The Good Mandate

The Bible is clear.  We are to love our neighbors as ourselves. Is the political fall-out of the mask mandate across the nation and even here in Big Horn County now morphing into a vaccination mandate? Is there a godly way to national recovery from covid-19? What mandate helped us past the carnage of unregulated car travel on primitive dirt roadways in the 30’s?

 

Our governor has pushed a bill forbidding Montana colleges, business places, county governments, and other facilities to set vaccination mandates for public access. Meantime, President Biden and mostly Democratic supporters are promoting the opposite. They say we can only achieve herd immunity with a national covid vaccination mandate. Should local public enterprises and service agencies be allowed to require vaccination evidence for access to their facilities? Our governor says no. Is that a good mandate?

 

It’s a good time to mull over another nation-wide mandate mounting up over the past four generations. I remember my father’s story from the time car travel was totally unregulated.  

 

It was a sunny noon midsummer, 1937. Sunday dinner came at noon after church, and my father-to-be was with family outside under a shade tree. Suddenly a strong distant explosion intervened. They quickly determined the source. It turned out two Burlington Route trains suffered a horrific collision, nearly four miles away. All three of his brothers and two cousins piled into their model-A Roadster and struck out full bore on the dirt road toward the sound they had heard.  Soon the ambulane sirens in the distance confirmed their vector, and the main road–equivalent to a ranch trail here–was crowded with then-new vintage cars in a traffic jam. The wildest of the reckless cousins, Melbourne, at the wheel, pulled out to pass a line of jammed cars.  Weeds hid a washout. The speed factor colluded. The left front wheel dropped, stopped instantly, and the rest flipped a cartwheel. Everyone was airborne. Miraculously, all flew clear of the car. My father-to-be, previously piled on top 3-deep in the rumble seat, flew farthest away into deep grass.  Others landed on rocks. He was the only one not bleeding, and all survived though badly battered.

 

The next day, Monday, was road grading day. My father-to-be hitched his team to the farm road grader for family-assigned road maintenance. It was a routine. Undiagnosed then was a cracked skull and internal bleeding. His unconscious body returned slumped in the grader seat behind the patient team of horse, dragging their reigns, still hitched to the grader. He was rushed to the hospital.

 

He spent fourteen days mostly unconscious before he began to revive. But his mind was changed. His fiancée soon realized he was not the person she had decided to marry, and soon broke off the engagement. Two years later he met and married my mother.

 

Most important, my father-to-be survived a nation-wide scourge of traffic deaths, leading to useful mandates for car travel now in place for generations.  Unnecessary lives had been lost on our primitive roads then.  But we the people, all of us, through access we have in our constitution, intervened. We did so via the federal government intervention, then community health in local locations all across our nation. It saved many lives. It does so to this day,

 

Let’s demand our governor learn the history of one kind community health mandate now in place for generations. We have these freedoms because our federal government, acting on our behalf, supported states and local governments to mandate transparency, regulations, and our respect for our neighbors’ very lives.  Our Helena officials have no business legislating mandates against local community health mandates, especially the well-researched, evidence-based practices our federal agencies have recommended. That’s how our nation did it, for generations, with our Montana state and county highway and traffic laws. Now, with covid regulations and mandates about as primitive as car travel mandates then, we have work to do. Our governor should join with us the citizens of Montana supporting the good of all of us. This means community health mandates and regulations not unlike our regulated rights to drive cars.

 

A Pew poll last week found 48% of conservative white Christians consider community health effects “a lot” when deciding whether to get covid vaccine. In contrast, 65% of Catholics, 68% of unaffiliated Americans, and 70% of Black Protestants cited community health first. I hope we in Southern Montana are better aligned with Jesus’ mandate to our neighbor in his “Greatest Commandment.”

 

 

Shaking the Pillars of American Democracy

 

I’m so thankful we are not China.

 

Unlike in Chairman Mao’s reign of 1966-1976, we have a democracy upheld by three co-equal pillars of our government. The truth-finding power (judicial branch) is separated from the law-enforcement power (executive branch) and the law-making power (legislative branch). Truth is not a matter of opinion, bias, or preference which can be manipulated to serve tyranny. Truth must be based on legal evidence subject to scrutiny. A few months ago, from lower courts up to U.S. Supreme Court, allegations of fraud in our democracy were found to be meritless at best. At worst, they remain a conspiracy to remove power from local officials in counties and states, to silence the voice of the people, and to give power to outsiders to determine whether or not an election is rigged. This is the worst of Chinese communist ideology. It doesn’t belong here.

 

“I’m here for your help, Mr. David,” spoke a well-dressed man at my door at XiHua University, near Chengdu, Sichuan, China, winter of 2002.  China’s federal government had directed university attorneys in constitutional law to contribute chapters to a legal policy document required for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). He, the lead attorney on our campus, was assigned to submit his writing on capital punishment. He had called earlier to set up an appointment, and had emailed me his document to peruse.

 

We sat down and progressed through the “Chinglish” elements I had highlighted. He was cordial and articulate. We began contrasting the American trial-by-jury with China’s trial-by-judges, as applicable to various capital crimes. I had studied the standards applying to sedition, speech against government, as prohibited in China.  I saw a huge hole allowing powerful officials to condemn critical speech, a capital crime there.  To my non-legal mind, his writing on sedition left evidence standards broad enough to drive a truck through. I told him this. He launched into a speech on why trial-by-jury could never work in China because peasants cannot understand evidence.  He said “It’s possible this works in America, but never in China. Jurists who have the lives of citizens in their hands cannot be common people here.” I was shocked. So only the powerful have the right to determine what is true, even the right to continue living.

 

I could understand some of where he was coming from. He divulged his opinion that up to 40 million people perished as a result of China’s “Cultural Revolution” That holocaust was fed by Chairman Mao’s big lie: “Counter-revolutionaries are everywhere around us, even in families; they have secret thoughts against me! They must be rooted out and eliminated!” (see documentation in Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang, friend of a professor friend of mine at XiHua University) Families were divided against families, children against elders, parents against children. Out of loyalty to their leader, they betrayed each other to be tried, sent to forced labor, and even executed as enemies of Mao’s revolution. 

 

Later that spring, we strolled off-campus with a half dozen students to find and visit a farm family. An elderly couple was home. We were cordially received, and our students talked at length with them. Three of us were invited into the farmer’s bedroom to see his most prized possession. It was a solid silver etching of a stern, life-size Chairman Mao, peering down above the farmer’s bed.  I knew my students were schooled in the new “Deng Xiao Ping” thoughts on democracy in China, rejecting Chairman Mao’s thought control. I heard a bit of tension in their voices. They explained to me later that this farmer could not possibly abandon his loyalty to Chairman Mao, because it was a religion to him. 

 

Elderly farmers continue to admire Mao today, even though they suffered under his oppression. Mao had set up production incentives for farmers in that county to prove the success of his authoritarian communism. Facing food shortages, farmers fudged their production data to win needed provisions. They easily exaggerated production rates. But this determined the following year’s taxes: in bags of rice. Officials cleaned out farm commune granaries, far exceeding their acreage capacity, because they falsely inflated their production the year before. He said the farm population of those who died in Sichuan from starvation exceeded counter-revolutionary executions. I asked, “How many total across China died?” He said it was more like 40 million lives lost during Mao’s reign. Yet decades later, loyalty to then the world’s greatest liar remained strong.  

 

Maybe it connects with Montana Republican politicians who still succumb to our former president’s lies.  He repeatedly cited twisted evidence of “massive fraud” on social media, echoed by political pundits who are not legally required to present truth. Fox News lawyers argued in court that “no reasonable viewer of ordinary  intelligence” would expect Tucker Carlson to tell the truth, even after saying, “Remember the facts of the story. These are undisputed.”(McDougal v. Fox News, 2020). The facts he cited were not facts. They were easily disputed, and he knew so at the time. With a lie carefully cultivated by a respected FOX commentator, and repeated often enough and widely enough, even our Montana leadership refused to speak the true evidence they also knew. 

 

Republicans can save us. They are just now beginning to question what remained unquestioned in this farmer’s mind on Chairman Mao. Our nation needs free elections.  Remember the thin blue line of Capitol police, who stood in protection of the true pillars of our democracy back in January 6? And some gave their lives? It can inspire a return of the Republican party to the values of our nation. 

 

Fortunately, corporate losses from our media lies are large. Lawsuits are looming against right-wing mistakenly-labeled “conservative” media giants refusing to come clean from, for example, falsely discrediting the voting machine reliability in Georgia. It was Republicans, grounded in our government’s judicial pillar of democracy, who began strengthening our pillars in Georgia. May truth spread among us, and may confidence in our American democracy return here in Montana as well.