About The times. (Gainesville, Ga.) 1972-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 13, 2018)
4A OPINION Sttnes gainesvilletimes.com Thursday, December 13, 2018 Shannon Casas Editor in Chief | 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 Smallwood was good, fair public servant Very seldom does a public servant spend 22 years catching flak from a fired-up audience for little money, no fanfare and numerous criticism. Don Smallwood has been Hall County Planning Commission Chair and deserves our plaudits for a job well done. He was always fair and let each side have their say before a final vote was taken. If you see Don on his jet ski going up the Tennes see River, on the golf course, at church or wher ever, tell him thank you. Jack C. Bell Gainesville Thanks for special section on county’s 200th anniversary Kudos to The Times’ staff for your celebra tion in the Sunday edition of Hall County’s 200th anniversary. I found it to be skillfully written, carefully researched and an informative read. One of our society’s ills is a sense of not being connected to where we live. Since Hall County is my adopted home I enjoy learning about its history. And as a retired journal ist I must point out that such articles underscore the critical importance of a local newspaper. Randall Murray Gainesville Fallout from family breakdown As France is gripped by civil disorder, many com mentators identify, quite correctly, as the culprit the outsized burden that France’s bloated welfare state places on its citizens. According to a recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the high est tax burden in the industri alized world is in France — 46.1 percent of GDP. In the United States, it is 27 percent, which includes taxes paid at all levels of government — federal, state and local. Welfare state spending in France is 32 percent of GDP, almost double that of the U.S., meaning that 1 out of every 3 dollars generated by the French economy is captured by the government and redistributed into social/welfare spending. But let’s recall that all this government was put in place in the name of making life better for France’s citizens. There’s plenty of analysis regarding the French situation, as there is in our own country, about how to streamline and reform government programs and deliver the same quality of services at a reduced spending and tax burden on citizens. But these discussions invariably fail to look at the full scope of human reality at play. The vast expansion of the welfare state, both in Europe and in the United States, occurred in tandem with a weak ening of the family. And weakening of the family generally occurs in an envi ronment of weakening of religion. When I speak and tell audiences that today 4 in 10 babies in the United States are born to unwed mothers, compared with less than 1 in 10 babies 50 years ago, I hear gasps. But in France, out of wedlock births stand at 6 in 10. Not surprisingly, a recent survey by Pew Research of 34 European countries shows France to be one of the least religious. Eleven percent in France say religion is very important in the their lives; 22 percent say they attend religious ser vices at least monthly; 11 percent say they pray daily; and 11 percent say they believe in God with absolute certainty. This is in stark contrast to the United States, where 49 percent say religion is very important to them; 36 percent say they attend religious services at least weekly; 55 percent say they pray daily; and 75 percent say they believe in God. Only 47 percent of French people say marriage infidelity is morally unac ceptable compared with 84 percent of Americans. So although the hold of Christianity on the American public has weakened over the years, compared with France it remains a quite strong force. This has important bearing on the wel fare state crisis, at home and abroad. As religion weakens, family struc ture weakens, and as family structure weakens, government strengthens and grows. Where people once looked to their parents to transmit values, love and care, increasingly they are looking to government. The problem is that it doesn’t work. Traditional family and marriage reflect eternal values that cannot be replaced by government. These values — where husband and wife join in holy matrimony, embodying and transmitting truth that is greater than their own per sonal, egotistical proclivities — translate to children, learning, work, creativity and productivity. In 1958,82 percent of Americans said religion can solve “most or all of today’s problems” and 7 percent said religion is “old-fashioned and out of date.” By 2015, 57 percent said religion can solve our problems and 30 percent said religion is “out of date.” Over this period of time, American family structure significantly deterio rated and our welfare state, although still nowhere near what’s happening in France, has become huge, bloated, and a major fiscal drain on the nation. We surely should work to streamline and reform the welfare state. But we shouldn’t lose perspective that the core problem is the integrity of the traditional family. This is where our answers lie. Star Parker is an author and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and a columnist for Creators. STAR PARKER www.urbarcure.org It only seems like you got all 5.IB robocalls THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE EDITORIAL BOARD Tribune News Service “Two years from now, spam will be solved.” —Bill Gates, then chairman of Microsoft Corp., assuring World Economic Forum participants in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 23,2004, that software engineers would find ways to eliminate spam emails by2006. Bill Gates’ unfulfilled promise pops to mind with each day’s emailed offers of a deal on diodes from Taiwan, or a share of an inheritance in Ghana. Fifteen years after the software wunderkind violated what should have been Machiavelli’s rule of prophecy — Predict only that which already has occurred — the robocall menace stalks virtually every one of us. So we were alarmed if not surprised to read the Tribune’s Business story reporting that during November, 5.1 billion robocalls were sprayed at Americans. That’s nearly 2,000 per second. And no, you didn’t receive all or even half of them. The news story reported efforts by Illinois’ Lisa Madigan and 37 other attorneys general to give Americans “simple ways to avoid annoy ing and invasive robocalls.” The AGs’ coalition has met with several major telecom companies and pushed the carriers to “quickly develop and implement technology” that would identify and block robocalls. Attorney General Madigan, our heart bleeds for you and the well-intentioned 37. For as many years as you’ve been attorney general (almost 16), we’ve been cataloging pledges that this or that initiative would diminish annoying and invasive contacts from scammers, spammers, cold callers, robocallers and pretend widows in London who want to share the loot with an accomplice. So far, we’ve seen nothing from these efforts but failure, failure, failure. And no wonder. The ingenuity of those who annoy and invade is thus far boundless. The number of fraudulent calls has skyrocketed with the perfection of spoof ing, in which robocallers hijack your area code or local prefix so you’ll think this might be the pharmacist calling, when in fact it’s Andrei in Budapest. The worst of the robocallers prey on people, particularly older people, with special avarice at this time of year: In the spirit of (insert holiday here), surely you’ll want to help the little ones by making a donation to our cause... The Federal Trade Commission calculates that the average victim of phone frauds last year lost an average of $700. The Federal Communica tions Commission keeps threatening to make a difference. Yet the number of robocalls contin ues to rise. We hope the attorneys general succeed where other public officials have failed. Much as we hope that the humans behind robocalling will reform and stop phoning. In each case we’ll applaud success when we hear it. Or rather, when we don’t. To submit letters: Send by email to letters@ gainesvilletimes.com (no attached files) or use the contact form at gainesvilletimes.com. Include name, hometown and phone number; letters never appear anonymously. Letters are limited to one per writer in a month’s time on topics of public interest and may be edited for content and length (limit of 500 words). Letters may be rejected from readers with no ties to Northeast Georgia or that address personal, business or legal disputes. Letters not the work of the author listed or with material not properly attributed will be rejected. Submitted items may be published in print, electronic or other forms. Letters and other commentary express the opinions of the authors and not of The Times. " WWKXH) RflUDKR 4 DICING W W AREONE THING... BUT EWING IN M BORDER WAll? VIHATAM LA MORON?" News Journal £j«W< <ort\/i»iarWfe«f4«on'a ® c reatoTs •<*** 2^* ANDY MARLETTE I Creators Syndicate Next economic crash could be dire Growing up during the Great Recession, when Gainesville City Schools could not afford textbooks or even sufficient tissue paper for that matter, I am skeptical of overspecu lated markets and wary of bubbles (hint: our economy is full of them). If you’ve actually been watching stock prices, you’ll see that many, particularly Silicon Valley Big Data companies, are going haywire right now. This is not a surprise, given that they are built upon sand and fraudulent behavior, but it is something that does not bode well for our national economy, to put it mildly. It is also clear that while employment is on the rise, the quality of many jobs throughout the country, particularly rel ative to huge increases in cost of living, has created a vice grip on many working class families in the country. Let me put it more frankly than that even. When the next crash comes, and you bet it will and I believe in 2019,1 am deeply concerned about the preservation of the social fabric of this country (the unraveling of which will then leave us vulnerable to international bad actors). Social indicators are already look ing grim, and our economy, at least on paper, is booming. But what happens when the economy tanks? If people hate each other so much now, if places are being shot up every time I check the news, if racial groups and political ideologies are showing open disgust and hatred toward one another, what happens when people lose their jobs, their houses, their livelihoods? Before 2008, people liked each other a heck of a lot better than now. What hap pens, with the next crash, now that our skeletons are all out of the closet? What happens when the chickens of societal failure to root out corruption and reckless greed finally comes home to roost? What happens now that the Pandora’s Box of hatred that had been opened up by Trump’s (and Hillary Clinton’s with her “deplora- bles comment,” to be sure) historically negative 2016 campaign? I hope I’m wrong. I really do. But to be honest, I don’t think I am. Some of the top minds in the world, that being the professors at Harvard University where I recently earned a degree, are concerned about what the near future holds. The tech bubble looks ready to pop. As do student loans. As do housing markets in major cities through out the world. Apathy, ambivalence, and, frequently, pure hostility seem to dominate our soci ety. So I ask again, what happens when the next crash comes? When it happens, it will be hard. But from the wreckage I hope that we build a new sort of national understanding. As Jimmy Carter, reviled as he is by some for whatever reason, said during his presidency in the late ’70s: there is a problem with the soul of our country. While we have been taught that we can buy our problems away, I will go on the record as saying there is nothing that is further from the truth. When the next crash comes, I hope that instead of chaos, there will be an understanding that this bipolar boom- bust cycle of overspeculation and painful contraction is a cancer to our nation and to our world. I hope that we will use this as an opportunity to let the poison out of our system. I hope we will realize that the money, money, money mentality is only good when that money is used for some thing meaningful. Things for things’ sake do not buy happiness. While we should not glorify the hard ships of poverty, we should remember the dignity of the working class and should abhor greed, even and especially when it comes wrapped up in a designer suit. Or designer uniform gray shirts, as the case may be. In this era of worshiping the tech demi-gods and financial prophets, when their reckoning finally comes I hope that we will remember that there is only one God, and his name is not Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk or Schwartzman. Loving Gainesville and Georgia as I do, I hope that we are insulated from the effects of what looks almost certain to happen. This is a special region and I believe once Silicon Valley’s bubble bursts, along with many others, there will be leagues of opportunities for smaller communi ties around the country to finally claim their slice of the pie. Even then, taking a page from our hometown hero Deshaun Watson’s book, I hope we stay humble and hungry, never smug and compla cent. And my ultimate hope is that we will remember, when dark days come, that there will always be something to be thankful for. Community, family, values, faith, tolerance mutual understanding, love our shared humanity despite superficial differences. Let us embrace these values and reject the primal, predatory greed that has emboldened the powerful for far too long. Our leaders didn’t learn our lesson last time. I hope and pray that this time, when the next crash comes, they finally will. Will Morris IV is a graduate of Gainesville High School and Harvard University. WILL MORRIS IV She Stines EDITORIAL BOARD Founded Jan. 26,1947 345 Green St., Gainesville, GA 30501 gainesvilletimes.com General Manager Norman Baggs Editor in Chief Shannon Casas
