Trego's Mountain Ear

Within our culture, each of us has something that offends us.  It can be – it usually is – something, usually a freedom of behavior, that we want to take away from everyone.  Less than five hundred years back, King James commissioned the  English translation of the bible.  He had a vested interest in the belief that kings ruled through divine right.  My preference is to take away King James’ divine right, and that of King Charles, too.

There are people out there – otherwise rational people – who want to remove our right to keep and bear arms.  Personally, I don’t understand them – but that’s besides the point.  We disagree politically because they don’t see why removing the right to keep and bear arms is unacceptable to me and mine.  The divine right of kings was important to King James – I suspect that it is considerably less important to the un-beheaded King Charles, and I know that losing it doesn’t bother me a bit.

The concept of private property is another spot for political disagreement.  Whether Soviet or Hutterite, we have some folks who have a different belief about how desirable private property is.  Since I kind of like having my own digs, my own car, my own revolver and so on, I’m likely to vote against people who want to take those from me.  And they believe I can live as happily in a rental, disarmed and riding the bus.  They don’t comprehend that the thought of a communally owned pocket knife terrifies me.

I’m pretty sure elections began as a substitute for combat.  If I realize that 82% of the population are quite comfortable with taking whisky away from me, I’m not likely to go to war to keep my bourbon.  It’s not worth going into a fight when I’m outnumbered four to one.  (Other folks may calculate differently – but elections, where we have a real choice, do offer an alternative to fighting)

The folks on the right want to take away a different parcel of rights than the folks on the left – but both want to take something away from us.  You have to go back to Abraham Lincoln, in August of 1861, to find a law authorizing the income tax.  For four score years, it wasn’t necessary.  In 1895, the Supreme Court ruled the income tax unconstitutional . . . so Congress passed the sixteenth amendment: “The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”

Interestingly enough, the progressives proposed it, the conservatives brought the amendment forward thinking it would never pass, and it did. 

When we look at elections like 1964, where Goldwater received only 38.5% of the vote, or 1984, where Mondale got just 40.6%, the elections were decisive.  In 2016, Trump won the election with 46.1% of the vote.  When the winner doesn’t reach 50%, it’s easy to figure the election isn’t quite legitimate. 

Of course, old King James didn’t have that problem – as a monarch by divine right, he had the only vote that mattered.  But to those of us blessed with democracy, we get to choose which infringements we’re willing to accept – and some combination plates aren’t available.  It’s hard to find a politician who supports abortion on demand and free access to automatic weapons. 

If we were willing to protect the rights and properties our neighbors find valid, we would have a lot less political hostility.