The gratitude for the gift of being able to live in the United States as an immigrant is reflected in Thalheim’s books. To use the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, the United States of America is the world’s greatest experiment in democracy! Her democracy is valuable and worth defending and promoting. Serving as a Judge Advocate General attorney in the U.S. Army Reserve in his late twenties and early thirties was an honor. And with that came the responsibility of wearing the military uniform of the United States of America and representing those who had come before and would come after to answer the call for this young democracy. This experience lead to the conception of Check “American” complete with www.checkAmerican.com to lead the way forward to post-racial America and the subsequent book “Check ‘American’ and the 2020 Census.”
Travels by the author to various parts of the world have also underlined the importance of and fragility of the Rule of Law, which is popularly misconstrued as the mere enactment of and following of statutes. Dictators have long ago decreed “laws” and have used “courts” to enforce laws, which do not apply to the elite leadership itself. The Rule of Law, on the other hand, is a state run by and for the citizenry with the laws applicable to all with concepts of due process, freedoms of speech, press, assembly, religion and the right to work to feed yourself. The United States is a Rule of Law nation because it is run by and for the citizenry under a working constitution. China is a Rule of Man dictatorship that wears the jewelry of democracy of “elections,” “courts,” “president,” “legislature,” and “laws,” to name a few elements of a democracy, but are no more than window dressing in a dictatorship which is the rule by the few over the many, namely in the case of China, the millionaires and billionaires of the Chinese Politburo. There has never been a free election there since 1949.
Traveling around the world has reinforced for the author the centrality and necessity for the United States in the maintenance and furtherance of the liberal democratic order. Though the author’s travels are limited in scope when compared to well-traveled citizens, he has traveled through Washington, D.C., New York, most of the fifty states, Paris, Berlin, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Venice, Vienna, Amsterdam, Brussels for the rain, Warsaw, Munich, Zurich, Prag, East Berlin, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk and Xabarovsk, the latter seven during the Russian/Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe from 1945 until the fall of the Berlin wall in November, 1989. Further travels were to Beijing, Wuhan, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Sarawak, Sumatra, Rangoon, Mandalay, Sydney, Cairns, Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canarvon, Hobart, Auckland, Queenstown, Christ Church, Milford Sound, Panama, Roadtown, B.V.I, St. Lucia, St. Thomas, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Dublin and points in between. America is unique like other immigrant countries, where a person can move here and in but a few years feel fully American.
The author’s study of European History at Middlebury College as well as being a first generation immigrant from West Germany and his travels through the East, West, the Soviet Union and China have factored into his analysis of the eleven principles of history and economics against the continuation of rule by the Communist Party of China over China and her citizens. The only way a dictatorship stays in power is by terrorizing her own citizens in order to avoid the call for fair and free elections and using terror so that the few may continue to rule over the many. Does the third generation of leaders in China have the same appetite to terrorize Chinese citizens as the two previous generations had shown themselves willing to do?
Domestically, the positive message of Faith Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church, an African-American church in the heart of Stamford, Connecticut of life, love, liberty was so strong that it had encouraged the author to run for governor of the State of Connecticut in 2017-2018, for which he was woefully unprepared. www.SaveConnecticut.com Nonetheless the message of life that we should be grateful for every day that we have as no day has been promised us, is a positive message, which should be shared. The message of love that we are all brothers and sisters children of God should also be spread. For the non-religious, 99.6% of our DNA is identical. We can only see .4% of a person’s DNA. The focus should be on what people share which is so much greater than the little DNA that people do not share. Liberty in politics is the reference to the freedoms contained in our Bill of Right, the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution. The governor’s campaign led in part to the author’s subsequent election to the executive committee of the Stamford branch of the NAACP, a non-partisan political organization, which participation engendered two more books for 2022: “The School-to-Prison Pipeline: How the public school monopoly and the teachers unions deny school choice to high needs black, Hispanic, white, Asian and other students” and then “100 Questions after the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor with policy recommendations and The Chicago Tragedy.”
We all love the environment. An issue that the author had promoted during his gubernatorial campaign was “The Paris Minimum.” Basically, when pursuing the laudable climate change goals of the Paris Climate Accord, policy should not lose sight of how new rules make life more expensive for the poor and impede the upward mobility of the poor in the United States and abroad. This has been simplified to “environmental equity” where we should do whatever we can for the environment provided we don’t raise the cost of living for poor people.
Another book in draft is “The Case for the National Slavery Memorial on the Washington Mall.” The formation of the United States in 1776 and the subsequent drafting of our Constitution in 1787, after the Articles of Confederation proved unwieldly, was an imperfect start with the continuation of slavery. The Slave Power before and after the creation of the United States almost ruined this great experiment in democracy and brought on the Civil War in 1860. The United States can recognize the historic wrong of slavery with a slavery memorial on the Washington Mall, within view of the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. Germany is the only major military or economic power with a monument to an historic wrong of that country in its nation’s capital. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin to commemorate the murder of six million Jews before and during World War II is mere steps from the nation’s parliament and to the symbolic center of Germany, the Brandenburg Gate. The United States can do no less with a National Slavery Memorial on the Washington Mall and still continue forward as a single united people.
Peter A. Thalheim 