of its most famed checks and balances said, if there be no virtue among us, “we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of Government, can render us secure. To suppose that any form of Government will secure liberty or happiness without any form of virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”

The architects of this Republic knew the importance of character and the high moral qualities that comprised it. Taken together, this was a basic article of democratic faith. Today’s democratic faith is laced with confusion and contradiction. The majority of Americans believe that “all views of what is good are equally valid” (72% agree) and that “everything is beautiful—it is all a matter of how you look at it” (69% agree). On the other hand, the majority (77%) also believes “we would all be better off if we could live by the same basic moral guidelines.” By wide margins, the majority believes that both “obeying those in positions of authority” (92%) and “following your own conscience” (81%) are important to character. They also believe “sacrificing your own interests for the good of others” (88%) and “protecting your own interests” (88%) to be important to character. Likewise, the majority believes that “sticking to one’s principles no matter what” (95%) and “enjoying yourself” (92%) are essential. Similar contradictions continue, when respondents are asked about specific moral issues. In terms of holding officials accountable, just 46% insist the president (a high symbolic representative of the people) needs the same virtue as the people, in order to govern effectively. Americans have become rather indiscriminate it seems, and that’s not fuzzy math—it’s fuzzy thinking.