Barry Farber
Friday, July 29, 2005

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Well, the Nazis rounded up the Underground fighters and herded the entire population into the cobblestone square to witness their mass execution. The raspy shout of the German firing squad leader boomed forth; "Ready!" "Aim!"… but before he got to "Fire!" the camera zipped up to the steeple of the church and showed the pacifist preacher licking the barrel of his Sten gun and mowing down every member of the German firing squad, whereupon the Freedom Fighters took the town temporarily and my heart forever. (Really! A few years later I took summer courses in Norway at the University of Oslo and shipped out with the Norwegian Merchant Marine!)

The preacher "snapped." And he snapped the right way. Today I snapped, too. I can only pray to God I snapped the right way.

It wasn't Live-8 or the debate over CAFTA or another article about AIDS in Africa or a Zimbabwe update. It was the accumulation of years and years of feeling the following instinctively and almost as an article of faith.

"Compassion: YES. Assistance: YES. Funding for the poor parts of the world: YES. Aid to the poor at home and abroad: YES. We, the OK, must help the non-OK of Planet Earth: DEFINITELY!"

None of that good doctrine fell away from my heart-brain system. It's just that another thought snapped into the frame that asked, "Have we forever lost the right to look the needy part of the world in the face and say, 'Why in the hell aren't you doing more to help yourselves?'"

It was a liberating snap. Consider our personal lives. Don't we differentiate among the deserving needy, the partially deserving needy and the undeserving needy? Sure, help them all. But don't let that differentiation get lost.

Study me and you'll never want to lay a medal on me for my exemplary ways, but I did learn the good habits of vigorous exercise in high school sports and never quit. My diet is commonsense. My weight, skinny. My finances, self-sufficient. And my relationship with alcohol is the most enviable since Winston Churchill. When I see victims of accidents or the kind of disease that strikes with random brutality, I'm 100 percent compassion.

However, when I see the voluntarily obese, those disabled by decades of inactivity, the decaying couch potato, the inexcusably improvident and the commode-hugging drunk, I feel – forgive me, please – high on a gleaming white moral horse thinking (NOT saying, God forbid! Just thinking) "Who in the hell asked you to let this happen to yourself?"

All misfortune is not created equal. Some misfortune intrudes, other misfortune is invited. Fifty years ago in school the message was jackhammered into us to "do right," don't invite misfortune by sloppy and unskilled living, try never to need and always to help the needy.

But we weren't taught to treat all the "needy" as one no-fault, morally equal, "forget about how I got here" blob of humanity. We who were taught to arrange our lives so as not to be broke, drunk, lazy, out of shape, etc., were not above discerning whose personal failures led to those unfortunate outcomes. We didn't offer sermons when they needed assistance. We helped. But society encouraged us to tell the difference.

Some important moral bones emulsified over those years, and now merely noting who "brought it on himself" seems horribly "judgmental."

Was it a secret fifty years ago that exercise was good for you? Was it a secret fifty years ago that smoking was bad for you? Or that thrift was a good idea and overspending a bad idea? You don't have to give me a medal; just give me a break.

Now, let's go international. (As they say on TV, "Parts of what comes next may be disturbing!") You can readily distinguish between the millionaire CEO marching briskly to work from the drunk sprawled in the gutter. Who can deny that it's equally clear when you cross from a basically OK and cohesive and together USA into an obviously corrupt and dysfunctional Mexico, where a U.S. violence advisory warns Americans away from the northern regions and the police are expected to augment their low salaries by coercing bribes.. And you could add far too many of the other countries south of our border.

Western Europe is still ‘an affluent executive en route to work' and Eastern Europe is like a highly talented prisoner of war taking excellent advantage of his liberation.

Africa is by and large an irredeemable disgrace: dictatorial, corrupt, murderous, genocidal by nature, and impossible to do anything honest about except cry over. How dare so many well-meaning people in the "OK" world devote so much emotion to Africa without once stopping to say: "Wait a minute. We can't cure megalomaniacal and sadistic dictatorships with love and money from Philadelphia."

I say to the war-wounded paraplegic on the park bench: "Whatever you need and I have, Pal; I owe you." And I say to the able-bodied dysfunctional sitting under a sign saying "Homeless, Please Help": "Get up off your butt and help yourself!"

North Korea is the biggest "loser" nation in the world. North Korea, incredibly enough, is the psychopathic killer who plants dynamite all around his property and says to his neighbors, "If you all don't feed me, clothe me and pay my electric bills, I will press this shiny silver button and blow up the neighborhood."

It's so easy to tell the successful countries from the failures. Why is it such a sin to say so?

Nothing betrays the abject failure of communism more than the starvation of 2 million North Koreans. But that's an old story.

Hey, drunk. Look at me. I have a cocktail or two and wine with dinner, and you can learn from me.

Hey, you overweight and lame and halt, NOT through the tissue-terrorism of arthritis but rather through your own laziness and neglect. Would you like to see my daily exercise routine? Arnold Schwarzenegger may scoff at its superficiality, but YOU may prosper if you copy it. I'll send you a video.

Hey, you drunks. I am the High Priest of Moderation. Kneel before me and take notes.

Hey, Mexico. Hey, Latin America. Hey, Africa. Hey, every one of you reeking little one-party backwaters with giant pictures of your big uniformed "leader" beaming down upon us as we arrive at your airport. It's no secret. The answer to your misery has been sitting out here on the porch where the goats can get it for more than 200 years.

DEMOCRACY!

If there's a way to give directly to your hungry people, I will, but I refuse to spend one more erg of emotional energy on your plight until you look around and realize that democracy is your recipe. You don't have to love America. You don't have to submit to America. You don't even have to thank America.

All you have to do is COPY America!

And you don't have to be much of a spy, a cryptologist or a hacker to discover our fabled secret.

Democracy breeds prosperity. Democracy also breeds peace. The last time a democracy made war against another democracy was – never!

The American Pavilion at Disneyworld's Epcot in Orlando puts on a one-hour pageant telling the story of America. They covered World War II WITHOUT MENTIONING THE GERMANS OR THE JAPANESE! (So help me, God!) The narrator told of "Nazis" rampaging through Europe without mentioning their nationality and "bombs falling on Pearl Harbor" without mentioning who dropped them.

I asked one of the ushers afterward how that oversight could possibly stand. "Hey, man," he replied, "we get a lot of tourists from those countries!"

That pageant gets gentle ridicule from me. My best rage is reserved for free peoples in free countries who wring their hands and hearts over hunger and AIDS and genocide without even one gentle allusion to the diseased regimes that manufacture such misery. Whatever force it is that muzzles us when we point the bony finger of indignation at those dictators is guilty of a murderous silence.

The Soviet Union stole our atomic secrets. Communist China bought our latter-day military technology secrets. The best secret of all is free. You want to help Mexico? Don't open the already sieve-like border or send money. Just send them a copy of the Constitution of the United States. And ditto for every failed state from Belarus to Burma.

Simplistic? Yes. Effective? Also yes. Look at them and look at us.

President Calvin Coolidge, not much of a talker, was returning to the White House one Sunday morning after church. The first lady heard him coming up the stairs.

"Is that you, Cal?" she asked.

"Yep," he replied.

"Were you at church, Cal?" she asked.

"Yep," he answered.

"Was our preacher there this morning, Cal?" she asked.

"Yep," replied the president.

"What was the sermon this morning, Cal?" she wanted to know.

"The responsibility of the rich toward the poor," he replied.

"And was he convincing, Cal," she asked.

Replied the president, "He convinced the poor!"

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