Of Occupy Zarahemla and Sharing Your Wealth with You

Only a couple dozen years before the visit of Jesus Christ, the resurrected Savior, to ancient America one of the leading civilizations of the time was in danger of a very different visitation, of impending destruction.  The society was already on the verge of cracking from years of organized crime in the cities and terrorist attacks from refuges in the nearby mountains.  Enforcement and counterattacks had either been unsuccessful or brought only temporary respite.  Too many of the people were either sympathetic to the criminals or not well organized enough to eradicate their threats.

Recent successes emboldened the main man of the terrorist network to issue an ultimatum to the chief judge of the struggling government, whose capital city was called Zarahemla:  give up or we will destroy you.  As forward as was the substance of the demand, it was surpassed by the pitch.  Until recent years I had not come across anything like it in my own experience for twisted assertions and sheer hypocrisy.  One of the great values of The Book of Mormon is how again and again the experiences of its people and societies foretell parallel developments in our time.  This was one more example.

Consider this pitch from the robber leader, Giddianhi.  It starts out merely audacious, saying surrender before we kill the lot of you, in language you might hear from any pirate:  

Therefore I write unto you, desiring that ye would yield up unto this my people, your cities, your lands, and your possessions, rather than that they should visit you with the sword and that destruction should come upon you.  (3 Nephi 3:6)

Apparently constant raiding was becoming too tiring.  They wanted it all, pronto.  What follows, though, is a rather astounding justification, but one that sounds all of a sudden very familiar to 21^st century Americans:

Or in other words, yield yourselves up unto us, and unite with us and become acquainted with our secret works, and become our brethren that ye may be like unto us—not our slaves, but our brethren and partners of all our substance.  (3 Nephi 3:7)

In short, the demand was, give us everything you have, join with us, embrace our philosophy of want-and-take, and we will share with you all of our stuff (which was once your stuff, but no need to fuss about that).  Then we will all be one big happy society, no more conflict, “partners of all our substance”, a socialist utopia.  The takers were inviting the makers to join the society of takers.  Certainly you see the flaw in the proposition.  When all are takers—including the makers—whom will the takers take from?

It feels like Giddianhi would be quite at home in the recent “Occupy” movement.  He demanded to occupy Zarahemla, and all would then be fine.  Modern occupiers’ demands for pricy downtown real estate to squat on, money to pay for food, shelter, bedding, clothing, health care, legal bills, publicity, and other wants and needs, are to be met by the prosperous whose prosperity makes all this possible.  And the occupiers will continue to occupy wherever they are until the government ends all inequities by raising taxes on the people who are already paying 70% of all taxes.  The prosperous must be still holding back from the rest.   

The occupiers claim to represent everyone (well, 99% of everyone) already, if people would just recognize that and admit that they are one with the occupiers. Y’all come. And together we will tax everyone to death and take their stuff, and share it with one another, and then all will be great, no more problems. 

Fortunately for the people of Zarahemla, they refused to buy it.  They built a wall around their land and kept all of the takers out, until the takers were faced with famine.  What if America’s makers ultimately insisted that they would not support the takers anymore?  What if the takers were forced to get jobs and work for what they ate?  They would howl, at least as long as they thought someone was listening.  Now that is utopia we can believe in.

Of Abraham Lincoln and Another Birth of Freedom

On the 203^rd anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln—to our national embarrassment a day no longer celebrated as a national holiday—I once again picked up a copy of the compelling lecture by Walter Berns, commemorating the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth.  Delivered on February 9, 2009, at the American Enterprise Institute, Berns’ lecture concluded with these words:

We say that a man can be known by the company he keeps.  So I say that a nation, a people, can be known and be judged by its heroes, by whom it honors above all others.

We pay ourselves the greatest compliment when we say that Abraham Lincoln is that man for us. 

(Walter Berns, “Lincoln at Two Hundred:  Why We Still Read the Sixteenth President,” AEI Bradley Lecture, February 9, 2009)

Berns offers a compelling statistic as a measure of the nation’s recognition of Lincoln and his greatness:

            More has been written about Abraham Lincoln than about any other president or, for that matter, any other American.  The amount is prodigious:  no fewer than16,000 books and goodness knows how many journal articles.

Abraham Lincoln was president for slightly more than four years, assassinated one month after his second inauguration, when the Civil War was not quite over but its end was in clear sight, Robert E. Lee having surrendered the rebels’ largest and most successful army just a few days before.  Soon after his first inauguration the war began. 

What are the grounds for asserting and recognizing Lincoln’s heroism, having fought a war and not quite finished it?  Because he did fight the war and persevered and put in place what was needed for its inexorable conclusion in the victory of the United States.  I do not say victory of the North, but rather victory for the whole nation.  North, South, and all of the later states of the West and all of their people and their descendents were blessed by that victory.  So was the rest of the world, for that victory showed that a free people could triumph in self-government, having rejected the tyrannies of Europe and overcome the challenge of anarchy offered by the rebels of the old South.  The United States has done a lot of good for the world since then, all of which would have been impossible but for that victory.

Lincoln’s immediate predecessor, the Pennsylvania Democrat James Buchanan, opposed the rebellion of the South but refused to do anything about it.  He dithered and dallied as state after state fell into rebellion and even seized U.S. Army and Navy supplies and facilities while doing so.  Berns quotes how then Senator William H. Seward mimicked Buchanan’s near traitorous dereliction of duty with the impotent formula, “the states had no right to secede, unless they wanted to, and the president had the duty to enforce the law, unless someone opposed him.”

Lincoln came to office with a singular focus from which he refused to be distracted, to meet foursquare the national emergency, that is, to unite the nation and preserve that unity.  And he knew why.  He knew what the United States meant for freedom, for Americans, and for all people everywhere.  In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln reminded his countrymen that the war was a test whether our free nation “or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, could long endure.”  The answer must not be allowed to be anything other than “Yes.”

As another mark of greatness, Lincoln knew that this was not about Lincoln.  As the war progressed, he fully expected to be defeated in the election of 1864 by the candidate of the Democrats, former Union General George B. McClellan, on a platform of ending the war by negotiating a truce with the South.  Lincoln pressed Generals Grant and Sherman to win the war before Lincoln’s likely successor could surrender. 

Moreover, Lincoln repeatedly pointed the nation away from himself and to who it was who fought the war.  At the new National Cemetery at Gettysburg, he reminded the nation that it was “the brave men, living and dead” whose national sacrifice had consecrated the war effort, far above the poor power of speeches by political leaders to add or detract from it.  Later, as the end of the war could be seen approaching and the end of his own life near if unseen—soon to be added to the many others who paid the price of preserving self-government—Abraham Lincoln again pointed the people to those who fronted the battle.  His second inaugural address could have been a moment of triumph and self congratulation against great odds.  Instead he asked the nation “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan”.

Lincoln was great because he rose to the challenge of the times without shirking or excuse and sacrificed all that he had to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, which principles were given force through the Constitution.  The force of those constitutional principles was correctly interpreted by the southern slave holders as leading to the inevitable end of slavery, confronting them with the acceptance of the end of their “peculiar institution” or rebellion.  They chose rebellion and anarchy, and Abraham Lincoln rallied a nation to refuse to walk away from that challenge to liberty for all.  

Today again we face a rather divided nation facing freedom-threatening dangers, not the least of which is impending national bankruptcy.  Fortunately, our nation is less divided than the press would have us believe (opinion poll after opinion poll shows large majorities who support the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution).  This time, however, we have a president who not only avoids the national fiscal crisis but feeds it.  To distract attention from that irresponsible policy he seeks every opportunity to encourage division and create new divisions. President Obama seeks to divide the nation by income, by race, by class, by religious belief.  He indicts whole industries and groups of people one by one as in effect enemies of the nation, whether it is the energy industry, pharmaceuticals, banking, health insurance, or Catholic leadership.  The solutions that he promises all boil down to “vote for me” in a media-supported national cult of personality.

Every cult of personality throughout history has ended badly for its people and their fearless leader.  The current one does not look to be changing that historical trend.  And yet, we still have the power to elect our leaders, and the year of national election has begun.  It may not be too late. 

As I ponder the birth, life, and service of Abraham Lincoln, I choose his example, because he rejected the cult of personality but instead gave his life for individual freedom and self-government.  I have hopes that the policies of dependence on government and the surrender of freedom will be rejected so that the American experiment will witness yet another “birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people” will continue to be a beacon and example around the world.

Of Holy Ordinances and Meaningful Lives

One of the benighted ideas that American society inherited from the benighted 1960s is the idea that marriage and other sacred religious ordinances are just meaningless ceremonies.  Forty years later the tracks of trouble and sorrow caused by this and related assaults on marriage should be readily apparent, yet the concept survives, supported particularly by people who see life as a carnival of selfish delights, where one grabs for all of the gratification that he can—and then dies.

That is after all a doctrine of isolation and death.  Sooner or later the commitmentless self-centered world view ends in death, leaving a heritage of broken kewpie dolls, regrettable memories, shallow relationships, and psychological emptiness.  In fact, periodically statistics show us that it shortens the mortality ride.  For those who follow that lifestyle—and most of America’s social leaders do and increasingly seek to impose it on everyone else—life seems short, cheap, and a despairing struggle for meaning of some sort.  When it is over there is a profound sense of loss, not only the loss in terms of the end of life but in terms of the loss of a lifetime that has been lived so bereft of redeeming value.

Many of the acolytes of this doctrine of death throughout the ages have been desperate to extend life but only to live it with more emptiness.  Others who are overcome along the way by the vacuum of meaning in the lifestyle have sought to end it all sooner than later, only to find that they have brought their empty life view with them into yet another life in the world of spirits, where they fearfully await the tallying up of their lives’ events into pitiful sums of value.

Our Heavenly Father instituted sacred ordinances from the beginning as tools to convey and reinforce meaning, each ordinance pointing to the Source of meaning in this life and in the eternal worlds to come. At the core of each sacred ordinance is a covenant and promise between God and man.  The form of each ordinance from God is designed to point the mind to Jesus Christ, whose atoning sacrifice in Gethsemane and on the cross gave meaning and value to this life.

Baptism, the first sacred ordinance offered to men and women in this life, is a useful example.   Through baptism we accept the vicarious suffering of Jesus Christ in our stead so that we do not have to suffer for our sins, in exchange for a covenant and promise that we will change our lives and refrain from sinning, a promise that we will turn away from the meaningless life of self-indulgence to a life rich in meaning and value focused on love, kindness, achievement, and development of virtue.  We are briefly “buried” in water, simultaneously burying our life of death and washing away its filthiness.  We arise from the water to newness of life, cleansed from our sins.

The marriage ordinance provided by God is an eternal pledge between husband and wife of perpetual faithfulness and dedication to the happiness of each other, as a foundation for living a joint life forever, a fitting and appropriate platform for bringing children into the family.  These covenants and promises are made by husband and wife to each other and also to God, whose power changes and unites hearts to reinforce faithfulness and to give these promises power that extends throughout eternity.  Taken altogether, this becomes a highly significant and holy ordinance with profound impact on the memory and the heart.  Compare that with the world’s version:  hey, want to live together?

Glorious versus pitiful.  The pattern is repeated for all of God’s ordinances versus men’s substitutes, the holy versus the hollow.