Excerpt from "The Way Out"
Larry P. Arnn
President, Hillsdale College
How
to Defeat a Rising Despotism
I will tell two stories that are suggestive.
The first
took place in the small town of Jonesville, Michigan, five miles north of
Hillsdale College. In our state, as in most places where the lockdowns were
enforced, businesses were crippled or destroyed en
masse. Restaurants were chief among them. One of our local restaurants is a
30-year-old diner called Spanglers Family Restaurant. Mitch Spangler is the
proprietor. The business was founded by his late father, and Mitch was
purchasing the business from his mother. The payments to his mother depended
upon the revenues of the business, and his mother’s retirement depended upon
the payments. The life’s work of two generations was at stake. Mitch was also
helping to support a daughter in college.
This is not
to mention the more than 20 employees whose livelihoods are dependent on
Spanglers. “Our employees are moms who have kids,” Spangler told the local
paper. “One of our employees is pregnant; another is a 19-year-old kid. This is
his first job, and he just bought a car.” Our leaders in Washington treat it as
a small thing when trillions are being thrown about. To the Spanglers and
people like them, their relatively small revenue streams are everything.
Mr. Spangler
was not prepared to surrender all this. When a second lockdown was ordered by
Michigan’s governor a year ago last month, he kept his restaurant open. He put
a sign on the door and posted on Facebook to make clear, among other things,
that he was acting out of necessity for the sake of his business and the
livelihoods of all those dependent on it; that precautions would be taken,
including the installation of an electrostatic fogger that would disinfect the
air; that he understood the thinking of those who would choose to stay away from
his restaurant, but that he hoped they would understand his own thinking. “If
you cannot support us, we understand,” he wrote, “but please allow us to have
the freedom to do what we have to do.”
The wheels of bureaucracy began to grind. Spanglers was visited repeatedly by the health department, by the licensing authorities, and even by the agriculture department (one wonders what they had to do with it). Spangler was fined and threatened with forcible closure. But he persevered, never backing down, and his busines did well. On a typical weekend, not only locals but supporters from the neighboring states of Indiana and Ohio lined up outside to show their support.
This may not seem on its face a big story, but it
is a most important story. It is important because it is a story about the
nature of human beings and of citizens and of our rights. The nature of a thing
is the essence of a thing. One aspect of the nature of a human being is that he
must eat to live. In condemnation of slavery, Abraham Lincoln loved to say that
every man was created with a head, hands, and mouth, the implication being that
the head should guide the hands in the feeding of the mouth. Because we are
made to live this way, we are also determined to
live this way. The alternative is dependence, which does not make us happy.
It should not
therefore be surprising that, if you try to destroy the business of a man whose
family has spent over 30 years building it, he will resist. Trying to strongarm
people like Mitch Spangler is not a good idea. There are millions of them, and
they have always made up the core of this greatest of free republics.
The second
story is more famous, but it too is about nature—indeed, about that word’s most
basic meaning. The word nature, as I said, refers to a thing’s essence, but it
comes from the Latin word for birth. Our nature
begins with how we are born and how we grow. Just as we are attached by nature
to the way we get our livings, so we are attached by nature to our parents, and
still more to our children. And this second story, set in Loudoun County,
Virginia, is about parents and children.
In schools throughout Virginia, including in
Loudoun County, children are being subjected to critical race theory (CRT).
This involves lecturing children, especially those belonging to the
non-preferred races, about the “structural evils” of which they are told they
are part. Being taught alongside CRT is a distorted view of the history of our
country, which true enough has its warts, but which surely has its glories as well—including
glories about equal rights regardless of race. Between fighting the armies of
the English monarch, the Confederacy, the Nazis, the communists, and Islamic
terrorists, something nearing a million Americans have died for the cause of
equal rights. These Americans have come in all colors.
Amidst
statewide controversy over the teaching of CRT, the Loudoun County School Board
also adopted a broad policy of recognizing “transgender” students in preference
to their “biological sex” (excuse the redundancy). Even before this, boys were
permitted to use girls’ bathrooms, in one of which there was an assault and
rape of a female student by a “gender-fluid boy.” The boy in question was then
allowed to attend another school in Loudoun County, where he assaulted another
girl. This first girl’s parents were understandably outraged and, at the risk
of being called narrow-minded, went so far as to complain to the school board.
Groups of parents who had already been protesting
CRT and policies promoting transgenderism joined in the complaint. There was no
violence at the school board meetings with one exception: law enforcement was
summoned, and the outraged father of the assaulted and raped girl was bloodied
and dragged out of one meeting. It is true, however, that voices were raised.
The National School Board Administration called
upon the Biden administration to investigate these protesting parents as
potential perpetrators of “domestic terrorism or hate crimes.” Remember, these
parents were citizens attending a meeting of an elected body to tell their
representatives what they think. The rights of petition and assembly are
protected in the First Amendment. Except for certain preferred groups, these
rights today appear to have been repealed.
U.S. Attorney
General Merrick Garland intervened, instructing the FBI to investigate these
parents and others around the country. The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division has
reportedly deployed tools and resources normally reserved for terrorist threats
against parents who are angry at school boards for what is occurring in their
children’s schools. All this provoked massive support, across Virginia and
around the nation, for the parents of Loudoun County.
This support
is not surprising. By nature, parents love their children and feel
responsibility for them. Citizens, especially one hopes American citizens, feel
entitled to state their grievances. The Declaration of Independence itself
contains a list of grievances against the King. The Biden administration
reacted to these protests just as King George III reacted against the American
colonists in the years leading up to the American Revolution: he called in law
enforcement. And the people of Virginia reacted in a way reminiscent of the
American colonists: they defeated the candidate for governor who took the
position that parents should have nothing to do with their children’s education.
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