A Delaware Coast Press reader writes that her father died almost 20 years ago. She considers herself fully recovered, but when something reminds her of him, the feelings come rushing back. She asks me if she needs medication to keep her from falling back into mourning.

This is my answer to her: A major loss is not something you ever fully get over. You just get used to it. When your father died, you felt the loss every day. As time passed, you didn’t think about it as often, but when you do, you feel it just as strongly. No, you’re not fully over it – and why should you be? There’s nothing wrong with feeling loss. If you couldn’t function during your unhappiness, that would be one thing. But to feel it after all these years is normal.

In his online article “Getting Over a Loved One’s Death,” Rodney Grubbs writes, “Having a hard time getting over the loved one is completely natural …. As a general observation, the stronger the love, the longer it takes to get over them. And quite frankly, I’m not sure what ‘getting over them’ really means. If you truly loved them, you will never completely get over it. What you will do is learn to live with it from a different perspective. Then you’ll feel better about moving on with your life.”

You don’t need medication for these occasional feelings. Medication is for people who are unable to cope, i.e., unable to handle the basic activities of daily living without significant disruption. When it comes to medication, there are two schools of thought, and both are wrong. Some people feel it’s wrong to take medication because it’s a sign of weakness. Nonsense. If your functioning can actually be improved with medication, then what moral reason is there not to do so? We don’t refuse medication for high blood pressure or diabetes on the basis of moral weakness, so why this?

The other common mistake is that people see medication as a cure. It’s not, especially for something like depression over a personal loss. When anti-anxiety or anti-depressant medication does work, it treats only the symptoms. But so do a lot of medications. There are many problems for which there are no known causes, and people take medication to address the symptoms. With grief and loss, it’s OK to take medication if you find that you just can’t function. Why not try to relieve some of that suffering? At the same time, no pill can make you bypass the natural process of grief. To escape the grief of having lost a loved one, you’d have to escape the experience of ever having loved them. That doesn’t make any sense.

Look at grief as normal. Tell yourself, “This is healthy. It means I loved him and that he was, indeed, the wonderful person I perceived him to be. I’m crying not only because he’s not here, but also because he was a great person to have loved.” Talk the feelings out with someone who experienced the loss along with you, or maybe even a counselor or a therapist. Don’t bottle everything up in the name of “getting over it.” It doesn’t work.

There are different kinds of losses. Losing a parent can be difficult, but it’s expected. There’s usually not the feeling of “falling through space” that comes with the loss of a spouse or a child. But loss is loss, and you’ll still feel it years after the fact. The challenge is not to get over it; the challenge is to reintegrate yourself back into a new and different life without your loved one.

Try to get back to your daily activities. Take on new goals to fill the void. If your loss is a major one, you’ll most likely need six months to a year for the process to unfold naturally and comfortably.

You can’t replace your loved one, but little by little you can resume your activities and routines, adding new experiences and memories to the ones you both enjoyed before. Your new life is not required to be better or worse than the old one. It will just be different.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach

“Before President Biden took office, it was virtually impossible for eligible borrowers to access the student debt relief they rightfully earned,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

How does one “rightfully earn” forgiveness of a debt into which one voluntarily entered?

What entitles one group of people to eradication of debt, and not another? I paid my student loans off in 2001. Why am I not getting a refund on tuition? Why am I NOT rightfully entitled while another is?

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few went to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

– Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience” [1849]

A two-year oldRussian piano prodigy.

November 28 marks the 1894 birth of one of American history’s most prolific public intellectuals—Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993). According to Lew Rockwell, he “was familiar with the work of every important thinker in nearly every field,” and he “wrote in every important public forum of his day.” His published work as a journalist, literary critic, philosopher, and economist ran to roughly 10 million words before his death in 1993, including perhaps the most popular economics book ever written: Economics in One Lesson.

In that vast output, perhaps Hazlitt’s most important contribution was his consistent defense of the central importance of liberty in American life, even though it lost him more than one job. At a time when real commitment to liberty is scarce, Americans need to remember his wisdom.

“Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality. Morality can only exist in a free society, it can exist to the extent freedom exists.”

“‘Freedom to’” is a guarantee that no one, including the government, will be allowed to interfere with one’s freedom.”

“The future of human liberty…means the future of civilization.”

“The State, of course, is absolutely indispensable to the preservation of law and order, and the promotion of peace and social cooperation. What is unnecessary and evil, what abridges the liberty and therefore the true welfare of the individual, is the State that has usurped excessive powers and grown beyond its legitimate function.”

“True adherents of liberty…[believe] in limited government, in the maximization of liberty for the individual and the minimization of the coercion to the lowest point compatible with law and order…we believe in free trade, free markets, free enterprise, private property.”

“Capitalism will continue to eliminate mass poverty in more and more places and to an increasingly marked extent if it is merely permitted to do so.”

“The ‘private sector’ of the economy is, in fact, the voluntary sector…the ‘public sector’ is, in fact, the coercive sector.”

“Capitalism, the system of private property and free markets, is not only a system of freedom and of natural justice—which tends…to distribute rewards in accordance with production—but it is a great co-operative and creative system that has produced…affluence that our ancestors did not dare dream of.”

“The superior freedom of the capitalist system, its superior justice, and its superior productivity are not three superiorities, but one. The justice follows from the freedom and the productivity follows from the freedom and the justice.”

“Government can’t give anything without depriving us of something else.”

“When your money is taken by a thief, you get nothing in return. When your money is taken through taxes to support needless bureaucrats, precisely the same situation exists.”

“Only if the modern state can be held within a strictly limited agenda…can it be prevented from regimenting, conquering, and ultimately devouring the society which gave it birth.”

“Liberty is so precious an end in itself that Lord Acton was moved to declare that it is ‘not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.’ Yet though liberty is beyond doubt an end in itself, it is also of the highest value…as a means to most of our other ends. We can pursue not only our economic but our intellectual and spiritual goals only if we are free to do so.”

“Moral rules which forbid mankind to hurt one another…include wrongful interference with each other’s freedom.”

“Many of today’s writers who are most eloquent in their arguments for liberty in fact preach philosophies that would destroy it.”

“In a thousand fields the welfarists, statists, socialists, and inverventionists are daily driving for more restrictions on individual liberty.”

“The solution to our problems is not more paternalism, laws, decrees, or controls, but the restoration of liberty and free enterprise.”

“The crying need today is not for more laws, but for fewer. If the friends of liberty and law could have only one slogan it should be: Stop the remedies!”

“Our intelligentsia….misprize economic liberty because…they lack the knowledge or understanding to recognize that when economic liberties are abridged or destroyed, all other liberties are abridged or destroyed with them.”

“Liberty is a whole, and to deny economic liberty is finally to destroy all liberty.”

“When Alexander the Great visited the philosopher Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: ‘Yes, stand a little less between me and the sun.’ It is what every citizen is entitled to ask of his government.”

Henry Hazlitt recognized liberty as the only moral system and economic liberty, or capitalism, as the only means of organizing society that can benefit all. And he defended that position powerfully against many attacks. As Ludwig von Mises described him, “in this age of great struggle in favor of freedom and the social system in which men can live as free men, you…are the economic conscience of our country.”

During his life, Hazlitt saw America taking the opposite course, prompting him to conclude that “So far as the politicians are concerned, the lesson…does not seem to have been learned anywhere.”

Now, with far more resources forcibly taken from some for whatever and whoever the government decides, his insights are more important than ever.

Gary Galles

Republicans did nothing about Bill Clinton flying to islands with minors

Republicans did nothing about Hillary Clinton smashing devices

Republicans did nothing about James Comey brazenly lying

Republicans did nothing about Andy McCabe plotting a silent coup against a sitting President

Republicans did nothing about BLM raising $100 million and breaking charitable giving laws

Republicans in Florida did nothing about James Biden’s alleged fraud scheme involving a hospital system

Republicans in Arkansas did nothing about Hunter Biden’s myriad crimes

Republicans have done nothing against ANTIFA and their interstate RICO operations

Republicans have done nothing against Fauci, EcoHealth Alliance, or the other fake scientists who promoted lies about Covid’s origins to hide their own culpability

Why would Democrats be afraid of us? They run the country while Republican AGs and DAs quiver in fear and run for the hills.

Charlie Kirk

Stop fixating on the 2024 election. You will be disappointed, frustrated and angry — again. I stand by my prediction that they will imprison Trump. And when his supporters protest, they will be imprisoned too. It will be a gigantic January 6. Watch.

Bigger picture: Freedom loving Americans must figure out ways to break with the nasty, psychotic and authoritarian federal regime. DeSantis is a hugely talented Governor of a robust, growing state. He should concentrate on establishing a republic of Florida. Perhaps South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia (minus Atlanta) could join. Offer peace with the federal government. Peace and trade treaties, and the like. Let New York, DC, San Francisco, Chicago and all the deep blue territories have their socialism. Let’s stop fighting, and simply leave them. Have real police, and a real military. Let the drag queen, woke military defend Manhattan.

I cannot design all the specifics for you. I can only tell you that the left-right differences are no longer sustainable. The left understands this. That’s why they impose an increasingly totalitarian net around our lives. The right just keeps promising a modern day Reagan Revolution. It’s too late for that. Way too late. Stop assuming there’s a majority who want freedom under the original American model. Do you actually know any leftists? They do not want ANYTHING you want. And they will stand by and let the government do anything it wishes to you, so long as the government is “progressive.” There are 70 and 80 percent majorities of leftists in some areas. They are not friendly and they are no more peaceful than Hamas and the Palestinians. They are mean, brutal, irrational and intolerant.

Move on, conservatives. It’s too late for reconciliation. A better world is possible, but NOT on our present course.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Sixty years ago today, I was in Mrs. Isles’ fifth-grade class on Friday afternoon at Boothwyn Elementary School in Pennsylvania when we got the news: President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas. They sent us home immediately and the next several days were consumed with the killing and its aftermath.

First, there was the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, who was accused of shooting the president from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, which was located by the presidential motorcade route. Two days later, Oswald himself was shot to death by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner who managed to slip into police headquarters with a gun when authorities were transferring him from the Dallas city jail to the county jail.

Finally, on Monday, there was the funeral, which I watched with one of my friends on his black and white TV at his house on Meetinghouse Road. I was only 10 years old but knew that something momentous had happened. I didn’t realize that it would be a watershed event.

Much has been written about the events of November 22, 1963, and six decades later, there is much disagreement with the government’s official story that Oswald was the lone shooter. Most people, to be honest, don’t buy the government’s account, which is summed up by the Warren Commission Report.

There is a veritable industry of writing and speculation about the assassination, and perhaps no one has been more dogged than Jacob Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation. With each major anniversary of the assassination, new information seems to come out about the case, and the FFF site has linked two accounts, one involving medical professionals who saw the president’s fatal wounds, and one from the Kennedy Beacon blog. They make for compelling reading.

According to Hornberger, the Kennedy assassination was an inside job with the CIA taking out the president because he wanted to end American involvement in Vietnam and pursue a more vigorous course of détente with the Soviet Union, as well as dismantling at least part of the developing national security state. Certainly, others who closely follow the various conspiracy theories associated with the assassination have different variations, but most agree that it is unlikely that the angry loner Oswald did all of the killing himself – or was even directly involved.

I see myself as unqualified to make a judgment on these theories, although there is nothing implausible with the account that Hornberger has created these past several years. Too many things happened after the shooting with too many witnesses to debunk them. If Hornberger’s viewpoints are correct – and I, for one, believe they are plausible – then America as we have known it died that day at Dealy Plaza.

The government’s actions after Kennedy’s assassination from the US escalation of the Vietnam War to the development of the vast national security state has eroded liberty and empowered the American state. Whatever hopes there were to preserve the constitutional republic known as the United States of America ended with the death of John F. Kennedy.

As for the state, it never entered an Athenian’s head that it could interfere with his private life: that it could see, for instance, that his children were taught to be patriotic, or limit the amount of liquor he could buy, or compel him to save for his old age. Everything like that a citizen of Athens had to decide himself and take full responsibility for.
 

Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (1930)

On what political propositions are Americans apparently agreed? There are two. The first is that the President currently in the White House should be replaced. Not by being tossed out on last February’s impeachment rap, but replaced when his term finally ends.

The second proposition is that no presidential candidate currently striving to succeed the incumbent is an exhilarating alternative. What’s the problem? If the incumbent is so bad, shouldn’t we be enthusiastic about at least one of the contenders? After all, there are two Democrats out there to choose from, and six Republicans. So whom are the American people waiting for? Abraham Lincoln? Pericles?

Many people are inflamed by the rampant demagoguery in the present scene. Demagoguery–demagogy–comes in two modes. Most conspicuous is that of the candidate who promises the voters what are best described as Nice Things. Why not health care for the uninsured? Or for children? Why not cheaper drugs? Free child delivery? (Free funerals?) Sharpshooters tracking down demagogy were out there waiting last summer, eyes trained, when Bill Bradley arrived in Iowa. Would he do it? Would he advocate an end to the subsidy of ethanol? Ethanol is the program, excogitated during the Carter Administration, which sought to augment the staying power of a gallon of gasoline by an infusion of ethanol. What happened is that the price of oil went down, and the potential economic value of an ethanol additive turned out to be less than the cost of producing ethanol, and that was many moons ago.

Answer? No. Bradley (like his Republican opponent Steve Forbes, a sound economic fundamentalist on most points) devised airy reasons why ethanol was an okay federal program, which he would not disturb, if elected President.

Was that demagogy? You would tend to dismiss it as that on the simple grounds that that is what Iowa voters wanted to hear. But wait! Only a small percentage of the agricultural community of Iowa is engaged in producing the corn that goes into making ethanol. So how do we account for the politician who ignores the interests of 96 percent of the taxpaying public in order to endear himself to so small a minority?

The answer to that is that voters at large don’t naturally intuit economic realities. Iowans assume that ethanol subsidies materialize from the good offices of fairy political godparents out there somewhere. They do not focus on the itinerary of the ethanol subsidy. It is of course a dollar collected in Iowa from citizens at large and then remitted to those Iowans who are engaged in producing ethanol.

So there we have the one problem–the encouragement given to demagogues by undiscriminating voters. The procedure here is to attract support to finance a campaign. But does the term demagogue fit in other circumstances? What about the aspirant who has a private vision to offer to the public and has the means, personal or contrived, to finance a campaign? In some cases, the vision isn’t merely a program to be adopted. It is a program that includes the visionary’s serving as President. Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today’s lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America.

But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something. So what does Trump say? That he is a successful businessman and that that is what America needs in the Oval Office. There is some plausibility in this, though not much. The greatest deeds of American Presidents–midwifing the new republic; freeing the slaves; harnessing the energies and vision needed to win the Cold War–had little to do with a bottom line. So what else can Trump offer us? Well to begin with, a self-financed campaign. Does it follow that all who finance their own campaigns are narcissists?

At this writing Steve Forbes has spent $63 million in pursuit of the Republican nomination. Forbes is an evangelist, not an exhibitionist. In his long and sober private career, Steve Forbes never bought a casino, and if he had done so, he would not have called it Forbes’s Funhouse. His motivations are discernibly selfless. Yes, you can make the point that under a flat tax he would pay less in federal income tax, leaving the critic with the problem of figuring out how many decades it would take Forbes to earn back, in reduced taxes, the $63 million he has spent on his campaign.

The other way to enter a political contest in which there is something less than a draft movement working for you and you don’t have the means to finance it on your own, like Trump and Ross Perot and Steve Forbes, is to opportunize on a political anomaly. If there is something approaching a dead heat between the two candidates of the major parties, go for the independent ticket.

Now this is (in my judgment, colored no doubt by personal experience) not exclusively the behavior of the demagogue. In New York State 35 years ago, the Republican Party had become a zygotic twin of the Democratic Party. In 1965 I ran for mayor of New York City having no prospect whatever of prevailing. It could therefore be said of my political venture that I was an exhibitionist and a demagogue: except that what I said, and the measures I advocated, were in large measure what many voters did not wish to hear (accounting, perhaps, for the paltry 13 percent of the vote I won). But then five years later my brother James Buckley, running on a third-party ticket, caused a great upset. He was a more persuasive contender, and he had a gift for giving life to common sense. It had been 50 years, back in Wisconsin in the Twenties, since a third-party candidate had been elected to the Senate. What accounts for such anomalies is a latent ear in the voting public that suddenly awakens to the tedium of establishmentarian contenders and says, on voting day: Cut it out!

Was that what brought Jesse Ventura to the State House in St. Paul in 1998? That, in part–plus the devil-may-care gratification of voting for governor a professional wrestler. The Minnesota voters may have suffered something of a hangover the next day. (What did we do!!!) On the other hand, what deep trouble could Jesse Ventura get Minnesota into? He wasn’t going to lead a movement to secede from the United States. Or to forbid smoking. The only strategic mischief he might get into (the voters were saying to themselves in midwinter) was to join the fray against Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump and maybe Ross Perot for Reform Party candidate for President in 2000. He couldn’t have so much as considered the possibility except for his victory in the race for governor. And since no one, possibly including Mrs. Ventura, can tell you what Jesse would proceed to do, assuming he were elected President and had omnipotent powers, any race in which he seriously competed can be dismissed as a venture in opportunism; a practice of the art of the demagogue.

So much for the passing scene. We need, in searching for consolation, to remind ourselves that the missionary is not automatically to be dismissed as a demagogue, practicing or inchoate. The apparent demagogue is, of course, a candidate for the respect owing to a prophet. John Brown was hanged. If he had lived and fought a hundred years later, there’d have been a national holiday named after him.

On the other hand, a sovereign democratic responsibility is to measure the claims of a candidate by empirical standards: Is he right for the United States? Now? And if he is right, is he the person to incarnate that mission? John Brown was wrong even as Martin Luther King Jr. was right, and a study of the two, and of their two movements in history, illustrates what we need to know about demagoguery and prophecy.

There are moments of deep gloom during the primary season. The candidates are immediately approached after a public event to be told whether what they just finished saying added or subtracted from their probable standing in the polls. And the American voter who wants to see a sign of life and of pride in the participants in our expensive and exhausting democratic obstacle course wonder, sometimes with a sense of desperation, whether what we’re seeing is new. Or, are we looking at merely this season’s reenactment of a ritual that began when Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton were quarreling before their conclusive encounter at Weehawken?

There is always rivalry, and there is always a search for means of exploiting the means of advancing one’s own position. In other ages, one paid court to the king. Now we pay court to the people. In the final analysis, just as the king might look down with terminal disdain upon a courtier whose hypocrisy repelled him, so we have no substitute for relying on the voter to exercise a quiet veto when it becomes more necessary to discourage cynical demagogy, than to advance free health for the kids. That can come later, in another venue; the resistance to a corrupting demagogy should take first priority.

William F. Buckley