Ignoring Fish Tales, and Learning to Fish

“Give a man a fish and feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime.” History shows that the United States stands for two things—individual freedom to achieve and a willingness to lend a hand. Our Judeo-Christian heritage created Americans who were rugged but compassionate individualists, people who worked hard, turned dreams into reality, and generously shared their good fortune. Such people were no more perfect or sinless than any other, but the prevailing American character was, for nearly 2 centuries, was an achiever who willingly sought to share, not just from his prosperity, but from its source in freedom and opportunity.

Today, some heirs of such entrepreneurs like to deny the legacy of capitalism, liberty, and generosity. They remind me of the story about a new minister who visited a farmer in his congregation. As he took in the bountiful fields and evident prosperity, the minister remarked, “God has given you a wonderful farm.” The man responded, “You should have seen it when it was His alone.” Of course, we know that God made the land, the plants and animals, and the processes of life, but human labor produces abundance while neglect and indolence assures scarcity and poverty.

Elitists today, who deny a creator, should be even more aware of the role that imagination, invention, and hard work has in producing the riches of economic, material, and technological success. Instead, like primitives who believed in fate, they attribute the results of liberty, labor, and largess to luck and larceny. None of us have ancestors who were faultless; today’s alleged victims and their presumed oppressors operated by the same rule: to the victor go the spoils. The real difference is what the victors did with what they gained. Typically, people have wasted rather than invested, spent their riches on themselves, and created throughout history a small, privileged aristocracy who expected the majority of common folk to serve them.

The United States has been different. Based on a few glimmers from the past and Christian principles of freedom, hard work, and charity, our ancestors fashioned a nation where any person could have land, prosperity, and a measure of power over his or her own destiny, a place where any child might even become President! Their vision was inspired, and the results have inspired people to duplicate it or come here to enjoy its promise.

Is it any surprise that some would prefer to fashion a new aristocracy and designate themselves masters over the common people? To achieve their awful purpose, they promise any who will listen justice for past offenses. They will rectify the luck, which rewarded some but deprived others. They will punish the successful and compensate failures. They assure any who feel that life owes them something that they will make sure they get what they deserve.

They will, indeed, get what they deserve—nothing! Few socialists, redistributionists, or communists really believe their own hype; history has proven that. They do not seek the welfare of the common man or worker; they seek power and their own self-aggrandizement. Look at the words of Lenin, Hitler, or Castro, used to gain the support of people, and then look at how those same people fared, once the tyrants were in control. I would rather deal with more forthright tyrants, who simply seize power and oppress people because they can. The stealthy sort of autocrat uses the hopes, fears, and perceived injustices of people to gain power, which they rarely use to fulfill the hopes, allay the fears, or address the injustices the used to get it. The Soviet Union was not a worker’s paradise, Cuba is not a beacon for anyone but a fool like Michael Moore, and Nazi Germany became the epitome of evil, oppression, and genocide.

What is hard to understand is why people in a land so prosperous as the United States listen to such crazy ideas. The poorest of the poor are richer by far than their counterparts of other times and places. Rarely do the loudmouths, who promise to leave if a Reagan or a George Bush wins an election, actually go. If Canada’s health care system is so great, why aren’t more Americans becoming Canadians? The border is open, and their immigration policies are less restrictive. Why aren’t the people who praise Castro moving to Cuba? I wonder at multiculturalists who declare every tribe and religion is as good as any other. Why don’t they relocate to some of those far away places and adopt their primitive way of life?

I have written elsewhere of the evil treatment of undocumented children. It is my opinion that our immigration policy and our treatment of foreign residents, here, is part of a strategy to create a peasant class. I believe it is wrong, and I believe it is dangerous. These aren’t primitive times where the poor rarely little power but their numbers. Today, third world terrorists can make bombs out of fertilizer, fly airplanes into buildings, and possibly smuggle a WMD into a major city. In their own lands, they ruthlessly kill each other so persistently and effectively that some despair of American forces being able to stop them. What could such people do here?

Yet, most people want to “fish to eat.” Most are willing to learn to catch fish, if someone will teach them. That is the amazing thing about the American dream; it teaches people how to fish so they may have enough to eat for a lifetime and even sell fish to they can enjoy a better life. It is a dream that is changing places like Ireland and India and even Communist China. So why are people here, in the land of the dream, listening to those who would destroy it?

Perhaps, the answer is to be found in the two things—individual freedom to achieve and a willingness to lend a hand—that characterize the typical American. Many of us still possess those traits. One the one hand, people work hard, strive to provide well for their families, and take care of themselves and their own. They’re not looking for a handout but just for the freedom and opportunity to make a good life. On the other hand, people recognize that tragedy, disability, and “bad luck” take away or keep some from having what all of us want. “There but for the grace of God” encourages them to respond to appeals to their compassion.

The most cynical rhetoric preys on that compassion. Countless government programs have won public support by calling attention to the needy, the downtrodden, the weak, and especially the children. Have those proposals made life better, have they achieved the hopes of compassionate citizens who went along with them, and, perhaps most importantly, have they justified the high price? Indeed, the costs have escalated exponentially while the successes are rare. In many cases, the ones supposedly receiving help are in a worse state. It is no secret that private schools, orphanages, drug and alcohol rehab, hospitals, and charities do a better work for far less money that those supported, managed, or controlled by government.

Someone said, “A sucker is born every minute,” and many of our leaders regard hardworking, generous Americans as suckers. At every opportunity, through nearly continuous political campaigns, with the complicity of like-minded media and educators, they manipulate and indoctrinate kind-hearted people, including recent generations of school children, with their rhetoric of compassion, one that, I fear, conceals an evil agenda. Yes, I said evil.

Jesus warned that one sin was unpardonable. He called it the sin against the Holy Spirit, which was a matter of giving credit to the devil what was in fact the work of God, by His Spirit. Real compassion has its roots in Christian love, a love demonstrated by the sacrificial death of Christ, the one is love incarnate. Using compassion to trick the American people into consenting to the wholesale takeover of their hard-earned incomes so that the leaders might anoint themselves a new aristocracy, with all the prerogatives of wealth and power, is close to that same sin. It is evil, and I believe the guilty will pay for their arrogance before the throne of God’s justice.

In the meantime, my fellow American, especially my fellow American Christian, wake up! Stop being a pawn in the games of such people. It’s one thing when someone takes your money or property by force of arms; it is quite another to surrender by listening to the lies and yielding what God has given to those who neither need nor deserve it.

Of course, some will allow it, even be glad for it, because it seems to relieve them of the duty of doing it directly. Not everyone who buys into the lies has been deceived; some think to divest themselves of responsibility and assuage their guilt by paying greater taxes. Their choice would be a mistake even if it worked. Helping others should be personal, not some impersonal and bureaucratic program. Genuine compassion requires direct human contact, sympathy, and understanding as well as material resources. Remember the goal is teaching them how to fish, not just hand out seafood that nobody else would eat. The best teachers are mentors; skilled flesh and blood fishermen, who can explain, demonstrate, correct, and compliment their student’s technique. Mentors give people more than skills; they give their students dignity, something programs and bureaucrats generally take from the people they are supposed to help.

Compassion in the mouths of elitists is nothing but a fish tale; more than exaggerations and deception, they stint of "fishiness." True red-blooded, red state Americans already recognize the stench, but many still accept their hype, often genuine in a desire to help the less fortunate but naive in accepting their "pitch." I'm never quite sure what to think of Christians who not only believe them but come to represent them as allies in compassion and service. Are they deluded or demonic? Whichever they are, we Christians must, at the least, "try the spirits to see if they come from God." In the broader arena, we must examine every message, looking both for cynicism and for ideas destructive to the "American way."

One clear indication are programs to provide more fish, to take fish from some and give them to others, and to ship tons of fish to places where they rot due to local interference. Another are efforts to change groups of Americans from fisherman and teachers of fishing to mere recipients of the latest fish handout, whereby all fish flow through government bureaucracies, while condemning successful fishing businesses as evil and creating the impression that all fish come from the government. We can identify the "fish stories;" we just have to pay attention.

Finally, we must renew our commitment to learning to fish, to fishing for ourselves, and to the spread of fishing to everyone. Capitalism and individual freedom work better than any system yet devised. Ultimately, they both recognize natural rights, which all humans have by virtue of being human, not by permission of government. Natural rights are the foundation of both the Declaration of Independence and the U. S. Constitution, even though many progressive elitists would prefer to ignore both. To preserve our right to fish, we must pay attention both to elections and candidates and to their views on the Constitution and its interpretation. Socialism and its ilk are contrary to both. Freedom, prosperity, and compassion all rest ultimately on natural rights, individual self-sufficiency, capitalism, and the Judeo-Christian work ethic.