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Opinion
Reece Terry, publisher
Mark Boehler, editor
4A • Friday, August 24, 2012
Corinth, Miss.
Letter to the editor Lack of voter turnout was quite underwhelming To the editor: The citizens of Corinth spoke in Tuesday’s election. While the results were what some might consider overwhelming or lopsided, the total voter turnout of less than 20 percent of registered voters, while not uncommon, was quite underwhelming. I find it disturbing so few people exercise this basic right we so often take for granted in America. Someone could devote an entire column to this topic. However, I want to address something different. I interpret this turnout, or lack thereof, to mean 80 percent of the city voters simply do not care about the direction or progress of the city. Unlike the 80 percent who did not vote, the city elected officials and the 20 percent who did vote do care, and should be commended. Regardless of whether you voted for or against the tax referendum, simply voting demonstrates you want a better city to live in. We just have a difference of opinions of how we achieve that better city. I truly believe everyone who took a position on this topic by talking to peers, writing letters or simply voting are committed to making our town even better. Corinth Mayor Tommy Irwin and the Board of Aldermen worked hard to develop the plan they ultimately recommended to the people. I’m sure they lost some sleep and maybe even some friends in the process. While I know the outcome was a disappointment, I hope they don’t lose their passion for the community they serve. We should not downplay the sacrifice and the tough situations that often face elected officials. With that said, I believe we are lucky to have city elected officials who are taking the initiative to improve our city. Now the election is behind us, neither gloating nor mourning will change the outcome nor further our cause. Hopefully, the 20 percent of us who voted, both for and against, will harness our desire to better our town and try to devise another plan, one that we can agree on, to improve. This will not be easy, and will certainly require tough decisions in the future, but with the participatory spirit, demonstrated by those who voted, we can succeed. To the 80 percent who didn’t vote and presumably don’t care, I hope you will consider this in the future. Please exercise your right to vote and try to find a way to involve yourself in the civic needs of Corinth -- there are many. While it may sound cliché, I believe it’s true: “Your city needs you.” Clayton Stanley Corinth
Prayer for today Lord, give us wisdom and a loving heart so that at every moment of our life we will be ready for a meeting with you. Amen.
A verse to share
The new world disorder requires new thinking After his great victory in Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush went before the United Nations to declare the coming of a New World Order. The Cold War was yesterday. Communism was in its death throes. The Soviet Empire had crumbled. The Soviet Union was disintegrating. Francis Fukuyama was writing of “The End of History.” Savants trilled about the inevitable triumph of democratic capitalism. Yet, in 2012, sectarianism, tribalism and nationalism are all resurgent, reshaping a world where U.S. power and influence are visibly receding. Syria is sinking into a war of all against all that may end with a breakup of the nation along ethno-sectarian lines — Arab, Druze, Kurd, Sunni, Shia and Christian. Iraq descends along the same path. A U.S. war with Iran could end with a Kurdish enclave in Iran’s northwest tied to Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran’s Azeri north drifting toward Azerbaijan, and a Balochi enclave in the south linked to Pakistan’s largest province, Balochistan, leaving Iran only Persia. The Middle and Near East seem to be descending into a Muslim Thirty Years’ War of Sunni vs. Shia. Out of it may come new nations whose names and borders were not written in drawing rooms by
“Where have you laid him?” Jesus asked. “Come and see, Lord” they replied. Jesus wept. — John 11:34-35 (NIV)
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Reece Terry publisher rterry@dailycorinthian.com
19th and 20th century European cartographers, but in blood. India, too, is feeling the Pat tremors. EthBuchanan nic violence in the Assam Columnist region has sent hundreds of thousands fleeing in panic. In East Asia, ethnonationalism, fed by memories from the 20th century, is igniting clashes among former Cold War allies. Twenty years ago, Manila ordered the U.S. Navy out of Subic Bay, which had been home to the U.S. Pacific Fleet almost since the Spanish-American war. Now Manila is inviting America back. Why? China is claiming islets, atolls and reefs 1,000 miles from the Chinese mainland, but only 100 miles from the Philippine coast. To annex what could be a mother lode of oil, gas and minerals in the South China Sea, China is stoking the ethnonationalism of its own people. Yet, a fear of ethnonationalism is behind Beijing’s repression of Tibetans and Uighurs, whose regions are being inundated with Han Chinese, just as Josef Stalin flooded Estonia, Lithuania
and Latvia with Russians after annexing them in 1940. “All is race; there is no other truth,” wrote Benjamin Disraeli in his novel “Tancred.” Beijing behaves as if it believes Disraeli was right. China now claims Japan’s Senkaku islands, which Beijing calls the Diaoyu. South Korea claims Japan’s Takeshima in the East China Sea, which Seoul calls Dokdo. Here history enters the quarrel. In 1908, in the Root-Takahira Agreement, Theodore Roosevelt agreed to Tokyo’s annexation of Korea in return for recognition of U.S. annexation of the Philippines. Root-Takahira is a black page in Korean history. For Japan’s occupation ran through World War II, when Korean girls were forced into prostitution as “comfort women” for Japanese troops. Tokyo and Seoul were Cold War allies, but these old wounds never healed. The visit to Dokdo recently by South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, cheered by his countrymen, represented a rejection of Japan’s claim and an assertion that the islets belong to Korea. Russia, too, has now gotten into the islands game. Two days after the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the day before
Nagasaki, Stalin declared war and sent Russian troops to seize the Kuril islands north of Japan and expel the population. Japan still claims the four southernmost islands of the Kuril chain. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev just stoked the flames of tribalism in both nations by visiting the Kuril island that is closest to Japan. With China, South Korea and Russia asserting claims and making intrusions on islands Japan regards as sacred territory, Tokyo is taking a new look at rebuilding her armed forces. The bipolar world of the Cold War is history. The new world order, however, is not the One World dreamed of by Wilsonian idealists. It is a Balkanizing world where race, tribe, culture and creed matter most, and democracy is seen not as an end in itself but as a means to an end — the accretion of power by one’s own kind to achieve one’s own dreams. As Abraham Lincoln said in another time, when an old world was dying and a new world was being born, “As our situation is new, let us think and act anew.” (Daily Corinthian columnist Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”)
‘Issues’ or the future of America? There are some very serious issues at stake in this year’s election — so many that some people may not be able to see the forest for the trees. Individual issues are the trees, but the forest is the future of America as we have known it. The America that has flourished for more than two centuries is being quietly but steadily dismantled by the Obama administration, during the process of dealing with particular issues. For example, the merits or demerits of President Obama’s recent executive order, suspending legal liability for young people who are here illegally, presumably as a result of being brought here as children by their parents, can be debated pro and con. The separation of powers into legislative, executive and judicial branches of government is at the heart of the Constitution of the United States — and the Constitution is at the heart of freedom for Americans. No President of the United States is authorized to repeal parts of legislation passed by Congress. He may veto the whole legislation, but then Congress can override his veto if they have enough votes. Nevertheless,
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every President takes an oath to faithfully execute the laws that have been passed and Thomas sustained — Sowell not just the ones he hapHoover Institution pens to agree with. If laws passed by the elected representatives of the people can be simply overruled unilaterally by whoever is in the White House, then we are no longer a free people, choosing what laws we want to live under. When a President can ignore the plain language of duly passed laws, and substitute his own executive orders, then we no longer have “a government of laws, and not of men.” When we confine our debates to the merits or demerits of particular executive orders, we are tacitly accepting arbitrary rule. The Constitution of the United States cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution. But, if we allow ourselves to get bogged down in the details of particular policies imposed by executive orders, and vote solely on that basis, then we have failed to protect the Consti-
tution — and ourselves. Whatever the merits or demerits of the No Child Left Behind Act, it is the law until Congress either repeals it or amends it. But for Barack Obama to unilaterally waive whatever provisions he doesn’t like in that law undermines the fundamental nature of American government. President Obama has likewise unilaterally repealed the legal requirement that welfare recipients must work, by simply redefining “work” to include other things like going to classes on weight control. If we think the bipartisan welfare reform legislation from the Clinton administration should be repealed or amended, that is something for the legislative branch of government to consider. There have been many wise warnings that freedom is seldom lost all at once. It is usually eroded away. You may not notice a gradual erosion, but you may eventually be shocked to discover one day that it is all gone, that we have been reduced from citizens to subjects, and the Constitution has become just a meaningless bunch of paper. ObamaCare imposes huge costs on some institutions,
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while the President’s arbitrary waivers exempt other institutions from having to pay those same costs. That is hardly the “equal protection of the laws,” promised by the 14th Amendment. John Stuart Mill explained the dangers in that kind of government long ago: “A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement.” If Obama gets reelected, he knows that he need no longer worry about what the voters think about anything he does. Never having to face them again, he can take his arbitrary rule by decree as far as he wants. He may be challenged in the courts but, if he gets just one more Supreme Court appointment, he can pick someone who will rubber stamp anything he does and give him a 5 to 4 majority. (Daily Corinthian columnist Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com.)
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