Skip to comments.

Posted on 09/25/2001 7:27:44 AM PDT by SJackson

More than eleven years ago, I took a notion my bell rope was going to be pulled sooner or later. I retired from the practice of law and began reading, writing, throwing away, rewriting, reading more, discussing, debating, and testing, discarding, revising, reintegrating, and preparing for something I only vaguely sensed might come, admitting the need might never arise and I might not be a decent implement to address it anyway. But it turned out to be something I couldn't not do, year after bewildered but compulsive year.

Colonel Dan's Friday column, American Resolve is our Key to Victory added considerable tensile stress to an already strongly-sensed pull.

Herewith a bong of many bongs, in deliberate preparation for more than a decade, for what it may be worth to you. Forget my name. Forget me. Those aren't important. Ponder the propositions. They probably are.

Colonel Dan and many of us have no doubt whatsoever that we are the good guys in this current struggle. Many others, though, seriously question whether Americans have a rightful claim to the moral authority to do the necessary to prevail, especially if the necessary proves harsh. They question whether we did not provoke the September 11 onslaughts and their predecessor attacks, whether we are not fat, soft, arrogant, petulant, self-indulgent, self-seeking, and selfish, and seem to wonder whether what we have sustained, and possibly worse to come, is not a righteous retribution, karma balancing, and comeuppance.

Still others recognize the hooligan assailants for the hate-infected maniacs they are, but are very quick to assert we are not much if any better. We've done as bad or worse, I've read, in different ways. At best this is a battle between immoral equivalents with different perspectives, circumstances, and viewpoints, it is claimed.

Those are the voices of the people who need to listen up now. For purposes of edification and affirmation, the rest of us can benefit from heeding these propositions, as I did for eleven pondering years, as well. Some of us need to learn why we are right, and others need to understand the ground-level, mundane reasons why our vast moral superiority in this fight is not just a matter of arrogance, assertion, or pose. It's not enough to know the other side is bad. To develop and maintain the resolve the Colonel rightly designates as crucial, we have to know why ours is good. You win on your positives, not your opponent's negatives. It worked in court, and it works in the grand arena.

We are the provident. We are the most provident of the provident. And providence is the highest earthly good, short of mystical divine dispositions. The natures and modes of those ultimately have to be left to the questing comprehensions of individuals who choose to seek them. But about mundane pragmatics and their ethical implications, we can talk and agree. And by that standard, Americans are very, very good, imbued with an ethic definitely worth fighting, as fiercely and harshly as need be, to defend, even though the nature of the standard dictates we work, not fight, when we undertake to advance rather than merely protect it. Labor omnia vincit.

Providence is materialistic in technique, but holistically fulfilling in its application and effect. It awakens and gratifies the highest and noblest human traits. Providence is prudent productivity. Productivity is the process of making useful things out of useless or near-useless ones and organizing helpful services from undirected, haphazard activity. Prudence means not being wasteful of raw materials, finished products, general environment, services rendered, or willingness to render service.

The conspicuously wasteful excesses characteristic of the prosperous, particularly the newly prosperous, present a dismaying objection. But exuberance and celebration seem to be deep-seated human traits, and may, in net effect, actually stimulate more productivity. We know by observation of the behavior of people blessed with old money, family fortunes and prominence going back several generations the arriviste gaudiness wanes and occupation with muted quality, civic duty and public service increases. The family with new money may buy toys and throw parties at first, but eventually it paints the house, spruces up the lawn, and begins to look up and down the street to see what might be done to improve the neighborhood. A great deal of environmentalism, both sensible and, since humans will invariably foul anything up to some extent, manic, is traceable to legions of prosperous Americans moving awkwardly into the old-money mode.

The major portion of the fulfillment, however, comes from this: In an affluent environment, it is possible to make a living doing a very great number of things. It is possible for people to pursue their sensed vocations, their callings, rather than having to adhere to locally available occupation in order to survive. The most talented potential violinist in the history of the world may well have toiled her life away plugging rice shoots, and being chided for not being very good at it, because her society afforded no opportunity to play violins and live.

The more immediate benefit of providence is relief of human misery and privation, improvement of human living conditions. Any creature endeavors to improve its living conditions. Pursuit of happiness and greater happiness is an indicator of vigor and vitality. All healthy living beings have a drive not only to survive, but to prevail over and exploit the components of their environments, prosper, proliferate their kinds down the timeline and across space, thus avoiding extinction due to local calamities and survive as species and not merely transitory specimens. It is the quintessential natural process of all living beings, and it was recognized and attributed to divine ordination in the first chapter of Genesis -- be fruitful, multiply, et cetera, even if divinity did not literally thunder it into the Genesis-writers' ears. Heard or witnessed in action, those old boys knew validity when they saw it operating around them.

The United States of America is the most provident society in the world. It is the most provident society in the history of the world. It is open, ebullient, innovative, ingenious, and industrious. Its people characteristically eschew promised secutiries and accept risks, and some attendant casualties, in return for relatively unbounded opportunities. A recently-published study authenticated the conclusion that results the country has generated irrefutably implied: Americans work longer and harder than people in other countries. There is not a country in the world where hard work pays better and faster, and the people go for the gold accordingly. So do hordes of immigrants.

The result is not rich arrogant Americans thumbing their noses at everyone else, but rich arrogant Americans also humbly and dumbly trying to show other people how it's done and help them do it. The nation has until now been and still essentially is insulated from alien rampage: a war is not lost, regardless of devastation sustained, until enemy forces occupy its territory. That is why the humble infantryman is the ultimate weapon: not the mightiest, but the last actor in battle. In the U.S.A., only the South and a very few regions of the North have ever experienced occupaton -- with the notable and emphatic exception of the Indigenes. It does not threaten us now.

The United States of America performs as conceived and as advertised. The one thing founders Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton agreed on was that the new nation would be a producing and trading land, not another looting and pillaging one. It would pursue commerce internally, in the largest free trade zone in the world, as it turned out, and, at arm's length, avoiding entanglements, do the same externally. With those policies and some helpful geography and equally helpful developments of events, or luck, it became the world's sole military and, to a much greater degree, economic superpower.

It won its last critical confrontation, the Cold War, with wealth only hypothetically allocable to arms, not arms actually built and sitting as frozen, sterile wealth sinks. When rivals directed their national outputs to military might, the U.S.A. directed its to providence, and, predictably, ended up supreme in both.

The nation achieved a condition of Mind Over Money and became arbiter of who had real money and how much. So long as that power was not too often used imprudently or oppressively, the concomitant record of the U.S.A. was that of an honest tradesman and broker, an impartial arbiter of affairs, in it for earned improvements and not for stolen booty, with malice toward none and in many cases unmerited benevolence toward all. It was conceded what it had earned, the point position in the march toward provident globalization. And, despite economically unavoidable discomfitures inflicted, it has been proliferating prosperity at a pace never before seen in the world.

Have we nudged, shoved, and sometimes bashed other people in the process? You bet. In order to keep provident globalization on track, we maneuvered into a position no nation has been conceded without triggering automatic onslaught by all the others, in possession and administration of an overwhelming military presence astride the world's largest oil supply. Oil is the lifeblood of modern commerce. No oil, get a horse. Millions, perhaps billions, of people starve quickly. Further proliferation of adequacy and then abundance is stymied and then drastically reversed. Assuming for the sake of argument we are thugs, or the multinational corporations our system birthed are thugs, which of the other thugs would the other other thugs have trusted to regulate the big oil spigot in a manner close to fair? Saddam Hussein? China? Russia? Really? Hardly.

Which other thug would the other other thugs have trusted to achieve the position of Mind Over Money, arbiter of the wealth of nations and populations? Osama bin Laden? The Sudanese? Argentia? No. No offense intended, but, no.

The United States, the former Soviet Union, and, to a lesser degree, several other nations demonstrated they could hold thermonuclear weaponry and delivery systems, as opponents, in tense and hostile times, for decades, without exterminating surface life on Earth. That outcome was contrary to the expectations of most people. It was a signal achievement. The achievers proved trustworthiness.

The United States has displayed historically unmatched largesse in its dealings with other nations. Its contribution to the reconstruction of its bitter enemies of World War II is legendary. And it would be a mistake to think it is being claimed the United States has an incredible collective heart of gold.

It has long been understood that peace and prosperity are companions. Sometimes helping bring about the second is necessary to produce the first. Sometimes, as the World Bank, originally a post-WWII reconstruction facility mostly aiding the former belligerents, found when it extended similar programs to Third World nations with very different cultural traditions, that does not work at all. But the United States has supported every effort and continues to do so.

And again, that is not because Americans are the world's blessed peacemakers. Nation-building, as it has come to be called, when it works, results in markets for American goods and services. Once the engine of commerce starts, mutual benefit gradually, and not always equitably, steadily or without reverses, enriches benefactor and benficiary alike. In modern capitalistic jargon, this has come to be called the win-win strategy. That may be an amalgamation of American and Japanese corporate cultures, the competitiveness of the one mixed with the cronyism of the other to produce a custom in which one bargains hard, but takes care not to put counterparties out of business or squeeze so hard as to destroy their motivation for doing business. It is the difference between reaping eggs and killing geese. Win-win's efficacy in comparison to the old dog-eat-dog, beggar-thy-neighbor, business-as-war memes is no longer late news.

A prosperous world does not attack its wealthiest inhabitants. A prosperous world requires no payment of aid to prevent such attacks. Proliferating prosperity is in the self-interest of the wealthy. There is little profit in stealing from the poor. There is great profit in improving their lot. If for no other reason, the United States tries to prosper the world for the sake of getting richer the best and fastest way possible. Only demagogues, the ignorant, and the mean-minded maintain the contrary. And the United States is not only a nation demonstrably inclined to lead the world toward material adequacy and then abundance; it is the only one able to. The saying that when the U.S. economy sneezes, the world gets pneumonia has a contrapositive: when the U.S. is prosperous, material circumstances around the world improve apace.

There is no need to add to the excoriation of the miserable specimens who plotted and perpetrated the September 11 massacre. They claim to act in the name of Allah, God. But observation of the natural system many believe divinely ordained shows creatures attempting to better their circumstances according to the means available to their various kinds. Provident, that is, prudently productive, techniques having been shown the most effective human means of doing just that, the United States, the paragon of providence, has to be acknowledged as the good side, the side in accordance with nature, until and unless such divinity as ordained the entire environment appears and declares the contrary.

We're the good guys. We're trying and succeeding, in spite of awkwardness, ineptitude, limits imposed by nature itself, occasional overzealous bullying, and more frequent playing rough in the very rough game that goes on. Everyone, notably including Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, would like to control the flow of most of the world's oil. Their purposes in aspiring to the honor are problematical, to say the least. Our purpose is to extend access to adequacy, abundance, self-realization and fulfillment, without dictating religious conviction or political allegiance.

Not only do we have an incontestable moral right to defend what we are doing: we are also eminently entitled to insist -- firmly -- on our freedom to do it.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.