Hey you.

During the dark middle years of our Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln went to a battlefield in Pennsylvania where thousands of soldiers had died in defense of our nation, while fighting to preserve what we Americans stand for.

Mr. Lincoln spoke very briefly that day, November 19, 1863. He spoke gravely, as a leader who deeply understood, and grieved at, the terrible, bloody price being paid for our freedom. What he said has filled and inspired the consciousness of us who have, over these last 150 years, benefited from the sacrifice of those brave men at Gettysburg. Here is a small shrapnel of what he said:

"But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate--we cannot consecrate--we cannot hallow-- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."

Nowadays, we may ask ourselves what were those men struggling for? What have all our soldiers, past and present, lived and died fighting for? Mr. Lincoln's final sentence that day reinforced it:

. . . that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

This Memorial Day, we should remind ourselves of this principle too--government by the people-- as we remember the men and women who have died on battlefields all around the world for us people, so that we can live free.

Are you actually making the best use of that freedom that these brave soldiers fought for? Or is your power to act favorably-- on behalf of yourself and those you love-- is that power, your personal initiative, your energy, buried in the ground somewhere on some lapsed battleground of your life? Is your impulse to serve others hiding in a bag of potato chips? or a carton of beer? Is it taking refuge behind the glass of a flat screen tv?

You, you who are reading this, ask yourself:

Am I a person? Am I one of those "people" whose responsibility is to govern?

Or have I abdicated? Have I ceded my personal responsibilities as an American to some other person or agency? Is my freedom to act and prosper locked in a harddrive, on a desktop, somewhere in Washington, DC? Or in my state's capital? Have I signed off on my freedom to act?

98 years after President Lincoln addressed, at Gettysburg, the heart issues of our nation's purpose--government by the people-- President John Kennedy said:

"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."

This, too, we need to remember, and act upon, instead of looking for handouts or unearned entitlements, instead of waiting for superman to bail us out of whatever couch-potato cushion we are stuck in. Are you doing your part to keep our United States of America a nation of free citizens, who are willing and capable to act on your own so that you and all the rest of us may benefit?

What have you done this week to make our country a better place? Did you do your job? Did you look for a job? Did you read something worthwhile? Did you break a sweat, hammer a nail, or cook a meal? Did you pick up your own trash, clean your plate after the meal, help load the dishwasher? Did you speak kindly to someone? Did you speak correction to yourself or your best friend? Did you plant a seed. I mean, it is spring. We can get out now and see what the real world looks like.

What's going on out there? And what does it mean that "the people," govern? Do I get a fancy desk and a legislative vote-on-the-bill button to push? Probably not. But you and I, as people, do have certain responsibilities thrust upon us, lest our great ship of state plunge to the depths of lethargy.

Although we cannot, as President Lincoln said, truly consecrate that hallowed ground at Gettysburg, there is something we can and should do.

Are you doing your part in governing this great nation? Many men and women have died so that you could exercise that privelege. Use it. Find something that needs to be done and do it, whether you're getting paid for it or not.

Glass half-Full

So this is what it's come to

As a working citizen of these United States, I am struggling with this notion of personal responsibility.

Many leaders, most notably our President, speak publicly about the idea that everyone is duty-bound to "do their fair share." This is certainly true.

How do we construct a society in which everybody can be incentivized to "pull their own weight?"

Almost everybody seems to be running out of money. The government is gone hog-wild with uncontrollable spending. Its as if we've got a monster perpetual motion societal machine that grinds up resources and assets and then extrudes them as public benefits--"benefits" if you're poor, "profits" if you're rich.

Some people game the system and do really well at it; they come out smelling like a rose, and richer. The liberals call these "the rich," or the "1%." The Dems and the Occupyers want to up the ante on these opulent types by raising their tax rates, so that there is more for the rest of us. I'm not so sure the system actually works that way. Once assets get ground-up in that perpetual motion spending machine, maybe they're lost forever. Maybe they come out in a black hole somewhere out in space beyond the demoted Pluto.

Other Americans, on the low-income end, barely get by. They wander around looking for employment, and get public assistance--welfare, subsidies, disability, and whatnot. But there seems to be a dropping point, a precipice, at the end of a slippery slope of public assistance. If po' folks have been on the dole long enough they forget (or do they?) how to really look for work. Do they forget how to think like a person who needs a job and must go out and just dam-well find one? Like, the next-one-that-comes along! What if it IS McD's? What if they DO have a diploma that is irrelevant to our present situation? Do they, instead of taking that minimum-wage insult, then choose to ease on into the public fix? Will they drift into our 12-step welfare enablements until they have at last lapsed into a prison of their own making?--a hazy cubicle smoked-up with cigarettes, beer, narcotizing tv, maybe little pops of legally-acquired or not-so-legally-obtained pills? These are the ones that the Repubs and the Tea Partiers want to cut off, because they are not pulling their weight.

In my helpless opinion, we've got dead weight on both ends--the rich skaters and the poor slackers--and there's very little we can do about it. The Dems and the President cannot fix it; the The Repubs and Romney cannot fix it, although they claim that they can. Ha! We'll see about that round about this time 2013. Furthermore, Congressional supercommittees, God help 'em, have passed the buck as business as usual.

I certainly don't know what to do about it, so I guess I'll just go to work this Monday morning--thankful that I have a job-- and hope for the best, and pray: May God help us work this dam mess out in some kind of way that every citizen will somehow find cause to somehow "do their fair share."

So you see I'm praying for a miracle here. But I have faith in God.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress

When I met Mr. Buckley

'T'was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea, that Cat Stevens sang "...I know that it's not easy, taking time...when you know something's going on..."
That's the way I feel right now. There is so much going on out there in the world--the real world, and the world of ideas, I hardly know where to start. I'm playing catch-up ball trying to figure it out.
For instance, I just found about Hayek. That's Friedrich Hayek, the fellow who was, during the 1930's, trying to divert the pump-priming impulses of John Maynard Keynes.
I still haven't read any of Mr. Hayek's work yet, but I have caught wind of it through an old aquaintance of mine, William F. Buckley. Thus have I found that there is an alternative way of viewing macroconomics out there, something that is a far cry from Keynesianism.

What if there were a million small pumps turning instead of one big one? That's the something that is "going on" that's got my valves lifting. But it is hard to do when you're holding down a 40-hour gig.

You see, in this free society we have a tendency to transfer the (as Mr. Buckley called them) heavy responsibilities of freedom to the government, instead of cherishing, and developing, those obligations among ourselves. We assign (as Mr. Hayek had earlier termed them) vague, extralawful mandates to people of political authority.
Mandates like, presumably, making sure everyone is fed and employed. But the state cannot effectively handle such grand philanthropies. Or--put it this way-- if the state (government) does try to handle all these responsibilities that free people should be willing to accept, the state ends up, over the long haul, robbing us of our freedoms in the process. Slowly they fall, one by one, to the wayside.

Think about this: which do you prefer? Freedom, or Security? Guess what. They cancel each other out. Well, maybe not totally; that's a long story and its a can of worms to boot. It does seem, though--and this is what I now discover has been "going on"--that Keynes and this guy Hayek were having this debate back in the '30s when all the detritus from the first great depression (as differentiated from the second great depression which we are now entering) hit the fan.

I was online listening, yesterday (Nov 12, 2010), to Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution interview Gary Becker, who was, I think, a founder along with Milton Friedman, of the "Chicago School" of economics, to which most of the elite media these days pay lip service but effectively disdain in their subliminal biases.
Mr. Robinson mentioned, as he spoke to Mr. Becker, Mr. Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale. Mr. Robinson said that he had found therein that (something going on here) Buckley identifies the postwar economics faculty at Yale as the source of our indecipherable but constrictive drift toward erecting statist solutions against every societal problem instead of handling them ourselves as responsible citizens.

Well, when Peter Robinson mentioned William F. Buckley, that set me off on a trip down memory lane.
When I was a sophomore at Louisiana State University, I somehow managed to serve as chairperson for our student union National Speakers committee. My student boss, so to speak, was Tom Levitan, a fellow light years ahead of me in familiarity with the issues of our time, which was 1970-71. Tom served as Lyceum area coordinator. He used to toss around names like "Buckminster Fuller" and "Leonard Weinglass" as if they lived just down the hall in the dorm. I learned a lot from Tom that year.

One of the things Tom helped to do was recruit speakers during that school year. We brought in Dr. Spock and Dick Gregory. Even though I was relatively uninformed about everything that was "going on" at the time, I nevertheless introduced those two well-voiced gentlemen to the students and faculty who were present--maybe 1200 or so people in each case.
I remember Dr. Spock telling someone in a post-speech conversation that he had been recently heckled by some "Maoist girls," and laughing about it.
Funny what memories stick with you. And Dick Gregory wanted a bowl of fruit instead of a big meal. And of course, he, being a comedian before he was a serious voice in the cause of justice, made th audience laugh. In fact, he made a joke about me--probably something about how I obviously didn't know what the hell I was talking about when I introduced him. Anyway...

The Young Republicans, God bless 'em, started making noise afterward. They were protesting we had weighted our speaker selections totally toward the left. They were right (haha) or course. So I, being the Speakers chairman, told them that if they could get William F. Buckley on campus for us, we'd put him on. They retorted that they could, and so they did.
But I challenged them further than that. I had too. I had to tell them that we had (wouldn't ya know it) just about blown the budget on the liberal speakers, and if they wanted us to pay Mr. Buckley his usual, quite princely, fee, they'd have to come up with half the money.
They did and we did.
I'll have to say this about those Young Republicans, and their chapter President, Mike Connally. They were firm believers in their cause. Which is admirable, and quite different from the reaction that liberals would likely have shown; methinks they would have demanded more university money on the basis of unfair treatment.

So that's how I met Mr. William F. Buckley. Yet I was clueless at the time about the immense significance of his project to propel and redefine American conservatism. We got him at the airport. I remember talking to him in his hotel room as he tied a skinny tie around his neck. He was smiling, obviously very happy about the work he was doing.

And what he was doing--he was very good at it. Clueless as I was, I neverthless introduced him to the packed house. I remember he made the people laugh a lot, while delivering a very serious message about the power of the individual to make changes in him/her self and thus make changes in society.

One last thing: Now I'm trying to figure out how my intuitive conservatism squares with our emerging awareness of the need to save our fragile earth from destruction by us humans. I really think it has much to do with each person taking responsibility for whatever piece of it (large or small) is given to him/her. It hinges more on that, I believe, than what the EPA or the UN mandates about such things.

One more last thing: I offer a phrase from an old song, not the Cat Stevens one I mentioned in the first line above, but a line from a favorite singer who is, like me, originally a Baton Rouge boy, Stephen Stills, who had sung in 1967..."There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear..."
Carey Rowland, author of Glass half-Full