Time To Start Standing Up For The Blue

Law enforcement personnel deserve your maximum support. Enough.

“What astonishes me is how few men there are today that are standing up and being counted.”

Helen Marie Taylor is a Richmond legend, one of the few voices willing to have the courage to defend Richmond’s monuments even at 96 years of age.

Taylor does so not out of any animus, nor is she aware of the hyper-Marxist Howard Zinn approach to American history that is plaguing our undergraduates.

Rather, Taylor recognizes something fundamentally Virginian that many of us have forgotten in our hypertechnical age.

Concepts such as honor, duty, community and sacrifice were the values that our great-grandfathers were trying to come to grips with in the wake of Reconstruction — a process that did more to confirm that “the War” was fought not for the freedom of a race but for the economic supremacy of New York bankers. Jim Crow, segregation, and Massive Resistance can pair themselves with welfare, abortion, and failing public schools for all the bankers cared — so long as Wall Street prospered, injustice could be tolerated and even sanctioned.

There is a point where Confederate sympathizers and Black Lives Matter agree, and if you’re not hearing it then you either do not understand the argument.

The line that there is nothing that Dixie stood for in 1861 that Old Glory didn’t stand for in 1776 is absolutely, undeniably, 100% true. Attempts to decouple Jefferson and Washington from the likes of Lee, Jackson and Longstreet fail for the simple reason that all five men fought to preserve the same system predicated on the ownership of human persons.

The quip of British diplomats that the Civil War was fought to determine whether a man could be owned for life or by the hour rings true as well. The injustices of racism were not quenched with the sacrifice of over one million souls — in fact, racism thrived and took on new forms in both the North and the South.

One mentions all of this not to excuse the sins of the past. For those who have tracked my political career, I have little tolerance for racial identity politics — in fact, irascible contempt for it.

Yet in this much, I completely agree with the Black Lives Matter (and they do matter) movement. They recognize what Northern and “woke” historians refuse to consider, namely that the Civil War wasn’t fought to end slavery or create racial harmony. Oh certainly, so-called “allies” will wash their hands like Pontius Pilate claiming that the war was fought over slavery, but they’d be wrong.

Slavery as the cause of secession? In most cases yes — any idiot can look up those ordinances. But the war itself? Was fought to preserve the Union and impose the economic supremacy of Yankee industrialists. It’s why Reconstruction was a myth, why the Freedman’s Bureau was a paper tiger, and why 40 acres and a mule turned into yet another broken promise from the powers-that-be.

Same system; same gristmill; different rules. This is the unanswered question left behind by Northern racism, and the answers do matter.

The mythology we have wrapped the Civil War into is precisely that. This same Army of the Potomac that liberated men in 1865 was exterminating Native Americans in 1868. No one should confuse this with a grand army designed to liberate humanity. Northern historians called it the Manifest Destiny; modern historians would call it genocide. Such are the pillars of American history.

Of course, this is a history our present day “woke” population would rather not consider much less hear. Too useless to themselves to divest their property in solidarity with the masses, they preach on and on about a Jacobin revolt and guillotines. They create “autonomous zones” while treating anyone who stands up for their rights as mere privilege (a critique from which they are marvelously exempt).

Yet in the end? These overprivileged and soft leftists are perhaps the worst examples of privilege and entitlement that exist. They can protest, they can riot… but in the end? They melt back into their apartment complexes, sip their IPAs, hide their tattoos, and apply to work at woke institutions all too happy to hire others who look and speak just like them: white, middle class, college educated, and above all else pledged to the postmodern orthodoxy.

Just enough to care; not enough to change.

Thus it is with no touch of irony that the targets of their “woke” outrage are blue collar, underpaid and quite frankly under appreciated men and women of the law — our police officers, deputies, and Virginia State Police.

Quick poll.

Which random sample of each group do you think best represents America? 100 law enforcement officers and their families? Or 100 woke Antifa goons?

Take a harder look at the folks wearing the blue.

You’ll find officers of every stripe and background, every color and ethnicity. You might be hard pressed to find any sense of “privilege” or upper class upbringing. Most of these men and women come from working class backgrounds; the vast overwhelming majority of them are involved for service — the police badge being a shield after all.

A good 90% of what they do is paperwork, sorting through the rules and regulations in order to maintain the old maxim that in America, we let 100 guilty people go so that no one innocent person would ever be unjustly accused. Most of the time when they are off duty? They sleep so they can wake up and go to baseball games and cookouts.

When the job does get interesting, they express the most noble sentiments of our communities. Pulling broken bodies from car accidents, calming a screaming child, escorting public leaders to a final resting place, checking up on those seeking treatment for drug addiction, being a visible presence of law and order, or just pointing grandma in the right direction. In fact, where the arrests aren’t made is where the profession takes on the qualities of honor.

Yet the profession of law enforcement is perhaps most noble because it is the tactile point where the sentiment of the public will is most definitively expressed. The police exist to enforce our laws, democratically crafted in legislature by the people’s representatives.

That deserves your support.

In fact, our law enforcement deserve a lot more than just your support — they deserves the presumption of good faith in every instance precisely because they are representing the public will.

Oh yes, I hear the whining voices saying “but Hitler!” and “but Stalin!” — and you know what? They can go straight to hell.

We don’t live in Nazi Germany. We don’t live in Soviet Russia. We live in the United States of America where majority rule and minority rights co-exist in a framework designed to pit the interests of the demos and the aristos against the nomoi (the law).

When the laws don’t work? We change them through a tried-and-true process based on assent and consensus, not violence and coercion.

That is worth defending. That is how you change systems. That is how you dismantle the gristmills of old. That is how you alter rules. Not through riots or the heavy hands of courts, but through talking.

The very moment you fall into the camp of questioning the integrity of law enforcement — again, working class Americans of every stripe and background? You are in the ACAB camp (the acronym stands for “All Cops Are Bastards”) and never call 911 for an emergency again. Because yes, it is an either/or binary choice between supporting something as fundamental as the laws of our polity or creating a law unto yourself.

. . .and I guess that brings us right back to our friend Helen Marie Taylor at the age of 96 lamenting the fact that there are no men left willing to stand up and be counted.

Truth is? There are men and women willing to stand up and be counted.

There are men and women who do this every day — not just law enforcement, but first responders — and ask for nothing in return. Certainly not for salary or pensions, and certainly not for glory or honor (at least the public sort). Certainly not for respect. God knows there’s precious little of that in the world today.

And they certainly don’t do it for praise.

But these men and women in blue serve for two very good reasons: (1) because it is in their souls to help those who cannot help themselves, and (2) because we damn well ask them to.

Every time you hear ACAB or “F*ck12” and all the hate they throw at police, remember that they’re not saying that about them. These overprivileged snotgobblers who never learned the terror of picking your own switch (and probably need to) are saying that about YOU.

These guys?

They’re just in the way.

Our law enforcement personnel deserve your support — whether that’s a cup of coffee, picking up their lunch tab, or a simple “thank you” on your way out. They deserve it more than the entitled snobs who throw rocks and hurl abuse at them precisely because they are the last ones to use the word deserve.

Mrs. Taylor is right — these are the men and women standing up and being counted.

At least have the courage to stand with them.

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Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.