The War on Clarity

July 28, 2002

by Bruce Walker

The problems in this world are not cured by complex thinking but by committed moral will. Courage and faith cannot be stolen from the innocent or hoarded by greedy. The simple answers to hard problems require a life vigilant against the lazy lanes of popularity and compromise, and dedicated to the often lonely path of doing what is right.

Those who achieve success in life can be divided into two types of people. The first type understands that God alone bestows all blessings, and that each of us must use his blessings to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our Lord. The second type, however, believes in nothing but the luck of the draw.

Those who make the wise choice of gratitude and thanks see the world clearly. Eric Liddell, who won a Gold Medal at the 1924 Olympics, shows this clarity in the wonderful film Chariots of Fire. He ran for the glory of God. There was nothing easy or undemanding about the grueling years of training to win his race, and Liddell was a well educated and very intelligent man. Clarity is not ignorance or silliness, but surety in purpose.

Liddell died as a missionary in China during the Second World War. A countryman of his during these same years was also speaking with crystal clear prose to the British people when he said: "I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, sweat and tears." Winston Churchill was brilliant in every sense of the word. Churchill, time and again during his life, showed physical courage as well. Winston Churchill and Eric Liddell both possessed strength, intellect, creativity and pure grit. Their lives are models of clarity as mature wisdom.

Leftists reject certainty and truth. As Dick Gephardt so famously said, those who succeed are "the winners in life’s lottery." The leftists cannot accept grace freely given and cannot acknowledge a firm purpose for their blessings. So they make simple truths into complex lies. Modern life is littered with their messiness.

The stock market in the last few months has dropped in value, but the Gross National Product has grown every single quarter - except for the quarter of September 11, 2001 - since the third quarter of 1993. The GNP, on an annual basis, has grown every year for the last decade (and will do so again in 2002). Stock prices simply grew much faster than the economy, and a correction in stock values - although unpleasant and painful - was obviously needed.

That hardly satisfies those who still study the hoary texts of the mystical Marx for arcane formulae of capitalist exploitation. That also does not sate the Democrat Party’s need for sinister culprits and masses of victims. Adam Smith is simple and true. Karl Marx is complex and false. An incomprehensible world lets leftists understand what the silly masses cannot.

Ten months ago radical Islamic terrorists, goaded on by decades of communist propaganda about America and by their own feelings of inadequacy, began a brutal war against America, Israel and all the noble values those two free democracies represent. The callous savagery of the attack has been compared to Pearl Harbor, but that is wrong: Japanese pilots did not strafe civilians on the streets of Honolulu or bomb civilian hospitals. Americans in 1941 had no problem seeing clearly who was right and who was wrong, but the even worse crimes of bin Laden, al-Qaeda and Hussein cannot be accepted as evil by leftists in America.

What are Democrats doing these days about the war against evil? Dithering. Questioning. Equivocating. Some leftists even posit absurd conspiracy theories. Consider this pompous silliness with the strong and uncompromising voice of President Bush in his early speeches to America about our war.

If Democrats and other leftists do not care about the truth, then why do they not just outright lie? Some do, of course, but those experts in criminal psychology who try to save mothers who murder their children or monsters who kidnap five year girls do not lie so must as they create needless complexity. Welfare theorists study and study and study, rather than simply conclude the obvious: strong self-supporting families with religious values cure nearly every social problem.

Inventing complexity is a way of lying without lying. It is a way for those who believe that they are simply chance dust in the cosmos to justify their own self-importance. That is why the left will always war against clarity, and will instead seek the cold comfort of a trillion details. The war on clarity is not science replacing faith. Science proves itself by elegant simplicity and not by endless codicils and exceptions. Leftist do not yearn for this. They yearn for the chaos of complexity.

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Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as a sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce has had almost two hundred published articles have appeared in the Oklahoma Bar Journal, Law & Order, Legal Secretary Today, The Single Parent, Enter Stage Right, Citizen's View, The American Partisan, Port of Call, and several other professional and political periodicals.

Send the author an E mail at Walker@ConservativeTruth.org.

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