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Dr. Kennedy, for years a force in conservative Christianty and conservative politics has retired from the pulpit of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. Story from the South Florida Sun-Sentiniel. In December he suffered heart problems and has been absent from the pulpit. See my previous post for more details on his significance.
In an earlier post, I pointed out that small-government conservatives need to observe the corollary of our beliefs: we need to be involved in one or more of the myriad of voluntary groups that better society and help meet human need. Today, a second corollary.

In the last post I mentioned the flooding we had recently, and the need some people have for shelter after being flooded out of their homes. Now and in the coming months these families will need to show responsible character. What am I talking about?--Will they move back into their houses that flooded, or will they make another choice and move out of a floodplain? Moving back into a house on a floodplain is irresponsible: you are, in effect, counting on society to help you out of your difficulties when you are flooded again. You are acting in a dependent way. Perhaps the closest one can come to living in a flood plain responsibly is by setting up a "flooded-out" savings account, hoping to have enough money in it for food and motel bills for next time. The second corollary for small-government conservatives is family responsibility.

Floods don't endanger property: building in flood plains endangers property.
Saturday night Southwest Oklahoma flooded. People evacuated from low-lying areas, water over the roads, at least a half-dozen people drowned. Here in our area a number of people are now homeless.

Yesterday evening I was working in the yard when I received a phone call from the police asking me to meet with the Red Cross. I went to the police station then was directed to the community center where a shelter would be set up. We had a quick meeting with the Red Cross team, determined what needed to be done to set up the shelter, then got to it. (I don't know why I was the only minister there; though I can imagine that given my parishioners I deal with the police more than most pastors in town, so mine may have been the first name thought of.) The call was put out for the volunteer fire department and we proceeded to sweep floors, unload the Red Cross trailer, and then set up cots, etc. By the time I left the first family was being checked into the shelter.

I am a small-government citizen. That is, I want my governments, federal and state, to be as small and inexpensive as possible. But, there is a corollary to this position. I must, therefore, be an active citizen giving of my time and treasure to ensure that needs are met on the local level. No true conservative can stand around and say, "Why don't they do something?" We want less "they." So we must be willing to pitch in ourselves. See this earlier post.

While traveling through Nashville we stopped to see the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson's plantation home. Old Hickory built himself quite a house; a two-story mansion furnished Philadelphia furniture and French wallpaper.

On one level, Jackson's life is a classic American rags-to-riches story. Born poor in the Carolina's, moved West to seek his fortune, practiced law and traded and rose in local society until he became a planter; serving in the militia then the Regular Army, he became a national folk-hero for his courage and success. As a political leader he championed the ordinary man against the elites. Ironic, some might say, given that he had risen into elite status himself. Opportunistic, some more cynical might assert, using common-man rhetoric to further his own ambitions. I think, though, Jackson believed his own words, and truly wanted to keep America the land of opportunity.

When Andrew Jackson championed the rights and liberty of the common man, he meant, of course, the common white man. He owned slaves; their labor made his lifestyle possible. Field hands lived near the fields they tilled, and household slaves lived near the big house, ready to answer the bells from the back-porch summoning them to meet the needs of their masters. Champion of Liberty and Owner of Slaves: was he a hypocrite? Not in the context of his time. His generation, and those before, understood Liberty to mean different kinds of liberty for different kinds of folks, depending on their ability for self-government. White men with full liberty followed by white women then children with blacks below. Does that make Jackson a racist. Sure, by modern standards. Although I would call his racism a "soft" racism: that is, I know of no evidence that he hated blacks and practiced cruelty toward slaves because they were black. Indeed, the slaves at the Hermitage lived better than most slaves in the area, and probably not below the conditions of many poor whites. This is not to condone slavery, but to attempt to understand our past.

Jackson, the Indian fighter, also was the man who adopted an orphaned Indian boy. He and Rachel raised him like a natural-born son. Contradictory? Seemingly so. Jackson believed in American expansion, and forced the powerful southern tribes west of the Mississippi. Yet he himself seemed to believe that he was doing them a favor as well as gaining opportunity for whites; that the only way the tribes could be preserved was to remove them from contact with whites.

The irony that strikes me today is that Jackson, a hero in his home state of Tennessee and admired throughout the South, gave one of the mortal wounds to the idea that America was a nation of states rather than a nation-state. When South Carolina rebelled during his presidency over taxation, Jackson forced her to remain in the Union with believable threats of violence. "Our Federal Union, it must be preserved."