The Rule of Public Opinion

This one probably won't make your local news. It seems that Jaime, a 5th grader in Maricopa County, Arizona, has filed a lawsuit against Arizona Governor Jan Brewer intended to compel the State to prevent global warming. The suit "has been called one of the most remarkable legal actions that has the potential to halt human-induced climate change." According to the story, she is "petitioning the court to require the State of Arizona develop a climate recovery plan that will protect Arizona’s resources for future generations." Well, I live in Arizona, folks. Good thing Jaime is here to straighten out our state. While the rest of you all go down to global warming, we'll have all we need to continue because the State will have developed a climate recovery plan to protect our resources. Too bad for the rest of you.

Recently CBS Sunday Morning News did a piece on how the Internet is revolutionizing revolutions. The story was about how the world is moving from a world governed by governments to a world governed by public opinion broadcast instantaneously over Twitter and Facebook and the like. You don't like it that your bank wants to charge you for their services? No problem. Launch a Facebook campaign and they'll buckle. You don't think your phone provider should raise their rates? Not in issue. Shut them down with a Twitter complaint. You think your government isn't fair? Well, stop complaining and launch a revolution via social media. This, they say, is good.

What else has been accomplished of late? Well, the tide of public opinion managed to terminate PIPA, a law designed to prevent theft of intellectual property, and SOPA, another law aimed at fighting copyright infringement and counterfeiting. Good thing the public got involved in a big way. There's no way they want to put an end to IP and copyright theft. Hey, where else are they going to get their pirated movies and music? No! It's our right to have that stuff and if we band together, we can keep our access to stolen property! Were they bad or good laws? Who knows?? Hail the tide of public opinion!

This kind of activism is predicated on a fundamental premise that human beings are basically good (and, of course, we know what we know ... like "the truth" about global warming). Give people the opportunity to "vote" and they will vote for what is right. Give them their voice and what will come out first is a cry for justice and fairness. In fact, people in general know what's best in almost all cases. Take, for instance, the story of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Bethlehem was the center for steel production in the U.S. from the late 19th century. Those steel mills made the town the thriving place that it was. They made the first "I-beam", the standard in skyscrapers everywhere. They provided armor plating for the war efforts in both WWI and WWII. They made the steel for the Golden Gate Bridge, the George Washington Bridge, the Chrysler Building, and the Hoover Dam, just to name a few. In the '80's, however, they ran into problems. Japan started shipping cheaper steel. The management of the mills begged the unions to decrease salaries and benefits to allow them to continue in business, but the union workers said it was not their problem; it was the government's problem. They, you see, knew better. They knew "fair". They knew that they weren't going to make sacrifices; that was for someone else to make. As a result, the steel mills closed in 1995 and the city almost collapsed entirely. Oh, wait ... that's not a good example of how good people make good decisions for everyone concerned, is it? No, I'm sorry. That's an example of what human beings do by nature.

A world ruled by "what the media tells me" and "how I feel about it" sounds rather appealing to some. It neglects the fundamental problem from Scripture: "The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked; who can know it?" But, then, if we can mitigate the whole problem of our standard of "good" versus God's standard of "good", we should be okay, right? I don't think I'd want to face God with that one in the final analysis. "Why should I let you into My heaven?" "Well, I was good according to my standards. Too bad about yours. Now step aside, old man." Let me know how that works out for you.