So, that’s a wrap! The final chapter of my novella, Fixing History, has been published. If you missed a chapter, here’s the series index.

On to the footnotes:

1.  My teenaged son, for whom I wrote this novella, disagrees with me about time travel.  He thinks that Sean’s proposed multiverse theory is more likely.  He will let me get away with a unified timeline, however, because it’s my story.  (How gracious of him!)

2.  How could Nik get away with just a phone call to his doctor?  At the time of this writing, California is in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic (at least from the political point of view).  Kaiser, California’s biggest HMO, has moved its initial level of care to telemedicine visits.   They don’t treat patients in person until their symptoms progress – at least, that’s what I’ve deduced from the emails they keep sending me.  Thankfully, my family hasn’t needed their services this year.

3.  2020 is also the year of the George Floyd protests, which have devolved into something much broader as time goes on.  Meanwhile, I have not heard a single mainstream politician or pundit disagree with the initial point of the protests.  Nor have I heard anyone do so privately.  When protests become violence, however, some have drawn a distinction between the two.  Chris Cuomo of CNN summed it up best, albeit unintentionally.  On June 2, he said on-air, “Please, show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful.”  

Many were quick to point him to the text of the First Amendment: 

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” (emphasis added).

4.  I gave Mackenzie’s dad several drop-the-mic comments.  This is one of the more important ones:  “The question is, do you have it in your heart to forgive America?  For all her flaws, she created something worth saving; something the entire world longs for.”

The Christian faith teaches us that forgiveness is key.  But the Enlightenment, and humanism in general, had a belief in the inherent goodness of mankind.  If people are basically good, then we should expect our leaders to be good.  If they aren’t we should cancel them – even up to the French Revolution’s ‘cancelation’ of Louis XVI.  (I saw a photo from the Portland protests this summer of a mock guillotine.  The implications chilled me to the core.)

In contrast, America’s Judeo-Christian foundation acknowledges that mankind is capable of being both bad and good, and therefore it embraces forgiveness as well.  Society gives criminals second chances at the end of their sentences.  Self-help gurus tell people to cut themselves some slack because guilt and regret hold them back. 

Liberal politicians and professors have been working for generations to break down the Christian morality of our culture and make all kinds of immoral acts acceptable in the name of tolerance (their version of forgiveness, it would seem).  At the same time, however, there is no forgiveness for disagreeing with them, which runs counter to both liberty and tolerance. 

That’s why Mackenzie’s dad asks a question that resonates for all of us:  do we have it in our hearts to forgive America for her flaws, and to celebrate her freedoms?

5.  Karl Marx hated capitalism.  Capitalism is freedom in economics: the free market.  Old-world monarchies are by definition not free.  (I’m not counting modern constitutional monarchies, which began with the Magna Carta but didn’t become fully developed in the UK until long after the American Revolution.)  Mackenzie’s dad reasoned that if the old-world monarchies never toppled, the free market would never have developed, leaving Marx without his main enemy.

           As an example of an old-world monarchy controlling the market, allow me to reference King Carlos III of Spain.  He reigned until 1788, and it was at his command that the California missions were founded.  His rules for the missions, among other things, enforced price controls and restricted trade.  The missions and pueblos struggled economically for a long time under that system.  I wrote about that in my socialism blog series last year.

6.  Here’s a final dad-quote: “To the average citizen, it doesn’t matter whether they have a king or a politburo.   Without freedom, democracy devolves into another form of tyranny.”  Tyranny becomes possible when rights devolve from government.  History is littered by good kings whose successors removed liberties they had granted.  For example, one of the religious freedom reforms that was later reversed was the Edict of Nantes.

You could make the argument that the ancient nation of Judah enjoyed a great deal of personal liberty, at least more than most ancient countries.  In modern times, however, it was not until the Declaration of Independence appealed to a higher authority that those rights were given enduring power. 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

We look at the Constitution as the founding document for our form of government.  By the same token, the Declaration is our mission statement.  For more detail, I recommend Hillsdale College’s series of twelve short lectures titled, “Introduction to the Constitution.”

If you’ve enjoyed this serial novella, you might enjoy my historical novels available on Amazon.  If you’d like to know when I add other blog posts, be sure to leave your email address in the sidebar so you can receive updates.  Thanks for reading!