A Book for Global Peacemakers

Richard Brookhiser looked at competing factions and went back to the development and struggles associated with writing 13 key documents to find a structure for satisfying the human desire for liberty. Rather that produce a ponderous tome for scholars, in 262 readable pages, his Give Me Liberty identifies a peaceful foundation for countries.

     Liberty is closely related to other ideas: consent of the governed, freedom, democracy, and the God-given human rights of equal individuals.

     Beginning with the first English settlement in 17th century Jamestown, Virginia, on the North American continent, colonists objected to sole rule by the London-based Virginia Company's royal governor. They elected members to a general assembly empowered to decide local matters by a majority vote. Although the governor could veto these decisions, it took four months of ocean voyages before the assembly learned his wishes. By 1699, the assembly decided to move to Williamsburg, Virginia, and its elected members became an independent body. The governor retained a veto, but a principle, consent of the governed rather than fiat, was established. There would be "no taxation without representation."

     Back in Jamestown, the first general assembly acknowledged "men's affaires doe little prosper where God's service is neglected." In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson would write: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." In short, human rights are Creator-given to all mankind as part of their human nature. When human rights, which are derived from God, are trampled, as the colonists claimed they were by George III, the Declaration of Independence noted rebellion is justified.

     Around the world, liberty continues to roll out much too slowly for slaves, women, and immigrants. James Madison justified excluding the word, slave, from the U.S. Constitution, because it would be wrong to admit men could be property.  In his 1863 Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln finally affirmed the United States." was conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Two years later the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, but 100 years after the Gettysburg Address, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. told a March on Washington the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were promissory notes still unpaid.

     At the first women's convention in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, the former slave, Frederick Douglass, and the only black person who attended, concluded, "(I)f that government is only just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to women the exercise of the elective franchise." Not until 1920 did the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution eventually grant suffragists the right to vote. Unlike other countries in the world, as yet no woman has headed the U.S. government.

     In opposition to Jewish, Irish, German, Italian, and Scandinavian immigrants, a U.S. voting bloc formed the Know-Nothing Party. In contrast, Emma Lazarus, who was proud of a country willing to take in the poor and oppressed, wrote a poem honoring the waves of immigrants "yearning to be free." With the help of the French engineer, Gustave Eiffel, and funding from Joseph Pulitzer, a Statue of Liberty rose in New York harbor in 1886. Ms. Lazarus preferred calling the statue, "Liberty Enlightening the World." and her poem became the message on the statue's base.

     The Monroe Doctrine began an effort to guarantee liberty throughout the world. On December 2, 1823, U.S. President Monroe sent an open letter to Congress announcing the Americas were closed to conquest. Outside interference, he claimed, would be viewed as "an unfriendly disposition toward the United States." Some 107 years later, in a "Fireside Chat," President Franklin D. Roosevelt prepared the United States to enter World War II by noting the Western Hemisphere was no longer protected by the Atlantic Ocean. A year later Japanese airplanes bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and proved the Pacific Ocean no longer shielded the country either. Liberty needed a defense everywhere in the world.

     By 1980, when Ronald Reagan became President of the United States, the Berlin Wall symbolized 40 years of unchecked Communist expansion. At the Brandenburg Gate in the wall separating West and East Berlin, President Reagan, in 1987, chastised the godless, totalitarian Soviet regime for restricting "freedom for all mankind." He told General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, "(T)ear down this wall," and on November 9, 1989, free men tore down the Berlin Wall.

     It seems, as long as people lack liberty, peace is not possible.
     

   
   


       

In Praise of Print

Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce.com, made his billions creating a software company in the cloud's digital age.  Why did he and his wife, Lynne, just plunk down $190 million to purchase Time, a print magazine founded in 1923? They say they want to find solutions to some of the most complex problems in today's society.

     Do complex problems in today's society lend themselves to hashtag solutions, slogans on posters in marches, presidential "debates," and election campaign ads on TV? Consider: racism, gun violence, immigration, cancer, gene editing, an income gap between the Benioffs and nearly everyone else in the world, corruption, censorship by the government in China and Facebook in the US, robots replacing human workers, marriage, privacy versus national security, climate change, lopsided trade balances.

     TV headlines and 3-minute interviews, apps, and a limited number of Twitter characters have not solved today's problems, and they never will. The Federalist Papers argued before the U.S. Constitution was ratified. An extra Bill of Rights was needed. The print media backed further Amendments needed to clean up initial mistakes about the election of the President and Vice President, slavery, women's suffrage, and alcohol.

     Print carries revolutionary ideas everywhere in the world. Why do authoritarian governments always shut down the press? Writing at Iowa's Storm Lake Times, with a circulation of only 3,000, Art Cullen won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for showing transparency's importance as a guard against bribes affecting government decisions. He wondered who was enabling the local Board of Supervisors in Buena Vista County, population 10,000, to help fund a million dollar defense against the Des Moines Water Works. His editorial disclosed the corn and soybean agribusiness farms that were contaminating drinking water with nitrates from their fertilizer.

     Open a discussion about tariffs at the dinner table or on social media. You'll see a difference of opinion on the purpose of tariffs, if they can accomplish these purposes, even if these purposes need to be achieved. Does anyone mention what they have read about what government representatives, experts on economics, seniors, Walmart shoppers, or farmers have said about tariffs?

     Informed judgments require the extended, detailed information print provides. Read the"Letters to the Editor," too. I'm often inspired by the readers who take time to compose the thoughtful opinions published. A grandmother's letter told why she insisted her two teen-aged grandchildren, she called them "screen zombies," put down their "tiny rectangles" to take in the spectacular sight of crossing the four-and-a-half-mile bridge over Chesapeake Bay.

     A digital marketer like Marc Benioff deserves gratitude for funding the printed link between society's complex problems and those who depend on the extensive body of information needed to solve them.

     

       

A Fork in the Road to the Future

How should children be prepared to handle the next 70 or 80 years of their lives? Or 40-year-olds to handle their next 40 years?

The trendwatching.com site, that has spotters all over the world, found people have looked at current conditions:

• immigration
• refugee crisis
• job automation
• depressed wages
• uneven recovery
• generational divide
• racial divide
• fear of terrorism

and sorted themselves into two groups:

• Global citizens open to an interconnected world, where people learn to understand their changing relationships to neighborhoods, cities, and nations
• Nation nurturers who seek comfort in the familiar

Dealing with change, especially rapid change, is not easy. It is understandable that some want to wall themselves off from foreigners; to pretend technology is going to slow down and manufacturing jobs, as we have known them, are going to return; to listen only to broadcasts that agree with them; and to cling to traditional families where a man works and an uneducated woman stays at home with the children.  But you only need look at one example of the future -  shopping malls and stores empty of consumers of all kinds who have switched over to ordering their needs and wants online - to see change is impossible to escape. (Could these empty stores be converted to on-going world fairs where "shoppers" could go to experience and learn new technologies?)

Like it or not, children are going to live in a world of global citizens. Parents and teachers need to prepare to help them feel at home there.