BART Cop Shooting of Oscar Grant

I've recently been following the story unfolding in the shooting of Oscar Grant.  From the live videos shot by passengers on the trains of San Fransisco (known as BART), it looks like an unprovoked assault and murder of an unarmed African American passenger.  It just doesn't get a lot worse than that.  The shooting was supposed to be a mistake, but I really think that makes very little difference, after viewing the video.  Mr. Grant was clearly being abused no matter what the situation, and if he had been shot with a taser gun, Officer Mehserle should still be in jail.  That our justice system has allowed him bail is atrocious.  That the officer with his knee on Grant's neck was not charged is absurd and revolting.  That any of this even began to happen shows that San Francisco police are not trained well and there are some who ought to be weeded out.

Afghanistan is the Wrong Move

I am glad Obama is President.

That said, one part of Obama's policies that gave me serious pause was renewing the war in Afghanistan.  Before I landed on Obama as my choice among the meager pickings for President, I was for Ron Paul.  The reason was that he understood the meaning of the phrase "humble foreign policy," which is, no unnecessary intervention in other countries - and that rules out most intervention.  A recent raid in an Afghan village shows exactly what the problems are.  19 civilians were killed, only six of them Taliban.  The raid was a secret operation, so of course, when the villagers heard a disturbance and their neighbors crying for help, they came out to defend one another against robbers.  What they found were American commandos.

Obama is going to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan.  What Afghanistan needs is for its government to take responsibility for its people, and for those people to have confidence in their government to take action against terrorists and militants.  Perhaps they are weak, and perhaps they require the support of our powerful military to prop them up while they learn to stand on their own two feet...

But USAID has been working in Afghanistan for years, developing the country for the stated purpose of making terrorism a less necessary option for the people there.  Yes, necessary.  People resort to terrorism much more often than (as was the case with the very rich Bin Laden) they simply volunteer.  For the mass of terrorists, this is the final straw.  When education is good, peace rules, food and the essentials are available to a population, terrorism does not have nearly the same attraction, as there is less anger to fuel it.

Have we learned nothing from Iraq?  Does not the presence of thousands upon thousands of additional American troops fuel the sort of hatred and resentment that fuels these fruitless modern wars?  Is this Obama's economic stimulus plan?  And secret operations within the country seriously undermine both our credibility and that of the Afghan government.

And those are just the political problems.  What about justice and national sovereignty?  Can you even imagine if the national guard killed 19 people in a remote town just to get at a couple of militants in America?  There would be massive outrage, political consequences, firings, trials - you name it.  Now imagine if they were Russian troops who killed American citizens who threatened Russian interests in our country, neglecting to warn our government or anyone in the village for the stated reason that we might be sympathetic to those interests.  Is this not insane?  But for some reason, there is an asymmetrical understanding of justice in the world today.

But of course, I neglect the justification.  Namely, that anyone opposing the ideology of liberal western freedom is entitled to none of the rights it has forcefully taken upon itself to protect.  I wonder, does any state have the authority to revoke the right to life?  Did the state give that right in the first place?  What about liberty?  These questions are no longer asked, though they came to light more clearly during the immensely unpopular Bush administration.  I fear that oppression may come on Obama's coattails for those who do not find his speech as fair-minded as he intends it to be.

A New Presidency, A New Playing Field

Barack Obama is now President of the United States.  Yesterday, he overturned rules that made it illegal for USAID to give money to organization promoting abortions overseas.  While this has been batted back and forth between Republican and Democrat demonstrations for three of his predecessors, it does not change the breathtaking implications for this move, and the huge moral burden it places communities in the third world that are attempting to promote sexual ethics, especially in countries with sky-high HIV rates.  Sexual ethics are the cornerstone of the abortion debate, even though the left is not interested in actually debating this issue (Obama said so himself).  To recap (briefly), choice is not a legal argument - it is a begging of the question, as it is the function of law to prevent certain choices from being made.  Thus, the only question is the justice or injustice of the action, and as it is only in this perverse modern world that people debate what is a human and what is not (never, ever erring on the side of all candidates being human), it is a fairly straightforward issue.  If we must speak of rights, the right to liberty does not usurp the right to life - that's very simple.

Obama has also issued a mandate to close Guantanamo Bay.  That is more like it!  The suspension of habeas corpus and the use of torture must be stopped, and as it is our reputation of adherence to our own principles that has been hurt, it is appropriate for the renewal of that reputation to occur on America's most valuable principle - the peaceful transfer of power - with the destruction of a symbol of the old ways.

Obama has his economic work cut out for him, and while we have now approved $700 billion with the potential for 825 more (totaling over 1.5 trillion dollars!) in aid to the private sector, there must be some sort of way to keep the economy from eating itself in this process of propping up failing institutions.  I hear every day about layoffs, and it makes me nervous.  I hope that Obama, in his work to keep existing companies (and even industries) from collapsing, he and his legislators will consider the absolutely essential matter of entrepreneurship.  There is no business without new business.  Unless, of course, we want to have a workers' revolution, which sounds fun, but I've nothing to wear.

I have been reading the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer lately.  He is a fascinating character - a pacifist who attempted tyrannicide.  Bonhoeffer was a very strong Christian, and the left makes an attempt now and then to appropriate him for their own ideas.  His books make that impossible.  I mention him because there was no one more outspoken against the cooption of the church by the state during the rise and reign of the Nazi Party.  It is not the Church's job to support the state, and if the state courts the favor of the Church, she must be on her guard.  Justice is her concern, but power is not, simply because there is only one leader of the Church.  As the brave German pastor Martin Niemoller put it, "Christ is my fuhrer."  So if there is good to be done by the government, it ought to be done according to God's law and God's justice - justice for the poor, the alien, and the widow - but the Church must remember that its duty is not the destruction of evil, but the salvation of souls.  The gospel must be preached as the gospel, for the gospel.  It makes me nervous when prominent Christians become ceremonial parts of western politics, not because there is anything evil about the politics, but because the Church must remember old Christendom, when power became the Church's new God, and Christ, the servant of all, was forgotten.