Random Political Thoughts: Views

So in my last post in this series I rambled on about my personal history as it pertains to the formation of my political thought. Now I'm going to try to wade into how things have evolved for me in the last year or so, leading me to certain current positions and working views.

Where I've been in the last year is in reading a lot about economics and the role of the Constitution in the vision of America's founders. I've been in the midst of the Tea Party movement and the Campaign for Liberty movement, both of which pull in people from a variety of backgrounds, politically and otherwise. I've been talking with strangers while collecting signatures and holding meetings and attending events. I've been following what my Congressional Reps are doing, reading lots of websites and processing different views on the many issues that have rushed on this nation. Most of the time I feel like it is all swirling in my head.

This political learning has grown up in me at the very same time as a sort of new awakening or conversion in my life as pertains to my interactions with other people and reality in general. (I can't possibly recap all that here, but just read through a bunch of posts in the last year and you'll get a sense of what I mean, if you are outside the realm of the two or three people who devotedly hang on my every blogged word). For me personally, although I do not enjoy politics as a "sport" and there is much about the discussion of it that I have a strong aversion to, I feel that if I try to avoid the political reality in which we live, it is a serious breech of charity towards the world at large. Oh, there is no person called "the world at large," but I cannot lose the sense that at some point, specific details of the lives of individuals become impacted by political trends and decisions. To only express concern at the point when an individual need arises in front of me is like when a person crosses the threshold from seriously overweight to obese. The time for concern and action is long before that moment, and the concern has to focus on far more than trimming back that decisive pound. I am being convicted and convinced that political awareness is an integral part of charity, just like health awareness in my example is an integral part of self-care.

I have a driving need to pursue the root causes of things. My brain works by seeing the broad picture and making connections, and not so much by making black and white judgments about rightness and wrongness. So I am not particularly interested in taking up sides, condemning bad policy or bad politicians, or in championing individuals or a party with whom I agree. These attributes of mine also make the supposed "impracticality" of political approaches of little concern to me. Some political views are judged "too idealistic" to work in the real world. Some candidates are judged to have "low electability" as well, and so party hacks gravitate towards popular people with whom they don't entirely agree. This is not my style. My goal is not to fix humanity's problems with politics, because this is impossible. My goal is to understand humanity's problems, because somehow for me understanding is a necessary precursor to charity.

I was really encouraged to come across this from Pope Benedict recently: "...normally those who determine the future are the creative minority." He spoke this in the context of visiting the Czech Republic, where Catholics are clearly a minority, and he was calling them to live their faith in such a way as to become leaven in society.

Ok, so here are some random thoughts:

• I feel many who are concerned with social justice often look to the government to be the catalyst, moderator, and governor of said social justice. True social justice, however, is a work of grace, and the government is not a means of grace, the Church is. Without grace, "social justice" quickly devolves into power and domination games. What the world cries out for cannot be contained in a government program. The truth is, though, that the local churches are far too anemic to do the job they are commissioned by the Lord to do. So perhaps the first political responsibility of the Christian is to repent of how we treat others.
  

• Totalitarianism is to me the most sinister political enemy. However I feel we in the United States have come to accept and even welcome it. I believe that many act out the false belief that rights are derived by citizens from the State, rather than the belief that rights are given by God to the individual, and the individual entrusts some of these to governing structures which exist only at the behest and service of the citizenry. You never see Totalitarianism 101 taught anywhere, but I do believe that our culture has been formed by government schooling with the belief that we exist not for God but for the state, or for some power that is extraneous to us.
  

• This is something I never thought I'd see myself write, but I think Christians have been taken advantage of by primarily the Republican party and the right to life movement. Anyone who knows me knows I am absolutely opposed to abortion, abortion funding, euthanasia, in vitro fertilization, infanticide, cloning, and all of the other direct affronts to human life. But I'm sure I am not the only one who closed my eyes to everything else ever done by a pro-life candidate, as long as we were in agreement on that ideological position. And in the meantime, how often haven't I felt "ah, ok, a good guy won... now we'll all be safe and I don't have to pay attention or worry about those other details". Christians need to be wiser voters. And I'm talking to myself first. We need to wake up en masse and demand a real difference between the totalitarianism lite candidate, who wears a cross pin in the lapel, and the totalitarianism full-flavored candidate, with a UN flag in the lapel.
  

• I am quite persuaded that a sound money policy is very important at this juncture in our history, and that if we had such a policy in effect we would be forced to curtail some of our most dangerous spending. Stated another way, if the government couldn't create all the money it wanted (thereby causing inflation and loss of currency value), it wouldn't be able to spend like the proverbial drunken sailor on war and waste. Government would be bound by the reality that there is only so much money, and once it is gone, it is gone. Like I try to tell my 8-year-old son.

• Health care: Europe has something over the United States, and it isn't socialism. The European first line of defense tends to be a natural, herbal, homeopathic, or "alternative" approach. These approaches are not regulated off to the side-lines or ridiculed by the medical establishment (that I am aware of). We Americans have tremendous innovation in life-saving medicine and surgical procedures, but we also have huge problems that derive largely from how we feed ourselves and use our bodies, and medical management of these problems is very ineffective. Well, no, that's not true. The management is effective, if you don't mind staying on drugs for a lifetime. The paradigm of curing illness has all but vanished from American medicine. Root cause? Who cares, if the pill changes the symptom. The history of the war between the American Medical Association and other approaches such as homeopathics, chiropractic, etc., is very intriguing to me. Until we change our view of how we care for ourselves, and throw the FDA and their good friends the drug companies back to the back of the bus instead of having them lead the whole show, talk about reform of how we will pay for all of this drug peddling is seriously missing the mark.

Well, that certainly doesn't exhaust every thought I could articulate, but it is a start.