The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Connecticut and Pimlico
People in Connecticut may be suffering from something worse than progressives striving to destroy the state.
People in Connecticut may be suffering from something worse than progressives who are striving mightily to destroy the state. They may be suffering from a sort of moral atrophy.
G.K. Chesterton addressed the question of moral atrophy in the following few lines about Pimlico, a town in England that, in Chesterton’s day, was what we might call a hopeless case:
“Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico; in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico; for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico; to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles… If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honor to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”
Like Pimlico, Connecticut has become a desperate thing. And some who might love it with a desperate love because it is Connecticut, the place where the bones of their fathers lay, already have moved away to other states where the grass is greener; there they will lay themselves down, and their children someday will strew flowers on their graves. The easiest thing to do is to move away from grief and tears and hard times. The most difficult thing is to remain on the spot and fight for the glory of Pimlico, to remain in the face of difficulties because Pimlico is sacred ground, and you love it with a love that transcends rationality itself.
Storge, from the Greek, is the first of four loves examined by C.S. Lewis in his book “The Four Loves.” It is the love that springs from familiarity, typified by the natural love of a mother or father for a child. Familiarity breeds fondness, not contempt, and that fondness turns to fierceness when the object of love – a child, a family, a neighborhood, a town or a state comes under attack, either directly or, more insidiously, through subversion. Storge is non-particularized, diffused, transcendent, given without respect to individual characteristics, a fierce and sacred outpouring of love from the heart’s core. True patriotism finds its foothold in the first of Lewis’ “Four Loves.”
If only love and loving intentions were enough. But they never are, which is why the road to Hell is paved with good intentions divorced from practical, healing remedies.
People in state government who love Connecticut must stop pretending to themselves that they do not know how to save our state. They know what the problems are; they know what the solutions are; and it is a kind of moral atrophy yoked to personal ambition and factional favor that has decelerated their virtue, which is, always and everywhere, a power of acting. The General Assembly must – absolutely must – regain control of its budget powers, and then act in the service of the entire state. This means the General Assembly must wrest control of its getting and spending constitutional responsibilities from state unions and partisan, spineless politicians.
Never in the whole history of the world has it been possible for any state – whether it be a monarchy, a democracy or a republic – to settle a recurrent spending problem by increasing taxes. And one need not consult history to draw from present experience the proper moral. Connecticut’s government has, within the administration of its present lame-duck governor, imposed business crippling taxes, the largest and the second largest in state history, on the real working people’s party, the revenue producing sector of the state – with what result we see before us, increased and unmanageable debt, now hardwired into future budgets by means of a backroom deal from which the duly elected representatives of the people on the Republican side have been excluded.
At some point, such autocratic effrontery produces a cleansing spirit of rebellion among those who love their state with a transcendent love.