Touchstone Magazine Mere Comments
"I am my brother's keeper!" Mr. Obama intoned in Denver when he accepted the Democratic nomination for president. "I am my sister's keeper!" Bravo. Then be your brother's keeper. Mr. Obama's brother, it is known, lives in a hut somewhere in Kenya. Or be your aunt's keeper. One of Mr. Obama's aunts, one upon whom he has lavished praise in his self-launching book, has lived in tenement in Boston the last five years. A little less praise and a little more cash might have done better. He doesn't want me to be my brother's keeper. He wants me to be his brother's keeper.
But what does that mean, to be a keeper? When Cain shot back at the Lord God that first teenage question, "Am I my brother's keeper?", he had of course just murdered Abel. He desired the alienation that his question implies. In his snideness Cain reduces the relationship of brother to brother to that of brother to keeper. Sheep are kept; children are minded; men are not. That at least seems to be Cain's unspoken assumption. Now the Lord does not reply that Cain is his brother's "keeper." He ignores the reply entirely. He tells Cain that his brother's blood cries out to him from the ground. He never wanted Cain to be his brother's keeper. He wanted him to be his brother's brother.
A brother is a great deal more than a keeper -- and also a much different thing, too. The keeper and the kept have, in that one regard, no mutual relationship. Indeed, the keeper can only keep by reducing the kept to a ward (which means, literally, someone who is kept care of, guarded), or to a sheep. If I am to be my brother's brother, I mind what may harm him, yet I also expect from him the acts of a brother: I am my brother's brother. If I give my brother -- not my client, my ward, my case number 11543, my sheep -- some money wherewithal to secure a loan on a house, I will expect my brother -- not my client, my ward, my case number 11543, my sheep -- to give me a kind of brotherly retribution. I'm not thinking of money here, not at all. I'm thinking of the added responsibility he must assume, because it is his brother's money he has taken; the added diligence he will apply to his work, lest my loan prove to have been in vain; the gratitude he should feel and show; and the lesson he will learn, should some other brother of ours need a hand in times of trouble.
And it is just because I want to be my brother's brother -- and a distant brother to people in need whom I did not grow up with -- that I am suspicious of the massive government takeover of what should have been charity. Then, you do not have brothers giving to brothers, but person A ordering person B to cough up money to A's brother C, after filtering it through A's political allies D and E. I do not want Mr. Obama to be my brother's keeper, or to be anybody's keeper at all, unless we are talking about the mentally retarded and the insane. I want him to be his brother's brother; let him start there. Then he can be his aunt's nephew. Meanwhile, he can leave me the wherewithal to give to my brothers. I do this in several ways. At the end of the month, when I'm writing out the bills, I go over all appeals to my charity, and choose the ones I think will use the money best. But I also spread some wealth in my neighbor's way by hiring him to do work that does not absolutely need to be done, but that I would like done, which I cannot do myself. That is a community service that no one will recognize; just as children pushed through leftist community service programs get credit for showing up, grudgingly and with their pants sagging, at the soup kitchen, but none whatsoever if they fetch the groceries for the old lady next door, or help to coach the Little League team, or mow the lawn for their own family. But then it is no surprise that people who would nationalize business have no use for private charity, either.
Mr. Obama, I do not want to keep anyone, or to be kept by anyone. I am a man, not a sheep. I do not desire low taxes so that I can avoid my responsibility to keep my brother. I want the lower taxes precisely so that I can best fulfill my desire to be a brother. And by the way, don't you think you could buy your aunt something better to walk with than a metal stick?
