BY THOMAS SOWELL
The “Occupy” movement, which the Obama
administration and much of the media have embraced, has implications that reach
far beyond the passing sensation it has created.
The unwillingness of authorities to put a stop to their organized
disruptions of other people’s lives, their trespassing, their vandalism, and
their violence is a de facto suspension, if not repeal, of the Fourteenth
Amendment’s requirement that the government provide “equal protection of the
laws” to all its citizens.
How did the Occupy movement acquire such immunity from the laws that the
rest of us are expected to obey? Simply by shouting politically correct slogans
and calling themselves representatives of the 99 percent against the 1
percent.
But just when did the 99 percent elect them as their representatives? If in
fact 99 percent of the people in the country were like these Occupy mobs, we
would not have a country. We would have anarchy.
Democracy does not mean mob rule. It means majority rule. If the Occupy
movement, or any other mob, actually represents a majority, then they already
have the votes to accomplish legally whatever they are trying to accomplish by
illegal means.
Mob rule means imposing what the mob wants, regardless of what the majority
of voters want. It is the antithesis of democracy.
In San Francisco, when the mob smashed the plate-glass window of a small
business shop, the owner put up some plywood to replace the glass, and the mob
wrote graffiti on his plywood. The consequences? None for the mob, but a
citation for the shop owner for not removing the graffiti.
When trespassers blocking other people at the University of
California–Davis refused to disperse, and locked their arms with one another to
prevent the police from being able to physically remove them, the police finally
resorted to pepper spray to break up this human logjam. The result? The police
have been strongly criticized for enforcing the law. Apparently pepper spray is
unpleasant, and people who break the law are not supposed to have unpleasant
things done to them. Which is to say, we need to take the “enforcement” out of
“law enforcement.”
Everybody is not given these exemptions from paying the consequences of
their own illegal acts. Only people who are currently in vogue with the elites
of the Left — in the media, in politics, and in academia.
The Fourteenth Amendment? What is the Constitution or the laws when it
comes to ideological soul mates, especially young soulmates who remind the aging
1960s radicals of their youth?
Neither in this or any other issue can the Constitution protect us if we
don’t protect the Constitution. When all is said and done, the Constitution is a
document, a piece of paper.
If we don’t vote out of office, or impeach, those who violate the
Constitution, or who refuse to enforce the law, the steady erosion of
Constitutional protections will ultimately render it meaningless. Everything
will just become a question of whose ox is gored and what is the political
expediency of the moment.
There has been much concern, rightly expressed, about the rusting of
bridges around the country, and the crumbling and corrosion of other parts of
the physical infrastructure. But the crumbling of the moral infrastructure is no
less deadly.
The police cannot maintain law and order, even if the political authorities
do not tie their hands in advance or undermine them with second-guessing after
the fact.
The police are the last line of defense against barbarism, but they are
equipped only to handle that minority who are not stopped by the first lines of
defense, beginning with the moral principles taught at home and upheld by
families, schools, and communities.
But if everyone takes the path of least resistance — if politicians pander
to particular constituencies and judges give only wrist slaps to particular
groups or mobs who are currently in vogue, and if educators indoctrinate their
students with “non-judgmental” attitudes — then the moral infrastructure
corrodes and crumbles.
The moral infrastructure is one of the intangibles without which the
tangibles don’t work. Like the physical infrastructure, its neglect in the short
run invites disaster in the long run.
— Thomas Sowell is a
senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2012 Creators Syndicate,
Inc.
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