People in Connecticut may be suffering from something worse
than progressives who are striving mightily to destroy the state. They may be
suffering from a sort of moral atrophy.
G.K. Chesterton addressed the question of moral atrophy in
the following few lines about Pimlico, a town in England that, in Chesterton’s
day, was what we might call a hopeless case:
“Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing –
say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the
thread of thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitrary. It is
not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico; in that case he will merely cut
his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to
approve of Pimlico; for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The
only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico; to love it with a
transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who
loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles…
If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is
theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers
will say that this is mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of
mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest
roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or
encircling some sacred well. People first paid honor to a spot and afterwards
gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great
because they had loved her.”
Like Pimlico, Connecticut has become a desperate thing. And
some who might love it with a desperate love because it is Connecticut, the place
where the bones of their fathers lay, already have moved away to other states
where the grass is greener; there they will lay themselves down, and their
children someday will strew flowers on their graves. The easiest thing to do is
to move away from grief and tears and hard times. The most difficult thing is
to remain on the spot and fight for the glory of Pimlico, to remain in the face
of difficulties because Pimlico is sacred ground, and you love it
with a love that transcends rationality itself.
Only that kind of fierce love, like the love mothers feel
for their children, can save Pimlico. “If there arose a man who loved Pimlico…”
Religious imagery ran like a strip of fire in the blood of Chesterton; in the
fullness of time, there arose a transcendent God “who so loved the world that
he gave his only begotten son…”
Storge, from the
Greek στοργή, is the first of four
loves examined by C.S. Lewis in his book “The Four Loves.” It is the love that
spring from familiarity, typified by the natural love of a mother or father for
a child. Familiarity breeds fondness, not contempt, and that fondness turns to
fierceness when the object of love – a child, a family, a neighborhood, a town
or a state comes under attack, either directly or, more insidiously, through subversion.
Storge is non-particularized,
diffused, transcendent, given without respect to individual characteristics, a
fierce and sacred outpouring of love from the heart’s core. True patriotism
finds its foothold in the first of Lewis’ “Four Loves.”
If only love and loving intensions were enough. But they
never are, which is why the road to Hell is paved with good intensions divorced
from practical, healing remedies.
People in state government who love Connecticut must stop
pretending to themselves that they do not know how to save our state. They know
what the problems are; they know what the solutions are; and it is a kind of
moral atrophy yoked to personal ambition and factional favor that has
decelerated their virtue, which is, always and everywhere, a power
of acting. The General Assembly must – absolutely must – regain control
of its budget powers, and then act in the service of the entire state. This
means the General Assembly must wrest control of its getting and spending
constitutional responsibilities from state unions and partisan, spineless
politicians.
Never in the whole history of the world has it been possible
for any state – whether it be a monarchy, a democracy or a republic – to settle
a recurrent spending problem by increasing taxes. And one need not consult
history to draw from present experience the proper moral. Connecticut’s
government has, within the administration of its present lame-duck governor,
imposed crippling taxes, the largest and the second largest in state
history, on the real working people’s party, the revenue producing sector of
the state – with what result we see before us, increased and unmanageable debt,
now hardwired into future budgets by means of a backroom deal from which the
duly elected representatives of the people on the Republican side have been
excluded.
At some point, such autocratic effrontery produces a
cleansing spirit of rebellion among those who love their state with a
transcendent love.
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