About The times. (Gainesville, Ga.) 1972-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 26, 2018)
7A OPINION ®he £ntics gainesvilletimes.com Friday, October 26, 2018 Shannon Casas Director of Content | 770-718-3417 | scasas@gainesvilletimes.com Submit a letter: letters@gainesvilletimes.com The First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. LITERS Socialism is Symptom of a larger issue not the gospel In Thursday’s Times, the editorial cartoon by Andy Marlette depicted a gun toting, Bible holding, white, male conservative and a young female. In the first scene, the conservative screams that leftists are preaching socialist ideals. In the second scene the young woman warns “just wait until you read what Jesus said in the Bible.” This cartoon is very important because we see that many Christians have been taught inac curately about Jesus and his ministry. His min istry is not political. Should we be surprised? Even some of the disciples who walked with him wanted, expected, a political king who would restore the nation of Israel. Not until Pentecost and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit did they come to a full realization of who Jesus was and what his ministry was. Instead of an earthly ruler, Jesus was a suffering servant. He was God in the flesh. He was the perfect sacrifice that would atone for the sins of all who would repent and place their faith and trust in his finished work. Today there are many preachers, pastors and priests that teach a false doctrine that perverts the gospel of Jesus and him cruci fied. Instead, they transform his ministry into a political action gospel of social justice. They seek redistribution of wealth with the aim of equal prosperity for all. He never promised equal outcomes in this life. He told us that the poor we would always have with us. What he did promise is eternal life through repentance and faith in him. Jesus left us with two commands. First to love the Lord our God. The second is to love our neighbor as ourselves. Our ability to do each of those comes from the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit. The love we show to one another is an out pouring of the gracious love God has extended to us. We will never solve poverty. We will never feed all the hungry. Even governments can not do those things. What we can do, as individual believers, is to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our Lord. Thomas Day Buford Replay only the good movies in the theater of your mind You may be familiar with Tony Robbins, a motivational speaker, author and personal development coach who has gained worldwide prominence after 40 years of sharing his you- can-achieve-anything message. I’m not a huge Tony Robbins fan. He’s not my guru. Never heard him speak, read just one of his mega-seller books. Yet there’s one “nugget” of his I benefit from daily. Directing a seminar, he asked participants: “How many of you have seen a movie you didn’t like?” Of course, everyone raised a hand. Watching movies we don’t like is a universal experience. During the worst ones, we may leave the the ater or cut off the TV halfway through the story. Next, Tony asked: “How many of you went back to see those bad movies again and again?” This time there was not a show of hands. Then Robbins made his point: “Of course you don’t go back to see awful movies in your neigh borhood cinemas. But you do frequently replay, in the theater of your mind, bad experiences you struggled through. You remember the boss who made your life miserable, and you vividly picture scary scenes in her office. You practi cally re-live a terrifying car accident that hospi talized you for weeks. You get angry visualizing a close friend who lied to you.” Switching to a positive approach, Robbins suggested: “From now on, never replay the bad movies, those personal and professional experi ences that shattered your stability. They were distressing enough when they happened. Why give them a chance to disturb you and disap point you again and again?” He added: “Replay only the good movies, day after day.” That’s a magnificent strategy, one I have shared with many people — because I have put his suggestion to use repeatedly. I don’t replay what doctors said to me twice: “You have can cer.” But I do recall the marvelous physicians, nurses, radiation therapists, and other health professionals who brought me through those frightening ordeals successfully. Again, I could replay repeatedly that grief- filled day of my father’s funeral. He was my role model and my life coach. I loved him dearly, lost him way too early. However, my morale remains high when I think of him. How? I replay mental movies of him taking me to the river as a small child and laughing with me as I threw rocks a few feet out from the shore. Together, we both cheered the small splashes. I replay him traveling to my graduate school commencement, though Ohio University was hundreds of miles from his Mississippi home. In our turbulent era, we need this affirma tive mindset. Daily, you and I are bombarded by shocking events that could demoralize us, even happening in our revered institutions: homes, schools and churches. Watch the inci dents once, discard them, and then replay in your mind the joyful movies that enrich your spirit and energize your life. Bill Lampton Gainesville To submit letters: Send submissions by email to letters@gainesvilletimes.com or from the form at www.gainesvilletimes.com. Please include your full name, hometown and phone number. Associated Press Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman addresses the Future Investment Initiative conference, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Wednesday, Oct. 24. The biggest mis take the Trump administration made in the Jamal Khashoggi case occurred while Khashoggi was still alive: letting Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, JONAH GOLDBERG Mohammed bin goldbergcolumn@ Salman, think he gmail com could get away with something so heinous — and so hei nously stupid. But the bell was rung, as it were, and there is no way to unring it. The Saudis surely made every thing worse by lying about it. But the aftermath is such a complicated mess because it illuminates decisions made long before Prince Mohammed’s goons brought a bone saw to Istanbul. It’s a bit analogous to the assassina tion of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That murder sparked World War I, yet the war was about far more than the murder of a single official. Look at the situation from the Saudi perspective. The U.S. has turned a blind eye to far larger horrors, including the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Prince Moham med’s forces reportedly target civilian centers and tolerate rape, torture and the conscription of children. The Iranian side is just as guilty. Saudi Arabia also executes about 150 people a year, mostly by beheading and occasionally by stoning. In recent years, several women were executed for prac ticing “witchcraft” or “sorcery.” Yet the U.S. doesn’t say boo about that. Instead, the Saudis have gotten two mutually reinforcing messages from the White House. First, President Trump has repeatedly said that every country has a sovereign right to protect its own distinct culture. Well, in Saudi Arabia’s distinct culture, rulers can do whatever they can get away with, particularly with regard to their own citizens. From Prince Moham med’s perspective, Khashoggi — a longtime supporter of the Muslim Broth erhood and an operator in the Saudi court — was an obstacle to reform and a tool of his enemies. That he had a U.S. tourist visa and a column in the Washing ton Post didn’t change that. It made him a greater threat. The second message is that Saudi Arabia is our ally. This isn’t new, but the Trump administration has taken it to new, personalized extremes. So long as Saudi Arabia helps contain Iran, softens on Israel and keeps the oil flowing out (and the weapons in), they can have a free hand. To paraphrase FDR, the man who forged the U.S.-Saudi alliance, the Saudis may be SOBs, but they’re our SOBs. The Saudis are also getting a third message, one that is coming more from the world of NGOs, op-ed pages and Wall Street than from the West Wing: Saudi Arabia needs to reform its economy and culture. Indeed, Prince Mohammed jumped the line of succession to do precisely that. It’s thanks to him that women are finally allowed to drive in the kingdom. One of the more cynical talking points among those calling for new leadership in Saudi Arabia is the idea that reform ers in backward authoritarian nations don’t do terrible things. The shahs were reformers, support ing Western-style modernization and women’s rights. They were also brutal dictators. Mikhail Gorbachev was a reformer. But I would be stunned if he’d never had anyone murdered. Regimes founded on mistaken principles have few nice options when seeking to reform. The point isn’t that the ends justify the means, but that when dealing with murderous regimes, the choice is often between the more tolerable of murderers. Some of the most outraged American voices in the Khashoggi affair had no problem working with Iran’s brutal regime. The Obama echo chamber made realist arguments about the nature of reform under the mullahs, but these same people are now morally aghast at our realpolitik with the House of Saud. The Turks are even worse. Along with Iran, Turkey is competing with Saudi Arabia for regional dominance, and Khashoggi’s death is merely a pro paganda tool for them. The Turks are brilliantly feeding evidence in drips and drabs to an indignant Western press. I get the indignation, but has no one followed the mass arrests and periodic assassinations of journalists under Presi dent Recep Tayyip Erdogan? Do people really believe the Turkish tyrant and NATO ally — who calls journalists the “gardeners of terrorism” — is sincerely offended? Should we call for Erdogan to step down? Why not? I have no good idea for what we should do next, because the problem isn’t really the killing of Khashoggi. As outrageous as it is, Khashoggi’s murder is a symptom of a far longer series of mistakes. Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. USA BENSON I Washington Post Writers Group Tensions boiling over into violence Newsday Amid the continued degradation of our national discourse and the corrosive politics of demonization, we have hit a new low. Violent rhetoric is being matched by acts of violence. And that’s terrifying. Bombs were sent to former President Barack Obama, former presidential con tender Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Eric Holder, former CIA Direc tor John Brennan at CNN, and billionaire philanthropist and Democratic donor George Soros, a target of House Republi can Campaign Committee attack ads. This cannot continue. It is tempting to make a direct con nection to the inflammatory words and endorsements of violence by President Donald Trump, who has attacked ver bally or on Twitter every one of the bomb recipients. But that connection might not turn out to be the case. What is certain is that he has created a climate in which we are not shocked that the president’s rhetoric could lead to this moment. That’s atrocious. Trump’s record on this score is long. In the 2016 campaign, he encouraged one crowd to “knock the crap out” of demonstrators, promising to pay legal fees. He has bashed CNN as an enemy of the people, and last week celebrated Montana Rep. Greg Gianforte for body- slamming a reporter last year; Gianforte pleaded guilty to an assault charge. Along the way, this climate has given others license to say whatever they want about anyone. At a rally Tuesday, Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz responded to a crowd chant by joking that Democratic oppo nent Rep. Beto O’Rourke could share a prison cell with Clinton. That’s not funny. It might turn out that the bombs were the isolated work of one deranged indi vidual, like the abominable shooting at a Republican congressional baseball team practice last year. That wouldn’t absolve anyone who has contributed to this tin- derbox atmosphere. It certainly doesn’t excuse the atrocious conjecture Wednes day from the far right that the bombs were fake and the work of Democrats to create sympathy among voters in the upcoming midterms. “Fake news, fake bombs” signs turned up within hours at political rallies. Trump said the right things in the White House on Wednesday afternoon. “In these times we have to unify,” he said, adding that political violence has no place in the United States. Now he has to show he means that, every day. No more vitriol at rallies. No more false accusa tions aimed at political opponents. No more celebrations of violence. Words matter. And the consequences get scarier. She Stines EDITORIAL BOARD Founded Jan. 26,1947 345 Green St., Gainesville, GA 30501 gainesvilletimes.com General Manager Norman Baggs Director of Content Shannon Casas Community member Brent Hoffman
