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David McElroy

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Years later, Supreme Court justice apologizes to Susette Kelo … sorta

By David McElroy · September 20, 2011

I sometimes have mixed feelings about people in positions of authority who make serious mistakes and then apologize later. I admire them having the guts to admit they did the wrong things in the past, but I’m frequently still irritated by the arrogance of their original mistakes — and the consequences of those mistakes.

So I have mixed feelings about the news that a Connecticut Supreme Court justice has apologized to Susette Kelo for his role in taking her home away from her in the infamous case of Kelo v. City of New London. (I’m not going to outline the facts of the case since they’re so familiar to most people, but click the link for a summary if you need it.)

The case was the one that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and established the precedent that governments can basically take away private property from owners with pretty much any excuse they want to make up.

In the story about the Supreme Court justice in Connecticut, it turns out that the justice was at a function at which the Kelo case was being discussed by the author of a book about it. Kelo herself was there and the author explained the full details and context of the story, including its impact on Kelo. Afterwards, this justice — who was one of the four votes on the majority against Kelo at the Connecticut Supreme Court — came up to the author and Kelo and said, “Had I known all of what you just told us, I would have voted differently.”

Sadly, in future correspondence, the justice told the author that he still believed the case was correctly decided on the basis of U.S. Supreme Court precedents, but he would have voted to disregard those precedents if he had known all of the personal facts — yet he also said he believes it’s best for justices not to know those personal facts before making decisions. Can you say cognitive dissonance?

We have a lot of people in positions of authority today who seem to be taking the same sort of point of view. They see at least part of the damage they’re causing, yet they’re willing to continue down the road they’re on, hopeful that dedication to “the system” will somehow result in something good. They remind me of something Ayn Rand said in the foreword to her short novel, “Anthem“:

The greatest guilt today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; the people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, and that facts can be eliminated by keeping one’s eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: “But I didn’t mean this!“

There are some evil people in positions of power today, but most of the people who are in position to stop the things going on aren’t intentionally evil. They’re simply cowards who can’t face up to accepting that they are living lies in one way or another — and that their actions are slowly creating tyranny that will make life worse for everyone. And when that happens, it will be too late for apologies when they say that they didn’t mean to do this.

By the way, Kelo’s house was torn down by the city of New London — along with the rest of the property that the city stole from its rightful owners. Instead of building the fancy development that the brilliant top-down planners had anticipated, the city has let the land sit there unused. The land where decent homes once stood is now mostly vacant. The only inhabitants are a colony of feral cats.

In case you haven’t noticed, top-down planning still doesn’t work. Individual freedom does.

Note: The link for this story came via Radley Balko’s Agitator blog, which I’ll once again recommend that you make a daily part of your browsing.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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