Rights, Responsibility, and the LA Wildfires
Democracy arose in Britain and in America as a fight for rights.
In the 1600s, Parliament stood up for their rights against King Charles I. Charles wanted to concentrate all political power in himself, much as the Tudor monarchs had done the previous century. But Parliament was not overawed by the king and protested when the king violated the established tradition of relying on Parliament to pass taxes and jailed people without trial who did not pay the taxes he demanded.
People have been leaving California in large numbers; Florida is gaining. Common sense is not so easily extinguished in America.
There was a showdown, and the king backed down and gave his assent to the Petition of Right, which appealed to rights granted by King John to his people in the Magna Carta: the right not to be imprisoned without trial, and the right not to be taxed save through an act of Parliament.
Sixty years later, Parliament obtained the consent of the monarchs William and Mary to the Bill of Rights, in which a long list of rights were confirmed by the monarchs as limitations on their power, such as a prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and of excessive fines, the affirmation of a right to bear arms, the prohibition of quartering armies in people’s homes in peacetime, the freedom to speak in Parliament, and more.
About a century later, America passed a Bill of Rights of its own.
In all these landmark fights, the rights were all limitations on concentrated government power. In Britain, rights meant limitations on the king’s powers; in America, they meant limitation on the government’s powers over the states and over individuals.
The key argument was always that these rights belonged naturally to those who were demanding them, and the bills and petition were only fending off those things being taken away.
Rights remain dear to us, but the meaning of “rights” in our present conversation has changed. Most of the rights being asserted by the Left are things that others need to provide — a right to medical care, for instance, means that people will be forced to pay for other’s medical care; FDR’s right to be free of want meant that others will be forced make up the want for us.
People have been born with an ability to speak freely. They have not been born with medical care or equitable pay or competence. Those things have to be acquired from others, or else coerced from them. These new kinds of rights are entirely different from the rights Parliament fought for or which the Framers enshrined in our Constitution.
Does that mean we should not try to alleviate misery, disease, and want? The call of the prophets through Scripture to consider the forgotten people, the people without power, as our human equals, has moved our spirits through the centuries. How do we acquit ourselves of our conscience’s demand to act for our common humanity?
It is by considering the genuine want of others to be our responsibility. In the biblical equation, proper power and proper responsibility advance in tandem. As we increase in power, our responsibilities grow. To be human we realize we must use our power for the good of all, not because they have a right to it but because we diminish our own humanity by not using the power we have attained for the greater good. In that greater good and nowhere else do we find our own greater self.
The Bible begins by describing God’s creation of the world and by asserting that the human being is created in God’s image. The world’s creation is an unforced act of love. Acting without the least selfishness, God gave of His existence to creatures large and small. The human being is capable of seeing marriage of power and benevolence in God and of realizing that is the measure of his or her own humanity.
How well we realize that in our lives is the measure of who we are, and that is not imposed on us from anyone else. It is a gift, to be able to walk in God’s pathways — lehidamot bidrachav, to emulate His ways, in the language of the Rabbis; imitation Dei, as the Scholastics deemed it. We feel the imperative in the depths of our souls. It is a responsibility to our deepest self as well as to others — a responsibility before God.
One might object that this is mere quibbling — in the end, one must acknowledge the demands of society, our fellows on the Left might say.
But it makes all the difference in the world whether the demand comes from powerful other humans or from our own selves. Americans fought against taxation without representation, not against taxation, but against taxation imposed entirely from without, as if we as a people could not act responsibly on our own, not only as individuals, but as a commonality, as nation.
We can see in a most empirical way the difference between governance based on demanding things from others as rights and that based on assuming responsibility.
California’s Imposition of ‘Rights’
California is exemplary for its assertion of many rights that require satisfaction at the expense of others. The right to be free of fear of a climate catastrophe means that you will pay more there for gasoline for your car and that dangerous heavily congested highways will not be remedied.
The right to a pristine natural environment is established by destroying the lives of farm families who can no longer be allowed to irrigate their fields sufficiently, and by endangering the lives of people from fires by no longer managing flammable undergrowth. The right to be free from discomfort is achieved only by introducing a version of Newspeak, so that real problems can no longer be talked about publicly and dissent is equated with defamation, incitement, or treason.
What is anathema to such a place is a culture of responsibility. Who is responsible for the unprecedented inability to control the Los Angeles wildfires? The man in charge of the state says that he is going to investigate — after the fact, of course, and for the purpose of assigning blame and ducking responsibility, rather than protecting the people who delegated their sovereign power to him as their governor. He has, however, been taking responsible care of his image — just check him out on Podcast America.
The mayor of LA was exercising her right to change her mind about her campaign promise not to go on one foreign junket after another. In enjoying that right, she was thousands of miles away as the likelihood of catastrophic fires in LA became more certain by the second.
The fire chief was also busy attending to the equity rights of identity groups, which she touted with pride as the most important work she was doing. She is good at blame, and some of it is well-deserved, such as her faulting the mayor for slicing $17 million from the FD budget. What could go wrong there?
In such a culture, no one should be surprised that when the disaster came, no one took responsibility. Not for controlling super-flammable brush accumulations. Not for the empty reservoir in the Palisades that resulted in hydrants with inadequate pressure or which were completely dry.
And no one took responsibility for the collapse of the culture of merit that had built the city. Instead, they celebrated that demise as a cultural triumph.
Florida’s Culture of Responsibility
Compare this to the culture of another state that also regularly experiences natural disasters — Ron DeSantis’ Florida. As Hurricane Milton approached this year, Florida’s governor was on top of planning the response, whether in immense prepositioning operations, staging emergency food, water, and medicine as well as crews to deal with power, gas, and water lines, or whether in speaking directly to the people with honesty and to good effect, and issuing emergency orders that were timely and effective. No blame games, just responsible government and what used to pass for common sense.
A sick culture gaslights those who still value common sense.
But increasingly, people are refusing to be fooled.
People have been leaving California in large numbers; Florida is gaining. Common sense is not so easily extinguished in America. We know our own lives are enriched by taking responsibility. We know our own lives sink into chaos and misery if we demand others take the responsibility that we don’t take up ourselves.
See how much responsibility is asserting itself in the face of this immense tragedy. Even legacy media has been filled with stories of how much people are giving of their own to help the thousands whose lives have been upended by the LA fires. It is the demand of their own souls that they are obeying in giving and volunteering, taking it upon themselves as definitive of their own humanity. They are living one hundred percent.
The blame for these people is a secondary consideration — it will inform their local politics. But right now, they are helping in any way they can their fellow Angelenos.
We are with them too. The political reckoning will wait a little. Right now, we join beyond politics to help heal those who are hurting so badly. It’s the responsible, common-sense thing to do. As we approach Inauguration Day, let us rededicate ourselves to the rebirth of a culture of responsibility and common sense.
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