David McElroy

I had to drive through a part of Birmingham Wednesday where I hardly ever go anymore. Years ago, I spent a good bit of time in that area. As a drove down a major road, my mind catalogued changes that have taken place in the 15 years or so since I regularly spent time there.

The O’Charley’s that was the popular brand-new mid-priced restaurant in the area about 15 years ago was closed and the building was in disrepair. What had once been a Pizza Hut where my ex-wife and I used to spend a lot of time was now a run-down title pawn store. A home supply store where I bought live Christmas trees for a number of years was closed and the building was crumbling from lack of use. There was example after example of this along the highway.

I was surprised to find myself feeling a little disoriented from seeing it all.

My rational brain understands that retail buildings are thrown up as cheaply as possible to serve the purposes they’re intended for. If a building needs to project an air of solidity and permanence, the building’s facade might be stone or be made of something else designed to look like something that will last. But underneath, today’s commercial buildings are cheap and intended to be thrown away in just a few years, after they’ve served their brief commercial purposes.

As I looked at those decaying and abandoned buildings, it occurred to me why I’m so strongly attracted to old buildings that are still in good repair and still in use. I find them charming and oddly alluring, wherever I find them. For instance, Hagia Sophia, pictured above, was built as a church in 537 AD. It spent most of its history as a church and then became a mosque. Today, it’s a museum. I’d like to visit it someday.

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Ever since we found out the extent of the NSA snooping in our lives, I haven’t been able to get a 2006 German movie off my mind. “The Lives of Others” follows an agent of the communist East German secret police as he carries out surveillance on a playwright.

The playwright was actually a good communist, so the state started out having nothing to fear from him. But someone in power wanted something the playwright had, so he used the “security service” for his own personal needs — and the state managed to turn the good communist playwright against itself. The details of the story are complicated, and various lives are changed over the course of the film.

I’m not going to tell more of the plot, because I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. If you’d like to know more, though, you can read the detailed plot summary here. And I’m posting the film’s trailer below.

It’s not the specific plot of “The Lives of Others” that the NSA snooping brings to mind. It’s more the creeping feeling that some politicians and bureaucrats here are working hard to build a modern version of the police state that the communist East used to be. For those of us who lived through those days and understood that the difference between the East and West was that we were free and they were not, it’s a chilling thought.

Are we slowly becoming more like our former communist adversaries?

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If you listen to most of the mainstream media, you’ll believe that a decision Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court has just destroyed the voting rights of black Americans. MSNBC’s headline says, “Supreme Court guts landmark civil rights law.” Reuters headlined its story by saying, “Supreme Court guts key part of landmark Voting Rights Act.” Salon’s headline said, “SCOTUS guts Voting Rights Act.”

It’s almost as though some members of the media got together with black politicians and others on the progressive left to decide that “gut” was the most emotional verb possible to express their disapproval of the Supreme Court ruling.

If you don’t know much about the law or the history involved, you might think the court said it was now legal for states to discriminate against minorities and take away their right to vote.

Nothing of the sort happened. The spin against the ruling is dishonest. The truth is that the decision is a win for fairness. Let’s look at the reason why.

Let’s assume that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a proper remedy for the problems that existed when the law was passed. Up until then, blacks and other minorities had been seriously cheated for many decades by racist white governments in more than a dozen states, most of them in the South.

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