Why I am not a Republican, Part 3 – 316

I really think I can finish this today. I hope I’m not being too ambitious. The question is whether I can get gun control, environmental issues, and the apocalypse all together.

Gun control and supply side economics were the two issues that really caused me to register as a Democrat back when I turned 18. We’ve already covered my economic feelings, and my feelings on guns haven’t really changed either. Naturally, I don’t favor a total ban on guns, but I can’t help but see that a gun makes killing really easy. You don’t need to get particularly close to the person, there are different levels of skill but you don’t need to be particularly skilled, and it can all be over very quickly. Those seem like good reasons to have some rules and regulations.

People use the slippery slope argument against this—that if you ban plastic guns and armor-piercing bullets now then blink and the government will be seizing all of your guns. If you try to argue that no, it is possible to have different gradations and levels, they make an argument that people are stupid. Okay, I admit I can see this, and there is plenty of evidence for it. Regardless, the process of legislation is slow, and somewhat deliberate, and even after a law passes it needs to meet constitutional requirements, and so yes, I really believe it is possible that we can find a middle ground here. Am I overly optimistic? Perhaps, but we do have laws and regulations about cars, and lots of people still drive.

Now, the reason that I put control with constitutional concerns and the environment is that I believe a lot of the fundamentalists who want to hang on to their guns feel this is necessary because of end of the world scenarios where they will need to fight off marauders intent on stealing their food storage. This goes along with the other things because many people who don’t worry about the environment base that on the fact that the whole thing is going to burn up anyway.

I can see that, and remembering that is actually how I keep from despairing about how bad things are getting, but I have always felt that you should not be a part of the problem. Consider Mormon 8:31: “Yea, it shall come in a day when there shall be great pollutions upon the face of the earth; there shall be murders, and robbing, and lying, and deceivings, and whoredoms, and all manner of abominations…”

It certainly isn’t an invitation to participate in the whoredoms, and He will clean those up too. Why should we take a casual approach to the sanctity of Earth? Destroying the beauty and the variety is really an ungrateful approach to what we have been given. I would call it grossly ungrateful and irreverent.

People get weird and stupid about this too. There was some controversy several months ago because some school wanted to show An Inconvenient Truth in their science classes. Several parents objected to the political nature of it (telling me they have not seen the movie, because it was not strongly political), others objected to the fuzzy science of global warming, and one letter amazed me. His point was that the Bible says the earth will get warmer so it can burn, and maybe this is just the fulfilling of Biblical prophesy. Okay.

I think there are a few points to make here. One good thing to remember is that often prophesies are the way God knows things will be, and so tells the prophets. Yes, there are things that He makes happen, like sending a Savior or a flood, but sometimes it is us (back to those murders and abominations), so just because it was foretold doesn’t automatically make it fine. This is where I sometimes get fatalistic about causes, because there are some battles that I know we are not going to win, and I can bear that because the Second Coming will fix everything, but I’m not going to climb on the enemy bandwagon either. There are some things we can make better, and those are worth doing.

For example, there was a project suggested to put in windmills off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The property owners objected because it would ruin their view. (I know, windmills are so ugly!) Anyway, the interesting thing about this is that the area is largely fueled by coal, and that there is a really high juvenile asthma rate (high adult rates too, but it is worse for children, probably because their lungs are still developing). I know that making that conversion would not end the global warming crisis, but it wouldn’t hurt that and wouldn’t it be nice to get some kids off inhalers? And I certainly don’t want to be the person who decides that my view is more important than other people breathing clean air. (Because the people with the asthma are not the ones with coastal property. They are the ones living in the cities and near the coal plant.)

I won’t deny that bad times are coming, and that there is not a lot that can be done to prevent it, but I will still do whatever can be done to make things better. If one polar bear is saved, or one person doesn’t get murdered, it all comes down to the individual, really. Think about it, with Hurricane Katrina (which was related to global warming, but was greatly exacerbated by government problems before, during, and after), it isn’t really that 1,833 people died. It is that one person died, and that happened 1,833 times.

We all understand loss, but we don’t really grasp big numbers, so we go kind of numb to them. Frequently we get around this by focusing on a small part, like a firefighter carrying one child away in Oklahoma City—one child who died. With Mumbai, we focus on one child who was orphaned. It is the individual that matters, and so anything we do matters because it can affect an individual. It’s great to think globally, but it may be more valuable to think locally, if for no other reason than because your odds of success are better.

So, what about that white horse prophecy, where the constitution will hang by a thread and it will be up to the church members to save it? I haven’t really been able to establish its truthfulness. It’s certainly possible, and defending it even might require guns, but here is my question: Has there been anyone up until now who has done more damage to the Constitution than George W. Bush?

Think of the Bill of Rights, and how the Patriot Act has cut into it, with rights to speedy trial and rights against unreasonable search and seizure. How has privacy and the rule of law been damaged by warrantless wire-tapping.

Even if you decide to scrap the Bill of Rights (which is really the heart of America, and the values), and decide to just go with the Constitution itself (how the government will work), then think about the concentration and expansion of executive power, and the shifting around of the office of the Vice President so that Cheney will claim to be legislative one day and executive the next, basically so he can avoid answering for his actions. Think about the value of the checks and balances that were written into the government, and the implications of signing statements under this administration. Think about the politicization of the Justice Department. I’ve seen the signs, and I don’t think that Obama is the Anti-Christ, but if the role of the Beast will be filled by an American president, the Bush administration has presented a priceless gift. Great job guys.

So there is one area where I get really ticked off about this orthodoxy of Republican-good/Democrat-bad. Not just Democrat-bad, actually, but also that Democrat equals automatically unpatriotic. You seem to have confused love with enabling—this could be an issue in future relationships.

I’m not sure if I have really made it clear how all of this ties together for me, but let me put it this way. If I believed that it was correct and appropriate to try and hurry up the Second Coming by encouraging environmental degradation, government corruption, and societal collapse, I would vote Republican every single time.