Rights and Privileges -- A New Piece for July 4, 2010
(article originally appears in The Cumberland View)
I am very grateful for the privilege of writing for The Cumberland View. I wanted to lead off with that because I believe it is a good start for some serious thoughts for Independence Day. If you do not think this is a tough time for our country you are out of touch with reality. The oil spill alone would be enough of a crisis. I lost a dear friend many years ago in an accident on a rig in the North Sea off Scotland. They shipped Jeff Fields' body home to Texas, and I officiated at the funeral of this young Texas Aggie. His parents never got over it, and now they have died, and I miss all of them. I have never been happy about off-shore drilling since then. I know it employs many people, and relatively few accidents have happened, but I defy you to defend the terrifying mess in the Gulf. Hopefully, we won't have to use a nuke to stop it, but we may have to. Ironic, isn't it that we have to consider such things. Did anyone or any company or any country have a "right" to drill that deep and that far out? Did the Creator just allow us our folly?
Oh, I know about Brazil and all that. I also know about tsunamis and Tektonic plates and a lot of stuff people want to ignore.
I don't know General Stanley McChrystal, but I do know Rolling Stone magazine. If that magazine had shown its credentials to me I would have said, "You can have five minutes and be on your way. No, make that four minutes."
And you can sit down and read the Universal Code of Military Justice before we talk. The right to free speech and freedom of the press are very important, even essential to our Republic, but we tend to confuse rights and privileges. The editor of this paper has a right to throw my articles in the trash can. Hopefully, General McChrystal will get his full retirement pay, but his rights are limited by Army rules.
The Secretary of the Army can waive certain rules. As we approach "the Fourth".
I pray for all in our Armed Forces and their families. I am pretty sure you do too.
Many years ago my sister studied at The Rhode Island School of Design. As her protective younger brother, I read their catalogue. I have always remembered a couple of sentences in it. "Attendance at The Rhode Island School of Design is a privilege and not a right. You will enjoy your time here if you remember that. If you ignore our few rules you may be asked to leave."
I don't waste money on gambling, but I am willing to bet this is not in any of their literature now and hasn't been in thirty years.
But in the case of our citizenship we have not only a right to speak up on literally everything, we have a responsibility to do so. And nobody can ask us to leave.
We do not have to be politically correct. Hopefully, we will be courteous to others, but that good quality is not in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. It is, however, in some of our great hymns for the nation. Obviously, we once knew we needed those hymns and the imagery in them. I think we still need them very much. They provide a healing for hurting hearts and a hope for better days. Blessings to you this weekend and always. |
