Excerpts
The Case of the Pantyhose Caper, January 1995
Thomas Jefferson: Front and Center, February 1995 |
Thomas Jefferson: Front and Center, January 2005
(This column received a first-place award in the National American Legion Press Association Contest in 1995)
With some degree of regularity, names of some prominent persons, both in the political arena and the entertainment field, are being reported as consulting with psychics (“One sensitive to extrasensory phenomena” according to a dictionary definition). In this way, one can supposedly avoid the pitfalls of life and be the captain of one’s life fortunes. This isn’t strange when you realize that even in Biblical times psychics were prominent, and for the same reason that they are experiencing prominence today--namely: When God doesn’t act as people think He should, or when God doesn’t intervene as people think He ought, they short-cut God and reach for the stars. This is not always as profitable as it may seem.
King Saul, before a great battle, consulted with the witch of Endor, in a sense, a psychic. He was so depressed by what he heard that he fell on his own sword in an act of suicide. His mistake? He should have sought God’s help.
Well, I wondered what it would be like to talk especially to Thomas Jefferson, who drafted our Declaration of Independence, and who was our third president. This wish seemed appropriate since he is credited as “author” of the so-called separation of church and state matter, and little else is generally quoted of what Jefferson said or wrote. A bit of research on the subject of Jefferson stimulated the imagination. And then a strange thing happened as I mused about Thomas Jefferson. For lo—whether asleep, awake, or in a trance, I know not—but behold! Thomas Jefferson interrupted my musing. The time: 1776. Mr. Jefferson was sitting with his writing desk (his own invention) in his lap. He was writing, and I took the liberty of stepping quietly behind his chair and looked over his shoulder. He was writing to Edmund Pendleton, a fellow Virginian. The subject of the letter dealt with what he felt necessary to include in the Virginia Constitution.
Certain statements caught my attention immediately! “Whoever intends to live in a country must wish that country well, and has a natural right of assisting in the preservation of it.” (With every new citizen, that is, America should be stronger.) And then this was noted: “Punishments I know are necessary, and I would provide them, strict and inflexible, but proportioned to the crime.” And more: “Death might be inflicted for murder and perhaps for treason if you would take out the description of treason all crimes which are not in their nature. Rape, buggery (sodomy) etc.—punish by castration. All other crimes by working on the high roads, rivers, galleys, etc., a certain time proportioned to the offense.”
Wow! I thought. Problems don’t grow old. They just linger about and continue to plague and disrupt society in ways many don’t wish to acknowledge. Then came a rousing moment! And this thought: “No pain, no gain.” Applied to violence and crime of our time, this means, unless serious crimes against society are dealt with dispatch and justice, crime proliferates, is nurtured even without intention. For the nature of man is sinful (lawless) and given the chance—given a finger—human nature takes the hand, the arm, and whatever else is available.
According to Thomas Jefferson, no plea bargaining, no woeful tales of an abusive childhood, or the result of the stress and strain of living would be acceptable to let one literally or figuratively “get away with murder.” In modern terms, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. But Jefferson also believed, “Laws . . . Proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with.” In other words, let the punishment fit the crime.
Well, it was good to get back to reality, but the experience left me with the conviction that little of what Jefferson said about crime, punishment, mercy, etc., has been quoted or suggested as applicable to our times.
Yet, Jefferson’s “Crime Bill” certainly outsmarts anything evident today. Nevertheless, from his memorial in Washington’s Tidal Basin he persists in giving the solution to our nation’s problems: “God, who gave us life, gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.” ‘Til we meet again, go with God, and God go with you! |
