Fall Break

This is just a brief note to let my loyal readers know I’ll be taking a break from my regular Friday blog posts through the month of October to refresh and refocus. The podcast will still go out as scheduled and—come November—we should be back up and running with more great content. Until then, enjoy the cooler weather everybody!

from savingelephantsblog
via https://www.savingelephantsblog.com/saving-elephants-blog

Episode 40 - Conservatives Care

Do conservatives care? Those are the Right are often characterized as uncaring. But what do we mean by caring? Does the conservative worldview make us distant and calculating, or does it open the way for us to care for one another without abandoning sensible policies?

Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined once more by Bob Burch to untangle these questions and more.

LISTEN HERE

from savingelephantsblog
via https://www.savingelephantsblog.com/saving-elephants-blog

How to Entrap a Political Enemy

The following was written by Bob Burch, my friend and frequent guest on the podcast who last appear on Episode 39 – Variety vs Equality.

I have read about the tiff between Democrat presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke and Meghan McCain on the topic of how gun owning Americans will react to the proposed gun confiscations and red flag laws. And my first thought was that it is frightening how prophetic history can be.

I have been reading Volkogonov’s biography of Lenin which describes how Lenin designed the scheme for the destruction of organized religion in the Soviet Union and I find the story relevant.

Let me set the scene.

Lenin hated religion for both philosophical and political reasons. As a man who believed completely in the atheistic materialism of Marxism, Lenin could never make peace with a worldview that not only opposed his revolution’s goals and tactics but that opposed the fundamentals of his philosophy. To make matters worse, the Russian Orthodox church had been so intimately tied with the czar and the imperial government that its very continued existence seemed like a survival of the pre-revolutionary political order. But beyond all of that, Lenin could not allow the survival of anything that could command the hearts and minds of the people except for the Communist party. The opportunity to destroy his enemy came in the form of a horrifying famine that raged from 1921-22.

In those years, due in no small part to the policies of the Communists, twenty-five million people were starving to death in the Soviet Union. The famine was so severe that people were cannibalizing the dead. Its misery could not be hidden and in time the world would pour support out for the suffering Soviet people. The first major effort to remedy the situation, however, came from the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox church, Tikhon.

In a public appeal, the leader of the faithful called on Christians to give what they had to help the helpless and even to sell the treasures of the churches to feed the starving. The only stipulation he put on them, in accordance with the teachings of the Orthodox church, was to not give up and profane liturgical objects. This act of charity, however, was exactly what the Bolsheviks needed to destroy religious institutions nationwide.

Incensed that counter-revolutionary forces might take control of the crisis and win the people over by solving their problems with something other than Communism, Lenin decided that the church had to be stopped and that the government had to provide a solution. On February 23rd, 1922 a decree was published for the forcible confiscation of all church valuables by the government, ostensibly in order to purchase food for the starving.

It was a master stroke. It immediately cast the Bolsheviks as truly moral heroes willing to do anything, even profaning the sacred, to save people. (This was a fig leaf, however. The Bolsheviks sent vastly larger sums out of the country to foment revolution in foreign countries than they ever spent on importing food for the starving.) It also gave them the vast wealth of the religious communities and, more importantly, the power to take that wealth without depending on the donations of their ideological enemy.

But, most importantly, it divided their enemies, the religious citizens of the Soviet Union, into two camps and gave them roles to play that they could not break free of.

The first camp were those who complied, who let their churches and synagogues and mosques be ransacked, looted, taken from them, and turned into warehouses and factories or simply shuttered. Whether it was their intention or not, their actions declared that the spiritual values they believed in did not matter as much as obedience to a regime that told them not to hold to those values. They were told to reshape their internal, spiritual life to the wishes of their master, the Communist Party. They were cast in the role of converts to the new religion of the state, who obeyed the Kremlin first and God second, and they played their part with obedience.

The second camp were those who tried to keep their sacred objects, who cared more about what they believed was divine than what the authorities said. These people were cast into the role of the greedy and backwards reactionaries, who cared more for their treasures than the lives of the starving, who would break the law and resist authorities. This let the Bolsheviks treat the second camp as criminals of the worst sort and justified ever increasing measures to break them. Those measures began with machine gunning entire villages and escalated from there. In short, they were cast as the worst of criminals and they played their part by their disobedience.

In the end, both camps played their part to perfection, either surrendering their lives in obedience to Lenin’s regime or surrendering their lives in death. Through slaughter and surrender, the Soviet Union functionally destroyed the religious lives of its people as far as humanly possible.

After reading a bit of history it is easy to declare with the nonchalance of a college freshman that every age is full of evil and that it is all the same and no one is talking about doing anything as radical as destroying religion in the United States. But that would miss my point.

The point is not that evil happened or that Bolsheviks were bad. Rather the point is that it is frighteningly easy to use laws to make entire groups of people live out roles designed to prove the rightness of the law.

Currently those politicians proposing red flag laws and gun confiscations are saying that people will comply. They are arguing that police officers will not be seen as modern redcoats and gun owners will not see themselves as modern minutemen. And if they are right, if no one resists, then the laws they propose will be found to have been justified by the obedience of the public. The laws did what they set out to do, take guns from the public, and no one minded.

But what if they are wrong? What if reports come streaming in of police officers and gun owners shooting it out and killing each other in the streets and living rooms of America? It does not have to happen too often. Just one out of every hundred AR-15 confiscations have to go wrong and you would have a virtual civil war. And what if the police make a mistake and try to confiscate an “assault weapon” from someone who does not own one but resists and kills a police officer with a shotgun or a revolver? What then? What happens to all gun owners then?

It would be then that the trap hidden inside their proposals would be sprung. Obviously, everyone who resisted confiscation would be a criminal. Worse, they would be either a cop killer, or at least an attempted cop killer. How can cop killers be allowed to own any weapon? The response must surely be to take every measure to secure our streets from such reckless killers!

And so, the only reasonable course would be to criminalize the ownership of more guns and to give the government more power to seize more weapons with even less oversight. That is always the answer.

No one will publicly say that this kind of plan exists. No one will publicly say that red flag laws are being proposed to brand all gun owners as criminals and as a step to make all weapons illegal. And in reality, very few people will even think of such a course of events, let alone think it is possible.

Yet that does not mean that the political trap I have described does not exist within the very framing of the proposed laws. And it does not mean that this trap is not possible to be used on multiple issues, such as climate change, mandatory vaccinations, or immigration, for example. If the public holds an issue to be at a crisis level where lives or the public welfare is on the line and there is a stark difference of moral opinion on the issue, then this trap is easy enough to set on any issue.

I do not know for certain that this is the strategy that red flag law advocates are pursuing. What everyone knows is that there are people in this country, albeit few in number, who publicly and openly hate the idea of anyone outside of the government owning a weapon as much as Lenin openly hated religion. And it would be naive to think that some have not struck upon this idea as a method to achieve their goals.

What is also known is that there are people in this country who fully intend to defend their rights no matter the cost. If red flag laws, let alone gun confiscation laws, are enacted then those who possess guns will be placed in the position of becoming either criminals to their own conscience by giving up their rights or criminals to the state in order to continue doing as they have always done. That is an intolerable and unbearable situation for any moral person.

If Mr. O’Rourke wishes to pretend that everyone will peaceably go along with the laws he is proposing, then he is fooling only himself. Everyone knows that will not be the case. For our part, we must not fool ourselves about how these laws will be used. These laws will be used to turn citizens into criminals and to justify using force against them. They will and we know it. It is not making the debate in this country more acrimonious to say this. It is saying the truth. We must admit to ourselves when we have seen this kind of law before, what the results were then, and what the results will be this time.

from savingelephantsblog
via https://www.savingelephantsblog.com/saving-elephants-blog

Beyond Reason – Part 1

During the eighteenth century there emerged an explosion of intellectual, philosophical, political, and economic ideas that swept across the Western world collectively referred to as The Enlightenment. These ideas led to unprecedented breakthroughs in science, the emergence of the free market, revolutions and political upheaval, and massive shifts in how people thought about the concepts of God, the role of the church and state, society, and the individual.

It would be an understatement to say that this was an exciting time to be alive. Nearly every prejudice, presupposition, institution, and idea were being pulled apart, questioned, reconstructed, or discarded. Systems of government that had endured for a millennia were giving way to radical new ideas of the rights of the individual, the equality of all people, and the shared humanity of us all. Some began to see The Enlightenment as the Age of Reason where humans would finally rid themselves of the ancient religious superstitions and the barbaric hierarchy of slavery and monarchy and would enter a new age where reason ruled supreme.

But to suggest that the Age of Reason contained some cohesive set of ideas that everyone could agree on would be like saying the Age of Trump is an era of bipartisanship. Some may have believed that reason was inevitably progressing history, but others were skeptical or even opposed to this idea. As William F. Buckley once famously quipped, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘STOP’!” And in the Age of Reason conservatives were yelling “STOP” as loudly as they could.

But why would a conservative oppose reason? There are plenty of things the progressive calls progress that conservatives understandably oppose—collectivism, equality of outcomes, the loss of cultural traditions, expanding state control—but what could possibly be wrong with a call to reason? In fact, don’t conservatives often accuse progressives of being over-reliant on their emotions instead of reason?

The answer lies in what we mean by reason. As Thomas Sowell put it:

“Reason has at least two very different meanings. One is a cause-and-effect meaning: There is a reason why water expands when it freezes into ice, even though most of us who are not physicists do not know what that reason is—and at one time, no one knew the reason. The other meaning of reason is articulated specification of causation or logic: When it is demanded that individuals or society justify their actions before the bar of reason, this is what is meant. The more constrained one’s vision of human capabilities and potential, the greater the difference between these two meanings. Everything may have a cause and yet human beings may be unable to specify what it is.”

From this vantage point we see that conservatives are not opposed to reason but they are skeptical of humanity’s capacity for employing reason sufficiently or intentionally in certain situations or fields. Reason might be an appropriately sufficient tool in the field of philosophy or science, but can the same be said of the field of politics?

“Many of the greatest challenges a statesman must confront arise from the less rational elements of the human character,” writes author and political analyst Yuval Levin, “Governing is, of course, a rational activity, and political thought must certainly be guided by some general principles, but it’s a mistake to assume that effective principles can be drawn from abstract premises rather than actual experience. The general must be derived from the particular, not the other way around.” Reason is an excellent tool for deriving general principles; but it isn’t well suited for studying the nuances of highly specific situations.

The conservative does not believe we can govern well using reason alone because politics is more than applying general principles derived from reasoning. Throughout his book, The Great Debate, Yuval Levin uses British statesman Edmund Burke to illustrate this point: “Burke believes that the attempt to apply what he calls metaphysical methods in politics confuses politicians and citizens about the purpose of politics—leading them to think that governing is about proving a point rather than advancing the interests and happiness of a nation.”

What then does the conservative believe is required beyond reason to govern well? Again, Levin turns to Burke: “If the premises of Enlightenment liberalism are inadequate, and if the resulting faith in modern reason is unjustified, what is the alternative organizing principle of, and the appropriate means for thinking about, political change? Burke’s answer…is prescription—Burke’s great anti-innovationist innovation.”

Just what is prescription and how does it take us beyond reason? That is what we’ll be exploring throughout this series, beginning with Part 2 next week.

from savingelephantsblog
via https://www.savingelephantsblog.com/saving-elephants-blog

Episode 39 - Variety vs Equality

Join Josh Lewis and Bob Burch as they explore the surprisingly nuanced idea of equality and show why conservatives have valued variety over equality.

Visions of the future are often replete with uniformity not (currently) seen on earth. Star Trek foretells a future in which barriers of culture, religion, class, nationalities, and politics have given way to global unity at times extending beyond even the human race. The conservative recognizes that such a world wouldn’t be one of living long and prospering, but an authoritarian dystopia obliterating the varieties that make civilization a possibility.

The conservative is a wet blanket on starry-eyed fantasies of a world where distinctions in currency, class, and cultures melt away. The conservative is that dreary realist in the room crushing dreams of a society in which human equality has been extended to both outcomes and incomes. The conservative is a killjoy who scoffs at notions of a government capable of administering perfect social justice. But, in the end, it is the conservative who defends with his dying breath Beauty and Virtue in danger of succumbing to some radical’s ideological vision of a cold, narrowing world of equality.

It may sound laudable to insist on a broad definition of equality for all, but the conservative rightly recognizes the institution of government is ill-equipped to carry out this lofty goal. Much like wantonly declaring there will be peace leaves a nation all the more vulnerable to war, declaring there will be no inequalities leaves a people vulnerable to the machinations of social experimentation. Noble Laureate Milton Friedman, in his 1978 lecture at Stanford University, observed that “a society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. And a society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other system that has ever been developed.”

Because conservatives hold that mankind is as much a spiritual creation as a biological organism, they reject efforts to bring about a social utopia through mechanical or scientific means. Such attempts to reduce men to machines is seen in the progressive visions depicting our future. Individuality is swallowed up in uniformity to such a degree that everyone wears a similar uniform in a society where all racial, religious, and cultural differences on entire planets are obliterated. The last “prejudices” that exist are between alien races. Uniformity, a classless society, the obliteration of cultural diversity—such is the endgame of a worldview devoid of the constraints of conservatism. Yet history has shown us time and again, these lofty aims inevitably lead to new and even more savage forms of inequalities.

LISTEN HERE

from savingelephantsblog
via https://www.savingelephantsblog.com/saving-elephants-blog

Punching Nazis

Here’s a scenario you may have never mulled over: You’re having a conversation with a complete stranger when he announces, in no uncertain terms, that he’s a Nazi.

Should you punch him?

Doubtless, we’re highly unlikely to ever face this situation as the Nazi regime was punched into oblivion over half a century ago. But I was surprised to learn just how many Should You Punch Nazis? articles are out there. With the rise of the alt-Right and white supremacy groups and the careless proclivity some on the Left have in calling everyone that disagrees with them a “Nazi”, some are beginning to think-through the ethical implications and efficacy of Nazi-punching.

In our grandparent and great grandparents’ generation, Nazis punching was less of a philosophical discussion than it was a national pastime. When a nation is at war, one does not ask if the enemy is deserving of punishment. Violent aggression is state sponsored. But then, the nation had not employed every able-bodied citizen to the task but only those who wore the uniform. The government asked a lot of the entire country, from rationing to buying war bonds to encouraging young men to enlist. But the government was not asking for wayward do-gooders to fly into Europe by themselves and punch the nearest bystander they suspected were allied with the Third Reich.

But today’s post isn’t about the merits or mischief of vigilantism. I want to focus instead on whether or not punching Nazis is likely to produce the outcomes we’d want. That is, what exactly are we trying to accomplish if we set about identifying Nazis to punch? Is it simply that those who hold views we deem too vile deserve to be punched, or are we attempting to impact society for the better?

Blogger and writer Katherine Cross published a piece extolling the morality and imperativeness of contemporary Nazi punching. “To be blunt,” writes Katherine, “Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter. There is nothing about the ideology or its practice that is anything but corrosive to democratic institutions.” I agree.

Liberal democracy is a big-tent ideology that provides a societal structure for many competing views to debate their ideas without killing or harming one another. This model has been highly successful in reducing violence between warring factions within the same nation. So long as they respect the liberal democratic institutions, we can all get along. But what happens when a viewpoint identifies the democratic framework as the very thing to be destroyed? “Fascism is a cancer that turns democracy against itself unto death,” Katherine continues, “There is no reasoning with it. It was specifically engineered to attack the weaknesses of democracy and use them to bring down the entire system, arrogating a right to free speech for itself just long enough to take power and wrench it away from everyone else.”

This is more than idle speculation. Fascist groups have successfully torn apart democracies and established themselves as the sole authority of a nation (Nazism being the most prominent example). While one means of dealing with the effect of such extremism in a free society is to marginalize it, Katherine fears this simply isn’t enough, citing the growing presence of white supremacists and neo-Nazis such as Richard Spencer. “When… someone like Spencer does come along and is being feted in the mainstream, there are no other options available to us.” Violence is the only recourse left to protect democracy, so punch away!

But is it true to say that Nazis are given mainstream status? Are white supremacists frequently invited to speak at public events? Are neo-Nazis given equal time to weigh in on important political discussions as other parties on major news networks? Do hate groups comprise a significant portion of the population? Is it really true that these extremists are afforded equal footing in our society and the only “options available to us” is to take matters into our own fists, so to speak? As blogger Barry Purcell put it, “If…you find yourself out of ideas once punching is taken off the table, this might represent a failure of the imagination on your part.”

Indeed, in a functional democracy, the best way to combat radical extremists who use fear and violence to further their cause isn’t punching them in the face—the very thing they’re good at—but combating their cowardly and baseless ideas with better ideas. At times it may be necessary to defend democracy with violence. But the internal maintenance of democracy is far more dependent on the stories we tell ourselves and the free-flow of ideas (both good and bad) than it is on well-intentioned ne'er-do-wells punching people in the face.

“Any ideology which is dependent on a victim-complex narrative will be validated, emboldened, and enabled by violent resistance,” continues Purcell, “The more you punch them, the better it goes for them. They’re so desperate for this validation that they will specifically engineer public demonstrations to provoke as much hostility as possible.” Journalist Jesse Singal agrees, stressing, “In the case of violent counterprotest tactics—e.g., punching Nazis—experts on extremism say it is likely only to aid the white supremacists’ cause.”

The point isn’t that punching Nazis is a bad idea because it’s giving them what they want in some perverted sense, but that it is unlikely to be effective and may even spread their doctrine of hatred. Singal continues by citing researchers in the field of countering violent extremism (CVE): “Hate groups are better able to recruit and glorify their cause when they are able to engage in violence, regardless of how that violence starts.” Singal then describes how this might transpire:

“In the U.S., explicitly white-supremacist groups know they are vastly, vastly outnumbered by everyone who hates them…So their only hope for relevance is to maximize every potential bit of media coverage. And the best way to do this is to create media moments: scary, evocative images like the torch photos…but also as many violently photogenic confrontations with counterprotesters as possible. Producing violence is an underlying, often unstated, goal of many white-supremacist protests and gatherings.”

The internet comedy news channel We the Internet TV recently produced a video with the provocative title 5 Reasons Why We Need Hate Speech that was more informative than humorous. There five “reasons” hate speech was needed were:

Shutting down hate speech makes it stronger (as we’ve shown above)Hate speech can be great speech (some of our proudest achievements in social justice began as ideas unaccepted by the masses at one time)Hate speech cannot actually hurt you (and shielding yourself from ideas you don’t want to hear makes you weaker)Suppressing hate speech makes us stupid (it doesn’t allow for the nuances that often accompany rigorous debate)Hate speech makes us better (there’s no way to silence the monsters who preach hate without becoming one of them. If we just tune out opposing viewpoints we lose the opportunity to fight for a better future.)

There’s a lot here, and I don’t want to get needlessly sidetracked (the video does an excellent job exploring each point). But here again we see that punching Nazis is unlikely to end hate speech. The video even notes that during the period when the Nazis rose to power in Germany there were very strict anti-hate speech laws. Every time a Nazi served time in prison for violating these laws it became an effective propaganda tool to win the public’s sympathies and remain in the news.

And it’s not just extremists like Nazis who can inadvertently profit from others trying to shut them down. Some even rise to fame because of their adversary’s efforts. Professor of Psychology Jordan Peterson gained international fame after repeated attempts by students to silence his lectures and speeches. Controversial journalist Andy Ngo gained prominence and sympathy after being assaulted by the radical Leftist group Antifa. Even yours truly gained a noticeable bump in visitors to my blog when I wrote about my experience with someone attempting to intimidate me into silence by contacting my employer.

A willingness to engage in violence against those spewing hate says less about one’s stance on hate than it does their inability to engage in civil discourse. “If people with a different political outlook are not just fellow citizens who disagree with you but the enemy, trying to bridge difference or seek compromise is pointless,” warns Cathy Young of The Boston Globe, “And once you’ve decided that it’s OK, even desirable, to punch Nazis, your definition of who qualifies as a Nazi or a fascist is bound to keep expanding.”

It’s easy to mentally assign a label to your political adversaries that absolves any responsibility on your part. If your opponents are actual enemies who must be destroyed else they destroy you, life just got a lot simpler (and potentially more violent). And it may be true that some are truly beyond the reach of civility and decency and rational persuasion. But sometimes people surprise you. I knew two brothers in college who were the epitome of civil behavior but had both been brainwashed into a neo-Nazi group in high school. Even conservative giants such as Thomas Sowell and Irving Kristol described themselves as Marxists in their young adult life.

To truly combat hate speech we have to offer something better. We have to cultivate an attitude of humility and respect for others, even when those others aren’t returning the favor. It’s hard work and there’s certainly no guarantee it’ll work in every case. But it is a small price to pay for the privilege of living in a culture that gives the government a monopoly on violence under limited circumstances while we work to live with people we may not like but we do not intend to harm.

from savingelephantsblog
via https://www.savingelephantsblog.com/saving-elephants-blog

Out of Office

I'm taking the week off from the blog as I prepare for another series. Here are some intriguing, inspiring, thought-provoking, and powerful quotes from conservative thinkers to tide you over until I return:

G. K. Chesterton, English writer/philosopher

“It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.”

“Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.”

“Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.”

“You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.”

“The secret of life lies in laughter and humility.”

“How many excellent thinkers have pointed out that political reform is useless until we produce a cultured populace?”

Yuval Levin, political theorist

“The statesman’s task is...not to drive society toward some particular ultimate and just condition but to create and constantly sustain a space in which the people may exercise their freedom and enjoy the benefits of life in society.”

“Man’s reliance on his imagination to guide even his reason is a natural fact crucially relevant to political life. A successful political order must protect and sustain the ‘wardrobe of our moral imagination’ and never lose sight of its importance.”

Edmund Burke, British statesman

“Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasoning but to human nature, of which reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.”

“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

“Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform.”

“Men must have a certain fund of natural moderation to qualify them for freedom, else it becomes noxious to themselves and a perfect nuisance to everybody else.”

Russell Kirk, political theorist

“All great systems, ethical or political, attain their ascendancy over the minds of men by virtue of their appeal to the imagination; and when they cease to touch the chords of wonder and mystery and hope, their power is lost, and men look elsewhere for some set of principles by which they may be guided.”

“Respect for the rights and duties of business does not mean that industrialists ought to write our laws and direct our state policies.”

“If most folk come to believe that our culture must collapse—why, then collapse it will.”

“Culture arises from the cult; and that when belief in the cult has been wretchedly enfeebled, the culture will decay swiftly. The material order rests upon the spiritual order.”

“No cause worth upholding ever is lost altogether.”

“Deny a fact, and that fact will be your master.”

Thomas Sowell, writer/economist

“Cultural features do not exist merely as badges of ‘identity’ to which we have some emotional attachment. They exist to meet the necessities and forward the purposes of human life.”

“Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options.”

“Economic policies need to be analyzed in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the hopes that inspired them.”

“Adam Smith had a high opinion of capitalism, despite his low opinion of capitalists.”

“When a company makes a million dollars in profits, that does not mean that its output would cost a million dollars less if produced by a non-profit organization or by a government-run enterprise. Without the incentives and constraints created by the prospects of profit and the threat of losses, the same output might well cost millions of dollars more.”

“Knowledge is one of the scarcest of all resources.”

“If payments to foreign investors impoverished a nation, then the United States would be one of the most impoverished nations in the world.”

Roger Scruton, British philosopher

“There is great hunger for beauty in our world, and it is a hunger that popular art often fails to recognize and much serious art defies.”

“Religion and family are two realms of value. But the first is increasingly marginal to the lives of modern urban people, and the second is beginning to lose its privileged status, as the forum in which peace and fulfilment are to be found.”

“You don’t need to regard marriage as a sacrament and a vow before God in order to adhere to the traditional view of it. In every society of which records exist, marriage is seen as a bond between man and woman in which the whole of society has an interest.”

“The state can redistribute wealth only if wealth is created, and wealth is created by those who expect a share in it.”

“There is a line of obligation that connects us to those who gave us what we have; and our concern for the future is an extension of that line.”

from savingelephantsblog
via https://www.savingelephantsblog.com/saving-elephants-blog