Daily Archives: January 5, 2022

Letters to the Editor| The Columbus Dispatch

While the human cost of the COVID-19 pandemic has been staggering, and its emotional toll on health care workers unimaginable, the economiccost to the health care systemhas been enormous, as well. Yet, a significant portion of the billions of dollars spent on hospital care could have been avoided.

More: "Doctors and nurses crying after their shifts," CMO says. 'Health care heroes' need support

According to the Health System Tracker, a publication of thePeterson Center on Healthcare andtheKaiser Family Foundation, there were a total of 690,000 vaccine-preventable COVID-19 hospitalizations form June through November 2021with each of those cases costing an average of $20,000.That equals 13 billion, 800 million unnecessarilyspentdollarsthat will come from taxpayers or insurance rate payers.

In the end, those claiming the freedom to be unvaccinated are doing so at an enormous cost to others. It gives freedom isnt free an entirely new meaning.

Chuck Ardo, Lancaster

More: How to submit a letter to the editor for The Columbus Dispatch

I am writing with regard to a Dec. 28 Dispatch editorial published in the Canton Repository "Lawmakers hellbent on making gun violence worse."

More: Our view: Hellbent lawmakers are doing 'something' about gun violence making it worse

In the "world of rules" you refer to, needing a license to drive a car, hunt deer, and take fish from Ohio waters, I fully agree with, as license fees help pay the costs of maintaining roadsand funding the ODNR to keep our state a viable place for wildlife to flourish, while giving the residents who wish to participate an environment to do so. It doesn't require a constitutional obligation to do so, either.

Regarding the concealed carry law that awaits the governor's signature, we must realize that the right to defend ourselves is granted by the Second Amendment to the Constitution. It is clearly stated that this right "shall not be infringed" -period.

More: Concealed carry, guns in schools: Two major gun bills win approval in Ohio House

Any need for a license will not be adhered to by those who have bad intent. The law-abiding citizen who is only wanting to have a chance of surviving a situation where his/her life may be in danger is no threat to anyone other than the "bad guy."

I highly urge the governor to sign this bill into law.

Randy J. Lindower,New Philadelphia

With every man, woman and child having access to one or moreguns, why should there be a question as to why homicides have risen in Columbus and the U.S.?

More: Amelia Robinson: Instead of celebrating Christmas, far too many are 'dying by the gun'

The actions of many of our elected officials explains why instruments searching for intelligent life are pointed toward the sky.

John Lindamood, Columbus

I am a vaccination card supporter (referencing Dec. 26 letter to the editor "Do vaccination card advocates support proper ID for voting?") and also support proper ID for voting.

More: Letters: Common sense needed about COVID-19 vaccines. Ohio Republicans need to shape up.

The problem is that William Kloss forgets we already have proper identification for voting:at the voting venue they compare my signature with the one on file when I registered as well as asking other questions about my address, etc.

If I vote by mail I have to submit my name, address, signature, date of birth and either part of my Social Securitynumber or my driver's license number. So showing a driver's license to vote would not add anything, and of course, not everyone has a suitable license. There is no need for anything else.

Martin J. Williamson, Worthington

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Letters: Freedom to refuse vaccine comes with enormous cost

Photo: Creative Commons/Caroline Lna Becker

Eighty-one years ago this week, President Franklin Roosevelt delivered what was, from a substantive perspective, the most important speech of his unique and remarkable presidency.

While the 1933 inaugural speech (We have nothing to fear but fear itself.) is almost certainly better known, FDRs January 6, 1941 address to Congress commonly referred to as the Four Freedoms Speech is now rightfully remembered, alongside Lincolns Gettysburg Address, as one of the best and most inspiring testimonials to the cause of human freedom (and enunciations of national purpose) ever offered by an American chief executive.

The speech was delivered at a time the U.S. was still wrestling with what its role should be in combating Nazi Germany and in it, Roosevelt forcefully called for the intentional construction of a world in which such noxious and destructive forces be forever banished and all human beings would enjoy a series of fundamental birthrights.

Today, at another moment of national and global peril (and in which the basic concept of human freedom has frequently been twisted and misdirected off onto weird tangents like the possession of assault weapons, slashing taxes on corporations, and the resistance of basic public health guidelines) its an apt time to recall and celebrate the four freedoms FDR lifted up and to add a fifth that he would have undoubtedly included had he been able to foresee the changes that have overtaken our planet in the intervening decades.

Freedom Number One on FDRs list was the freedom of speech and expression. Of course, in some ways, the world has made important strides in this realm over the last 81 years. Here in the United States and many other parts of the world, for instance, the freedom of artists resides in a much stronger position than it did in the mid-20th Century when thousands were blacklisted for leftist political views and films and books were regularly banned for obscene content. The advent of the internet has contributed to this trend by making it harder than ever for would-be censors to monitor and control what people express and consume.

But, of course, the fight in this realm continues. In just the last year, forces of the political right have launched a new and concerted campaign to whitewash how American history is taught and renewed efforts to prevent schoolchildren from accessing celebrated authors. Meanwhile, in other parts of the globe perhaps most notably, Xis China and Putins Russia the right to openly criticize the government and champion meaningful political change remains effectively nonexistent.

A similar story can be told with respect to FDRs second core freedom the freedom of worship. While some countries have made enormous strides in ending government efforts to stifle or advance religious belief, the trend is decidedly negative elsewhere. Not only do many nations remain organized as repressive theocracies, but even in the United States, our historic commitment to separation of church and state is under a new and energetic assault.

And then there are Freedoms Three and Four the freedom from want and the freedom from fear. Here too, of course, the record is decidedly mixed.

Across the planet, even as millions of humans live longer and healthier lives than ever before, millions of others live in abject poverty with hunger and hopelessness their constant companions even here in the U.S.

And while the world has made important strides in turning away from the threat of nuclear annihilation that so dominated and poisoned human mental well-being throughout the second half of the 20thcentury, today we rightfully fear an equally daunting existential threat: the global environmental emergency.

As more and more people are coming to realize especially in the dark shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic the planet Earth is, effectively, shrinking. The global population continues to grow and resources and inhabitable land become stretched thinner and thinner. As the destructive impacts of climate change become more apparent, humans are, tragically, right to fear for the long-term sustainability of life as weve come to know it.

Its for this reason that we would do well to supplement FDRs still excellent list with a fifth freedom on which all others remain utterly dependent the freedom of a sustainable environment. After all, the cause of human freedom wont amount to much in the long run without rapid and intentional efforts to preserve the fragile biosphere upon which all life is dependent.

The bottom line: The Year 2022 is sure to feature passionate and important debates on a dizzying array of political, social, economic issues so much so that it will become easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. At such a time, caring and thinking people would do well to stay focused on a discreet list of guiding objectives, and the one we might describe as the Five Freedoms is a good place to start.

Originally posted here:

The five freedoms we must champion in the New Year - ncpolicywatch.com

Two people were pronounced dead at the scene of a crash in the inbound lanes of Freedom Drive in west Charlotte Tuesday morning.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. Two people were killed and two others were hurt in a crash on Freedom Drive in west Charlotte Tuesday morning, authorities said.

Medic responded to a reported crash on Freedom Drive near Alleghany Street around 5:30 a.m. The crash involved a 2004 Nissan Maxima and a 2017 Hyundai Sonata and both received severe damage.

Medic said two people were pronounced dead at the scene.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department confirmed the identities of the two as Onjenay Porter, 25, and David Coleman, 32. They were passengers in the 2004 Nissan Maxima.

The drivers of both vehicles were taken to a hospital for treatment.

CMPD says the Nissan turned directly in front of the Hyundai, causing the crash.

The driver, Kenya Harris, was determined to be impaired by an officer. Warrants were obtained against Harris, who remains hospitalized, for felony death by motor vehicle.

Officers say impairment and speed do not seem to be contributing factors for the driver of the Hyundai, who was wearing a seatbelt at the time of the crash.

Freedom Drive was shut down between Alleghany Street and Camp Greene Street for the investigation. The road reopened shortly after noon.

Drivers in the area can use Tuckaseegee Road to get around the incident. Drivers heading toward Uptown can use Ashley Road or Wilkinson Boulevard to get into the city.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police have not determined the cause of the crash at this time or identified the people who were killed. Any person with information about this incident is asked to call 704-334-1600 or 704-432-TIPS.

Contact Chris Mulcahy atcmulcahy@wcnc.comand follow him onFacebook,TwitterandInstagram.

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Driver charged with DWI after 2 killed, 2 hurt in crash on Freedom Drive - WCNC.com

The major camps in today's debates merely disagree about whose relativism should be protected by the structures of political power.

Conservative discourse in America has set its sights on the extremes of a woke progressivism preached by the liberal establishment in politics, big business, and the media. Pages of conservative publications and think tanks are littered with censure of critical race theory, gender ideology, LGBTQ ideology, etc. This is as it should be.

Yet many of these criticisms fall into the same traps as the very thing they criticize. An ideological and moral relativism lies at the heart of both sides of this discourse: a shrill insistence on the freedom of the individual to think or be whatever he or she (or whatever other pronoun) wishes to think or be. The sides merely disagree about whose relativism should be protected by the structures of political power.

In contrast, we can remember a conservatism that would assert, simply and confidently, that there exists an enduring moral order, one that is not simply relative to the subjective whims and preferences of the individual; that the truth is not simply what you individually decide it to be; and that public authority should govern according to precisely this enduring and objective moral order. Ben Shapiros notorious quip that facts dont care about your feelings might be considered a faint echo of this older moral realism that used to be the hallmark of conservatism.

Yet the capitulation of many conservatives (including Shapiro himself) to a libertarian individualism that renounces the role of government in publicly committing to a particular vision of the common good undermines this commitment to moral realism, in practice relativizing even the claim that moral truth is absolute: I choose to believe that moral truth is absolute, but you may choose to believe whatever you wish to believe. It is not uncommon to hear conservatives (on talk radio for instance) condemning the indoctrination of Americans by the left as a direct attack on their constitutional right to freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Why cant they just leave us alone and let us think what we want to think? Conservatism, by this account, is about getting along withor simply being left alone bypeople who think differently from ourselves. Isnt this the purpose of the First Amendment? Isnt this the noble vision described in the founding documents?

It is important to keep in mind, however, that the liberal proponents of progressive ideology also view themselves as proponents of free thought and free expression. That is, after all, the core of progressivisms main tenets. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are the doctrinal expression of the lefts brand of identity politics, which professes the individuals right to make his own identity, to express himself authentically by a pure act of will. If I cannot simply choose my gender, and claim all the rights proper to my chosen identity, then am I really free? If the constraints of the patriarchal family structure, or Christian morality, or traditional gender norms, etc., prevent me from choosing my identity, then am I really free? The lefts agenda to enforce woke doctrine is really nothing other than its own attempt to preserve that most American of values: the freedom of the sovereign individual.

Both the libertarian conservative and the progressive liberal see themselves as victims of an oppressive and dogmatic ideological structure: the conservative sees himself as oppressed by the ideological structures of the left, its political parties, the media, university administrations, corporate leadership, etc.; the progressive sees himself as oppressed by the very structures and traditions which, allegedly, the conservative wishes to conserve. Both protest that they are entitled to think whatever they please, be whomever they please, express themselves however they please, and be left alone by those who would tell them otherwise.

For the conservative, freedom of thought is a right protected by the original American Constitutionthough not by much more than that, as the Constitution alone proves to be increasingly insufficient against the ongoing capture of Americas institutions by progressive ideology. For the progressive, the freedom to choose ones own identity must be protected by standards of diversity, equity, and inclusion that are incorporated into evolving constitutional structures, including the government, the media, the schools, the leadership of Americas corporations, and so forth, in order to protect the individual from oppressive structures (e.g., the traditional family, traditional religion, etc.) that would put limits on that freedom. Yet both sides are intent on holding the other accountable to their own version of relativism, and they see their opponents as authoritarian oppressors or dogmatic fundamentalists.

Libertarian conservatism overlooks the fact that moral realism has practical consequences in the public sphere. Moral realism requires a strong political commitment, not simply to freedom of thought or freedom of identity, but to the public recognition and enforcement of moral truth and the common good. It is not consistent to be a realist in theory but a relativist in practice. If the truth really is absolute, then it follows that you may not simply choose to believe whatever you wish to believe, or be whomever you wish to be. If the truth is truly independent of an individuals feelings or choices, then it requires a public authority to defend it as such. Without such a public authority to defend and enforce the truthyes, even to legislate moralitythen in practice, no matter how much one might assert the contrary, the truth has been relativized. This is what both the libertarian and the liberal desire: a world where each person may choose his truth, where no morality is publicly enforced except the right to choose ones own truth.

The impulse to criticize woke or progressive ideology on the basis of an imaginary right to freedom of expression undermines the more venerable conservative commitment to moral realism and tradition. Conservatism thus becomes no more than a mask for an alternate form of liberal relativism. It is notable that this mask drops when the same reasoning about free speech is deployed by some self-styled conservatives, such as David French, in defense of woke ideology, or at least in defense of the freedom of its proponents to propagate it. It should be clear that this essentially libertarian approach, even if it goes by the name of constitutional conservatism, is a misguided response for conservatives to adopt towards progressive liberalism, not simply because it is powerless to ward off progressivisms assaults, but more importantly because it is essentially the same thing on an ideological level.

Jonathan Culbreath is an independent writer and researcher living in Southern California.

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Which Freedom? Whose Relativism? - The American Conservative

Equines For Freedom (EFF) is proud to announce that the 120 members of the Riverside High School (RHS) National Honor Society (NHS) held their inaugural Veterans Day Walk-a-thon on November 11, 2021.

Coordinated by Stephanie McManus, RHS NHS Faculty Sponsor, this event encouraged each student member of the NHS to solicit family and community sponsors for their participation in the walk.

Working together to obtain sponsors and then walking together around the RHS track on Veterans Day, 2021, the students raised a total of $5, 069.00. All monies raised by the RHS NHS was then presented to EFF to support the on-going reatment of veterans.

In past years, McManus coordinated an annual Veterans Breakfast, typically held on Veterans Day, but that event, like many others, has been cancelled for the last two years due to COVID. She is looking forward to resuming the Veterans Breakfast in 2022 as well as moving the walk-a-thon to the spring. As with this event, the focus, going forward, will be on raising money to support local organizations which specifically assist veterans.

EFF is a 5013 non-profit organization which provides equine-assisted complex PTSD treatment to current and former U.S. Military service members and First Responders regardless of the source of trauma or characterization of service at no charge to the member. To find more information about EFF, please visit their website at http://www.equinesforfreedom.org.

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Equines for Freedom benefits from Riverside High School National Honor Society Walk-a-thon - The Abington Journal

Two recent works of political theory evocatively capture the origins of the state of perverse unfreedom in which we live today. French philosopher Grgoire Chamayous The Ungovernable Society: A Genealogy of Authoritarian Liberalism (originally published in 2018 and translated by Wiley in 2021) and British writer Stuart Jeffries Everything, All The Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern (Verso, 2021) help readers understand the origins of the shift to neoliberalism from the 1970s to now, the repercussions of this move and how we can shift away from it.

In their influential 1980 documentary and accompanying book Free to Choose, neoliberal economists Milton and Rose Friedman argued that an unrestrained free market was the solution to social problems. They claimed that governments and unions were holding back human progress and innovation. Milton Friedman, who won the 1976 Nobel Prize for economics, also believed that democracy was the enemy of freedom and that individuals were primarily consumers who could better express their preferences with their wallets than with their vote.

Friedman supported the 1973 coup in Chile, where popular democratic socialist Salvador Allende was overthrown by right-wing authoritarian Augusto Pinochet. Despite the junta unleashing police terror on civilians, including the execution of hundreds of leftists in football stadiums, Friedman endorsed the state that adopted his favoured free-market policies. He believed capitalism was synonymous with freedom, making a military dictatorship preferable to a reformist, moderate Left government that respected civil liberties.

In the following decades, many of Freidmans and other right-wing libertarian ideas were applied by governments from Beijing to Pretoria. But far from creating a free-market utopia, we live in a world that provides fewer opportunities for the majority than in the 1970s. A World Inequality Database report released in 2021 conclusively showed that rising incomes for the super-rich have been directly accompanied by lowered social mobility for the impoverished and middle classes.

As inequality and impoverishment reach new heights, even the former middle classes are finding themselves both overworked and less socially mobile, which can be seen in rising levels of depression and anxiety. Rather than a world of open borders and free minds, we are increasingly encircled by what political theorist William I Robinson called the global police state of surveillance and growing walls.

Friedman believed that Homo economicus a person motivated entirely by profit with no interest beyond accumulation was the glorious end point of all historical endeavour. But, despite marketers and media influencers claiming we have more choice than ever, the grim social conditions of the 2020s feel like a cage surrounded by blaring video billboards that pacify us with false images of unattainable luxury and autonomy.

Chamayou began his book in the early 1970s. Across both the Global North and South, radical reforms and social interventions to regulate capitalism had resulted in rising living standards. This increased pressure on social power structures brought on calls for more radical, direct democracy. From decolonial movements to feminisms refusal of male despostism over women, the era was defined by a new sense of emerging human freedom, and of shared collective and individual emancipation.

But from the perspective of corporate managers and politicians, it was seen as an attack on the entire socioeconomic order. Marshalling a huge web of documentation, from the reports of conservative think tanks to the internal memos of business people who felt their staff was becoming too unruly, Chamayou makes the compelling argument that the neoliberal shift was fuelled by a sense of crisis among elites.

Their tactical response was two-pronged. It entailed pushing for new monetarist policies to restore the power of capital, through lowering taxes, undermining unions and chipping away at social safety networks. By making life harder for working people, it was believed, they would be dissuaded from the popular radicalism that the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s had brought about. Ideological indoctrination sustained this new direction. Anti-corporate campaigners had given big business a bad name, by exposing its complicity in the crimes of the Vietnam War, support for the apartheid government in South Africa and many other explotative practices. In response, corporate marketers and politicians such as Margaret Thatcher presented capitalism as a radical force opposed to the cold bureaucracy and ossified forms of state control. They took the popular ideals of freedom and hollowed them out, reducing them to the limited scope of economic choice.

This idea of freedom was a pretext for growing authoritarianism. Chamayou demonstrates that workers have consistently seen the disappearance of workplace democracy and must now endure extended working hours, reduced salaries and intensified surveillance in factories and offices.

In his book, Jeffries explores how this ideological shift was accompanied by postmodernism. The term is often seen as a boogeyman the Right claims it means a nihilistic rejection of traditional values, and many leftists have interpreted it as an attack on the values of social progress.

Jeffries demystifies both these approaches. He shows that postmodernism emerged in the 1970s as a suspicion of grand narratives, with a focus rather on flippancy, change and play. For example, the architecture of public housing schemes was seen as cold and inhumane, leading to calls for developers to learn from the colour and energy of commercial advertising in cities like Las Vegas. Pop icon David Bowie showed that identity and personality were fluid by changing appearance in each album. Hip-hop, which emerged from the decaying urban conditions of New York in the late 1970s, used the technique of sampling old songs to create the future sound of music.

But these benign experiments disguised how the Right and capital benefitted from postmodernism because it also brought about the sense that innovation is no longer possible, that there is nothing beyond the consumer economies of today. This has allowed the Right to normalise neoliberalism as the only viable way to organise society. Even if we feel nothing works and that we live in an ever-worsening corporate dystopia, we are constantly reminded that there is no alternative.

But as both these engaging and richly detailed works show, neoliberalism is a historical and political project that is only a few decades old. It is not an unassailable fortress, but a flimsy ideological construction that, as the recent rejection of the Pinochet-era Constitution in Chile shows, can be contested.

The revolts of the 1960s showed that rather than creating an opposition between personal freedom and social justice, improved conditions increased the scope of individual liberty. The Left needs to reclaim the concept of freedom from the Right and advance a vision of human emancipation that shows neoliberalism to be the authoritarian mirage it is.

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Book Review | The illusion of freedom - newframe.com