An article and response illustrating the right and left political tug of war in America in 2024. We might understand one another better if we discussed our assumptions. We might understand each other better if we wanted to understand each other. As Christians, we must be involved, but we must put Christ first and politics later.

Initial article by J. Damon Cain columnist, Beckley Register-Herald

Apr 19, 2024

Bob Dylan’s third studio album, “The Times They Are a-Changing,” was released in February of 1964. A departure from his first two efforts, the disc featured only original compositions, stark and sparsely arranged ballads that offered a critical if not searing examination of the myriad issues in that decade of seismic change so long ago. Racism, poverty and social change primarily dominated the headlines and the discussion, big issues those. The storm clouds of the counterculture movement and the protests over our nation’s involvement in Vietnam were just forming on a distant horizon. Lightning was flashing.

Here recently, watching our nation pull back from a proud history of advancement, of so many hard and worthy battles fought and won long ago for human rights and civil rights and voter rights, for human dignity, seeing now the autocrats and theocrats who would, in their arrogance and narrow thinking, ignore our Constitution and attempt to impose their will on the rest of mankind, determining what is appropriate and moral and what is not for all of society, I am concerned for our nation’s future, for its democracy, for a healthy debate and our ability, as a nation, to collaborate and build consensus, to compromise for the greater good.

Not one of these thin-skinned wannabe dictators would ever think to board a bus to right a wrong, a moral injustice, knowing in advance they, outnumbered, would get their teeth rearranged at the Montgomery Greyhound station.

But these unmitigated bores would have the gall to ban books at public libraries, write laws to abolish the teaching of history and scuttle any uncomfortable classroom discussion of race. They would, as they have, restrict women’s access to quality health care, unflinching as they tell their wives and sisters, mothers and daughters, female neighbors and colleagues that their bodies are no longer sovereign, that they have to answer to the dictates and moral standards of a ruling party of conservative white nationalists, men in legislatures across the country like the one just up the road in Charleston, West Virginia.

Standing in what feels like the shifting sands of a beach under assault as the tide rolls in, I have been thinking often about those years long ago, about Dylan’s lyrics when he was at his best and I was just a kid, one of four sons of Jack and Alyce Cain, growing up in the isolated and protected world of rural Iowa.

Yes, the 1960s was one of the most tumultuous and divisive decades in all of world history – and it was televised most often on impossibly small television sets, the images in black and white and grainy. The news arrived first in the early afternoon, right after lunch, when the mailman delivered our newspaper, The Des Moines Register, and then every night at 6 on one of three broadcast stations.

The debate during those years shaped our nation, but rarely did it reach with much force back home. Not on the farm. The price of beans, soybeans, was more consequential. Well, until those TV screens turned to color and the news reports started showing war zone film footage from battlefields halfway around the world, not until the caskets started showing up, and not until the school president came close to shutting down the University of Iowa because of campus protests. But that came later.

The title track to that Dylan album is one of the artist’s most famous, “a song with a purpose,” the nation’s troubadour would say. It was ahead of its time, a prophecy, capturing that spirit of upheaval and foreshadowing even greater change and trouble ahead.

While the album was released about four months after the assassination of President John Kennedy, the title track had been written in the fall of 1963, ahead of that terrible and tragic day in Dallas. There were others. In ’63, before Kennedy, Medgar Evers, an American civil rights activist and the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, was assassinated by a Klansman and white supremacist, Byron De La Beckwith. In 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down. And then in 1968, both Martin Luther King, Jr. on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, and Bobby Kennedy in a kitchen hallway of the Ambassador Hotel’s Embassy Ballroom in Los Angeles.

It was King who popularized the saying, not his, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Well, I hope that is true. But in these days, as we see our nation’s values stained by those who think only of themselves, we had best acknowledge that there are no guarantees, that things will not necessarily get better. The good guys don’t always win.

Can you hear the thunder?

Reply to B-R-H Opinion piece 20 April 2024.

Response by Mark D. Harris

21 April 2024

Mr. Cain,

I was going through the “In their own words” section of the B-R-H from 20 April and noticed your opinion piece entitled “Sorry, but the good guys don’t always win.” Your article contained a fair amount of name-calling (“thin-skinned wannabe dictators,” “unmitigated bores,” “autocrats and theocrats”), which may delight the ghost of William Randolph Hearst but is perhaps not the best way to convince others of the truth of your viewpoints.

I am intrigued by many of the assumptions that underlie your comments. The first assumption, of course, is that the 1960s and the 2020s are analogous enough to justify an opinion piece comparing the two decades. Another assumption is that your vision of “advancement” is shared by those who you would consider, and would consider themselves, “good guys.” Presumably, you believe that those who disagree with you, such as the targets of your name-calling, do not want “advancement” and are not “good guys.” I suspect that they may not agree, particularly those “men in legislatures” in Charleston WV. I know of no legislators who believe that they are “ignoring the Constitution” and I have not talked to even one that wishes to “abolish the teaching of history.”

Perhaps the differences between your opinion and those you berate are the assumptions that each makes. Since history books can only be so big and school assignments can only be so long, perhaps the history debate is about how much of each idea and event to include. If one assumes that abortion is murder and that murder is an evil thing, which is the cornerstone of the pro-life movement, then those who oppose abortion will not relent, though legions of judges, politicians, and activists shout, scream, cry, and fight for a thousand years. If one is pro-choice, he or she must either deny that abortion is murder, which becomes harder by the day as medicine advances, or like Bill Maher, admit that abortion is murder and that they are OK with that.

You note that your opponents push the “moral standards of a ruling party of conservative white nationalists.” Is your assumption that pushing a particular morality is a bad thing? Doesn’t everyone push some moral standard, as our standards are reflected in our every thought, word, and action? Our moral standards are the glasses through which we see the world – our weltanschauung (world view). Muslims may push the Quran and the Hadiths, Hindus may push the Vedas and Bhagavad Gita, and Buddhists may push the Tipitaka and the Sutras. Secularists may push the Humanist Manifesto, Das Kapital, and the Communist Manifesto. “Victim” groups may push the worldview illustrated by Derrida and Foucault, with a dash of Nietzsche thrown in.

The beauty of a representative democracy, a republic, which is what we have, is that each citizen can push his or her own moral standard. The question has never been whether to follow a moral standard, as it is impossible to make any laws without moral standards, but rather which standard or combination of standards to use. The society that results is an expression of the chosen moral standards and the virtue or vice of its members. Most societies have followed the moral standards of a majority of their members. I invite you to read the original religious works mentioned above and look at societies following Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, secular, and other moral standards. Which of those would you prefer to live in?

If you would suffer me one last comment, you may not wish to characterize those with whom you disagree as those who would never “think to board a bus to right a wrong.” Many of your rhetorical targets have been outnumbered and had their teeth, limbs, bodies, and minds “rearranged” by bullets, bombs, and bayonets while they were trying to right some of the greatest wrongs in history.  I trust that you did not intend to deny their sacrifice.

Perhaps knowing the assumptions behind one’s conclusions is the best way to have a fruitful conversation, one that generates more light than heat.

Thank you for your provocative opinion piece. Thank you also for your assistance in the “In their own words” project.

Mark

Summary

Mr. Cain and I seem to represent different ends of the political spectrum. We clearly disagree, but I hope that we can do so without venom or vice. More fundamental than politics, which lasts for a lifetime, is religion, which impacts forever. We must never sacrifice eternity to find fame, money, or power in our earthly sojourn.

As a Christian, I must disagree with Mr. Cain’s thesis, that the good guys don’t always win. There is only one Good Guy, and at the cross…He won.