Freedom?
Spotted by reader Scott in Asheville, NC, on July 4th:
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Reminds me of an email conversation I recently had with someone I don’t know. He made some comment about Ayn Rand and economic success being equivalent to morality or something, and I wanted to point out to him that economic freedom is probably the most powerful force for good in the world, that when the water rises, all the boats rise with it. Which you can see even in China where they are under authoritarian rule, but have made significant advances due to their embrace of some form of “capitalism”.
His response ? “Love” is the most powerful force in the world. Ironically his utopian naivete was offset by rigid cynicism in saying a large percentage of economic success was due to exploitation.
To me, the idea that “love” is some ACTUAL powerful force in the world is about as unbelievably naive as saying “love your enemies” to bring about peace. Just plain silly. “Love” has never done a THING for the people suffering at the hands of dictators in this world.
Friends? Self-respect? Peace of mind? Backbone? Defense? Rednecks?
Assuming they mean ‘real’ enemies they’re right in that quite often you’ll end up dead. People like that always seem to think their love will be met with reciprocity…if they even think about it at all.
OTOH, I’ve always been able to dispatch people with that attitude by mentioning Rush Limbaugh or Sarah Palin or someone anathema to whatever other bumper-sticker ideology they display.
Love? Hey knucklehead car owner, if your enemy has a gun and uses it on you and you are killed, of course you will not have an enemy any longer because you will be DEAD! Good Grief!!
Yeah, and appeasing our enemies because we “love” them works. Two words: Chamberlain & Obama.
Chamberlain was naive at best; in the face of facts, he chose to believe a pathological liar and famously cry, “Peace in our time!”
Obama promised to “write letters” to begin talks with Iran; to try terrorist detainees in US courts; to close GitMo; to pay to have detainees taken by other countries; all out of a desire for the terrorist-Islamist-jihadi enemies to see we “love” them. The Cairo speech would show our American “love” and change the minds of these terrorists, he said.
How’s that working out for the US, for the world? We all know the answer.
Let’s just hope and pray that it won’t lead to the same end as Chamberlain’s Utopian folly. Because we have nuclear Iran, Pakistan, India, China, Russia, North Korea (and who knows who else at this point?) with bigger, better, and newer nukes than we have this time around.
Love is a good thing, in addition to quoting a song from the distance past, “…happiness is a warm gun…”
I am a Cafeteria Christian. This means I went down the line and I took some of the tenets of Christianity and others I left there. I have always wondered about the supposed wisdom of loving one’s enemies. By the way, I didn’t take that tenet. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I would finish the bumper sticker by saying, Love your enemies and you won’t have any peace.
That’s right. If you love your enemies you’ll be kissing their a$$ and serving up whatever they want to them and the main thing they want is to see you destroyed/ruined.
If you’re dead or begging in the street, you don’t have
(m)any enemies.
Platitudes inspired by estrogen.
A bumper sticker for the other side and a matching set – “If we could get rid of all the police, there’d be no more crime.” (Not original)
“Love your enemies.” and “Turn the other cheek.” are counsels to eschew revenge. They are NOT counsels to abjure self-defense.
In addition, the counsels contain NO, repeat NO, implication that loving the enemy will produce a specific outcome, such as making the enemy not an enemy. The counsels do NOT address what a loved enemy will do in response. How could they?
In addition, the counsels do NOT mean that self-defense against an enemy is unloving. Loving the enemy may include any number of context-driven responses to them, up to and including killing them. Love and discipline, including lethal discipline, are integral components of life. (And by “discipline” I mean punishment/rebuke to train to a standard of behavior, not sado-masochism.)
In addition, there are four types of love and they are operationally integral: love for an inferior (libido), love for an equal (philia), love for a superior (eros), unconditional love (agape). The occasion, use and consequence matrices for those types of love differ and integrate, so, the requirement of clarity demands careful articulation when discussing and doing love.
Finally, it is against revenge that these counsels point. They align with a fundamental rule of soldiering: never pursue an enemy who has left the field of battle, on the contrary, protect them as one does one’s own. If they are on the field of battle, or if they only feign leaving it, the right of self-defense legitimates (but, importantly, does not demand) fighting them to a decision. But an enemy who leaves the field must not be pursued, meaning, revenge must not taken on them for coming upon the field in the first place.
The long-term personal, familial and social benefits of eschewing revenge are well-known and real. To those benefits the counsels look. They are realistic, practical and confirmed by the experience of the race. They do NOT commend much less demand baring the neck or cheek to an enemy. They do not address the subject of self-defense, much less the subject of an enemy’s response.
Hollywood, bars and locker rooms commend revenge. The sign is irrational.
No. What the bumper sticker means is just what it says. It presupposes that your enemy will love you back rather than stick a dagger in your heart or back. It is no different than the “war is not the answer” or the “coexist” bumper stickers. And revenge may or may not be wrong, but it feels really, really good.
[…] revealing a lot about the person driving the car in question, I’ll just say that it figures this one came from Asheville — second only to Chapel Hell as NC’s home away from home for bonehead college-student […]